Earlier this year I was feeling pretty freaking sorry for myself. In earlier podcasts, I talk a little bit about this scenario, but I was laying on the couch feeling real down and out and I came across this free webinar from a lady named Kate Blake. I opted in. I wasn’t really sure why, but I felt like this was something I needed to do and I quickly wondered how in the hell she knew who I was.

The things that she was saying, I was like, shit. It’s like she’s in my brain. I was tired and wore down and ambitious but struggling and basically stuck in my own way with old behaviors and patterns. She’s also the driving force behind Liberation Week. If you’ve not listened to that episode, I highly, highly, highly recommend you go back to that. We wore our largest insecurities on t-shirts for five days straight. It was insanity but one of the most amazing experiences we’ve had. And the positive effect just keeps going.

I am so stoked to be bringing you Kate Blake today. Actually, right before our call, I got Kate Blake to myself because I needed a reminder that I actually am pretty fucking magical. I just forgot. So Kate specializes in helping female leaders transform their lives by navigating highly successful careers, finding time for themselves, and reconnecting with their joy. She built a lucrative and growing business, but was burnt out and disconnected from all of the things she cared most about (much like many of us).

Determined to enjoy the success that she had earned, she learned to create a deeply balanced life without sacrificing everything. She now uses these tools to help other powerful women, like myself, reset their lives and live on purpose.

Kate, welcome to The Gutsy Podcast.

kate 101

Laura: So you’re like a household name around the Worx & Co office because not only did we go through Liberation Week, but your positive messages continue to ripple through. So you’re just amazing. I’m going to start us off with that.

Kind of take me back, bring me up to you up to speed with like your journey and how you got to be where you are right now and the types of women you’re working with?

Kate: My journey was a little bit of a checkerboard. There was no direct straight shoot. Like, I know I have a very clear understanding of what I want and who I want to be. So I think like most of us, I spent a lot of my life looking for answers outside of myself. I thought the answer was somewhere out there. And if I could find somebody else’s set of rules or someone else’s way of being successful and I could just follow that, then that would be great.

And what I found over and over again was that just wasn’t the case for me.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel to over 40 countries and I have a Master’s Degree in International Relations and I’ve almost become an operative for the CIA. I mean, just the random things that have shown up and I’ve been in extraordinary experiences but was like what, how could that go? It was really just a reflection of me not never looking inside to get clear on what I wanted and who I was.

I got really, really good at, oh, somebody else needs this thing. I can twist myself or tweak this or adapt over this way to make sure that I could do that. And I’d do that for about a year or a year and a half or so in a job and I’d be like, Oh my God, I am so bored. What am I doing with myself? How am I back to square one again? I still don’t know what I want. You know, over and over again.

And somewhere in my mid-thirties, I guess early thirties mid-thirties, a friend of mine went to a wedding and she said, “You have got to meet this woman. She is so cool and she sounds a lot like you and I think you really might enjoy the work that she does.” It turns out she was a coach and I ended up working with her for about three or four months I think as a client. And really just that primary shift of going from looking outside of myself, trying to find the answers there.

Do well in school, you get the right jobs, o get the next degree to get the next one. I was doing all of those things and it just felt empty. So in those few short months working with Alandra, I really started to understand, Oh, the answers are inside of me and they might not match what everybody else’s answers are. And that’s okay. But first having that realization and then learning.

How do I now implement this into my life? How do I start listening to my intuition? How do I start listening to my gut and acting on it? How do I lean into the things that actually feed me and feel really good? Because often those are the only indications we’ll ever have about what’s next for us and what do we do. So when I started doing those things, it got just a lot easier.

There was just a lot more space things. There wasn’t this binary right, wrong, left, right. You know, turn the light switch on or off. In terms of my decision making, in terms of how I judged myself, in terms of how I made decisions, there became a lot more wiggle room and a lot more ease and compassion and excitement and joy along the way as well.

So I’ve started my business from there. I got certified, I started the business, and started helping people, solopreneurs, build their business from out the gate — from the beginning — because they were really just a reflection of me. And over the past 10 years, a little bit more than that now, I’ve worked for the past four or five primarily with CEOs and founders of startups because that’s just sort of where I was and the way my brain works. I’m very entrepreneurial in the way that I think.

