This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - From Burnout to Burning Bright with Jessica Zweig | 225

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Do you have days where everything feels heavy? The responsibilities and the burdens, the expectations and the worries, and you feel like you’re just not strong enough to carry it all. And you’re afraid you’re about to break. Me too. And here’s what I know – we’re not meant to feel that way. As our guest today will tell you, the light isn’t where you think it is. It isn’t out there. You don’t need to go searching for it. It lives inside you, and it’s always there. Jessica Zweig, has been declared “a voice of her time” by Marianne Williamson and “Personal Branding Expert” by Forbes. A serial entrepreneur, Jessica founded three businesses and recently sold her agency, SimplyBe., the nation’s premier personal branding company. Her first book was the #1 bestseller, Be: A No Bullsh*t Guide to Increasing Your Self-Worth and Your Net Worth by Simply Being Yourself. Her newly released book, THE LIGHT WORK: Reclaim Your Feminine Power, Live Your Cosmic Truth, Illuminate the World, just hit shelves! Host of top-ranked podcast, The Spiritual Hustler, Jessica is a highly sought-after speaker, a leader of a global community of spiritual women and hosts sold-out retreats on business, branding, and spirituality across the world. If you’re feeling dark and things are heavy, I’m sending you so much love and reminding you that light only needs the smallest space to get in. There’s a fire burning within you, I just know it. Grab your matches, we ride at dawn. Connect with Jessica: Website: https://jessicazweig.com/  IG: https://www.instagram.com/jessicazweig/ Book: https://www.amazon.sg/Light-Work-Reclaim-Feminine-Illuminate/dp/1250332966  Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsor: Head to zenimals.com and use my code NICOLEMKALIL to save 10% off your Zenimal!  Whether you’re looking for yourself, your kid(s)/teens, as a gift for someone else - everyone will benefit from more moments of zen.

I am Nicole Kalil, and I wonder, how often do you have days where everything feels heavy? The responsibilities and the burdens, the expectations and the worries, where you feel like you're not strong enough to carry it all and you're afraid you're about to break. Do you have times where you go dark? And I don't mean sarcastic, funny dark. I mean real dark, where it feels like everything you do doesn't matter, where you begin to question whether or not you matter, where hope starts to fade and you just don't know what to do, where to go, or who to be next. Yeah, me too. And here's what I know. We're not meant to feel that way. Hear me when I say this. It's not our fault and it's not that it's bad or you're bad when you do. I'm only saying that we're meant

for better, that you deserve to feel whole, valued, and worthy every single day because you inherently are. You were born that way and you remain that way, whether you're seeing it or not. And you know what the opposite of heavy is? It's interesting because it's also the opposite of dark. In both cases, it's the light that we seek, and it's the light that will save us. But as our guest today will tell you, the light isn't where you think it is. It isn't out there. You don't need to go searching for it. It lives inside of you, and it's always there.

As Jessica Zweig says, inside you is a light so bright that it could light up the fucking world. Do you see it? so bright that it could light up the fucking world. Do you see it? Do you feel it? Well, friend, you're about to, because Jessica Zweig has been declared a voice of her time by Marianne Williamson and personal branding expert by Forbes. A serial entrepreneur, Jessica has founded three businesses and recently sold her agency Simply Be, the nation's premier personal branding company.

Her first book was a number one bestseller called Be, A No Bullshit Guide to Increasing Your Self-Worth and Your Net Worth by Simply Being Yourself. And her newly released book that I am super excited about, The Light Work, Reclaim Your Feminine Power, Live Your Cosmic Truth, Illuminate the World just hit shelves this week. Host of the top-ranked podcast, The Spiritual Hustler, Jessica is a highly sought-after speaker, a leader of a global community of spiritual women, and hosts sold-out retreats on business, branding, and spirituality across the world.

Jessica, thank you for being our guest and for showing us the light. So I must dive in by asking, how do we find this light? First of all, it's so good to be here and thank you for having me, Nicole. My pleasure. I was so moved by that introduction because as you were describing that listless, hopeless, heavy place, my heart started to ache because that is a place that while though I'm past it, I'm so familiar with. I started my first business when I was 26 years old, never stopped until I was about 41. And my new book, The Light Work, begins at the depth of my burnout and darkness.

