The Menstruality Podcast - How We Run a Cycle Aware Business (Alexandra & Sjanie)

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

The hidden agenda of the menstrual cycle is to help us become more fully ourselves. As we deepen our cycle awareness practice, it plugs us into our calling, our vision, our unique way of expressing our genius. The realising of this calling  requires an outer structure, which often looks like a business. The beautiful thing is that the menstrual cycle can resource us along the way. We’re in the middle of launching our brand new programme, Your Cyclical Business which is designed to support you if you’re a teacher, healer or creative, a freelancer, or a purpose-led entrepreneur to channel the wisdom of your menstrual cycle to create a thriving business.So in our conversation today we want to invite you behind-the-scenes of Red School to see how we work with our cycles (and for Alexandra her post-menopause process) to run our cycle-aware business. We explore:How resting and tending to your nervous system in inner winter is a key to managing overwhelm, and creating sustainable work rhythms without burning out.How each inner season of the cycle works in a particular way to help us move from self doubt and imposter syndrome to trust in ourselves and our creative process.How we bring the discerning energy of inner autumn to craft marketing strategies that allow Red School’s work to expand in an aligned way. Join us for our upcoming Your Cyclical Business free webinar: https://www.yourcyclicalbusiness.com---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie: @sophie.jane.hardy -  https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey, thank you so much for tuning into the menstruality podcast today. So happy that you're here listening. Today we're going next level in our exploration of the hidden agenda of the menstrual cycle, which is to help us all become more fully ourselves and as we deepen our cycle awareness

practice it plugs us into our calling and our purpose and our unique way of expressing our own genius in the world and the realising of this calling often requires an outer structure which can often look like a business. And the beautiful thing is that the menstrual cycle can resource us along the way. So here at Red School, we're in the middle of launching our brand new program, Your Cyclical Business. So in our conversation today, we wanted to invite you behind the scenes of Red School to share how we work with our cycles and for alexandra it's her post-menopause process to run our cycle aware business so we explore how resting and tending to your nervous system in inner winter is key to managing overwhelm and how each inner season of the cycle works in a particular way to help us

move from self-doubt into trust in ourselves and also how we bring the discerning energy of inner autumn to craft marketing strategies that allow Red School's work to expand in an aligned way. Good morning you two, we are talking business today. And let's start as we always do with a cycle check in. So should we start with you, Sharni? Where are you at? Yes, I am. I'm in a good place to talk business. I mean, there are times in my cycle where the thought of talking business just would make me cringe. But today I'm day day eight and how am I doing? Well I have a puppy. I got a puppy three days ago and interestingly even though I have a puppy I'm feeling this day eightness, which for me is a kind of, I feel encapsulated. I feel like I've got my nervous system modulated, regulated. There's this kind of capacity to hold and pace myself. So the chaos of the puppy and the lack of sleep and all of that is doable doable I'll talk to you I'll talk to you in a couple of weeks but good day of magic on my side today and I am in a way not quite a couple

of weeks but 10 days ahead of you I'm on day 18 and I'm I feel robust I've been working hard this month but what I'm noticing is you know just as we started recording this podcast they started drilling a hole outside my house and I think if I was where you are in the cycle I'd probably be able to ride with that a bit more easily than I can today it's it feels very loud sounds feel really loud to me as I start to enter in the in the autumn which does happen early for me so it feels loud and it feels close and i'm i'm having to just hold the tension because you know life throws crap at us and i'm rolling with it today such is the nature of running a business there's there's stuff to deal with yeah so i am well I track by the moon loosely but I track by all sorts of cycles

I'm sort of free cycling I think you'd be known to call yourself a cosmic cyclist a cosmic so I am a cosmic cycler yes I cycle cosmic rhythms yeah the mysterious ineffable rhythms I cycle I'm really good at that one but I also do really enjoy pacing the moon cycle it's actually a very good self-care process because I have very distinct experiences at different times of the moon month so it's day 12 and I do have you know generally speaking when it's coming up to full moon it is charged and i can get quite high um but you know there's kind of a yang energy in the system and i can um and i have capacity um so there are two things i'm noticing today one is i've just come off the

back of you know some poor sleep recently and better sleep last night, but I'm conscious of this rising energy that there's not enough chi in my system from the disrupted sleep. not hard but not to let that expansive full moon energy you know the coming up to the full moon sort of grab me and supercharge me because it would fry me. I love what you just walked us into there because what you just described is a very intimate intricate process of managing of pre-paving the way so that you don't burn out which as anyone who runs a business and who has to wear 10 different hats every day and who literally could work 24 hours a day there's still probably more to do one of their real arts is learning how to pace our energy and manage ourselves so that we don't burn out so that was a great description of that oh great yes i mean that really is the bottom line isn't it that is the bottom line of running

a business yeah yeah because without us well without us in a good place nothing yeah nothing more can happen so it's sort of the the be all and end all and it's a step that most people miss yep and it's the business grows and then your capacity yeah has to grow to be able to manage all of the new things I think that's where I see myself slip up and other people is okay I've got my rhythm I know what I'm doing and then suddenly things change or things grow and you have to manage new people or more clients or you know all kinds of different things and so many people have had to manage these changes through the pandemic like moving to online work for example and then learning how to take care of themselves in the new situation.

