Why self regulation is a crucial part of creating success
We are going to be diving into a conversation all about self-regulation and why learning to self-regulate is such an important aspect of running a successful business & experiencing the richness of your life.
I want to talk about this because when we're jumping into looking at things through the lens of...
How do I attract more soulmate clients?
How do I receive more money in my business?
How do I show up more embodied in my truth?
How do I manage my energy more effectively?
The most important thing that we need to connect with is self-regulation.
In this blog we’ll get into:
- What is self-regulation?
- Why self-regulation is important for your wellbeing & success as a coach
- How not knowing how to self regulate can impact every aspect of your life & business
- What are a few powerful ways to regulate your emotions & energy?
- How expanding your capacity comes from learning to self regulate
What is self-regulation?
Self-regulation is your ability to monitor and manage your energy states, your emotions, your thoughts and your behaviours in a way that produces positive results.
Why self-regulation is important for your wellbeing & success as a coach
When you're able to self regulate in a way that's conducive to your overall well being, it starts to impact everything else in your life:
- Your relationships
- How you show up in your business
- The way you coach your clients
- The way you manage money
- The way you feel during your launch
Literally, everything comes back to how you're able to self-regulate.
How can you hold your energy?
How can you hold your power?
How do you process things that happen; the challenges, the good, & the experiences that leave you just like fucking drooling with excitement?
Learning how to self-regulate requires self-awareness, emotional intelligence, & knowing how to handle external stimulation.
As a prime example, think of social media.
How do you actually handle all that external stimulation?
Are you able to cope with stress while still being able to connect with others?
What's becomes super important here is actually developing ways to sustain your focus.
Your ability to self-regulate as an adult is directly related to how you learned to self-regulate during childhood.
One of the biggest things that you can give to yourself in your adult life is re-parenting and doing that inner child healing.
This will help you get grounded in the present and realize how you'd like to show up in your life and handle things as they happen.
How not knowing how to self regulate can impact every aspect of your life & business
Oftentimes, when someone has poor self-regulation skills they lack self-confidence.
It could show up as:
- struggling to feel worthy, or
- having a really hard time handling stressful situations, or
- maybe getting really frustrated super easily.
Self-regulation really gives us the ability and the capacity to bounce back from challenging situations with far more grounded energy and a lot more self-compassion.
In this self-regulated state, we're also able to stay calm under pressure and know how to process our emotions in a healthy way.
When we're talking about creating a life beyond, your most wild, delicious dreams and you're looking to expand your capacity to receive more of what you desire, it comes back to how secure you feel within yourself & how secure you feel within your ability to hold the energy of the things that you're calling in.
What can happen is sometimes when you're not able to self regulate, and your nervous system hasn't acclimated to what you've called in, all of a sudden, it doesn't feel safe, and you can end up sabotaging it away or unconsciously totally rejecting it as your reality.
It can keep you in spirals that don't feel conducive to what you're actually here to experience as a premium coach.
And so when we're talking about developing a practice of self-regulation, the biggest thing and most important step is awareness.
It's truly understanding who you're being in the world and how you show up in your life.
It's starting to understand what your triggers are, what your stressors are, and just being able to meet yourself with a lot of love, a lot of curiosity, and a lot of self-compassion.
When we're embarking on a journey of learning how to regulate ourselves,
when we're embarking on a journey of learning how to be more in touch with our emotions and being able to manage our energy in a way that is conducive to our overall well being inside and outside of our business,
it's really crucial that we approach these things with that curiosity and understanding that it doesn't have to be a huge doom and gloom experience.
Remember that you get to move through your experience of healing, evolving and transforming from the lens of self-worship, play, joy, & magick.
That’s not to say that every single experience is going to be easy, or a walk in the park, or not challenge you, but we do get to invite in the ability to move through our experiences with a lot more grace, rather than feeling like we have to suffer to get what we want.
Instead of feeling like we have to struggle before something good happens, something that I really enjoy infusing into the work that I do with my clients is making, healing, evolving, and transforming, fun, playful, and curious.
It’s something that we can enjoy along the way because the reality is we are always meeting new parts of ourselves.
Yeah, it can feel like a spiral from hell when you get stuck in this self-help narrative of
feeling like you constantly need to fix yourself,
or there's constantly something more that you need to do,
or that every time something challenging happens you all of a sudden think that you have so much more shadow work to do.
And don't get me wrong, life is so nuanced, and it's not to say that there isn't going to be shadow work to do, or there isn't going to be certain traumas to face or challenges from the past that we need to make amends with.
