Are you a soul sourced entrepreneur? If you haven’t even heard of that term until now, then you’re one of the lucky ones to learn about it here. In this episode, Steve Farber discusses entrepreneurial concepts in the most unique way with Christine Kane of Uplevel You. Christine is also a professional singer, songwriter and the author of the bestselling book, The Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur. Join in as Christine shares her insights about resets, patterns, identifying our accomplishments in our lives, and how we could train ourselves to self-coach.
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Are You A Soul Sourced Entrepreneur? With Christine Kane
It’s not a coincidence that the title of this show, Love Is Just Damn Good Business, also happens to be the title of my book, Love Is Just Damn Good Business. Check it out if you haven’t as of yet. Our guest is the one and only Christine Kane. I met Christine a while back. We met at a business conference, which is not all that unusual for me because I spend a lot of time at business conferences. Given that Christine Kane at the time was a full-time singer, songwriter, and musician who was at a business conference, that was a little bit different. There’s a good reason for it.
Christine is a talented and beautiful singer-songwriter. She built quite an impressive career. She toured around the world 200 days a year. She shared the stage with people like John Mayer, The Beach Boys, Los Lobos, Nanci Griffith, and Shawn Colvin. She carved out a great career for herself as a musician and in the process, she learned that she is, at her core, an entrepreneur. Over time, she has evolved into helping entrepreneurs who see themselves as being creative, sensitive, something other than the stereotypical entrepreneur. Christine helps them to see that those things are an advantage. She is the author of this new book, The Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur. Christine, it’s a real pleasure to welcome you to the podcast.
It’s a huge pleasure to be here.
I want to hear your story. I’ve got the typical bio from your publisher. I’ve also poked around on your website, of course. I see the way you tell your personal story on your website. There is no resume, CV, bio, and the language on your site is the story in your own voice. Can you tell us where this soul-sourced entrepreneur idea first began? Not as a book, not as a marketing thing, but the core and the essence of it? Where did that begin for you?
I was touring, playing music, performing, making CDs, DVDs, and all the stuff. I was also hosting retreats for fans of mine who kept asking me, “How do I do what you’re doing? How do I start a business? How do I live my passion? How do I do it in a way that feels authentic and real and not be terrified?” As I started teaching people and doing that work, I had to mine from my process. I’m like, “How did I do this? How did I set this up? Where did I hit a wall and have to change directions?”
As I taught business and as I worked with entrepreneurs over the years, I started to realize there were two tracks in every business. I didn’t talk about this but I started to realize we had all this strategy, which was everything people associated with the business. How to sell? How to hire a team? How to set up systems? All these little things that we call strategy. Where most people I found were getting caught was in something I started calling the soul track.
There’s the strategy track and there’s the soul track. That is the mindset. That’s playing small, “I worked in corporate. I was National Sales Director. I was Regional Sales Director. I was good but I can’t sell myself.” All those little things that come up that say, “You are worthless. You’re valueless. You’re too small. People are going to find out you’re a fraud.” Those are the things that are in what I call the soul track. That’s where I had to work with people.
Call yourself to expand and personally grow even if it’s not easy. Share on XI could teach them the strategy but we always ended up looking at the obstacles and the blocks in what I call that soul track. The soul-sourced idea is that those are the things that are being called to grow, to expand. You’re being called to break out of it. Those are also the things that lead you to a more aligned direction and on a better path than the typical left-brain, grab it out of thin air, and say, “Here’s my purpose.” It’s a more organic way of being but it happens to be true and resonates with my ideal client, for sure.
When did you start as a musician? When was that for you? When did you decide, “I’m going to be a singer-songwriter?”
I was working in a cubicle at Ogilvy & Mather. I had been in PR for one year out of college. I was miserable, I could barely contain myself. I couldn’t believe this is what people settled on doing. I never shared with anybody that I had this dream. I don’t even I was brave enough to say it out loud to anyone. I started writing letters to God in my journal that I was miserable in my job, that I was grateful I had one but I was miserable. I wanted to be a songwriter. I didn’t tell a soul in my life. I bought my first guitar. I started taking lessons. Eventually, I quit my job. I then moved to a different city. I started taking steps. I was terrified the whole time but at least not depressed anymore.
