031: Type-A to 'It's All OK': Law of Attraction Journey

As you’ve been building your business have you ever felt exhausted? Felt like you're overdoing it? When I say overdoing it, I mean literally doing, doing, doing all the time, and being stressed out about the results - or perhaps the lack of the results. If we're going to make it, if we're going to build brilliant sustainable businesses, we don't want to feel those levels of stress, and this is something that I've been looking into a lot. So, if you're with me on this one, let's dive in.

When I was 11 years old, I had a run of success. Within a couple of weeks, I got a distinction on my bat mitzvah exam, at the same time as passing the 11 plus, which in the UK is a selective exam that tells you which high school you're going to go to and allows you access into a selective school. In my case this was an all-girls school, which was only for people that pass this exam. I think at the same time I also passed my violin exam, because I seem to remember things came in threes. I remember the reaction that I got - as you can imagine my Mum was over the moon - you know, typical Jewish mother, she was so excited about the achievements of her first born. I think I lapped up the response from all the adults around me, my grandparents, parents, aunties, friends, that I was doing something special. I was an achiever.

When I look back, I realise that taking that on board has been something that I've carried with me through all these years and into my forties - that appetite to be an overachiever, to always be acing everything.

I doubt my type A personality was born from that experience, but it certainly led me into a path that, through a 20-year career working in advertising and through into my experience as an entrepreneur, has taken me to a place where now I've just stopped and said, is this really what it's about? Is this really how I need to act?

Through my experience in academia, getting my degree, through to getting my job in advertising, I always wanted to exceed. I always wanted to do really well with my achievements, and I would push myself into action. I would motivate myself. I was always the person that was getting it done, that others would look to for inspiration.

That has been a blessing for many, many years in many, many ways. If you followed along with my story about my surrogacy journey, you will know that upon finding myself infertile at 29 years old, I wasn't going to take that lying down. I motivated myself, I pushed forward, I took action, and I was inspired and all the things that create amazing success until, seven years later, my beautiful twin girls were born in California.

Over the years though, I think this pushing and striving has also taken its toll. Perhaps you can relate - just that exhaustion that you feel even after achieving something wonderful. You think, gosh, does it really have to be so hard? Do I really have to be pushing and striving so much because I'm tired? I'm not enjoying the ride. I think that's a lot what it's about.

It's about focusing too much on the outcome and very little on the journey, which of course we know should be the enjoyable part. Working towards something should be something we enjoy doing, not just something we have to do in order to get what we want at the end of it.

This isn't something that I perhaps understood very well until now. Back in early 2020, I was laid off from my 20-year career in advertising. As a senior director that was a blow, but at the same time, I knew that I was destined for a different path. I knew that I wanted to be my own boss.

I knew I wanted to help people and work in a heart-centered environment. I knew that I wanted to use the skills and everything that had been me to that point, make an impact, make an income, and feel lit up every day.

If you're listening to this, I'm sure that you share those ambitions too. I really did throw myself into the business of being an entrepreneur. I think I was really fast out the gate. I absorbed everything about online business that I could at the time. I took action. I stayed motivated. I really drove myself forward. For a while it was working - my sheer enthusiasm and excitement carried me through for months and months. As I got my first clients, as I started to build my business and my income started to increase, as my social media presence got going, as my podcast took off - I felt the momentum of it, I felt excited and was really, really driven to just keep building it, thinking if I just keep going on this trajectory, think where I could be in a year or in five years - and then it happened.

Now, if you've been listening to my podcast for a while, you might have spotted a bit of a theme that crops up once in a while and that is what happens when your vibration isn't as high as you wanted it to be. In fact, check out episodes 24 and 26, where I talk about how you can increase your vibe so you can be successful, and also about the entrepreneur dip and how to overcome it. Although I didn't realise it at the time, I'm now realising that this was me reaching burnout. This was me suddenly saying, I can't go on like this, this isn't fun. This is hours of work every day. This is not getting the results that I would envisage from the number of hours I’m putting in. This is starting to say what next? Starting to feel burned out.

Now, if I was wanting to feel burned out, I could have stayed in corporate. For any of you who've been in those kinds of high-pressure jobs, you know the feeling and I'm sure that you'd be very, very happy never to feel that again - as would I. Yet here I was – I had created this job for myself that felt like hard work and at that point I started to look inwards. I started to question if there was another way. At this point I really started to turn towards the law of attraction, wanting to know more and more about it.

