🔮 A Spell for Releasing Your Shoulds Around Social Media (& Everything Else) — with Natalie Miller

Amelia Hruby [00:00:01]

[Sparky synth music begins to play, overlapping with the introduction to the episode]

Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:00:08]

[Music continues to play as Melissa Kaitlyn Carter begins to sing]

Let's go, off the grid. Okay! Let's go, off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go, off the grid.

Amelia [00:00:24]

[Singing fades out but synthy sounds continue]

Have you ever wish that you could have a successful business without social media? Well, you're in luck. I'm Amelia Hruby, writer, speaker, and founder of Softer Sounds Podcast Studio.

Amelia [00:00:34]

On this show, I share stories, strategies and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty. Download the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig. That's b-y-e-i-g and join us in doing it all Off the Grid.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:00:56]

[Music gets louder as Melissa Kaitlyn Carter sings again]

Let's go, off the grid. Okay! Let's go, off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go, off the grid [music fades out].

Amelia Hruby [00:01:15]:

Hello and welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. I am the founder of Softer Sounds, a feminist podcast studio for creative entrepreneurs. And I am also your fellow explorer on this journey of running a successful, sustainable business without a social media presence or with minimal social media presence or whatever non-algorithmically invested social media presence you'd like to have.

You're currently listening to season two of Off the Grid. If you're joining us as this releases, we just came back from a little break. This season has been full of amazing conversations and ideas, and let me tell you, if you have loved this season's convos, then today's episode will not disappoint, I promise.

Before I introduce our guest, I just want to remind you as always, that this podcast is paired with an amazing free resource.

The Leaving Social Media Toolkit includes the three tools that I use to leave social media and start my business and run my business without it. That's where you'll find our five step plan for leaving any social platform, my list of 100 ways to share your work without social media and a great notion database for planning creative marketing experiments. You can get the toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig and, of course, at the link in the Show Notes.

Also, if you're joining us when this releases, we are gearing up for the Refresh in August. The Refresh is my three-workshop series for refreshing your relationship with marketing, mapping your business ecosystem, and charting an algorithm-free path forward. There's an amazing group signed up so far. I'm truly so excited about the folks joining us.

So if you're enjoying Off the Grid, if you love season two, head to the Show Notes for all the info and you can join me live later this summer. Okay, let's get into today's episode.

So today I am having a conversation with a podcaster and coach who I have admired from afar for years and today is with us on Off the Grid.

Natalie Miller is a boldly feminist mindset coach who helps changemakers get fully grounded in their power. She coaches entrepreneurs, artists, and thought leaders to shift out of over-performance and into sustainable, potent, whole, self honoring generativity. You can tap into Natalie's magic through her Sunday letters on her Mind Witchery podcast and by using her revolutionary anti planner, Time Witchery.

Today, Natalie's here to talk about the shoulds that so many small business owners, myself included, have in our heads and how taking our shoulds seriously might just be the magic that we need to finally release them. So welcome, Natalie. I'm so happy to have you here.

Natalie Miller [00:04:01]:

I'm so excited to be here. And dare I say, Amelia, between your voice and my voice. Do people say all the time what a lovely voice you have? Because that's what I think when I listen to your podcast.

Amelia Hruby [00:04:17]:

Yes. They always say "I love your voice", and then they say, "and I love how you just laugh with yourself the whole time that you're talking." I agree. We're going to open a really silky smooth portal here today, and I'm so excited for it. So I kind of want to start really basic, because when I first heard the phrase "stop shoulding yourself", I couldn't even understand what was happening. I was like, "a should?" How do I think about this? What does that mean? So I'm wondering if maybe you can begin us there, like, what is "a should" and how might shoulds impact small business owners?

Natalie Miller [00:04:56]:

Yeah, what even is a should? I think a should is an unexamined imperative. I think it's something that we are sort of just taking for granted that we need to do or ought to do or I don't know. It's this unexamined ought to. And I agree. I think a lot of people will say, oh, got to stop shoulding on myself, or, oh, that's a bunch of shoulds. And they kind of like, brush it aside. But the thing about a should is that 'twill not be brushed aside.

Amelia Hruby [00:05:50]:

So true.

