It's not your "Business", It's you.

Creative success and the balance between self responsibility and self acceptance.

Hello hello!

I’m writing to you from my green velvet couch. I just spent the last half an hour breastfeeding while simultaneously trying not to pee myself. It’s an expensive couch.

Being nap trapped has expanded my inner capacity to hold discomfort in many ways. This being one.

The other is that I want to make and create when my children sleep.

Often I can’t.

I need to sit with the tension of desire and timing and find comfort within the discomfort of no longer being able to act the second I have energy to act.

This is the dance of creativity and motherhood.

But today’s letter is not on creative tension (though an incredibly juicy and worthy topic in itself).

Today, Is a bit of real talk - because I’m bleeding.

When I bleed, I self censor less. I am honest more.

Today calls for some honesty.

The reason you’re not making money,

Or not freeing up your time as a resource even though you have back to back clients,

or the reason you don’t feel free in your work yet,

or the reason you’re always so damn creatively blocked and feeling stagnant,

or the reason you feel like inspiration has been singlehandedly avoiding you.

Just you. Nobody else.

Or the reason you feel like no matter how much you try to market yourself, nobody see’s you.

Or that your work is going unnoticed and it’s exhausting….

Or the reason why you’re addicted to creative chaos rather than building something sustainable and true…

Is actually YOU.

I know. Sort of brutal, but stay with me here.

See, in cancel culture and in the world of doing inner child healing,

It would be better of me to say that it’s not actually you.

Sometimes these things happen.

It’s circumstantial.

It’s nobody’s fault.

In the world of radical responsibility, I’d say - it’s entirely up to you and your own shortcomings are totally yours to hold all on your own.

But that’s not it either.

What if we didn't need to polarise into hardcore self acceptance OR hardcore self responsibility.

What if there was more of a middle ground we could play in, that has room for less shame and judgement and instead more liberation.

I am sure you’ve heard others speak into how our businesses are actually 80% an inside job. It’s the energetics.

The 20% is skill, strategy, timing and capacity.

But has anyone actually broke down the 80% for you?

The 20%

The success of your business can lean on strategy. Maybe some healthy hustle culture. “Getting it done”. Overriding your body intelligence in order to hit goals (Personally not an advocate for this but I see it time and time again in the old age of business). Strategy can look like Facebook ads, YouTube or nailing social media. It can look like thriving email lists, and back end structures of websites, SEO, marketing, branding shoots, affiliates, the works.

*Some of these things ARE important, and what you mostly see in the business world is people going all in on the 20%, then realising they are a shell of a person, wondering why they are stuck in the same loops, lacking fulfilment and sustenance… so they go through a mini life crisis, do some mushrooms, burn it to the ground and try to start again from a more wholesome internal world.

The 80%

This is where the magic actually is.

This is your relationship to creativity as an intelligence beyond ourselves that we are in co-creation with.

This is understanding how our nervous system attracts and rejects experiences based on what it assumes is safe or unsafe… and sometimes, success feels unsafe. This is our ability to decipher if we are about to sabotage or if it’s actually the correct decision. Fear or Intuition.

This is unpacking the parts of us still being motivated by making mum and dad proud… or the haters proud, and instead connecting with our authentic dreams. The process of this includes deconstructing societal and cultural conditioning around who we think we are, and what we think we want.

Are you who you are? Or are you a product of your current and past circumstance, your environment, your community, the borrowed beliefs of what is possible from others. Can you acknowledge you’re a goldfish in a glass bowl, knowing you can only grow to the size of your habitat.

Is it “Just who you are”, and your “Personality”, or is it simply who you’ve been conditioned to be? Would a new identity, slipping it on like a new dress, making sure it fits snug and comfortably, be enough to shift the way you show up in your life and therefore the opportunities that present to you?

The 80% is your relationship to social media, rather than attempts for viral reels. It’s your ability to be vulnerable and let others in, curating true and honest community.

