Makena: Hello, everyone.

Gigi: Hello, everyone. Welcome. Welcome.

Makena: Welcome. We are together in Houston, Texas right now. 

Gigi, you have some exciting news…

Gigi: Yeah, I just moved to Houston. It’s a big, big step. 

I moved here, and then we had the hurricane. We’re just getting over that right now.

Makena: It was especially exciting. There was no power for days.

Gigi: Makena’s here visiting, which is amazing. 

We had the opportunity to host an event yesterday with women. That was so much fun. 

I’m looking forward to hosting monthly events here and just entertaining.

Makena: Yeah, it’s such a beautiful space. 

I was just in Austin before this and hosted an awesome event there as well. 

If you’re not on our email list already and you want to get an invite to future events, you can go to www.wayofthemuse.com. 

There are lots of different freebies you can sign up for and fun things on our homepage, and that will get you on our email list to hear about upcoming events.

We love gathering online, but there’s nothing like gathering in person.

Gigi: So much fun.

Makena: Our topic for today came out of one of my live gatherings a few weeks ago in San Diego. When I was talking to some of the women, I noticed a theme in what they shared about what’s going on in their lives. 

This is something that comes up again and again with the women we talk to and also for us personally. You and I were talking before we got on today about how I’ve been in a bit of this recently – trying to get clear on what direction to go. 

Many women were saying, “What is next for me in my career or my next chapter?”

That’s our topic today: How do you get clarity on your direction when you have many options? It’s an amazing place to be, but it can also feel overwhelming. How do I know which option to choose?

The big thing we see a lot is people getting stuck and not choosing any direction. They all had different options, business ideas, ways to grow their current business, and career directions. 

One woman was considering going back to school but wanted to earn money on her own terms while studying. Some were desiring partnerships and felt ready to call in their person but found it challenging to focus on that and their careers. 

I brought this topic to you, Gigi, because we help our clients with it all the time. I thought it would be fun to do a podcast episode about it. 

If someone came to you with different possible directions, how would you help them get clear?

This was going on with me just recently, right?

I have some exciting things on the horizon. I was going through a lot of different ideas and a lot of different directions. How do I know what to prioritize and where to really move my energy forward? 

You’ve helped me with this so many times, so I feel like I do know how to do it. But just to say that, it’s still something that I come across. 

Gigi: I think it’s easy to forget because it feels overwhelming when it’s all in our heads. 

If I’m with someone, I talk through their ideas and I feel and sense which idea has more energy or aliveness. When we’re coaching, that’s how I handle it. 

We’ve talked before in our podcast about the coaching method we use, the Aliveness Method. We can see that aliveness in the eyes when people talk about something they are inspired by. You can see the light coming into their eyes, a little glimmer. 

Over time, I’ve learned to feel and sense in different ways. I can hear and feel it even when I’m talking to somebody on the phone, which we don’t talk on the phone anymore.

Makena: For those who watch our podcast videos, not just listen to the audio, in our on-air coaching sessions, we sometimes point this out. We’ll say, “Oh, you really lit up when you said that…”

And you can actually see it and practice seeing it. So that’s a great opportunity for that. 

It’s so cool that you can even tell when people are lighting up over the phone. 

Gigi: Yeah, I do. I feel it when you get tuned in and you can too, right?

Makena: I can feel it.

Gigi: For our listeners, maybe you don’t have the opportunity to have somebody that actually has coached or trained and sees that the best way is, I really encourage you to write down all the different ideas that you have. 

Just put them on paper, all the different possible directions, and really dump everything down.

Because the power again is in the paper instead of in your head. It’s very hard to make distinctions when it’s in your head. 

Then you want to look and see when you go through each one, and you look at it and really think about it, which one is the most inspiring, and it really brings you the most alive.

As you’re going through, you could even rate them – it’s a one or it’s a five. As you increase the numbers, it means there’s more energy and more aliveness there. 

