🎙52. what if I’m wrong and everybody else is right?

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Welcome Back to the spiritual 9-5 podcast. I’m your host, Marie Groover, Founder of The Corporate Psychic and Essential Teams – two businesses that are here to transform the way we live and work, to be more intentional, more enjoyable, more fulfilling, more enriching and more sustainable. This episode is about cultivating the right conditions for visionary entrepreneurship, the right conditions for authentic living, the right conditions for success and failure. And it’s dedicated to that sneaky thought that we all have sometimes, what if I’m wrong and everyone else is right?

If this resonates, please send this episode (or transcript) to one person directly. It means the world to me.

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The other night during The Quantum Sessions Mastermind, one of the founders in the group asked this question: But what if I’m wrong and everyone else is right?

If you don’t know, The Quantum Sessions is an experimental mastermind that I have been running for 10 months now. It’s a small group of female founders and entrepreneurs who dared to ask this question – what if I show up for the next 12 months, holding my highest vision, walking alongside other women holding their highest visions – what would happen?

We know by now that who we spend our time with, matters. And that when we can get in the room with people who have walked further than us, we get further faster. A perfect non-work, non-business example is this.

My ex boyfriend had surfed since he was like 6 years old, or maybe earlier. He had a large group of friends who also had been surfing since they were very small. They were all REALLY good surfers. When I started dating him, I would call myself an average or even below average surfer. I had the stoke, I knew how to surf. I had been surfing for years. But my progress was.. Mmm, not really progressive. When I started surfing with him and his friends, my surfing changed 10 fold. No one was coaching me. No one was critiquing me. We were just surfing together, a lot. And all of a sudden I was having all of these breakthroughs in the water. If you know me and surfed with me before I dated this guy and surfed with his friends for 2 or 3 years, and if you still know me and surf with me now, you can fully attest that I am a different surfer.

And this is neat because I remember prior to surfing with these guys, I never really thought much about my surf progression. In some ways I just thought “mm this is the way it is.” “I’m just an average surfer.” “I’ve hit a perpetual plateau.” And it wasn’t that I was okay with that and that I didn’t want to get better. Every year maybe twice a year I would go on a surf retreat with professional coaching – so like obviously I cared about getting better. And I desired to surf better.

And yet, something magical happened when I just changed the group of people that I surfed with the most. And when I started surfing with people, where every single person surrounding me in the water was better than me, I just changed for the better, by way of surfing.

And we see this in real life as well. When we change our surroundings, when we change our environments, they change us – for better or for worse.

I was listening to an episode the other day on the home–body podcast hosted by mary grace allerdice. Amelia Hruby was her guest (the same guest that was here on the spiritual 9-5 a couple shows ago), and they were talking about the importance of the environmental and ecological nourishment of ourselves and our businesses. Grace referenced a tomato plant and said that a tomato plant is not responsible for the soil that it grows in, it’s not responsible for the sun and rain and the conditions for where it is planted. It is only responsible to grow tomatoes. And that it cannot possibly be both the farmer and the plant. But that when it is in the right conditions, it cannot help but to produce tomatoes in abundance. You see a tomato plant knows what it is and knows how to do its job, but only does its job well when the conditions are right.

Hm. Similarly – to go deeper along the metaphor of plants. When a flower in a pot in your home is dying – do you blame the flower, or do you look at the environment? I hope that you don’t blame the flower, but I won’t blame you if you do. I am not a green thumb but my father and my grandmother are definitely green thumbs. And if it were me, borrowing from their knowledge, I would move the plant into another room. I would check the amount of water and sun. I might fertilize the flower. I would try to find the space and cultivate the system for which the flower would thrive.

Because, like the tomato, when the flower has all the right conditions, it cannot help but to do its job and do it’s job well, which is to bloom.

And this is what we were talking about the other night with my mastermind cohort, The Quantum Sessions. We were talking about what conditions need to be present within our lives in order for us to naturally thrive.. In order for our businesses, to naturally grow.

Because we, as humans, in a very manufactured production-valuing society, like to control everything. So as entrepreneurs, it’s not uncommon to try to be both the farmer and the plant. To try to manufacture the conditions for growth. Which is OK, but sometimes we get a little bit confused on which is our role.