Natalie Miller [00:05:51]:

Will not be brushed aside. And this is important for small business owners, of course, because there are so very many things to do as you're building a business. Right. There are all of the different kind of categories of activities. There are all the different possibilities. Heaven knows. There are all the different things people are telling you would be good. Right. And so very quickly, you can have mountains, buckets, piles of shoulds all over the place, and it becomes actually debilitating because then what will you do?

Amelia Hruby [00:06:29]:

Yeah, I mean, I think of this entire podcast, like, Off The Grid exists because of this should, of you should be on social media as a small business owner, as an artist, as a coach, as a creative, as anyone who wants to share your sacred or practical work in the world. Not that those are different. It can be sacred and practical. But if you have something to share, you should be on social media. It's such a strong narrative. And I think one of the tricky things about shoulds for me that I'd love to hear your thoughts on is the way that can be so challenging to disentangle. If a should is something I came up with or something society came up with, and how to even start to be in conversation with a should, how do we recognize shoulds? And then maybe, where do we go once we've recognized we're encountering one?

Natalie Miller [00:07:31]:

Yes, I actually have a practice for this. Yes. This is something that I have done for years. I came up with it myself. I don't know, maybe at the very beginning of my coaching practice, actually. Here's what you do. You write down your shoulds, and you will find that if you really just do it free writing style, you will have pages and pages and pages of I should floss more. I should file my quarterly tax return. I should be on social media. I should try out TikTok, right? Shoulds, should. So you write this big list, maybe set a timer, not to make yourself do it, but to let yourself stop.

Amelia Hruby [00:08:15]:

Yeah, cut yourself off.

Natalie Miller [00:08:17]:

Cut yourself off, right? And then you go through and you see one by one, could I substitute the word want for should? So instead of I should floss more regularly, could I say I want to floss more regularly? And the thing is, you can't just check this in your brain. You have to check it in your body. You got to really pause and remember what's a should. It's an unexamined imperative.

So this is the examination, okay? If I substitute should for want, and then in my body, I imagine myself doing the thing, right? Because in order to check in with the body, we have to actually access the body. So for me, that's like, okay, I'm going to close my eyes. I'm going to imagine myself flossing. Yeah, I do want to do that. I do want to do that. Yeah. You know what? I'm tired at the end of the night, but I do like the feeling of flossing my teeth. It feels good, and I know that there's good reasons behind it, right? So when you go through one by one and you find the ones that are in your body wants, now, they're not shoulds anymore. They're wants. And everything that is left over, the question is, where did this come from?

Amelia Hruby [00:09:48]:

So what are some places that shoulds come from if they're not wants of our own our own desires?

Natalie Miller [00:09:56]:

I mean, I almost can't help but turn the question to both of us, right? Where do they come from? You are an expert here. So where does the should about social media come from, do you think?

Amelia Hruby [00:10:11]:

I think for many of us, it started as a social should powered by FOMO. My friends are all here, so I should be here. And then I think actually what happens is we produce this desire to be there through FOMO. Like, our fear gives us this hook that we have to be there. We should be there. And we think that's a real desire to be there, but it's just a fear of not being there. And then we'd start in that space of being on social media in a social way.

And then if you're a business owner, it comes out of any article you're going to read, marketing basics class you're going to take, other business owner you've seen. Most of the people I work with, they started their business after encountering a lot of other business owners on social media. So it's like the playbook that you're witnessing.

And then you have the layer of the tech platforms themselves producing these shoulds. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Meta, Twitter really enforcing that we should be in these spaces, pitching it to business owners, specifically. And yeah, it goes on and on, but it's like very layered. We get the should within our social circles. We get the should within our professional circles. We get the should from the platforms themselves, which takes us from the personal level to the systemic level.

Natalie Miller [00:11:37]:

Yes, co-sign. Can totally see all of that. There's one more that I'll add that I see especially with my clients, because I work with people who are high-performing, overperforming, really, overperforming. And it's like for overperformers, there's also the "well, it's a challenge." And let me tell you what I do with challenges. I slay them. I go Khaleesi and her dragons on challenges. And so I think there's also that someone might feel discomfort in the face of social media and be like, I think I have a visibility block. And that's what I need to do is I need to work on my visibility. Which could be true. And it also just might be that you don't want to be on Instagram. Maybe you like to kind of watch the dog reels. I do. I like to watch dog reels. But maybe you don't want to actually perform.

