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And an exercise to help

Welcome, dearest reader, to the latest edition of Rhythm & Recognition. Each week (usually) I share an insight or lesson from inspired by a coaching session with a client or my own journey on running a more sustainable, aligned business. All in service of helping you find your own rhythm in this modern life and more effortless recognition for your unique gifts. -Kyle

I’m guilty.

In fact, I’ve been taken to the Supreme Court of Business-Mistakes-You-Didn’t-Even-Realise-You-Were-Making many times for this.

I’m guilty of the crime of not charging my worth.

Okay, maybe crime is a bit harsh, after all the only person who was impacted was me.

Or was it?

Can not charging what you’re worth impact those around you? Your family. Your clients. Your community.

Surely being affordable is important, right?

If you run a service based business, especially in the health, fitness and wellness space, I’ll hazard an educated guess in saying that you love what you do. You love seeing your clients transform. You love opening people’s eyes to a new way of living.

You love it so much, and find the work so meaningful, that you’d do it for free.

In fact, maybe you are doing it or parts of it for free right now.

A great example of this is charging for an hour of your time, then heaping on free bonuses, check-ins, etc. because you want your client to feel they got their value for money.

It’s totally understandable. And I’m not calling you out, like I said, I’ve been there before.

But it is worth understanding what’s going on and how this might be making things harder for yourself (and possibly worse your clients) in ways you haven’t realised.

The Problem With Working For Free

On the surface, working for free seems noble.

And in some ways it is.

One example that comes to mind is that you can help people who can’t afford to pay you. And that means you can help more people, right?

Let’s look at this very newsletter. This edition of Rhythm & Recognition might help a bunch of people. It’s free so anyone with an internet connection can read it. And it costs me nothing except an hour to write it down.

But imagine if instead of writing this in a newsletter I only taught this to people face to face, one at a time.

For free.

Would it make sense to do it that way? Remember, I love helping people with this kind of thing. It fills my cup.

I’ll imagine that what you’re telling me is, no.

(After all, it’s much easier to tell someone else they’re undervaluing themselves than looking at yourself.)

My costs for teaching people one by one would go through the roof:

• Time spent away from other things I enjoy and my family

• Cost of fuel driving around (even flying as some of you are overseas)

• Added stress of more things in my day

• Not enough time for my healthy habits like eating well and exercising

• Maybe I need to pay for a space to teach people too, so I’m out of pocket too

Now, in this example it seems obvious that unless I’m financially backed, doing this for free won’t work out long term.

It’s a very unsustainable business model.

Well, here’s the thing.

If you’re charging too little for what you do, you’ll find yourself in a similar situation. Your costs (not just financial, but energetic too) will end up outweighing what you’re bringing in. You’ll find yourself busy but just kind of breaking even.

So this is the part where I say, just increase your prices and then you’ll be saved.

Ha!

As you know, it’s not that simple.

So, what’s going on here? Let’s look at it in the next section and then I’ve got an exercise you can try.

Why is it so hard to charge what we’re really worth?

We are often the sum of our experiences.

And that includes our experiences around money.

Throughout our lives we’ve seen or heard things around the topic of money which we’ve then internalized as beliefs.

Sometimes it’s that money always felt scarce growing up. Sometimes it’s an offhand comment from a friend who says ‘I wouldn’t pay that much, what a rip off!’.

So then when it comes to picking a price to charge for what you do, all of these stories show up, often without you even realising, and weigh in on what that price should be.

So when someone tells you to simple ‘increase your prices’, while that seems easy, it often feels hard because you’re coming up against these hidden beliefs.

Now there are lots of ways to deal with these money stories from therapy to IFT (to just putting your head in the sand) but they all start with actually identifying what they are.

Sometimes simply identifying them is enough to move on from them.

In the exercise below, I want to share a simple way you can discover your stories that only takes a few minutes.

Exercise: Uncover your money stories

Okay, grab a piece of paper and a pen.

Now, before we even get into the exercise, there might be some stories rattling around your head already just from reading this newsletter (eg. ‘my current clients will leave if I increase my prices’ or ‘people are doing it tough right now’).

Let’s clear them out of the way by writing them down first. Don’t judge them. Simply right them down and move onto the next one.

Now, let’s dive in.

1. Write down your current price for your main service. Now cross that out and double it. That’s the new price for your service. Imagine announcing that to the world.

2. Great! Now, what’s coming up for you? Write down all the money stories as they come up. Even if they seem insignificant.