And the muscles get worked even more, don't they? So what we're naming here is firstly, just our capacity just to find our rhythm and care, you know, our basic kind of self-care of knowing ourselves and how the cycle kind of really feeds all that. But how also because the cycle is initiatory itself, but our businesses, as you say, suddenly, you know, go through evolutionary leaps, you know, we were asked to expand. And that's like a little initiation in the business, isn't it? It's where we're stretched. So we have these moments of being stretched, and we have to recalibrate to that. But even when, because that's happening all the time for us, isn't it, Shani? At Red School, we get these new kind of things that we take on and

in theory, it all looks fine. And then we start doing it and we go, oh, oh, oh! The whole new level of something is required of us. But I feel you know yes we are stretched but it's because we've got that baseline that we've just been naming yeah that's that's right

um i love i love where this conversation is going because this thing of having to cross a new frontier, Sophie, that you're talking about, like coming to the edge of our capacity and then our business demands more of us, our business, our project can be anything. We're always having to step into new terrain if we are to let what we are wanting to do evolve so our business demands something more of us we then we have to come up against this edge in ourselves and that is by definition uncomfortable it is by definition hard yes and it's it's that's that's the the sort of um moment where it's like a kind of crack in the system and all the shit gets in, right? That's where we like doubt ourselves and push ourselves beyond what we're capable of. And that's where we really hit that wobble. So those moments are such profound teachings, aren't they?

And they're such profound workouts, both on a kind of nervous system level, but also on a spiritual level. We're really having to learn to hold more, you know, hold ourselves more. And in doing that, we then find ourselves growing up. So there's this lovely process of like growth that happens through our business that has surprised me that has really surprised me I never would have expected that running a business would be such a profound spiritual practice absolutely yeah when I first set up my consultancy I thought great I'm just going to take everything I've been learning myself and I'm just going to go in and coach some people.

And then boom, suddenly I'm faced with, oh, hang on, I need to do marketing. That means I need to be visible. That means I need to do videos and people are going to see them and criticize me. You know, and that means I have to actually negotiate working with other humans. And just every day, every hour, I think there's an initiatory challenge in a business, really. And especially if that business is very core to what you most love and to what, as we at Red School would call, you're calling, then it's supercharged. So luckily, we've got an ally in this we have an ally but luckily we have an ally in the menstrual cycle so in our conversation today we're going to look at how how we work with this ally of cycle awareness and our cycles in Red School. So I have a question for you two, which is, what do you most love about having a cycle aware business? What do you most love

about working at Red School? Yeah. I mean, Sophie, maybe you should kick us off because the interesting thing is Alexandra and I have been so inside this and you've stepped into something so why don't you why don't you kick it off yeah so one of the things that comes to mind first is that there's this great underlying understanding that everything will change and it's really great to track this actually inside myself because I have a tendency to catastrophize I'm very driven by purpose I'm quite an ambitious person when I want to do something I want to do it all the way and then if something goes wrong I can tend to put all of that passion and energy that's coming into the purpose into oh oh no, what are we going to do now? And something I noticed working with you two,

to pretty cycle aware people at this point, I'd say. I think so. Quite possibly. Working with you two is you bring in this calm and this ground that always settles me. There's this implicit understanding that okay we have a challenge but we'll move into a more fruitful creative phase you know something new will always come around I think what I love about it most is it's so relaxing to work in that kind of environment it's so relaxing to be able to just know that you two are gonna say something like

I mean what do you say you've got you've got certain sentences that you say it's so I mean it's kind of a basic philosophy of mine now or a way sorry way of thinking but it has come out of my trust in the process you know the years of practicing cycle awareness the trust in that ever that changing dynamic of you know expansion of fullness and emptiness and fullness and emptiness that i trust the cycles of life in general. You know, I have wobble moments, you know, but I can gather myself very quickly. And, and things and I trust that. So in that trust, there is a sense that something bigger is holding me. And also that it is an evolutionary process. You know, that something there is