And so to answer your question, I mean, this is the whole premise of my new book. We find our light in the dark. If we are really willing to face our shadows, our trauma, our pain, our heartbreak, and really take responsibility and meet it, the deeper we're willing to go, the brighter we can shine. That's one part of it. I loved what you shared that we are innately filled with light. We are innately worthy. We are innately loved. And that is really the truth of the human species and the human experience. But we live in a planet that has deprogrammed us from remembering that fact. And if you study science through the lens of spirituality, we are literally made up of light-encoded filaments in our DNA.

Our bodies are made of light. And through stress and through failure and through trauma and through just turn on the news, we are being conditioned to forget the magnitude of our own power and our own light. And part of that conditioning, I believe, especially as women, female entrepreneurs, women in business, ambitious women, we feel like we have to hustle and prove and grip and convince that we are worthy of being loved, being successful, being needed. And that was my story that led me to the darkest moment in my life, which was really the inspiration for my new book, The Light Work. So much of what you said resonated with me, but very specifically this feeling like we need to prove our value and our worth and prove that we deserve to be loved. What would you say to

somebody who maybe isn't or hasn't experienced love in the, and I'm going to put in air quotes, traditional way. Maybe you didn't feel loved by your parents. Maybe you aren't experiencing love from the person you want or in a romantic relationship or something like that. How do we find and create the love for ourselves? How do we see it when it's not there the way we feel it's meant to be? Is my question making sense? It does. How woo-woo can I get on your show, Nicole? You can get very woo-woo if you want.

Can we go there? Let's go there. So we live in an infinite, ever-expanding, literally endless universe, right? We are a tiny grain of sand spinning around a rock in the midst of a galaxy with trillions of stars and planets amongst trillions more galaxies surrounding us, and it's never ending. And through my own personal experience, I believe, I know that the true core element, the foundation, the building block of the entire universe is love. That is what everything comes home to, whether it's in romantic relationships, that aside, we came here as us in this human form to experience love, to know love, to show love, to have love, to give love. And we'd spend a lot of time outsourcing where we find that love

in partnerships and friendships and validation with success with our parents even. And when we really look around, there is love available to us in all ways, always. And when we really tap into that consciousness, you know, and it can be found in the exchange of a stranger smiling at someone on the street, that's maybe holding up a homeless sign and you can't give them any money, but you smile and you give them a peace sign. And they look you in their eyes with gratitude. It's taking a walk and taking in the beauty of this planet and just the miracle of a flower snuggling with your dog reading reading something that opens your heart seeing something dumb and silly on social media that warms your warms your heart for the day because you see human kindness

and manifested in reality literally we were walking around a planet vibrating with love everywhere. And yet we have been so conditioned to believe that that's separate from us. And it's, it reminds me of that quote, like be the love that you seek. Like you have to start with yourself that nobody else is going to be able to give that sense of embodied love to you but you. And like I said at the top of the question, how woo-woo can I get? I write about this in my book. It's the first chapter in my new book, The Light Work, called Source, Finding Our Way Back. And the question is, finding our way back to what? Because we have all of these faiths and modalities and dogmas and religions. And I talk about my experience of exploring all of them and everything led me back to, no, the light, the eminence, the divine, it's me.