3. You’re doing great! Now cross out the last price and write down a number that’s half way between those two (eg. $100 normally, $200 doubled, $150 half-way). Now imagine that’s your new price and that you’re announcing it to the world.

4. Write down what comes up now. Often some new memories or beliefs will arrive. (Sometimes that number will feel good and nothing will come up, if that’s the case just notice that as a bit of a clue of how much more you could be charging.)

Bonus: Pick a number between that half-way mark and your normal price (eg. between $150 and $100) that feels just on the edge of your comfort zone. That’s a clue of what you could change your price to right now and still feel safe.

Now, scan back through your list and ask yourself:

• Which of these stories are actually my business?

• Which one’s am I carrying around for someone else?

• Which do I know to be true and which are assumptions?

• And for any sticky ones: Why is this so important to me?

If you’ve never done something like this before, it can be really eye opening, and if you have, maybe it’s time to do it again?

Feel free to reach out or leave a comment if anything resonated with you.

Community Mini-Reading

I received a comment on last week’s newsletter from a reader who was curious about creating an energetically sustainable business like my wife has. She also mentioned she’d checked out her Human Design briefly and it had resonated with her but she wasn’t sure what to do with that info.

That’s very understandable. Human Design is a bit of a beast with many layers. So I asked for her type (she’s an Emotional Generator) and from that I simplified things into just two things she could experiment with to align more with her Human Design and grow a sustainable business.

If you have an Emotional authority or are a Generator, you might find this helpful too.

Here’s what I wrote:

If you’re looking for some ways to make use of it [Human Design] here are a couple of practical ways you can experiment with aligning more with your type of Emotional Generator:

1. Fall in love with the phrase ‘Let me get back to you on that.’ As an emotional authority its wise for you to take your time making decisions. Clarity usually comes with time, not always in the moment.

2. For a week spend some time at the end of each day noting which activities and people made you feel really satisfied and which left you feeling frustrated. Satisfaction is a signpost that you’re heading in the right direction where as frustration is a sign it might be time to let go of something.

Let me know how that resonates or not. This is the kind of thing I talk about with clients when I do Human Design sessions with them. I try to always bring it back to practical actions because it can be pretty overwhelming.

If you’ve got any Q’s about using Human Design with your business, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

-Kyle

Hypothesis: What if you grew a business by just being more you?

When my wife started her business 24 months ago, we decided to toss out a lot of what we’d learned about business from decades of making our living as self-employed people, and instead try something completely new.

The old ways weren’t gonna work this time

Zoe’s previous business (as an artist [painter]) and my business were both remnants of a time before kids.

Now, with a newborn and another pre-school aged child, neither of us had the energy to go all out into a new business.

Zoe was pretty clear for her new business that she didn’t want to:

• Work 40+ hours per week

• Spend a ton of time on social media

• Work both mornings AND evenings

What she did want for her business was to:

• Be flexible around our family schedule

• Allow her to work as many or as little hours as she desired

• Pay for continued study

• Make enough to contribute meaningfully to the household

This might just work…

With our previous businesses we’d always had plenty of time and energy to get some momentum going at the start. To say yes to every client. To work at strange hours. To spend hours doing overly repetitive tasks.

But Zoe didn’t have that luxury this time.

She needed to be efficient with her energy. She needed another way.

So, as an experiment we had the idea to try building her business by letting go of noise out there around how to build a business these days and instead focusing on trusting herself and what makes her unique.

She used Human Design as a lens to help identify her strengths and not compare herself to others.

It did work!

Now, 2 years later, the results are in. And they’re impressive.

Perhaps not impressive in the way you might be used to from people writing about business these days. No, she’s not making 7-figures per month. But in an industry were most professionals last less than 12-months, her business continues to grow consistently each quarter, while only working a handful of hours per week.

Here are some of the decisions she made and how they panned out:

Allowing time for momentum and recognition to build

With her limited available hours of work and being a Projector (her energy comes and goes) we knew that growing her business wasn’t going to be a sprint to the finish line. She needed a sustainable way to work from day one.

Because Zoe’s style of personal training is different to the status quo, we knew it would take time for people to ‘get it’. She needed sustainable ways to keep showing up in our local community until people started seeing the magic in what she does.

One way she does this is through a face-to-face workshop teaching about the pelvic floor and how to correctly activate, strengthen and use this group of muscles. Being a one-off event, this means she can promote it and run it only when she has the energy for it.