But what we do need to remember is that you are a multifaceted human being,
You're not broken, you don't need fixing, there's so much that you get to experience in this life that can come from that place of pleasure and curiosity and fulfillment, versus operating from the lens of having something wrong with you.
I'd really like to invite in that conversation around there being nothing to fix, you are a whole person already.
Truly the journey is about you remembering and returning to that wholeness, that deep inherent worthiness that is your birthright.
And so, when we're looking at learning how to self-regulate, it really comes back down to you as an individual person and understanding what is going to work best for you.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to learning to regulate your nervous system and manage your energy and emotions.
You are a multi-dimensional human being and you're never meant to be boxed into this, one-size-fits-all approach where you are trying to be somebody else or you're trying to do something in the exact way someone else does.
We really want to look at what is going to facilitate the most expansion for you in the most straightforward way where it doesn't have to be super complex and overwhelming.
We want to look at ways that you can get back to that deep sense of fulfillment and grounded energy within yourself through things that actually feel exciting and fun.
And again, I’m not saying that you're not going to hit resistance at times or that you're not going to be challenged or that you're always going to be motivated.
What we want to look at is how you can,
even in those moments where you're feeling resistance,
even in those moments where you doubt yourself or feel frustrated,
even when it comes to the actual practices themselves to help you move through your different experiences,
How you can actually hold yourself through that?
How you can move through it?
It's not about avoiding, it's not about suppressing, it's about learning how to hold all parts of you because no part gets left behind.
What are a few powerful ways to regulate your emotions & energy?
So there are a few different ways that you can dive into a practice of self-regulation.
Meditation/Mindfulness
One of the biggest ones is meditation or mindfulness. I am a huge advocate for meditation. I've been doing it every day now for years.
It's not about you needing to have some kind of surreal experience every time you meditate, it's really about you being in touch with your body.
It's about noticing those sensations that are happening, noticing the quality of your breath, noticing your thoughts, bringing awareness into who it is you desire to be, and being able to really be with yourself from that place of curiosity, rather than judgment.
Meditation isn't necessarily just about you sitting there for 10 minutes, it's about what happens as a result of you learning how to attune to yourself.
So when you're meditating for that 10 minutes, it's not just about that period, it's how you end up training your brain, your body, and your soul to attune to your human experience outside of just the times that you're sitting down to meditate.
Movement
Movement is a huge way to self-regulate.
When we're talking about meditation, it doesn't need to look like sitting on a yoga mat or sitting on your couch with your eyes closed, it literally can be anything that you're being fully present with.
Shaking is an incredible way to regulate your energy, and your emotional body to release trauma.
This is something that I have dove into a little bit in the past, I'm not going to go super far into the benefits of shaking, but I do highly encourage checking it out.
Other forms of movement that may be of benefit are of course dancing, working out, walking, or yoga.
The idea is that you're moving energy through your body.
Movement is such a beneficial thing for so many reasons on top of self-regulation.
Check in With Yourself
This is something that takes practice, but another important thing that you can do is be able to check in with yourself throughout the day.
Ask yourself,
How am I?
How am I thinking right now?
Who am I being right now?
What am I thinking right now? And is it actually true? What could be true instead?
It's basically being able to move through the day recognizing and reframing those challenging situations into a more positive light.
It's being able to actually allow yourself to become that observer of your thoughts where you're not identifying with your thoughts or feelings, but you’re rather witnessing your experiences and then deciding what they actually mean to you or what they don't mean to you.
Attune to Your Emotions
Another thing is being able to attune to your emotions by being able to actually identify and understand your emotions and the emotions of others.
I always say that emotions aren't facts, and nor are your thoughts, they’re experiences that you have.
But it's really important that you're able to get to a point in your self-regulation journey where you're able to not make your feelings mean something about you, but rather actually use them as signposts for what you do or don't desire.
Use them to know what feels good or what doesn't feel good.
What is a yes or what is a no for you?
What needs to be adjusted or what feels good to be with?
When we're in a process of learning to regulate ourselves, we're able to approach our emotional states with that curiosity & compassion, knowing that part of our human experience is feeling things.
Feelings aren't bad or good. Feelings only have the meaning that you give them.
So when you're in a sad experience and you've learned how to regulate yourself, instead of making it mean that you're doing something wrong, or that something's wrong with you and that everything that you are working on is just gonna fail, you're able to witness the sadness and think,
“Oh, interesting. I'm having the experience of feeling sad.”
“Well, what do I need right now?”
“How can I love myself?”
“Does my body need rest?”
“Is there something that I could do to elevate my state?”