Amelia Hruby [00:12:44]:

It's like two sides of the same coin that I get from people a lot. Do I not want to be on social media, or am I playing small, afraid of visibility? And it seems like I will see people stay on social because they have this narrative that's very close to a should of if I'm not present here, then I am holding myself back. I am getting in my own way. I am playing small. It's a limiting belief, almost.

Natalie Miller [00:13:12]:

Yeah, I'm hiding. I'm hiding. It's proof that I'm hiding. Yeah. And so in that case, as a coach, I would say, okay, so there's a difference between I should play big and I should do that on social media. Right? You might sit with I should play big, and you might feel this blend of excitement and also nervousness. And I would say, yeah, then that very well might be a real want or a real desire. But if you really think about sitting down to create a reel or you really think about figuring out TikTok and your guts get all, then that's a sign that maybe that's not the path. Right.

I mean, I feel like, Amelia, what I love about your Leaving Social Media Toolkit and the very much praised, much vaunted 100 Ways to Connect with People, not three, everybody. There's 100 and counting ways that you can connect that have nothing to do with social media is that we get a bit myopic, don't we? That visibility equals social media when that's not the case at all, actually.

Amelia Hruby [00:14:31]:

Yes. It's the same way that having influence and being an influencer have completely been collapsed in this moment in time that we are in. Especially if you are someone who has ever been on social media, which is the majority of the planet at this point, population wise.

I often say to clients and people I encounter through Off the Grid that having influence is a very different thing than having an audience and a very different thing than being an influencer. And it's the same way that being visible and having a lot of followers are very different things as well.

Natalie Miller [00:15:19]:

Yeah, very different. And I think there's something about the qualitative aspect of checking in with your body to see if you desire the thing. Do you truly want to do it? That means to me, there's juice there, there's energy, there's magnetism there. There's something I write in my little anti planner every day. Almost every day I write different things. But I write this almost every day. When I do what I love, I magnetize opportunity. When I do what I love, I magnetize the right people to work with, to connect with, to co-create with. Right? I mean, it really does come from when you are doing what you want. Not what you should, but what you want. That is what makes you influential, that is what makes you visible, audible maybe instead of visible, if that's better for you. Right?

Amelia Hruby [00:16:30]:

Yeah. Two different things are coming up for me thinking of how this might land with Off the Grid guests. And one is that I always want to invite people to write down and examine this should of I should be a business owner or I should be selling my work because often I will see folks get really frustrated that something's not performing or selling or earning what they want. And then when we go deeper, I'm like "you ended up on this online business path almost without your own consent." It's like a relationship escalator. But just like from I posted something on Instagram to now I'm supposed to have a thriving business. And so I think there's a really helpful moment here for folks tuning in to pause and check in with even that should of like I should run a business.

And then once they've done that, if that does come up, if it becomes a want, I want to run my own business. I think the shoulds sneak in between that. I want XYZ sort of business and here I am without that business and how am I going to get there? And something I say on this podcast a lot is like you do have to market your work. Like if you want to have a business, you have to do some marketing of some kind. I don't feel invested in what you choose and I think that should be guided by your desires and your wants, not your shoulds.

But at the same time, for some people, just marketing at all feels like the biggest should that they can't translate into a want. So I'm wondering how can we meet folks in that mix of like, I want a business, I don't know how to get from here to there. Every marketing activity feels like a should, social media or otherwise.

Natalie Miller [00:18:29]:

Well, my coaching mind immediately goes to, okay, well then why do you want to do this? What's your why? Right? I don't want to minimize playing small, being afraid of being more visible, more audible. I mean, especially if you are a member of a group that all of the dominant systems would prefer stays small and quiet. You are really up against it when you're trying to put yourself out there, right? Or I should say we are, we are really up against it when we're trying to be bigger and put ourselves out there. And so I don't want to diminish that at all. That's legit. That's a definite fear. Right? That might be at play here to really see though, do I want to do this? Do I want to sell my art, for example? Why do you want to sell your art? What is that about for you? What are the values that come to life when you sell your art? Like, are you being revolutionary? Are you being generous? Are you bringing beauty into the world? Right? And if you can't find, I think, the values that are coming to life, if you don't have a why that is compelling to you, then that's definitely a whole set of shoulds and open the next door, you know?