You had a glimpse of the business corporate world. You dove headlong despite your fear or terror into the music world. When you laid down that gauntlet for yourself that said, “I’m going to be a singer-songwriter.” Did it ever occur to you back in that early time that there was going to be a business element to this as well?
No. I was broken. I was the worst of the worst at first. I wanted to be rescued. I wanted to be discovered. I thought that I would get a record deal and then it would all be done and everyone would recognize, “This is wonderful.” When that didn’t happen, I was about two years into it. I started to get slapped around enough that it woke me up out of that disempowered place. As I was on the road doing trips, I started to listen to business books. I realized, “If I want to keep doing this and I don’t want to go back to being in a cubicle, I’m going to have to get serious about myself as a business.” I don’t know if I articulated it that way. At first, I went through a lot of that disillusioning thing. I had that little tantrum, “I thought it was going to be easier than this.”
Writing songs and playing music, all of that, was a great thing in and of itself. I loved learning that. I love art. I love music. This is like that strategy and soul thing. When I had to start shaping up and shaping the strategy path and get my little mindset into gear, everything changed. I started to realize, “I have to start being the one to give myself permission. I have to be the one to discover myself. I have to be the one to be able to put myself out there.” That turned a lot around for me. It gave me a great deal of respect for entrepreneurship and business ownership and understanding how all of this stuff works.
What I’m hearing there is the realization that I need to bring in a business element to my music career is the shift from waiting for something to happen to you and from that, “I can take control of this to a large degree.” A lot of artists never get to that part. It’s like, “I’m going to do my art and the world will discover me.” Sometimes it happens.
I have a podcast called The Soul-Sourced Business Podcast. I did a whole episode on waiting. It’s called Procrastination and The 8 Waits. It’s the things people wait for before they step into that driver’s seat.
When I look at your work, Christine, I see the creative songwriter in the way that you present to the world.
It’s such a burden, though. When you and I were at SOBCon, at that conference, the whole thing was about how to write good headlines. I know how to write a good headline but they bore me. Otherwise, they’d be saying, “Five ways to break out of procrastination and always have great priorities.” I can’t do it.
That’s a good thing. It sounds like you’re apologizing.
I’m not searchable. People find me organically. It’s nice and it’s great.
Soul Sourced Entrepreneur: We’re here to do something, to expand into something, to grow in some way.
People find you for the right reasons. You said earlier, “I was the worst of the worst at first,” which is a great line for a song. They do find you organically. They find you because of what you’re offering to folks. People are walking around with that need to fill. I’ll give you an example. I have the Uplevel Your Life Journal, Daily and Weekly Practices for Activating Your Personal Power. My wife, Veronica, bought this course. She was using this back in 2016, 2017.
I wrote the whole Uplevel Your Life Program when I was still a musician. That’s what started my company. My company became Uplevel You. I love that she did that. It’s still our top-selling program.
It wasn’t a response to some snappy marketing. Your marketing is snappy but not formulaic marketing is my point. I can’t imagine that you would approach it any other way. Otherwise, it would be inconvenient with what you’re teaching us. If I’m going to be a soul-sourced entrepreneur, I’m assuming that what that means is I have to show up in my work. Not I as somebody who aspires to be like somebody else or pretending to be somebody else. If you weren’t doing that in the way that you’re showing up and the way you teach that, that would be a problem.
To me, marketing is communication done well. Some people use it in manipulative ways. When it’s done well, it becomes an extension of you in a deep connective way to communicate to your prospects and your clients. People notice when you’re doing something different. When you find that voice and when you find your message, you begin to put it into your writing your articles and your emails and that of thing.
I want to pick apart the title of your book for a second. You’ve got Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur. I want to take those piece by piece and then put it all together. First of all, what do you mean by soul?
