Episode 01: What is Gentle Business?
QUOTE OF THE EPISODE
If you've ever asked yourself, ‘why does it feel so hard?’ - I think that the deeper question is, ‘why do you feel so unsafe?’
Welcome to episode one of the podcast where I breakdown exactly what a gentle business is and the two most important aspects to a gentle biz: safety and care.
Listen on iTunes or Spotify or below. If you love what you hear, press subscribe or leave me a review. I love hearing your thoughts!
Important Integration Steps from Episode:
Identify how safe you feel in your business right now.
Come up with your safety list.
Notice the way you speak to yourself. What could it look like to bring more softness?
How can you integrate more care in your workday?
Important Links from Episode:
DM me + tell me what you think about the episode.
Check out our amazing partners!
Read the Transcript:
Hello, welcome to episode one of the gentle business sessions. I am Ashley Beaudin, your host. And I am so grateful and so honored to be sitting down, to take some space with you today, to talk a little bit about what is a gentle business. I wanted this to be the initial episode because defining what a gentle business is really the foundation to all of the content and conversations that are going to happen in this space.
But before we dive too deep into that, something that I would really love for you to know, is that I am so grateful that you would give your presence to this.
Something that I've been thinking about a lot is the generosity. Of our attention. The greatest gift we can give one another is not time. And it's not money. But it is attention.
And so to have you here. Whether it's a little bit of attention or a lot. I am so grateful to have you here.
I hope that these next few minutes can be an incredibly grounding and gentle moment in your day. And that you are inspired to meet yourself here with care.
So gentle business. Gentle business is a softer way forward in entrepreneurship.
What is that held up by? And I would say, and I will continue to say. That I believe that it is held up by two really important things. And that is number one, your sense of safety and number two, your sense of care. And having those two things really be centered in your business model. So not necessarily things that we add on top of, or we layer in, but they are within the very centrality of your business, that the way that your business operates is flowing out of a centered sense of safety and care.
And so I want to break that down a little bit about what do I mean when I say safety, what do I mean when I say care?
When I speak of safety, what I'm really speaking to you is emotional safety. It is this question of how do you feel in your business? It is a question of where is your nervous system sitting within your business? It is do you feel held within the structure of your business?
We hear a lot of advice of don't play it safe or demonizing safety. Like it is something evil something corrupt. Something that will hold us back from the life that we want.
But we also know that the opposite is actually true, that. If we do not feel safe within our businesses or within our lives. We will be permanently stuck. Chronically stuck. In ways of self-protecting that so often, do you not feel in alignment with the life or work that we are very much desiring to create.
I want to say too, that there is a lot of vulnerability in entrepreneurship and that's not something that we always acknowledged.
And wherever there's vulnerability, we will carry with us our vulnerable stories. And often our vulnerable stories will then get imprinted onto this business that we feel vulnerable in, and that can put us in a place old ready, where we don't feel safe. And so how much more important would it be to make sure that we are prioritizing our sense of safety in our business?
I do want to make a distinction that prioritizing and centering safety and business is not apathy or coddling or whatever word someone might associate to that.
You need to feel safe to grow.
Bottom line.
You can never truly grow. Outside of a sense of safety.
For some, what you're thinking and imagining as playing it safe is actually not genuine safety. It is actually self protection. But that's the closest thing, you know, to genuine safety. Because genuine safety will not keep you stuck. But self-protection will always keep you stuck.
How safe do you feel? And what does it look like to cultivate more of that?
One of the big things that I do when I start working with people. Is that we look at number one, what is your current state of safety? How is that showing up for you emotionally? How is that showing up for you in self protection? How is that showing up for you in your nervous system and in your body?
Like let's identify and assess. Where you're at within that. And then number two. Can we begin to create a list of things that will help you feel safe.
What are your integral safety pieces? That will maintain or help you cultivate a sense of safety in your work.
So we want to create the safety list. What are things that will anchor you and ground you into safety? What are things that are really important for you when centering emotional safety in your work. Now, this can look different for everyone. There's like literally a million different things. That it could be. And what makes me feel safe is, or necessarily what's going to make you feel safe and we're all different forms of human beings.
If you have a hard time answering that question, what makes me feel genuinely and truly safe? You can sit with the question in terms of the outcomes are safety. So when someone feels safe, they feel whole, resourced, loved, confident, creative, powerful. And so it might be easier for you to sit with those questions. What makes me feel whole? What makes me feel resourced? What makes me feel powerful? And those will give incredible information into your safety pieces.
But I wanted to give a few that I have found really common in clients.
One of the most common things I see pop up for people. On their safety list is spaciousness. The opposite of urgency, the opposite of hustle. That feeling of being crushed and being pressured in that feeling of being rushed. The feeling of hurry. Hurry, hurry. You got to do something. You gotta do something. Now that frantic feeling.
Can be really overwhelming for some individuals. And spaciousness can be the medicine. To that, that sense of spaciousness, that sense of, I have time that sense of, I don't have to do it all today, have longer timelines, having more gracious expectations can be a really beautiful safety piece.
Another big one that comes up for people is predictable income. So moving from large income months, every few months to steady predictable recurring revenue. This is beautiful for a lot of people's nervous systems because of that factor of predictability. There can be such a soothing nature and predictability.