If our business is the tomato plant, then sure, we can be the farmer. What conditions does our business need to thrive? We can either try to create those conditions, or we can try to go find those conditions and place our business in them.

If WE are the tomato plant – what do we need to thrive? And how often do we try to source our needs on our own, vs just moving to a better location? Vs Allowing ourselves to be the way that we naturally are, and just placing ourselves in the right environment, with the right support to grow even more into the way that we are?

Because when we are true to ourselves, we can’t help but to do the things in the world that we are meant to do. We can’t help but to be excited about the things that we can truly create or grow or change. We can’t help but to be abundant in our gifts to the world.

But, when we are not true to ourselves, we face the possibility of shriveling up and dying.

Take the tomato plant. If the tomato plant were sitting among cacti. And let’s say I’m the farmer in this scenario – because this sounds like something I would do. The tomato plant is STARVING FOR WATER. It’s SO THIRSTY. It cannot go on like this any longer. And so it asks the cacti – hey how do you thrive in these conditions? And the Cacti say something like, oh we don’t need all that much water to survive. We store it all up and we just hang out until the next outpouring of water comes. You just need to toughen up.

What will happen if the tomato plant takes the advice of that cactus?

It will die. It will shrivel up and die because the tomato plant was not designed to just toughen up.

So we don’t just surround ourselves with people who have gone further than us, but we surround ourselves with people who can appreciate us (because they are us), and people who are going where we want to go, people who are being who we want to.

Let me give you another example.

Since I was a child, I’ve written poetry. I didn’t take any classes. I wasn’t trained. I just knew how to listen and let the words come out of me. I continued this practice until high school. Where, I was the only poet, that I knew, especially in this way. And I ran with two different groups of friends. One group was kind of intellectual and maybe a little righteous. And the other group was total dirtbag stoner surfer skater kids. High school is a formative time in life, which is why I’m using this as an example. In that time of my life, I hesitated to call myself a writer, or share my writing, because my writing wasn’t literary. It wasn’t essay. It wasn’t story. It wasn’t fiction. It was something else. And poetry as a genre wasn’t taken seriously by anyone that I knew. And I didn’t see any examples of that something else even in poetry, of the way I wrote or expressed, that were taken seriously by anyone yet in the mainstream. And, so I decided to also stop taking it seriously until I could find a genre that I fit into. And I stopped calling myself a writer for a long time.

I still wrote. But, again, I didn’t allow myself to take my writing seriously, because I didn’t think that anyone else would either.

Fast forward to today times. I got a whatsapp message from a dear friend who one time called me a philosopher-artist, which is how I like to identify myself now, btw. She sent me a podcast episode from the On Being Podcast hosted by Krista Tippett. And the guest was john donahue, a poet, and so much more, who passed away back in 2008. And I was listening to episode, crying, because I thought “oh – there are people out there in the world who get me. Who are just like me.”

And I realized that I had not spent enough time in my life trying to find the most optimal conditions for some of the parts of me, and for some of the work that naturally would come out of me, if I nourished these parts of me.

You see – finding your circles of people in life can be work. And it’s really important to do this work. Because if you don’t do this work, you will be surrounded by cacti when you are in fact a tomato plant. And you don’t even have any idea that there are other tomato plants in the world. And that might lead you to feeling lonely, or inadequate, or misunderstood, or weird, or wrong.

So how do you find your conditions, how do you find your people, and why am I equating people and conditions together?

Well, because human connection is a basic necessity. Like, as important as food and water and shelter. And the humans you place yourself around are a massive contribution to your environment and whether or not it nourishes you.

So how do you find your people?

I believe, that you start by being and embracing yourself fully. My friend would have never sent me that podcast episode if it didn’t remind her of me. And it wouldn’t have reminded her of me, if I didn’t open myself up to her, in the ways that I had.

You see – people can’t see who we really are (let alone truly accept us) unless we show them. We leap first in relationship, before we can be caught. And sometimes we are not caught – but sometimes we are redirected to those who will catch us. Those who will get us.

