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EP 27: “Stop forcing the fruits” - A story of success as told by the laws of nature w/ Shannon Clarke
19 Plays1 month ago
What if success wasn’t something you had to fight for?
What if it was something that flowed naturally when you stopped pushing and started listening—to yourself, to your joy, to what actually feels good?
In this episode, I sat down with Shannon Clarke, a woman who walked away from burnout and into deep alignment. She shares how letting go of the relentless hustle and embracing joy led to more abundance, peace, and success than she ever imagined.
If you’ve ever questioned whether grinding harder is really the answer, this conversation will change the way you think about business, leadership, and life.
We dive deep into:
✨ The shift from overworking to leading with heart and ease
✨ Why burnout isn’t a badge of honor—and how to break free from it
✨ How slowing down can actually accelerate your success
✨ The key to building a business that supports your joy (instead of draining it)
✨ How to embrace trust, alignment, and flow instead of hustle and grind
💡 If you're ready to redefine leadership, create sustainable success, and build a life that feels GOOD, this episode is for you.
🎧 Tune in now and learn how to step into true success—one that supports your joy, well-being, and long-term fulfillment.
Love,
Dana & the Modern Day Healer Team
Connect with Dana HERE and Shannon HERE and tell them what you loved most about this episode and what resonated deeply.
**If you loved today's episode, remember to give this podcast a 5-star rating! You can quickly leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts by scrolling down on my show page, selecting a star rating, and tapping “Write a review.” This helps other modern-day healers discover the show, and your feedback helps me curate more content you love. Thank you for your support!!
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Transcript
Introduction to Modern Day Healer Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Modern Day Healer Podcast. I'm your host, Dana Hayes, and I am so excited to share with you the stories, the trials, the tribulations, and most importantly, the triumphs of my own as well as many other successful modern day healers.
00:00:20
Speaker
We've gone all in to pursue our passion, to make an impact in the world by helping humans heal from the past and find true empowerment in their lives today.
00:00:31
Speaker
So what exactly is a modern day healer, you might ask? A modern day healer is you. She is me and anyone else who feels a calling to help others heal yourself.
00:00:42
Speaker
grow and share their light. You could be a wife, a mother, a teacher, a writer, a speaker, a podcast host. You might be a workshop producer, a course creator.
00:00:54
Speaker
You're most likely an entrepreneur and can't shake the desire to make your calling your career because you know how much impact you could make if you went all in and had the opportunity to share your story with the world.
00:01:08
Speaker
That is a modern day
Dana Hayes' Mission and Introduction of Shannon Clark
00:01:11
Speaker
healer. I am a podcast host, a co-author of an amazing book about the journey of sobriety, a wife, a mom of two young children, and the creator of the spiritual lifestyle brand, Living in Power.
00:01:23
Speaker
I am Dana and I am a modern day healer. I am so glad you're here. Let's get started.
00:01:38
Speaker
Welcome, welcome, welcome to today's episode of the Modern Day Healer. I'm Dana Hayes, your host. And today, oh my God, we have the world's most radiant woman, Shannon Clark.
00:01:51
Speaker
And that is honestly all you need to know. Shannon. Shannon is here to help unlock the deepest part of yourself that is is joy. It's not just full of joy. It literally is joy so that you're able to show up in everything that you do as the most authentic person.
00:02:12
Speaker
loving, passionate, compassionate version that you've ever, ever experienced. So I want to introduce Shannon Clark to you. Shannon, thank you for being here. And I cannot wait for you and me to get into this conversation that we were just talking about because it is so freaking necessary and good.
00:02:30
Speaker
And so first of all, before you even introduce yourself, I want to say that Shannon is, um like a leader in her own right. And what is so cool about her is that she is literally the most, um, the literally the most radiant, but also the most joyful, kind and caring person i might, i think I've ever met to be totally honest with you.
00:02:55
Speaker
And I think it's amazing. And it just showcases, how kindness, like that compassion, that empathy for other people can take you so much further than the pushing, the pulling, the forcing that I think a lot of people start their businesses with.
00:03:13
Speaker
And I want to know more about how how you got to where you are because Shannon is a leader in one of the masterminds I'm in. And, um, and I think that speaks volumes about what she's been doing in the
Shannon's Accidental Leadership Journey
00:03:28
Speaker
world.
00:03:28
Speaker
And so I would love for you to share with the listeners where you were, were before, like how you got to this place that you're at now and basically what your main ethos is. And then we're going to get into more about, um, what we were just talking about, like our main core topic.
00:03:44
Speaker
Oh my gosh. I feel like I'm already crying. It's amazing when someone reflects back to you the parts that you know matter so much to you and to be seen those...
00:03:57
Speaker
those
00:04:00
Speaker
has nothing to do with what I do. You know, it's nothing to do with my accomplishments. Being kind isn't an accomplishment and I am not trying to be kind or loving. I just am. And I think that that's something that i that most women especially get to remember of themselves, that the the parts of us that do naturally propel us towards The leaders that we are the healers that we are, the the like magnetic versions of us that we desire to be have nothing to do with trying.
00:04:33
Speaker
It's everything to do with remembering what matters most to you and then living like that. um Your question about how did I get here is wild. I describe my journey as like falling ass backwards into a lot of things.
00:04:49
Speaker
No.
00:04:53
Speaker
And maybe it's ah less of like accidental, but honestly it was accidental leadership. All of the leadership roles that I have had with the exception of maybe one or two that I actually applied for were accidental.
00:05:05
Speaker
They were other people seeing how I had been contributing to the community and wanting to recognize that. So it didn't come from a place of wanting to be in a leadership role per se just naturally being someone who tends to lead with heart.
