How to Gain Unshakable Confidence Through Clarity ft. Erin Weed

25:04Should I take the job? Should I, you know, whatever's going on in your life. Should I make this client? Right. If you write down the facts about it, the feelings about it and what you want, and don't overthink the whole thing, just let it flow, see what happens at the very end. and here's how all the frameworks start to tie together when you do head hardcore at the end of it you have some clarity even if you don't like what emerged you have clarity and you know what you need to do and that turns into confidence and then the confidence turns into the connection to actually go out there and do it make the connection so it all feeds into each other but head hardcore is just another way of saying intuition and gathering the full truth and operating from that place.

25:47I used to still work with a lot of activists because that's a big part of my background and a lot of activists operate just in the heart. And it's fire, it's passion, and it's amazing. But if you don't balance it out with the factual truths and a vision for where we're going here, it gets lost. Same thing working within Google. Brilliant, brilliant data people, mostly head. But if you don't have heart, like, what are we doing here? Like, this is a human experience. So now let's turn this distinctly on business, because what you just walked us through was beautiful. If we start with the head heart core framework, it leads to clarity and clarity turns into the confidence and the confidence turns into connection.

26:34And so it's at this point where people falter, at least from my perspective, in that the connection isn't expansive. enough. It's not at scale. So when you're talking to somebody and this person is like, I'm doing the work and I'm trying to create connection and I'm falling flat. From your perspective and your experience, if they're not getting the amount of connection that they want, clients, business, growth, how do they reverse engineer? From your perspective, what is something to be done? Well, I'll tell you the question I always ask my clients when this happens is I'll just say, did you really want to do that in the first place?

27:05And a lot of times the answer is my heart wasn't in it. But they did it because? The money, the opportunity, the temptation, whatever that is for that person. Feeling like they should. Feeling like other people do it and it's successful. So I should do it. And if you really get curious, a lot of times the things that don't work is because we didn't want it to work. Oh, that one hurts again. That one hurts. I feel like you're just calling me out. I'm just going through like a Rolodex of instances in the past where it was an unfavorable outcome. And all I think of myself was like at the origin, I didn't want to do it.

27:41And it's so calibrating again, you know, eight years later to be going into the conversation because I do push with my head. I have a very large head, you know, like I came out and my parents are like, this girl's never going to lift her head. She's going to be eight years old and she's going to wobble. Yeah. People are like, she has such thick hair. I was like, no, I got a big head and thin hair. Like people are like often misled. And so I do think that I can push through. And this is so recalibrating to say, what do you want to do? One of the things is when I walked away, we're going to get to the dig work that we had uncovered for myself and for JD.

28:15I talked to JD before the recording and I said, hey, can I share our experience? And he's like, it helps people. That's exactly what I want to do. And so you had said that there's this unsustainability of inauthenticity. I was deeply struggled with this for a lot of my life. The idea of being something and someone who was going to be wildly accepted. I didn't need to be approved of, but I needed to be accepted. I believed that my value as a human was in proportion to how much I gave and how much value other people had. And then we met and you had said there was an unsustainability of inauthenticity.

28:49Can we talk about that? Yes. From a business perspective. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I'm remembering you walking into my office and I think you could have taken that big head and kept on going and pushing and doing what you do, right? You were tired. You were tired. You were so tired. I remember your face. and you were tired of doing the things that other people said you should do or you're tired of a version of success that didn't feel true to you anymore you i'm not saying you were inauthentic i think you are wildly authentic you know it is kind of funny people ask me questions like i do work with very visible people and oh what's this person really like what's this person really like you know and you are just so authentic but you just said i had to write down you were tired of a version of success that you had achieved.

29:44And that is 100%. I was 100 % myself, but I was tired of the version of success that I achieved. Right. And we sometimes build the thing so successfully and we outgrow it. And then we feel like we have to stay doing it because now the world knows us for X, right? So we have to stay being X. And I'm like, no, no, no. We are here to evolve. And so part of the authenticity journey is about being willing to change, being willing to shed the skin, being willing to let go of the thing. And I have walked that talk and it is not always fun. But the good news is that the more in alignment you are gradually, when you do have to make these shifts, it doesn't feel so shocking.