What’s interesting about startups is that culture and the way things are done and the way people feel and the experiences they have every day at work, it all starts from the founder and it builds from there and the interactions that they have and the way that they behave. So if they don’t have a clear understanding of their impact on a room, their own sense of emotional responsibility and IQ, their way to hear what someone is saying to them, but understand they can feel something else might be going on, and how do I navigate that? You know, we started working on all of those pieces.

And then in this last year in, I think maybe May sometime this last year, I launched a woman’s program that focused on helping women develop their own sense of self and take up more space in their own lives. Because from my perspective, I think the way that we run business, the way that we run our government right now, socially, culturally, we are very slanted and we run primarily through masculine energy.

Now this does not mean men and the way the men are doing it is wrong. I think all of us as humans have access to masculine and feminine energy. Unfortunately, what we’ve put all of our importance and our weight on is the masculine. The feminine is devalued and dismissed and discounted. And we saw this all with the Me Too movement and with the Brett Kavanaugh appointment and with, you know, just the way that we are running everything and how we measure success right now. I think we are overly slanted on the masculine, which aims and anchors winner take all, there can only be one, I’m going to step on whoever I need to to get there. it doesn’t really matter what anybody else loses as long as I get mine.

And there are moments when that is necessary. The feminine, however, it has a focus on the collective. You know, and as women, we naturally function this way. We think about the family, we think about the community, we think about our friends and what everyone needs, not just our own.

Unfortunately, as women, we often don’t include ourselves in that very space that that we protect and nurture. So part of what I think we need culturally and in our business sense and government and the whole entire thing is much more in this feminine aspect to show up feminine leadership. We can’t actually actualize that change in the world when we haven’t done the work ourselves.

So the program that I’m offering now is a group program because as women, I think when we reset things, doing it in community makes it so much better. But we’ve got to learn how to take up more of our own space. We’ve got to be comfortable using our voice. We’ve got to be comfortable using our power and doing that in ways that might rub against the edges of other people that make it mean something that it’s not.

So how do we do all that stuff in our own lives with our own selves so that we can actualize that out in the world? That’s sort of what I’m up to right now. I do work with men still because I think that over the past 40 years we’ve done a really good job resetting what feminism is and helping women really take back their voice and reclaim their power. And yeah, we’ve put a big mark in it. We haven’t really moved it as far as we need to, but we’ve done a lot of work around it.

We haven’t really helped men, you know, men are still expected to only win and everything is a competition and everything is about who’s more important and who’s more powerful and helping them reset what it means to be a man that they can be proud of and who they want to be is a really important piece. I think we need to take responsibility for as well because as women, we cannot do this on our own. We can’t get any further societaly and culturally and in our families without the men in our lives. Needing that support as well for them to sort of decide who they want to be and giving them the support that they need as well.

So that feminine leadership works on both sides with men and women. And I just threw a whole lot at you, but there you are!

masculine vs feminine

Laura: I’m already writing down so many questions. This was phenomenal. For those of you that may or may not know, I went through Kate’s program over the summer and it was quite literally one of the most life changing things that I’ve ever experienced. So you’re getting some nuggets of awesome from her right now. And this is just a little lean into what it’s like to work with her on a regular basis. A little plug there for you.

So one question that came up is the masculine versus feminine, especially in a leadership role. Sometimes I think it’s perceived that if you have too much feminine energy, then you’re walked over and you’re not taken seriously. But then if you’re too masculine then it’s too much of a dictatorship and you’re the asshole. So how do leaders and CEOs specifically balance both of those energies in the role of leading others?

Kate: Yeah, that’s a great question. So first I’m gonna, um, get curious with you that your description around the masculine and the feminine. When you were describing that, were you looking at that from being a woman or from being a man?

Laura: Well, I think I’m looking at that in a stereotypically what it’s perceived as.

Kate: Yeah, as being a woman, right? Because as a man, you know, men don’t often, I guess they can worry about being too soft, maybe. But I don’t hear very many men worried about being an asshole or being perceived as overbearing or pushy or all those words that as women we take on.

So I want to neutralize a little bit with the feminine-masculine aspect of it, first off, before I even dive in your question because the feminine to me is powerful. The feminine is unshakeable. Because when you think about a mother bear or a human mother, right, there is a power in there that no one in their right mind would cross. So that’s part of what feminine leadership is also because you know that power is there. But it is not wielded or used to threaten or used out of balance. It’s used when necessary. It’s implemented when it’s the benefit for the whole, right.

