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Simple, Feminine Business Models that Create Sustainable Abundance
for healers, life coaches & holistic practitioners
Dear Friend,
Over the past few years, I’ve seen that many of the women I work with are craving a simple and feminine business model.
There are two main reasons:
Reason #1: What they’re being told to do to market their businesses feels too complicated. They feel overwhelmed with it. It’s too high tech. There are too many moving parts. They have to learn so many things. You’re ready for something streamlined and doable.
Reason #2: What they are being told to do to market their business feels too aggressive. I’ve had many clients confess that they feel like they’re being asked to market like men. It doesn’t feel right. They want to fight the patriarchy, not become it.
May you can relate. “There’s got to be an easier way that isn’t so full of pressure,” you think. Or is there? You’re beginning to doubt this. To make it worse…
You Are Plagued With Ten Other Big Doubts
Not only are you doubting that there’s a better way, you’ve got doubts about yourself and what you’re offering. Each of these doubts seems like a huge, bright, red stop sign. Even when you address one, another one seems to appear in an endless line
- Doubt #1: “I want to tell people about my work but would they even understand it?”
- Doubt #2: “Even if they understood it, would anyone actually want it?”:
- Doubt #3: “Even if they wanted it, would they pay for it? So far, despite trying marketing, raising (and lowering!) my prices and doing mindset work, it seems like people aren’t paying (did I waste my whole life in learning and honing these skills?).”
- Doubt #4: “Even if they’d pay someone for help with this, why would they trust me?”
- Doubt #5: “Even if they would trust me, who am I to even offer this kind of help?”
- Doubt #6: “How can I ask for money for something that comes so easy to me?”
- Doubt #7: “What if I fail and humiliate myself? What if I succeeded and got all this attention and then made a fool of myself?”
- Doubt #8: “What if I come across as desperate, pushy or sleazy?”
- Doubt #9: “What if I’m not really meant to do this?”
- Doubt #10: “I’m uncoachable.” Maybe you have invested in other programs that didn’t bring in clients and you’ve begun to lose trust in yourself. “It must be me,” you say to yourself. “Even the experts can’t help me. Maybe I’m just resistant to being coached.” You don’t want to keep trying, keep looking, keep failing. You’re exhausted.
Those doubts are real. They are frightening. They are resolvable. They don’t need to stop you. You’re not alone.
Hi, my name is Zahra.
Over the past ten years of helping women like you, I’ve seen how many women feel trapped between being either The Starving Artist or The Corporate Sellout. But neither are truly abundant. Both are both poor in different ways. Neither one truly satisfies. Both cost you dearly.
This is why my work is focused on a third option: becoming an Abundant Entrepreneur.
What do I mean by that? A happy, meaningful life + sustainable income in your business while staying true to yourself.
How do we get there? By creating simple & feminine business models.
What is a simple, feminine business model?
It’s the combination of three elements.
Your Simple, Feminine Business Model:
Element #1: Inner Work:
This means doing the work to overcome your wounds and heal your relationship with femininity, money, power and abundance. Almost every woman who has come to me for help has come plagued with several of the nine doubts, if not all.
Element #2: Outer Work:
This means crafting a simple, feminine strategy to grow your businesses that doesn’t take a lot of time. Building such a model will do a lot to handle your doubts too. Sometimes it feels impossible just because we don’t see ‘how’ it could work.
Element #3: Community:
If you have been feeling alone in a culture where we value independence over community, you are not alone.
To create sustainable, long term success with ease, we need a supportive community that can lift us as we are climbing.
How did I learn all this?
In 1994, I moved to Canada from London, England and started my life from scratch, renting a basement with no money, no friends or family.
In some ways, I was very happy to have freedom to make my own choices. Moving to Canada gave me the freedom to reinvent myself and gave me the physical and emotional space to create my life the way I wanted to. In other ways, I was having some big money struggles. I was scraping by, slowly going into debt, in a city with no family or friends and doing a survival job that I didn’t enjoy.
I grew up in a family that was many things, but two of them were: ‘wealthy’ and ‘dysfunctional’. In my mind, wealth became associated with that dysfunction. This was reinforced daily by seeing the ways that rich and powerful people abused their status. I had a very negative relationship with money and wealthy people.
I didn’t like them. They hurt and controlled others. They misused money. In my mind, money was bad. Power was bad. People with money and power were very bad indeed. And so, in reaction to that, the only people I surrounded myself with were people who were broke. I felt safe around people who were not wealthy.
This was the catch 22 I’d been in for years.
I was an entrepreneur who needed money. I needed to network and make connections with people in greater positions of wealth and power than me. But I hated them.
But my poor friends couldn’t help me with my financial and business struggles which were getting worse every day.
I kept accepting clients that either couldn’t pay me well or, if they paid me well, I expected myself to work way too hard for the money. They either couldn’t afford my full rates or, if they could, I’d do twice the amount of work they paid for. Both led to burn out.
Then, one day, it happened: I was hurt by someone I really trusted who didn’t have money. Wow.
This blew my mind.
I realized that money has little to do with someone’s character. Being poor doesn’t make people good. Being rich doesn’t make them bad.
