The Emerging Women Podcast

This episode’s guest is Christine Kane. Christine is known as the Mentor to People Who are Changing the World.

She is the president and founder of Uplevel You™, a million-dollar company committed to the growth and empowerment of entrepreneurs and creatives around the globe through teaching not only high-level cutting-edge authentic marketing and business strategies, but also transformational techniques to shift mindsets and wealth. After 15 years in a successful career as a popular songwriter and performer, Christine shifted her focus so that she could provide a deeper level of service to other creative entrepreneurs. Christine was a featured presenter at the 2013 Emerging Women Live Conference in Boulder, CO.

In this episode of Grace & Fire, Christine and I speak about:

• Her transition from music to being a mentor/business coach
• Treating Business like Art
• The Power of Communicating “Your Story” and how to avoid traps when sharing it
• Clean Selling and aligning with true intention while not letting assumptions rule
• Imperfect action and the benefit of taking small steps

Tune in and listen to Marketing with Intention and Integrity with the Rock Star Business Woman: Christine Kane.

Transcript

Chantal Pierrat: Hello, Christine!

Christine Kane: Hey, how are you?

CP: Welcome!

CK: Well thanks for having me. [I’m] really excited.

CP: Yes, I can’t believe it’s been over a month since the event. It was so great to get to know you and to see the other side of Christine Kane, behind the curtain, which is actually the same as what I always imagined you to be.

CK: [Laughs] Well, thank you. It was just such a great event, and I’ve just been talking about it to everybody. It’s going to be huger next year than it was this year!

CP: Yes! I’m totally pumped for it. You know, what’s interesting is that when I first discovered you—and the reason I’m saying [this is to] see the truth of who you are—I discovered you through your music. And I was thinking, “Oh, she would be a great singer for Emerging Women.” And it took me a little while to realize, “No, this woman’s also a business mentor.”

So I would love to hear a little bit more about how that was a transition for you, because as far as I can see in your business, you’re very much like who I saw and got to know through the internet on your music. It’s not like you have two different personas, it’s the same. And those two categories—mentoring and business coaching and being basically, can we call you a rock ‘n’ roll star? Because I actually feel like you can fit into that category. The two seem to be mutually exclusive, so maybe you could start there and tell us about your background and how you came to where you are now.

CK: It’s funny you say that. For a while I said that, “Oh my God, it’s very different, I should hide the fact that I played music because that will make people question my ability as a business owner.” But any artist knows that in order to do what you want to do, especially now, you have to know that you have a business and you have to treat your art like a business.

I actually believe that business is an art. And when you look at some of what I learned in the world of songwriting, if I was to sit you down and really talk about it, it’s amazing how much it links in with a lot of the lessons I’ve had to learn with business. Now, with that said, it’s very different now that I’m running a company and we have a team, and I am stretching muscles that I never thought I would have to stretch. But I really do with that I had done more of this and really stretched this out a little bit more because I think I would have been able to do even more with my music at the time.

So how the transition happened, though, wasn’t so much that I was like, “I’m going to go in and be in business.” When I was performing, I was pretty clear early on [about] not just becoming a musician. There was a point where when I had become a musician, I had all the people clapping at me and supposedly I’d reached some level of a dream come true [and] I realized that I needed to make the intention and set the intention that this was going to be bigger than my ego. I started to realize it didn’t have as much to do with the music as I thought.

So it became, really, about service, and when you look at art or any business, it’s a service profession. And when I opened up to that, what started happening was people would come up to me backstage, when I was signing CDs, and they would say, “How do I follow my dreams? How do I live my purpose?” And they weren’t saying, you know, “How do I play that chord? Or write that song?” They were asking me about the bigger pieces of their lives. And I began coaching them without even knowing what coaching was.