And so that’s a really important aspect to look at because the feminine leadership to me is really about the collective. It’s about holding each other accountable, but from a loving and compassionate place — not from this adversity that none of us fail. It’s just horseshit. There actually is no such thing as failure in my mind. When we go off course, it’s because the path that we are on is giving us an indication that we’ve misstepped. That’s it. It’s not that now I’m a failure and I should collapse into a ball on the ground and never get out again because look at I can’t do it. It’s that I’ve misstepped. The only way we’re going to know to actually turn the car a little bit more to the left is to know that I’ve gone off the side of the road a little bit.

It’s all about our perception, right? And our reality. And so, you know, I think the idea of the masculine, the feminine, if everything was run by women and it was all about this feminist thing in this whole whatever, then we’re back in the same problem that we’re in right now. What the true course is really the balance of the two. And by balance I don’t mean you use both at all times at every moment. You use one when it is necessary for the moment. And the other one is when it is work more apparent and more necessary. It’s the balance. It’s the give and take.

It’s like raising children. We know when it is that it’s not worth the battle to say, I’ve told you to take your shoes off for the last time that I ever will, right? Sometimes you know, she walks in with her shoes because she just had a fight with her best friend and she’s really sad and needs a hug. So it’s about the balance and about the awareness of seeing the whole picture and understanding what do we want to teach and what do we want to implement and how are we all learning and growing together?

Because inside of our family structures, both at home and in the office space, we’re all learning and growing together. And when we leave that space for us to have a little bit of wiggle room when we fail or when we don’t show up in the way we thought we best could or best wanted to, we want to make sure we look at what did I learn from this? That’s how this experience becomes a beautiful experience.

We don’t just whitewash over it like, Oh well we just lost a $40 million client. Obviously that’s a big thing. The most important thing is to say, great, I’m going to learn this on the $40 million clients so that I don’t make the same mistake on the $3 million client or whatever. I did that backwards, but you know what I meant. Right? We’re learning from it and we’re making sure that we’re growing and moving forward. So I’m not sure if I answered your question?

employees are humans, too

Laura: Yeah, I think I think leadership has really come a long way too and that what the quote-unquote CEO looks like in a company now is not what it used to look like. Like there’s a whole lot more room and flexibility for love and compassion and understanding your employees. Not just like, here’s your job, do it and go home. But like who they are as a human.

I think that’sone of the biggest missed opportunities in growing businesses is not tapping into that feminine portion of the energy and knowing that like before your people are employees, before they have a skill, they are human beings. They have feelings and emotions and stuff going on way beyond what most people even take the time to realize.

Kate: Yeah, and you’ll notice that when you actually pay attention to that stuff, what happens to their output at work or their contribution?

Laura: 100% of it’s always up and up.

Kate: And why is that?

Laura: They feel personally invested. Like I’m somewhere where people care. Like I’m not just a number. I’m not just a workhorse. I’m not just on a production line. I’m somewhere where I’m valued as a person and therefore their outcome is just, I mean, it’s astronomical.

Kate: Yeah. It’s the loyalty. It’s the trust is the commitment. It’s all the things that we want to in our relationships outside of work and if we’ve actually had them inside of work, it changes your whole entire daily experience. The lived experience becomes something else.

Laura: That’s true. You know, in full transparency, I’ve had some fellow business owners in my life be like, you care too much about your people, you’re investing too much in your people, you shouldn’t get to know them on that level, you shouldn’t be friends with them. And anytime that I’ve tried to go back against that, like, you’re right, I should be a little bit more whatever that is — it feels awful. In my body. Like I physically can’t. They are literal human beings and yeah, we all have a job to do but that doesn’t mean I can’t and shouldn’t know who you are as a person.

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s a fine line, right? Having close relationships is very important. But we have to sure that underneath what’s driving those relationships is not blurred, right? Because with employees, much like our children, we don’t need them to like us. And it can be very easy to get in that role where we just want it all to be easy and we want it to be smooth, and as long as they like me then it’s okay. That space can get a little bit blurred. So we’ve got to be careful about that at times.

