Celebrating 100 Episodes of The Prosperous Empath® Podcast

Catherine A. Wood  00:01

Hello, hello. Welcome back to the prosperous Empath cat here. Oh, wow. I want to share some context for this episode. So first of all, I’m recording today’s episode on my first full week of work back in the office after my maternity leave and life feels so full and joyful and different than when I was here prior to having Micah. So I’m excited to bring so many new insights and life and business lessons to you as I rebrand the podcast a little and share a little bit about what we’re celebrating today on this episode and what you can expect going forward. Also today is the morning after the 2024, presidential election here in the States. And I’m definitely coming to you this morning with a really heavy heart and a renewed importance to share my message and take up more space as a woman, as an entrepreneur, as someone who’s committed to living and honoring my values, both in and out of my business, so I’m feeling even just more of what for of a reason to be here and to share my message and to take up space as an empath printer, I have been looking forward to recording this episode and celebrating the crap out of reaching 100 episodes with you, my beautiful listeners, if you’ve been here from the beginning, thank you so much. If you’re new to the podcast, thank you for tuning in. It is absolutely, completely not predictable that you’re here listening to me recording my well actually I think today is the 100 and fifth episode, because for 100 episodes, I was completely empowering maternity leave and not interested in taking any space from my beautiful baby. But I’m excited to be here with you today, celebrating our one reaching 100 episodes of the podcast. And you know, I really do mean, mean it when I say it wasn’t predictable, because as an introvert, an empath and a highly sensitive woman, I am just so much more comfortable asking questions and listening than I am taking up space and talking. Particularly these solo episodes, I’ve gained a lot more comfortability with recording them, but it was really hard in the beginning, and I’m so happy to be here with you today, having leaned into that resistance we’re celebrating, not only reaching over 100 episodes of the show, but also reaching over 10,000 downloads of the podcast, the show has been listened to in 39 countries. I took a complete break from looking at the stats while I was on maternity leave, which, again, if you’ve been tuning into the show for a while, you know how much I love my statistics. And I completely took a hard boundary and I didn’t look at any of the podcast statistics for the past two months. Super proud of myself for that. The show has been listened to in 39 countries, ranging from the US and the UK and Australia to being some of the top listeners to even having listeners in Lithuania, Ghana, the United Arab Emirates and even Indonesia, which is just so cool. You know, I hear from a lot of folks that they want to launch a podcast, and if you’re one of those people do it, I think one of the gifts of launching my podcast is that it really helped me realize that there’s An audience out there for every single one of us just waiting for us to communicate our message in the way that they are meant to hear it. I’ve had so many people write into the show and message me and join my community over the past couple years to share with me how meaningful this episode was, or this guest, and something that often strikes me about not only my message, but also a lot of the things that my guests say, is that they’re not the only one saying that message. You know, like I’ve had countless guests on the show talking about. Boundaries and burnout and balance, and they all share it in a very unique way that attracts their intended audience. So I think that’s really one of my biggest lessons in launching the show, is that when we truly embrace our own authentic voice. We find those who are meant to hear our message. I had so much resistance when I was first gearing up to launch the podcast. I mean, I think it took my producer, thank you, Hayley, a lot of follow ups to check in with the production of the show, and when we were getting closer to launch, I had a lot of resistance. And I think something I really appreciate about resistance is that the greater resistance we have to something in business, in life and love, it is typically a sign of something we are meant to lean into rather than avoid. One of my favorite teachings about resistance comes from the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and he shares this beautiful distinction around fear and resistance. He says that, essentially, fear is resistance. They are one in the same thing, the greater the resistance we have to something, the greater the fear, and the greater the fear, the greater the possibility on the other side of that fear is. And the only way around fear is moving through it. We so often try to run the other way or resist it or put it down. But if we want to overcome resistance or fear, we have to lean all the way in to the center of that fear to find our fearlessness, and that has been such a prized lesson I’ve taken with me from launching the podcast, because I really did have a lot of fear of taking up space here, and I’ve gained so much. I’ve met so many amazing people. I’ve learned so much from my podcast listeners and from also recording solo episodes over the past couple years. And so I’m I hope that you can really hear that if you’ve been wanting to launch a podcast, or if there’s something you’ve been really resisting doing in your podcast, in your business, maybe it is a sign to start getting curious and to leverage that resistance as a light bulb, rather than a sign to walk the other way. Some of the other learnings I’ve taken with me from the show over the past couple years is that when you can’t figure out what you want to communicate or how you need to say it. It’s so much easier to express, to get out, to communicate when you’re connected with why it’s so important, when we’re connected with why our message is so important, it’s a lot easier to speak from the heart versus from the head, and when we share an embodied message from our heart, it will land so much more fully in the messages of other people. That is a lesson that I think was really captured by Isabel Griffith when she came onto the show to talk about the power of somatics. So if that resonates, I really recommend her show that was such a powerful message that I took from myself, took for myself in recording the episode with Isabel. We also we all have a creative process, and I think we so often try to do things the way other people tell it, tell us to do them or the way. You know, we hire mentors to follow in their footsteps, when in reality, we need to find and trust our own creative process. It’s so much easier to be authentically ourselves and overcome and experience less resistance when we’re following our own creative path. I know for me, when I first launched the show, and I’d feel this like this ego driven goal to record, you know, three episodes today or this week, but I would do so in the afternoons, or I’d do so during a day when I wasn’t feeling grounded or connected to my message, or maybe I was just not in the mood, and I would really I would sit down at my mic, and I would just press start and stop and start and stop. And I would get so frustrated and so annoyed at myself that I