Amelia Hruby [00:20:09]:

Yeah, I was just thinking, going back, this is maybe a slight detour, but back out of business and back to your example of flossing. I don't relish in flossing. I in fact don't enjoy the act of doing it. But my why that motivates it is that I want my own teeth in 30 years, 40 years. And I think that that is a true deep want of mine. And so taking care in that way, tending to my teeth by flossing feels good in relationship to that desire. Even if maybe at any given night, I'm like, do I want to floss right now? Maybe not but I'm holding this space for myself to be motivated by that why and those values of care and tending and loving myself in that way, even when that can feel hard or sticky or uncomfortable.

And I think this does come up in marketing a lot. Speaking to what you were saying about visibility, we can want to do something and it can be scary and uncomfortable and maybe even present as something we kind of don't want to do for those reasons. And I love that you've reconnected us then to the why. I'd love to take a step perhaps into the how, because I think something that comes up a lot when folks go to start a business is there's just a lot of things you don't know how to do, for instance, marketing. And you can get caught up in these sorts of best practices, which often look like "five steps to get this" lists and get pretty far away from your motivating why or what it is that you want without even realizing it. So I'm wondering, how do we distinguish between a should and a want and a best practice when we're trying to learn something new?

Natalie Miller [00:22:07]:

It's so funny that you talk about best practices because lately I've been thinking, I don't really believe in them. Just because, okay, this is a little bit hyperbolic. I'm being polarizing. It's a little hyperbolic. But the thing about a best practice is always my question is for whom?

Amelia Hruby [00:22:28]:

Yes.

Natalie Miller [00:22:29]:

Right. Some people will say what you got to do is batch content, whether it's newsletters or podcasts or social media posts. Batch, batch, batch. If Natalie Miller tries to batch anything, anything except possibly for homemade dog food, I do batch dog food that I make because my spoiled ass dogs now get homemade in the instant pot dog food. That is the only thing I can batch.

Anything that is creative, anything that is knowledge based, I cannot batch it. It is so stultifying for me. It feels terrible. Like I have a Sunday letter. I literally sit in my pretty sun filled planty living room on Sunday morning and write it. Occasionally I write it Saturday night on a plane if I'm headed somewhere. But really, it is me on Sunday. And that is the practice that works for me. And so that is a best practice. Now, I would not go out into the world and say, you know what you need to do? Have a day of the week. I mean, just think about this is really a best practice right here. Amelia, this is so ridiculous. If I said what you need to do is choose a day of the week and then choose a place that you enjoy writing and then name your letter after the day of the week, that is often what a best practice sounds like. And it's just like, whoa, I get that that works for you. That does not necessarily work for me. Right.

So I'll just kind of start there. I think there's also, like, this is really interesting. When I mentor brand new coaches who are trying to start businesses and they're wondering about marketing, like, what do they do? I will take it out of business and I will say, let's just imagine that you need to sell a piano. What are you going to do? And everybody's like, dead quiet for 30 seconds, and then they start thinking about it. Right. And, like, oh, I could put it on Craigslist. I could send an email to my neighborhood list. I could contact a music school, I could contact piano teachers in the area. I could see if there's a used piano store, et cetera. Right? All of a sudden, these people are so creative about thinking about where they're going to sell a piano they don't actually have. And it's like, you have that also for your business. You have that for your art, for your coaching, if you can kind of do the work to get the personal worthiness of the selling kind of taken care of. Right? So this is a roundabout way of saying, I believe that we are all so creative. I believe that we all already know, here are some things that work for me, and here are some things that don't. Like Amelia, if I ask you, what's your relationship to deadlines? What would you say?

Amelia Hruby [00:25:50]:

They work for me, but I don't need them to motivate me.

Natalie Miller [00:25:53]:

Perfection. Right? Like, you already know that about yourself. I think we know a lot about ourselves. I can take one look at the idea of batching content and be like, no, I know that's not going to fly. And then I experiment to kind of figure out what does work, actually.

Amelia Hruby [00:26:13]:

And that's a core part of, I guess, how I teach marketing through Off the Grid, which is not to provide any one way of marketing, but to ground us in experimenting in our practice. And I think experimentation can also be a way of examining shoulds and releasing shoulds by trying it. And something else I love about experiments is I like to ground them both in how does this feel and does it get the result that you were hoping for? And for most people, when they start to do a social media experiment and look at it from that angle of, did it actually sell this thing I was doing? Or did it actually get me that relationship with that new audience that I wanted? Often it doesn't.

And it's that moment of being like, oh, this experiment isn't working. And I just keep doing one experiment with the exact same variables, controls, insert science words here over and over and over again, and it's not yielding a result.