It’s not just being vulnerable, but being able to hold yourself in vulnerability while simultaneously allowing others in.

It’s your ability to sit with yourself, in the limbo, in the discomfort.

To sit in creative tension and trust it’s unfolding. To trust the initiations that are taking place in the unseen worlds, calling you forward and only in hindsight can you connect the dots.

The 80% is understanding how sexuality, creativity, and aliveness work together not apart, all strands of the same hair on the same head, being braided in parts.

Or how your relationship with you husband/wife/partner is impacting how you show up in your work and the clarity you have to create anything new.

Or how your kids needing you, and your never claiming time for yourself is actually a self worth and belief issue, not a “I have kids and no time” issue.

It’s knowing how your ideas guide you and that you not only need to open up an energetic channel with them to listen, but also an energetic contract to make it a fair collaboration. But if you have a witch wound in your lineage and have hidden your voice, your intuition or your own inner guidance system… then connecting with your ideas and claiming those dreams or visions out loud… may feel like you are about to die.

It’s unpacking starving artist energy, starving mother, starving… martyr.

It’s about understanding the tension and patterning behind money, and all the projections we place on a tool that could help us. Though instead we strangle and suffocate it, we beg for it, pray for it, get rid of it quicker than it arrives, we judge having it, we judge not having it, we grip so tightly to it that it cannot move freely circulating our lives or in the lives of our communities.

It’s facing off with addictions to busyness, hustle culture, patriarchal structures within a capitalist society that want you to be a cog in the damn machine, and reconnecting to your soul and spirit. This takes time. Years even, or a mushroom ceremony perhaps.

It’s understanding addictions to overwhelm, or lack of clarity, addictions to starting but never finishing, addictions to editing your website 20 times but never posting the fucking reel.

Addictions to posting the reels, and never setting up structures to support your vision.

Addictions to doing it all yourself and then wondering why being a mother in business can feel so damn lonely and confusing.

It's shining the light on how the way that YOU were born set up a pattern of “life” within you that now is on repeat in everything you try to breathe “life” into.

Your ideas are birthed in the same ways.

Is this working for you?

Is your dreaming process anchored in escapism? Or grounded knowing? Are you receiving the visions of your life from your future self reaching back through time and space? Or are you attempting to self generate?

Hacks and Strategy does not work for the 80% .

It requires high level self inquiry, nervous system work, understanding our body intelligence, patterning and dreaming process.

This can be done through more connection, and wild honesty, rather than through pushing through into more addictions to self help.

These aspects of ourselves can be SYMPTOMS of circumstances, uncomfortable experiences, and a life lived. They are only able to be recalibrated through us. This is the line between accepting ourselves, loving ourselves, and then seeking transformation through a place of knowing we deserve better, rather than from a place of self judgment and assuming we aren’t enough.

We are not aiming to be perfect but we are aiming to be honest.

We are not aiming to clear away all that doesn’t serve us so that we can only access what does. We are aiming to be human.

We are not aiming to be always happy, always abundant, always joyful.

We are aiming to dance with motherhood, creativity, generating resources, and being devoted to the vision of our lives from a space that is grounded and sustainable in our every day lives.

Below are some articles I’ve written or recorded in the past that I feel would be relevant to some of you.

Take a look as I have hundreds of hours worth of intentionally created content/articles here on substack, with many of them free for you to devour.

I am here to support your 80% so that you can bring to life the vision in your daydreams.

Love Kat.

PS. We have just THREE AND A HALF days until doors close to The Art Of Alchemy (my 12 week online journey for mother makers to explore, learn and recalibrate the entire 80% of their business, self and creative process… )

This is my FINAL round of Art of Alchemy as creative muses are calling me into other spaces.

Please use this opportunity to come and work with me

Subscribe to The Mother Makers on substack for free and dodge the algorithms together by having high value articles straight to your inbox or in your App Library.