Now, perhaps you know a great deal about the law of attraction - it's so popular with entrepreneurs in the self-development space - or perhaps it's something you've heard of, but not really got too much information on at this point. That was where I was only a few months ago. I had read The Secret many, many years ago and really hadn't applied anything in it. I'd heard reviews that criticised it and said that it's just telling you to picture all the things you want in your life and then just chill out and expect it all just to drop in. It'd been criticised for not focusing enough on the action that you need to take. Now, for someone who launched a podcast called Action Taker Tribe, it really didn't feel aligned with who I was, so I'm not really that surprised that at the time it didn't resonate.

However, as many of us know, certain things come back into our lives at just the right time, and I've been on a journey to absorb so much amazing self-development stuff. Last year, I also started to get more familiar with Kabbalah and became really interested in how many of the things in Kabbalah aligned with what I'd already learned when I trained in Pranic Healing. Even though they come from completely different cultures, so much of what they were saying was just the same but using different words.

Also, as I started to study more about the law of attraction - firstly through Abraham Hicks and an amazing daily podcast that they have and then through joining Heidi Stevens program more recently - I can see so many similarities that give me great comfort and makes me believe that this is something. More than that, it is the experience I've had by following their teachings which has really transformed where I'm at in my life.

Now, just before that, let me tell you about a conversation I had yesterday. If you believe in synchronicities in the law of attraction, which I do, then this is a story that I know you're going to appreciate. Yesterday I was out in the centre of London, just off Oxford Street. I don't go into town very often anymore because I don't have to.

I used to commute and that was where my office was back in the corporate old days, whereas now I work from home like so many of us. I love that, but what a novelty going into town on the tube, up the escalators. I was going to meet a beautiful friend of mine, Anna Orenstein, who I recently did a workshop with. She's an amazing financial coach who I met through Kathy Heller's community and although we have been the closest business buddies for such a long time now it was the first time that we met face to face.

It was a beautiful moment. It's glorious summer sunshine in London and we'd booked an outside table at a little bistro in a shady little street, just off the main drag. We had a beautiful lunch and connected so well. We drank some wine and ate some lovely food.

It was just perfection - I felt absolutely amazing. It was a Tuesday afternoon and I got to choose how I spent my time. I got to spend it with an inspiring person making connections.

As that beautiful lunch ended, I jumped onto a call with somebody else who I've also become close to, although never actually spoken to. We've been supportive of each other's social media, and we've been in each other's spheres since we were on the ‘Made To Do This’ program together about a year ago. Ryan Reynolds is an outstanding video specialist and an amazing soul.

As we had this conversation, it transpired that Ryan's also been learning more about the law of attraction. We had a wonderful chat, talking about what we've learned, synchronicities and just both became so inspired by what the other had to say. As I explained to Ryan that I really felt my life had changed as a result of this learning and that in the future I'd really like to help other people make the same transition, Ryan made a suggestion that has led to this podcast episode right now.

He said, ‘well, why don't you share your journey? Even though you might not feel like you're the finished article, perhaps you could help others just by sharing your journey.’

It was like a light bulb went off in my mind. I was like, yes, because this is what I want to talk about right now. This is what I'm inspired to talk about. One of the things that had held me back was I felt that even though I was on the journey, until I had concrete results and could say, unequivocally, that if you do this, you'll get that, that I wasn't ready to share it. I know, of course, that isn't the case.

When we're called to talk about certain things or at other times, we're called to listen to people talking about certain things, it's for a reason. Perhaps if you're listening to this episode right now, you're here for a reason and you're hearing a message that you need to hear right now.

Whether or not you might have grown up as a type A person like myself or not, learning things like going with the flow, learning to receive, or learning how to take inspired action is equally as important for every type of person building their business or otherwise.

Now there is not enough time in this episode for me to share everything there is about the law of attraction, although I do go into a bit more detail about it, I think in episode 24. However, I do want to share a couple of real core elements that have had a massive impact on me over the last couple of weeks.

In their outstanding book, ‘Ask and it is given’, Abraham Hicks talks about how you have to set a vision, and once you have a desire, it is literally ready for you as soon as you can match the vibration.