But so often, we do what I did with poetry instead. I said, I’m not going to call myself a writer until I find the right genre. And BTW poetry doesn’t even scratch the surface of my writing. So I basically said, I will not be this thing until I have permission. But, without giving myself permission first, without being a writer, without calling myself a writer, without sharing my work – how on earth would anyone else recognize me as that? How would I find what I was looking for?

And this isn’t about recognition, like reward or validation. This is about someone else who is like me, seeing me, and saying – oh hey, we are similar. Maybe we should grab a coffee sometime and connect. Maybe we should swap poems because we are on the same wavelength and I will never castrate your work and I already know that you will never castrate mine.

These are the conditions for a poem to bloom.

Another example, a bit more relevant to the usual vibe. Entrepreneurship.

When you are an entrepreneur, you go into this work because you have a vision. And I believe that you will be the most successful when that vision is fully and only your own. Not when it is a replica of someone else’s vision. Not when it’s just something that you’ve seen done exactly, before you. But when you are a visionary. When you see what doesn’t exist yet. When you see what other people can’t yet.

And to be a visionary takes tremendous resiliency and self trust and exploration and experimentation. So what are the conditions that will nourish you so that you can bloom as a visionary? So that you can comfortably experiment until you figure out the right formula for your vision?

And what are the conditions that will nourish your vision, so that it can materialize?

It’s not people who are preaching the opposite of what you desire. It’s not people who are creating conditions for which you have already escaped. It’s not people who are making millions as simulacra of simulacra, and yes I am talking about the instagram coaching instrusty, but I’m also talking about so many other business in a box, corporation in a box, marketing in a box, entrepreneurship in a box methodologies that worked for someone once but like will absolutely not work for everyone.

It’s people who see you as a visionary. It’s other visionaries. This is why I think hiring a coach or joining programs like my mastermind, The Quantum Sessions, is so important. Because you get to find your people, the ones who support you unconditionally because they see your vision and they see in you a part of themselves, that part that is going to make it, and I think we really underestimate and undervalue that, so much so that it takes lifetimes to feel seen, sometimes.

When I listened to that podcast episode, I felt so seen. And I was listening to a dead person talking. But do you recognize the power of possibility that arises within you when you realize that you are not alone?

One of the members of my mastermind, asked this question the other night: what if I’m wrong and everyone else is right?

The session was about Making Our Own Rules in life and Business, and unsubscribing from the rules and the conditions of the world that are not serving us, that do not need to dictate our lives or our businesses so that we can shrivel away.

And it’s scary to click unsubscribe. It’s scary to leave social media as a marketing channel when you see so much success and so much opportunity. It’s scary to set out on your own when everyone else is subscribing to or in favor of a way of being that doesn’t fit who you are. But when it’s ultimately unaligned, is that even for you?

What if I’m wrong and everyone else is right?

My response was this – you could fail either way. Which one is worth failing for?

Because even if the tomato plant is in the perfect conditions, birds might come and eat all of the tomatoes before they are harvested. This literally happened to me last week yall. I was waiting for my tomatoes to change in color and one morning they were almost ready and a few hours later I came outside to 15 birds just demolishing my plants, oh but just enjoying themselves.

Life isn’t guaranteed. Success isn’t guaranteed.

But what is worth planting and fighting for? And who, that you admire, that you trust, that you see yourself in, has already done it? Imma be calling my dad up for some tomato plant tips cause those birds did not get the best of me.

But if it were an endeavor that I didn’t truly desire, I would probably quit. Not plant anymore tomatoes. This episode has talked way too much about tomatoes, in way too many different ways.

What do you believe in?! What is worth efforting for? What is worth the lessons in failure? Who do you see yourself in, that is already on the way?

Because being a visionary absolutely doesn’t mean that you do it the way everyone else did? And, being a visionary doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.

What if I’m wrong and everyone else is right?

But what if you’re right?

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Thank you for listening to this episode of The Spiritual 9-5 podcast. I’m your host, Marie Groover and I am so incredibly grateful that you are listening. If this episode resonated, please share it with even one person directly. And sign up for my newsletter, you can find it in the shownotes. I send out so many juicy tidbits that go far beyond this podcast, like information on my work, my real work we could say running The Corporate Psychic and Essential Teams and how you can work with me and also lobby me for podcast topics.

Thank you again and have the best day.