00:05:21
Speaker
you know, how do we lead? Well, interestingly, total side note, I did actually do a master's in leadership. So I used to work. I used to work in higher education. So i used to work as ah in student services in universities. And I started in that kind of field of work because I needed a change. I would had been working in nonprofit and had been creating opportunities for young people from all over Canada, that's where I'm from, um to come together and talk about how we can affect change in our communities through sport and recreation. Like I was a sport girl. Like I started at my degree was in phys ed.
00:05:59
Speaker
I was working in nonprofit and in sport and working in nonprofit activates everything about the heart, right? ever If you talk to anyone who works in nonprofit, you will see their heart. They are not in it for the money.
00:06:11
Speaker
That's not why people work in nonprofit. They're in it because they feel passionately about changing the world. And that was, that is still me. And it comes at a cost because when you pour out and pour out without the resources to support you, you know, that can really be exhausting. So I moved into, accidentally fell into a job in universities um developing like an orientation program and leadership development programs for students and fell in love with working in that space where
00:06:42
Speaker
people, you know, the people going to university, they're in their 17 to 24 year old selves, where they're discovering who the fuck they are. Like, do you remember your 17, 18, 19 year old self?
00:06:55
Speaker
Tell me what she was like, I want to know. ah train wreck. She was a complete train wreck. I mean, I'm not very honest. Yes, I do. It was crazy. Right?
00:07:05
Speaker
But I think about myself and I think about how how much experimentation I was doing, right? Like, you weren't a train wreck. You were experimenting with the boundaries of what...
00:07:17
Speaker
like your own boundaries. How far can I push myself before I collapse? You know, like how much can I drink? How much do I want to learn? How little can I do in school and still pass? You know, how am I being in my relationships? There's so much discovery that happens at that stage of life and it is intoxicating to me.
00:07:39
Speaker
So as I was working in this area of like being with people in this massive evolution of them, And helping them to really like make connections between what they were learning in the classroom and then what they were learning in life and start to map where there was dissonance, right? Like life. So really what I was doing was experiential learning, helping people walk through this process of making sense of what they're learning structurally, like I am being taught how to be a nutritionist and I'm going into community and I'm seeing food insecurity happening everywhere and we're not talking about that and it starts to make the mind say, oh my gosh, like I have some strong beliefs about this, what are
Life Experiences as Continuous Learning
00:08:21
Speaker
they? And you go through this process, like coaching, the work I do now is not different.
00:08:26
Speaker
Your life is your learning. Your life is your learning and the way we reflect and make meaning on our lives is the magic. But often we don't pause long enough to actually think about the meaning we're making.
00:08:40
Speaker
We are making meaning all the time through every single minute of every single day, but we might be making the same meaning over and over again or making something mean. something bad about us. You know, we have these tapes that we play, the stories we have in our, anyway, I could go on. I digress.
00:08:57
Speaker
All that to say, i was in this field of work for a really long time. I did a master's in leadership. And what they talk about in terms of like, what makes a really effective leader, if you want to make change in the world.
00:09:07
Speaker
So my topic was on how do we, how do, what are the characteristics about leaders that position them to make effective social change to address major issues in the world, like mental illness and sexual violence?
00:09:25
Speaker
It's not the degrees they have. It's not the positions they hold. it is none of that shit. Do you know what it is? Helping people feel like they're safe to make mistakes.
00:09:37
Speaker
It is creating an environment where trust is the primary the primary value. It is communicating frequently and honestly and informally.
00:09:50
Speaker
Like it's not, it's not the, you know, if you're in, if you're listening this podcast and you're in a leadership role in some kind of capacity, do not underestimate the small moments where you actually get to ask someone how they are and not just speed by as they say they're fine.
00:10:07
Speaker
They're not fine. they're probably not fine. There's probably a lot more nuance to what's going on. And when leaders in any space take time to actually ask themselves first, what else could be going on here?
00:10:24
Speaker
What else is under the surface here? You're asking a question, let's say in this mastermind, someone comes in and they're asking a question about, you know, feeling like a,
00:10:37
Speaker
feeling like a fraud as a coach because they haven't made a certain level of money, let's say. what's actually going on here? You know, really what's what's here? What do you actually need from a human perspective? And what all humans need is love and acceptance.
00:10:54
Speaker
So I'm not going to answer your question about why you feel a fraud. I'm going to give you the love and acceptance you need so that you soothe that part of you that's seeking affirmation outside of yourself. It's here.
00:11:07
Speaker
It's always been here. But we've never learned that, especially if you're... A girl child in school who generally is conditioned to want to be good, fit quietly in your chair, do the schoolwork and do it perfectly. We learn from a very young age how to be good students and how to be good people and not ruffle feathers. And as a result, what we learn is to we learn to forget that we have everything we need inside of us.
00:11:41
Speaker
Hmm. Okay. I love that. I love where we're going with this. And so something we were talking about before we started this episode is the idea of being happy.
00:11:53
Speaker
um ah being happy as opposed to being successful and success being the byproduct of actually truly being happy first.
Personal Struggles and Work-Life Balance
00:12:01
Speaker
And for me, I just want to say like my set, like I just have to go back to this real quick.
00:12:06
Speaker
so My age, that little, that, that space in time between 17 and 24 for me, I was not just pushing boundaries. I was also actively engaging in a very, very um like I didn't know at the time, but yeah,
00:12:23
Speaker
a deadly disease. You know, I was engaging in my own active alcoholism. And so I was really, um, I was just so addicted to alcohol. And I, i didn't realize that first sip was what sent me off on this whole crazy podcast.