Whichever idea has the most aliveness or energy, and you really feel like you could take action on it now, you could go for it.

Because there are a lot of ideas that we have that are super exciting. 

Like you Makena, You’ve got some ideas right now, they’re super exciting. But right at this moment, they’re not going to happen. There’s an evolution to them. 

You want to take the one that you feel the most excited about right now. One that you feel you can put the time and energy into. 

Because where there’s aliveness, what happens is that energy and inspiration will actually fuel everything else you’re doing. 

So, if you find the one, you begin to take action on it. Even the things that you really don’t like to do suddenly take on a new life. 

Makena: This is such a powerful distinction because many people feel like they don’t have the energy to add anything else – “I’m too tired.”

When they move in a direction that has energy and aliveness, their energy changes. 

We always say, “You can do it all, but you can’t do it all at once.” 

People might look at their list and think, “They all have energy… They all sound great… I don’t know which one to choose still.” 

It’s not that you’re only going to choose one of them and not do the other ones. You do choose one, and over time, you can branch out into maybe even doing them all. 

Gigi: Absolutely. You have to start somewhere, or you’ll get stuck in analysis paralysis. 

This is probably what you were dealing with when you met with the women in your group and saw several of them. Maybe those ideas had been in their heads for years, even.

They’ve had something in the back of their mind, and we’re waiting for that perfect moment – and it’s just not going to come until we take some action. 

What you want to do is you want to look and see what do you want to do there – choose the one that you’re going to take action on.

Another important piece is: why are you doing it? What excites you about it? Where is that energy coming from? 

When you know the deeper reason and the reason you’re going for something, it has more legs. 

The other thing is that you can really own the value in order for that inspiration to last if you know why you’re doing it.

When we work with people, we have an in-depth process where we really look at each option. We help people by supporting them to see which one has the energy and aliveness and then the deeper why. 

But for those who are listening, the first step is just to tune in. Ask yourself, what has the most energy? Where do I feel the most excited, curious, or alive? 

You can sense and feel that in your body. It’s like vitality. If you don’t know in your head, start working on one of these items and you’ll see by how you feel when you start taking action on it too.

Makena: This is the process we call “Following your Aliveness.”

Those of you who’ve been listening for a while are familiar with this, most likely from some of our other episodes. 

If you’re not, we’re teaching a very simple version or a way to begin following your aliveness here. 

I also recommend that you want to go back and listen to some earlier episodes, that’s always great because we really do build on some of these concepts over time.

One quote I love that we created is, “Aliveness is the compass that points the way to your most extraordinary life.” 

Another way I like to put it is, “Aliveness is the key to your clarity.” 

What we mean by that is… like Gigi is saying and has been teaching and guiding people through for 38 years, as you start to pay attention to where you have more energy and aliveness, noticing in every moment and paying attention to those cues and then starting to move in that direction, we start to see, we get more clarity, and more and more clarity comes. 

Gigi, why is this the most effective way to get clear on a direction? How does this all tie in? 

Gigi: As I said before, with aliveness, you feel energy and inspiration in everything you do. It also helps you feel more inspired about the things you have to do that you may not be so excited about. 

You come from a different place. The way you see the world actually starts to change. You see possibilities where you might have felt a lot of confusion because you were trying to weed through all these different ideas. 

As you said, clarity comes through action. When you finally choose and take that action, you can relax. 

Just think of it in terms of brain bandwidth: you get so much more access to your thinking that you can start to put into something that you can really actualize and go for.

Makena: I love that brain bandwidth example. Because I’ve asked people before, how much time do you spend going around and around in your head, thinking about these things and wondering, should I go this direction or that direction, like on an average day or week? How much time? 

And for a lot of people, it’s a significant chunk of time.

But what if you could start moving in a direction? See where that energy is, and then start moving in this direction. You’d suddenly free up all that time you were spending going around and around in your head.

It may or may not end up being “the thing” eventually, but you’ll see pretty quickly: Is this a direction? Does it have energy? Does it have legs? 