something evolving, you know know expanding and for good i want to say you know there's a there's life that has my back and i've learned about that through trusting my menstrual cycle and that's opened me to this bigger trust and um so coming now to the specifics of your question where this challenge now i see it as um a kind of evolutionary moment oh oh gosh we hadn't thought of that issue you know when we were planning something and now or you know we've run out of time with something what do we do you know how do we you know all because we have huge ambitions don't we are in school then suddenly we discover our limits when we go for it and you know and so on and i see that as an invitation into a kind of new way of thinking a creative

thinking a um a respect for the boundary that it's brought in as well and um all those elements there's another thing that i'm courting here actually i want to see if i can catch it um oh yes this is also very important the beauty of working with a small with a team is that who are cycle aware is like a because in the moment i may not you know i may not have an answer but i know that perhaps sean each of you are in different places in the cycle often and i you know that each place in the cycle is like a resource so i you know of course i'm post-menopause now so i'm just liminal all the time so i can sort of talk about the cosmic stuff but the detail of the business is not so good. And if Shani, for instance, is menstruating, you know, she's not going to do detail in that moment. But then we trust, you know, there's maybe Lauren who's, you know, ovulating or in her spring and she pops up with a solution or an idea, you know, just because that's where she is. Or you, you know, you might be sitting in your autumn and you bring in suddenly a gravitas

around it a discipline or something so this wherever we are in the cycle we've got all these different resources to respond to a challenge as well and i kind of you see i trust the collective intelligence that's at work in our team and that begs the question then if you're on your own which we can respond to later but yeah yeah so so sophie um the the bit you brought up about the kind of in a way the challenge between your ambition and drive and kind of creative visionary capacity that you have and you are almighty with that you know you are almighty with that and how um and how you know we often always come up against edges at red school whether that's to do with time limits or resource limits or something alexandra you spoke of this trust,

which comes really through cycle awareness. And the other piece you mentioned, which I think is really great that you named it, which is one of the things I love about being in a cycle aware business is that we all have come to appreciate the power of limits and limitations. Yeah. Because a kind of linear paradigm suggests that more is always possible, and that more should always be done. That linear paradigm

really feeds that not enoughness. Whereas a cycle aware business business and cycle-aware people get that sometimes enough is enough and we've met a limit. And actually, if we respect that, that boundary creates more potency in our business. It creates this creative, as you described it, this creative opportunity, that limit then allows us all to go in and discover something new that we otherwise may never have thought of. So it's really grounding, it's really anchoring and really stabilizing. And I feel, you know, one of the things I love about working at Red School is how limitless our creativity is together as a team. For the reasons you've said, Alexandra, because we've always got these, you know, these different perspectives,

people at different places in their cycle. So that creates such a rich, fertile, creative environment. But also because we respect that our business is cyclical and that we work with that and that creates this container that then really galvanizes something and potentizes something that we do. So what I find with Red School School even as we are a small team it's incredible what we can do together because we tend to be very efficient very economical very discerning and we allow the limits of our business to really support us that's phenomenal what we pull off isn't it

it is yeah with a small team yeah yeah and the as you're talking I'm realizing the other thing I love about working in a cycle aware business is the intimacy that cultivates oh yes so when we begin our meetings we always begin with a minute of silence to be with ourselves and then we have a cycle check-in so what it means is I know you all so well on this really intimate level where I understand how your strengths and vulnerabilities shift and change through the cycle month which is really helpful information because then say if we're in the middle of a launch and we know that Sharni you're heading towards you're on day 24 25 and you're heading towards the bleed maybe Lauren's in spring she's

got loads of energy and I'm in summer we can say Sharni what can we take off your plate so that you can go and slide into your bleed and and do some visioning for us for this launch and we'll pick up the reins of the you know the horse cart so that we can keep this thing moving forward so it creates this um it paves the way for really harmonious relationships even when one of us is feeling fiery in our inner autumn we can all stand back and go okay she's she's got the power right now yes you're so right you you know Sophie I when I think I like to think of an organization as like a living entity, as a kind of creative impulse in its own right. And I think the things that apply to us as humans apply to our organizations. Like our organizations need to be healthy and they need to have heart. You know, they need to have like, they need to have purpose.

They need to be rich with meaning. And what you are describing here is like how we adapt and how we're flexible and the harmony we have between us as a team goes such a long way in terms of creating a healthy organization. Like I feel like Red School is so wholesome and healthy. And it's because all the people in it are practicing cycle awareness and we're all respecting each other's cycles so there's this lovely orchestration in our organization there's this rhythm and cadence and flexibility and responsiveness so it feels so organic and alive like that and it's there's a lot of life that can come into red school because of this you know because of this intimacy we have with each other and because of how we respect our

own cycles and each other's so it really brings health to red school don't you think i totally agree i mean the word that was i was holding was i feel a kindness at work through through cycloence it brings a kindness so you know because there are days where you know we have a ton of work and you know we're really stretched and um and there's a sort of uh you know a a sense of, as you said, can we take anything off your plate? You know, if someone was in a very vulnerable place, because they need to kind of drop for a while. And we know that they're going to dream, you know, they're going to just replenish themselves,