I struggled with using that because I didn’t want people to think I had co-opted that word to mean anything in particular. What I truly mean is the core, the essence of who you are, and coming from a deeper place than ego. It’s no more expansive or complex than that. Beyond ego, left brain, here’s what business has to be, a deeper place.
More of an internally focused approach.
In anything we do, we are the common denominator. What energy we bring to that is always going to be a part of it and yet most of us avoid that. We avoid ourselves. We avoid our darkness. We only want to be happy and jolly. We don’t want to talk about anything that’s hurting. We distract, avoid, and tune out whether that means soul to come back to the center. It doesn’t necessarily mean internal, like, “Let’s all stare inside and get all dark.” It’s about being able to be present to that. Being able to understand that the energy you bring to your work, your business, or whatever it is matters and that it’s worth spending some time mining for what’s there as opposed to avoiding what’s there. That brings us to that next word, sourced.
I’ll use something that people are taught in facilitator school. Say more about that sourced piece.
I’ve had encounters with a lot of different business strategists and coaches. Everybody is data-driven. I’m all for data. I’m all for facts. There is some weird X factor that most of the strategists can’t explain when they look at my stuff that doesn’t necessarily align with all the perfect data, all the perfect left-brain stuff when it comes to business. That sourced part is coming from the truth of who you are, marketing from a real authentic place, and making the choice to be super congruent because you’re coming from a different place as opposed to, “This subject line works. This heading works. This fake scarcity works. It’ll get people.” It’s a difference from getting people to, “I’m going to be who I am. The ones who are the right ones are going to come.”
There’s an emotional process that you have to go through to overcome obstacles and produce great outcomes. Share on XTo the left-brain strategists, it sounds woo. I’ve been called woo. I’ve been eye-rolled and all that stuff. I live in Ashville. I am not even close to being woo compared to what’s going on around me here. That’s why I say strategy and soul are both important. As you said, love is just damn good business. When you are tuned into that, there is something, whether you call it love or you call it the soul that leads, that is sourced, that can make deeper, better, and bigger decisions for you.
It’s not a question of recognizing that soul aspect of ourselves. It’s using it in our business, which brings us to the word entrepreneur. This might sound like an odd question but what do you mean by entrepreneur? Who is it that qualifies as an entrepreneur? The reason I ask the question is it’s one of those words that we use to describe a lot of different things. It’s a pretty big umbrella. There are a lot of different definitions for it. How would you describe it?
I like to be upfront. I don’t have a neatly defined way of looking at it. For me, it’s the spirit of the thing. It’s someone who is stepping out of rules. I look at it as creating your own economy. Meaning your world, your life, you are now responsible for all aspects of it, whether it’s the people you hire, the people you relate to, the fact that you’re paying yourself now. You are every aspect that we consider our lives to be, spirituality, environment, economy, relationships, people working for you, the service that you provide. Everything is in and from you. You are the core of this business you’ve created.
My disillusionment moment with music wasn’t an overnight thing. It was a moment where I started to realize, “I’m going to have to do something about this.” I stopped being in the world of being at effect and stepped into a world of being at cause. The spirit of my music at that time and then moved into an executive coaching business started to come forth and I realize that this is bigger than money, business, and this tactical thing I might be doing right now. To me, that embodies all of what entrepreneurship is about.
That’s beautiful. I meet a lot of people who describe themselves as entrepreneurs. This is the thinking behind my question. When I put them side by side, they’re more different than they are similar. I’ll give you a few different areas on the spectrum as it were. “I’m an entrepreneur because I want to start my own business doing something,” that’s one classification. The other is, “I’m an entrepreneur because I pay myself. I’m responsible for my own business. It’s me. I’m a solopreneur.” There are a few of us. There’s the, “I’m an entrepreneur. I started a company. I have 600 employees and we do $700 million, $800 million in revenue a year.” That’s also an entrepreneur.
The person who said, “I want to start a business someday,” is not necessarily thinking, “I want to have hundreds or thousands of employees and do hundreds of million dollars in revenue every year.” There’s a commonality there among those folks as well. I’m reluctant to use the word spiritual but there’s the entrepreneurial spirit that exists in all of those different manifestations of what that could look like. Who do you tend to attract more in your business?
