246: The Unsustainability of Inauthenticity with Erin Weed

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I feel like so much around authenticity is not about creating who we want to be, but simply remembering who we were in the first place and deconstructing all of that programming that's gotten in the way. And to loop it back to this idea of the lack of sustainability to be anything but yourself. I just feel like life is too short to be someone you're not.

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Welcome back Free Timers. You are in for such a special treat today we have Erin Weed with us. Erin is an intuitive communications expert with a passion for truth and storytelling. She is dedicated to helping people discover their purpose and express it succinctly. She has a very well known, highly spoken of unique process for this called the Dig where she helps people clarify their purpose, simplify their message and amplify their truth. She is also renowned for coaching Tedx and Ted speakers. She's a 22 year professional keynote speaker. She now certified at least over a thousand people in her Dig process. At the time of this recording she launched a speakeasy for other professional keynote speakers that I was very lucky to do an off the record chat about licensing for. And Aaron is just one of those people who for the last 10 plus years people have said do you know Aaron? You two should know each other. Let me make an intro. And we connected over a decade ago and then reconnected for the speakeasy and now for this conversation. So Erin, welcome to the show.

I am so happy to be here. Thank you.

When you scheduled you suggested a topic and it was so juicy. I've just been counting down the days. The unsustainability of inauthenticity. Most people when they say what topics they want to discuss they just write whatever or the book and here you drop this really compelling, crisp, concise idea that's so powerful. So let me just start by asking you, how did this come to the top of your mind as something that you have been interested in exploring?

I would say that my work with the dig has taught me a lot about following the data points of truth. So what I mean by that is when I'm digging someone, I basically interview them about their entire life story. And from their life story, we pick out these repeating patterns or themes, and we distill those down to just one word. What I've noticed is that people just repeat these themes over and over and over again, and that becomes your operating system. And essentially, we're all just living out this operating system. For most people who haven't done the dig, it's in the background, so you don't know it's there, but it's basically running your life for better and for worse. That's where you struggle and where you shine. And one of the things that I learned about listening to people's life stories and seeing when their operating system was in alignment with who they are, things worked usually for the long term. When people were doing things that were not in alignment with who they really are, I saw things break down. It's partially intuitive because it just feels better to be in alignment with what's true for you. But I just think it's a fact that unless it's true for you, it's probably not gonna last. And you can overlay this onto relationships, onto jobs, onto creative projects. I don't know. It just feels like a fact. I mean, have you found this to be true in your life?

Yes. And in fact, sometimes I wonder if I'm not all that cut out to run a business, even though it's been almost 13 years. Because of this reason, this for me as well, unsustainability of inauthenticity, I'm sort of unable to stick with a business model or revenue streams that aren't aligned on a spiritual soul level. Even if they're working or mildly working or I need some elbow grease to get them working, unless they're aligned, I cannot bring myself to do it. And so I think I've also had more shifts in my business than I otherwise might have. In a way that if I had just stuck with one thing or did the same thing over and over or stuck with parts of the process I don't love, like, launching things, then maybe things would work better, but I can't bring myself to do it. So I find actually I'm in conflict around this a little bit with my roles as business owner versus like truth seeker, freedom lover, creative, you know.

Yeah. Well, first I just want to celebrate you because I think what you do and what you model for others is you are a creative person who is willing to try things and you are also willing to pull the plug when it just ain't working out. And there's a lot of permission in that. There's a lot of flow in it. I have not dug you yet. That will come.

Can't wait.

But what I'm already feeling in this is you have a lot of flow energy. You want to be in flow with how you want to spend your time. I also feel like you're very energy driven. So for better, for worse, things really impact you. So it's almost like your offerings and your business needs to be in total alignment with how your energy flows.

I mean, spot on. That's true.

