The Sensitive Entrepreneur's Guide to True Self Alignment in Business: Closing the Gap

Have you ever sensed a disconnect between your evolving self and your current circumstances? As a mentor for the highly sensitive, I've navigated these very waters, transforming from a naturopathic practitioner to guiding others through their own metamorphoses.

This episode is a heartfelt exploration into the intricacies of our personal and professional growth, especially for those whose sensitivities run deep. I explain the growing pains of outgrowing relationships and businesses, and the 'gap' that can be created when this happens. I also celebrate the empowerment that comes from embracing authenticity, and how that closes the 'gap'.

This episode is an invitation to reflect on and assess whether your professional life mirrors your personal growth and to consider the profound impact of aligning your purpose with your work. Join me on this intimate journey of growth, and let's soar together into our most authentic and sensitive selves, leveraging your sensitive gifts for the most profound impact, fulfillment, and success with your work.

Transcript

Michelle Dowker: 1:11

If you're an ambitious, highly sensitive person like me, and especially if you've been on the path of inner healing, you have this deep soul desire to continually grow and evolve that you're aware of what I call the gap. I've used an analogy about the gap that I'm going to explain to you today over and over again with my clients, especially in relationships, but this analogy is also extremely important for any sensitive entrepreneur who is on this personal evolution path to be aware of any gaps in your business in terms of your relationship with it and what can happen when that gap gets so great that it is no longer sustainable. So first I'm going to explain this analogy in terms of relationships, because this is how my explanation started years ago, when I was working with highly sensitive people in terms of leading them through their own inner healing journey and inner awakening journey. When you embark on this type of inner healing work, you start to change, you start to come back to yourself, you become more whole, you shed the limiting beliefs and the social conditioning constructs and the survival behaviors and patterns that you'd operated from before, and when you do this, you change, your actions change, your reactions change and the things that you desire to move towards in your life also change your visions, change your perspectives, change. And when it comes to relationships, sometimes, when you are shifting your goals and how you're operating and how you're seeing the world and what you desire out of your life, sometimes the people that you are in relationship with aren't coming along with you for the ride, because we're all at different points in our lives and not everybody, as it is, at a point in their journey where they want to do the inner healing work or grow or shift or change.

Michelle Dowker: 3:49

Maybe that's not part of the path, maybe that's not their desire, and sometimes what can happen is, when we embark on this type of personal development, inner healing and personal evolution path, the people who are in our lives might not necessarily be at a point where they want to, and you start to notice that there's this gap that starts to form between where you were when you were at the same level as them and where you are going to, and you're seeing that they haven't changed or they haven't changed as quickly as you have, and so sometimes you can end up seeing what I call the gap. That can look like you can see them operating from those old survival behaviors that you used to operate from, like people pleasing and perfectionism and codependency. Maybe you see that they're not taking responsibility for certain things, that you've since learned how to take responsibility for self-responsibility and you want them to do the same. Maybe your interests and your goals and your desires and the goalposts that you've created for yourself have shifted and changed and you're moving forward in a more advanced direction or more quickly, and you're seeing that they're not. Maybe they're holding on to something, maybe they're stuck in comfort or familiarity, or maybe that's just not the direction they want to go.

Michelle Dowker: 5:23

Sometimes this gap can feel a little frustrating, because we want the people who are closest to us to be moving with us, especially when we're seeing how much inner freedom and empowerment this type of personal evolution work can deliver. Not everybody is at that place where they want to, and it's a really common human tendency to want to seek comfort, to seek the familiar, to stay in the familiar, because the unknown can be scary and it can feel uncomfortable to be navigating, maybe, depths of personal evolution and looking at ourselves, and that's not something that everybody is willing or wants to do. So now there becomes this situation where you're at this point, where you're starting to see a gap develop between you and the person in your life. Unfortunately, we can't change other people and it doesn't matter how much you try, if they don't want to make those changes. If they try to do them for you, it's likely going to fall flat. They're likely going to grow resentful if they're feeling like you're pushing them to do something that they don't want to be doing, and it's really not your job to force anybody to be doing anything that they don't feel motivated to do from within themselves.

