Behind the Scenes at Soother HQ
Happy Sunday, Soothers. I was out running on this mid-February morning that cuts the line between winter and spring. I still smelled woodsmoke from chimneys around the lane, but also fresh sawdust, mulch and cut grass. It was cold enough I had to wear gloves and a hat, but the sun warmed my face as I crested the hill. The creek had edges of ice trimming it like lace, but daffodils and crocuses pushed up relentlessly, eagerly, from the ground.
As I ran I listened to Ezra Klein's interview with Rick Rubin, whose book, The Creative Act, I wrote about last weekend here in the Soother. Klein and Rubin dove a bit deeper into the concept of the "sensitive antennae," Rubin's term for creatives' ability to pick up and notice on the frequency of ideas around them. I thought about doing a whole Sunday Soother based on that concept, starting with a story of me and a weird crusty energy healer who believes in aliens handing me a pair of copper divining rods as we stood at the top of a ridge in Sedona, Arizona, but I decided to save that one for my podcast. You can listen to that episode here.
But instead I decided to write today a bit about some behind-the-scenes stuff going on at Sunday Soother HQ (aka me at my kitchen island still in my sweaty running clothes) because if there's something that's more creative, more spiritual, and more overall just completely requiring of self-inquiry, expression, intuition and experimentation than running your own creative business, I haven't yet met that. And I thought it could be fun for you all to understand a little bit about how my business is evolving and where I'm thinking of taking it in the next year or years.
First off, let me say this: running a business, being a creative entrepreneur or solopreneur or whatever I'm calling myself these days, is fucking wild and exhausting and endlessly scary and frustrating. It's also totally magical, captivating, and utterly liberating. It is the most creative act of my life. I know those of you who have done this or are doing this understand that duality.
The thing is: there is nobody responsible for making decisions but you.
This is both excellent and horrible.
There is no right answer about how to balance your time, create in the world, make money, charge, build audiences.
This is both creatively stimulating because you're experimenting all the time and trying new things, and also totally frustrating. There's never, ever one right answer you can land on permanently and settle into.
The ups and downs of your business are reflecting two things: your own personal growth and interests, and the culture and society around you-slash-the interests of your own particular audience. A lot of the time, these two things will be totally at odds, and the call to follow your own intuition and interest — which I think we must try to do to the best of our abilities, above what we think "could" make us money or be technically successful — can be increasingly difficult to hear or trust.
As a creative business owner, I have it about as easy as anybody has ever had it in this field. I come from a background of economic privilege and maintain all the privileges of my race, sexual orientation and more. I have a safety net. I'm an unmarried woman with no children and no caregiving duties, meaning I can basically completely devote myself to doing my work and building my business.
And it's still the hardest, scariest thing in the world I've ever done!
But what I try to do is feel gratitude for the constant intellectual and creative stimulation running a creative business gives me, rather than fall in a pile of despair about how never in my life will I ever be able to settle into one easy, consistent rut. After all, it was the rut of the corporate 9-5, the hierarchy, the patriarchal, racist nature of that system, the obligations, the dullness, the politics, the monotony that was both easy but stifling, that were the inspiration for me to try out this whole entrepreneurship thing anyways.
Would I rather have this than that again? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
And simultaneously I feel like I'm often blindly stumbling in the dark of a cave system, reaching my hands out to the walls to guide me and guessing at which path to go in next. Intuition plays a big part in this, and lately, my spidey-senses have been guiding me in a few different directions.
For the past three years (I started my biz in 2020, so I am currently entering my fourth year of running it, which is wild) I focused on one-to-one life coaching and teaching courses. My coaching and teaching focused on intention, self-discovery, healing, inner child work, nervous system regulation and learning to heal to better thrive as a highly sensitive person. A lot of the work was helping clients deal with pain, and trauma, and growth from shame, recovery from Complex-PTSD or other wounds. Some of it could be relatively heavy and tender, as any healing work is.
What I'm sensing now is a subtle shift, but it's taking on a few forms:
I'm sensing in me a desire to focus on groups at a larger scale, but also at a smaller scale... For the past three years my work has been 1:1 or in smaller groups, of anywhere between 4-40 people in some of my courses. There is so much clarity in my mind that the group structure provides an extra layer of healing and joy for the participants, but the 1:1 work allows me to go deeper with somebody and perhaps accomplish more, with more accountability. I feel both a sense that I want to create a large-scale membership with hundreds of people in it, at affordable rates, for that larger group joy, and then also focus in on groups of 4-6 people, around business or creativity, perhaps, for more money. I had an idea last night in meditation to do a small HSP entrepreneur group called The Business Playground; drawing in biz owners who have gone full-time and/or made say, $20,000 in their business already into deeper support and conversation. Stay tuned. I'm also definitely launching the Sunday Soother membership later this spring, you can read about that and get on the waitlist here.
And speaking of playgrounds, I'm entering a playful magic era. A lot, a LOT of my work in the past few years has reflected my own heavier healing journey. As I worked to heal shame, codependency, and to connect with my very wounded inner children, that work was reflected in my coaching too, and in what my clients needed from me. And now, as I know my nervous system is more regulated, and those inner children have been supported and validated... all I want to do now is play. I'm in a lighter era. I'm constantly obsessed with magic and feng shui and spellwork and manifestation, and learning and teaching more of it effectively to people, so they too can delight at living in this utterly magical and fantastical universe we exist in (that oppressive systems are continually trying to throttle). It's all witchy, all the time, but like, good witchy. Glenda witchy.