but they often come back with a brilliant idea as well. I love it when Shani comes back from her bleeds. I really do. It's so cool. So that respect of, know high activity and then low energy and no part of the cycle is seen as a waste of time this is actually really really important all parts of the cycle are recognized as a resource and you know i was thinking then shani when you were talking about the wholesome feeling of you know of red school you know red school is you know it's messy running a business there's just so many moving parts and you know it just yeah it just requires a lot but

so um that you know if we can care for the health of the business then I feel there's flexibility when you get all these curveballs that come in and you know when you're stretched in a certain way you've got a sort of baseline of kindness and how you come to things so I would love to I would love to explore with both of you and I'd like to share my experience too of how you manage specific challenges as entrepreneurs as business owners as business owners that are leading with purpose you know your your business is serving your calling and I just want to walk us into this one so in the last decade of my work as first as a filmmaker and then as a not-for-profit communications director and then as a consultant

a business consultant running my own business and now at Red School and I have some interaction with our graduates you know in terms of like for example I just ran a workshop for our graduate community about heart-centered marketing to support them to grow their menstruality businesses so I'm getting to see how this lands with them as well I've seen that there are three core challenges or you could call them developmental pathways or initiatory pathways or evolutionary pathways that seem to come up again and again for people and derail them again and again from this challenging work of running a business and so the three core challenges that I've seen are overwhelm, as in there's too much going on or I'm creatively overwhelmed or all the tech is overwhelming me. And then that path can lead to burnout. The other one that's huge is self-doubt, which can look like imposter syndrome.

Who do I think I am feeling like a fraud, that person's doing it better than me, yada yada, you know how it goes. And then the last one that I see all the time, and particularly because I have a focus on marketing in my work a lot, is this playing small and being afraid of marketing or confused about how to do marketing, or just frankly, like not liking the idea of doing any marketing or selling you know you just want to be able to do the work that you do as for example a massage therapist or as a as an artist or as a teacher or a coach you don't actually want to do the you know the business of selling so I would love to hear from you I'd love to go through these challenges and hear how your cycle awareness has supported you as as a business owner with these challenges

so could we start with overwhelm yeah because actually overwhelm is a big one for me I've all felt it all my life actually because of the hugeness of what my being knew was my calling I now realize and I felt it right from the beginning actually you know when I was a teacher in the early days excuse me yeah and of course I didn't have cycle awareness in those early days. Well, how have I managed overwhelm? It has been a process that has grown out of trusting what I said at the beginning about, you know, how cycle awareness has built this trust in life and it's also come from growing confidence in myself and that confidence has come from my cycle awareness practice you know really trusting there's a whole kind of you know psychological developmental path built into a menstrual cycle journey. And learning to honour each phase of the menstrual cycle has sort of built me up in different ways,

you know, has constituted the me that I am. And of course, that came to a full flowering at menopause so there's that that sort of background work that just incrementally grows through the process of menstrual cycle awareness where you're really honoring and learning to honor more and more the whole pace of each of the seasons and so in the moment what that means for me now is spaciousness in boundaries and I've you know I've really gotten boundaries around uh i mean especially the inner autumn has really cultivated helped me cultivate boundaries and um and so when overwhelm comes i uh it's almost like i have to slow down and let and i now recognize oh my system is not up to speed with this yet. My system is not up to speed with what's happening. And I actually, never mind slow down, I actually have to stop.

And, you know, once upon a time I might have said, oh, I'll bleed on it. When a problem comes up but I again I have no idea what the answer is I honestly I would bleed on it it was I mean it was incredible it's just incredible it really works to bleed on it because I don't bleed anymore but what I do is I just take empty space I just go off and do something else I go no no no I have no idea I've got to go to bed now. In other words, I do nothing, which is, of course, what you do at menstruation. You do nothing.

So there's my imprint of menstruation. I have to take a menstrual moment. And one, I sort of come back to myself, which is what you do at menstruation. I kind of recalibrate myself. Yes, I come home to myself. And I open up this space for, you know, how to handle this. I mean, don't you think that's so cool? That is so cool that out of nothing, something comes. You know, Shani, you have it when you bleed.

Because honestly, it's so funny watching you coming into a bleed. Because we work so bloody hard at Red School and shawnee's in total well well she can barely think straight i can run anything past her at that point and get away with it you know she'll just go yeah she's like drunk she's got her dark glasses on i think you should pick it up here, Shani. I've ruined your reputation altogether. But you're so right, actually. And it's the coming into bleed thing where I can hit overwhelm and the other place. So there are these, just to say about overwhelm, there are these places where overwhelm is more likely to hit in the cycle, right? We all know this.