It depends. I’d have gotten plenty of people who had that idea. Because we’re talking about corporate, what comes to mind is I’ve had a bunch of people who were in corporate jobs who decided to go start their own business and took off and have created empires. They didn’t necessarily know they were going to create empires with teams. One of my clients started with zero. She had left corporate. She went to six figures in a year. After a few years of being my client, I turned her into a coach on our team. She was amazing. She’s in Rwanda helping people be entrepreneurs there. She’s one of those amazing people who discovered that there was an entrepreneurial spirit in there.
I also have people who come and they are burnt out by it all. They thought they wanted to follow their dreams and they realized it was harder than they thought. They aren’t running this thing well and they don’t know how to market, they don’t know how to sell. They have this business and they need to systematize it. I work at that level as well. I don’t worry as much about labels. Titling a book is one of the hardest things. You have great titles, so maybe you don’t struggle with that as much.
I don’t like labeling who gets to say they’re an entrepreneur versus who doesn’t. That’s an Instagram argument that I’m not interested in having with people. I know there’s a lot of ponies in any industry out there. There’s a lot of wannabes in any industry out there. Someone says they’re a musician and they’ve never played a gig. They’re still a musician if they’re playing music. I find that if I get too into the weeds with who gets to say what, I lose all focus on what I’m about.
The issue that I have sometimes with people who are self-described entrepreneurs, there’s almost a tribal element in some ways. In some of the conferences that I’ve gone to speak out or to hang out in out of curiosity that is geared towards entrepreneurs, oftentimes, there’s an attitude. The attitude is that either you’re an entrepreneur or you’re a slave, either you’re an entrepreneur or you’re living your life dancing to somebody else’s music. In other words, if you’re working for somebody, you are less than. That’s the attitude that I hear a lot from entrepreneurs.
My question to them is, “If you’re the entrepreneur and you’re going to build a company, are you telling me that you’re going to build a company of slaves? Are you going to tell me that you’re going to build a company populated by your employees that are going to be less than? Is that what you’re saying?” In a lot of ways, when people feel the way that you did in the cubicle and when people feel the way that this other person you told us about felt, sometimes it’s because they’re in the wrong place. There’s something else that they need to be out there doing and carving out for themselves. Oftentimes, it’s a failure of leadership in that place that they feel that way, to begin with.
I look back at that and first of all, I should never have been hired. If anyone had been smart enough to do my Kolbes, DISC, or anything like that, they should have run. They should have been like, “Security, we have a breach here,” when I came in for my interview. What you’re pointing to though comes back around to how important it is to know yourself. At that time, I did not have the awareness of management principles and company principles to realize that office was run badly. My boss was not a good communicator. Nobody was seeing my strengths. I got these 360s that were a disaster. I didn’t know what I was doing. I do believe that. Understanding who you are is a huge piece of it. I also think that some people are never going to make it in a job.
There’s no scenario that applies to everybody. I live in an odd world. It’s not so odd for people to do the work that I do. I am an entrepreneur. We have a small company, a virtual team, certified facilitators, a lot of different partnerships that we work with. My clients are corporate clients, for the most part. I’m doing work in companies in which I would not be suited to work. I’ll speak for myself. It gives me a different perspective. It’s that both worlds perspective. I can see both sides of the coin.
Soul Sourced Entrepreneur: All the best entrepreneurs and business owners and the wisest people in any area of expertise say that they’re all still learning.
Back to you. You said they shouldn’t have hired you, they should have escorted you from the building and pulled the fire alarms. I’m not so sure that as a rule of thumb, I would agree with that. If they were smart, they would have known who you are and they would have found a way to use your natural creativity. After all, you did work for a PR firm. We tend to fall back on some image of the “right person” to hire instead of saying, “I want to hire good people. I want to hire creative people. I want to hire people who have a natural love for being around other people that want to make a difference and want to have an impact. I’m going to teach them what they need to know. I’m going to figure out a way to use their strengths and their passion in the work that has to be done here.”