Natalie Miller [00:27:15]:

And you've just happened upon, I think, a third answer to, do I want to do this? I don't know. I don't know if I want to do it. Do I really want to go on other people's podcasts? I mean, I'm not sure. So yeah, how do we figure it out? We do it, we try it, and we stay in touch with ourselves. Because I think another thing that can happen sometimes is we get very busy in small business building an apparatus for ourselves, right? Rather than just doing that kind of small experimentation to see is this a thing I even enjoy?

Amelia Hruby [00:28:07 synth music begins to play]:

Hi, Off the Grid listeners. Amelia here interrupting our conversation today because I want to share with you one of my favorite marketing tools. When I left Instagram, I invited all of my followers to subscribe to my mailing list in order to keep in touch with me, and I promised to send them monthly-ish notes on a lot of the themes I used to talk about on social media. I've used many email service providers in my day, but my favorite of all of them is Flodesk.

Flodesk is a gorgeous, easy to use email service provider. It helps you create beautiful, thoughtful emails. And even better, it's really set up to help you create easy to use landing pages so people can join your list and workflows so you can automate sending messages to folks who sign up through different pages. Flodesk is how I run all of the welcome sequences and lead magnets that Softer Sounds. It's also how I run the Leaving Social Media Toolkit that you might have downloaded after listening to this podcast. I'm surely not sending those emails out myself manually. Flodesk is doing all of that automagically.

If you'd like to give Flodesk a try, please use my affiliate link below in the show notes. You'll get a discount, I'll get a kickback, and we will all send more beautiful emails together. Again, check out the affiliate link in the Show Notes. For now, we're going to get back to this episode of Off the Grid.

Amelia Hruby [00:29:40]:

I really appreciated your reflection on best practices and that question of best for who? Something that's arising for me around that is just examining and interrogating this idea of wanting the best to begin with and this sense of, I think, that so often we're drawn toward these teachers who are normally just influencers, who promise us the answers and the best way and the right way and the easy way to get success that is what we desire beyond our wildest dreams, even. And that in itself is another should. And I've come to think of it as a way of, like, it's almost like we're taking away the experience from ourselves. We're taking away our own authority on how we might do this or our own creative experiments around it. And something that you kind of came back to over and over again, talking about practices that work for you is like self, trust, inner authority. But I don't think we necessarily arrive to our business with that, right?

I do talk to a lot of business owners who couldn't tell you what their relationship to deadlines is, who don't know sometimes if they even like making their work, let alone if they like how they're marketing it. So how do we learn, this is a huge question, but how do we even take a step toward cultivating that inner authority, trusting ourselves in our businesses?

Natalie Miller [00:31:15]:

Yeah, it's interesting. And obviously we work with different clients, so I don't know. But I think people know so much more about themselves than they realize if they just pause to consider. So that's one thing.

Another piece is this. If I were going to have a metaphor for trust. Trust is like an ember. So trust is the glowing thing that's left over when you've burned something, right? So you set fire to something, you really brought a big burst of energy in. And listen, that could be going part time instead of full time in your day job. That could be leaving your wife, that could be writing your book, that could be renting a studio. There's any number of kind of, okay, I'm going to bet on myself. I'm going to take a chance on myself. And no matter what the outcome is when you bet on yourself, the fire of that creates self trust. Because if it worked, then awesome. You know that you can trust your instincts. And if it didn't work, then awesome because you know that things cannot go your way and you can still be okay. It could kind of work and also not work. Right? Which is the most likely scenario is that it does work, except not in the way you thought or it doesn't work, except it kind of did give you these bonus sort of takeaways. Right? And in that scenario, in the end, what you have still are these glowing embers and fascinatingly, just like with a fire, once you have them, you can't just count on them. You have to keep burning shit. You have to keep trying a new thing. And again, trying a new thing doesn't have to be achievement-y. Right? Trying a new thing could be, I'm going to take the month of July off. Trying a new thing could be, I'm going to shut down this offer I don't enjoy delivering, and start something new. Right?

