The Visionary Woman

Kris Plachy: Today is gonna be juicy. We're gonna be talking about the visionary woman, is that you? Let's find out.

Well, hello, how are you? Thank you to my team for last week. For those of you who may not be like on my mailing list, you may not know all the juicy details, but basically what happened is I went to Hawaii and had an amazing time, which I will be talking about with you. And my 16 year old daughter when I was supposed to come home, we found out she had tested positive for Covid.

And she was symptomatic even though she's been vaccinated. And my husband and my son and my daughter have all been in the same house. And the general consensus was to, my husband was like, please don't come home. I tend to be a little bit of a nervous nilly and I think he is much better at all of that part of of parenting.

And so he's like, why don't you just stay in Hawaii for a few more days? We're fine, and my daughter's totally fine. She just had some. Few days have felt pretty bad but fortunately mild anyway, so that preempted everything because I didn't have equipment, I didn't have, I just was a mess. And I didn't even have the brain capacity to really think about what to do.

So my team stepped in and pulled something from the archives, which was brilliant, and Michelle recorded the intro. And so anyway, it just, I'm just so proud of my team and just so honored. They pick me. So today I wanna talk about the visionary woman. I'm gonna give you as much backstory as I can here in every attempt to be fully transparent, which is what I ask of my clients.

And so a couple of things that, my business has grown exponentially over the past 18 months, which has been such a fun ride. And I, the people that we work with are, I mean, the women are, I, I just, you know that feeling when you have a conversation with another woman and you're just, you leave and you feel like you're buzzing.

That's how I feel all the time. It doesn't even, honestly, it doesn't even feel right that this is my business, that I get to work with women like this every day because I just really is this like how you make a living it just feels decadent. So the growth of the business has just added volumes of these women to my life and to my, to my work, and to my cl my team, and to the what we do in the world.

And so as the growth has happened in the business, that's meant my own growth as a leader, right? And I recognize I teach this. I also need to do the same thing. So I continue to bring into the our world trusted advisors, people that I know I can rely on. And when we were looking down the barrel of this growth, I had a conversation with Michelle and said, there are things I don't know how to do, but the one thing I do know how to do is lead a team.

So what we're gonna do first is we're gonna lead our team and we're gonna build the team that's gonna drive this result. And that's exactly what we did. And so to the point where, and I've talked to my clients about this, right? Our profit margin has gone down. Like we've made some significant decisions in order to invest in team.

Because the dream is in the team mama, and I know that, and I know how to lead a team, so I wanted that part first. But there are other parts of my business that I know I need to get better at, and one of them is marketing and it's an ongoing thing. I think I, I think I have a great message. I think what we do in our, I know what we do in our program is.

Badassery and people are getting tremendous results from that experience. But, figuring out the mechanics and best solutions for marketing. So we have just hired a fractional cmo, Laura Meyer, to work with us and we start that this week, which I'm super excited about. But she already started by giving me some things to think about and the one questions that she asked me a couple of weeks ago that just went right between my eyes and it's been so good for me is, what do you wanna be the best in the world at?

Now that question is obviously a very important one to answer, but isn't easy. Yeah. So that question then brought me to my coaching call with Natalie, who's my coach Natalie Olsen, who is amazing and she really helps me with my spirit. I sought her out during C O V I when I know that I, I just needed healing and help and she has just been such a guardian angel to me.

And so I brought that to her and I'm like, okay, I know that this growth of mine is really leading somewhere. And then of course, she's just really, really helped me. And so today we had a conversation and we talked about really what is it? What is the dream that is on my heart? And she said, what do you want?

What do you want? And I said, I wanna sit on the beach with powerful women who are deep, wise, conscious, scared and vulnerable. And I wanna help peel back who they are so they can be amazingly. I wanna be where visionary women who have huge, big dreams on their heart come to transform themselves so they can achieve what they want.

That's what I want. And so we ended up having this whole conversation about how the women that I work with are visionary women. And ultimately the work is allowing, is creating space for that visionary because a lot of women who are visionaries, which is what I want to ask you all to think about, share similar challenges.

Visionary women are big, visionary women struggle with girlfriend relationships. They're very strong and perceived as strong by others. Visionary women believe in. And are invested in transformation, both theirs and whatever it is that vision calls them to do, they're very powerful. But I know that visionary women can often feel unseen and unheard and that they can feel empty because visionary women take up a lot of space and they are the people that other women go to for help, for support, for love.