30:26And so what is the cost of inauthenticity? Well, I think it's living a life that isn't true to you. And does that make you feel pain? For me, that's devastating. For me, that was really the reason that I started my first company when I was 23. In 2001, I had just recently graduated college. I was living in New York City, and I was a TV producer. And that was like my dream, telling stories, you know. And about a year into my TV career, I found out that one of my best friends named Shannon McNamara had been murdered while fighting off an attacker in her apartment. And this was back in Illinois, where We went to college.

31:09And it was definitely one of those situations where everything shifted for me. I just saw the world in a completely different way. And I flew home for the wake and the funeral. And this is looping back to this idea of around authenticity and inauthenticity. The night before the wake, I had a gathering of all of our sorority sisters, because obviously this was very shocking. and the person who killed her, I think at that point, hadn't even been caught yet. There was just rumors. It was nuts. So I was like, let's have a bonfire in my parents' backyard in suburban Chicago and let's just talk. And so everybody came over.

31:48And for the first few hours, we were talking about what had happened and processing and crying, all the things. But then the conversation started to shift as the evening went on. And we stopped talking about specifically what had happened to Shannon. And we started talking about all the things that we were going to do as these young women who were all in our 21, 22, 23, what we were going to start doing or stop doing as a result of this new, very murdery reality, this scary world that we had all woken up to because we were all very privileged people. And I started hearing people just say, hey, I was going to backpack Europe all by myself, but now I realize that it's just such a silly idea because that would be so dangerous.

32:31And so I'm going to cancel the trip. And I started hearing another sorority sisters say, I was going to take an internship downtown Chicago, but the parking garage there is super sketch. That's going to be too dangerous. I'm going to pass that internship. And just went on and on and on. All these things that we were going to stop doing as women that were totally authentic to our individual paths, we're going to stop doing it because something bad happened. And I was horrified because I was imagining Shannon looking down on this conversation being like, oh, hell no. Like, go live your life. Like, I'm so sorry this happened to me and it scared you, but like, go live your life.

33:09And Shannon's family backs me up on this. They believe she would think that. And so I ended up starting a company called Girls Fight Back. And I wanted to teach women how to physically defend themselves if they were ever in a bad situation, how to trust intuition, but also how to physically defend themselves if it escalated to that point. And so I started Girls Fight back in 2001. And basically, it was a seminar production company. I went out on the road. This was kind of pre-social media. This was like all the tools that we build businesses with now did not exist. And so I had to figure out how to start a movement and build a business based on a really tragic experience.

33:50But I didn't know this at the time. And it would have really, really helped me had I known that that entire 12-year Girls Fight Back movement was actually about authenticity. That is my dig word. Authentic. The violation that led me to creating that company was the fact that my sorority sisters were going to build inauthentic lives. To me, that was an absolutely intolerable. But an inauthentic life based on fear. True. Worse. And I get it. It's understandable, right? And we can't do it because it's just going to lead to all sorts of domino effect of inauthenticity. That's the problem. You make one super out of alignment decision and that will lead you to all of these other things.

34:39When I look back at my career, I see the domino effect and then the courage and the pain that it took to get back into realignment. Yeah. Yeah. And you ultimately, most people do get back there somehow, you know, because something will happen because it's unsustainable to be inauthentic for too long. And the unsustainability could be health. Just the body just starts to reject. It could be relationships. It could be they could be all sorts of things. Or it could even be mental health. There's plenty of people out there that are living inauthentic lives and they're from the outside, everything looks fine.

35:19And it's a result of inauthenticity. I've seen it and I've experienced all of those things. I've experienced the physical manifestation of being inauthentic, but here's the thing. I didn't have the words or the tools then. Like my body's not feeling well. And if I had actually just done the work, I probably would have realized I'm like, I am having a physical manifestation of knowing that I'm out of alignment. I've had mental health issues because I was out of alignment. I have had just deep pivots in my life and business because I was out of alignment. And now that I'm having these tools, I think that I am better at acutely of being aware of when I'm veering towards that.