Then I moved in and started getting coaching myself and realized, “Wow, this is just really helpful, and it’s a really wonderful modality for working with people.” And I began offering retreats for women, completely separate from doing music. While I was still on tour, I’d come home and I would do some retreats in Asheville. And that grow into an online business, and there was a point that I just knew that all of my passion for helping people, serving people, coaching people would eventually lead me out of music. I knew it in 2005, and in 2009 I made my last CD and I really just gave my all over to what is now my company.

I just kind of said, “You know what, this is the moment.” And it wasn’t a mental moment. I didn’t just say, “I’m quitting!” I actually evolved into it. And it evolved fully into business coaching, however I will add that I do a ton of business coaching, but all of it is connected to soul. All of it, even strategy, every marketing piece, when I talk about pricing strategies. Especially when you’re working with women, there’s so much soul and so much mindset that I now think there’s no way I could be doing this without having done music.

CP: Wow. Yes. One of the things that you led with here was that songwriting—the process of songwriting, you’re seeing that coming up. And one of the things in business, especially when women articulate business, [is] it seems that the power of story and our own personal experience is relevant. And I’m curious to see if that is coming in for you and the talent that you have in songwriting, if that’s translating or you’re encouraging people to communicate their story in their marketing.

CK: All the time. All the time. Story to me is everything. It builds trust. I think we have to have credibility, that’s very important. But I think we also have to have vulnerability. And when you’re vulnerable and you are sharing your story, you want to be strategic about how you do it.

This isn’t just to say, “Bleed all over the place,” because I think sometimes very heart-centered people have that tendency to say, “Oh, she’s giving me permission to tell my story and I’m just going to go all over the place here.” There are strategies to share it without overwhelming people and fire-hosing them. But people do need to hear what has driven you to this place and why you are leading this business or creating this thing that you’re doing now.

I think people love to hear those transition points. When I tell people I was hiding—for a long time I was hiding that I was coaching people backstage, I was hiding that I was doing women’s retreats because I was an artist and I was in the coffeehouse world. There was a coolness factor. You wear your jeans and your black shirts and you look really cool, the cooler the better, and don’t admit that you have Deepak Chopra or Sounds True cassettes in your car or whatever it is. It’s like that kind of hiding, and when I share that with people, that’s a story I’m sharing.

There have been so many people who have come up and had their own story that linked in with them. And there’s a trust there. And that’s where it links, and that’s usually my ideal client, someone who went through some kind of transition like that. So it’s funny, we are the center of our business. We are at the core of it. So of course our own stories matter. And that’s going to attract people who are our ideal clients, I would say 90 percent of the time.

CP: Right. Now, you said something interesting, because it reminds me of myself. I tend to overshare, and I was wondering if you had some tips on, as people are sort of deciding what to share in their story and what pieces are relevant, especially when we’re talking about those transition points. I love how you used that phrase. What traps do you find women falling into as we’re trying to articulate our story? How do we avoid those?

CK: Well, I think it’s really important to sit down and find what your relevant stories are, because this isn’t just blabbering on. It’s not like, “I’m going to sit down and tell you everything.” Those are conversations with our pals and with our friends. So I think it’s [really] important to say—first off, it starts by knowing, who is your ideal client and what matters to her and him? What are their doubts and objections and what are some of their challenges? What stories do I have that are relevant that link into those? How am I going to serve them?

And I think one of the biggest resistances that people, especially women, in business face is the word “strategy.” So strategy, for a lot of people, makes it seem like, “Oh, you’re harshing my buzz. I’m just so spontaneous and I just tell whatever I want.” But telling the story involves some strategy because otherwise you go off into some tangent and people can’t follow. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And I think this is where being on stage for so many years in music has served me, in that I had so much practice learning when I was sharing something where their eyes would glaze over [or] when I was sharing something that got a laugh or whatever. I think it’s [about] the relevant pieces, and I think women are resistance to practice. They’re resistant to strategy. They’re resistant to saying, “If I’m going to be on stage, what are the most relevant stories that matter?”