Michelle Dowker: 6:48

This topic often tends to come up with my clients that they're noticing that this gap is starting to develop. My clients that they're noticing that this gap is starting to develop, and I often explain to them that there will be this point where you need to decide what your line in the sand is in terms of deciding whether or not that gap is sustainable or not any longer, and there's a variety of things that you can do, decide to do if you're finding that this gap is becoming unsustainable. It could be a serious conversation which might help them to decide for themselves what they want to do, and you might need to move ahead on your own without them, because if you're holding on to something that is no longer aligned, then it's not beneficial for either of you. Now here's the thing. I've used this analogy a lot with clients in terms of their relationships, especially their romantic relationships, but today I want to talk about this concept of the gap when it comes to your relationship with your business.

Michelle Dowker: 7:53

A lot of times I tend to work with clients, and this has been my own personal story of when you first start your business doing what you love. I know for myself. I had started my business from an unhealed place. I had already done quite a bit of work with therapists, so I had a decent level of self-awareness, but there was still a lot of layers to unpack that I had not at that point in my life when I first started my business 13 years ago, and so I was still operating out of people pleasing over delivering, overworking, workaholism, rescuing others, codependency. I was looking to my work to give me validation and acknowledgement that I was doing a good job, that I was valuable, that I was doing something of value.

Michelle Dowker: 8:51

I hadn't yet found that peace and fulfillment and sense of value and good enough from within myself, and I was looking to my patients and I was looking to my title as doctor and I was looking to my business to give me the things that I really needed to find within myself. That was number one I really needed to find within myself. That was number one. And number two is when I was first starting my business, coming out of naturopathic college, my focus was very generalized and, for the population that I was serving, a lot of the work that I was doing had to do with teaching the foundational basics of diet and lifestyle and stress management and those types of things which I loved back then. I loved being able to teach people how to empower themselves by making different decisions and different choices with the food that they're eating, the lifestyle habits that they were undertaking, and working on mindset and stress management and seeing how much that that can impact your physical symptoms and physical health and help you feel better.

Michelle Dowker: 10:11

And then here's the thing is, I was undergoing my own healing journey that had many steps, twists and turns, and my own personal inner awakening really happened, as I've mentioned in a previous podcast episode, after my mom passed away and I ended up with the worst endometriosis and autoimmune flares of my life that left me bed bound for months. It triggered a dark night of the soul that made me question absolutely everything about my life and my purpose and my direction, where I was going and what was brewing underneath the surface that I had not yet looked at was brewing underneath the surface that I had not yet looked at. So all of that had sent me on my own inner healing quest, embarking on a whole series of spiritual coach training, certifications, and then working with my mother's spirit, with a psychic medium, and it was those things that really transformed everything for me and triggered my own inner spiritual awakening, and it's what led me to put together the inner liberation method that I have since guided dozens of clients through to find their own inner healing and inner awakening and come out the other side feeling completely liberated and empowered. So here's the thing Through this whole journey of my own personal evolution. There have been many points on my journey that my relationship with my business. There were several gaps that were forming as I was evolving and growing. There were a couple of things about my business that weren't growing and evolving at the same rate. One of them was my clientele and the focus of the work that I was doing, which I'm going to go into detail about what that looked like and the things that needed to change, as well as the fact that until I became fully aware of the gaps and took the action to close those gaps, for quite a while I was still operating out of those old survival patterns because that's how I had set up my business. I needed to make the shifts to close the gap so that I was no longer operating from a people-pleasing lens, so that I was no longer overextending myself and having loosey-goosey boundaries around how I was working, my schedule, who I was working with and the level of energy that I was maintaining and protecting about myself when I was connecting with patients and clients. So in my personal timeline of my work, I told you about the story, about how and why I ended up switching away from local clinical naturopathic practice and shifting over into online wellness and life coaching, and in the early years of my coaching experience I started in 2019.

