3. What to do when you fall out of alignment with your offer

In this episode, I tackle the uncomfortable question many solopreneurs face but rarely discuss: what to do when you fall out of alignment with your offer.

What if a business coach helps people create 5-figure months but she's been struggling to hit those numbers herself for the past year?

What if a financial consultant no longer feels good helping people with individual finances without also talking about civic action?

What happens when the offer you once loved no longer feels like something you can proudly stand behind?

While it might feel like you're just failing or confused, what's really happening is that the universe is sending you a message you've been ignoring. It is an invitation to something deeper, truer, and ultimately more powerful than what came before.

Your next chapter is calling. Pick up. 

Transcript

 Hey friends, this is Liberatory Business, and I am your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening, and welcome to today's ep - wait, what? Welcome to today's episode. Okay, here's my question for you today. Do you have an offer that you used to be able to stand behind a thousand percent, but you're feeling like not so much anymore nowadays?

If that's you are in really good company. A few days ago a business coach DM me to ask me You know, they said business used to be good Like I used to bring in consistent five figure months and so I started, you know Coaching other business owners to create five figure months, but for the last year I have been really struggling To bring in business and it's just been dwindling and I still have business coaching clients and they're seeing results but it just feels out of integrity to keep talking about five figure months when I'm having trouble doing that myself.

But I used to but not anymore. I don't know what should I do. Listen, even if you're not a business coach, if you offer some kind of service that's very personal and draws from your own life and experience, you might relate. I've talked to so many people who are struggling with some form of this, right?

I used to offer something based on what I could do, what was really true for me that I could totally stand behind, but I'm not sure I can stand behind that anymore because I've changed or external circumstances have changed. I can maybe still help other people with that thing, but if I were to keep advertising something that I myself am not really standing behind, not really living, not really exemplifying, that feels a little off, right?

If that's you, the rest of this episode is for you because I have the answer. Here's the first thing you need to know. What usually accompanies these thoughts is a sense of shame, right? Like whenever something changes, our first instinct is to go to Oh, I failed. I did something wrong, right? I used to be able to do that, but not anymore.

But let me tell you right now, there was no failure. There was no screwing up, none whatsoever. And there's no reason to feel ashamed. Because what happened wasn't failure. It was change. Things changed. You changed. Life always changes. The world around you, right? If you used to always be happy and you're not happy anymore, it's not that you failed at being happy.

It's just that you're in a different season of life where things happen that make you feel something other than happy and you're supposed to learn from that because being happy is not the only valuable thing in the world. To give another example, I always think about how in my 20s, I had a million friends, and I was so social, and I was always going out all the time, but nowadays, I only leave the house to go to the grocery store, or to, drop my kid off in kindergarten.

Does that mean I failed at being social? No! I changed! I'm a different I'm in a different season of life! I'm almost 40 years old. My priorities are different, right? If an offer that used to feel very congruent to offer before stops feeling congruent, it's not because there was a failure or screwing up or messing up.

It's because something in your very internal landscape has shifted and you might not even have noticed. You might have noticed you're like, yeah, I know what it is, but sometimes you're like, I don't even know something could change at the Unconscious level while on the conscious level you're like everything's exactly the same.

Everything's fine. I don't think any differently I don't know why things are changing, but I promise you something deep inside has changed and what I want you to know is that When something deep inside you has changed, it's because the universe wants you to get in touch with the deeper truth of what you can best offer the world right now, and it's not the same thing as what it used to be.

Because the thing that you were doing before, it wasn't as true as it could be. It wasn't as deep as it could be, it's not, it wasn't as congruent as it could have been. And that's not to put down the work you've been doing, it's not a binary between, it's either deep or shallow or congruent or totally incongruent, but there is, it's a gradient, right?

As we grow in life, we're always hopefully inching deeper, inching towards becoming more deep, inching towards becoming more congruent, more true, right? The universe is alright, come on, Time to do an update. Let's get deeper. Let's get truer. You're growing up, so why isn't your offer growing with you, right?

Your past offer may have represented your best work in the past, but if you're still clinging on to that when you're in a different place, that's gonna be crunchy. So the important question here is, what is it that you're being asked to channel going forward?

And unless you pause and slow down and pay attention to yourself within, you're not going to notice. And honestly, chances are, if your business is drying up to the point of being financially precarious, and you're being forced to reassess your offer, like you weren't doing it, you weren't taking initiative, like you're being forced because of your finances, it's probably because you haven't been listening to your heart and you haven't been listening to your inner guidance and you've been ignoring these subtle inner whispers that say this is not quite it.

