Emergence with Elaira

Ep.31. Soft Power serires: handling rejection in a heart-based business & soulful work

• Elaira Tickute

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Building a business that truly aligns with your heart takes courage and finesse of your heart.

In this episode I share the delicate nuances about heart-based entrepreneurship journey and sabotaging reasons or vulnerabilities to share your soulful work due to fear of rejection and treating your heart sensitivity as the weakness. 

We have been told so many times: “don’t take it personal” in business and I am inviting to reframe that and to find strength and gift in your vulnerability & beauty in your deep care.

I share my own heart based entrepreneurial journey insights and observations from my clients who have faced the similar unique challenges of this path. I talk about what it takes to build heart resilience and the balance between staying open and connected with your heart while building the muscle against rejection and setbacks. I explore what it takes to be deeply invested in your business without letting the fear of rejection stifle your soulful work.

In the second segment, I explore the compassionate and empathetic approach necessary for heart-centered business growth. I talk about the art of listening to your fears and vulnerabilities while fostering the gentle self-leadership that integrates all parts of yourself, including the ambitious, sensitive, and afraid. 

There is always a wisdom within frustration, resistance and the power of moving at the pace of your slowest parts. 

This is my heartfelt guide to creating a thriving, purpose-driven business that embodies your soul's mission and contributes positively to humanity without hiding, shrinking or neglecting your sensitivity and deep care. 

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Speaker 1:

Dear listeners, and especially the loyal ones who have been listening me for a while, today I want to share something really dear to my heart and my own journey, but also something very dear to my clients that I'm working with, because I work with people who desire to build heart-based businesses, which includes a lot of heart work, and heart work is about how do I stay open, how do I stay connected with myself and my ecosystem, instead of guarding up like the transformer, like closing up, shutting down or building the business from your defences. And what I discovered and observed and came to conclusion building heart-based businesses, businesses with a deep purpose that there is a little bit different journey of entrepreneurship and you can apply regular business resiliency and entrepreneurship, resiliency to the heart-based businesses the same way and let me elaborate what I mean by that. So what we often hear in the entrepreneurship journeys you have to claim your voice, you have to go there and share your point of view. You have to not take it personal. You have to be resilient for rejection and fear. And while fundamentally objectively, and fear, and while fundamentally objectively those statements are true, there are some layers, how that gets to be embodied for the sensitive, extrasensory, heart-based entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1:

So first thing I want to say to you if you feel scared and maybe vulnerable about sharing your work with the world, there's nothing wrong with that. It means you found something you deeply care about, something precious to your heart, maybe solution, maybe your point of view, maybe your perspective, maybe solution, maybe your point of view, maybe your perspective, maybe something that you really want to see in the world. Or you see totally differently that the rest of the world sees Something that maybe goes against the norm, but it's something close to your bone, close to your heart, close to your soul, something soulful for you. It's normal that you feel vulnerable. It's normal that you don't want that precious seed of your heart to be rejected. It's just the signpost that you're on to something, something real, something big real, something big something in your inner map of your medicine, of your gift to this world, something sacred to you, and that's absolutely amazing. I already want to celebrate you for discovering that a lot of people don't even arrive to that point.

Speaker 1:

The shadow side of this happens when this point of view your work becomes so sacred that you overprotect it from the world. It becomes so sacred that you decided to hide because it's so precious, because it doesn't have capacity or righteousness to be rejected by others. But this way you don't do any justice, neither for you, neither for soul of your work or your voice that wants to be expressed. It just gets to be closed in your tower, in your bubble, and nobody can see it. That's the thing with the heart. When you build the guards around your heart, you not only protect the enemies to come in, the threat to come in, the rejection to reach it. You also close the pathway for love to come in, for appreciation to come in, for people to come in who really are craving for your soul of the work, people who need to hear this, people who are reaching, people who are seeking for you and your solution.

Speaker 1:

Building heart-based business requires to embrace the challenge to walk, build, create and share with open heart, stay connected and stay open through the adversity of environment, of situational circumstances, through the seasonal weather that blows the branch of the trees. So one of the things that can help to untangle that and look at this from the different perspective is to understand how you are your business and how you are not your business at the same time, the duality and paradox of it. I absolutely want to dismantle that perspective of you. Don't have to be too sensitive and take things too personal about your business. If you build heart-based business, you are having very intimate relationship with your business, very close bond.

Speaker 1:

To create soulful work requires probably some sleepless nights, some deep fears to be faced, struggles, some birthing contractions, deep commitment to the work, to your message, to your offers. It's something you birth through your own experience, through your own embodiment, through your own deep care or maybe even anger, what's okay and not okay for you about the world, humanity, society, or the solution or diagnosis you have about Building soulful, heartful, purposeful businesses often is really building the deep, deep intimacy and deep relationship with your body of work, with your movement, with your message, with your medicine you're here to bring and I think it's absolutely healthy to be sensitive about it, to be protective about it. It's like if someone would throw trash on your life partner in your personal life, wouldn't you be insulted, wouldn't you stand for it, wouldn't you say no, that's not okay. The same is with sacred, conscious work. You are here to be the guardian of it. You are here to protect and nourish it and there's absolutely nothing wrong quite the opposite to deeply care about your work.