And so you've tried things to figure out like, hey, does my energy flow well with this or not? Well. Oh, not well. Bye. Right. And this is a universal truth. Right. I think a lot of us are going through the world and we're trying things on, but unfortunately we live in this society that says it's only successful if it stays around forever. And so we go through the slog. And this is where the unsustainability comes in. Where, let's take a business for example, since this is something that me, you and your listeners probably all have in common. So you're running a business or you have a particular offering within your business that is feeling very energetically draining. It's feeling like it's taking more than it's given. Or maybe you're putting a ton of time and effort into it and the income just isn't there. Or maybe it's attracting people that are just not in your vibe and they're just kind of sucking your soul. And yet we get fed these ideas of like, stick with it, ride it out, overcome. But what's happening over time is it's becoming less and less sustainable because it's breaking us down. So if we're to play with this idea that businesses have a soul just as much as people do, like everyone's soul is kind of like diminishing because you're not putting your true energy into it. The business isn't giving you back any energy over time, what's going to happen, like this is where the unsustainability kicks in. It's probably going to break down somehow. Or for a lot of people, I see the Lack of sustainability shows up in their health, they start to get problems. Physical health, mental health, whatever. I'm not a doctor. I'm not diagnosing anything. But I am seeing from having Doug as many people as I have and heard entire life stories of 1500 people over the past decade. I have seen patterns of when you do something over and over and over again that is not in alignment with your truth, you get sick, things break down, things don't work out for the long term.

I'm curious, was there a big moment for you, either in recent memory or starting out in your business, where you came to this realization about something you had been offering?

I would say my first entrepreneurial endeavor became my masterclass in this. And that was a company called Girls Fight Back. I started it in 2001. It had a pretty rough start in the sense that the company was started in the aftermath of one of my closest friends being murdered. And her name was Shannon McNamara. She was murdered at Eastern Illinois University. And at the time I was living in New York. I just moved there to become a TV producer because I always loved this, like, truth and communication vibe. So I just moved there. Shannon was still in college, and she was killed by someone she didn't know who broke into her house in the middle of the night. And, boy, did she fight back. And that's why I called a Girls Fight Back to honor everything she did that night. And she really inspired a lot of people over the following 12 years because she inspired me to start this company and to call Girls Fight Back and to teach women that they could fight back and to teach them and that they could predict and respond to sketchy or violent scenarios, that we are not damsels in distress, that we do have tools and there's lots of them and to empower them, to use them. Doing this company between 2001 and when I sold it in 2013 over those 12 years, it was an interesting time to start a business because 2001 was pre social media. When did everything really come online? It was like 2008 or I always.

Think about the iPhone launched in 2007. And so I feel like, yeah, Facebook was mostly for college students around that time, just getting going. And then as soon as the iPhone and the app marketplace, then things really started rolling. But, yeah, I don't think, at least for a few more years. I joined Twitter in 2008.

Okay. So then basically almost half the time that I ran this business without the Internet. So it was an interesting span, especially as a person. I was 23 when I started it. And I would say that for me, the unsustainability of it was. First of all, I think I had a lot of really unprocessed trauma in those years. Three months to the day that Shannon was murdered, nine, 11 happened. And I commuted every day to the World Trade center at that time. I mean, those 90 days, I don't even know what to say. Like, the amount of darkness and horror that I experienced personally in all the ways. So I think the unsustainability of not processing our wounds is very, very clear to me now. In hindsight. I also feel like the business model of Girls Fight Back was very much a speaking model. I essentially started a seminar production company where for the first half of the company, first half of those years, I was the only talent. At some points, I was traveling 250 days a year. It was absolutely out of control. And living on airplanes and getting up at 4 for 6am flights, taking two planes, because I think you've done some college speaking. So it's a whole different. Getting to colleges is, like, a thing. The travel was really intense. And then every night I was getting up on stage, usually speaking to packed auditoriums because they made these Girls Fight Back seminars, mandatory for these high school and college girls and so filled auditoriums, they didn't have a choice to be there. Talk about energy management, traveling all day and then getting up on a stage. And the highs and the lows were so extreme because it's such a hard topic. And almost every night I would get a standing ovation, and then I would leave and I'd be in the middle of Iowa, driving two hours to my Hampton Inn so I could get three hours of sleep to do it all over again the next day. You know what I mean?

I can't even imagine. And even you're sort of processing out loud while also maybe not fully taking enough time and then speaking about such a traumatic experience. And I would imagine, like, I don't know, it's probably a very intense topic to even be speaking on all those years and chatting with people about and holding space for and hearing their stories, too.