This is where I always like to use the example of riding a bike. 

To learn to ride a bike, do you just sit there and read books about riding a bike? 

Do you go around and around in your head about how you’ll get on the bike, what that will be like, and how you’ll get good at it? Or do you have actually to get on the bike?

The truth is, we have to get on the bike, start pedaling, and probably fall down a few times. 

If you keep doing that, you keep getting on and pedaling. Eventually, and for most, especially children, it doesn’t take long. They start going, and suddenly they’re riding the bike, and not only in that momentum, but you can go places, you can go to the places you want to go.

But none of that could come from theorizing, planning, strategizing, analyzing, which is where so many of us get caught. 

It’s the same thing when you’re thinking, “What is my direction?” – you can’t just get there in your head. That’s the truth. 

And everybody, so much of the time, is looking for that clarity before they get on the bike.

Gigi: Yeah, that is very, very, very accurate. I think that’s something to sit and really look at and reflect on. 

We also see this when we work with women – we saw this yesterday in the class – is that we tell ourselves a lot of stories about it, too. Not only are we taking up bandwidth in the brain in terms of what we want to do, but we add stories to that.

Makena: Tell me what you mean by those stories.

Gigi: Stories about why we can’t do it. Stories about how we have to wait. Stories about how there are more important things to do.

Makena: Maybe I’m not that good at it actually. What if it’s not the thing I want to do as a career? Is it really even worth my time?

Gigi: The funny one is, what if I waste time doing that? Then you think about how much time you have wasted thinking about it. Right?

Makena: So true. Sometimes, it’s truly years. 

Gigi: Truly years. We find that. We had one woman in the class yesterday, and she was in an event we did a couple of years ago.

It’s something she had in the back of her mind—we’ve talked about it before with her artwork. When she took the class, she took action, went for it, and got on the bike. And she has been doing it for two years, and her art and name were on Times Square two weeks ago. Wow. She could have never imagined that.

She had already spent about 10 – 15 years. How long did she say even? 

Makena: A long time. She’d been painting forever but never told anyone.

Gigi: Yeah, she never told anyone. That’s just such a beautiful example of getting on the bike and going for it. And it’s a beautiful example of going out of nowhere by doing that. Look at what she’s accomplished. She’s been in amazing magazines and all because she had the courage to finally choose and to go for it. 

It’s a great story. She’s amazing. It’s a wonderful story. 

I had another client who was trying to see what was next for her. I had worked with her for several years, and she was ready for a change.

She had a very successful career, but she thought she wanted to pivot into something new. She was curious and looked at different things. She had several different ideas and didn’t know which one to start with. 

So I finally said, “We’ve got to choose a project.”

We went through this process of seeing what had the most energy for her, and she chose it. She took it on for a few months, and she really got into action. She fully embraced it.

That’s so important. You can’t have your foot on the gas and the brake when you go for this. You just have to fully go into it and say, “This is it.” 

Even when your mind says, “Well, I don’t know if this is it,” you just go, “This is it.” 

After a while, she saw that it wasn’t it. This was really valuable because otherwise, she would have spent years wondering about this. It would have been in the back of her brain for a long time. 

Makena: Can I ask you about that? You said you have to go into it as if it’s it, but after a while, she saw it wasn’t. Do you put a time period on that? 

How do you know when you decide, “okay, was it really the right thing or not?”

Gigi: A time period is always good. That’s what we had done. I am trying to remember if it was 90 days for her project or six months or something like that. 

Because you want to have a timeframe then you can go, okay, what worked, what didn’t work. Is this something that I want to continue?

That’s a very important question.

What happened for her was that, while she was studying something on the side, she learned about it because she was really curious about it. It was fun for her, and she was having so much fun that before long, she was spending all her time there.

Makena: I remember this. Yeah. Yeah. 