As a company owner, I have done that with my team. I have somebody who works for me as my operations manager. She started as an assistant. She came from a corporate world and landed here. At first, she thought I was crazy. I sent her through training. I sent her to Dan Sullivan’s Team Tools. I sent her to Kolbe training. She started to learn things and realized, “My boss is this way because she’s supposed to be this way. I have strengths, too.” It has been a game-changer. I’ve had full-time employees. After COVID, I went to more contractors than employees. They’ve stayed with me 6, 7, 8 years. Amanda has been with me for years. Some of it is because I have taken so much time to recognize the value that they bring to the table because without that, I would be lost.
I get it, back to this soul-sourced approach to business. A soul-sourced entrepreneur, somebody who wants to start their own business, is in business for themselves for sure. It applies to anybody whether they consider themselves an entrepreneur or not. One would assume we all have a soul and we don’t pay attention to it in the way we show up in whatever we do. One of the elements of the LEAP Framework that we teach is energy. It’s Love, Energy, Audacity, and Proof. You talk about energy as well. Say a little bit about what that means to you and how we should be paying attention to it.
The book is set up in four different sections and it’s all based on an acronym. That acronym is a mantra we say at Uplevel, which is my company. It is I’M IN. I broke it down into these four sections. I’M IN is all about being fully present in whatever work or business you’re doing. The first I is initiate intention. That is where we have to have that vision, that idea, or whatever it might be. I walk through all of that. Unfortunately, in many of the mindset training or law of attraction things that we see out there, that’s where people stop. The second letter, which is M, is all about managing your power or managing your energy. I use those words interchangeably.
Once you’ve set an intention, that intention is powerful that it brings up anything unlike itself to be cleared. Most people stop at that point because it’s terrifying. They think, “Look at me. I’m calling in all kinds of bad stuff.” The part about managing that energy and understanding your energy means that at 3:00 PM on a Wednesday when you were all gung-ho on New Year’s Eve to set all those resolutions, you’re now faced with choices, low energy, and who are you. That whole section of the book is learning how to deal with the mindset of entrepreneurship, to deal with the fact that someone wants you to discount your price or someone betrayed you as an employee or whatever it might be. How do you manage yourself in all of those situations? I speak to that as the daily working with your intention and living through all the myriad things that happen in a business.
When I start with an intention to create something, to accomplish something, to make an impact, to make a difference, the intention is the easy part. That’s usually where it stops because we don’t like to do anything unless it’s easy.
It’s like getting an idea to write a book is so much better than the actual writing of the book or whatever it might be.
How many times do people come up to you at one of your retreats or one of your events and say, “I want to write a book.” Do you hear that a lot?
All the time.
I’ve gotten to the point where I will say to people, “I hear what you’re saying but what you’re saying is not I want to write a book, it’s I want to have a book I want. I want to have written a book.” I can start with the intent nut the intent to write a book is different from a passive desire. The Intent has energy in it. This is my interpretation of what you said. If I have an intent for something to create something that, by definition, does not yet exist, then the natural response to that is what we interpret as negativity. It’s the resistance and doubt. That is where it stops for a lot of people. It’s the experience of it. The question is, “What do we do with that?” For some people, when they start to experience negative voices or whatever, they think there’s something wrong with them, “If my intent was pure enough, it should flow out.”
“I shouldn’t be floating by now. The angel should have delivered it,” or whatever your little bent is on this stuff.
When I find myself saying, “I’m not worthy,” then I find myself saying, “I shouldn’t be feeling that I’m not worthy. What’s wrong with me that I feel that I’m not worthy, which makes me even less worthy?” Is there a little nugget, something that we could use on the onset of that thing?
Intent has powerful energy in it but the intent to write a book is different from a kind of a passive desire. Share on XThere are many. I don’t like to be a promoter of my book instead of giving advice. That whole section is written deeply and it’s written about that part of the process. What you’re describing is a moment where the dirt comes up. You plant a seed. That’s the intention. The first thing that comes up is not the sprout, it’s the dirt. What you’re talking about is, at that moment, suddenly you have to react. It’s that painful thing. In the book, I teach two different ways of dealing with those things. One is that reactive because it always happens.