Michelle Dowker: 13:31

I was working in the weight loss space with a fellow colleague. That was the first gap that I was starting to see. As I was working with these clients, I was recognizing that I was growing less and less interested in explaining the basics of where do you find sugar in your diet when you're looking at ingredients. What is a carbohydrate, what is at ingredients, what is a carbohydrate, what is a protein, what is a fat? And looking at the basics of putting menu plans together. They excited me at first, but I was finding that repeating myself with these basics was no longer interesting to me, was no longer interesting to me, and I could see that there were so many more deeper levels to consider here that this particular clientele was not interested in working with, like the emotional relationship to food and stress management and your own personal relationship to yourself, which is really the crux of everything when it comes to your relationship with your food and how you're managing your stress and how much you're accepting who you are now.

Michelle Dowker: 14:47

Because when you don't accept yourself, even if you're not at the place where you really want to be, the more you do not accept yourself, the more you are at war with yourself, and the things that you don't accept will control you. They will have power over you and show up in places and in ways that you least want them to. And so there's this one really important aspect of acceptance that I had to learn and that I guide my clients to deepen for themselves, because this is one piece of a bigger puzzle to really find the freedom from the things that you might be feeling are controlling you. So here I was, working in this space with weight loss. It was becoming increasingly clear that I was less and less interested in dealing with these basics I'm not throwing any shade on the fact that these are important things for people to learn if they aren't aware of these things yet and I was on my own personal evolution journey with my own diet at that point, because I had discovered the autoimmune protocol and carnivore to manage my own physical symptoms that talking about the basics and guiding people through the rudimentary beginnings of discovering how to make changes to your diet was not something that I was interested in doing any longer.

Michelle Dowker: 16:22

I had been advancing my own journey and it felt like I was reaching too far back into my past of my own knowledge, that I wasn't feeling like I was connecting with the clientele that I was working with at the level that I really wanted to, and I knew that this was preventing me from being able to deliver the level of results and transformation that I knew that I could be providing the people that I was working with. That was my first gap that I was seeing was starting to form and I was seeing that I was getting a little bit bored with what I was doing. I was looking less and less looking forward to the client calls where I had to onboard someone and teach them all the basics at the beginning, and I knew I just knew in my soul there was something more for me to be doing, especially with everything that I had been discovering for myself. You know, doing an elimination diet and cutting out gluten for the very first time in your life and trying to figure out where gluten is and how to do that was so far into my past by that point that it just wasn't exciting me like it was, especially because, with my own health journey the fact that I was so reactive to so many foods that I had to resort to the meat-only carnivore diet for a period of time I knew that it was an extremely helpful therapeutic diet used as an elimination diet for certain people who had tried everything else. I wanted to explore offering that as a solution to people who had tried everything else, even up to the autoimmune protocol.

Michelle Dowker: 18:13

As I was helping people with that, I was doing my own work to heal my own inner emotional terrain. And as I was doing that, I was starting to incorporate more and more of that into the work that I was doing. And that was a gap. That I was noticing was also happening was that I didn't want to be teaching people how to do a carnivore diet as an elimination diet, but rather I was enjoying more when somebody had already started the carnivore diet and now they were looking for that deeper inner emotional journey work so that they could reintroduce foods again. That at that point, was lighting me up to address the underlying emotions and stress and mindset and do that inner emotional healing. And I had created a protocol that I had used on myself and I would then guide my clients, who I was guiding through this inner emotional healing journey, through the gradual reintroduction process once they had done the inner emotional healing and they were finding so much success with being able to tolerate foods again.

Michelle Dowker: 19:31

This is the first stage of the multiple gaps that were going along in my career journey. I know for myself, if I would have just decided to stay in the first iteration of my online work coaching weight loss and I decided to stay there, I know I wouldn't have been happy. I would have grown more and more restless with what I was doing. I knew that I was on this journey of evolution and I didn't see all of the puzzle pieces yet to my own inner healing journey. But I knew there was more.

Michelle Dowker: 20:09

Now, as I was working on my own inner healing journey and, like I've mentioned, did the spiritual coach training, worked with my mother's spirit and I had been doing all the shadow integration and the inner child healing and the inner reparenting. My health was getting better because I was addressing the inner emotional terrain that was putting all of that stress onto my nervous system. And studies show that nervous system dysregulation is a prime trigger for immune dysregulation conditions like autoimmunity and like endometriosis, and nervous system dysregulation is what can definitely worsen all of these symptoms. So that when you address the nervous system and you address the underlying inner emotional terrain which has the biggest influence on your nervous system, then of course your body has a much better opportunity to balance itself out and rectify dysregulation with the immune system, with the nervous system. And so, as I was getting better and as my health was improving, at this point I was still working with and bringing in clients who had chronic illness themselves autoimmunity, endometriosis we had been working on this inner emotional healing to help them to find better regulation with their symptoms and, for some people, even go into remission.