Yeah, totally. I feel like anytime we talk about a topic that's hard for people, and this could even be things like money for business, for some people, it's just a hard topic. But for a lot of women, just the idea of something violent happening to us in the future or the sad reality that I was confronted by, that I really didn't know at that time, was just how many women have lived through something terrible and it's just like a collective trauma. And I don't want to leave out men here, but just not who I spoke to at that time. So it was hard. And I will say that a lot of activists on all different topics I think might be approaching things sometimes the way I did. And that was just my life needs to become the mission. I need to end violence against women. And it became my identity in so many ways. It was so amazing. I mean, we were getting success stories every week from people who had seen me. I have no idea who the person is. They're in an auditorium somewhere and telling us how something that they Learned from this 90 minute one woman show basically helped them to save their own life. And there's an addictive quality to that of almost feeling hyper responsible. It was magical. It was absolutely magical and it was absolutely intense and absolutely wild and the opportunities I got. I was on TV shows all the time and by the time I decided to sell the company, which I'm so grateful I was able to make an exit on a company like that, pretty interesting selling a social impact organization. But by the time I left, I mean Jenny, I was pretty broken. I was pretty wrecked.

We'll be right back just after this.

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How did you know when it was time to sell it and wind it down? At least wind down your involvement. And how would you even know how to do that at that age? And there was less of the Internet around of people telling all these stories of selling a business.

A lot of it was intuitive, both the knowing of its time and then also the knowing of how much and to who and all those things. But I will say the birth of my daughter was probably one of the biggest turning points of my entire life. And this is such a random story, but I basically gave birth to my daughter on Shannon McNamara's birthday.

I can't believe that. That's wild.

And on top of that, it was the summer solstice, June 21, the day with the most light. And I remember just holding her in my arms at 4:00am, you know, and just weeping because I felt like just a portal had both opened and closed for me. And I knew so many things in that moment about my life going forward. And one of the things that I knew was that Girls Fight Back was going to take off in a different direction without me leading it. And the image that I got was basically my logo, which was basically a stick person. It was like a stick lady that I hand drew the day I started Girls Fight Back. And she has this wild, crazy hair. And I just saw this image in my mind's eye of that stick person logo. And she was growing wings. When I got back to work and everything after the whole birth adventure, which is probably a whole different podcast, I drew it. I just sat down and I drew it and I put it on a sticky note, and I set the intention of releasing my business to not selling it. But I wanted her to fly away. I wanted her to fly. And it took me almost a year of just having a lot of conversations with a lot of potential buyers, but it was really almost a year to the day that I ended up selling. Interestingly enough, I sold Girls Fight Back to my speaker's bureau. So they actually bought the ip, the intellectual property of Girls Fight Back and all our following and everything like that, our email list. They bought it almost like an intellectual property package. And this way it was actually kind of cool because then the Speaker's bureau was able to sell Girls Fight Back. And at this point, I had a whole team of speakers too. So they got all the contractors as well. And the speaker's bureau was able to make a much higher percentage versus if I was just a speaker going through their bureau.

That's such a win win.

It was a win win.

And, like, material lives on.

And wow, that buyer was also a survivor. So she's running this amazing speakers bureau, college and high school focused bureau. And this is what I love, when somebody's able to intertwine their business with their passion and their healing and just their human journey. And so for that, that person, her name was Gina, she was able to heal something within herself in addition to the business taking on a Whole new chapter. It's been since resold to someone else. She's absolutely amazing. Her name is Nicole. And just to watch what she's doing with it now makes me so filled with pride.

That's so amazing. And just that it continues to this day. How did you come up with the dick?

So after I sold Girls Fight Back, I had one of those what am I gonna be when I grow up Moments. And I was 36 at that time. And I do wanna mention cause I so admire your radical transparency. I wanna be that. And I did not sell Girls Fight Back for a lot of money. Like I think we talk in business about selling, you hear of exits and you just assume that they're financially set for life. And that was not my experience. In fact, I probably paid money on the back end. I'd have to go back and check my records. I kind of just blocked it out. But I think I was so passionate about it continuing that I actually took a hit. After all the debts were paid and all the contractors were done and all the stuff I. I think I took a hit. So it wasn't like I was in a position to just like kick back. And also I had two little kids at this point, one of them being a three month old. And at the time I was married to a person who was now working. And so I was in a pickle, if you will. So I volunteered though, which I actually think is one of the best ways to try on businesses is just to like go in other people's organizations and no strings attached. But I volunteered for TEDX Boulder. I had spent so much of my life up to that point on stages and connecting with audiences that were rough crowds because high schoolers, they'll heckle you, right?