And you can plan some of that in advance. When I do my Masterminds, this is the stuff we work on. We just did a whole two-day [program] on positioning and what it means from a real soul-authentic place, and what stories you have, and how you’re going to put them out there so that people get them and you’re not just like, “Here’s everything I could possibly give you with this story!” You don’t need to tell every last little piece. It’s [about] what really is going to hook in and matter to and impact your ideal client or someone, even if it’s just from the place that they get what you’re trying to convey, they get what you’re trying to teach. It’s not always about selling.

CP: Right. That’s the thing about music—when you’re on stage, there are so few words. I feel like singer/songwriters and folk singers and even rock ‘n’ roll, of course, you’re just there and you’re saying maybe just a handful of words, but they’re so powerful.

CK: Yes, and I think that’s part of the key. You really learn, in songwriting, how to cut it down, because you don’t have an endless amount of time. Unless you’re writing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” or something like that. But even that is a story that goes on for a while, but it conveys the key points. Even long songs convey the key points, and I think there’s a gift to learning how to do that.

I know that you hear, Chantal, like when you’re on stage, you shared a lot of stories, and I’m sure you heard from people, “That one story blew me away.” When you hear that feedback, that’s very good feedback. And that’s where you think, “Huh, where does that need to go? Is that a part of my bio? Is that something I bring on stage when I’m going to the next event or whatever? Or is it a blog post? Or does it lead into something else I’m trying to teach?” Because once you share something and you hear that kind of feedback, it’s really, really the truth. It’s not just you sitting there wondering anymore.

And one of the things I loved that you said on stage [laughs] was, “I used to be a dude!”

CP: [Laughs]

CK: I giggled my ass off when I was in the audience there. I just loved it. I loved that about business. And the classic thing you’re trying to teach people is that to be out in the world, to be in the commercial world—whether it’s in your business or being an executive or being very professional—you don’t have to be a dude. And I think just the way you said it was hysterical. And I’m sure you had that kind of feedback from other people. That’s what I always say to my clients: “Use that in your marketing.” Because when done well, marketing is not marketing. It’s simply communicating.

CP: Right. I feel that there is a resistance to strategy and marketing, because it feels like we’re conniving somehow or not totally authentic. But I think that what you’re presenting here is something quite the opposite.

CK: Yes, it’s actually service. Because then you’re not going to be up there rambling on for 12 minutes about a story that could have taken you three. Any comedian knows, when you’re trying to get the response you want, it takes a while to hone down to the key elements that are really going to do the trick.

CP: What about online marketing and a lot of the sort of genre of solo-preneurs or author/entrepreneurs or people who are selling courses? It seems like there’s not that many business models out there, and I just wonder about all of the—there seems to be a marketing style that doesn’t feel very soulful out there. I’m curious to see if you have advice for women who what to actually, like you said, express the deepest part of themselves but also not to get in this place where we’re taking advantage of people or really pushing too hard on the sell? Where can we come to that place of service but actually have effective marketing?

CK: And that’s the classic question. That’s the classic question of the spiritual business owner, of the purpose-driven business owner, however you want to frame that. It reminds me a lot of, in the songwriting world, [where] there’s a real division between the “artists” and the “songwriters who make money.” [Laughs] It’s like the ones who sit in offices and craft songs are often considered, by the artists as, “Oh, they’re just out to make money. They’re just trying to write a hit. I can’t be contained like that.” And yet, when I did go to Nashville and write with people like that, I learned so much about structure and format and how to be a better songwriter. And those songwriters would learn, really, a lot from being around a little bit more artistic voice.

It’s really how you enter. I call it “entering the ocean” when I’m teaching people about this. With marketing, and with sales, I think you can learn a lot from people who understand the structure, but when you can put it through your filters, you can rise the art of it merely by your own intention. And this is what I teach my clients, that “I’m going to teach you the structures and formulas for marketing, and you can use them to manipulate. You absolutely can. And yet, when you stand in your intention, and when you communicate clearly, and you drop the hard sell”—I think people are getting smart about selling and they’re not as into it—“you bring people to a place of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as opposed to pushing.”