The vibration is always high. Good things have high vibrations, good things come from happiness, come from inspired action, come from great feelings. That's why we talk about being high vibration.

We also worry when we're low vibe - we know that when we’re low vibe we magnetise unattractive things to us. It’s that way that bad things come in threes, or if you're in a bad mood you also stub your toes or you also lose your keys. We’ve all experienced this stuff constantly, and it doesn't matter whether we believe in the law of attraction or not, we're all beholden to the same universal laws - the same way that whether or not you believe in gravity, doesn't really matter - if you jump from a height, you will still fall.

So, my theory was, well, why not rise up? Why not learn this technique? Why not see how it goes and actually start to feel good and start to see results in an easier way - a way that didn't require so much pushing, so much striving.

I’ve boiled it down to three things and I've realised that as a type A, as a striver, there are three ways that you typically behave, and certainly I have been behaving. One was pushing action. You know, that striving, pushing, what am I doing today, tick 20 things off, what am I doing tomorrow, do better than you did yesterday - that kind of heavy energy. Also, the need to control everything. I worry that everything's my responsibility - no one could do this for me. I have to do it alone. You can see how that easily leads to the third indicator, which is burnout. Exhaustion, low vibration, frustration.

I've been working on flipping this on its head and I believe now that my job is simply to feel good. This is something I would never have thought before. I would almost feel guilty for having a good time when I could be working. I didn't really understand that by feeling good, the work would be easier.

Like I talk about in other episodes, how I'd let my self-care go, and then suddenly I brought my self-care back. In episode 28 I take you through my self-care routine and it was important for me to talk about it because I had let it go to such an extent that I had felt like doing an extra hour’s work was more important than the self-care - how wrong. I flipped that on its head and went back to journaling, started to learn meditation in a new, committed way, took long walks in nature every morning, no matter if it's rain or shine and always before I sit down at my desk - always prioritising feeling good first, putting on good music, whatever it takes to feel good.

I found that was supporting the second thing that I've now feel is so important, which is releasing control. Now, this is something that I'm still working at. I'm certainly nowhere near being the finished article because releasing control means being ready to receive. It means being unattached to a specific outcome. If you are a driven, type A person who's been results orientated, you can see that taking the leap into releasing control is not a simple one. Yet already I'm starting to see massive differences, not just in my business, but also in the interactions with my husband, with my children and actually how I treat myself.

Being less invested in the outcome and more interested in the fun that I'm having along the way is starting to create a shift and I'm excited to see how that's going to go.

I'm excited about sharing more on that. I've just started reading a book called the power of receiving by Amanda Owen and I'm really excited because I think that it's going to fill in a piece of the puzzle and help me understand a little bit more about what it really means to release control.

The third thing, and this is my favourite thing right now, is about taking inspired action because - unlike what the critics thought about The Secret, which was that you didn't need to take any action - the reality of the law of attraction means that you do have to take action, but the action you take is inspired action that comes through intuition rather than being forced.

The idea is that when you're working with inspired action, not only do you feel amazing - because you're in flow, and we all know how outstanding it feels when literally things flow through you and appear in the world, they manifest, right? - but also, we get so much more bang for your buck for the actions that we do take. This is the idea about pushing and striving for hours as I was doing, versus just getting myself in a high vibration, doing something that lights me up and inspires me and whoosh, it exists in the world. It was like it manifested out of thin air. I mean, of course it didn't. I sat down at my desk, and I started doing a podcast episode, or I sat down at my desk, and I started doing a course in Kajabi - whatever it is, suddenly there it was.

As I was doing it, I just felt so excited that I didn't want to be anywhere else. This was where I was having fun. Feeling good became not just something that I did that was aside from work. The feeling good in this moment is actually the work that I was doing and that was really, really different to the way that I was living and working before now.

I really hope that this has resonated with you. I appreciate that this is just the tip of the iceberg, but I really take pleasure in sharing my journey as I learn more about the law of attraction and I apply it to my own life and my own business. If you're inspired by the law of attraction and you want to chat a bit about it, drop me a line - send me a message on Instagram, I’m @iamjo.ingram.

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Have an awesome action filled, inspired week. Take care. Bye now.