No, you need you to go this way, not that way. And when you keep ignoring the signs that are trying to take you to the right path for you, the universe has to step in and force its hand. It so often does that. Oh, really? You're not going to listen. Okay. You're not listening to your inner voice.

I'm going to make it really hard for you to ignore me by rearranging your circumstances so you have no choice but to set up and pay attention. I'm going to make your cash flow dry up. I'm going to make this thing happen. So you have no choice but to be like, wait, hold on a second, right?

Maybe you used to be all about business results, but something has shifted inside you and now it feels like business results are a little hollow without the spiritual work. Maybe You used to be all about making your dreams come true, helping people with their dreams. You have been growing and evolving and now you see that maybe our dreams aren't in the future where once we arrive at this magical destination in the future, everything is amazing forever.

So maybe your inner truth is pointing to more Oh, I want to talk about dreams in a different way where we're not looking to a mysterious point in the future to save us, but it's making us more present in the now. Maybe your thing was helping people to date better and now your own dating life is in shambles And you're like, oh my gosh, who am I to tell people that I can help them date?

And what that's really pointing you to is that you're seeing that hey Maybe what happens in relationships with other people is not the main thing Maybe the relationship I have with myself is the main thing and really that is my updated truth and one last example, maybe you help people with their finances, and maybe you're seeing that working on your finances alone, it feels, starts to feel a little bit hollow, and what your heart is also really in is civil activism, and unless you can marry working on your personal finances with civil activism, it's never gonna feel quite right.

If your old offer no longer feels like something you can 100 percent stand behind, that's because something new is emerging that you need to channel, that the universe needs you to channel to serve the rest of humanity. And let me be clear. This can be very scary to do. For example, let's say you're the financial consultant who now feels the need to, make civic action a part of your work.

You might wonder, would anyone give a shit about this? Who am I to do that? Who even does that? Is everybody just going to be confused? If you're the dating coach who now wants to focus more explicitly on cultivating your relationship with yourself, you might worry, Oh my God, are people going to think that I don't, I didn't know what I was talking about before?

So it's gonna bring up all these fears. And it takes a lot of thoughtfulness and bravery to put the new iteration of your thing out there. And let me tell you, you wouldn't be getting nudged by the universe to evolve your offering if the world didn't need your evolved. Offering it can be humbling to talk about like how you're changing and what you've learned and what you want to do differently because we all want to project this image of like I know exactly what i'm doing and it's never going to change and this is it for the rest of my life, right?

But that's an illusion, right? It's not humbling when someone talks about how they're learning and evolving, it's actually really courageous. It speaks to their aliveness, speaks to their courage, it speaks to their integrity, right? And yeah, to be honest, it can take time and some experimentation to learn how to talk about your new thing in a way that feels confident and clear.

And it can even take some more time before your business results can catch up to your newfound alignment. And it will catch up. But let me tell you, you have to lead with courage first. You have to lead and let your heart lead you first. Because the path might be challenging, you were literally made for it.

You are cut out to do it. You can do it and it's worth it because I think nowadays we are often so short sighted, right? Like we think about what we're here to achieve in the next year or two, next three years, next five years. And few of us think about the fact that. We have decades ahead of us, and I'm assuming that most of us have most of you listening have decades ahead of you decades of work.

The journey of your business is long and you are worth moving through different chapters. The multitude of chapters that allow you to grow into your biggest artistry. And yes, whatever you do. Whatever your work is, it is art. What might be scary and challenging for now is going to make you so much better of an artist and so much better skilled at navigating this business journey for the long haul because this is not the first or the last time that you're going to be evolving and changing and pivoting.

It's just baked into life. And when you allow yourself to really submit to this process and go with this process and trust it, it really is going to draw out the deepest, truest work that only you can do, that the rest of humanity needs you to do, because no one else is going to do it. And that is how you create your legacy.

It's not by Continuing to do the exact same thing you've been doing before. Think of this as an invitation from your bigness, a nudge from the universe that sees the true nature of your genius. Our conscious minds are pretty limited, right? All of our cognitive filters and cognitive constraints. We can only make predictions about the future based on what we think was true from the past.

But, what's available ahead? When you allow yourself to trust that there's more than what we could see is so much more interesting, so much richer, so many more possibilities than you could probably even imagine. Here's my encouragement and blessing for you to pause and to listen to yourself, to listen to those subtle whispers from your heart.

Listen to those little You know, angel whispering in your ear like that's not quite it, but this is it. Make the pivot. Let yourself change. And let yourself be bigger, and more, and deeper, and more aligned than you, than whatever you thought you were before. Okay, that's it for me today. I'll talk to you next time.

Bye.