This ultimate service, for instance, with selling is to bring someone to a decision point, not to push them into “yes.” And when you can really learn how to sell and ask clear questions and bring someone to that point and also see where their objections are, it’s actually a really beautiful thing. I’ve let people go, I’ve welcomed people in. That’s just how I do it and I teach people about it. Sometimes it takes a while to get there because the judgment and the pain that we’ve gone through in our paths of purchasing and selling often leads us to—we start the path with judgment and criticism and it’s very hard to pull that stuff off so we are in our purest self, we know the structures, but we’re communicating clearly.

There’s just a way of doing it. I teach clean selling. That’s part of the retreat we just did. I gave a whole piece about clean selling and removing some of those assumptions and manipulations that often taint how we’re communicating how we sell to people. Does that make sense?

CP: Yes. Tell me a little bit more. I love this idea and I love the terminology of “clean selling.” I feel like there’s a need for this, but can you articulate that a little bit more?

CK: Yes! So one of the things I talk about when I coach people is that before you get on a call with somebody, you want to do clean coaching. I work with people for a year, and it’s very tempting to get on the call and be judgmental from the start. I don’t mean judgmental mean, I mean you’ve [just] got all your preconceptions.

And so I teach a sort of ritual for before you get on a call. It’s really cleaning up your assumptions about the person, where they were last time, if you’re really busy, if you’re feeling stressed that you won’t be able to coach them. Some of my clients get people who are maybe doing better than they are, making a lot more money, and they’ll assume that they’re not as good as their client. Just clearing all that out.

So if you’re selling, it’s really good to go through a process, before you get on the phone—because a lot of my start-ups [I teach] are in the point where they’re still getting clients one-on-one. I teach a way of looking at, “What are my assumptions about this person? What are my assumptions about my relationship with this person? What are my beliefs about selling?” I have them put them all on the table and then take a few minutes to breathe and really intentionally let those go. And then step in and align with the intention, the cleanest intention [of] who they know they truly are and why they’re doing what they do.

We’re not trying to get to a place where it’s magic and I transform their brain. I’m just trying to get them to align with their true intention and let the assumptions not be what rules the call. Does that make sense?

CP: Yes. It’s lovely. I feel like I need to do that when I get on the phone with my father. [Laughs]

CK: [Laughs] That would be a whole different podcast, if we’re bringing parents and family in!

CP: Right? But even whether or not you’re a coach, if you’re in a leadership position and you’re having a meeting with an employee or you’re doing a team meeting. This goes in all relationship.

CK: This is ultimately leadership. I teach my clients—whether they’re in start-up and they have one client or [have] never gotten a customer yet or their running six-figure, seven-figure businesses—that ultimately what we’re talking about here is that you are a leader. When you’re a good marketer and you’re telling a story, you’re a good leader. When you’re selling well, you’re a good leader and you’re leading people. You’re not manipulating. All of the things that we judge against it, it’s really continuing consistently to realign with your message, with your positioning, and with your clients or your prospect, whatever it is. Continuing to realign with what do you and what you’re serving.

Because we can get thrown off really easily. And a lot of us think that’s our true selves. But it’s not our true selves. As a business owner, as a leader, you have to keep continually stepping into the vision and do whatever it takes to protect your confidence in holding in that vision. That is what marketing is, that is what selling is, and those are all the structures we want to create for ourselves as business owners. And that stuff, to me, is the hard word, not the, “How to sell.” It’s really continuing that process of realigning.

CP: You know, I love how many times you have said the word “structure” in this interview. I mean, I really appreciate that, especially as somebody who comes from such a creative background. It’s remarkable how much you actually lean on structure, for some who I know, being a four on the Enneagram and you’re a creative spirit, who tends to be more right-brained.