The other one, which may be more important, is the proactive, the creative. Meaning start to create a habit. If your wife did Uplevel Your Life, I taught it in there too. One of the habits that I teach in the book is a Sunday summit. It’s a series of questions. Not a big series, it’s a little moment. It’s a come to Jesus moment, you and yourself, every Sunday, prior to the week, where you do a little coaching 360. I don’t want to hide this from people. You can grab it. It’s SoulSourcedBook.com. You can get all the tools from the book. It’s in there. It’s nothing major. It’s something I started with Uplevel Your Life and people loved it. They started doing it every week.
What happens is when you’re proactive like that, when you create a habit like that, getting thrown off, all those little things that steal your attention, distract you, and make you feel like you’re worthless, or whatever your patterns are, they don’t take the wind out of you as quickly. You’ve spent some time being proactive with that habit. That would be where I would start anybody, getting some non-negotiable thing that you do every week where you check in on your intention, your word of the year, or whatever your thing is. You look at the things you accomplished last week. Where did you get thrown off last week? You then do a reset. You say, “Where am I at?” You look at why did you get thrown off.
A lot of times, I’ll have people say, “I was going to write my book and I didn’t write my book.” Every week, they come back and they realize, “Maybe it’s not time because I have so many other things. I have three little kids. I’m running this and doing this project.” It’s okay. At that point, you can say, “I’m going to take this off my priority list instead of beating myself up about it. I’m going to delegate it.” Whatever it might be. You start to recognize your patterns and they start to not hurt so much or be this thing you judge yourself so much for because you start to train yourself how to self-coach, which is important in all of our lives. I don’t care if you have a business or not but it starts to realign and reset you each week.
I’M IN, That’s I and M. What’s the next I?
The next I is interpreting circumstance or interpreting experiences, whatever it might be. Interpretation, as you said, “That means I’m unworthy. I got rejected. Therefore, it means God doesn’t want me to have a business.” Whatever you might do with it. We tend to have what I call the KonMari approach. An approach to organizing the situations that happen in our lives. There’s good stuff and there’s bad stuff. We have these two bins. “I got the deal.” Good stuff. “I didn’t get the deal.” Bad stuff. “My boss loves me.” Good stuff. “My boss hates me.” Bad stuff.
We are black and white-ing everything that we don’t recognize how much of this can be reframed toward anchoring back to our intention and say, “How might this be calling me to expand? How might this be my intention showing up?” You say, “I want a million-dollar business.” Your team all quits the next week. What if your intention was powerful that you simply released everyone who wasn’t going to get you to that million-dollar business? Is that a pain in the ass? Absolutely. Much better to reframe it and say, “Look how powerful my intention was.” I try to anchor everything back to how clear you are in each and every day and how you interpret everything that matters. The N in I’M IN is navigating decisions because that’s what we’re all doing all the time. We’re constantly making decisions.
That navigation is going to depend on your interpretation of the events.
Everything. Your intention feeds your attention and your energy and then you’re interpreting the experience and then that does influence the decisions.
It sounds like in the interpretation piece, there’s a little bit of the philosophy that everything happens for a reason. That’s a fascinating subject to me. I don’t want to debate philosophy. It doesn’t matter what the philosophy is. If I act that way, it’s going to have an impact. In other words, if I act as if all these people quit and if I assume that’s a good thing, what can I learn from this that’s going to serve me in achieving my goals? There’s no downside to that.
Yes. I also want to point out that I don’t think people make that shift instantly. That’s not a call. It’s not like, “Think happy.” When you are hit with something, there is also an emotional process we have to go through. There is a pause button that does need to be set. I want to clear that up.