It's the coming out of our bleed. It's the coming into our bleed. Those are the two strongest moments of overwhelm, beginnings and sort of endings, but also any transition moment. So cycle awareness, Sophie has given me this understanding about, about myself and about cycles, creative cycles, and when overwhelm is most likely to hit. So that's been one big education I've had. So I have context now for overwhelm. The other thing that cycle awareness has done is this practice of cycle awareness, aside from the fact that you learn about your cycle and can manage your life and all these kinds of things when you practice cycle awareness, it is at the end of the day,

a mindfulness practice, which means that through this daily checking in with myself, I'm developing more and more awareness of how I am in any given moment. I'm really clocking my condition, the state of my nervous system, what my needs are. So overwhelm tends to happen for me when I am no longer in that kind of awareness of myself and I'm instead being swept up by what's seemingly coming towards me, like what's rushing in, what's, you know, the new thing and my head has gotten all involved in that and all the details of that and gone off in a million directions and I've lost the ground of awareness of myself and then my nervous system accelerates and I've lost connection so what cycle awareness has done for me Sophie has really taught me how to pace myself. And that's a word we use a lot at Red School. But that's the thing that cycle awareness is teaching us, is how to stay with ourselves,

how to regulate ourselves, how to stay present and embodied. Because when we we are we don't become overwhelmed it's it's that simple and Alexandra's story was great because obviously I forget this all the time and I run headfirst into new things and I lose myself and I get overwhelmed I mean bloody hell we all do it it's's just, it's like, it's a hazard of living, you know. It's a hazard of living. Feeling overwhelmed. But what I've learned is I clock that much sooner. And I now know that slowing down is the key.

So I pull back. I don't try and fix, solve, rather than trying to manage the overwhelm that is an absolute rabbit hole that that just creates not a rabbit hole it's a hamster wheel that just perpetuates itself so i let go i actually step back slow down come into myself find the ground in my body you know alexandra lies down does nothing you know I might do something to slow down so it's been such a profound teacher in that way my practice of cycle awareness so now is a good moment to segue into our advert for today's episode which is actually for a webinar that I'm hosting. I'm so excited,

I'm nervous, I feel vulnerable, I'm up for it, I'm proud of it. I can't wait to share it with you. It's called how your menstrual cycle can help you to create a thriving business. So it's designed for anyone who runs their own business. You might be a teacher, a coach, a therapist, a creative, a freelancer of any kind and if you run a purpose-led business and you want to learn how to bring your cycle awareness into your business to help to make it more sustainable, to support you with your marketing, to help you negotiate your inner critic and move through imposter syndrome so that you can do the work that you're here to do, I warmly welcome you to join us. It's an introduction to our new Your Cyclical Business program. It's on May the 17th and you can register at yourcyclicalbusiness.com. That's yourcyclicalbusiness.com. How about you Soph? Well, just writing off what you you're saying it feels to me like it's a nervous

system game this overwhelming yeah moving from overwhelmed to being able to create sustainable rhythms of working it's got so much to do with how we're able to regulate and soothe our nervous systems. And that I've been really present to this this month because this has been a big month for me as we're putting together the cyclical business course. It's big as in there's lots of work to do, but it's big as in this is the first time in three years that I've really put something out there into the world. So in the last two cycles, I've known, okay, Soph, you can ride off the Via Positiva in spring. I've got to take care of myself in spring because I can go too fast. But in spring, ride off it, be superwoman in summer.

And then dude, you've got to slow down because you really want to put this thing out there in the world and you're not going to be able to if you don't slow down. So then I've been disciplined about turning back towards myself in in autumn slowing the pace down and then actually giving myself some rest time and the other thing I'm negotiating there is having a child now so getting rested menstruation with the family is a new game so yeah lots to negotiate but what I've seen especially with this creative process of the course is that resting in inner winter is just everything for creativity and it's everything

when it comes to being able to work sustainably and I actually recorded a message to myself in my inner winter this time and it was about my vision for this course and what would truly help it to be the best it can possibly be and I've been listening back to that message all the way through the month because the tone of my voice is so calming and I sound so wise you know I'm like who's this woman you know I'm running around now in my inner summer like but there's this yeah this wise woman speaking to me from from inner winter she's I find that so moving sorry Sophie I'm interrupting you so moving that it's just so beautiful so she's she's stopping me from being overwhelmed because basically this the advice that came to me from my bleed was do what you did before you did IVF which you wouldn't