It makes me think a little bit of when a baby is being rocked. The rhythm of being rocked. I can be really soothing. I would compare that to the idea of predictable recurring revenue.
It's a soothing rhythm that can exist within our businesses to help us feel safe.
Another big one is is around resource. Having food in your fridge for real. A certain amount of money in your bank account. A certain amount of cash in your wallet. Drinks on your table. A box of snacks by your desk. Those can be beautiful safety pieces.
So hopefully those give you some good examples that you can. Build off of.
The second important piece here is around care.
How I see it is that care is built off of safety. If you practice care, but you do not have a sense of safety, you will reject all care. A person who is feeling unsafe, a person who is in protective mode has absolutely no time for care.
When, even on some biological nervous system level, you feel on alert. You feel protective? You feel not safe? You will reject all forms of care to some extent. Because to accept care would be to put yourself in a vulnerable position when you are literally wanting to do the opposite in order to keep yourself safe. So we have to build care on top of safety. That's why safety is so integral, so important. Like you could think about this and a million other ways. How much are you rejecting abundance or wealth because you don't feel safe? You're rejecting love. Acceptance belonging, because you don't feel safe. You're rejecting opportunities, places to be seen because you don't feel safe. Safety is integral.
So when we're looking at care, what we're really looking at. Here is how to meet ourselves with compassion and gentleness. And the main ways that this really comes up is one how we are moving ourselves through our days. And number two, how we are speaking to ourselves internally. And number three, our general relationship and connection with itself.
So number one.
How are you meeting yourself with care? In the day-to-day of your business.
How is care integrated into your workday?
Number two, how are you speaking to yourself?
What could happen? I find specifically what this is, that if you imagined almost like a pyramid. Safety is on the bottom blog. Care is on the top block. Someone has done some work around really centering their sort of safety in their business. So now they're in that place of layering and care. But maybe they have not really examined or reflected on their relationship with self. And so, they go into the next week and the way that they motivate themselves, is by just using a lot of shame or a lot of self-criticism. We can often see is that then that will actually knock the individual back into that safety zone where now safety has again become the priority. Because in that way, meeting themselves with harshness or pain or cruelty or hate has sort of activated the person into a sense of unsafety. And now that becomes the priority. This is why. These two work so much together and also that It's really important, how we lead ourselves, how we speak to ourselves and how we motivate ourselves.
So noticing that what's that like for you.
This is something that I could spend a lot of time unpacking, but that beginning question of where did it say within you right now?
And what would it look like to bring even just a little bit more softness?
And then thirdly our relational dynamic with ourselves. It's really plays into you the way that we speak to ourselves, but also, how connected do you feel to you?
How connected do you feel to you? Is it easy to orient towards yourself? Is it easy to trust? Is it easy to you?
To even be with you, is it easy or is that really hard?
The way of gentle business is about having an honest and kind relationship with self. It's in the paying attention. In the presence. In the asking questions. In the reflecting in the integrating and making decisions and taking actions out of that place.
Let's just a notice for right now.
How has your relationship with self been? Would you describe it as honest, would you describe it as kind or would you describe it some other way?
Do you believe that it can be different? How do you wish that you could describe it? If this relationship with yourself was a metaphor. What words would you use?
What I really hope that you can take from this little talk, is that gentle business is a softer way forward in entrepreneurship. It is.
Your sense of emotional safety. And your sense of practical care.
Safety. Has to come first. And when it does. Everything gets easier.
If you've been wondering. Why it feels so hard. If you've ever asked yourself, why does it feel so hard?
I think that the deeper question is.
Why do you feel so unsafe?
Of course, there are things that are naturally hard, like figuring out taxes. But if you keep coming up into that feeling of stuckness, like you're hitting the wall again and again, like you can't, you just can't seem to, move through it. That would be the question that I would offer you.
When you ask why is this so hard for me? Replace it with - Why does this feel so unsafe to me? That gets to be this beautiful beginning. To this work.
My takeaways for you in terms of action would be to come up with your safety list. Come up with what could be integral for your sense of care around the ways that you work, your internal voice with yourself and the dynamics relationally that you have with you.
Bringing more softness and gentleness and care into those things.
If you have any questions, thoughts, ideas. I would love to hear them. Feel free to DM me on Instagram at @gentlebusinesscoach.
I am so, so, so excited to introduce to all of you, the partners for this podcast. They are. Marvelous and Willow space and they are two incredible software platforms. That are really partnering with me. In delivering this podcast. Willow space is an incredible CRM that you can use to manage projects and invoices and contracts and all that. Goodness. Marvelous is more a digital education platform to offer. Everything from courses to communities, to digital products, et cetera. You're going to be hearing a lot about these platforms over the next few months. And I can't wait to introduce you to you all of the different ways that these could be a support.
What I really deeply value and respect about both platforms is that they both hold integrity, gentleness and beauty at their very center. Which is very much the gentle business. Kind of vibe. In, so. Lots more to come on. Those beautiful companies. And if you have any curiosities or questions about either of those, you can check out more about them on my website.
Thank you so much for tuning in. To the first episode of gentle business sessions. It was so good to have you here. And I cannot wait to spend more time with you in the space, feel free to subscribe or leave a review! Or share with someone who might need this content. In their life. And I look forward to being with you again, very soon.