The everything-happens-for-a-reason conversation that we have for ourselves is one of the things that we do to console ourselves when we’re experiencing that natural, normal, negative impact. There are a few people that are going to say, “Everybody quit. That’s fantastic. I don’t have to make payrolls this month.” Any normal person is going to feel all kinds of things, from betrayal to frustration to self-doubt. We step back and say, “Maybe there’s a good reason for that. If so, how can I navigate my next decision, my next steps?”
The question I always ask first is, how might this be calling me to expand? Not that it’s easy because it’s not. You’re saying nothing has meaning. It doesn’t. We can look at it as a deep existential question. There isn’t any meaning. As an entrepreneur, a leader, it does help you to bring a different light to things than the usual American media-driven drama story, “These people suck. These people don’t. You suck. I don’t,” whatever it might be. Divisiveness is one of those things. I don’t think it’s anybody.
To be clear, I’m not saying that nothing has meaning. What I’m saying is that even if that were true, we can act as if everything had meaning. There’s no downside to it. I don’t claim to be smart enough to know one way or the other. When I think everything happens for a reason, I do subscribe to that for myself. Not that I could prove it, not that I would want to convince anybody else of it, but it serves me in the way that I work and show up in the world. It also implies everything happens for a good reason.
It depends on what you consider good. This is where it comes back to that word soul. We’re here to do something, to expand into something, to grow in some way. If we were all constantly getting our way, there would be little growth. It’s like when you hear somebody describe their first time in the stock market and their stock explodes and they suddenly think they’re genius until they get slapped around a whole bunch and they realize they’re not. They have to learn. There are so many stories like that. Because you succeeded at one thing, it doesn’t mean you’re brilliant at that. All the best entrepreneurs, business owners, and the wisest people you speak to about anything, any area of expertise, they’re all still learning. They’re all still expanding. One success, two success did not make them suddenly say, “I’m great at this.”
The question of how might this be calling me to expand is a great question to ask in the face of success as well. What you described reminds me of this old quote. I don’t know who originally said it but my mentor, Tom Peters, used to quote it all the time, “You should never rest on your laurels because today’s laurels are tomorrow’s compost.”
Soul Sourced Entrepreneur: Your intentions will feed your attention and energy, and then you’re interpreting the experience and that would lead to making decisions.
I love Tom Peters. I quote him in my book, by the way. As I tried to describe the soul track, I quoted him. I said, “It’s the soft stuff, the stuff no one wants to talk about.” I quote him saying, “Soft is hard. That soft stuff is what creates the hard numbers and the hard results.” I love him.
He was on this podcast. That was a lot of fun. It’s interesting because the word soul has lots of, for some people, baggage or connotations attached to it. One of his books back in the ‘90s was The Pursuit of Wow!. I was at the Tom Peters Company at the time and we put together a workshop called Service With Soul. I remember trying to explain to potential clients exactly what the hell that meant.
My clients love it. I get that in corporate, especially then probably it was even harder. It’s probably a little easier now. People resist anything. This is why I don’t like labeling stuff, who gets to say their what? Who gets to say this? It’s hard. It’s one of those things that everybody has an association with a word that can be negative and you have to do your best with your context.
Christine, you’re talking to a guy who wrote a book called Love Is Just Damn Good Business. I’m curious if you’re seeing the same thing with the reaction to soul. The general assumption is that the business world will resist that but that has not been my experience.
People come up to me after things. I did corporate training. I also taught a monthly thing for government leaders every month in West Virginia for their leadership retreat space. People would come up to me afterward and whisper things, “I’ve always thought this.” It’s like, “Why are we whispering? Why is this dreaded?” It’s funny but everyone has their thing. The right people will come up and tug at your sleeve and say, “What you’re saying means something to me. Thank you for saying it.”
We’ve had almost identical experiences with that. Here’s what led me to conclude. I’m not in the business of convincing anybody of anything. I’m not in the convincing business. I’m in the confirmation business. I’m going to suggest that you are too. What’s happening is when somebody tugs on your sleeve and whispers in your ear, you’ve confirmed for them what they already knew is true. In some cases, they think there’s something wrong with them because the whole corporate environment, wherever it might be, is implying that’s crazy. There’s no place for that in business.