35:53And so the amount of in alignment has gotten less and less over time. And so when we think about these things, we talk about like the business of alignment, you sold to that business, which congratulations, that's something that very few people even do. And then you started on a journey of speaking at a TED talk, helping other people develop their TED talks. You developed it like, hey, the tool that I'm going to use to help you get your TED Talk was actually the tool that started the next business. And so now we're going to talk about the business of your business because this is what this podcast is.

36:20I like showing the variety of businesses and lives that people have been able to build on the back of, in your particular case, being wildly authentic. And you're just saying, I have developed this beautiful life, a strong business doing this. And so if you want to know what it is that you do. So what is the business of your business? We're not going to talk numbers, but what are your revenue streams? How have you figured out your passion and made it a business? Yeah. So, well, it's the dig. It's doing the dig in multiple ways. I still do private intensives with people. That is one of my favorite things to do.

36:55I also train other people on how to do the dig. I love creating frameworks and I love teaching people how to do them and applying them almost in an open source kind of way with their own clients. So I certify people and I'm developing a course as well and doing a lot of writing and creating just to make this more accessible to people. And then you also go into organizations though, yes? Yeah. I'm a keynote speaker and I teach head hardcore mostly in the organizations. The dig and getting people down to their one word is a bit too individualized for that, but head hardcore is the basis of my keynote.

37:29Interesting. Okay. Well, that's essentially basically where we started the podcast. And for those people who are watching and listening, number one, thank you for being here. And if Erin has moved in any way, shape, or form what it is you're doing, you can find her on Instagram at Erin Weed. Tag her. Tag me. Now, what we're actually looking at as a business would be what we would call a product suite. Product suite are private intensive. Product suite is that she certifies other people. Product suite is creation of a course and or a book. Can I say that? Can I say that? Sure. I just did. We can cut it out.

38:01We can edit it. That's the beauty of this thing recording. No, we're good. We're good. I'm writing a book. I'm writing a book. And I want to speak it into existence because when I look at other people doing things that are so powerful, it's like I'm sitting here and I'm talking about this and I want people to know that the thing, the magic and the alchemy that it is that you do, you're finding a way to create a product suite and create a life that is less around one-on-one, less around one to small group, one to many. And you get to touch people in a much bigger way. And to me, in my mind, that's the beauty of business is how many spokes to a wheel can we create that are all pointing into the thing that you are being put on this earth to do.

38:38And so when we think about all of these things, you and I had a conversation about the book, and we talked about marketing. How do you market the brand that has become The Dig and Aaron Weed? What is your marketing mechanism? Well, I mean, for me, I funnel everything through my Dig word, which is authentic, authenticity. And so the funnel for me is always not funnel in a marketing sort of way, But like just how I make those choices is through the lens of what feels most real for me. And so for me, I love Instagram. I just like the visual medium. And I tend to do a few things. The first one is I'm trying to start kind of a side movement of the word of the week.

39:23So every week I pick one word and this is usually a word that I just want to infuse into my business, into my life. It's maybe a superpower that I need that I don't have that I really want to drop. Give me an example. Give me a good story here. Well, this week my word is optimism. And it's all about making the choice to see and to believe that a favorable outcome is coming. Like making a choice though. So like the word choice and optimism, I think are very closely tied. And so yesterday I wrote a post and I was, you know, sitting here at the beach and had my optimism hat on. And you sent me a selfie FYI.

40:06I love that selfie. I was like, you look good. I love the beach, man. I just love it so much. So now what I'm looking at, I'm almost looking at these one words as they're more than words to me. It's a frequency. a frequency it is a word is a label for a frequency so stick with me people who i've just lost on the woo but it's actually energy so like if i approach a situation like this i could have been nervous last night right like i'm gonna be a jasmine star like this is really you know this is exciting but i infused it with optimism there's only a favorable outcome that's happening so there is a frequency that when i showed up here today i felt so calm i felt so ready.

40:49I just trusted and believed that every single thing that is unfolding here is exactly as it's supposed to. That's optimism. So that's a frequency of optimism that I brought to this. I'm sure you had something running in the background for you. Did you have an intention? My intention today was to serve. Oh, I love that. And so one of the things that I have been noticing on the podcast is the way I hold myself on the podcast. And I've spoken about a little bit on the podcast is like, I think I come across as a lot of sharp edges and sharp edges can come across as also confident and not know-it-all, but kind of sort of, well, of course I know what to do.

