Speaker #0Last night I was driving home with the kids in the car. It's dark, it's raining, it's windy, it's been a bit of an exhausting weekend of trying to do festive things and everyone's a little bit poorly and tired at the end of term and I've been struggling a little bit to be honest with you. In fact, I think I've been experiencing a bit of a crisis of confidence in the last week or so. And as I was driving home, just desperate to get home and get in my bed, my four-year-old started singing to himself. And I started listening to the words that he was singing on repeat. And for the first time in quite a few days, a huge smile spread across my face. And I just felt such joy. as I realized that the words that he was singing were exactly what I needed to hear. So you'll have to keep listening to the podcast for the words of the song. But if this idea of a regenerative crisis of confidence is something that resonates with you, I believe it will be worth the wait. Let's start by thinking a little bit about why we might be experiencing crises of confidence. Now to speak personally I know that it has not been helped by me being unwell and that's felt like quite a protracted illness now I'm doing fine but I've just had this chest infection that won't shift you can probably hear it still a little bit in my voice I'm kind of getting out of breath and a little bit dizzy and I'm finding it very frustrating. You know on top of that I am nearly 41 and I'm meeting increasing challenges with my hormones to the point that my cycle is now quite challenging at points and there is a certain darkness that comes with it and the reason I'm sharing that is because I don't think that we talk often enough about how menstrual cycles and hormonal cycles affect us. And I really believe that regenerative work is work that, if it's in tune with nature, must make space for cycles and for ups and for downs and for ebbs and flows and darkness and light. So those are my deeply personal reasons. But I think that confidence is almost always the root cause of inaction in our regenerative careers. It's what keeps us stuck in corporate jobs that suck the life force from us. It's what has us thinking that we're not qualified to do the work that we want to do. It's what has us so scared and fixated on the money piece of the equation. It's what has us convincing ourselves that our business idea or the career path that we want to take just isn't viable. And it can be really debilitating. That's what I've discovered for the first time as someone who is naturally very confident. It feels so unsettling to be in some kind of crisis of confidence. So I'm going to share with you six. reasons that I have identified for myself why I think this confidence issue has been cropping up and have a listen out because I think that many of these might also connect with you and if nothing else I think it's helpful and important to know that we are not alone in feeling this, that there are in fact very good reasons why we may be struggling with our confidence when we're in pursuit of purposeful work that makes a genuine contribution against such a difficult global backdrop. So number one, the old tools no longer serve me and I'm going to speak from a personal perspective here. This is definitely something that I'm struggling with. A lot of the things that I have relied on as As an entrepreneur, as a business person, as someone who has made pretty dramatic career shifts several times in my life, a lot of those tools just don't work anymore or they are very much not aligned with regenerative principles. So if I can give you one example, an old tool would have been to work harder. In difficult times in the past the answer, or so I thought, was always to work harder, to put in more hours, to kind of dig deeper, think harder, come up with better solutions and and that probably did work sometimes as an entrepreneur. I don't think it's sustainable but it certainly doesn't feel right to me in this chapter of my life. I don't believe that we are called on just to pour more and more of our time and energy into regenerative pursuits and I've certainly discovered for myself that when I give into that tendency to work every second of the day my body was just going to shut down it's just not going to let me do that anymore so and there are many other examples but they're all sort of a similar um similar they're in a similar vein this idea that you know our you productivity is directly related to our success and our worth and all the sort of paradigms that are caught up around that in terms of you know putting in the hours you know doing the grind finding our hustle whatever it might be those tools no longer serve me a second reason is that i am disentangling from a system that i've known all my life And perhaps those words are too dramatic, I don't know, but that is what it feels like to me. There are so many different facets of what that means. You know, one is stepping outside of my identity as a CEO and founder and business leader and rediscovering who I am without those labels. And a very big part of it is my... ongoing and very necessary journey around anti-colonialism and anti-racism and understanding systemic injustice and that's something I still have so much work to do on and it's very difficult when you start to realize that the system that you just sort of understood as the way the world was was a system actually that was just set up really to support people like you and deliberately exclude many other people and again there are other elements around um in america i think what we would refer to as the american dream i don't think we have an equivalent terminology here in the uk but i certainly grew up and i think many other people did with this idea that our life's path would be, you know, going to university, pursuing the career path, getting