Gigi: She started developing expertise there by accident. The funny thing is that that became her business. It came from action and her aliveness. By going into action, but by accident this time, which was funny, she was working on this other project but doing this other thing for fun.

Before long, she wasn’t trying to strategize a business or anything like that, but this became her work. She never planned it; she never predicted it. The clarity actually came through her actions. 

Makena: That’s such a great example. I think so many people are in that place of, “I have so many different directions.” In this case, it was around starting a business. 

Many people who come to us are starting businesses; some are already established and may want to pivot, or sometimes they’re growing what they’re currently doing. 

But there is a cohort of people that we work with who are starting something new. 

Often, this is what we get: “Well, I could do this, or I could do that. I have so many different ideas. I don’t know which one to go with.” 

This is really a way of taking something, moving it into action for a certain period of time, and then seeing, once that time has passed, was it the direction.

We often see with people; sometimes, it turns out to be the direction. Other times, something comes out of left field, or one of the other ideas really shows up. I love that. 

There were some women there the other day who really wanted a relationship. What about someone in that case, where they’re going, “I’ve got a lot going on in my life or my career. I want this relationship. I’m not sure how to prioritize this.”

Gigi: I have a great story about that. We have another client, and she’s been working with us for several years. She’s very focused on growing her business and, in the last three years, she has had a lot of success. All this time, she’s been talking about wanting a relationship for a long time. But didn’t have the curiosity or the energy to make it happen.

She would go online, but she didn’t really want to do the online thing. Over time, what I saw was that she would say she was going to start, and then she would stop. 

I saw that because the way she structures her business is so systematic, she also needed some kind of structure in finding a relationship instead of just saying, “I’m going to go online and date whatever.”

I found this structure for her and I assisted her to really find this model. It’s systematic and very focused on finding a partner. It was amazing. We had a coaching session. I really talked about how to do it and gave her the model. She studied it a bit and then she went out, got an opportunity to go to this brunch before she even started with the model.

She met this person within a couple of weeks, and she was already in a relationship. They’ve been dating now. How long do you think, maybe 90 days or something?

Makena: I think maybe two months, something like that.

Gigi: She’s having the time of her life – so happy. Of course, it’s also challenging her to grow, but what’s happening is it’s allowing her to work through these areas where she was actually stuck and wasn’t fully living.

It’s so fun to witness her blossoming in this area. I watch her struggles, but also the weeks where it’s just like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this. My life is so rich and full now. I’ve got my business, I’ve got my family, I’ve got my relationship.” 

It’s super exciting to watch this shift when she was able to find a way that she could focus on this aspect that she really wanted and that really worked for her.

That gave her more aliveness and energy. 

Makena: What’s so much when women work with us is I feel like they say, “I’m so focused on this one area of my life or these couple areas of my life. I don’t see how to integrate all the different pieces.” 

Because women love the lifestyle. They want a rich relationship, a rich family life, to feel beautiful, to have travel and adventure, to have a successful career. We want all these different pieces. 

Often, it feels like, “Well, I have to choose. I can only do this or this, or I can only focus on a couple areas at a time. It feels like I have to sacrifice in one area to have richness in another.”

Over time, as the women work with us, like this particular woman you’re talking about, she came in and had to focus first on an area that was the most important to her: her business and career.

But as she grew, she gained strength, confidence, and success. Then, there came a time when, as you said, it was just having the right structure and support for her to really be able to move this area forward that she had, um, felt challenged in for a really long time.

I want to share a couple of corporate stories because a lot of our stories involve entrepreneurs, and we work with people who are in both. 

One story I’ll share is actually the woman I referenced earlier in the episode. Who’s thinking about going back to school. She is actually a client and a listener of this podcast. 

She had a long-term dream of moving to another country, but she wasn’t sure and hadn’t prioritized it. She was looking for a change, and we started to talk about how she could make that happen.

When we went into it at first, she thought, “Maybe I need to go back to school, and that would go open something up there. I could return to school, and it would open up new career paths.”