I wouldn't normally collate like the experience of IVF with how to run a business but what I had to do before my IVF process was learn how to keep my nervous system so soothed and calm so that I could create the conditions for this new life to flourish and it left an embodied breadcrumb trail in my in my body that told me that if I want to produce anything beautiful in this world it needs to come from a soothed nervous system exactly oh wow yes and that's what my inner winter told me so all the way through the month I've been checking back in doing my 7-11 breathing that Sharni taught me how to do when I was approaching IVF and doing the things that soothe my system yeah okay let's let's look at this um second challenge now or initiatory pathway initiatory opportunity of running a business

which is how much self-doubt it can bring up you know how much it can make us question ourselves and what we know and what we look like or what we sound like or you know what we're like in comparison with other people doing similar work you know this this self-doubt imposter syndrome challenge do you recognize it at all do you know what I'm talking about I think I might have possibly I think I might have caught that at the corner of my eye occasionally. So how can our cycle awareness help us here? How does your cycle awareness help you? I, just through the course of this conversation, Sophie, I'm really appreciating the education that I've had from my cycle. When you ask the questions these way, this in this way, because I realized the thing my cycle has taught me is how the perfection of the visions I have at menstruation have to go through a process of becoming real in order to be realized in the world and that process of becoming real often takes some of the sheen and the perfection out of the vision and that has to happen

that process of kind of chipping away at the fantasy if you like in order for it to become reality and I have learned how bringing a vision into the world the moment I make public anything that I hold dear it is opened to that reality check and feedback comes and feedback brings in self-questioning and self-doubt and challenge to my ego. Yeah. And I've learned that that is a very necessary and vital process. The inner autumn of my cycle has taught me how letting that feedback and doubt come in letting that uh the that self-questioning have its moment is of profound value because what i return to my bleed with is um is more embodied it's it's more real it's a little more manifest than it was before so I'm really grateful for that education because suddenly um all that self-doubt and questioning

has its place you know it has its it has its um it has its home and I can welcome it just a little bit more um which makes a huge, huge difference. So, Alexandra, what are you thinking as you listen to me? Can I just pause you for a moment? Because I really want to hear from Alexandra, but I think what you just shared is so profound. I do too, yeah. I kind of want to slow us down a little bit and just be with what you just said, because what you're saying is

there's power in this self-doubt and if we can work with our cycle process to be with that power it's making us more fully ourselves wow so i want to come off the back of that which is that what's just come to mind when you've said that is how not to let self-doubt cross into shame because you know i think it's actually important to doubt you know to question things you know to have that time of questioning it's crucial nothing grows up without that and to really you know when someone provokes you and challenges you and says you know what you know this is a load of cobblers or something you know you're you're forced to um well one to i think you know i've got to find to remind myself of who i am and take my own side.

I need to do that first. And then secondly, then really take seriously, because if I regard this other person as an intelligent human being, you know, they're seeing something that I'm not seeing. And to take that in and um and what happened you know i've come through years of shame dealing with shame and coming from that place of not letting self-doubt lead to shame is that's the line that cycle awareness is over the years has really helped me with and the appreciation of all those stages of the cycle and yes I've just slightly lost my way here but the thing that you know well the thing that I'm coming back to here is remembering my years of cycling especially when I was in my 30s and starting to open up to this work and even as I was having outrageous menstrual pain which is how I came to it all and I give space to menstruation

and over time this incredible kind of place opened up at menstruation and I would feel this extraordinary rightness of my being this I was like i was being fed because you know here i am dealing with shame and you know all that sort of crap going on even as by the way i was someone who was very opinionated and out in the world saying they didn't hold me back but at the same time i was sort of crippled by it i think it it affected my health. I think it's behind a lot of my health stuff. But then I would get this, oh, far out, this affirmation come into my being, and I go, oh, wow, this huge love.

Then I would get up to ovulation and doubt it all and go, well, so I'm making all that up. And then I'd get round to menstruation again and remember it all. So this is a tale about the importance of menstruation, of caring for that month after month because I could, and this makes me want to cry, I could not abandon what was coming up at menstruation. And that was the key to helping me to keep trusting because it was all this work that was sort of unfolding itself i mean it wasn't the articulation we have today but it was the beginnings of it that's led us to where

we are today and um i just couldn't i go oh oh yeah yeah no no no that was real yeah yeah fortunately i also had one or two friends who were allies you know you know people who did take me seriously um so I think that's profound about the cycle isn't it yeah it wasn't other I mean yes I had one or two friends affirming things for me but you know how that never works ultimately you know you have to pick it up for yourself and this was given gratis every month how great is that and that's real evidence for me that our menstrual cycles can be our best business coach and ally and mentor yeah not only do they help us make use of this critical energy or this um this self-doubt in the way that you described, Sharni.