Learning new things as a productive business building activity

I’m the type of person who will read half a book about something and then just give it a go. I’ll fill in the missing gaps as I go along. And this is often my approach to business.

So naturally, when Zoe joined me in working for herself years ago, I gave her the same advice. ‘You don’t need more info, just put some stuff out there,’ I’d say.

But this was actually terrible advice for her.

With a 1 in her Profile, Zoe is meant to do her own research on things. She’s meant to dive down rabbit holes. She’s meant to absorb a LOT of information. Where as I would get overwhelmed and stuck if I tried her approach, she deepens her craft, see’s new patterns and becomes a formidable expert.

So this time around, instead of ‘winging it’ she decided that spending time learning was a form of marketing for her. The more of an expert she became, the more evident it became in her sessions, social media content and workshops.

Trusting her intuition

Zoe’s best way of making decisions is through her intuitive knowing.

She often knows what she needs to do right away, but then feels like she needs to justify it or ignore it to please those around her. That’s not how she’s meant to operate.

By practicing trusting that inner knowing, even when it didn’t make sense, she was able to avoid getting stuck in analysis paralysis when it came to the many decisions a new business owner needs to make.

A year of aligned invitations

The overall strategy for a Projector when it comes to business and relationships is to wait for recognition of your gifts and then be invited in by that person to help them.

It can be an incredibly frustrating thing for us (I’m also a Projector) because we can usually see how to help most people with their problems, but unless we’re invited for our opinion, we can just come off as annoying.

So we knew that for Zoe to get her best clients, clients who would pay what she’s worth and help spread the word, that she needed the recognition and the invitation.

But when you’re starting out, building that recognition can be a really slow process.

This year though, something clicked and she’s received aligned invitation after invitation with very little effort on her part.

Here are some of them:

• An invitation to run her workshop which then sold out overnight (she didn’t have to sell a single ticket herself)

• An invitation to become a paid mentor for other trainers, physios and therapists undergoing the same training she’s been through

• And an invitation by another business owner to create a new movement space together for our local community

She didn’t hustle for these. She didn’t have to spend hours connecting on social media. Instead, she trusted in her natural gifts and Human Design was the tool that gave her permission to do so.

I’m so incredibly proud of her. It takes immense courage to start a business and to ride the highs and lows that come with it.

It’s also really cool to have this business that’s part of our lives, that really helps a lot of women and also allows us to be present parents.

Human Design continues to blow me away.

There is a part of my brain that still says ‘this shouldn’t work’ and yet even if it is just a bunch of hocus pocus, it’s been incredibly helpful hocus pocus.

I asked Zoe if, looking back, she thinks she could have gotten to this point in her business without knowing her Human Design and she said:

‘It probably would have been a lot harder and more frustrating.’

Thanks for reading! If you’re curious about Human Design and how it can make business more ease-ful and less frustrating, I do offer a 90-minute HD coaching session where we can dive into how you best work.

Also, if this resonated in some small way, please leave me a comment to let me know.

Self-reliance or self-sabotage?

Hey readers, Welcome to Rhythm & Rec. Each week I’m sharing a personal insight or an insight a coaching client had with me, wrapped up in a lesson you can learn from too. This week it’s a personal insight about an area of my life I didn’t realise I was keeping at arms length. I hope you get something out if it, I had a lot of fun writing it. -Kyle

I want to share with you a huge insight I had last week.

An insight into a behaviour that I think has been lurking in the back of my mind, quietly calling the shots for some time. Like a backseat driver who sounds so confident that you listen to them while they direct you the long way round.

It’s caused me a lot of confusion as I didn’t realise it was there. I kept wondering why things that should feel simple, felt like putting together a jigsaw puzzle upside down.

First, I’ll go into how it’s been showing up, then share with you it’s name, and finally, how I know what to do next.

Total Confusion

You may remember that for the past 6 weeks or so, I’ve made a commitment to explore what coaching other’s full-time might look like.

This is a very different business model to my main business, Bootcamp Ideas.

Working on Bootcamp Ideas looks like making a coffee, turning on my computer and then planning out content, creating content, making little offers to invite people to join my newsletter, writing the newsletter, making podcasts, editing videos, creating programs, etc.

It’s fairly solitary work. I used to collaborate more but there aren’t as many creators in that space as there used to be (although, that could just be ‘the voice’ as I’ll share soon).

So switching to a coaching business has been really disorienting.