Michelle Dowker: 21:41

However, I was finding that a lot of people that were coming into my world were so identified with being a person with a chronic illness and the themes that we were navigating in our work together was keeping me tied to identifying with chronic illness myself and I recognized that as I was growing and evolving away from identifying with being a person with chronic illness, I recognized that there was this gap again that I was reaching too far back into my own personal experience of when I was at the prime of my worst debilitating chronic illness condition of my life. I had to reach back into that experience to relate to a lot of my new clients who were struggling in the muck of having a chronic illness portion of the population. I could see that it was not helping me to be keeping myself in that particular stage of my business evolution journey and the energy that I was putting myself into working with this particular subset of the population. I could see that that gap was growing and if I continued along this direction of having this special focus of working with people with autoimmunity and endometriosis, who were specifically coming to me for that particular reason. I was seeing that I was going to be in a very similar situation that I had been in the past, when I was struggling with coaching in weight loss. Similar feelings were coming up frustration and restlessness, and feeling like there was something different and bigger that I had to be doing that aligned more with where I was going as I was continuing my own inner healing and personal evolution journey.

Michelle Dowker: 23:57

So I ended up making a shift away from working with people with chronic illness and towards working with people who identify as highly sensitive people people who want to move past coping mechanisms and survival patterns that are often associated with being highly sensitive and move more into self-empowerment coping mechanisms and survival patterns that are often associated with being highly sensitive and move more into self-empowerment. And the reason why I made this shift was because I was noticing in the subset of the population that I was working with, the people with autoimmunity and endometriosis. The people that were getting the best results and the people that I enjoyed the most working with were also people who identified as highly sensitive people. They tended to respond the best to my particular approach and methodology, and that makes sense because I'm a highly sensitive person. So, of course, the people who also resonate with that particular personality trait are going to resonate very well with my own personal experience and the particular methodology that I had guided myself through as I've been going through this inner healing journey.

Michelle Dowker: 25:11

So I decided in around 2022 that I was going to shift away from working with people with chronic illness towards working with people who are highly sensitive, people who are ready to step into the next level of their inner liberation, and I guided them through what I ended up calling the inner liberation method. This was a methodology that I had created from doing my own inner healing work with my mother spirit, and the process is a blend of a bunch of different modalities that I've learned as a naturopathic doctor, some of the processes that I learned in the spiritual coach training program and a lot of approaches that I intuited while I was working with my mother spirit. She really was the impetus to so much of the healing and transformation and evolution in my own work that has enabled me to guide others to be able to do the same for themselves, and I'm grateful every single day for my mother being on the other side helping me through this and doing her own healing. And as we heal together, I can feel the power of my lineage being healed and the impact that that has, not only for me but in my ability to facilitate and guide others to do the same for themselves. Once I went through this own methodology for myself, which I continue to refine and process and guide myself through, what I was finding was with the highly sensitive people that I was guiding through this process, they would come out the other side feeling liberated from the conditioning and the limiting beliefs that kept them from being and expressing their authentic selves. They finally felt free to be themselves, without hiding, without masking. Every single client would tell me that they felt liberated and empowered, that they finally come home to themselves and they feel like their own best friend. They finally felt comfortable to stand up and assert their own boundaries and communicate what they need and what they want, and less reactive and triggered by other people and their stuff. I don't know how many people have told me that I'm their earth angel, their guardian angel, because their lives have changed so much from this process, and this is why this work is so important to me, because it does make such an important impact in other people's lives, to be able to guide them back to the truth and the power of who they really are and I believe that that's how our world and humanity is going to heal is to decondition from all the social conditioning and the survival behaviors and the limiting beliefs that we've been led to believe about ourselves Because we've been operating in this wounded space of society and humanity.