That is, I don't have to search outside myself to find that connection. And that is my long-winded answer of that question. I think that we outsource our whole lives to find that love. And if we can go within, we don't have to look very far. Agreed and not at all too woo-woo. I think that is beautiful and something we all can be reminded of on a regular basis. So in your book, you talk about the light worker's mission. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So before I get into that, let's go back for a second and sort of what's led me to this point. You read all my accolades at the beginning and it's always sort of weird to hear that. It's like, I did all that. That's what people said about me. And I'm, you know, yeah, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I built

many businesses, sold the last one recently. And my whole adult life as a female professional was all around like external creation. Like what could I create that would validate me, make me money, tell me that I was winning and allow me to keep growing my own personal game, you know, without that being a negative thing, but just, I, this is my career for me, for my own lifestyle, my husband, my family, it's beautiful. There's nothing wrong with that. And it wasn't until, uh, 2022 when I fell into the depths of my burnout and depression after building this business and holding up the sky and having no choice but to look at my habits and hustle and beliefs as a female entrepreneur crushing it, boss babe identity, and how much that wasn't actually serving me, that I went on a deep healing journey to really, truly heal my body, heal my system,

heal my mind, to get really clear on what I was really here to do. And it's different than what my resume says. It's different than what my beautiful accolades in my bio say even. My mission is something different than my, say, purpose or my creation. And so in the writing of the Light Work book, it's actually called the Chapter 9. It's one of my favorite chapters. I'm so glad you asked this question. It's called Your Creation, Your Calling, and Your Cause. And that makes up the anatomy of a lightworker's mission. Because Simply Be My Agency is one of my greatest creations I've ever

done. It's seven years. I built it. I sold it. I will be proud of that for the rest of my life. But it's not my calling. What is my calling? I'll speak for myself myself it's to help women heal bodies psyches step into the light that they are to shine to expand with power and freedom at the same time I want to teach women how to do that and my cause what is it that you want people to say about you when you die like what is the true legacy you are leaving here? And for me, that's to help save the planet, the animals, the sentient beings of this earth. This is my lightworkers mission. And I really believe that we weren't put here by accident. We came here on a divine assignment to live out the unique DNA blueprint of who we are.

Literally a snowflake. No one else is us, to fuck shit up for the greater good. To me, that's why we're fucking here right now. And it's not just so that you can build a business or create a great resume, or even with all due respect, build a beautiful family. We are here for Gaia, the planet. And however that expresses in you is up to you. And in the book, I give you a framework of how to figure that out with the anatomy of the Lightworkers mission. Which I love always having frameworks and exercises, things that can help us apply and test out the learning. That's so important to me. I'm curious your thoughts on this because I sometimes struggle with this and I would imagine somebody tuning in might as well, where sometimes when we think about cause

and calling and creation and these big things, maybe it's just something we do a lot as women. We think it needs to be big in order for it to count. It needs to be global or it's stupid, right? Or I would imagine we both agree that some of our callings might be more intimate. They might be less public. They might not involve a business. So maybe help us think through some of those ways that we can uncover and discover what our own unique lightworkers mission might be? Yeah, beautiful question. So I host retreats. I host sold out retreats across the world. And I actually brought this exercise, this Lightworkers anatomy into my last retreat with a bunch of my,

all the women that came. And we got these little triangles because it's a triangle framework. I put out all of these magazine clippings and we did these cool like mood boards to express creation, calling, cause. And I explained the framework and then everyone got to basically scrapbook for an hour. It was beautiful. And when we went around the circle and everyone was sharing their creation, their calling, their cause. We had women who were mothers who were like, my daughter is my cause. We had another entrepreneur of a beauty brand, and she's like empowering young women to know that they can be successful, one woman at a time in my little boutique salon. That's my calling. I had another woman who is the founder

of a huge catering company and she wants to nourish people's bodies with delicious food wherever she goes, whether she's hosting an event or having dinner with her family. That is her calling. And so I want us to really reflect like what, what lights us up so much that we, we would never even need to get paid for it. Like, that's a question to ask yourself, like really what, if you were to name your assignment from wherever you think you came from on your soul, what, what is that for you? Why do you think you're really here? And it's perfectly beautiful if it's just for you. And so I, I give a lot of examples in the chapter of women who are, you know, authors who are moms, who are TV anchors, corporate

executives, real woman in my life that I studied and talked to and helped shape their missions. And they were all just, one of my friends is a TV anchor and that's her creation. She's worked her ranks. She's like on the top news station in Nashville and her calling is astrology and she keeps it super to herself. It's a very private part of her life. She doesn't really share how woo she is, but it fills her soul and it gives her a sense of purpose and connects her to life itself. And I just think that I really just believe so wholeheartedly that we're all here at this exact inflection point in humanity to make this planet more loving. Truly.