But other than that, yeah, absolutely. The human beings that are in front of you and having them hold themselves responsible for what’s happening in their own lives, what’s happening at work, what’s happening in their overall experience to make sure that they can show up as the best version of them at work for themselves and yourself and all that. So much of that is through role modeling.

being kate blaked

Laura: I’m also super interested in talking more about listening to the inside versus the outside because when I’m thinking about resetting your life, correct me if I’m wrong, but that feels imperative to starting to make real changes that yield actual differences in your life.

So tell me a little bit more about just listening to the inside and the outside and that whole dynamic?

Kate: So even when you say you want to reset your life, that even itself seems really big and like this huge whole thing. Right? So needing to reset the entire thing, if you were able just to pick something that you would like to have different, what’s that? Let’s just start with one thing.

You would like to have a different experience. You would like to have a different interaction. Like what’s one thing in your life that you would like to be different?

So you give me one, let’s just do that. We’ll do a live example. What’s one thing you would like different? Or it doesn’t even have to be you, you can just give me an example.

Laura: No, that’s fine. You can, you can Kate Blake me. Um, my financial situation.

Kate: Great. Okay. The tricky bit is the outside thing tells you all the things about finances, right? And tells you a story and your mind is going to anchor onto that. And there’s panic and there’s a bunch of future scoping and oh my gosh, this thing, we’re never going to get out of this and we’re only going to stay here and we feel trapped. Right?

If right now you were instead to look externally at all that stuff, if you went internal, what’s the internal story telling you? Do you have everything that you need right now? Do you actually have more than you need? If you sit down and really like look at it and process it?

Laura: Yeah, absolutely.

Kate: Okay, and so that part is really important and you’ll notice it’s internal, not external, right? So if you sit down and actually process it and you look at all of it and that you actually have more than you need, what does that change energetically for you?

Laura: I feel lighter. I’m not as overwhelmed. I don’t feel as like doomsday. I’m not thinking as much. Not like overwhelmed.

Kate: Yeah. So the, your energetics have shifted, your emotional state has shifted. How are your thoughts?

Laura: More optimistic.

Kate: Yeah. From this place, is it more likely that you’re able to have a more positive outcome or from the state you were in when we were like, Oh God, all the external evidence of it being doomsday and terrible?

Laura: It seems way more realistic to be able to achieve things.

Kate: Yeah. And so here’s the thing that we often do as adults, we skip over taking care of the emotional part of self.

So I referenced this and I call this your three-year-old self. So the three-year-old version of you is alive and kicking in every single one of the human beings on the planet. And he or she is the one who is responsible for holding all of our negative emotions. All of our fear, overwhelm, scarcity, not enough. Who am I? What am I doing? Oh my God, doubt all of it.

All of you listening to this who either have children or who have seen a child having a temper tantrum in the middle of the restaurant, when we try to be rational with that child — what happens? They just freak out more. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to. Nope. They’re just gonna keep freaking out.

So the adult version of you, Laura, is like, okay, we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do. Finances. We’re going to come up with a new plan. We’re just going to keep charging forward. Your little one is like, Hey, what the fuck? What is going on? What is happening? How come you’re not listening? Why are you shoving me in the corner? I’ve told you over and over again. Like there she is freaking out.

So the likelihood of you actually being able to get yourself out of this, not only is it so much smaller — it’s like it’s next to impossible in this current state.

The other problem is that even if you were able to get yourself out of it, what happens then?

Laura: Inevitably it’s going to return. It’s a cycle.

Kate: Great. Say more. Why is that?

Laura: Well, you just keep doing the same thing. It’s like lighting a fire and putting it out, lighting a fire and putting it. I don’t know. It’s doing the same thing over and over again but expecting it to be different.

Kate: Great. And what are the thoughts that you have? What’s the most predominant thought you have around your finances? What do you make it mean about you?

Laura: That I suck. Honestly,.I’m a failure at it. Like I am not smart enough to make money. Clearly it’s not for me. Like I don’t get it enough to even understand how to use it properly. It’s not mine and therefore I am a shitty business owner.

Kate: Great. So it’s not mine. I’m a failure. I do it wrong. Yeah. Are these new thoughts that you’ve had in the last like maybe two or three weeks?

Laura: [laughter] No, not even remotely.

Kate: How long have you thought those or something close to that?

Laura: I would say probably around age 10 maybe. Yeah, maybe even sooner than that.