Michelle Dowker: 28:17

I believe that part of the work of humanity of healing and becoming whole is each one of us remembering the truth of who we are, and my little corner of that is to help fellow people who are highly sensitive people to remember the truth of who you are, to remember the power that you have within you and to believe that your unique sensitivity and all the gifts and all the traits that come with that are not flaws. You are not broken. You might be different than 80% of the population, but that does not mean that you're weird. That does not mean that there's something wrong with you, but instead to remember the power of who you are and the superpowers that come along with being a highly sensitive person, because there are gifts to being highly sensitive that when you harness them and leverage them in your life and in your business. It will help you to deliver the level of impact that you know that you're here to be making in this world in a meaningful way to help others to find their own sense of wholeness and healing. Can you see how much more powerful that feels in terms of work to do than what I was doing before of explaining how to do an elimination diet, explaining where to find sugar, because I could see how it changed people's lives? But as I was healing and growing, I needed to be doing the work that coincided with the level of evolution that I was undertaking in my own life as a highly sensitive person.

Michelle Dowker: 30:11

We have this need to go deep and find meaning. We have this need to go deep and find meaning and if your business is not keeping up with that deep level of depth and inner sense of need to create meaning and impact in this world, then that gap is going to leave you feeling restless. That gap is going to leave you feeling like there's something missing and if you're not aware that it's caused because of this gap, you're going to be searching in places to fill that gap that aren't actually going to fill the gap. So if you're feeling restless and you're feeling like something's missing. If you're not recognizing that it's because your business and how you're operating in your business is not keeping up with your personal evolution, you might seek elsewhere to find ways to fill what feels like is missing, and oftentimes in society and inhumanity. If we're not aware, we will tend to look outside of ourselves to fill that gap External things like other people's validation, maybe more certifications, chasing status, chasing money to try to fill that gap.

Michelle Dowker: 31:31

And while earning an income is absolutely important and money gives you stability and freedom to be able to do the things that will help you to create the impact in your life and in your work that you know that you're here to do, seeking the money to fill the thing that you feel like is missing is not going to work, it's not going to help to make you feel like you're fulfilled from within and you're constantly going to be chasing. And so the reason why I'm mentioning this is because awareness is always the first step. If you can become aware that, if you're starting to feel some of these things, to take a look at the relationship with your business if you are an entrepreneur, or the relationship with your business if you are an entrepreneur, or the relationship with your job or your position. If you do have a career, see whether or not it still aligns with where you are as you continue your own inner healing and personal evolution journey.

Michelle Dowker: 32:30

So, going back to my own story, as I was working with these highly sensitive people who had gone through this inner liberation process which lit me up to guide them through and see them come out the other side feeling so empowered and connected to themselves, they truly their lives transformed and many of these clients would come out the other side feeling so connected to themselves and they realized that their work no longer aligned to who they were before they went through this inner healing evolution, through the inner liberation process. Once they more deeply connected with themselves and accepted themselves and became their own best friend and started to express their true authenticity and stood up for themselves and established their boundaries and expressed and communicated what they needed and really identified what they actually wanted in their lifetime, they could see that the work that they were doing no longer felt purposeful. A lot of people would say it just felt like a paycheck and they wanted more than that. Some people would tell me that they could see that they were in a toxic work environment and they no longer wanted to just tolerate that. They didn't want to just push through until retirement. They knew that they couldn't do this for another 20 years and they didn't want, in 20 years time, to look back and go. That's not what I wanted to do.

Michelle Dowker: 34:03

There was an inner drive that lit them up and they wanted to share that with the world in a purposeful and meaningful way, and so some of these clients that I was working with that I guided through the inner liberation process and they were seeing that their work was no longer aligned and they were feeling that restlessness. Some of these clients wanted to explore with me how to find ways to feel more aligned and fulfilled and purposeful in their work in ways that resonate with their newly connected, empowered, healed and connected self. I found, as this process was happening, that, while I loved guiding people through the process of inner healing and awakening, it felt like such a joy to work with them once they'd gone through the process, and now they want to align their work so that they can work to their fullest potential and make the most meaningful impact that they know they want to contribute to the greater good. This is the thing guiding them through the awakening journey to get to the other side really lit me up to see the outcome. And it's a really heavy journey to guide them through. It's not always easy, right? This whole inner awakening and inner healing journey, right, guiding them through this labyrinth of meeting themselves and all the parts is absolutely empowering and it's big. While I enjoyed doing that, I could see that once they'd gone through that and out the other side, there was something even bigger happening when I would guide them through this next iteration of themselves.