But that's it. And so whatever expression that is for you is yours, and that's perfect. I'm JJ Khalil, and I'm here to tell you about my Zenimal. Zenimal is a meditation tool that helps me in so many ways, like settling down at the end of the day to fall asleep, to practice gratitude and awareness of the world around me. It also reminds me that I'm a good kid. I think any kid you love would like a Zenimal too.

They also have them for adults and kids if you need a little more Zen. You can go to zenimals.com, that's Z-E-N-I-M-A-L-S, and use the code NICOLEMCALIL to get 10% off. I feel like the universe or God or whatever it is that you believe in leaves us breadcrumbs. Yes. Right? And I don't know, I've been thinking a lot about who I was when I was young and what I loved and what, because I agreed with something you said earlier, as I think just life and societal expectations and work and busyness and all that sort of separates us and blocks us from remembering or knowing what we came here knowing. I love that you said this. This is truly the whole metaphor

and takeaway of my book and my work and what I'm up to. You use the word remembering. When we incarnate here on planet Earth, we go through an amnesia trip. We've literally forgotten the truth of this universe, which is love. And if you look at a child, right? I love where you were going, the breadcrumbs. Like when you

think back when you were a child, I don't have kids, but I have nephews and nieces that are two and seven and six. There is such a purity to them, an innocence, a play, a joy. We lose that. We forget that. And there is this big narrative today around spiritual awakening. I'm here for that narrative. I'm part of that conversation. But I think it's deeper than that. I think it's a remembering of who we are really meant to be, who we have been, which are limitless, joyful, sovereign, healthy, empowered beings. And if you look around the world, most people wouldn't define themselves as that, at least on a mass scale. And part of the story in my book, after my burnout, I went to Egypt. I had a very significant experience

there. White lightning hit me inside of one of these temples. I started to expand into the auric field, started hearing voices from cosmic beings. And they told me the singular message, Jessica, you have got it all wrong, girl. You have forgotten the point of this human experience, which is to have fun. And this innocence, this joy, this joy for joy's sake, this bliss, we've lost it. And it's up to us, people like us, having platforms, using our voices, going through these experiences ourselves, but to create space and conversation and experiences for people to remember. Because we have so forgotten that truth. And when we are in a high vibrational state of simple joy and embodiment, we do get closer to why we're here. That is our mission. And so I think it's an absolute journey home. Yeah.

I know, I feel like I'm in process, in progress of this myself. And sometimes it's hard when you hear something like this because it speaks to you, right? Like your inner knowing is like, that's something that I need to hear or that feels right. But then it's the practicality, the tactical, the look, like the how, how do we do this? So do you have any practical steps or practices or like, here's some things that you could do that would help us maybe find or maybe activate and grow the light that's within us. Well, shameless plug, but there are about 88 journal prompts and 13 exercises and activations in my book, The Light Work. At the end of every single chapter,

there is what is called an invitation. So journal prompts and a key, a little key to unlock more light within yourself. And I guess I'll just start with the simple practical tip of literally making joy a priority. There was a long period in my life, Nicole, where I had all the success in the world and no joy. And so shutting my computer down at three o'clock in the afternoon to take a walk felt radical, but it brought me joy. Going, you know, to an ecstatic dance class on the weekend, dancing sober with a bunch of random strangers in my town at these ecstatic dance parties, that was a practice. taking out stress, creating new frequencies of higher vibration through movement, drawing. I went to Blix. I picked up a bunch of art supplies and drew and got into my little girl

heart again, you know, and creativity. I have a beautiful practice in the book. It's at the end of the chapter called Body, where I have you have a conversation with your body. Sit in meditative silence. I have some series of questions you can ask her just to get into right relationship with her and see what she feels. What does she want you to know? What have you been ignoring? How does she want to move? And I really feel like there's so much I could say about this, but one of the biggest pieces of my healing journey as I've moved through the other side of the dark was being in my body, truly not running from it, not stimulating it. Like my nervous system was so jacked by the end of my burnout season and softening, practicing gentleness, ease, play, simplicity, boredom. Like literally,