Kate: So most of your life, right? So most of your life, this becomes a very, very familiar and very, very stable way of being because it’s like, I know this way. I know how this feels. Yeah, I got it. And Dr Joe Dispenza does a lot of work around this, helping you actually change your state.

Because what happens is you have this thought, I’m a failure or I can’t do it or I don’t know how or I couldn’t figure it out. That creates an emotional state, which feels pretty crappy. For you to be able to maintain that emotional state for the past however many decades, your body has learned to release a chemical to balance it out. Right? ‘Cause I feel shitty, so my body has to release a chemical in order for me to be able to maintain it. To be able to sleep okay.

We’ve now created a state that feels normal. We’ve normalized it. Oh, this is who I am. This is how I feel whenever we said anything having to do with finances, this is all I’m going to feel and I’m going to relate to it. So if by chance, by some miracle I am able to pull myself out of this mindset, this thinking for maybe an afternoon, my body starts to freak out. Cause it’s like what the F dude? No, no. We know this other thing. We know how to survive. We know what it feels like. That’s comfortable, that’s safe. That’s where we know what to expect. We’ve got to go back there.

That’s why you go back in the cycle.

So what it takes is really not only having the new mindset, but then new tools that you implement on a daily basis. So you create new habits and create new behaviors. And it’s simple stuff. It’s simple little stuff, right? You start, you feel yourself go, Oh, I’m feeling negative about this financial thing and there is truth in it. There is a reality to it. So we’ll get to that in a minute. But right now I want to deal with my emotional state.

Okay. What do I need right now to feel like I’m safe? That young part of me is blaming herself, making herself wrong, making herself an idiot who can’t do it. What does she need to hear in order to feel safe?

Laura: It’s okay. Like I got you and we’re in this together.

three-year-old self

Laura: I think it’s really important to share with the listeners right now, like we did a lot of work on the inner child when Kate and I worked together. And part of that was learning to comfort my little girl, you know, the little person inside of me that is part of who I am.

So part of this is acknowledging her and not just pushing through the emotions. Not dealing with the emotions is basically like telling a three-year-old to shut up. And that brings on a whole lot more panic on this version of me that lives inside of me. So acknowledging her and saying I’ve got you. I’m in this. I’m in this with you. This is mine. You don’t have to carry this anymore.

Kate: Yeah. And babe, it’s not your fault. You did nothing wrong. I think you are amazing. I know that there’s magic inside of you. I’ve been carrying all this stuff that’s for the adults to do. It’s not your job.

You notice that as you say all those things, as we nurture ourselves in the ways that we really wanted to be nurtured when we were three and four years old, we get to repair into ourselves. When as we even say those words right now, that part of us, it’s calming inside. It’s settling down and then the adult version of you who’s having this conversation with me, she gets to navigate and decide, great, how are we going to get ourselves out of this financial thing? What’s our next step? That’s all we’ve got to come up with. What is just the next step?

And you can do that with your eyes closed, right? And you know that what happens is that when we skip over the emotionals part of self and we just discount it and dismiss it and devalue it and throw it away, she has got to be acknowledged. And she’s the one who’s like, I hold all of this. I’m the one that has all of this. This is the important job that I have. I’m here to tell you something and I need you to listen. So we’re just gonna start listening to her.

And this is a process that is a lifetime of work. This is not do this exercise until you feel better. This is what we will do for the rest of our lives. Because if you’re anything like the two of us, you’re entrepreneurial and thinking, which means there is going to be something new to be discovered, something new to be developed, something to stretch yourself outside of where you’re at. And even if you’re not, even as a mother working at home, bringing these new lives and humans into the world and keeping yourself sane in that process, that in itself is an entrepreneurial thinking mind.

So how do we take care of ourselves? Right? And this is the whole center of all of this like self-care thing that’s so important. If you’re not taking care of yourself emotionally, you can go to the spa every day for five hours. It won’t make a difference.

self-care + Awareness

Laura: That’s a true story. We were talking earlier about about self-care and what that means and what that looks like and a huge portion of it is taking care of our emotions, but  we’re also so quick to just like pour ourselves in everyone around us like it’s our responsibility to fix everybody.

And you know, you were even talking to me about like how quick I am to dump all of myself into those around me yet leave myself completely depleted and it’s not intentional, it’s a subconscious thing. It’s almost like a training that I have built of my own because I love to care for people. You know, it’s second nature.