It's like I've said so often, right? Like where do you go to work out your worry? Because a visionary woman isn't just a visionary in her business, she's a visionary in her life. And my clients who I've worked with who have really, really thrived are the women who had a vision on their heart that was outside of who they were, but what they all shared in common was this throttle.

When it comes to magnifying the vision through others, i e the team, right? So often they come to me and say, I wanna do this thing in the world. I'm big, I have this big thing I wanna do in the world, but, but how do I hire an office manager? Like I'm never gonna get there if I can't just figure out how to hire people, if I can't fire people, if I'm too much of a people pleaser, if I can't hold my boundaries, if I'm so exhausted all the time, if I'm working all the time.

How am I gonna get that to happen in the world? I just had this conversation on my blueprint call just now. Beautiful, beautiful woman with a beautiful business said, sh is, is this just, should I just stop and not add to not have a team and just do it by myself? This is the question of all of us.

We've all asked that question, and the the way to answer isn't yes or no. It's, I don't know. What does the vision say? What does the vision that you were given, it's yours. It doesn't belong to anybody else but you. What does the vision say? Is it time to quit? Is it time to say, we're gonna stay small? I told her about Peter Singy.

This was a model I learned years ago that we either do one of two things, we have this big vision and we change our reality to achieve the vision, or we lower that vision to accommodate a comfortable reality. Which one? The women I know that want to work with me, who end up in our program, they choose, I'm gonna change this reality man to make that vision happen because I can't live, I can't function in this world.

If I don't make that vision happen, I am called to do it. And so the, the, the thing that we all share is that challenge of how do people hear me? How do I get them to understand how do I make people do their job? How do I have to stop doing all this junk this day-to-day, this fussy stuff that keeps me small when I have so much I want to put in the world.

Oh, and also by the way, visionary woman, how do you transform into the woman who achieves the vision? How will the world change once you have, because you know the v, the vision that we have for our business is to prove the power of one thriving woman to prove the power of one thriving visionary woman.

When a visionary woman thrive, the planet moves. Do you believe me? Because I see it. So we just did our Hawaii retreat. We had 12 women. Gorgeous human, amazing, perfect, stunning women from everywhere and anything. We, I, I think we only had one set of duplicate states and the duplicates were people were, me and one other gal from San Diego, so we were all from California.

The rest of the, everybody else was from all over the country. We have a woman who co owns a business in finance with her husband, digital marketing, insurance coaching, and online sales. Construction, real estate assisted living, fulfillment and distribution, a physician, a floral and wedding planner, an interior designer, and a food service retail shop.

I think a lot of us now because of who we are as a society and the way that we've all become so indoctrinated in social media, we think of visionaries as these people with huge presences online. They're influencers. And while, sure. Those people can have huge visions, I, that's fine. I don't necessarily just work with those clients.

I work with women that you're never gonna know, like you see 'em on the street. You would know that she's running a 55 million business and she's donating millions of it to causes to support other women. But she knows, and that's why she does. So all of these women come to Hawaii to convene with me on the beach, literally, or in the woods, gorgeous woods that felt like we were in the fairy dust land.

If you don't follow my Instagram, you should, cuz we posted some pictures there at Chris Plaquey coach and the conversations, everybody comes thinking, okay, but I'm gonna talk about how to be a better leader. You know what I'm gonna talk about? And what we realize is where everybody has little prickly spots of vulnerability of doubt.

Of lack of denying themselves worthiness, being and practicing self-worth, indulging guilt and shame, indulging embarrassment of their own success. But then you come and they're all together and they, it's so powerful to watch these collective 12 women visionaries see in one another what they experience in themselves and how they shine with each other.

They have permission with each other to be who they are. And one of my clients, Rebecca and I were talking about how it is hard to meet women. All of us shared that, that we, we struggle to find close girlfriends. And what was so great about this retreat and this experience was it takes, months to get to know another woman that you might meet through a kid or an event in your community, or right, you might meet them and you think, oh, you're nice.

That's cool. Let's get a class of wine. Let's get to know each other. It takes forever to write, really realize and see who they are at this retreat that we skipped all that, and these women were able to see each other immediately and they fell in love with each other. When you think about women being visionaries and the collective that the way that we are now, this is new.

We're in the first century of this work, y'all Sure. Have there been women leaders and visionaries throughout history? Yes, but not in mass. We are pioneers in new territory. We, there are a lot of us, but we haven't coalesced yet. We are in pockets, but for the most part, most. Women who are visionaries are isolated, and many of us think that the problems we experience are unique and also make us wrong.