In my experience, the more willing you are to put bets on yourself into the fire, the more embers you have at your disposal, the more self trust there is in there. Now, I will say that that's the way that it works for me and I self coach the fuck out of myself. It's very easy to get discouraged. It's very easy in the face of some things that kind of initially look like failures to be like, okay, that's it. I got to shut it down. But with relentless appreciation of the outcomes, meaning, I love the word appreciation as like a higher valuing. Like, I'm going to give value to whatever comes out of this, whether it works in the way I thought or not, I'm giving value to it. With that appreciation also comes a self appreciation. And we have more knowledge about ourselves. We have more knowledge about what works for us and what doesn't, right? So just start. What do you do? What do you advise people to do when they're in that place?

Amelia Hruby [00:35:08]:

I think that I have kind of two different practices. One very similar to yours and then a slightly different angle depending on their personality. So sometimes with some people I'm like, you just need to go do a bunch of shit and you need to kind of experiment and document that process and how it felt for yourself. Very similar to start the fires, collect the embers.

I think the other thing that I will advise people to do is a little more of, I call it like building an archive for cultivating self trust. I personally, as an overachiever and with many friends who overachieve, I find we have this amnesia, we don't do that appreciation process of appreciating and raising the value of our successes. And instead we've built these museums of our failures, temples of our failures that we go to, to judge and shame ourselves, not to worship our resilience or something like that.

So sometimes I'll work with people on looking back at things that have gone well and kind of, I do think of it as like building a museum or like we're going to do an exhibition of all of the things that you did do, all of the times you did share your work. And in those instances, I try to make it less about the response or the impact or like how did it land with others and just what is the thing that you did where you wanted something and you did that thing or you wanted it and you got it for yourself? It's really just looking back at those moments and then cultivating that, saying yes to your self practice. And that's been just really helpful for myself and in my personal life and in my business. And it's been really helpful too for a lot of my community of the folks who have done all the things but need to remember all the times that they did the thing and that it went well. Kind of having that archive to revisit and remember, just remembering that we can trust ourselves.

Natalie Miller [00:37:10]:

Yeah, I love the idea again, of trusting ourselves to be okay either way. And also, I think I was thinking as you were talking, like expanding our timelines a bit because how do you know that didn't work? We're not done, right? Like Van Gogh. Van Gogh's art wasn't acclaimed until he was gone. So imagine if he stopped and was like, well, nobody's really buying this. I guess I'm just done now, right? There are so many examples of that. I also love the practice of going back to a time when we made a decision that really feels like a mistake and being like, okay, but what did I get out of it? Right? Not as like a kind of way of frosting a shitty experience, right? But really as like, no, that was rough, but what did you get? You got something. Appreciate, give more value to that and be curious about where that's going.

Amelia Hruby [00:38:35]:

Yeah, just thinking of the timeline piece, I think you're so right that in our age of instant gratification, we think that the results of our actions are what happens immediately next, when in fact, it is often what happens in a year or five years or ten years or after your lifetime. And I love your Van Gogh example, but I was even thinking for myself, I had the tiniest moment of this the other day when I was talking to one of our community members in the Lifestyle Business League, and she told me, she's like, oh, I found out about you because you were on this podcast. That is a podcast episode interview I did that got fewer than 100 downloads, which I know because it was with a client and I'm in their back end and in my head I was like, well, it's nice I got to have that conversation. But it didn't really have any sort of appreciable impact when in fact, it introduced me to this new person who's now a part of my community. Who knows what future collaborations and things that that will bring and yield? But I had so quickly written it off.

Natalie Miller [00:39:45]:

Yeah. And can I ask, was the interview fun?

Amelia Hruby [00:39:49]:

It was great. It was one of my favorites. Yeah.

Natalie Miller [00:39:52]:

I mean, that's the thing, right? I have a similar story right now. I'm working with someone finally. I met her almost a decade ago when we were both attending some kind of marketing event thing, and we met and we hit it off like a good ten years ago.

Amelia Hruby [00:40:10]:

Wow.

Natalie Miller [00:40:11]:

Now, she's an incredible client. Like, where she is in her business is exactly my sweet spot of where I help. She's really wanting to make a major shift in her very successful business, and that is what I do. And it's like, oh, well, that worked out ten years later. I could go back. I could be like, oh, I wasted all this money on this conference. And I was like, no, actually, what I loved about the conference was the people I met there, including this one, who's now my client. How amazing, right?

Amelia Hruby [00:40:50]:

How amazing. Yeah. For me, my business has become a place where I'm really able to slow down and really try to center in a more, I think of it as like a sacred slowness. I don't feel the pressure to have reactions to everything happening in the world. I don't feel the pressure to respond rapidly to most anything. And the reason I don't feel that is because I've really made the values clear. I've communicated. It's a lot of boundary setting with myself, with others. It's a lot of choices that I've made.