00:12:40
Speaker
sequence of events through those years up until I was 30. And so for me, though, like when it came to building the business, because I mean, I didn't get sober until I was 30. And I started business when I was 25, 26. And five twenty six and I was still actively alcoholic then.
00:13:00
Speaker
And I'm sitting there doing things from this perspective of this is what you do. Like, this is how you do it, which it all came from this conventional, like, quote unquote, knowledge or wisdom from the old white men who came before me.
00:13:17
Speaker
Yeah, it really put me in a position to hate my life. ig But the real issue for me was, i knew I was being called to be an entrepreneur.
00:13:31
Speaker
But I didn't understand why it hurts so bad. And so I would love for you to tell me a little bit about your experience with that. Like, how does, you know, did you force or push or pull before you like actually put yourself in a position to and find yourself, find your real self, find your joy, find your radiance, and then success started to follow that? Or like, how did this come? Yeah.
00:13:58
Speaker
Yes. Okay. So I was working in this field, and doing all the right things, over delivering, like working way more than I needed to, said like impress people. If someone had an expectation, and that still happens of me, I would exceed their expectations. This is what I learned to do. It was very, but i get off on exceeding people's expectations of me. If I was addicted to anything, it would be that 1000%.
00:14:26
Speaker
And um I remember, so I had done this job, it It's an interesting story. So my husband's in the army, we've moved a lot. I, we ended up in a tiny little town and I got this dream job of mine, like catapulted me to a different level of leadership. So i was the director of student services at a very tiny liberal arts university.
00:14:48
Speaker
And what was really interesting about that place was that it, unlike most other organizations I'd ever worked at, that university had this deep value of family and connection.
00:14:59
Speaker
And they the the the president and the vice president were calling me out for working so hard at the expense of my children. And it was the very first time that I had ever heard someone say, stop working so hard.
00:15:14
Speaker
Your family needs you. And like, literally, that was when I stopped doing that, it was as though everything fell into place.
00:15:27
Speaker
And then we had to move and I took some time off from working and I decided that I needed to act keep my brain active. This is when I did the master's and had this newborn baby and I was nursing this newborn baby. I literally didn't even ask for an extension on my papers to give birth.
00:15:45
Speaker
Not joking. I didn't. didn't for anything. i just gave birth and then two days later I was writing my paper with my newborn baby beside me and like literally killed that masters. Like I got two awards for that masters. I exceeded all the expectations of everyone else and myself.
00:16:01
Speaker
and in The space of doing that master's, I had also stumbled upon a job in the next city we were going to be living in. And it was one of those like, oh, I didn't know this job would be available at this time. And it's exactly the job I want.
00:16:16
Speaker
It's at the or one university that I would want to work at in my city. And it's available right now. But it was all the hard shit that had been really difficult for me before dealing with all of the sexual violence and all of the like all of the conflict on campus. None of the space where you get to slow down with people and be in that journey of self-exploration. It was crisis after crisis after crisis.
00:16:43
Speaker
And I knew that. I knew that before I applied for the job. And I remember calling up my old boss who had worked at that university where family was such a deep value. And he said, Shannon, I know you can do this job, but will you be happy?
00:16:57
Speaker
That was his question. And I remember thinking at that moment, like, I mean, I'm a happy person. I can't imagine myself not being happy. yeah Like, I'm sure I'll be happy. like yeah I kind of brushed it off as though happiness was like assumed. I guess I had this assumed level of happiness at that moment that it felt like that the the happiness itself was going to sustain me.
00:17:22
Speaker
And so I took the job and it was wonderful at the beginning and then quickly became this never ending mind fuck.
00:17:33
Speaker
There was no way I could solve the problems There was no way that I was i single handedly was going to solve the problems of sexual violence on campus or the mental illness that I was being confronted with on a daily basis, nor the conflict among staff. You know, there were so many competing, challenging situations and my exceeding expectations strategy.
00:17:56
Speaker
no longer worked. Like if I was to exceed expectations, like what was that gonna look like? But that was my singular strategy was work hard, exceed expectations, like do, do, do. Meanwhile, I had these babies at home, like my little baby, I went back to work, he was nine months old. I know in comparison to the US, but like we have 12 months of mat leave.
00:18:20
Speaker
And I decided to go back early we I couldn't pump. He wasn't nursing. So he was home with his dad. And like, we just, it was beautiful for them. But I think back to that time now, I'm like, wow, like that was a big decision to kind of cut off the one value that had really instilled in me.
00:18:41
Speaker
in that other job, this value of like family first, you like your legacy is your family. It's not what you do. It's nobody's going to be talking about Shannon, director, student services on my headstone when I die. Nobody's going to be writing that, you know, they'll be writing mother, sister, daughter, you know, woman who lived with kindness.
Burnout and Recovery Process
00:19:05
Speaker
But that wasn't who I was at that time. um and i burned out fucking hard like so hard i remember going this is a very long story i'm just talking at you at this point um i remember going to defend my master's thesis and i was in bc so on the other side of the country and it was springish and there were birds and i remember watching these hummingbirds flit from flower to flower and feeling jealous of their freedom. Like it's weird when you're jealous of a bird, but that's how out of alignment I was.
00:19:43
Speaker
And there were two adult older women there, you know, 10 years further in their life's journey that I was really close to. And both of them said, Shannon, when I look back on the time that you're in right now,
00:19:55
Speaker
I wish someone had said that no job is worth sacrificing your happiness for. I wish someone had told me that. You don't get those years back. Like, that's precious. And if you're miserable, like, if you're, like, your health is so much more important and you're not well right now. You need to take a break.
00:20:15
Speaker
I came back. from that, didn't take a break, was crying every day on the way to work. I could not stop the tears. And I finally went to like the campus clinic, health clinic.