41:29And like, I am impervious to doubt and fear and questioning. And I know that that's not me. I also know this is how I was born. This is me as a kid, as an eight-year-old, I could tell a Sunday school teacher or a bus driver, I was this. And so my focus is if I focus on serving people, they will see me as I am sharp edges and all, but they know the intentionality is to give to them something that has been given so much to me. And so that was my intention. That was a long story about it. Well, I love that. Okay. And I felt that like, like one of the questions that you asked me as we were voice noting, like planning this was just like, how can I make this awesome for you?

42:10Right. Like you're, you're not only serving your listeners by doing all of this, but you're wanting me to have a great experience as well. And it's just like, people don't usually ask that, you know, it's just like, so I felt the frequency of you wanting this to be good for me. You know what I mean? Okay. So go back to this idea of frequency. Now, the first time I met with you, I had never really understood that scientifically this is, I mean, sure we can say it's woo, but scientifically we vibrate. And so one of the things, and I'm going to get to that in a second, but can you explain that for somebody who is like, this is just so far out of my comfort zone and I don't get how this deals with business.

42:45Can you explain how you explained it to me, this idea that we as humans scientifically vibrate and it has a manifestation in our business or even in our personal life? Totally. It could be as simplified as saying people feel your business just as much as they see your website and they see what you wrote, whatever. Here's a great example. Have you ever gone to a conference? Let's just say it's a conference with a team. Let's say an online business conference, which you speak at most of those at this point. Now, at these conferences, you can choose all these different sessions that are breakout sessions, right?

43:17They're all pretty much going to be about online business though. But one person, you emerge from their session and you learned about online business, but you felt something. You felt a frequency of freedom. Oh, I can have an online business and I can live anywhere in the world. I could fulfill my dream of being a digital nomad or whatever, you feel free. And then you go to your next session. And this time you walk out feeling integrity of like, how do you do online business right in a way that serves people? Right. And it is a completely different feeling. In both of these sessions, you were learning about online business, but there were different frequencies that you walked out with.

44:00When I'm working with speakers or people that are just trying to communicate, all we're doing is we're naming those frequencies so that people don't just feel them but they hear them too you know if we fully claim it so like i would love for your listeners for all of you at home who are listening to this like think about it like okay why do you do what you do why do you do what you do okay i know what you do right let's say you're a coach but what is the frequency behind it. You know what I mean? Is it about wholeness? Is it about love? Is it about being? So as we were going through this process, as you articulated early on in the episode, you had said you come down with like 10 words.

44:41And I want to go back into this visual, the white circular table, the bright orange chairs, Aaron sitting across from me, the windows with illuminating just above the head coming down. And we had, I would probably say, well over a hundred post-it notes. I mean, hundreds at this point in time. And so what you start doing is you start talking and you start distilling down the 10 words. And when I see the 10 words, I see myself and I see what matters to me. And then we distilled it down to one word. And I had that head heart alignment all three across the board when I looked at the word and I said, oh, that's exactly why I'm put on this earth.

45:20And my word was enough. and it kind of just goes back and puts a little bit of a lump in my throat is for so long I had to learn that I was enough just me being me to build the business and everything that I do every offer I make every stage I stand on yes I am teaching about x but what I really really have become known for is making people believe that they're enough and making believe that the thing that they want can be enough and is enough and that the impossible is possible for them. And the minute I identified that the word was enough, that's all I wanted to say. And so I want to say thank you in person for doing that.

46:01Well, and so when you say the word enough, what I experience is I drop into the frequency of enoughness. And the dark side of that is experiencing times in life where you don't feel like you're enough. In fact, maybe feeling like you're too much. Right? So there's this whole spectrum with enoughness, right? And we're always, you know, we're not enough. And now we're too much. And now we're not enough. You know, like what's the, you know, what's the just right? And only you can decide. But I think you are an incredible teacher of enoughness, even before we named it and claimed it. You know what I mean?