I began to see that there were some wealthy people who had the power to do good by helping others. I began to find examples of wealthy people who did good things with their money (even if it was only in the media at first). Suddenly, I needed to re-evaluate my relationship with money from scratch.
Here is the truth: I ran away from making money because if rich people were bad that would mean I would be bad. But now… that was all up in the air. I decided to build a successful business.
I decided that I wanted to make a good living.
I decided I wasn’t ‘bad’ for wanting to do that.
Suddenly it was all clear to me, I needed to question my beliefs around money and wealthy people. I needed to stop judging wealth and power if my business was ever going to work. I needed to stop sabotaging my success.
Looking back now, I feel that this economic and spiritual crisis prepared me to teach what I learnt during that very critical period in my life. Little did I know my future life was being built from the rubble.
It sent me into a three-part journey from which the three elements of my approach to simple, feminine business models came.
Element One: Inner Work
I had no choice but to go inwards. As I look back I can see that, by experiencing a financial lack, I was being initiated into abundance. The lack I was experiencing was teaching me two things. The first was how to turn hard circumstances around. The second was that many of the resources I needed to do that were already within me.
I studied every self help book I could get my hands on and took every course (even if I had to borrow money).
Element Two: The Outer Work
I could have probably kept going, after having children while also running a business, it was clear to me that my energy and time were limited. I needed to find an easier way to market myself.
I needed a simple business model that could get me results instead of getting lost in the next shiny object or the newest social media platform. I finally came up with a five step process that allowed me to get clients who were perfect for me without ever feeling like I was pushing or ‘selling’ to anyone.
To learn about my Five Step Process, click here.
Element Three: Building a Community
As my business started to grow, I realized that I didn’t only need the help of one or two people, I needed a community to carry me if I wanted to continue to grow.
In doing this work, I discovered the next block I had: I was deeply committed to ‘independence’ and doing everything on my own.
I was terrified of asking for help.
In business, we need to network and collaborate with other people. If we are afraid of asking for help, we can only grow so much. Not collaborating with other people made it really hard to grow on my own. I could no longer create success unless I let go of my belief in independence. Wanting to go solo, meant that I would never let myself hire people or delegate, which could have freed up my time and brought some badly needed balance to my life and freed me up to actually make more money. I could have delegated my newsletter, learning web designing, housework (I have a cleaner now), or even grocery shopping (my husband buys groceries now).
Marinating ideas or emotions on my own. Now, I have friends I can be vulnerable with so emotions move faster. I Mastermind with others to move forward fast, making decisions faster. Day to day help with children, I network with other parents.
It also meant that I’d often feel so stuck and overwhelmed and freeze up because I’d never open up to anyone. So I stayed feeling stuck. Being vulnerable could have freed me up. I was working really hard with not enough reward for my efforts.
Being independent and not asking for help also led me to burn out in my business a few times. Even though I was making a lot of money, I was exhausted.
After I learnt to delegate, ask for help and started to collaborate with others, it freed up my time to enjoy other life pursuits. I feel it wouldn’t have been to ask for help or collaborate if I didn’t heal the wounded relationships from my past.
I learned to let go of control and delegate the tasks that could be done better by someone else. Creating a community in my life provided me with the inter-dependence and reliance on others I had never experienced before. I started to flourish and blossom.
And that’s how the simple, feminine business model was born.
The Happy Ending:
The result of all the inner work, fast forward to today: I live in a beautiful home in Fraser Heights just outside of Vancouver that we purchased for $1.5 million with my two children and my husband. I love what I do for a living, serving clients internationally through my coaching business. I could have never imagined this when I moved into the bare basement, broke and in a strange city where I knew no one.
If you’d like to create your own simple, feminine business model, keep reading.
In our work together, you will learn how to:
- Craft a message that clients understand and are willing to pay you for it.
- Create a business from a place of feeling Abundant and Enough vs. Scarcity.
- Package your services so you are not working really hard
- Create a simple marketing plan to bring in clients consistently (and the exact steps you need to take)
- Create a talk that sells
- Convert potential clients into paid clients by having a sales conversation that feels good.
- Ask for money by healing your judgments of money, wealthy people and the relationship and power.
Scale & Closing Thoughts To My Sisters…
I believe the relationship we have to money and power lie at the heart of women’s empowerment.
Our basic survival and safety depends on money. It isn’t possible to make more money unless we heal the money traumas we grew up with.
Women, in particular, have been unfairly treated over the years, either in our families or in our culture at large. The unfairness and injustices we experienced make us more sensitive to others and affects our relationship with money and other people (as trauma around money only happens in relationships with other people).
But, in business, we need to have relationships with people, including our customers.
Healing our wounds rids us of cynicism and gives us the kind of sensitivity needed to help others heal. Our healed wounds can make us guides, not guarded and allow us to embrace others instead of always ‘bracing ourselves’. They can make us generous, not jaded and full of blessings, not bitterness.
If we have had a painful relationship with people in power, we will have a difficult time stepping into our own power and asking for money.
By stepping into our personal power we gain the courage to ask for money for our gifts.
By asking for money for our gifts we heal the split between money, wealthy people, and power.
As women we need to do this because this world desperately needs powerful women with the means to bring their feminine spirit into the world.
To learn more about my approach, click here.
If you’d like to book a Discovery Call, click here.