00:20:28
Speaker
And I was like to the doctor, what, it what, I just, I'm curious about this. And I'm like, Yeah.
00:20:36
Speaker
what is this about what is all this crying about is there some way we can stop this crying and she said well how much of that would go away if you didn't have this job and i said well probably all of it And she said, well, then you need to take a break. I'm like, okay, well, i'll'll I'll take a break in like a couple of months. Now is not a good time. I literally was hiring a new staff person that day and I couldn't just leave, you know, my mind. The mind says you cannot leave. The story I was telling myself is if I left now, I was a failure. That was the story.
00:21:09
Speaker
You are going to let down everybody who's believed in you. Nobody will understand this is the end of you. This is the end of your reputation. and She said, well, if you're not going to choose to take time off, I'm going to require it. I'm writing you a note right now and you're going to take it to your boss and you're going to take some leave.
00:21:28
Speaker
And she was bold. She was really bold with me. And I don't think had she not told me that that was what she was requiring of me, I would not have done that for myself. I was so far down the line of self-sacrificing that I would have continued to kill myself for this job because I was so terrified of letting everybody down. And the only person that I was letting down was myself.
00:21:51
Speaker
That was the biggest. I was letting myself down every single day and happy to do it because someone else was benefiting from it. Right. And by proxy, my kids were also being sacrificed. You know, I think the thing is that we don't necessarily realize when we sacrifice ourselves as parents, our children are also then being sacrificed. You know, if we do overtime, they are doing overtime.
00:22:15
Speaker
If I'm sacrificing myself, they are also, you know, no longer able to access all of who I am. So I took time off and never went back to that job. And I took like two and a half years of like deep healing, you know, and the healing that I would do is not at all what you would imagine. You know, I think this is where it comes back to like, what is it that I do now?
00:22:38
Speaker
It was my own joy that healed me. It wasn't.
Joy and Happiness in Healing
00:22:42
Speaker
therapy, although therapy was useful. It wasn't, you know, any particular tapping modalities or, you know, meditation. It was actual, what is going to bring me joy today?
00:22:55
Speaker
And do that. And then follow more. And then follow more. And that was how I healed myself. I really believe that our joy has so much more to so to offer us than just being a byproduct of some future destination that we think we need to arrive at.
00:23:13
Speaker
Yes. Oh my gosh. I love that. And I can completely relate. I think the way that you say it might be a little bit different than the way I say it. The language might be different, but the sentiment and the reality of it is exactly the same because I always say, I always say that it's not about modalities or methods. It's not. It's about the foundation of you coming back to yourself.
00:23:38
Speaker
Right. And that is what gives you the ability. It gives you that energetic transmission necessary in order to actually help others heal themselves. It's the same thing.
00:23:49
Speaker
Right. And so I love that so, so much because we we start our I did anyway. I'll use my own experience here. I don't speak for others, but I know for me, it's like I started with sacrifice sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice, because that's what I thought it took. That's what I was told it took. But you know what? The beautiful thing is looking back is that I put myself in the arena, right? Like we put ourselves into the position to start at the very least, because so many people will sit there and question themselves to the point where they don't even put their foot in.
00:24:23
Speaker
And get the show started. But what I love and what I see for myself, my clients, the people that I interview on this podcast is you start somewhere, right? You start with this, this idea.
00:24:36
Speaker
You're like, I'm being called into spiritual entrepreneurship. You don't even realize it's spiritual though. You just now realize that you're going into this path, right?
Entrepreneurial Journey as Spiritual Path
00:24:44
Speaker
And you have no idea what that's actually going to entail of you, like who you're going to have to become in order to quote unquote, find that that success that business provides in a material form, right? Which is money, clients, whatever, impact.
00:25:01
Speaker
Okay. You have no idea what that's actually going to entail, what journey you're going to have to walk. So you start and you forget like or you don't even realize that the reason you started it is for freedom of time, not for anything else, not not to um not to make money. Definitely not. Like I think anybody I speak to money, they want money to be something that they don't have to think about.
00:25:28
Speaker
It's It's because we want freedom of time, but we don't realize that or we forget it. So we start this path and then what happens is we start sacrificing and it hurts. And it's like, why is this not feeling right?
00:25:40
Speaker
And it's because it's like, this is the spiritual journey and it's teaching you what's aligned with you and what's not. And the faster that you stop resisting what's not aligned, like for you, the faster that you stopped resisting what's um doing what was not beneficial to your mental health and for your family, the quicker you were going to make that jump into that next level of consciousness for yourself or that next level of joy, however you want to put it yeah And so for me, it was exactly the same.
00:26:10
Speaker
The faster that I stopped trying so hard to make money and let myself, I did this. I literally took two plus years off, dismantled everything and healed every single day.
00:26:22
Speaker
i i did actually work a program, but I didn't. the same thing. I connected to what made me happy and let go of the rest. And I, I was diligent about it and I was thorough and I had that change of heart where, oh my God, I am not just joyful. I am joy. Like I know myself now that is who I am.
00:26:41
Speaker
Right. And so Then you go you get to this place where you are an entrepreneur. That's what you've been becoming this entire time. It's a spiritual entrepreneur because you're bringing yourself back to yourself and you're helping other people do the same.
00:26:55
Speaker
And then all of a sudden the material success starts to follow because it's it's a natural, you followed the the laws of nature.
Nature as a Source of Strength
00:27:03
Speaker
And that's what happens. And I know for you, that's also a big part of what you do is bringing people out into the forest and like,
00:27:09
Speaker
really allowing people to connect with their innate strength and their gifts through nature. And I love that because it's a different perspective. So can you tell me more about what you do and how that's helpful?