But also, and I'm thinking in the inner autumn there, I'm working with the inner critic. And I want to point people to the reference of our inner critic podcast episode, and I'll put it in the show notes if you want to go deeper into that. And especially how to, as you pointed to Alexandra, not let it go into shame or manage it so that you can be with the critical energy without it descending into shame. But then also menstrual cycle is best business coach, how in a winter we can dock into ourselves and receive this affirmation that we can actually believe because it's coming from ourselves. Yeah, it's coming from ourselves yes and then the next piece in this um journey to kind of self-belief is the inner spring because it's this confidence building moment and there's something about how our cycle teaches us in Inner Spring that it's okay to experiment.

It's okay to fumble and find our way like a newborn deer. It's actually right and good when you're beginning something new to make mistakes and not know. The inner spring really teaches us about the power of that innocence and not knowing. And when we let ourselves inhabit that space, it builds confidence. Contrary to what I always thought, this is a profound healing that's come to me through my cycle. I had somehow learned this behavior that if I step over the awkwardness of being new at something and not knowing, if I just bypass that phase and go straight into like, I can do, I can do this, I can do anything. You know, that was my mode. That was how I got through that

vulnerability. It's like, I just pretended, you know, I pretended I could do it. And then I just threw myself in and faked it. And, you know, that got me so far, like, make it till you make it, that thing, it gets you so far. And you'll actually lose some of the integrity of yourself in that process. And letting myself discover through cycle awareness, I came to discover how to go through that awkward, uncomfortable, not knowing you beginning. I mean, it still makes me like squirm. However, I know the juice in that because it builds real confidence. It builds genuine resilience of being. So when it comes to then sharing what you share in the world when people criticize you or when the self-doubt comes in it doesn't cripple you because there's this core inside you you've built this heart in yourself you've built this trust in yourself this belief in yourself and that is everything so it starts at menstruation but the inner spring brings it home baby it brings it home if you're really pacing yourself this is exactly isn't it if you're honoring this whole thing of

honoring the cycle i also want to name one other thing actually around because you've brought up this in a way how the cycle now is is building you know you've got this rising current at the first half of the cycle so you've got this rising yes you know as you say that the goodness keeps going from menstruation and then you get this real like flowering in the summer a natural confidence that's there and it's so important to sort of consummate all that because that sort of buffers you up, doesn't it? It kind of gives you, as we say, good, healthy ego development. It's essential. And that comes from pacing it. And it's really essential for business because our businesses ask us to step up and be visible and to speak, to be the voice of our work.

So thank goodness we've got the inner summer for many of us not for everyone for some people it's a more bumpy time for lots of reasons but for many this moment of it's easy to connect it's easy to collaborate it's easy to communicate often in a summer yeah and and for even those of us who find the inner summer bumpy, there is a, and this is where your course is going to be so powerful, Sophie, Jane, is that there is actually something untapped there. There's a resource for all of us in the inner summer. And the bumpiness is our gateway in there because it is in our nature to blossom it is

in our nature all of us as humans need to be seen we all need to be recognized we all need to be acknowledged for who we are and what we have to give it's such an essential part of our growth and the growth of our business and evolution of our soul and how we can come to contribute. That positive feedback from the world is as important as that criticism. It is as important. So there is a real call from our wild power to let ourselves be seen. And that might be in a quiet way but nonetheless we all damn well need to be seen and recognized so yeah i think your course is going to really help people who struggle with that i'm sorry can i just say it's in your nature to blossom

quote that is a word that is a significant that's a really quotable thing I've got a story actually from from our work together at Red School that seems to bring a lot of these threads together and it sort of segues us on to this third challenge which is instead of keeping things small allowing your business to expand and doing the marketing and expressing and voicing that needs to happen so can you remember when we put together the inner critic workshop that we did when did we do it painfully earlier earlier this year yeah yeah so there was a moment because I think it was in my bleed I had this idea um you know we were we were looking at how we could invite more people to join the menstruality leadership program. And I thought, well, I would love Alexander and Sharni to have this teaching moment where they share one of the core teachings of Red School so that people can see the power of joining our programs.

And I said, I just like moseyed on up to a team meeting and I was like we should do a workshop about the inner critic and I was full of all this like energy about it and we both went no I don't think so do you understand what it means to do a workshop about the inner critic but we decided to stay with it and you two did this great work to put this workshop together and then we started to market it and we put it out there in the world and it didn't land as well as at the beginning it didn't land as well as I thought it was going to and I was in my inner spring which can be a time like you just described so beautifully Shani of this like back and forth not sure uncertainty that is actually growing confidence and I said look I don't there aren't many people signing up maybe we should just cancel this and I'm not sure where

you are in your cycle Sharni I'm imagining you in your inner autumn because you you were like no let's hold the tension let's let's stay with this something wants to happen and lo and behold literally after that meeting people started to just flood in and book onto this workshop and it was such a great workshop you know just standing alone in and of itself it it was such a service for the people that listened and then interestingly lots of new people started to join the menstruality leadership program off the back of it so it was this moment of I could have gone with the self-doubt and played small but thanks to your inner autumn wisdom and I'm sure there's a massive helping of your post-menopausal wisdom to you