And it was mandatory. So they weren't even there because they wanted to be there.

Oh yeah, they'd be making fun of me. Like they were bashing me in the bathroom. Like while before I go on stage, like I can't believe I have to go to this stupid speaker. And they didn't know it was me because I look so young and you're actually having to walk on stage having already been shamed. That was like a day to day.

And thank goodness they didn't have phones or they probably would have all been on their phones in the middle of the day.

Totally. Oh totally. But I saw it always as like a really fun challenge just to like win them over and change their mind about something. So I volunteered at TedX Boulder. Mostly I just wanted to give back. But also it felt like a really compelling new platform. And some of the people I started working with went viral like right away. And these same people were super public about this weird little process. I took them through that. At the time, I wasn't calling it the Dig, but it was very much the Dig. And they were like, I don't know what she did to me. I remember somebody saying that. I was like, I didn't do anything to you. I just like pulled out all your content so you weren't so wrapped up with everything in your mind. And we got to the truth of the factual truth of your message, the emotional truth of your message and the desire based truth. And then I put it all together and I showed it to you again and we kind of surrounded it with this frequency, this one word frequency. Like why do you do what you do? Is it about freedom? Is it about joy? Is it about healing? Like why? And I found in all my years on stage is that that frequency can actually be infused into your message and you don't even have to say the word, the audience will feel it. So people started just doing really well and giving me probably a lot of credit I didn't deserve. But nonetheless it launched my next chapter and I've been doing it ever since. And that's 11 years.

Wow. And over 1500. That's incredible. You're famous for putting a lot of that excavating process on post. It notes, right? Sticky notes and like moving them around.

Yeah, they are my passion.

I love synthesizing as well and kind of creating order from chaos. What are you looking for? Let's say you write down all these sticky notes. You're hearing words kind of jump out at you, you're hearing themes, you're hearing recurring phrases, so you're getting them on. You tell me how many sticky notes, what is your next step? When you're looking at all that data, the person's maybe in the room with you, maybe it's virtual. What are you looking for? When you look at that excavated piece.

On all the notes, there's something about that. When the COVID happened, I switched to electronic sticky notes. So I have a system for doing that too. So it's not so much about the physical notes all the time. I think there's something very cathartic for people to tell their whole life story and get it out of them. And then with a objective person sitting in front of you to look at it in a very neutral sort of way and just notice the themes. And there's just something about taking it out of us in order to have this self discovery experience.

You say that the word is not a descriptor. It's about the life path you're here to learn and teach about. It's the lens through which you see the world. It's the stories of our life so we can be better teachers. And also that our word is often both our strength and our shadow in the same kernel. So tell me about this piece that our word is not a descriptor. What do you mean by that?

Sometimes people will tell me, oh, I think my dig word might be inspiring. Right. I will tell you. To this day, not a single person has had the dig word of inspire. Like hasn't happened. No, I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm just saying it hasn't. But a lot of people think that that's what it's going to be. Or they'll think about attributes about themselves that people have given them positive feedback about and they'll be like, oh, my dig word is brave. Now, brave could be a frequency word or be a descriptor word, but part of the dig is figuring out the difference. And instead of looking forward like a core values exercise is usually something that you're actively choosing and that you aspire to be. The dig is different from core values in the sense that we're looking in the past at what's already happened and we're looking at the repeating one word frequencies that have showed up time and time again, and we're simply remembering it. And when I take it on the sticky notes, when I write things down on the sticky notes, and then I say, this is what I'm seeing. How does this hit your resonance meter? Which is my way of saying, 0 to 100. How true is the steel? And a lot of times people will just have an exhale and they'll be like, yes, I remember. And I feel so much around. Authenticity is not about creating who we want to be, but simply remembering who we were in the first place and deconstructing all of that programming that's gotten in the way. And to loop it back to this idea of the lack of sustainability to be anything but yourself. I just feel like life is too short to be someone you're not.

Yeah. And we should say your word is authentic.

It is.

Was it hard for you to come up with your word? Because I always say reading the label from inside the jar and whatnot.