Michelle Dowker: 35:45

Once they went through this inner evolution journey, and I was seeing that as I've been continuing to evolve and grow and heal, guiding them through the initial stages of this inner healing journey, and this inner awakening journey was starting to become another gap because it's so far back from where I am now I was no longer connecting to them in the same way that I was when I was initially guiding people through this journey and I was noticing that restless feeling again that was showing up because I wanted to get them through the other side as quickly as possible, so now I could guide them through the next step, that next step of okay, now I've awakened. Now what? Now I want to be operating from this place of inner thriving overflow and share this with others in the most purposeful and meaningful way. With my work, I was seeing that that was the thing that was lighting me up the most, compared to what I was doing before, of guiding them through the journey to get to that place.

Michelle Dowker: 36:52

When I started taking on people who had already gone through an inner awakening and now they want to go to that next level of themselves with their work fully aligned and fully fulfilled and living out their purpose in lockstep with their newly evolved self, I was finding that those people were getting huge results quickly when they would work with me, because I was taking them to that next level and because I had evolved myself through this path. I was leading them through my own personal experience, as well as the fact that through this work, I've really been connecting to my sensitive gifts, including intuition and clairvoyance, and putting puzzle pieces together and out of the box problem solving and solution making that helped them to see the things that they can't see for themselves yet, because we all have these blind spots of things that we can't see, and I was seeing that my talent sits with helping these people once they've gotten to this other side and now they want to align their business, and essentially, what they were seeing when I was guiding them to this place was that gap between them in their newly evolved self and the business or the work that they had before they had gone through this process. That gap was growing, just like that gap had developed for me several times along my business pivot journey, and so one of the things that right now that I'm doing with clients is helping clients who have gone through some major personal healing, personal evolution journey. Now they're on the other side of this journey and it is a lifelong process, but they've had some major shifts in who they are, how they operate and what their focus is in their life and what they feel that they want to be contributing in terms of their purpose work. There's this gap between where they are now and where their business was before some evolution that they've encountered, and this next level of themselves that they are now operating from, and part of the work that I do is to help them recognize the gap and see how to close that gap by making shifts to how they work, who they're working with, the type of focus in terms of the type of work and specialty that they are focusing on, because, likely, if they're evolving, likely who that they're meant to be working with and how, and on what is going to be shifting, as well as their expertise and experience, is growing and evolving. And then the other piece of that is how to shift the standards and structure of how you're operating within your business, because, likely, how you were operating in the past, before you've had some great inner evolution, is going to be it was likely different than where you are now.

Michelle Dowker: 40:03

For example, so many of my clients, when they first started their business, would be operating from that people pleasing, and they wouldn't be standing up for their boundaries and asserting boundaries and deciding where their line in the sand was. This tendency to say yes to things that they don't really want to, but they're maybe afraid of upsetting people or losing clients or disappointing people. And then what happens is you know, I've done this myself is I would end up paying the price feeling drained, feeling resentful, feeling frustrated, feeling restless because I was doing the things that I didn't actually really want to be doing, but out of the feeling of maybe feeling not good enough or seeking the validation all of those things, I was still operating from these patterns, helping shift the underlying mindset and perspective of how to shift how you're operating in your business so that you are setting the standards that work for yourself and work for your highly sensitive nervous system, needs Shifting your perspective and mindset on how to establish boundaries and why and why they're so important. And actually it's doing everybody a disservice when you don't Seeing how important it is to actually be focusing on what lights you up the most, because that's where your zone of specialty is, that's where your unique edge is and that's how you can help people to get the greatest impact from the work that you are here to deliver.