So, she started applying to schools in other countries. Interestingly enough, she said, “Well, I need a way to earn while in school.”

We were looking at different options there. Recently, we had a session out of the blue (it’s not really out of the blue; it always feels that way). because she’s been on the bike, so to speak, taking action in the direction of this dream, which has been in the back of her mind for years, but now we’re moving something forward there.

Now, “out of the blue,” an opportunity has shown up from some friends she was talking to for this incredible potential job direction. A career direction that would allow her to be completely virtual work from home and make even more money than she’s making right now. She might not even need to go back to school in order to go live in another country like she wants to.

I just love that as an example of sometimes we think, “Well, that was just random. Maybe it would have happened anyways.” 

In our experience, because she was on the bike, she was taking action. She was pedaling forward, and falling down sometimes. 

Like you said, when you follow that aliveness, opportunities start to come – sometimes seemingly out of nowhere.

That’s a really great example there of what we’re talking about. One other example is from corporate, which is a different scenario. 

Someone I worked with a couple of years ago. She was in corporate, but she always had this idea in the back of her mind of starting her own thing, her own business.

When we worked together, we were able to fully explore that. Like so many people, it was then in the back of her mind, but we started looking at what that would be, how she would approach it, and what had the most energy, like you talked about, and she started taking some action in that direction.

When she started doing this, similar to the story you told earlier, she saw after a while that she wasn’t fully in. Then again, sort of out of the blue, this amazing job opportunity came up, and it was so aligned for her. It was so much of what she really, really wanted. 

Again, you could say it was random, but so often, we see that it came through. She fully walked through this one direction and saw it wasn’t actually it. 

So, she could free herself of that idea that had been there for years. She took the job opportunity, and she felt fully clear that she didn’t have to sit there. Like we talked about, she was going around and around in her mind all the time thinking, “Oh, maybe I want to start a business. Maybe I don’t want to do this.” 

She could fully go all in on that and feel really, really great about it. 

But what if somebody feels like they don’t really have the energy? 

We touched on this earlier, but I hear this so often from women: “I don’t feel like I have the energy to even think about a new direction or to start to really take action to move it forward. I’m super busy in my career or have young kids at home or all of the above.”

What would you say to someone who says that to you? 

Gigi: There are actually two different pieces here. There’s the time and the energy.

The truth is 90% of the time, people have the time. It’s just a matter of how you allocate the time that you have. 

We’ve seen this in the stories we’re sharing right now: When you really commit to going for it and taking the time, time expands all of a sudden.

Makena: How much time do we spend scrolling on our phones or Netflix or doing something else? If you truly could put an hour a day or half an hour a day into something, it would move it forward.

Gigi: Then with energy, it’s so important to stay curious. Pay attention to your aliveness and your vitality because it’ll give you that inspiration and vitality that you may be lacking right now. 

It’s funny the moment you really choose something that inspires you, even though you may have hesitancy about taking the first steps. Structuring it to be 30 minutes a day for a few days, even, and you’ll start to feel different and then you’ll start to gain energy. You’ll have a new vitality. 

Makena: I remember a woman who went through our coaching certification a few years ago. She had been a long-time client of yours. She ended up becoming one of our coaches as well and eventually leading that program. 

She was so busy and thought, “I just don’t have the time to take this program.” This was in COVID years, and her business was booming. It was one of the industries that was booming at that time.

She said, “I have no time to do this,” but she really felt strongly that this was the direction. 

We said, like we always do, “Get in there. If it really has energy and aliveness for you, something will shift here.” 

She did that. It was amazing because she was going through the program and had her career, and she started training to become one of the coaches. Suddenly, she was doing so much more than she was doing before. But she told us, “I feel like I have so much more time and energy.” 

Gigi: Because she started being one of our leaders for our coaching program, that fueled her because she got so much inspiration for that.

COVID was a tough time for her, too, so she had the inspiration to get through it. 