Yeah, I certainly didn't have the experience that I'm creating for other people. It's just impossible. But I did train somebody many years ago before I did the official dig facilitator training. Just last year, I trained somebody who was shadowing me to kind of dig me, but I was also kind of digging myself in the process. So I would say out of all the digs I've ever done, I'm probably the least credible one. But I do feel very strongly that authentic is my word and it's very much tied to the word frequency. So a lot of my work is around tapping into people's frequency and then helping them to express themselves authentically. That's probably why I've worked with so many public facing leaders, because I don't want them to burn out like I did with Girls Fight Back.

You mentioned somebody shadowing you. You've since trained over a thousand certified facilitators at the digit. Was it hard to kind of let your baby go in terms of your process? I mean, it sounds like you had done it before with Girls Fight Back. But I feel like a lot of business owners have a hard time making that transition between them having the genius that comes up with a process or a method in the first place and not really wanting to let it go or see other people do it, you know, in the moment you feel like they're going to do it imperfectly. I bet you've seen enough people in action now to see that they bring their own special sauce to it. But what was that transition like in your own business?

I just trained people for the first time in 2022 and I actually started small. It was 13 people. And for me, whether it was training speakers for Girls Fight Back or training facilitators for the dig. I don't know if I'm missing something in the whole founder DNA, but I just don't worry about them. I'm very selective about who I bring into my world. I will never train somebody in my methods that I don't think is just an absolute hell yes not only as a human being, but also is a hell yes in alignment with the method that we're talking about. And I guess I also think with the dig, I just feel like my way is not the only way. I think the DIG is more than anything, it's a framework. It's actual data point framework. We have steps, we have a DIG report that every client gets. I mean, you see how it all unfolds and the beauty of it. The client is the digger. The person facilitating is the facilitator. So the facilitator is simply facilitating a process. But you're doing the digging and that's important.

That's a really fascinating way to think about it too. In terms of letting go of control. It's good that you never had that issue and how has it been from a business perspective? Because that's also a choice from the business model point of view in terms of supporting now this community of dig facilitators.

Well, I'm going slow on purpose because of that. I do feel like the wider we go with anything, the more things can go off the rails and it's just the double sided coin of life, right? If you want growth, you're going to have growth problems. If you want to keep it small, you're going to have small problems. So I feel like I'm very lucky that I tend to attract people in very high integrity. In fact, it's very rare that I'll have a client call and I'll be like, whoa, no. I mean, I can think of maybe two over the past 11 years. They just don't come into my force field. And I love that.

I love how you put it, by the way. It's like there's choices. If you say small, you'll have small problems. And if you stay big and not small in scope, but just there are certain problems that are always going to come with a smaller business and there are certain problems that will come with a bigger one. And I like your process of kind of moving slowly.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Well, let me ask you, on a resonance meter from 0 to 100, your own meter, how are you currently feeling in terms of I don't know, like your level of happiness or let's say authentic expression in your business at this moment in time, at the time we're recording.

Yeah, at this point I have been in a bit of a cave frankly to sit with this because one of the things that I've learned is that the more people that are around you, that follow you, that know you, the more pressure can come with that to choose correctly. And maybe this is what you were referring to earlier. When you're, you know, you're changing business models and things like that, the more people who are around you that are going to notice, it becomes more of a thing. And so I am sensitive to that. And recently I've really been in kind of a place of intentionality and I've been working on a book that I think is going to kind of be just really the framework of everything that I've been doing in this chapter. And that of course brings up a lot of stuff and self reflection. I chose a Word of the year for 2023 and that is together. And for me I've always had a big community around me, but when it actually came to my work and doing the work, I've been pretty much a lone wolf. So this was a stretch word for me. But this together word has totally informed me running the Digg facilitator training program which is just going so well and will grow what it needs to grow. It's also supported the launch of my membership community which is called the Speakeasy which Jenny spoke at. And that's basically a community of purpose driven thought leaders who are building businesses with their authentic messages. And so that, that's something I never would have dreamed of doing a year ago. It just would have felt like way too much drama frankly. And I am very much in alignment. I almost feel like when it comes to public leadership of any kind, well, leadership in general, you could do one to one work. So like the coaches and the consultants, you could do one to some work. So working with the small groups or the teams or you can do one to many work. So that's the writing, the speaking, the courses. So I kind of feel like one of the mistakes, and I would say this points to the lack of sustainability is when we're trying to play in too many of those at the same time. Like if you're doing private coaching plus leading a team plus giving big keynotes, I'm not saying it's impossible, but I feel like it is a bit energetically unsustainable. A big part of my being in the cave. I think what I've been preparing for is shifting more from this one to one work that I've been doing with the dig for all this time, and shifting kind of to the other extreme, which is the one to many. And that's feeling a little uncomfortable, but totally aligned.