Kate: I’m going to interrupt you for just a minute ’cause that’s true. And as women, I think predominantly as women, we all do this to a much larger extent. I think men are kind of catching up and figuring it out. But as women, because we are caretakers by nature, this is just what intuitively comes to us.

Way more important than that Laura, is that you cannot get yourself out of I am a financial failure or I’m a loser or I’m terrible I can’t do it — whichever — if you keep yourself in that way of relating to self by giving all of your energy and your efforts to anyone else. The minute you put all that effort and that energy inward, what happens?

Laura: I mean, I feel like things start shifting.

Kate: Yes, you’re able to focus, you have more energy to like move the needle. You start breaking patterns and habits. All the things that we say we want.

The tricky thing is the pattern, the worn path. It’s like, you know when you go out on a bike bike trail and it’s been raining the last few days and you can see there’s a worn path where the bike is, like everybody else’s tire has gone through that path? What I’m asking you to do in this process is to pick your bike up out of that worn path and ride next to it.

You’ve spent a lifetime, honey, believing this garbage, believing this trash because your mom believed it about herself, her mom believed about herself. Wherever we learned it from — you did not come out of the womb thinking these things. None of us did. So we learned it as a child. We kind of by osmosis pick it up like, Oh yeah, that’s what you think about yourself. That’s how I’m supposed to. So now you’ve spent a lifetime doing that.

It doesn’t change overnight and it doesn’t change without diligent, compassionate, focused awareness to create a new way, a new belief.

Laura: I think that’s one of the things I learned most in our time together is the art of learning to be aware. Like when I start thinking something, when I start feeling a certain way, being aware and literally quite literally just stopping. And like again, tapping into my emotional self and saying, okay, why am I feeling this? What do I need to do differently? How do I need to react? You know, just really being like, let’s just not go back into autopilot.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I feel I probably have done that for the last couple of weeks, but even just the conversation today and just being aware of how I’m feeling and then responding to it differently versus reacting the way that I’ve always been taught.

Kate: Yeah. Well, because what happens, honey, the awareness of it, you see it, and just even seeing it is the pattern interrupt. Oh, I’m feeling something. When has any child on the planet ever been taught: What are you feeling right now? What are you experiencing right now? Whoo, did you see that your emotional state just changed? It just shifted? No. None of us have been taught this.

So the minute that you go, huh, I feel pissed off, what does that do?

Laura: [laughter] Well, it gives you a second to process why the hell you’re pissed off?

Kate: It changes you. It takes you out of autopilot where you’re just in reaction moving. Now you’re like vomiting you’re pissed off-ness on whomever’s in front of you. Right? It allows you to have an awareness of it, which changes the state. It alone changes the state that you’re in when you go, Huh? Because you take on almost that observer role.

Wow. Why do I feel pissed off? Okay. And then I get to be curious about it, which is the next piece that you were saying, what is going on?

Laura: Like somebody cutting you off, right? When you’re super pissed because someone cut you off and then all of a sudden you want to light the town on fire.

Kate: Yeah. Or trying to think of like when you call in to have somebody at the Apple phone center help you with your phone and screaming on the phone with them. You’re like, this has nothing to do with you. I am really sorry.

So the awareness of like, what am I doing? How am I showing up? Who can I be proud of in every circumstance? Even when I fuck it up, especially when I fuck it up.

Fucking up

Laura: I think that fucking things up is one of the largest triggers. It’s like, okay, well that immediately sends me into I have screwed everything up. Why keep trying? Who was I to even think I could do this in the first place? And you know, this mental thing — it’s like a downward spiral.

So I think there’s almost a bit of an art form to a fucking up. Like you said earlier, it’s like you’ve misstepped. And I think that’s a really good reminder. Like failure is not the end see all be all, it just means there’s a course correct.

Kate: I mean, even if you look at your business right now, when you started your business, did you ever think that you could be where you are?

Laura: I mean I dreamed, yeah, but I didn’t, you know, the things that have happened along the way, the achievements that we’ve had, the growth that I’ve had, the team that I have. You can’t get down on that kind of granular level to even think like, yeah, I knew this is exactly what it was going to happen.