46:40Because you carry that frequency. just as much as you assure people that they are enough. I also love that you challenge people when they're not stepping up to the level of who they are. You do that for me. When we left the last meeting, I was like, I have got to do more marketing. This is ridiculous because I really don't enjoy it. Right. But what we did, okay. So yes, I call it a loving kick in the pants. I absolutely challenge the people that I desperately, within my bones, you absolutely can do whatever you want to do because the idea would not be given to you if you were not capable of it.

47:17So how do you step into that? And then for the people who know what it is that they want to do and they set their mind to it, I was like, oh no, honey. Okay. You know, now, now we must work. Now we must work. And here's the thing that we talk about being authentic and we go back to Aaron and I sat across from each other and it's just how we like live life is we can immediately drop in and we're immediately honest and immediately like, How do we go and thrive? And you said, Jasmine, my word is authenticity. It is authentic. And the current mode of marketing feels inauthentic to me. And so then we had a conversation of saying, cool, how might we, not this is what I think you should do, how might we make it authentic?

47:54Because you have a vision and a goal that is the brand that is the dig, that is going to change people's lives, that is going to, dare I say it, change the world for when people understand why they were put on this earth. And part of that would be the book. And part of that could be a course, none of which are out right now. So I think to my mind, how might I, as a go-to-market strategist, as a person who wants to 10x your business and 10x your impact, what must we do? And so we got down to it, and a lot of it came down to, okay, who must we hire? How might Erin be 100 % authentic in her marketing and get other people around you to support that vision and take it off?

48:28And that was the answer, and that's what we came to, and that was authentic. And so yes to the work, yes to being authentic, and can I give you something? yeah okay oh i on the back of us talking i thought to myself i walk around and i remind myself to be enough and to remind people to be enough and so i got a circular necklace with on the inside your dig word has been engraved oh my and so i just want to say thank you for reminding me Thank you for flying. Y 'all, she flew from Boulder. And so circular affinity to always being remember that you are authentically you and the world needs you as you are.

49:16And thank you for showing up for me. But also, Erin, thank you. You flew out from Boulder. You came here on this day. You arranged for your children to be well-loved and taken care of. and you're here in the service of others. And I just want to say thank you. So before we go, I want to go back and highlight a few things that stuck out to me is as you're listening, your one main takeaway is to think about something that might be in your path or in your journey that you are feeling a certain way about. And we're going to apply the head, heart, core framework. All three ideally would be in alignment.

49:54But if in the case that they're not, the answer will come to you if you have the courage and the gumption to actually say, what is it that I want? And what is it that I want becomes very clear. And once you have the clarity, you will be empowered to step into the confidence. And once you have the confidence, you will then be able to create connections. Now, if some point you realize that you haven't been able to create the connections at scale that you had wanted, Erin asked, if there is a lack of connection, did you even want to do it to begin with? And if you are at that point, the thing I hope and a bid and I encourage you to do to stay authentic to yourself is to go back and ask yourself, what is it that I want to do?

50:35Because the more clarity you have, the more confidence and the more connections that you will build. And if you happen to be like me, who have built a business, a brand, and you are tired of the version of success that you have achieved, I dare you and I encourage you to go back and do another head, heart, core alignment. At the time of this recording, all I have been doing for the last year is head, heart, core. It is dark work. It is hard work. And it is worth it work. And for those of you who are here and you thought this was a little bit woo, I challenge you. Turn the woo into work. And Erin, as you continue to build out all of the things that point back to the ecosystem that is you, where do people go to connect with you even deeper?

51:22ErinWeed.com. And I also just wanted to offer a free training. There's a little button on my website that says free training. And it actually walks people through the head hardcore exercise. So all you have to do is press play and I will take you through the whole thing. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, you can find Erin Weed and the free training at erinweed.com. Also, Erin Weed on Instagram. and if you decide that you would like a word of the week, an intention for the week so that we can focus on vibrations and if you would like to borrow optimism or serve from either of us, please feel free to do that.

52:03Tag us at Jasmine Star at Erin Weed. Thank you for listening and watching the Jasmine Star Show. I am so blessed because of your constant feedback that we get people like Erin to fly on our own time and time to come into Newport to do these recordings. It is an honor. It is a privilege. Thank you from the bottom of my heart and thank you, Erin. Thank you. you're the best you're the best I love you thank you I love you too thank you