Yeah, it's such a good point. I've often talked about those three as well. And it's hard to have context switching all day or even within a week. And it's a lot to hold. Like, I find that my energy goes in waves. For the last few years, I haven't wanted to hold space in a one to one container because I actually know what it's like to show up at my best. And I know that I don't have that kind of extra energetic capacity right now. And that's just interesting to notice. And so if we can, even as business owners, going back to this idea of frequency and authenticity and alignment, it's even just looking at that balance of one to one, one to some, and one to many.

Yes, in that word. Switching, I feel, is pretty important because the energy isn't so much in doing all of the three things. It's in the switching between the two things and how you have to adjust yourself to show up in a successful way doing those things.

How come it's such a pattern? Obviously, I'll speak for myself. For me, I feel like there is no there there with alignment. And it's almost like an inevitable thing, at least in my life and work, that the inauthenticity or the misalignment, it's just going to creep back in. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on why that happens. Is it just that we are human beings and our souls are evolving and we have a certain course of studies here on Earth School. Is it inevitable that we're going to get out of alignment or is there certain set of practices, I guess, to make those misalignments less dramatic?

This is something I'm actually really passionate about, is the fact that no one is authentic or inauthentic. This resonance meter thing came into play because I feel like at any given moment we're from 0 to 100 in our authenticity. And the more we're authentic, the more we're going to be aligned. The alignment is really just the action that mirrors the authentic truth of who you are. So it's always moving. But this is the fun part. This means that the work here at Earth School, I love that you called it that the work is to know thyself so deeply that when your resonance meter starts to dip, you're so attuned to it that you're able to stop and be like, why? What's going on? What's happening? Where am I out of alignment? So it doesn't have to dip to zero. It could have just gone from 90 to 80. And you feel it differently. And so this is something that I would encourage your listeners to sit with is just maybe even take out a pen and paper and just think about when is the last time that I was out of alignment and how did it feel in my body? How did it show up in my thoughts? How did it show up in my life expression? And like, I notice for a lot of people, myself included, when I'm starting to get out of alignment, I tend to do a combination of three bad habits, but it starts to become more of a daily thing. I will drink wine, stay up too late, and watch a crappy show on Netflix.

I love that, you know, you're three.

Oh, my gosh. When I feel compelled to, like, get out the wine, I do enjoy wine. I'm not knocking drinking as a thing, but there's a difference between having a glass of wine and needing a glass of wine. You know what I mean? And I'm attuned enough now to know which one is it. And then the wine leads to the turning on the show because, oh, I'm here to relax. And then that turns into, like, hours and hours and hours. And then that creates this cycle of going to bed too late, waking up tired. We'll guess what wants to happen all over again that next night. So after a night or two of that, I'll be like, hey, what's up, girl? Talking to myself. And like, inevitably, there's something that I just don't want to name because usually to come into full alignment with our authenticity, it means that we have to let something go that feels scary.

Isn't that so true? Like, we almost reject the whispers, the early whispers. And I think that is why, at least for myself, somatically, they will then show up in my body. And my body, I've always said, has me on a short leash. If I get out of alignment, yank, it's like, oh, searing ear infection, yank. Chronic asthma, whatever it's going to be. My body talks to me in that way. And again, not a doctor, not saying for anybody else, but in my experience, my body will definitely get my attention if I'm not.

Yeah. And that leads to this point, the lack of sustainability. And if it's Not a person's body. It could be their mind, it could be some kind of external sources. I. I just see it from a data perspective. If we're not authentic, it will catch up to us and it is not sustainable.

So we're recording this toward the end of the year. It's a little early still, but do you have a word emerging yet for 2024?

I do not. I am still so in my word for this year. It doesn't even feel to me like the year is ending. I feel like I'm almost coming to the pinnacle of it. Do you do words for the year?