I try and build in boredom as a practice, like where I sit and stare at the ceiling and lie in my bed and don't check my phone. Like we are so programmed to move fast and rush and go, go, go. It's like, where are we all going? What are we rushing for? If we can slow down, hear ourselves, get our minds quiet, root back into our bodies, move some things through. Breathwork is great. Meditation is great. All of these tools, they're all kind of expanded in my book, but it is such a journey. It's not at all a destination, but I would highly recommend that you practice joy. So I'm fascinated by the idea of creating time for boredom. And as a mom, I've read information about how it's good

for our kids to be bored because that's where creativity sparks from. And that sort of feeling that you can create your own fun and joy. And I don't know why I've never made that connection to me as an adult, but what a cool, what a cool thing. And I would venture a guess, not very many of us are bored all that often because we have so much shit to do and things on our plate. And so that leads me to my next question. And you've said this a couple of times, but I think we've, we've been socialized to focus so much on the external, right? When you were talking about the body part of your book and having a conversation with our own bodies, what kind of jumped into my mind is creating that relationship within ourselves is what you're saying.

And how often how we feel about our body, how we feel about our work, how we feel about our value, how we feel about what we are maybe unconsciously, but handing over to other people or letting other people be the deciders of those things versus building it internally. What are some ways that we can be cultivating the inner work and letting go of that need for external everything, validation and all the whole, the whole gamut? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll speak specifically as, as in a metaphor to the, to the body, right? So I graduated from college at 22 years old. I had gained not the freshman 15, but the sophomore 30, and it didn't leave. Wanted to be an actress, graduated from college to pursue that industry, took a meeting with a pivotal meeting with a big commercial director in my big city who told me to stand up, sit down, turn around, sit back down, and told me to my face that if I wanted to be an actress, I would need to get myself down to a size zero. I was an eight. This led me into a decade long of body dysmorphia, eating disorders,

reading all the diet books, not getting my period for two years because I was so underweight. Then came out of that industry, became an entrepreneur, started really getting stressed out from being an entrepreneur, contracted an autoimmune disease, surrendered all my sovereignty to Western medicine who put steroids and antibiotics down my throat. Surgery didn't work. Western medicine failed me. That was my experience. And it wasn't until my late 30s that I realized that I had been handing over all of my power, my validation, my confidence in my entrusting myself from the inside out to other people. And this goes back to my woo-woo beliefs and here we go, but we're not just human flesh,

bone and fluids. We are sacred technology. We have DNA inside of our chromosomes filled with our genes that are literally encoded with light. And this includes not just our physical bodies, but we're here to express the light through our souls and through our personalities and psyches and messages and voices. And so really coming home to that truth is, I think, what everyone is seeking, whether they know it or not, that we are so sovereign and so powerful. And sometimes we have to be brought to our knees. Like I have been to really remember again, those truths and just start to pay attention to what's yours, what voices, what beliefs, what practices are yours or have you adopted unconsciously or consciously from the people around you, whether that even be your family

circle, your intimate friends, your social circle at work, your community online, what feels true and good and right in your body. It all comes back to your body and really checking in with where your body sits. The body doesn't lie. And we've been really conditioned to leave our bodies with all of the stimulus and all of the stress and all of the going that if we could just slow down, you know, tune in, make that a practice, I think we would find a lot more of our own truth underneath it all. And that's really the assignment of a light worker. So my last question, I know you have eight embodiments of the divine feminine, and I knew we wouldn't have time to go through all eight. So I honed in on the one that I'm most curious about because I define confidence and confidence is my jam. That's what I talk about all the time. I define confidence as firm and bold trust in self. And you have trust as one of the eight embodiments of the divine feminine. Tell us about trust from that perspective.