Michelle Dowker: 41:41

By focusing on what lights you up the most and that might change and evolve as you do. You to be able to tune into the language of your inner knowing and intuition and master that so that you can recognize when those gaps start to form, so that you can empower yourself to take the actions to keep your business evolving with you in lockstep, so that you don't end up getting into positions where that gap grows so wide that it feels so unsustainable that you get to this point where you say I can't take this anymore. Something's got to give. You can take action and responsibility way before you get to that threshold. That's really helpful because then, instead of getting to these points of crisis where now you've got to go and shift everything and it feels like your entire world has been flipped upside down, you can continue to make shifts and adjustments as you grow and evolve and become aware of how to keep your business evolving with you so that you feel the most lit up by your work on an ongoing basis and you are contributing the deepest level of impact that you can through your work, because you're connected with helping people at the level that's most aligned for you. Helping the people you're helping to find their level that's most aligned for them, connecting with yourself, connecting with your truth, becoming whole and helping others to do the same and that's really how humanity is going to heal.

Michelle Dowker: 43:30

And, especially when you're a highly sensitive person, you have specific and unique gifts that 80% of the population don't have to the same degree that you do. So say, for example, things like really keen pattern recognition, seeing nuances that other people don't pick up on, holding space like no one else for the client that's sitting in front of you, extremely accurate intuitive sense, and even psychic gifts like clairvoyance, like I have, where I can actually see things show up in the bottom right hand corner in black and white Pictures and images and words and feelings. They all kind of show up in the right-hand periphery when I'm connecting with a client and I've since learned that those things that I see they're not nothing. They're not made-up things, because every single time that I now bring up what I see to my client, it's the exact thing that they needed to help to put their own puzzle pieces together, to help them to move forward with their goals and desires, to help see themselves with crystal clarity so they know exactly the direction that they're heading and how to make those decisions for themselves. I help them see themselves through the intuitive and psychic images that I see and this is exactly how I help my clients to be able to close their own gap and then learn how to maintain that and even prevent it from happening in the first place, ongoing without needing to rely on me to do it for them. This is what lights me up the most right now.

Michelle Dowker: 45:20

That doesn't mean that this is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my career, because I'm continuing to heal, grow and evolve. I continue to do my own inner integration work so that I can become increasingly more connected to myself and feel increasingly more whole. And it is a lifelong process and as I continue to grow and evolve the level at which I can guide somebody else because of my experience and because of my connection to my own unique, sensitive gifts, the level of clientele that I'm going to be guiding is going to keep continuing to shift. And I see that now as a fact because if I don't, then that gap will widen and I will get to that restless place where I will say something's got to give, this has got to change. I can't continue to do this for another 20 years and while all the iterations of my work I felt connected to and enjoyed and loved at some point in my life and I could still do any of those things I have the ability I also know that part of the impact of the work that I do is the fact that I need to be doing work that lights my soul up and is connected to what I believe is my deep inner purpose, and when I do that, I can see now I've had enough data to prove that the more I do this for myself, the bigger, more transformational results.

Michelle Dowker: 46:50

I facilitate for the clients that I'm working with. This is the way it works, and so I know sometimes people feel like it's maybe selfish to make these changes, because who are they to want to focus on, maybe a more advanced level, when there's so many people who need the foundations and need to learn the basics? And yes, it's true, there needs to be people who are there to teach the foundational basics and teach at every single level of one's personal journey. But that doesn't need to be you. If it doesn't light you up anymore, there are many other people who it does light them up to be focused on that level of the journey, and if that's what lights them up and it's no longer lighting you up, then it's not serving either of you to force yourself to stay at that level just because you know you can.

Michelle Dowker: 47:51

They'll be best served to go and do that level with someone else and then, once they move through that level, they'll come out the other side and they're going to want to look at okay, well, now what? There's this whole next level for me to look at and I'm looking for guidance with this level and that's where you come in and as you shift and evolve. That level might shift and evolve too and you might find that you know what? Maybe they're best to go find somebody else to work on that level with and when they come through that level, you're going to be there to help them through that level, because they're going to get to a point where, wow, okay, now I'm here. Now what? There's more. There's always more. There's always new levels to explore, and here's the thing is, the more and more levels that you've gone through in your own personal healing and evolution work, there's less and less people at the more advanced levels than there are at the beginning levels. The world needs all of us at every level. There's a lot more that I can say about this, but I think I'm going to leave it at that for now, and I'll talk more about this in another podcast episode, and I have a feeling that maybe I'm going to be creating a workshop about this soon because this is such an important topic.