But I think that so many shoulds fall away when we just slow down, even to what you said before, when we pause, we know so much more about ourselves. We can really stop ourselves in a quote unquote shoulding moment by just putting it down, just taking a pause, slowing. And that, I think, has been really potent medicine for me in business, specifically. It's just letting it be slow, letting it grow slowly, which is one of Softer Sound's guiding principles.

Natalie Miller [00:42:08]:

That makes me think of if you've walked uphill for a really long time and then you shift and you start walking downhill, at first it's like, oh, my gosh, this is so easy. But then after a while you're like, oh, you actually use different muscles to go downhill. Like in our culture, we are walking uphill all the time. Right. And so to slow down, it is building another muscle. Or in my case, I was thinking I don't think about slowness as being the guiding value, but I think about freedom and flow.

Like for me, I really have to be able to wake up and make lentil soup if that's what needs to happen. I need to be able to do that in my business. And because business can be amazing, I've created a business where I get to do what I want. I have so much freedom to flow with whatever is interesting to me. Right? And it's like on the one hand, doesn't that sound so easy? But no, it's actually a muscle that we've built up. It's a muscle that we've built up and it's a countercultural muscle too.

Amelia Hruby [00:43:22]:

Yeah, it absolutely is. I love that. Feels expansive. I feel like my value is currently slowness because I'm a capricorn rising. And I really like the antidote to my intense overwork is I just right now need to slow down. But the why isn't slowness for the sake of slowness. It's slowness for the sake of, as I build this muscle, I will have much more time, freedom, flexibility, flow, those are really kind of within that. And I really see it as almost like an evolutionary journey.

Natalie Miller [00:44:06]:

Yeah.

Amelia Hruby [00:44:06]:

And for me, it just starts with slowing down and eventually I'll get to these other so I can have these other things that I desire. But it is it's very countercultural. Especially, I would say, in business to not feel like you have to jump to what the client needs or has asked for. To not feel like you have to jump to what the institution expects immediately and to be willing to hold true even if you saying no means someone else says no, which can be something that happens.

I've just recently went through an experience of a client saying we need our audio turned around in 48 hours. And me saying I don't do that. And we parted ways, and that was okay for both of us, but I felt the impulse to be like, that's okay, we can do that. I could figure that out for you. And then I had to step back and be like, no, it's just counter to everything I'm trying to build and do differently here.

Natalie Miller [00:45:05]:

Yeah. And to review, right? Like, if someone doesn't have this muscle built that you've already got built, right? What do you do in that moment? You pause and you go, okay, I'm feeling like I really should accommodate this client. And then you go into your body and you imagine yourself, you imagine yourself waiting for the audio, which come on, is like, definitely coming 36 hours before, not 48. Right. And then you imagine yourself sitting to edit, and it's like you put yourself in that situation, your body will tell you whether or not it's aligned.

Amelia Hruby [00:45:40]:

Yeah, exactly. And I will say, I have some other clients where on occasion, I'll get audio with 48 hours turnaround, and I'm happy to accommodate it. I'm like, great, let's do this. Also, there's flexibility. Sometimes the same thing can be a yes in one context and no in a different context. A yes with one person, a no with a different person. A yes for me, but a no for you.

Natalie Miller [00:46:04]:

I actually think that is another aspect of shoulds, that should is such a blanket. It's just not very nuanced at all. Right? And so I think when it becomes like, I should hold a very strong boundary with my clients, it's like, actually, that doesn't feel great either. Right? What do I want to do? And what I love about checking in with what you want, even though it's not always straightforward, right?There are curated wants in there. There are things you want to want. It can be complicated, but when you really tune-in to what you want, you will be in the present moment, especially when you check-in with your body. Your body can't live next week or two months ago. Like, your body is right here.

Amelia Hruby [00:46:50]:

What does checking in with your body feel like? What does, like, a yes or a want feel like for you? For me, it's very sacral. It's very gut. Like, I feel it in the root of me. I'm just wondering where, is there like a location you feel it? Is it a different sort of thing?