Work now looks like grabbing a coffee, turning on my computer but then reaching out to people I haven’t spoken to in a while, building personal connections, having Zoom calls, messaging friends, responding to newsletters and finding ways to demonstrate my coaching skills in public.

It seems simple on the surface, but there has still been a lot of resistance:

• Feeling like an imposter

• Feeling hurt when someone ghosts me

• Feeling like I don’t have anything worthwhile to share

• Putting a lot of pressure on every interaction

• And just generally doubting myself

At first I put this down to the all being something new in my life. A change in my identity that I’d need time to adjust to.

But then, this resistance kept sticking around.

And last week, I realised what was going on. It was an old friend of mine showing up in a new way.

The Controlling Connector

A few years ago I hired as my coach (a fantastic human btw) and one of the exercises we did together was to name some of the shadow-y parts of my personality.

One such part we dubbed ‘The Controller Connector’.

The Controlling Connector loves connecting with other people, but always on his terms. He gets peeved if someone is running late. He gets hurt and defensive when his vulnerability isn’t reciprocated. He dismisses those that don’t live up to his high standards.

He tries desperately to protect me.

But, he’s actually holding me back.

You see, the insight I had wasn’t just that old CC was showing up, the insight was that I’ve been trying to grow this coaching business while controlling every connection I make with someone else.

I’ve been standing guard instead of surrendering. I’ve been armouring up instead of being truly vulnerable. I’ve been trying to have all the answers instead of listening.

And what’s been most helpful in trying to work out what to do about this, is another area of my life that I realise I do the same thing.

Being Held By The Ocean

Nearly 8 years ago, my wife and I packed up our 2-bedroom unit in a busy area of Melbourne and moved everything 2 hours away to the coast.

But despite being surrounded by beaches, I often baulk at the idea of going for a swim.

I’ll get sandy. I’ll get salty. I’ll cool down while I’m in there but then I’ll just get hot again. The water is too cold. What about sharks? What about stingrays? What about jellyfish? I didn’t bring my bodyboard. I didn’t bring my flippers.

But then I get in the water and something magic happens:

The water holds me.

I catch waves. I hold my breath. I lay on my back eyes closed and float. I frolic like a seal. My kids hang onto my shoulders and I tow them around.

(My wife watches from the shore and rolls her eyes having just heard me complain for 15 minutes and knowing that I’d love it once I got in.)

All my fears are forgotten (except when a stray piece of seaweed brushes my calf, followed by a moment of panic and relief). And I’m just there, in the moment. At peace.

This feels exactly like what I’m going through now.

I’m still on the beach, worried if the water will be too cold or if big set will come through and dunk me or if I’ll piss off that guy surfing by being in the wrong spot.

It’s time to dive in and remember something:

I actually love it here.

plus, the newsletter has a new name

reader! You might notice that this newsletter has a new name. It was called The Dadlift, now it’s called Rhythm & Recognition. As I get clearer with what I want to write about on here, The Dadlift felt too personal to me and like there wasn’t any space for you, the reader. Rhythm & Recognition nicely sums up what I’d like to help people with, getting recognised for their gifts and delivering them to the world in a way that’s sustainable. Let’s dive into the first issue.

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A little over a month ago, I made the tough decision to take an intentional break from my business of 15 years, Bootcamp Ideas.

Today I want to share with you how, despite my worst fears about the whole thing crumbling, it’s been a truly helpful and nourishing experience.

But first, let’s start with why I’m doing this now:

I haven’t taken more than a week or so away from my business other than during those sleep deprived months right after my kids were born.

Looking back, I always thought of those times as breaks. But they weren’t really.

While there was plenty of walks to the cafe for latte’s and babycinos, there was also a lot of managing the household so my wife could rest. There wasn’t much in the way of sitting around and journaling going on because, as it should be, I was fully immersing myself in life with a newborn.

But other than those moments, I’ve never truly given myself permission to take a proper break from Bootcamp Ideas.

Charlie Gilkey loves to say ‘you can’t read the label from inside the jar’ and that was me. I was trying to make decisions from inside my glass walls. I need to take some time off to get proper perspective.

No space for error (or life)

This all came to a head recently. I’d had some breakthroughs in coaching and realised that I wanted to explore my own path as a coach again.

So, in classic Kyle fashion, I added to my life without taking anything away.

I was now trying to juggle two businesses. I’d mad panic work Monday and Tuesday to get all my Bootcamp Ideas stuff done, then spend Wednesday and Thursday trying to think of ways to find clients and work out exactly what kind of coaching I would like to do. (I spend Fridays with our youngest while Zoe works with clients.)