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah. Well, okay, so I say joy. I say joy healed me. But what I mean when I say joy, and everyone's joy will be different, is literally sitting and staring at the bees at my flowers and just noticing how they're attracted to the flowers. And the flowers are just there.
00:27:42
Speaker
and I think about myself and I'm like, am I the flower? Am I the bee? you know And i I literally spend slowing down so much to be able to watch what nature has to offer us.
00:27:54
Speaker
I've always been a forest lover. My grandparents, um my soul's home is their house that was in the forest. I grew up like literally barefoot in the trees. That's that's where we played. we did We were like in the trees. And so I think I've always had this sense of connection to the forest and rocks. You know, here where I live,
00:28:15
Speaker
were We have this exposed precambrian shield and strewn throughout the rocks are these like veins of quartz. You know, you think about that like people have quartz on their desks. I just have to go to the forest and I can touch where the quartz came from, you know, and and connecting to the actual origins of all the things we try and bring into our homes.
00:28:36
Speaker
is magical. nature Nature has everything that we need. you know the the aerosols that the plants emit, our bodies naturally absorb what that what we need from the forest.
00:28:50
Speaker
When we go into the forest and we attune to the pace that it sets, it doesn't move fast. It doesn't blast through seeding itself. you know it It goes slowly.
00:29:01
Speaker
a tree grows slowly over time. And then it bears fruit. Here's a funny story. i was talking with my dad last night and he said he had an apple tree on his, he has a property and he had this apple tree that would drop apples and it would slam down on the roof of the chicken coop.
00:29:19
Speaker
And he hated the sound of these apples bonking on the chicken coop. So he cut the tree down and the neighbors were appalled because apparently this tree is one of only three three apple trees of that heirloom variety that don't really exist anymore.
00:29:36
Speaker
And so he has located ah ah like version of it that he's going to plant this year. And he said, i just need to live long enough to see it bear fruit again. so And you know, a tree will take 20 years to bear fruit.
00:29:52
Speaker
Now let's say that the tree is our business. Let's say... Right. And we're expecting ourselves to go in to plant ourselves as though we're the tree and instantaneously bear fruit and have a six figure a year in three months because some girl on the Internet told you that that was possible.
00:30:10
Speaker
And that's great for her. I love that for her. But if I'm going to do things my way and my way, I've learned cannot be all about achieving these like forcing the fruits to bear.
00:30:24
Speaker
You know, at all costs. Well, what if we were to imagine that we get to move as slowly as the trees? And it doesn't mean we starve ourselves while we wait for the apples.
00:30:37
Speaker
There is fruit everywhere. We can... Feed ourselves, nourish ourselves, provide for ourselves. Okay, people, if you're not making a million dollars in your business, you can earn money in a million other ways while you build your business.
00:30:49
Speaker
Okay, don't starve yourself waiting for six figures. Go eat some fruit, you know. But we can actually allow for the spaciousness of our businesses and the fruits of our labors to come in its natural time instead of forcing the tree. Like, what would you do to force a tree to bear fruit?
00:31:07
Speaker
What would you do to force a tulip to to bloom faster? You can't. But are you sitting there beside the tulip, staring at the earth, being angry at it for not actually producing anything?
00:31:20
Speaker
If you're doing that to a tulip, you're probably doing it to yourself. Or if you're doing it to yourself, go out and stare at the dirt and watch every single day as a tulip comes out. And think about what are you thinking while you're watching that tulip come out?
00:31:35
Speaker
And if it's critical thoughts about why aren't you blooming faster? then maybe it's time to think about, could you offer yourself some more compassion, right? This is where we wear the compassion. When we lead with compassion, we have to give it to ourselves first.
00:31:48
Speaker
This is what it means to be a radiant woman. I cannot give you compassion to give my clients compassion, to offer compassion, to hold a compassionate, non-judgmental space if I'm busy judging myself behind the scenes.
00:32:01
Speaker
I'm not saying I'm perfect. There are very many moments where I'm confronted with the ways that I judge myself and I'm critical of myself. But I always come back to how can I offer myself compassion? How can hold myself with so much patience and kindness the way that I would sit beside a tulip as it opens, you know?
00:32:21
Speaker
And and so nature becomes the teacher. It's not a place I go. It's the teacher that I turn to to remind me. And i use the metaphors from nature. to remind everyone that I connect with that we can go so much slower. We can we are so much more resilient than we give ourselves credit for.
00:32:40
Speaker
we We have so much more strength, but we need to remember that in order to be strong, we need to root deep and wide. It's not just, there's so many ways that nature can teach us what we need to remember in our businesses and in our lives that People underestimate, especially if they're cut off from the capacity to slow down and observe.
Rejecting Societal Norms and Embracing New Opportunities
00:33:00
Speaker
And that they're cut off because we've been trained over deliver and be busy and that and be exhausted and try and do it all. You know, we were talking before about, you know, how unfunny it is to to like show depict these moms.
00:33:15
Speaker
who are simultaneously doing self-care while vacuuming, while drinking a bottle of wine, while holding a baby on their hip and like looking like in their house goats.
00:33:26
Speaker
This is what's funny. Watch the internet and you will see those memes get millions of views. And what is that doing other than normalizing this exhausted, busy,
00:33:37
Speaker
no time for myself story that women have carried for millions of years. That is bullcrap. I will not be carrying on that story for myself, nor for my children. I want my kids to know that motherhood is beautiful, that motherhood is filled with joy and sometimes rage.
00:33:57
Speaker
and But that I can be a happy mom, that motherhood isn't a burden, that it's it's ah an opportunity to to remember what it's like to play, to remember what it's like to be curious, to remember.