CK: Well, I think my whole purpose of going into music was that I had to grow up. And part of it—you mentioned the Enneagram. I had to learn that my emotions weren’t the core, the leader of the universe and the reason I existed. I began to recognize how important structure was in songwriting, in being on stage, and then [in] running a business.

It’s something that, [in] the way I teach people—when I’m teaching marketing and when I’m teaching selling—there is a structure involved, but it’s a lot like when you first learn the guitar. You’ve got your metronome going, and you’ve got your finger here, and you’ve got fifth fret here. And it all feels very rote and very stiff and horrible, but you do it enough times and then you’re on stage and the metronome’s in your head playing, but you can drift a little bit away and come back in. It’s improvisational, but you have to start with that structure. Otherwise you’re just all over the place.

I think some people can have a business without a lot of structure. It’s more free, there’s more flowing. You’re a seven on the Enneagram, so [for] some of my seven clients, I can’t enforce structure for them because they would hate their business. So I kind of say, “All right, well, then just recognize it may be hard to get to a level where you’re delegating very well because your team is going to need a little more structure,” because hopefully you’re not just going to be hiring other people just like you.

CP: Right, right. Noted. I’ve got nothing but sixes and threes and twos.

CK: It’s so funny. We’re just—yes.

CP: We’ll talk later. [Laughs]

CK: No, no, no, I was about to say, someone we both know that I’ve hired, I was telling her that [when she was] saying, “Well, what do you want in this position,” and I said, “I need either—” and I was looking at all my notes from several months ago, because I get very, very clear before I hire people because of who I am. And I was reading it and then I burst out laughing and I said, “Oh, and it says here I want either a six or a one on the Enneagram.” [Laughs]

I look at all angles of the kinds of people I need to hire to complement the way I run my company, because you don’t want a whole bunch of me all around because it would be a little messy. I lean on structure, but I don’t enforce it for others very well, so I need other people to know what my structure is and then keep the team going to it.

CP: Right. You know, just from starting Emerging Women and really being in the space of promoting the feminine in business, what I found is there are the two extremes where there are women who have been so in their masculine—and this is where I came from, being a dude—that they’re so shut down to the power of the feminine [that] they actually don’t even value it. I was at a point where I didn’t even value it. And then on the other side, there’s women who have relied only on their feminine and maybe have overindulged story and emotions and are in this sort of soup of trying to figure out, “How can I get my left brain, too,” because both are required to emerge in this new space where the feminine power does have a little bit more weight. We need both sides.

CK: Yes, absolutely. I remember in music I was invited to a lot of women’s music festivals and some of them were very anti-men, and I wouldn’t go to them. I just don’t see the point of that. I see a lot of that, where women will trash men and trash the masculine. And I just went through the same thing where I was invited to speak somewhere and when I brought what I wanted to speak about to the table, they said, “No, it was very masculine driven.” And I was shocked because [they said,] “This isn’t going to work for us,” and I wasn’t even going as far [as] I could go with some of the more feminine principles, or what you would call the more feminine principles.

But I think the key thing right now that I see working for people, especially my clients, is a combination. There’s two tracks: one is what I call soul and the other is what I call strategy. And that’s how I teach, is that you have to have strategy. You’ve got to have that left brain. You’ve got to know what marketing is. You’ve got to understand the structures and the systems. But you always have to be tapped in with the softer pieces, the soul. I don’t even like calling them softer, but it is.

The mindset, the stuff that comes up, the resistance that comes up, where your own stories are—and I don’t mean the stories like the marketing stories, I mean the stories that you tell yourself, like, “Oh, they didn’t call back, so therefore I’m not going to follow up anymore because they hate me and everyone always has hated me and my dad told me I should never do business and therefore I can’t possibly do business.”