the good jobs, earning a certain amount of money, meeting the right person, getting the house, getting the bigger house. I actually don't know where that chain ends. I'm not sure that there is an end to it. I think that's entirely part of the problem. There's always something more that we're supposed to be working towards. And when you start to reject those constructs and say, I don't want to live like that. And actually things that I thought were positive, supportive frameworks are in fact very dangerous to many people or very self-serving. There's a real loneliness, I think, that comes with that and a very unsettled sense. So that certainly can contribute to... a crisis of confidence. And a third point, and this is something that I know because almost all of my clients describe this to me, is carrying the weight of very heavy, sometimes overwhelming feelings. You know, very often those feelings are, I think we describe them as eco-anxiety or climate anxiety. I don't know how I feel about that term. because I think it doesn't take into account the full picture. You know, for me, it's, yes, it's... realizing that we're on the brink of planetary collapse but that also means economic collapse and that starting to see the system for what it is starting to see the power constructs and being aware of that and letting that in you know letting in thoughts about the kind of future that we might be leaving to our children even seeing what we're doing to each other right now in the here and present, the feeling that you're starting to understand these things and you want to make change around them and yet it feels like there's this incredible momentum towards destruction and it feels how can you possibly play a role in preventing that. I promise I'm going to leave you with a positive note today, I know this is heavy stuff. but this is how I've been feeling and I think this is how this or something like it is how many of you are feeling too so I think it's important that we make space for these feelings you know another factor the fourth point I want to make here is I think I have feel like I have very few examples to look to I'm very grateful for the regenerative communities and and those aren't formalized communities just connections and spaces that I've been invited into, people who are thinking in similar ways, having similar conversations. I think that's incredibly important. But it's, you know, it's not the same as choosing a kind of well-trodden career path where you can go, oh, look, okay, this person has done it and this person has done it. And even when, you know, I was building a business and there were elements of it that hadn't really been. done before, but I could look and see, well, this is what it means to be an agency. And then I can layer on the parts of it that will be unique to our company. You know, there were examples to follow. There was a sense of, you know, yeah, I can know what this looks like. I can have an idea of what success looks like in this area. And I think for many of us pursuing regenerative careers, we don't. We don't have those clear examples. If we're lucky, we have other people who are on the same journey, but it's not a case that we can look at people at the destination and go, right, that's it. That's the exact path I'm going to follow. We have to find the courage to forge it ourselves. And that means, this takes me to my point number five, that means that most of the time, And this is the honest truth, I'm making it up as I go along and I've done that throughout my career. I'm pretty good at it but for some reason I think the stakes just feel so much higher, not for some reason, for all the reasons I've just described the stakes feel so much higher. It feels like there isn't a luxury of time or complacency anymore. And I applaud making it up as you go along. It is exactly what I would encourage you to do because it is what everybody else is doing actually. And the difference is just that some people are very good at making it look like they know exactly what they're doing. It's often a case of who is speaking the loudest. Everyone is making it up. But when you're making it up and you're dealing with weighty feelings and you're disentangling from the system and the old tools no longer serve you, it feels even more frightening, I think. And then the final thought that I had around this, number six, was I can't see the destination. And that has been the case for about two years now since I made the decision to sell my previous company. And. step into whatever the next chapter of my life would be. I actually distinctly remember the moment that I made that decision and I made a commitment to myself to move forward without needing to know what the destination would be and just to focus on the next right step. I've been doing it for two years now and it's still scary. It's still unsettling. It's also joyful, but it isn't easy. And... This isn't to say that I have no idea where I'm going. Of course I know exactly the kind of work I want to do within regenerative work life. I love working with my clients. I can see exactly what we can achieve together. I have an idea of how I want this business to fit within my life in this particular phase that I'm in in my life and the balance I want to find there. I have very early ideas about what I will do when I'm in a position to have impact beyond my business. I may have shared with you before, what I really want to do is to find a way to invest into rewilding projects, perhaps even have my own rewilding project, and for the benefit of the business to flow into rewilding. But it's very much in ideation stage, and I just have to have the confidence. And as to you, my friend, just have the confidence to keep taking that next right step. And it's okay if it feels wobbly as we do that. Of course it does. So I hope you