00:34:08
Speaker
Like kids, kids will sit down and they will stare at a field and they'll find the ladybug. You know, when was the last time you sat down and looked at grass for a ladybug?
00:34:20
Speaker
you know That's what kids have to offer us. But we're so busy trying to perfect motherhood that we don't even remember that there's nothing perfect about it. And that's the beauty.
00:34:31
Speaker
Right. And that's the same with business too. and And I totally agree. It's like, so as women who are the listeners of this show, we're actively participating in our own oppression, right? When yeah we are normalizing this um this idea that we should be able to do more with less.
00:34:51
Speaker
It's not true. That's not fair. how How in the hell are we going to let men go out there and do more with more? And we have to think that We should be able to do it with less because that's how we were raised. That's what we were told. We need to be the ones cutting the coupons.
00:35:08
Speaker
We need to be the ones saving, saving. They invest in themselves. They invest. They're the responsible money people, right? They're the responsible business people. It's time for us to actually step up.
00:35:20
Speaker
And to step out of our own oppressive nature, right? Like at this point, that's what's been ingrained in us. And so I think today, like this podcast episode, if you're listening to it, this is like your chance to open your mind if you haven't yet to the idea that you shouldn't have to do more with less. There's actually tools and resources and things for you to invest in, right?
00:35:43
Speaker
Right. that are going to allow you to expand yourself and your own capacity with joy and still get to be a mother or whatever it is that you want to do in your life that's not business related.
00:35:56
Speaker
But ultimately, you have to be able to believe in yourself enough to get to that point. And I think when we're talking about coming back to our joy or our our soul or our light, you know, our mission on earth,
00:36:13
Speaker
It's really a matter like of, for me, when when I do that and when I am able to release the pressure on myself and when I am able to actually have true compassion for me, practically speaking, that comes from me trusting and relying on something bigger, number one. So however you want to frame that, um nature, God, universe. Yeah.
00:36:37
Speaker
And also recognizing, just like you were explaining in more of finite terms, you know, the tree and how long it takes for it to to bear fruit. It's also recognizing that, you know, in that same breath,
00:36:52
Speaker
We are infinite beings. So allowing yourself that infinite timeline and recognizing that's the truth of the situation and you're allowed to take time and to not figure things out. I don't want to say it like that, i don but but to give yourself all of the grace because that's what you are.
00:37:12
Speaker
So you're allowed to take time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. i was wanting to come back to something you said. And it was about, you know, the the soul of our business, the word soul of our business came through in my mind. And I was thinking about, you know, but the question that came up for me was, okay, so Shannon, you say you live with joy and that it affects your motherhood. Obviously that's clear. You're more present mom and you're no longer sacrificing yourself for some job that doesn't feel aligned. So how is that actually affecting how you do your business? How do you do business then?
00:37:52
Speaker
in this way. And I was thinking about the numbers of times that I've heard entrepreneurs describe how exhausted they feel in their businesses, especially when it comes to things like producing content or producing anything, you know, we're producing output in our businesses and the the outputs, the way that we measure the output is through money and numbers of clients and, you know, results the same way that we've already been taught.
00:38:20
Speaker
We're creating the same businesses that we learned in work. So we're making our businesses look like our jobs when actually they can feel a lot different. You know, the way that women are meant to lead is very different than the way that men have been taught to do business.
00:38:37
Speaker
The way that all business in North America, at least, is run is a very old model designed to actually produce output from in order to meet the demands of war in times where there was nothing, right? Like that was the origins of modern day business was, okay, everyone get into the factory. We're going to make this such that we can produce as many outputs as possible.
00:39:02
Speaker
And business hasn't changed because it's been run by men, just saying, just going to say, but men are, but men are as much um impacted by this model as we are as women.
00:39:15
Speaker
And it will require women to come in and show a different way. This is how we lead. We don't lead by doing differently. We lead by being differently. That's that's the feminine art of business.
00:39:29
Speaker
Now, if we were to actually look at our business and we ask ourselves, how am I being in my business? Well, so what's matt immediately going to come up for me now is like, okay, well, I'm doing all of these things and what the story will come up frequently in, as I listen to entrepreneurs all the time, right? I'm in multiple business masterminds and I hear the questions. I've been in leadership spaces for the last four years. The questions are, I'm doing all of these things, but I'm not getting the results that I want.
00:40:02
Speaker
And so we keep signing up for more and more things. We think that there's a problem with the content or the messaging. We post more and hope for the same results. That's not going to be the way. Not if we were to imagine ourselves being...
00:40:17
Speaker
different, leading differently, showing a new way of doing business. This is what you're all about, right? You're reminding us of our spirituality.
00:40:29
Speaker
Spirituality is not producing results. Spirituality is connecting with our hearts and with whatever higher being there is following our intuition.
00:40:40
Speaker
and I was thinking this morning, yesterday, yesterday, it snowed here. It's March, there's not going to be much more snow. And it was this soft, fluffy snow. You live in a place where there is no snow, I think, which is really freaking lucky. Okay.
00:40:55
Speaker
But I live in a place where there's lots of snow for a long time. And you know at this time of the year, we've had however many
Peace and Creativity
00:41:02
Speaker
months of winter. It feels like it's going on forever. And then it starts to get warm.
00:41:06
Speaker
And there's a last snow. And this one was one of those last snows where it snowed five centimeters overnight. And every tree branch was covered with this thick layer of snow. It looked like a picture.
00:41:17
Speaker
If I looked out my window, it looked like a holiday movie. And I knew I had to go out and play. I needed to go outside and I needed to play. So I took myself five minutes down the road, down to the river with my cross-country skis.