This is my theory. I can’t prove it. I’ll talk in terms of love for a second. Most people already believe that love is good business. The problem is that most people don’t believe that most people believe that love is good business. They hide. The same is true with this approach to soul. I wouldn’t be surprised at all. What you’ve written is an evergreen book. They are timeless principles. Over time, I predict that you’re going to see more and more people in the corporate arena gravitate to that.
I already get calls from them. I already hear from people constantly about it. I don’t think it’s long before more and more people are speaking at this level and it comes out. We’re seeing more and more companies take this on and make this more important. It does take a while.
There’s a trend in that direction. I remember back in the ‘90s, back in the early days, I was a younger man. Millennials were coming into the workforce and they were saying things like, “We want to do work that’s meaningful. I don’t want a job for life. I want to do meaningful work while I’m here. I want to have an impact on the world.” Back then, we were saying, “These kids now.” Now, we’re still saying the same thing. The difference is that little by little, over time, there’s less and less collective resistance to these ideas, which is a sign of evolution, I suppose. Tom has a new book that came out. The subtitle is Extreme Humanism. He said, “This is my nineteenth book. I’ve written the same book nineteen times.”
I like listening to his books. The Little Big Things is one of my favorites. We have our quarterly team meetings. I’ve read excerpts from that book many times.
Those aforementioned people that say, “I want to write a book,” I always encourage them to do it. There is an experience that you have when you write something. You’re participating in an ongoing conversation in a way that people who don’t write books are not. They’re participating in it by reading the books and having conversations about it. It’s a great gift to be able to put words out there and ask people to respond to them. The words that we put out are built on everything that we’ve learned. We’re all contributing to each other’s work. It’s about jumping in on the conversation with people like Tom and many others who’ve had such an influence on the way that we show up. What we’re doing here is a great thing. Christine, this has been a treat.
Thank you so much.
It’s wonderful to reconnect with you and have you share your wisdom with all of us. Where is the best place for people to contact you and connect with you?
I’m all in the usual places. My website is ChristineKane.com. You can look at more about the book at SoulSourcedBook.com. I have a podcast called Soul Sourced Business for anybody out there who’s a business owner.
Your podcast, at least so far, is a solo cast.
I wanted to take the first year and get my feet wet. I was like, “If I have to start with interviewing people and becoming good at interviewing, that would be too stressful.” I turn on the mic and teach.
It’s great stuff.
Thank you.
I know I sound like a fanboy. I am.
Back at you.
I remember when we met and I came home with a few of your CDs. Our girls were younger at the time. They were a little starstruck.
My nieces used to have posters of me on their wall next to Britney Spears when they were young. After a while, it was like, “Hey.” They turned late teens and then it was like, “Whatever.”
I want to say on the record, it has been so much fun to watch your career and that brilliant way that you’ve navigated into this world of helping people to become better at what they do.
Thank you. I’m grateful to know you and to be a part of this and your work, too.
Thank you, Christine. To all of you reading, thank you. Until next time, do what you love in the service of people who love what you do.
Important Links:
- Love Is Just Damn Good Business
- The Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur
- The Soul-Sourced Business Podcast
- Procrastination and The 8 Waits
- Uplevel Your Life Journal
- Tom Peters – Previous episode
- The Pursuit of Wow!
- Extreme Humanism
- The Little Big Things
- ChristineKane.com
- https://ChristineKane.com/home/
About Christine Kane
Before Christine Kane founded what became a multi-million dollar coaching company, she spent fifteen years in the music industry, producing seven CD’s and a DVD on her own label, while touring the globe over 200 days a year. She shared the stage with luminaries like John Mayer, The Beach Boys, Los Lobos, Nanci Griffith, and Shawn Colvin.
In 2010, Kane opened Uplevel You, a company that serves a new class of idea-driven, aggression-averse entrepreneurs (a class she counts herself a member of). Her work has attracted more than 125,000 loyal email subscribers and has coached thousands of clients into the six and seven figures in their businesses, while remaining true to their message and their souls.
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