One sick kid or a busy weekend could throw the whole thing out. There was no space to let things flex as they need to when you have small children.

So I committed, and now I’m here, with you, to share how it went and then what’s next for this experiment?

(Speaking of experiments, thanks to the book Tiny Experiments by for reminding me that you don’t have to commit to things forever, you can just try stuff.)

Here’s what I learned

(You can read more about the experiment in my previous post.)

1. I was f*cking burned out

This really surprised me. I didn’t think I was burned out because I was still showing up. But the warning signs were there. I was drinking more coffee. I spent large chunks of last year sick and I never get sick (‘It’s just part of having little kids,’ I’d tell myself).

And now, I’ve spent so much of this month sleeping, and wanting to stay in bed in the morning. So unlike me. I’ve had baths, sometimes 3 times per week.

‘You do seem kind of aimless,’ Zoe said to me last week.

Without the constant pressure to be productive I found myself wanting to do… nothing. But not in a way that feels ‘lazy’, more just because that feels like the most productive thing needed right now. I’m going through a lot of change and uncertainty and the space to process it feels very nourishing.

2. Dancing with competence and excellence

Gay Hendricks’ book The Big Leap famously talks about how we want to operate from our Zone of Genius. These are the things that really only we can do. Below that zone is the Zone of Excellence and then the Zone of Competence.

In my work with Bootcamp Ideas I spend most of my time operating in my zone of Competence and then sometimes Excellence. I think at some point in the past, when there was a little more of a community vibe to Bootcamp Ideas’ I was probably in my Zone of Genius, but now I mostly go through the motions each week. Looking for ways to eke out as much meaning as possible.

3. I really want to coach more

If there is an area I feel like I’m in my Zone of Genius, it’s coaching. Especially coaching health and wellness entrepreneurs and creators.

I’ve dabbled in coaching before, but never really gave it enough momentum to build up some credibility. The lure of the easier, yet less fulfilling, work of my business would drag me back in.

This month really forced me to sit with this and to start changing the way I view myself. As a coach, not just a business owner. I was able to sign up my first ongoing coaching client and I really enjoy the work we’re doing together.

4. Too much focus on content

Before this break I was spending a LOT of my time an energy each week creating content.

But this was all Zone of Excellence/Competence stuff and it left me with very little energy to actually connect with people. So I would double down on my content to try to get it to create the connections I wanted and would end up feeling frustrated and bitter when it didn’t.

By cutting myself off from creating content I can see that my time would be much better spent creating spaces for connection to happen and investing time in existing relationships.

And this kind of leads me to my last point.

5. Where has my heart been?

My heart is not longer in building Bootcamp Ideas.

As hard as it is to admit it publicly, I’ve known this for a while. And having taken time off I can see that this has been the source of a lot of my issues.

It’s kind of like being in a relationship where you still like the person, but you don’t love them anymore. You keep doing things to try to rekindle it. You go to therapy to talk about it. You agonise over it a lot.

And to follow that relationship metaphor even further, it’s like instead of ending the relationship I stayed in it while waiting for someone else to come along. Which if this was a real relationship, that would be silly right?

Alas, when your business supports your family, it’s a little trickier.

(Although now I’m drawing all sorts of parallels with toxic relationships where money is involved.)

So, what’s next?

Yesterday, I opened up Kit and sent the first email to my audience that I’d sent them in over a month.

I wrote them to let them know that I’d be extending my 30-day hiatus for another 60 days.

Yes, this time has been so needed that I’m firmly, audaciously claiming more of it. I’m 37 as I write this, I’ve been running Bootcamp Ideas for 15 of those. That’s over 40% of my life!

I want to continue to pursue coaching as a career by using Human Design to help health and wellness entrepreneurs and creatives and I know that needs space and time to flourish.

I’ll be sure to update you all at the end of the full 90 days with any further insights I’ve had.

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Next week I’m running a workshop called Connection Marketing (thanks 2-Hour Workshop Blueprint by for making that easy), it’s for my Bootcamp Ideas audience but you are more than welcome too. It’s all about how you can find and connect with the people who need to hear your message. It’s a combo of smart marketing with some Human Design to help you market in a way that aligns with your strengths.

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I’ve also updated my 1:1 coaching page, so if you’re interested in working with me, have a look and get in touch.

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Lastly, thank you so much for being here. If anything about my 30-day break resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you!