just couldn’t I couldn’t overcome my resistance, when, in reality, my creative process is the most activated in the morning time, in the early morning hours after I’ve empowered my morning routine. I. And had that time to get grounded, to get connected with my intuition. I’m so much more connected to my message. I’m so much more willing and able to lean into resistance during those morning hours. And so at this point, if I haven’t recorded a podcast in the morning and the afternoons arrived and I know I’m supposed to do it, I just put it down and I come back to it the next morning, and I can achieve in 30 minutes what it likely would have taken three and a half the afternoon before. So that has been such a valuable and juicy lesson from undertaking the creative process of launching a podcast. Now this is a really important lesson, and this also points to a little bit of the rebrand that you’ll be hearing moving forward on the podcast. When I launched the podcast back in 2022 I came to you wanting to talk about prosperity and wealth, because I have noticed that it’s really challenging for empathpreneurs to become prosperous and thrive financially in their businesses. And I wanted to break open the top. Like to really reveal how empathpreneurs could have it all, how they could achieve holistic success on their own terms, while also doing it in a financially lucrative way. But what I’ve realized over the past couple years, not only in working with my clients, but also in connecting more more and more with empathers, is that I have met one too many objectively wealthy or objectively thriving empathpreneurs who aren’t living their all, who aren’t allowing themselves to reach and enjoy holistic success. And so what I’ve realized over the past couple years in particular is that so many empathpreneurs, so many of my audience members, like you and me, that there are so many of us who are Wait. I want to take this part back Haley and start over from this part. Here’s the final lesson I have really gleaned for myself from recording these past 100 plus episodes of the prosperous empath. I came here because I wanted to talk about prosperity and wealth. I wanted to share the stories and lives of those who identify as empaths and heart centered entrepreneurs who are extremely driven by their missions and purpose, and show how they achieved this. But I realized that that was super short sighted, because at this point, I have met one too many objectively wealthy Empath, preneur and client to realize that just because folks have those resources of money, things and sometimes even of their time, That does not mean that they allow themselves the experience of having it all or enjoying it, or in some cases, of even retaining their wealth. And while I realize that this is a very privileged thing to say, it is a very common experience for those who are highly ambitious and who those who are practiced in being driven and motivated by that ambition to lack the practice or to lack the familiarity with enjoying or reveling in the experience of having it All once they get there, wherever that proverbial there is. So that really segues into where we’re going from here, and a little bit of the rebrand that you can expect from these episodes moving forward, which I am super excited about. While we are going to continue to talk about prosperity and to talk about wealth, we’re going to talk about it in a much more broad perspective, rather than the purely financial perspective of money. We’re going to talk about it through the lens of allowing yourself to have it all through experiencing holistic success and how folks even define that for themselves. We’re gonna explore this idea of something I’ve been really grateful for in my motherhood journey is that I have had a lot of practice in embracing spaciousness, in teaching myself how to be present and be in the present moment, and a. Allowing myself that joy and satisfaction of feeling fulfilled or content, and I think that that’s really allowed me to revel in this postpartum time I’ve been in, and also just put down that need to do the next load of laundry or get the dishes done or clean up this mess and just be and delight in the wonderment of my son. I have absolutely loved every moment of this postpartum time, and there’s been some really hard moments too, I’m not gonna lie, but I’ve, I’ve appreciated all of them the full spectrum, and I do not think I would have allowed myself to enjoy so much of being a mom had I not had all of this mindset work over the past decade, of just giving myself permission to slow down and embrace the stillness and Be present. So I’m so grateful for all the work, all the time, all the working with my I’ve so appreciated all the leadership and self development work that I’ve done before becoming a mom, that I feel has allowed me to embrace motherhood and mompreneurship a little bit different, which is also a little bit more about what you’re going to be hearing on the show. Moving forward, I want to talk about motherhood and how it applies to mompreneurship and vice versa. I do not see a lot of examples. I certainly don’t have a lot of examples in my life of mompreneurs thriving and having it all. And I’m so excited to have more guests on the show to talk more about that topic. And then finally, a little bit of the tactical changes moving forward. And they may seem small, but they were big changes to get to for me, and when I hit on them, if they just landed with a thud, like that intuitive thud, like, oh yes, this is what needs to look different. So moving forward, we are going to switch up the podcast from being a weekly production to a bi weekly podcast. We’ll release episodes every other week, and we’ll also start releasing the unbounded potential newsletter every other week. Now the newsletter is a huge change, because I have been sending out weekly newsletters since early 2016 um. 16, and I realized that that just does not feel aligned anymore. For me, I’m feeling much more called to slow down my extra time commitments in the business so that I can focus on my clients and doing the work that I love, and then being with Micah being a mom, it just does not feel aligned for the season of business and life that I’m in. So I’m switching it up so that I can really prioritize my time and energy and resources in a way that feels super good, and I’m super excited about it. I’m also going to start recording shorter episodes, so you’ll hear that this episode is a little bit shorter than normal, and that’s also my intention moving forward, so that I can really maximize sharing value and sharing a window into my own experience, while also not taking up so much of mine or your time. So the last thing that’s going to be looking a little different, and you’ve probably already noticed it, but I am going to be spending even less time on social media, and more and more time in my private community, surrounding myself with colleagues and peers who share my beliefs and values. If you’re not already a member of my community. We will link to it in the show notes, and I would love to see you there. It has been such a joy keeping the interior of my postpartum life and my son completely off of social media. It’s felt so empowering and so liberating to just be able to enjoy in the moment, and so I hope to see you. I hope that you’ve found something of value for yourself in this episode. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you in a couple weeks.