Kate: Right. So now looking back from now, if you were to start it all over again, would you have the knowing like of course there are going to be bumps in the road. Of course it’s not a straight shoot up. Of course there are things that are coming. I have to now understand and plan for them to come. And it’s not because I’m a failure, it’s because it is what life is. It’s how it goes.

The second thing is if you spend every single day, honey, like look at everything we have accomplished over the years of having this business. Holy shit. Wow. Instead of I still haven’t done that. Haven’t gotten there. Oh my God, we’re still where we are with the finances? What am I going to learn? Why can’t I get it right?

The majority of us spend over 90% of our day looking at what’s gone wrong, what we didn’t get to, what was a mishap or a mistake or failure, and then all that does is recreate more and more and more of that.

Even that simple shift to look at, what am I proud of today? What did I accomplish? What am I protecting in this space that I can feel good about? Because I am the only one that is going to change my lived experience and it all starts from what I’m thinking, that creates how I feel, that creates an emotional state, that reinforces usually a negative self-belief, right?

Something happens in the world. I look at that and go see, my finances are still not where they need to be. Look, I am a failure. Look, I am not enough. I’m going to prove that negative belief correct and I’m going to do that all day long. I have a belief, my mind’s only job is to look for evidence of it being true.

If, on the other hand I were to go, you know, my finances are where they. As of last month they haven’t changed, but as of last year or five years ago, holy shit, we’ve grown a ton. This is actually pretty amazing. Your whole way of relating to self, the whole way you feel about yourself, the way that you experience yourself changes entirely. You now feel more confident, you now feel more capable. The likelihood of you getting more clients or connections — the people you want to interact with on that level — now becomes possible.

how you think is how you feel

Laura: It’s all such an energetic field. And one of the things you told me along our journey together was what I was attracting was a reflection of what I was putting out and that like got me right down deep in the gut. I don’t know. I was upset for a hot minute and then I was like, shit, she’s right. Like, it’s like a mirror, everything around us as a mirror.

Kate: And more than that, honey, cause it’s not a blame thing, right? It’s a really important thing. It’s not about necessarily what you’re putting out consistently, it’s how you are relating to yourself. What is showing up in your life on the outside is a reflection of how you are talking to and treating yourself on the inside.

And yeah, it is what you’re putting out to some degree. How you’re talking to your spouse or your partner or your teammates or whomever, it comes out of us — it leaks out. But the most important root of it is how you are talking to yourself, how you are thinking about yourself and feeling about yourself because that feeling is ever pervasive.

We can always, especially when we have any kind of negativity, notice when that’s present. The thoughts aren’t always necessarily there, right?

Laura: Yeah. I’m super aware of how I treat myself now cause like at the end of the day, if you strip everything back, literally I am what I have. I am me and what a beautiful gift. And to think back to when I used to look at myself in the mirror and think about how fat I was or ugly I was or unsuccessful I was and who do you think you are? And going through all these things, I’m like, really? That was talking to my little girl as well. That was telling her all these really terrible things.

And I know a lot of people have heard this, but like, the things you say to yourself, is that what you would say to other people? Would you talk to your best friend that way? And of course it’s like absolutely not, but why are we willing to do that to ourselves?

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. The reason we are willing to do it is because culturally we are taught and we are steeped in self-hatred. Think even just as women. Think about the multi-trillion dollar businesses that would collapse overnight if women liked their bodies. Our culture just feeds it.

You’re not tall enough. You’re not thin enough. Your boobs are too big. Now they’re too small. You’re don’t have a big butt, but have it be small enough. I mean, there’s no way to win. And that’s just with our appearance. Then look at the way we measure ourselves on, well, I have a degree, but it’s from a state school. It’s not from whatever Ivy league. We discount everything on every level.

And so yeah, it’s really tricky unless we’re paying attention to it and we start to figure out what am I allowing in my space, what am I going to believe? How do I change those behaviors? And I will share with you all that these need to be things you do on a daily basis or else it’s an intellectual concept. It’s not an embodied lived experience. That’s the only way we create new behaviors.

What Does Gutsy Mean to You?

Kate: I think gutsy to me is, is daring to stay connected. Fighting for your life every day and daring to do the work to stay connected. It takes work to do that. And that’s the work. That’s where the magic comes from. But the being unwavering and being committed to that, I think that’s what’s gutsy as hell and sexy as fuck.

connect with Kate

Website | KateBlake.com

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