So in that chapter, I'm really speaking about wealth creation, right? And being a female entrepreneur serving lots of women, I felt it was really important to really rewrite a bit of this narrative that we have to hustle and pitch and grip and prove and convince people that we are worthy, that we have something of value for them. That's why I named my show, my podcast, The Spiritual Hustler, to reclaim that word hustle, but to do it from a feminine vibration. And there was a long period. I think trust is the ultimate flex of confidence and faith and internal peace. And to really, truly trust that everything is happening for you in perfect timing and to truly, literally make that a practice, that has actually made me more money.

That has brought me more aligned opportunities in the perfect time. When we release the gripping, when we contract energetically, subconsciously, consciously, physically, things don't move. There's no flow. And so really, truly practice it. Like every morning I say at my altar, I trust, I allow, I receive, thank you more, please. That is my mantra. Yesterday I took a nap in the middle of the day. I was exhausted. It was a Wednesday. I was so tired. I took a nap. I set the intention that while I let my body rest, something beautiful is going to come into my inbox that I don't have to try for. I woke up 30 minutes later, opened my inbox and I closed a client. It's like, it's like a practice, right? And I say in my book, when we allow to believe that when doors close,

windows open, when we stop gripping onto that one little tiny thread of an opportunity, there's a whole spindle waiting to unravel in our direction. I think trust shifts your frequency. It makes you more magnetic. It releases the desperation energy. And really it's, it's, I think the hardest one of all of the embodiments, but it's the most powerful. I agree on both counts, hard and powerful. And I loved what you said. It really spoke to me directly about the contracting, because that's what happens when you're not trusting, right? Like the, I need to control, I need to fix, I need to solve. And there's this contracting and just the reminder that things don't flow from that space.

And we don't feel good from that space. Where I often find trust becomes challenging for me is when things aren't going according to plan or when, you know, things are, and I put in air quotes, bad, right, or hard. And what I say to myself so often is the only thing that's missing is the benefit of hindsight. I don't yet know how this is working in my favor. I just get to trust that it will. And I say that, I didn't realize it until this moment, I say that so that I don't contract, so that I can breathe and move forward and not try to fix or control. Because it reminds me that just fundamental belief that things are working for our benefit and we get to trust ourselves. That doesn't mean everything's easy and works out often or all the time or anything like that. It

just means we get to trust that there is another side and we'll get to it. Yes. That's my thought. Reaction? No, I'm obsessed with that. And I think that it's really when we are up against those stress, when things are shitty and they're not working and we're stressed, that's where our trust is truly tested. It's easy to trust when things are going well. Yeah, exactly. It's all aligning.

I trust my life. I trust the universe. I'm co-creating with my reality. But when things are breaking down, that is where you are being called to a higher version of yourself and to really put those muscles of trust into practice. That's where we grow. Yes. That's how we grow. That's how we grow. Well, on that very powerful note, you must find and follow Jessica,

but absolutely get your hands on her book, The Light Work. It's out this week, available on Amazon in your local bookstore. But what I would do if I were you is go to thelightworkbook.com. Again, thelightworkbook.com. We'll put it in show notes because not only can you get the book there, but there are amazing resources, over $3,000 of value that you get for free. And then also Jessica's doing a virtual event that you can participate in as well. Okay, great. Yeah. So go there fast, friends. Jessica, thank you so very much for your time, your talent, and your light. Thank you. This has been awesome. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for having me. Okay. I'm going to close us out with one of my favorite

quotes that I've shared before, but it fits so well here. But before I do, let me say this. If you are feeling dark and things are heavy, I'm sending you so much love and reminding you that light only needs the smallest space to get in. And I promise it's there. And if it's too dark and too heavy for you to find the light on your own, please, please, please get the support you need. Whether that's therapy, spiritual guidance, medical support, whatever. Even if you can't see it, I promise you the world needs you here and there is light to find. So here's my favorite quote. I stopped waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel and I lit that bitch up myself. You are the light. There's a fire burning within you. I just know it. Grab your matches.

We ride at dawn because you being light is abso-fucking-lutely woman's work.