hear that you are not alone. It is absolutely natural to feel this way. And as I said, I am someone who... isn't actually very confident. I thrive on change and challenges and I am struggling with this too. So what do we do together when these feelings, these little crises of confidence pop up? What do we do? I actually have three ideas that I'll share with you and the third one I promise I will even sing a little of the song for you. So the first one is to be in community as I've mentioned and one of the things I want to focus on in 2025 is to create more community space within regenerative work life. This is very much in the early stages but I would love for you to come and join us on our LinkedIn page, the regenerative work life LinkedIn page. We are Claire, my community manager, and I are finding ways all the time to make that more of a community space. And I'm also going to be hosting some kind of community cafe, perhaps monthly next year, where anyone who is on this journey out of corporate or out of the corporate mindset and towards a regenerative career or starting a regenerative business can just come together to. to share ideas, to be in solidarity, to offer help or to ask for help and just be in a room with each other, as Claire beautifully put it when we were discussing this idea. So if that's something that interests you, then make sure that you either follow the page, LinkedIn page, just search Regenerative Work Life or subscribe to my weekly emails. If you go to regenerativeworklife.com forward slash subscribe, you can sign up there. You'll get weekly advice for your regenerative career, as well as invitations to any live trainings or these community events that I'm going to be hosting. The second point is know your why. We may not know the destination, but we have to know why we're doing this and we have to remind ourselves of it daily. And I think the more clearly that we can articulate that, the more regularly we can remind ourselves of it. the more confidence we can have to stay the course. So if that doesn't feel immediately accessible to you, I invite you to really spend some time reflecting, journaling perhaps, on what is your reason for embarking on this transition. And then the third point I will bring us to the words of wonderful, wonderful Otto, aged four, singing In the back of my car, in the dark, in the rain, for about 20 minutes, just for himself, for nobody else. And the song went something like this. Just keep practising, you can do it. Whatever you want to do, you can do it, if you just keep practising. Just keep practicing. You'll be able to ride a bike with stabilizers or become a farmer. Just keep on practicing. You can do it. And here is why this song brought me such joy yesterday after a pretty glum week. Because of course we should approach this work with the beginner's mind of a four-year-old who believes that if he keeps trying and put in the work, one day he will be able to ride a bike without stabilizers. He knows that he needs to practice because he's never done it before and it's really challenging and it's a bit scary and he expects it to take time, he expects it to be hard. That message for me was Alissa just stay focused on your craft and I'm going to use that word unashamedly, stay focused on your craft, don't get distracted by thoughts about where you should be or how long this should take or comparing yourself to others. Don't give in, frankly, to the voice that tells you that, you know, you've disentangled so far to the point that you've kind of become irrelevant, that you can't function within society anymore, that you've become unemployable. Does anyone else have that thought? I've been unemployable my entire adult life. I don't know why that fear is suddenly popping up now. I need to stay focused on my craft and whatever that means to you, I invite you to keep practicing. You know, for me, it means pour into my clients, focus on the work that I do because I know how powerful that is. Show up to this podcast with vulnerability and courage, make the commitment to spend daily time in nature, keep... integrating with my community in a way that feels meaningful to me. You know, be bold and experiment with new ways of working and exchanging value. And it doesn't need to be grandiose, this idea of practice. If you have an idea that you are brewing up. We heard from Chloe last week and her idea about mushroom farming. I think these words are for Chloe too, just keep practicing, just put in the work, grow your mushrooms, learn about different ways to do it, experiment with different substrates or compost, whatever it is, whatever your idea is, just keep practicing because with time, with effort and with commitment, you'll be able to ride your metaphorical bike. without stabilizers. Let's keep putting in the work together, my friends. I hope that you have enjoyed this episode. I appreciate you listening and holding space for me to be vulnerable. And I would love for you to be an active part of this community. So please make sure you're Subscribe to my emails or you're connected with us on LinkedIn and let's discover what that's going to mean together. Thanks for listening. And I'll be back here next Wednesday. Thank you for listening to the Regenerative Work Life podcast. It's time to put what you learned today into practice. Remember, you were called to this work for good reason. Nature needs each and every one of us and you can do this. If today's episode has been helpful, please take the time to share it with someone who needs a little guidance in stepping out of corporate and into regenerative. Learn more about how I can help you find your vision for a work life filled with purpose, impact and joy at regenerativeworklife.com and connect with me on LinkedIn. Just search Alisa Murphy. I'll see you back here soon for the next episode.