Michelle Dowker: 49:06

So a reflection question for you Do you feel like your business, how you're operating in your business, the standards you have for your business, the clientele you're working with, the types of focus that you have in, the type of work that you're doing in your business. Do you feel that it's aligned with your level of current evolution and where you're going on your evolution journey? Do you feel that it's in lockstep or do you feel that there is a gap? And the first question to ask is so, first of all, becoming aware if there is that gap and deciding A where is your line in the sand where it no longer becomes sustainable for you to be having and maintaining this gap between where you are and what you are doing in your work, and whether or not you want to be maintaining this gap, or do you want to close the gap by making some shifts to how you're operating, who you're working with, how you're working, the standards and boundaries that you're setting and how much you are owning who you are in your business.

Michelle Dowker: 50:16

And I see this especially for highly sensitive people, especially for those of us who have tried to fit ourselves in the mold of what the other 80% of the world is doing in terms of running your business right. The not so sensitive world doesn't always coincide with who we are, and oftentimes some of those survival behaviors that we tend to do are hiding ourselves, masking our sensitivity, masking our neuro divergence and trying to pretend or be like someone else or hide away our sensitivity, thinking that they're flaws, thinking that they shouldn't be brought out into our business, that they're flaws, thinking that they shouldn't be brought out into our business. Here's the thing like I mentioned earlier, there are gifts to your sensitivity. Highly sensitive people comprise about 20% of the population, which means you have gifts that, when you harness them as your superpower and you layer them on top of the skills that you already have from your profession, you stand out, you leverage your skills and you have a leg up on what you can do and the types of transformation and the types of healing that you can provide for the people that you're here to facilitate transformation for by leveraging your sensitive gifts, owning them and that's part of the work of making sure that there is no gap is owning all the parts of you, all of your gifts, instead of hiding them away, instead of shaming them away, guilting them away, pretending you don't have them, because I know for so many of us who are highly sensitive, these have been things that we've tended to do to avoid judgment, to avoid people being uncomfortable with us, to avoid being called weird or a witch or quirky, because I know I've had lots of people tell me these things in the past and I used to take them personally until I went through this inner healing and personal evolution work, and now I see that those comments are based on their own projections and have very little to do with me, and maybe that's just a sign that they're not the aligned clientele for me to work with. And instead of hiding my gifts so that they will work with me, I put my sensitive gifts front and center in my work and leverage them so that the people who want those gifts, who align with those gifts and appreciate them, I will use those gifts to help them to leverage their own gifts, to help them to align with themselves and their work so that they can step into their highest potential and create the greatest impact that they know that they're here to make.

Michelle Dowker: 53:02

So today was a little bit of food for thought. If there has been a gap that you've been noticing has been happening in your work as you've been evolving and healing and growing in your own personal experience. I hope this might give you a level of awareness, if you haven't been already aware, or some perspective to consider if you already knew that there was a gap and some things to consider in terms of how to close that gap and how to align yourself so that your business does evolve with you in lockstep. And if you're at that place where you're hearing what I'm saying and you're seeing and you know that there's this gap that you have been working on closing and maybe you can't see all the pieces of the puzzle for yourself, clearly, that's where I come in right, because we all have aspects that we can't see for ourselves.

Michelle Dowker: 53:52

I have my own mentors, because you can't see your own blind spots and you can't see the bigger picture when you're in the middle of it, and so, if this calls to you, I would love to hear from you. Send me a message and we'll chat, and if it feels like an aligned fit, I do have limited spaces in some of my one-on-one containers. What we do in those containers is help you to close that gap and really help you to step into this next level, iteration of yourself leading with your sensitive gifts as your superpower and leverage those in your work, and then help you to see exactly how to keep that gap closed as you continue your own evolution and so that you can do this for yourself ongoing. So if this aligns with you, I look forward to speaking with you and, either way, I look forward to speaking with you in the next episode.