So I think a lot of times when people are really saying, “I’m into the feminine of business so therefore I’m not going to do business,” I think they’re hiding, sometimes, behind their story, saying they’ve been hurt, they’re scared to be hurt, they’re scared to actually get some structure because they’re scared they can’t do it. So it’s all loose, mostly, because they’re scared, but they have conveniently found the feminine story to make up for that and never have to face that fear.

And I think it’s really freeing when you can face that fear and recognize it’s not going to kill you and it’s not going to harm you. You actually can be really strong and you can [do] whatever it is—follow through, sell, market, etc.

CP: Right. Oh, that story, that example you gave sounded so familiar!

CK: Yes. And we’ve all gone through it. I mean, yes, totally.

CP: One of the things that I was curious about in your own life, in your own process—I mean, you have come so far since turning your career from music into this world, and you’ve been very successful. And I’m curious to see if you, recently, in the last year, have had your own transition point. We always have emergences, right? We’re always emerging into something new and juicy, and I’m curious to see if you’ve had anything like that in the last year.

CK: Yes, for sure. This has been a year, for me, of huge transition inside of me. Because one of the things I realized—we’ve made over a million dollars, we’re close to two million for three years, and that is a fantastic place to be. And I’ve recognized, “OK, I know how to make money,” and I could drive forward. Part of the reason we haven’t doubled, tripled, and continued forward is that I really and truly didn’t want to until I got the right team in place, until my systems were in place.

And this year, I really wanted to get my “why” in place. What, exactly, are we doing? Because it’s one thing to know how to make money, and you can dive infinitely forward continuing to make money, and I really have had to take some deep time working with my own coaches and working with some very, very—I don’t even need to use the word “spiritual,” just really wonderful people who are helping me understand, “What does Uplevel You do? How do we do it different? And do I want to take it to the next level?”

That’s a key question, and I think, in the world, what I’ve noticed is that a lot of people approve of me. My accountant approves of me. My lawyers approve of me. They look at our bottom line and say, “Well, who wouldn’t want this?” So there’s a lot of nods that are out there in the world, and yet I felt like something inside of me kept calling me to go a little deeper. I’ve taken a lot more time, had a lot more space, doing a lot more writing and clarifying, what is it that I most want to be? Who is it that I most want to be? What do I most want to teach? And is this truly going to be—how well are we going to serve people?

Sometimes it’s really painful to do that. I’ve been tired and I have endless amounts of ideas and ways to make money. And then, when you have overhead, once you have a team—we bought office space three years ago, and there’s a lot more. I don’t ever want to take a client or I don’t ever want to have to do anything because someone’s behind me saying, “Yes, you have overhead.” And that’s the weird reality of having a business, and so that’s been the driving force for me to step back and say, “What am I doing? What is this about?”

I am literally just now—and Emerging Women was a huge part of thing. Being there and hearing people speak and seeing Tami Simon talk and all the amazing people, it was just so part of the door busting open after a long year of a lot of contemplation. And I’m just now starting to see possibilities like people coming into my life and stuff happening, and it’s pretty amazing. Some of it’s involving some surrender, so yes. That’s a long way of answering your question, “Am I going through a transition?”

CP: The longer the better! The longer the better. Because I feel like it’s so easy, when someone’s up on stage and someone’s running a multi-million dollar business, to project and say, “Wow, she’s really up there and she’s made it.” But the truth of the matter is, no matter where you are, if you’re committed to a path of consciousness and conscious business, we’re always unfolding. We have some major points along the way. To hear your story in particular is helpful to a lot of women, so I appreciate it. Like me. [Laughs]

CK: I’ve been a mastermind with a lot of men—a mastermind where you have to be making a million dollars or more. So there’s a lot of men in there and there’s not a lot of vulnerability. It’s just not OK. And I’m like, “Well, why wouldn’t they say that?” Every now and then I’ll get someone by ourselves and we’ll be talking and he’ll be like, “Oh, I totally went through that. Oh, yes, it sucked.” And it’s like, wow, I wish people would share this more often because it’s so helpful to know when someone is massively uncomfortable and has gone through discomfort [while] still running a successful business. And that’s the key thing: you can go through uncomfortable times and still be running a business. It doesn’t mean you have to run away.