00:41:30
Speaker
And I just tooled around. And stopped by the river because it was so peaceful. There wasn't a single sound. And it was... I will have to show a picture or something. I wish I could show you a picture, but it was this soft lighting. The whole sky was kind of this like misty gray, and the water was this dark gray, and it was moving, but slowly. The only way I could tell that the water was moving was that there were little ice chunks on the top of the surface, and they would slowly float down the river. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known it was moving at all.
00:42:05
Speaker
And I was thinking, you know how often do we ask this question? like We lust for... inner peace spaciousness in our bodies when our minds are working so hard to figure out what we're doing wrong.
00:42:18
Speaker
And it's to actually be in those moments where our brains relax. where we get to literally notice that the water's not moving except for it is.
00:42:29
Speaker
And this is what peace looks like. And we don't have to work to find peace. We actually go out and we be in the peacefulness. And then we feel the space in our minds. And then...
00:42:43
Speaker
the creativity comes. Creativity itself, if we want to look at creating a business, because being an entrepreneur is being a creative. You're creating something from nothing every dang day. day And in order to access our creativity, we must, must, it's like the singular most important thing to do is give ourselves the opportunity to open our minds to space. Right?
00:43:06
Speaker
whether that is like working out, you know, the pathway there is going to be different for everybody, right? My pathway there is nature because I will find exactly what I need. It's like my body knows when I'm in nature, this is the time where my mind, it's, it's looking for different things. It's not looking for answers. It's looking for beauty.
00:43:26
Speaker
It's looking for wisdom. It's looking for meaning. It's not looking for answers or solutions to problems. There are no problems in nature. Right. And same thing when we go and we exercise and we move our bodies, like the mind stops working because the body's working, you know?
00:43:42
Speaker
And so we move our bodies not to get thinner, not to to look better. We move our bodies to open our minds so that creative ideas can fall in. This is what people mean when they say, I'm channeling ideas.
00:43:57
Speaker
Okay, we hear i'm I've channeled this idea. Well, I actually want to know what you were doing doing, I'm putting doing in quotation marks, when you channeled the idea. Where were you?
00:44:08
Speaker
What were you engaging in? Were you sitting in meditation? Were you on the treadmill? Were you running down the street? Were you painting with your children? Were you painting? Were you in the forest? Where were you when you channeled that idea?
00:44:24
Speaker
Because wherever you were and whatever you were engaging in in that moment, that is the top thing you should be doing in your business. if If every day i went into the forest, every day I would have new ideas of what to create.
00:44:40
Speaker
I have endless stories just from that one that one moment. And so we get to show people how, show men that business can be a creative art form instead of about producing outputs.
00:44:55
Speaker
And when we look at what the world needs now, what the world needs now is love, sweet love. I'm singing on your podcast. Oh my God. Delete the, no, I'm just joking.
00:45:07
Speaker
But really, the world needs now is creativity, innovation. That's what our businesses will thrive in. We do not create successful businesses by doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results.
00:45:20
Speaker
We create new experiences in our business and evolution in our business by being innovative. And in order to be innovative, we need two things.
Resilience, Self-Compassion, and Achieving Goals
00:45:29
Speaker
space to release our minds from solving problems so that creative ideas can come in and a resilience to failure.
00:45:39
Speaker
because we will fail. And this is, I think, one of the greatest lessons I learned from burning out so hard. I failed. I did. There's no two ways about it. I failed at that job.
00:45:52
Speaker
And i hated myself for having failed for years. I couldn't talk about that without crying. I'm still tearful about it because it feels, it felt bad.
00:46:02
Speaker
It didn't feel good to fail. But I faced that huge fear. I failed in the biggest way. You know, maybe not in the biggest way, but for me, I failed in the biggest way.
00:46:13
Speaker
And I still learned. I learned that I can love myself anyway, even if I have failed, you know. In the research on compassion, self-compassion, they talk about you know, two paths to achieving the goals we want.
00:46:29
Speaker
One is to like, be like the horrible coach you see in all the bad sports movies, like yelling at the players, like be, you can, you can achieve your goals being a ah horrible coach to yourself in your mind.
00:46:43
Speaker
You know, you need to work harder. You need get it. You can never like, what are you doing? You're not showing up. You haven't produced content. You're just not doing it. You know, you could be that person and you will achieve your goals being that hard ass in your mind.
00:46:58
Speaker
The downside is it will come with a huge health cost, right? The impacts of that are heart disease, anxiety, stress, and more. people who are kind to themselves in pursuit of their goals, who acknowledge that they are not perfect, that does not mean you're any less driven.
00:47:19
Speaker
And there's a big myth that that's the only way that we can get to our goals is being driven and being a hard ass. We will still achieve our goals when we are being kind to ourselves and we will do so without any of the negative health effects of stress, anxiety,
00:47:36
Speaker
heart disease, you know, whatever it is that shows up for you in your body, you know? So if your body is showing you moments of like contraction and it's telling you like you're having headaches every day, i would love to look at how kind are you being to yourself?
00:47:51
Speaker
How kind? What are your the stories you're telling yourself in your mind? What does it sound like in there? Does it sound like a bully on the schoolyard in your mind? Or does it sound like the gentlest, kindest place that you could ever imagine feeling? And that like that sense of like safety in ourselves, like if we cannot feel this sanctuary in ourselves, the way that I saw in nature that day by the river, if my inner world doesn't feel equally as delicious, then I get to imagine that it could.
00:48:24
Speaker
Right. And we don't we've never been shown that, you know, I don't think that's something that we've really learned. Who's teaching us that? Not in school. You don't learn that in school. At least I didn't. You know, maybe we do now.