I do and I've done them for a long time. I was going to ask you, how do you pick your word of the year? Like, I've talked on a previous episode about the Claire's clairaudience, clairsentience. But how does your word come to you? How does it find you? Or vice versa?

I very much identify as clair cognizant and I'll be fully honest. Like, when I'm digging people, I am using my magical skills just as much as my intellectual ones. I actually went to a clairvoyant school for a year around the time that I was having my daughter, that whole magical experience. And so it definitely is an intuitive process for sure.

Also, I want to know about this clairvoyance school. That's fascinating. How does your word come to you or does it just land in your mind? Just curious how it drops in.

Yeah. So how do I know when it's coming to me? So the claircognizance kind of just embeds this sense of this is what you need to learn and I just know it. And when I had together this year, I was just like, oh, God, that sounds like so much work. I was so annoyed by it. For me, it's about what do I need to learn? And the fun thing about the dig is that I overlay just kind of this life purpose word of your one word that emerges from the day. But I overlay it onto the word per year. In fact, I even do a word of the week. I see these words of the year, word of the week. I see them as things that are alive for me right now that I am consciously and intentionally choosing to lean into instead of away from, but through a lens of authenticity. Being so radically honest and real about what it feels like to be together. That's my work.

I love that you do a word of the week. So what is your word this week at the time of our recording?

My word, this week is shine. And this feels relevant because like I told you, I have been in a more inner space recently. Really? My birthday was earlier in October, and there's something about birthdays. I know. Yours was a few days later. And I've been very contemplative. Contemplative?

Yeah, I know. That's a tricky word. Contemplative words are hard.

I love them so much. But ever since then, I've just been really kind of processing a lot of things, moving forward and making sure I am in alignment. Because this is what we have to offer the world is to be aligned human beings. And if we're doing everything else right by the terms of how the world is going to tell you that you should live your life and you still feel like crap, you are out of alignment. You are just not subscribed to whatever world you're playing in and what rules they're giving you. And I just implore you to please reevaluate and make up your own rules.

So brilliantly said. That's already a great permission slip. But I'll ask you officially, if you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I'm going to go with the do something differently here. This is something that I shared in my TEDx talk and as part of my keynote, and it's a framework for getting radically honest with yourself. And it's very simple. You could take out a sheet of paper, or you can even just think about it in your mind. But pick a topic that has been either vexing you, challenging you, or is just simply alive for you, and share your truth about that only with yourself. To start first, name the factual truth about it, like what is undisputedly true. Then name your emotional truth about it, what you're feeling inside. And then name what you really, really want. So I call this exercise Head, Heart, Core. And if your listeners would like to actually go through the exercise, you can just go to headheartcore.com and I made a video where I'll actually walk you through the whole thing. But it's a way to acknowledge the fact that as human beings, we don't have just one truth, we have at least three. And when you overlay them over each other and you almost look at them like dimensionalities, like the facts blending with the feelings blending with the desires, and you look at it as like one spinning orbital, that's when you really get authenticity.

I love that you even have a process to walk us through. You're the first process based permission slip. I just want you to know.

Yes, and the reason I created all this stuff is because I don't feel like society is teaching people how to be real. It is not encouraged. So my role more than anything is to be an advocate and an educator for how to be your authentic self. No one gave us this training manual.

Speaking of claircognizance, you can just totally shoot this down, but the word power keeps coming in while you're talking. Not abuse of power, not power in a hungry way. Just when we step into this authentic self, we are more powerful and we are empowered to make things happen. And you speak with such authentic, grounded power. It's just the words propelled of like I'm sort of pausing longer after you speak because I'm taking it in. And you just have such, such conviction and mixed with your brilliant process, it's just such a joy to learn more about you and dig in together.

Thank you for saying that. And you know what? Thank you for naming that. Because every time I dig, I feel the power of that individual, of what they're able to do, of who they are, of what they're here to do. You think about the chances of actually being born at this time in this body. Oh my gosh, what an epic opportunity. And to do anything less than what we're actually here to do feels to me like a missed opportunity. So we just need to remember that's.

Our mic drop moment, folks. Erin, thank you so, so much for being here. What a joy. And I can't wait to do another round, either for my show or yours, whenever that launches.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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