So if you're a woman with a big dream on her heart and you know that there's so much more you wanna do, but you don't know how to manifest all that you have been informed that you want to achieve, or you don't know how to make that happen in the world because you're frustrated that Joyce in accounting doesn't process payroll timely, right?

Or that you can't find a good front office manager or you can't find someone to sell for you, or you can't even find an assistant for heaven's sake, right? I get the frustration of that, and then I also know the spiral that that creates. How is it that I could run a 5, 8, 10, 12 million business, but I can't figure out how to fire someone?

It's such a weird juxtaposition and it seems like such an odd space for me to sit with you all. But the truth is that is so revealing, and within 25 seconds I can tell you everything I need to know about you. I can figure out where your, where your instability is. I can tune into you because I get you. I get visionary.

I understand the visionary one. I know how much you want to be understood. I know how often you don't feel understood. I know how often you feel it's simultaneously capable and unstoppable and insecure and vulnerable and scared. So I wanted to make this podcast because first of all, I wanted to give voice to this.

I just don't think we talk about it enough. Again, I feel like there's lots of conversations about how to make money and how to build a business, and how to scale and how to do all the things, which is fabulous. Get it, do it all, make it all have a blast. But there is a moment where y'all look at yourselves in the mirror and you say, who hell am I?

And how am I gonna get there? How am I gonna make that happen? Why am I doing this? Is this even what I want? And what do I tell myself on a regular basis that is just exhausting and I'm done with it and I'm ready to change my story. You are special and unique and different. You were given this dream, you were kissed with it for a reason.

And I do think that oftentimes it takes a long time to realize itself. So I will tell you that I, I know I've mentioned this on my podcast before in the, in the spirit of reinvention, years ago, I ha had this vision of starting a retreat in Hawaii, doing a retreat at the beach with other women. And I sat at my old desktop computer and I figured out how to make a website on some dumb platform.

And I made this whole website and I created what the details of the retreat would be. And it was very much like what I do now, frankly, which is so interesting. And this, this was at least. 14 years ago and 15, and I, I reali, I, I saw that on the website. You could put music on it, which I just thought was so cool that you could have music when you open up a website and, and there's a song that's a favorite of mine.

It's by James Taylor and it's called like Everyone She Knows It's a beautiful song. If you haven't listened to it, download it and just listen. It's a beautiful song for women. It's a beautiful song. I think it's a beautiful, my husband loves it. It's James Taylor. How can you not? While that idea, that website, that whole thing never happened.

I don't know whatever happened to that website. I didn't do a Hawaii retreat until six years later this year. I just did this Hawaii retreat and I made a video for all of my clients just capturing all the different moments. It, it was beautiful, fun, creative space for me, and I said it too. Like everyone she knows by James Taylor.

That dream was put on my heart 15 years ago. It took that long to get here. So we can't be in a hurry and we can't judge the journey and use it as a reason to quit. And for whatever reason, I never quit this Hawaii dream. And there were years where I would, I would put out there, I was gonna do this retreat and it would take me nine months to get six people to come.

And that's when I was charging like $900 this year. It sold out in four days and it was $4,200. It took a while, but I never stopped because the, the work of this experience is on my heart. I know I have to do it for them and for me. What is that for you, and are you willing to walk through the fire to make it happen?

To walk through what's difficult? Do you need a space where that could be honored? Where other people will understand you, I think we all do. So if you're a visionary woman, I would just ask you, where do you go to work through your worry? And I would like to remind you that worth is not an external qualifier.

There is nothing that makes you worthy. You are alive and breathing. Therefore, you are worthy. No amount of money, status, stature, success. Beauty makes you more or less worthy of that gorgeous vision. And I will leave you with one other thought, which is that I oftentimes hear people say, who am I to think I could?

And then you insert your vision, change the world through education. Help women feel more empowered by taking care of their body. Change the way that relationships work. Like whatever it is, whatever that is in your heart, that vision. You wouldn't have it if you weren't here to contribute. So let's stop wasting the time around whether or not you should do it, and let's focus instead on I'm gonna do it and I'm gonna be willing to invest in myself so that I can become the woman who delivers in a way that feels authentic and genuine for me.

What do you think about that? I always love to know what your thoughts are. You can ping me on Instagram. You can send an email to hello chris plaquey.com. But thank you for spending time with me today. Talk.