00:48:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's definitely high time. And um I agree with everything you just said. And I think just as a, I mean, i can't believe time has flown by. so i'm gonna it settle here But this was so good because I feel like this is exactly what I teach. It's the paradox of, of life itself, right? So I'm always constantly saying, well, look at the paradox of this.
00:49:00
Speaker
If you're putting pressure on yourself to get to a certain point, The opposite of that is taking the pressure off and realizing that taking that pressure off is what's going to get you there in the first place. And then on the way, you're probably going to like care less about that end destination anyway. So it's funny because that's that's what it takes to get there, which is, again, such a paradox.
00:49:22
Speaker
um And then I love that. they I just want to come back to you saying. and but I actually think this could be an entire podcast episode on its own because I teach this so fervently. Like this is something that I just, I wish everybody understood is the prioritization in your business and prioritizing that one thing, that one thing that like you said, is your channel opening.
00:49:47
Speaker
whatever ah Whatever that process is for you, you need to do it first and foremost before any business doings, because ultimately we are human beings, not human doings.
00:49:57
Speaker
And when you think about it that way and you actually prioritize that as something that you ah quote unquote need to do, right? This is the only thing that you need to do because in doing that, you become who you need to be in order to get to this place that your soul is is pulling you towards.
00:50:15
Speaker
um But the second that you just do, do, do and you let go of that and you... actually stop prioritizing the thing that brought you to this place to begin with, that's when everything becomes unraveled, confusing, frustrating, upsetting, right?
Prioritizing Joy in Business
00:50:30
Speaker
It's like we got to get back to square one, which ultimately is trust. It's trust in ourselves, trust in the process, trust in the the laws of nature and God, the universe, source, whatever you want to call it, um and allowing instead of trying to force yourself those fruits to be to be bared like that's what this is all about so Shannon this was beyond I appreciate you so much and I want to give you an opportunity right now um to say whatever else you want to say but if you have any offers or if there's a specific place that you would like to send the listeners to in order to um connect with you please yeah well thank you
00:51:11
Speaker
First of all, I just think you're incredible. And I do think we don't get to spend enough time talking together. We're seeing each other in April, Dana and i And I think we're both counting down the days. It's going to be so good.
00:51:26
Speaker
it's always really neat to have a conversation like this and know that, you know, I guess in some ways I'm like, oh, how do we get, this is why your podcast is so cool because this is how people get to see that there is other ways. There's another way of being in life. It doesn't have to be do everything in order to have everything. it is be who you want to be.
00:51:48
Speaker
And everything will find its way to you. Yeah. um Okay. So my invitations. Well, first of all, if you're not following me on Instagram, that would be a perfect beginning place. That is where I live. I love, love that place. I like, like to think of Instagram as like my creative playground. It's one of the ways that I express.
00:52:09
Speaker
all of these ideas and creativity. So follow along there.
Shannon's Upcoming Program and Closing Poem
00:52:12
Speaker
And when you follow along there, what you'll see is that I'm going to be launching my signature experience, which is called the Radiant Woman Experience. um And it is six months. We're starting in April. So it's coming right up. So that will be like inviting people into that this month. I'll be doing a free three-day wild self-expression activation sometime this month. I haven't figured out the dates yet.
00:52:36
Speaker
So if you're noticing that you have a tendency towards like performance and people perfectionism, this would be a beautiful place to come because we're going to be exploring the three feminine archetypes that I use to come back to, to call me back to my home. So how I describe the radiant woman is this like perfect integration of these three feminine archetypes. We haven't even talked about that yet, but That's a whole other podcast podcast episode, but I'm really looking forward to that.
00:53:06
Speaker
Those two, things happening. So, yeah. Oh my God. That's awesome. Okay. So what's your handle on Instagram? Shannon E Clark with an E at the end. Okay. And I will, for anybody listening, I will obviously post um all of these links in the show notes. And, oh my God. Okay. I can't, just, I'm literally dumbfounded that this is time. And thank you so much again, you radiant woman, you, this was amazing.
00:53:34
Speaker
so welcome. Can I ask one? I want to, I want to end this with a poem that I wrote. Can I end it with a poem that I wrote? do okay I'm going to find it.
00:53:45
Speaker
Cause I think this is
00:53:48
Speaker
the most beautiful way to sum up our conversation. Okay. I write poetry. I didn't know I could write poetry and I'm really excited to share it with you. Okay. So this one is called, I made a contract.
00:54:02
Speaker
I made a contract with my soul to never, ever sacrifice myself again for another person's best interests to never again, forget to put myself on the list of my devotions, to continue to speak my voice, shed light on truth, disrupt the status quo.
00:54:19
Speaker
To teach people to love me, showing them where they end and where I begin. To ask for what I desire. All of it. The deep, lusty desires, the full-body pleasures of life.
00:54:30
Speaker
This sacred body was made to experience orgasmic joy, exultant confidence, and deep-rooted ownership of being utterly and completely necessary. To be clear, this does not mean i am hard or uncaring.
00:54:45
Speaker
This does not mean I am unkind or lack generosity. It means that the same care and compassion I give to others, I give to myself. It means that my dreams matter as much as everyone else's.
00:54:57
Speaker
My needs matter. My voice matters. I matter as much as everyone else. This is my promise to my soul and its promise to me that we will together find a way to remain deeply committed to loving ourselves as much as others.
00:55:12
Speaker
Signed, my soul and me.
00:55:17
Speaker
Beautiful. Thank you for sharing, Shannon. Thank you for sharing your heart. And I appreciate you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This has been beautiful. And I hope to get to connect some more over the next few months.
00:55:33
Speaker
yeah Okay. Thanks, Shannon.