Makena: Yeah, absolutely. One that’s coming to mind right now is someone in corporate who said to me she really wanted to start her own business. It has been an idea forever, but she was exhausted. She felt a little burned out and could not see.

I said, “Trust me, first of all, the coaching is only a small number of hours. It’s not a lot of time. Then this project that you’re thinking about, this business we started as a project, and we see if it’s the right thing and it has energy, that inspiration is going to make it feel like you have more time on your hands.” 

A few months later, she said, “Oh my goodness, you were so right!” 

She stayed up at night, excited to work on something. She could barely sleep because she was having so much fun. 

She says to me all the time, whenever I see her at some of my events, “I feel so different than when we started because I have this thing I’m passionate about, and it doesn’t matter when I’m busy, or I have a lot going on because I have so much energy and so much vitality.”

That’s really what we’re talking about. 

Even the woman we had on the podcast – I think it probably aired last week at the time this one airing – we just checked in with her.

If you guys listened to that one, she wanted to dedicate time to her new business, her new project, or at least an idea of a direction she wanted to go.

It was so cool because she felt like she didn’t have the time. She was raising her young son. We just checked in with her since she is in our monthly membership program, The Collective.

She said she is working on this project, this direction, six days a week now while her son is napping. He naps for a couple of hours. She said, “Yeah, I’ve been consistent six days a week working on this direction.” 

That’s incredible. How many moms are like: “There’s no way I have no time,” but because it’s something that she’s excited about, it’s fun.

Gigi: Super exciting. The point here is that you can’t move everything forward at once. 

When you have so many ideas, it’s impossible to really take action because your mind is cluttered, and you feel you don’t have the energy to do that. 

You have to pick a project and a direction, put that time into it. Go into action for a while. Then after you get this up and running, you may be able to add something else in a few months. 

When you choose a project, it’s important though to really set the other ideas aside. Don’t second-guess yourself. Commit to your project instead of questioning your choices.

You may be able to add something else in a few weeks or a month, but for now, you want to put your mind to rest and really fully embrace what you’re doing.

When your timeline is up you then look and see what worked, what didn’t work, and if this is something you want to pursue and move forward on.

If not, you can go to your list and take the next most exciting thing on it, then do the same thing with that until you go through the action items that inspire you and see which one really takes. 

Makena: That’s such a great systematic approach. It just puts your mind at rest.

For those of you who are maybe newer to the podcast or maybe you’ve been thinking about doing an on-air coaching session, we did have that one last week. We’ve had several now. 

The on-air coaching sessions are so powerful because people can hear themselves in someone else’s story and take something away from it.

I want to mention that those are something you can apply for. It’s a $1000 value to do a coaching session like that with us, but you’re getting it for free if we feel like you’d be a good fit for it. 

You don’t have to share your name in that sense, they’re very much anonymous. You get on, and we coach you. That’s just something that we put out there for other people to really learn and benefit from, but you also get the benefit of having had that session with us and that clarity. 

If you are curious about doing that, you can go to www.wayofthemuse.com/OnAir. We highly recommend that you apply, and we’d love to chat with you. 

This is a really fun episode. 

I think I’m going to be sending this to so many people. Whenever they’re like, “I have all these…” 

I’m going to be like, “Go listen to this.”

That’s what’s been so fun about building a library of content. I’m like, “You know what? Listen to episode 16, or go listen to episode whatever.”

That’s just so great. I’ve wanted that for years because you’ve helped me with so many things. And I’m like, “If only I could just share this, share this with somebody else.” 

Of course, if you all listen to this and you think, “Man, I really want to go deeper. I want to work with these women. How do I do that?”

You can always go to www.wayofthemuse.com or www.wayofthemuse.com/programs and check out what we are up to. 

Thanks so much, Gigi. 

Gigi: Thank you, Makena. Thank you for the listeners. We so appreciate you. 

Makena: See you next time. Bye-Bye.