Finally, I really miss my blogging roots and want to try to re-incorporate that. For anybody who doesn't know, I have been blogging in one form or another since 1995 when I was 15 and my family first got AOL dial-up. It started on Radiohead email listservs; moved to Diaryland and Livejournal; my college boyfriend and I ran a blog that started when I was documenting my post-college year in Italy and turned into a site that got us involved with the DC blogging community in the 2000s and 2010s. The Sunday Soother was born out of a writers block that lasted about, oh, six years, and was my re-entry into re-establishing my writing voice and creativity. It used to be a much more conversational, casual and kind of almost influencer-y newsletter, but as I evolved in my professional identity the content reflected that too and it became a lot more teacher-y and instructive, I would say. As I grew in readership I felt an obligation to keep that "professionalism" up, and while I think I've written many really excellent and helpful pieces that have touched on teaching healing and growth and spirituality, I miss having a more playful space to write more casually in, and perhaps more regularly, too.
So what does this all mean? Well, like I said, the act of creative business is a lot of the time one of a heavy mix of intuition but also totally guessing at what might work. It's hard to describe the intuitive process in business. Basically, I'll get an idea I can't shake, and for me, right now, here are a few of those ideas and how they might work:
The Sunday Soother membership: This is already in the works and will launch in late March. I'm currently planning for three tiers, from $11-$44, with different levels of content. The vision of the membership is to be a community geared towards the personal, spiritual, creative and entrepreneurial growth of the highly sensitive person. Offerings will include weekly Tarot/energy readings, intention setting, my much-beloved New Moon Journal Circles, masterclasses on a variety of topics, and maybe more? What I'm excited about: the creativity possibility, reaching a larger audience, building a real, consistent community, having a place where all my wild and wacky ideas I want to teach, which are now kind of scattered throughout the year in random one-off workshops, having a more consistent home. What I'm nervous about: the financial viability of this vis a vis the amount of work I'd put into it. It probably would require hundreds of people signing up for it to really work. My audience is sizable, but not like, huge (I have 7k people on Instagram; 5k here on the Soother; probably about 300-500 downloads of each podcast). Random past calculations I've done seem to indicate anywhere from 1-5% of my audience sign up for paid offerings and that may not be enough to make it financially stable. I'm not adverse to hard work especially in the first year of an offering; I compare business constantly to a garden, you have to put in the work and tending first before you see any returns, and that's part of the process. But, I have a tendency to overgive, too, and I worry about burning out before it becomes financially viable. So, this is going to be a big huge experiment, which I'm equal parts nervous and excited for. You can sign up for the waitlist here. My commitment to it is to do a full year of it, no matter what that looks like.
High-level small groups, focused on either magic or business... or both. I was talking to my friend Meg the other day who was in my Secretly Ambitious biz course when it was just 4 people and we were reminiscing how great that was. In 2022 I taught my 3 flagship classes to big groups, 30-50 people each. And that was definitely magical. But I missed the intimacy and accountability of a smaller group. I could give custom coaching to each member but they still had a sense of community, too. I have that now in my Soothe mastermind small groups, so I'm relishing in that. And I'm also thinking seriously about launching 1-3 small groups around magic/manifestation and/or business later in the year, keeping them under 6 people. What I'm excited about: the chance to really impact a small group of people and get to know them deeply and be able to give them life-changing coaching, especially in the field of biz, which I love to teach. What I'm nervous about: for this to be viable for me to do it probably would come with an $8k-$10k price tag. I'm a Capricorn, so I've got a lot of natural talent with selling and charging and finances overall, but I still struggle with fear of judgment and nobody signing up the higher my prices are.
Self-paced courses: I am gonna turn a bunch of my past courses and workshops into passive, self-paced offerings. Secretly Ambitious, Intentional Living, and Intentional Dating will be coming out to you soon, if you haven't taken those. They won't have live coaching or access to me or a community as part of them, which can be a bummer, but they will be more affordable (they were each about $1,000 beforehand and probably in self-paced versions will be more like $500).
The "Secret Soother": It's hard not to think about moving to Substack and making some money off a newsletter, when literally everybody else is doing it. But I really do have a commitment to keeping the Soother (and my podcast) free. I think they are the best funnel I could have for folks to eventually find my coaching and courses, so I never want to gate-keep them with a cost. But I have thought about moving to Substack and doing the following: Turning on subscriptions for people who want to pay, just because they like the Soother and want to support it. And then also having a $5/month subscription option for an idea that came to me the other day: the "Secret Soother." This is where I could incorporate my more casual, bloggy style of writing. I honestly am thinking of this like a Tumblr account. Quick shares, hot takes, more stuff about health and wellness and magic that I'd like to write about as I'm discovering, but don't really warrant a full Sunday Soother essay. What I'm excited about: This sounds fun! What I'm nervous about: Nothing really, other than the process of moving off of Mailchimp and the admin of having to update all my subscription sites. Maybe there's some more consideration I should do around Substack as a platform first. But this feels like fun experimentation, and to be able to more casually blog again feels super super fun.
And that's where my brain, and business is, these days! As these ideas unfold or shift, you'll see them play out in real-time. Who knows if I will follow through on them, or how they will actually look when they come out to play, or if they actually will see the light of day. Stuff changes for me and it changes quick, but this is what I'm thinking about as we continue into 2023.
I hope you found this peek a bit interesting. Thanks for being a part of my evolving creation, of my small bit of creative offerings to the world. It's a delight and it's magic and it's so fun (even while it's confusing and scary and frustrating) and I'm so grateful for each and every one of you who make up this sweet and tender community.