Speaker 1:

Don't fall for a trap that you have to approach the rejection of your work through the desensitized, numbing way like you don't care. It's very different work. You're not selling cars. It's like you come to a salon and it's like this is Audi, this is Mercedes. It's like mother birthing to child. It goes through all kind of growth periods, changes in her body and expansion and death and rebirth of identity. And it hurts when someone says oh, your baby doesn't have a nice face, but she doesn't stop loving it, she doesn't stop growing and nurturing and taking care of the baby. And here comes a twist Parents birth the children, but their children don't belong to them. The children are their own beings. Parents are the guardians of their children, but they don't own them. They are separate beings and this is where enmeshment with your work may come in, when you think you are 100% your work.

Speaker 1:

When people reject your work, you feel like they reject you. People have various reasons, various cycles and readiness for your work and they may choose not to work with you or your service or not choose your product for million known and unknown reasons. But that says nothing about you as a person, you as a being. It's not rejection of your essence. There is a huge difference and separation to receive rejection or receive negative answer to your offer or your services and to receive negative answer and rejection to you, which is often not the case. They may not see the value in your offer yet, but it's not the same as you being invaluable and unworthy. This is the part of where you are not. Your business comes in. Your business, its own being, its own identity. It has its own nervous system and cycles of contraction and expansion. It has its own needs and yes, at the beginning of it and the birth of it, when it's just the seed or just the baby, it's maybe hard to see that or embrace that fully. But when you start to nurture and grow your business, you start to notice it kind of gets its own momentum. It's kind of have its own way of growing.

Speaker 1:

I just had a beautiful call and conversation with one entrepreneur just before this call, and she is closing her company with laying off the employees in multiple countries and talking to investors who invested in her company, and we talked about exactly the same thing that I'm sharing here. She said suddenly I felt it's not relationship. I want to be in. My business became this huge own organism that I no longer want to be guardian for. It's too much too heavy. We want to go in different directions. We have different needs. It's too much too heavy. We want to go in different directions, we have different needs. It's like a relationship with your partner, like any relationship. You start dating it seems like, oh, I'm so exploring myself and we can be more of ourselves with each other. We can discover new things, who we are, how we create together and at a certain point you realize, okay, we grew too much in different directions. We have two different visions or where we want to go and where we want to experience and we have to go apart.

Speaker 1:

And I'm sharing this point of view because I'm inviting you to look at your business as its own, being, its own ecosystem, its own identity, its own nature, living, breathing organism that has its own needs, its own way of where it wants to grow, how it wants to be expressed, and so on. If you have struggles to see that or to recognize that, you may tend to go in deep enmeshment with your business and, due to that, lose yourself in the process of building and growing the business. Your whole life and identity becomes your business. And another aspect and perspective I want to share as the final note in this episode regarding this topic is if you feel vulnerable and scared to share your work, if you feel overprotective and and feel like you cannot take the rejection, you have huge fear of rejection. It may mean that you don't fully trust just yet or you don't fully have the capacity to fully root and embody your light. Somewhere you don't have your own back for your own sacredness, somewhere you rejected yourself, maybe somewhere, somehow, you're afraid or don't have just yet the capacity to claim it fully, to embody it fully. The roots of your light, of your essence, in your body are not strong. It's like a tree or a flower. It's like a tree or a flower. If it doesn't have strong roots, any tiniest wind will blow it away. And this is the work part of the work to build heart-based businesses to look in all those places where you disown your light, where you disown your potential, where you disown your essence, where you give your power away, where you're opening your leakages of energy because you don't have strong boundaries or respect to your energy or you don't have devotion and commitment to your sacred, soulful work yet fully there. And this is the work to build resilience for heart-based businesses. To build heart resilience.

Speaker 1:

But it's a very, very different way of building the resilience than we were told to in the old business paradigm. If you feel scared and vulnerable to share your sacred work and then you say yourself you shouldn't feel this way, it's sort of gaslighting yourself. It's rejecting yourself where you are and how you feel. It's rejecting your heart in the moment, and then it makes sense if you do that to you. It's unbearable to receive that additionally on top from external environment.

Speaker 1:

And this approach is not gentle self-leadership way. It's not the soft power way that I'm talking about in my business. The soft power movement is about staying connected, holding listening and being compassionate to all those parts of you that are afraid but also who are ambitious and daring but also scared and fearful. I always say there's wisdom in frustration, there's wisdom in resistance and you can go just as fast as your slowest parts of you are ready to go. But if you don't listen to it with empathy, with curiosity, with true listening, what it has to say, why it feels like it feels, and acknowledge that and listen and find the resolution or hold it and stand for it, include it, you bulldozer yourself with rejection, with abandonment of your heart.

Speaker 1:

Building heart-based business is not the easiest journey, but it's the most rewarding one. It's your soul awakening journey, is the access point of your soul, embodiment, your purpose, embodied man, your sacredness, your authenticity, uniqueness and your medicine, your purpose. You came to bring here to the world your piece of the puzzle you're here to solve in this better humanity, better society, better future. And from where I'm sitting and what I am observing, it's the only way for thriving and successful businesses Money making, money for the sake of money.

Speaker 1:

Companies are dying off. It's the world of yesterday. It's gone, and I don't have anything against the money. I think money in hard-based businesses and big, hard people hands can do amazing stuff and I deeply care about that. But I'm talking the purpose behind it, the purpose, the reason, the why and how you built your business. So let your heart be sensitive, let yourself care about your business, about your work, and let that be your gift instead of a weakness, and also treat it as such.