CP: Right. So this brings me to your work—the CEO of YOU is [what] you call it—and you’re taking that out into the world more, less with entrepreneurs but in business settings. Can you tell me how your work is being applied to people who do more leadership work in big organizations?

CK: Well, right now that’s a minor piece of what I’m doing. I’m mostly primarily working with entrepreneurs.

CP: Oh, I see, OK.

CK: The key piece of that, though—the CEO of Y-O-U is really about a personal path of leadership more than anything else. And I think leadership has been pounded into the ground. The word is so overused to where it means nothing to any of us. It’s a tough one, sometimes, to talk about because I think it does have a real masculine quality to it. I think it’s a really soulful place to be. And the gift of what’s happening right now in our economy and in our world is that institutions are crashing every which way. And the gift of that is people have the wisdom to see it, that each of us is being called to be a leader.

It’s like Seth Godin—the tagline of his book Tribes is one of my favorite things, which is, We Need You to Lead Us. So his theory is that anyone who’s out there blogging, creating companies, creating movements, has that same theme. We are all being called to become leaders in our lives. And that doesn’t matter if you have a job or if you have a business. It’s true across the board. So when I speak to companies or when I speak to entrepreneurs, that’s really the theme of it all. It’s actually a really liberating, beautiful place, but it’s also an uncomfortable place.

CP: Yes it is. True ownership—I think a lot of us are trying to figure out, too, that in this new, more conscious business arena, that dance between working the vulnerability and the credibility. And then how that plays into who we are. Just the process of identifying exactly what is aligned with us is a huge undertaking.

CK: It’s an ongoing, forever undertaking.

CP: Yes. Well, we’re at the end of our time here. I’m wondering if you had one piece of advice to give a women on the precipice of her own transition or her own emerging. What would you tell her to focus on? I’m talking about that point where the light bulb goes off, you know what’s in alignment with who you are, you’re ready to step out and manifest it into the world, and there are a lot of obstacles and challenges and good things and hard things that come from that. What advice would you give that woman?

CK: God, every part of me is going, “Oh, there are so many things!”

CP: Well, you can give more than one, but your secret weapon.

CK: So I think I would start with imperfect action. That’s where I always speak when someone’s just at the beginning point. And by “imperfect action” I mean take small steps. Words like “purpose” and “changing the world” and that sort of thing, they’re big and they’re highly charged. So a lot of times I talk about the five things we wait for. We will wait for our purpose to show up. We will wait for something perfect. We’ll wait until our ego goes away or whatever it may be, but it’s kind of a trick.

I think you have to start by taking some steps and getting your first client and doing it imperfectly, writing blogs, signing your voice, even if you’re not if this is the right step exactly. I’m very much a proponent of taking imperfect action on that, because that’s going to be what starts to show you your voice and your mistakes and what triggers you and what works.

So imperfect action, I think, would be where I would being. And then I would say some kind of practice. I teach something called the Sunday Summit where I have people just check in, realign, set priorities for the week, and just re-intent, re-decide what they’re doing that week. I think practice really comes into place, especially when you’re just getting started and you’re just beginning a new emergence.

CP: Yes. Great to have you here, Christine. I feel like we got into a lot of good, juicy detail, too, through the business side, so this has been helpful. And it’s always a pleasure to connect with you. I hope we have another chance in the near future.

CK: Well thank you so much for having me on this, and having me in Emerging Women. I’m going to be sending many, many people there.

CP: Awesome.

CK: Yes, it’s great, thank you so much.

CP: New York next year! OK, well, we’ll see you later. Thanks, Christine.

CK: OK.

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