Natalie Miller [00:47:10]:

Yeah. As I've coached lots of different people through this. Right? It is a little bit different for everybody, but almost always the quality of it is like expansive and the breath is moving. There's a connectedness and an expansiveness, and so you kind of get it in the gut. I get it sort of like 360 degrees around my chest and back. Like, my heart kind of opens up. Generally speaking. You can just kind of ask a person, how does it feel in your body? And there will almost always be centered, light, excited. It's got that kind of vibe. A no from body almost always has contraction in it, less breath in it. Sometimes there's like a disconnect or a dissociation where it's like, oh, I actually don't feel it's harder to connect with my body or I'm feeling like my limbs are separate from my core. Right?

So an easy way to kind of start to explore this for yourself is to just think about something that reliably you love to do and imagine yourself doing it and see what that feels like. Right? So right now, for me, that would be like reading a novel by the pool in the summer. Fave. Love it so much. I imagine doing that and it's like, oh yeah, I get all of the expansive freedom vibes and then something you reliably do not like to do. Stand in line at the post office. Right? And it can be just basic little things like that, but you can start to become a little more familiar with how your body communicates. A yes and a no, a want and a no thank you.

Amelia Hruby [00:48:59]:

Yeah. I do think that practicing this in the context of your day to day life and choices and things can be really helpful and necessary for then being able to translate it into what can often feel like these bigger, more elusive decisions we might be making in our creative practice or our business or relationships. When I can center in the me, then I'm better able to connect with what I want in choices that are involving lots of other people and factors.

Natalie Miller [00:49:30]:

Yeah.

Amelia Hruby [00:49:30]:

I think what I'm taking away from this conversation is so much of releasing our shoulds is writing them down, being willing to and open to examining them, seeing what translates to a want or doesn't and then also being attuned to those desires that arrive and learning, practicing, saying yes when we can, such that we are tending those embers. We are starting those fires that create those embers of self trust. And that's how we create the trust and the confidence to do business our own way, whether that is on social media or not, but in our own way, as guided by our inner authority, not the external narratives or shoulds.

Natalie Miller [00:50:25]:

Yeah. And even as that is a very self centered practice and enterprise, you don't have to do it alone. A conversation like this can help you. A coach can help you. Joining a networking group of people who are all figuring out this stuff together can help you. Right? Like, yes, it is inherently self centered and you don't have to do it all by yourself.

Amelia Hruby [00:50:51]:

So true. So, Natalie, how can folks connect with you? I'm sure now that they've made it to this point in the conversation, they want more of you and your work. So how can they connect with you or go deeper?

Natalie Miller [00:51:04]:

Yes, well, that letter that I write every Sunday, you could get that. It'll come on Sunday. So that you can find on my website and then you can also find your way to my podcast, Mind Witchery, on my website as well.

Amelia Hruby [00:51:22]:

Yes, I love both of those things. I will just make a plug here that Natalie's newsletter is so enriching and I just love that you really write it to the reader. It reads just as a beautiful poem every week, which I love. And your podcast is full of spells, which this episode being called a spell is an homage to that.

Natalie Miller [00:51:47]:

Oh, I love it.

Amelia Hruby [00:51:50]:

I guess I'm just co-signing that your letters and your podcast are fantastic and folks should go listen and subscribe if they are not already. Natalie, is there any parting words or wisdom that you'd like to share with folks before we sign off from this episode?

Natalie Miller [00:52:07]:

This will take time to believe fully, but when you do what you want to do, you will always be headed in the right direction, I promise. There will be scenic routes. There will be moments where your car breaks down on the side of the road, but when you are headed in the direction of what you want, you are always going the right way.

Amelia Hruby [00:52:33]:

Beautiful. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, listeners, for joining us in examining and releasing our shoulds today. All the links are in the show notes, as always, and until next time, we will see you off the grid.

[00:52:52 Melissa Kaitlyn Carter begins to sing over sparkly synthy sounds] Let's go off the grid. Okay! Let's go off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go off the grid.

Amelia [00:21:23] [Music continues to play softly] Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Find links and resources in the show notes and don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig.

Amelia [00:21:35] This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter and our logo is by n'atelier Studio.

Amelia [00:21:42] If you'd like to make a podcast of your own, we'd love to help. Find more about our services at softersounds.studio. Until next time, we'll see you Off the Grid.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:22:07] [Melissa Kaitlyn Carter sings the new theme song again] Let's go off the grid. Okay! Let's go off the grid. Okay! I know that you really wanna put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go off the grid [sparkly synthy sounds fade out].