Know that no matter what you're feeling, it doesn't actually need to impact the results that you have in your business.
It's really about getting to that point where you're able to notice that you’re having an experience, and then being able to actually choose what meaning you want to give that experience.
Breathwork
The other one that I wanted to talk about is breathwork.
There are many methods of breathwork that all have different effects on the body, your energy, and your state of being.
I’ll explain one of the techniques that I find really effective.
I actually learned this from my partner, Justin, he is currently studying to be a breathwork facilitator.
As someone who has experienced different waves of anxiety their whole life due to a number of things, something that has been a huge help for me in my adult life has been learning how to regulate myself through my breath.
The type of breathwork that Justin taught me that I found really, really helpful is a slow breathing technique.
1) You inhale really slowly through your nose for five seconds,
2) Then you exhale really slowly through your nose for five seconds,
3) and you finish a round by holding your breath for 10 seconds.
4) You just keep repeating that until you feel that sense of calm, really focusing on taking those nice, slow, deep belly breaths in through your nose.
Sometimes it can be helpful to repeat some kind of mantra, or affirmation when you are moving through a challenging state of being.
One that I really like to use is “I am loving awareness.”
You could also use something like, “I am in the process of calming myself down."
The key thing here is finding what works for you.
Expanding your capacity comes from learning to self regulate
As a leader, as a coach, as somebody who's running a business, you are in a position where you are literally holding space with and for your clients, your community, your team, yourself, most importantly, and your friends, your family, maybe your partner, and whoever.
You are in a position where you are learning how to be in relationship with the energy, the emotions and the different states of being within yourself, but also within others.
And so when we're talking about expanding your capacity
to receive more money,
to hold the energy of more clients,
to be able to handle more delegation, more responsibility, & more eyes on you,
it's so crucial to your sustainable success that you learn how to regulate your emotional states, especially when it comes to who you're being in your business.
When you don't know how to regulate yourself you can easily get pulled into others' energy.
I've seen this with my clients to where they come to me while they’re in a process of learning how to regulate their emotions, and they would find that on their coaching calls they would feel really connected to their clients' energy and automatically mirror it.
If their client was feeling hyper-aroused or really stressed about something, they would then feel themselves being sucked into that exact energy.
We don't want to be operating from that energy when we're in a position of supporting our clients, we want to be able to hold our energy and hold our power.
When we do that we can hold a very powerful, secure, and expansive space for them while they process their experiences.
The same goes for after your client calls.
If you've had a bigger day of calls, and all of a sudden, you haven't regulated yourself or you haven't cleansed your energy field after each call, you might find yourself in a state where you feel really overwhelmed, your nervous system might be super dysregulated, or you might feel anxious
Whatever it is, it's so so important that you learn how to self-regulate.
You'll notice that when you are in a position where you're struggling with self-regulation, it'll become really clear during things like when you're launching.
You'll notice pretty quickly if you’re not self-regulating during a launch.
I've seen it time and time again, where people aren't prioritizing nervous system regulation and emotional intelligence, or even knowing how to actually process the thoughts that come up in that experience, and they are going through their entire launch feeling like they're holding on to the holy shit handle of their life, and not even enjoying the process.
When they get to the end of it, they're like,
“holy shit, I feel like I need to take like a 10-week vacation because I feel so burnt out.”
So needless to say, the point I'm trying to get across here is self-regulation is crucial to creating sustainable success in your business.
And when we're looking at being able to get to this place, it's really about you learning to be in a beautiful relationship with yourself.
I believe that as you're creating incredible amounts of impact, success, wealth and joy, I want you to be able to actually feel that in every chapter you step into as a premium coach because I believe that in this chapter,
This is where success meets sustainability for you,
Where business meets pleasure,
Where intuition meets that juicy impact,
And where you get to step into a timeline so deeply embodied in your magnetic brilliance that you can't help but be like,
“Oh my god, pinch me,” as you experience how absolutely amazing your life and business get to be.
So I hope that this has given you some insight as to why self-regulation and emotional intelligence needs to be, in my opinion, a non-negotiable part of running your successful business from a sustainable place.
I believe that you get to have your cake and eat it too, and one of the most important ways for you to be able to show up fully embodied in your unique brilliance is by being able to see and hold yourself through being able to know how to regulate your nervous system.
If you loved the topic of this post, be sure to listen to the full, unedited podcast episode of The Embodied Leadership Podcast at the links at the top of the page.
Please reach out and connect with me below 👇
Connect & Work With Rachael:
The Embodied Leadership Newsletter