Alexandra of let's hold the tension here we know this is important we were able to expand in that way it was a cool moment wasn't it it was a very cool moment and that is um there's such marketing wisdom in that I'm really enjoying the story because it's making me appreciate how all the stuff the skills we learn in the practice of cycle awareness really apply in business, really apply. we have self-doubt and questioning and uncertainty if we can trust that that is a natural part of the process and indeed a necessary part of the process yes it's a gateway we must all go through is uncertainty and questioning so we will pass through it But does that necessarily mean we should act on it? Maybe not. And so often, and this is a rule of thumb when it comes to cycle awareness, so often it's best practice to really be with the feeling before acting on it, to take that pause and hold the tension, as we like to say,

hold the tension. So in this case, holding, in other words, just staying with the uncertainty and the not knowing long enough, allowed something new to be revealed, allowed like a new opportunity to open up. And that is, I was talking to my listening partner when I was down visiting her in Devon not so long ago, and we were talking about marketing. And she was telling me that she had a course coming up. She's very cycle aware. And she said, only one person's booked so far and i said i said when is the course happening she was like oh in two months time i was like this is not the moment to pull the plug like the game is not over the song is not sung the cycle has not played out the questioning and wondering if it's the right thing to do and all

of that is part of the process stick with it because in that holding of the tension really you can tap into this organic unfolding of something and you know so because you are a marketing maestro you know that at the last moment that's when the floodgates open. Everyone goes, hey, heck, actually, I'm going to join. And we all know from cycle awareness, before we hit our bleed, it's exactly the same thing. Just before you're about to step off the face of earth, what happens? Suddenly, you've got to clean your entire house it's like there's this moment of culmination before it's all over and that happens in marketing too doesn't it it really is a thing and we learn that from cycle awareness so yeah i mean i could talk

specifically about this pathway until the cows come home I absolutely love it and um yeah I I think what I want to share now is is the invitation to come and join us for the webinar for your cyclical business because we've talked a lot today obviously about how this all plays out for us at Red School and within ourselves with our own cycle process. But I am genuinely very intrigued to hear from our community, the people in our community who are business owners, what does this look like for you? How do you support yourself to rest in the winter so that you can have a soothed nervous system and not go into that overwhelm and how do you let yourself shine and be a voice for your work in summer and then how do you negotiate all of the inner critic and

playing small so that you can let your calling be expressed and actually expand your business like what does that actually look like for you and that's what we're going to explore in this webinar that's coming up next week on the 17th. If you're a business owner, if you have a vision and a calling that you know that you want to bring into fruition in the world, this program is designed to support you to do it by accessing the wisdom and the power of your cycle by working with your cycle to help you understand your strengths and be able to tend to your vulnerabilities and I think the thing that I'm most excited about for the program is that we're going to do it together in community so it can feel really lonely I know I've often felt lonely yeah as as a business owner you can

really feel like we're doing this by ourselves and we're not we're doing it in community and community is where cycle awareness can really flower you know as we see on all of our programs so we're going to have lots of time together to look at what this actually looks like in practice for you how can you work in each of your inner seasons to support you in your business that's the aim of the game and along with that warm welcome I would like to make a high recommendation because there is nowhere else in the world where you will be able to learn what you are going to learn from Sophie Jane who is so embodied in her cycle and such a marketing maestro I uh I I think you would be crazy to miss this I mean I'm coming I know I

was reading you know because we've been inside this process a bit creating it and then just reading your sales page this morning i thought oh wow oh wow yeah i just real feeling of the the um the perfection of what you were offering and how great it was yeah yeah totally we're lucky we get educated by you constantly so we've got a direct line to you which is you know one of the privileges you asked at the beginning what we like about working at med school well you know we get to work with you so that is actually my number one answer i'll take it i'm in my inner summer right now I'm just taking this all in and receiving it and celebrating myself you will thank you wow what a fun conversation I've really enjoyed this thank you so much such a joy more like this please Sophie Jane oh that was fun i hope you enjoyed it i again really warmly welcome you to join us for the

webinar that's coming up next week on the 17th how your menstrual cycle can help you to create a thriving business it's going to be a great opportunity to connect with like-minded people to understand how to create and run and grow a business in a way that is more intuitive more receptive more creative more relational more connected to the immense intelligence of nature all around us and within us so it's on may the 17th and you can register at yourcyclicalbusiness.com okay thank you so much for tuning in today i look forward to connecting with you again next week and until then keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm