When working with my clients and with myself, the one thing we always end up tackling is our self-limiting beliefs. They seem to always be lurking below the surface ready to pounce whenever we get excited about doing something new and radical. They’re quick to tell us we can’t, we shouldn’t, we don’t deserve to.
When doing a Tarot reading, there is nowhere for those self-limiting beliefs to hide. The Tarot has a way of shining a light on them so that there is no escape and we finally have the clarity to address them head-on. But where are they hiding the rest of the time?
The root of all our beliefs
Every belief we have, whether it’s about ourselves or about the world in which we live, is rooted in the subconscious. They are created by events we have experienced or witnessed reaching as far back as our very early childhood. These events may not even seem that significant at first glance, but they are the catalyst for the creation of these self-limiting beliefs.
A lot of the time we think we need to have gone through something shocking or traumatic for it to imprint or change the way we think, but that’s not true. There are so many factors that need to be taken into consideration when thinking about how an event has imprinted on you. Some things to consider are:
How old you were at the time, when we experience something in our very early years, our brains absorb it like a sponge, which is why therapists often start with your childhood and relationship with your parents.
Where you were emotionally at the time of the event. For example, say someone with low self-esteem was insulted about being single, those people will hold on to and absorb the effects of that event in a different way than someone who is very confident and has much higher self-esteem. People with lower self-esteem may be less likely to brush it off or allow it to pass them by.
Repeated experiences. If something keeps happening time and time again then the brain will start storing that away and keeping it as evidence for when a similar situation comes up. This can often happen when fear, embarrassment or trauma is involved and is something that CBT therapy addresses directly.
> “There is one grand lie – that we are limited. The only limits we have are the limits we believe.”
— Wayne Dyer
How can we dig out these beliefs to analyse them?
Trying to reach the subconscious on your own can be difficult because the subconscious is where your mind puts the things it doesn’t want you to consciously think about. It’s a bit like your conscious mind rocks up at an exclusive VIP club and then is instantly turned away by the bouncer. Your mind doesn’t want you to venture there.
Tarot is a great tool for accessing the subconscious mind because it forms a pane of glass between the conscious and the subconscious. You’re being supported and guided through the hidden world of the subconscious, rather than being left alone to wander into places you may not want to go. The cards reflect back to you what is happening in the subconscious so you can see what is going on from a safe distance. This means the mind puts up less of a fight to keep things from you because it feels safer.
Meditation is also a great way of relaxing and opening up the subconscious. It encourages the mind to loosen its grip and allows you to move through its many levels unencumbered. It can however take a bit of practice to be able to go deep enough, but finding a meditation teacher or following a guided meditation can make things a little easier.
> “We learn our belief systems as very little children, and then we move through life creating experiences to match our beliefs. Look back in your own life and notice how often you have gone through the same experience.”
— Louise Hay
Why do we need to address self-limiting beliefs?
Often these self-limiting beliefs are stopping you from reaching your full potential or keeping you from doing something that would be life changing. To be able to keep growing, keep living to our fullest and always expanding our awareness and perspectives, we have to tackle the things that are keeping us in place, which is often these self-limiting beliefs.
Some limiting beliefs are harder to face than others and its ok to put some of them aside if you don’t feel fully ready to tackle them. Like I said at the beginning, these beliefs can sometimes be rooted in trauma, so it’s best to pull at those when you have professional support such as a counsellor or therapist.
For those beliefs that are less sensitive, booking Tarot readings or exploring self-divination can be a great way to start the work. I’m always happy to help guide people through their journey of self-discovery, so if you’d like to work 1:1, fill in my Tarot booking form here.
I’m only 31 years old at the time of writing this blog and even I remember a time before our lives were ruled by technology and information was not available to us at the click of a button.
It’s only in the last 20 years, which is a fairly short amount of time, that technology has completely altered our way of life and the lens through which we see the world. Everything is instant now. Next day delivery, instant answers to our questions through Google and an expectation of instant responses from those we contact.
In a lot of ways it has made our lives easier and I’m not bashing technology, my entire career is based on the digital world, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that it has created a society of control freaks. I include myself in this. We have control of so much now, everything is customisable and when that control is taken away or not available to us, we can panic or feel the anxiety building.
Identifying our issues with control
I am someone who needs to be in control of everything, of my time, where my focus is, who gets to contact me, outcomes, you name it I need to control it. It’s only since taking on a more spiritual and witchy way of life that I’ve started to work on this and try my hardest to ease off the gas a little.
However, that need for control is usually a very subconscious problem that can be a little slippery to manage. Often we don’t even realise that it’s bubbling to the surface until we’re huddled in a corner rocking back and forth because our parcel didn’t arrive when the app said it would.
> “The illusion of control makes the helplessness seem more palatable. And when that illusion is taken away, I panic.”
— Allie Brosh – Hyperbole and a Half
This is where we can introduce The Emperor. A card that is filled with divine masculine energy, the need for control and have authority over everything. I notice this card a lot when I work with clients who own their own businesses. They often crumble in the face of the unknown because they have become so used to spinning all the plates at once. They struggle to release some of that control, even if it’s in their own best interest because attached to that need for control is a fear, a fear of everything breaking if they don’t always have their hands on the wheel.
Using The Emperor card to battle our inability to relinquish personal power
It’s a tricky subject ‘control’ because people tend to have different relationships with it based on their own personal experiences. It may be that there is some childhood trauma that is at the root of your need for control, it may be more recent trauma or it could be a learned response.
The need for control, if we use The Emperor correspondences to guide us, is an imbalance of the fire element, a big dollop of fiery Aries energy that is in full control of our actions, thoughts and feelings. More than anything though, our need for control comes from our basic human need for safety. If we are in control, then we can make sure we are safe, that everything is going to plan and nothing scary or unexpected will happen to us.
What The Emperor can do, is help us to find a way to feel safe, but understand and most importantly, accept the things we can and can’t control. He can help us do this by turning our attention to the stable things we have in our life instead of focusing on the things that are crumbling or cracking.
> “May you find the strength of will and the grace of endurance to overcome every challenge.”
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
An example of this would be if you’re facing the possibility of being let go from your job, you may automatically think about all the bills you’ll have to pay without an income, your mortgage, how you’ll put food on the table. What The Emperor does is swoop in and act as that voice of reason, that fire we have within us that keeps us alive. He shows us that we need to be more trusting of our own capabilities and trust that if the worst does happen, that scrappy, primal instinct to do whatever needs to be done to keep your head above water will kick in and keep everything afloat.
The Emperor in all of us
The Emperor card represents our basic instinct to stay alive. We all have him inside of us, it’s the same as a gazelle grazing in a field, one crack of a stick behind it and its Emperor instinct kicks in and away it goes. It’s the fight or flight energy and when we have too much Emperor in control, that’s when we can feel anxious and panicked.
What we have to do is learn to work with The Emperor, instead of trying to battle him into submission or simply lying down and allowing him full control. We have to understand why he is appearing, where his motivations are coming from and how we can work in tandem with him. We are using his energy to see that there is no one way to keep ourselves safe, that if one safe haven falls, we have the skills and ability to build or find a new one.
So, let’s see what we can come up with when we allow ourselves to dive into our own Emperor energy. Use these journal prompts to start using The Emperor to address your own control issues and needs, start to discover where they are coming from and how you could start to find a balance again.
What is it that I’m afraid to lose control of?
Why am I afraid of not having full control of these things? Why wouldn’t I feel safe if I didn’t have control of these things?
Are there any situations in my past where I did not have control of a situation and something bad happened? If so, how do you think this experience could be contributing to your current problems.
If you did release control of these things, what is the worst thing that could happen? Are these things realistically or statistically likely to happen?
List all the things that currently make you feel safe and secure. How many of things are in your control and how many rely on third parties or outside sources?
If you did release or lose control of your current situation, what would you do? What plans would you put into place? How would you navigate the situation?
We’ve all been brought up on films and TV shows with characters who fit into either the ‘love for life’ category or the ‘workaholic’ category. We never see a character that loves their job, works super hard but also makes sure to take time off and relax. They’re always on holiday and having to check their phone or being drawn away from their family time by a demanding boss or work emergency. But what if you could love your job and still have healthy boundaries for personal time?
As a society, we seem to have decided that we can either have a successful business, or we can have an exciting and fulfilling personal life, but not both. Well, that’s just bollocks. There is no rule that you have to sacrifice your health, your family, your friends or your personality for your business. So, how can we make sure that we have both? Is there anything we can do today that can start creating that healthy work/life balance we all crave?
As soon as you even think about becoming an entrepreneur, you should be thinking about the boundaries you need to set. One of the first things I did was set clear working hours and times of the day when I was free to be contacted. These were non-negotiable, because as soon as you say ‘oh just this one time…’ you’ve opened flood gates that are very hard to close back up.
> “Balance is not better time management, but better boundary management. Balance means making choices and enjoying those choices. ”
— Betsy Jacobson
Sometimes it may seem like you’re being unreasonable when you ignore a call from a client or customer because you’ve committed to taking a break or you’re working on another task, but your time is your own, you decide how you spend it. Time is the most valuable asset we have as entrepreneurs and if we’re not careful how we spend it, we can find ourselves always feeling like we have a lack of it, resulting in stress, panic and overworking.
Placing your value in the right places at the right times
This idea around time flows nicely into my next point. You need to be clear about what you value in your life as a whole. Just because you love your business and you want it to succeed more than anything, it doesn’t mean that you can’t value other aspects of your life.
> “Strive not be a success, but to be of value. ”
— Albert Einstein
Choosing where to place your value and when is another way to build those boundaries. During work hours, your value may be placed with the tasks you’ve got listed on your to-do list or the meeting you’ve got set up. Once you log off, where do you then place your value? Is it in your wellbeing? Is it with your family? This is another form of boundary setting, which will help you find more focus and intention in the present moment, instead of allowing your thoughts to roam all over the place and leave you feeling frazzled.
Paying attention to your energy
Every morning, take a second and think to yourself ‘What does my energy feel like today? What energy do I need more of?’ If you’re struggling to get motivated, or you know for a fact that the day isn’t going to productive, then adjust your day accordingly. Do tasks that are quick and don’t require you to focus for long periods of time. Do things that require you to be moving about a lot to keep your energy flowing. Set yourself an early finish time. Pay attention to how you feel throughout the day and keep adjusting to accommodate.
I know that if I’ve had insomnia the night before, I won’t be able to get a huge task list done, so I move things around so that I can still be productive, but in a way that takes my energy levels into consideration.
Flexibility with your working hours
This is one that has taken me a while to get used to coming from regular 9-5 jobs. I’m now a lot more flexible and forgiving with my working hours, pushing tasks back an hour or two, or starting later and finishing later. However, I always make sure I have time for myself, both in the morning and in the evening. What I physically can not fit into one working day, gets pushed back to the next day.
> “You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at once.”
— Oprah Winfrey
Having complete flexibility with your working hours is yet another perk of working for yourself, so don’t be afraid to indulge in it, especially when you’re feeling a bit rundown or in need of a slower working day.
Having moderation as an entrepreneur is completely unique to you, your needs, your values, your energy, so there is no one size fits all solution. A lot of what I’ve learned about moderation as a business owner has been through trial and error. If you put something into place that you think will make you more productive, but actually just leaves you feeling tired and stressed, scrap it and try something else. Nobody gets it right on the first go, so be kind to yourself and be mindful of your wellbeing.
Yes, I will be the first to admit that this post is very much inspired by the new Disney movie Soul (2020), which seems to follow a new Pixar trend in causing an existential crisis in adults and children alike. However, the themes of Soul was already on my radar and have been for quite some time.
As someone who grew up with boomer parents, the attitude towards work and job security was that you worked to get as much money as possible, to be able to pay for a roof over your head and food in your belly. The idea that you would strive to find a job that actually made you happy was a fantasy. Only those that were born into wealthy families were afforded such a luxury.
As a millennial, my own attitude towards work is very different. I’m not naive to the fact that a lot of people don’t have the luxury of saying no to a job they won’t enjoy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe they can’t want it and have it be a genuine and realistic hope. However, there is an issue when it comes to those that want to start a career because they feel like they were called to do it, or that it is there life’s purpose. There is a philosophical conflict somewhere embedded in this way of thinking and I wanted to see if I could unpack it a little more here.
> “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
— George Bernard Shaw
What are the pros of thinking your career is your life’s purpose?
Let’s start with the positives of this approach to work. For one, it means that you’re putting your own happiness first and you’ve realised that in order to keep your vibes high, you need to do work that actually means something to you on an emotional level. This way of thinking has given the world a lot of indispensable people. There are some essential vocations that can only be done by those that feel they were called to do it, such as doctors, nurses, firefighters and other essential personnel.
This dedication can give you passion, motivation and a drive like nothing else. It can give you a purpose in life and give you a sense of self that other things might not be able to. It can help you feel like you’re always moving through life and not wasting a single moment, but the main thing is that it gives you a sense of control. Freedom in knowing that you are the one in the driver’s seat and the choices you’ve made and continue to make are serving a higher purpose. When we declare our career our life’s purpose, we may feel:
Like we’re making the most out of life
Like we’re leaving our mark on the world
Like we’re helping our fellow man
Like we have complete control over our own destiny
Like we are being watched over by a higher power
Like we have the support of the universe and things will work out in our favour
It all sounds great, right? Well, it’s a very thin line you walk when you declare your career or vocation as your life’s purpose. If you lean too far into it, you’ll start to notice more negatives than positives creeping into other areas of your life. You may even start to put too much faith into your self-proclaimed prophecy and forget that the world is not that black and white.
> “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll take you there”
— George Harrison
What are the cons of thinking your career is your life’s purpose?
Now I’m not saying you can’t feel like you’re called to do a type of work without risking your grip on reality. What I do want you to keep in mind are the pitfalls of thinking about your career in this way.
I love what I do, I love getting up in the morning and working on Witchness Magazine, writing up tarot reading reports and posting off orders around the world, but do I think I was always meant to do it? Probably not. I do think I was always going to be an entrepreneur of some sort. I’ve always been a workaholic when it came to things I felt excited and passionate about. I enjoyed doing it, so why not do it all the time? This is something that many people who declare their work their life’s purpose fall into. They have such a strong connection with it that it completely occupies their conscious mind. They are unable to pull themselves away, even when they have nothing left to give.
Let’s circle back to talking about Soul for a second. The idea of the film (as I understand it, it’s open to interpretation) is that no human being is born with an overall purpose for their life. They aren’t thrown into this world with an end goal in mind. The purpose of life is unknown and it’s something humans have been trying to figure out since the beginning of time. We all want to know why we’re here, what we’re supposed to be doing. It’s a bit like starting a new job without an orientation or job description, you’re just left to figure stuff out for yourself, that’s life.
> “To empty the heart does not mean to not love. On the contrary, true love, as God intended it, is purest when it is not based on a false attachment.”
— Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life’s Shackles
Economy, business, money and materialism are all man-made things, so even if we were put on this planet for a specific reason, it wouldn’t involve any of those. They are just the parameters that have been created by civilisation, to give us a sense of direction and purpose. Basically, we couldn’t figure out the meaning of life, so we created one from scratch.
More often than not, the drive and sense of purpose we feel for something is our passion. It’s not a divine call to take a specific road in life, it’s a desire to take that road. We have free will and we have a choice around which paths we choose to tread.
If we label our career as our life’s purpose, then we place it above all other things. We value it above other aspects of life such as health, hobbies, interests and personal growth. We crown it as the sovereign of our lives and all decisions we make are to appease the sovereign, but that means we can effectively become a slave to it. We become blind to anything that lies outside the realm of our vocation.
Work is not and should never be your main reason for living, no matter how much you love doing it. Like Allen Saunders once said, “Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.“.
If there’s one thing an entrepreneur knows well it’s failure. To be honest it’s an inevitability that comes with choosing to build a unique, soul-purposed business. You’re charting new territory and a lot of the time, making it up as you go along. For the first two years of any business, you’ll spend a huge chunk of time just testing what works and what doesn’t.
This experimentation stage is what helps you build and grow your business. Nobody comes straight out the gate with everything figured out. Even if a business appears to have been successful from the get-go, looking in from the outside you have no idea how many failed launches, terrible straplines or awful looking websites the owner went through before they finally settled on the finished version.
Try, fail and try again
I had the idea for The Self-Care Emporium in 2019 while I was living and working in New Zealand. I was thousands of miles away from home, barely knew anybody and preparing to return to the UK with no idea of what I wanted to do, other than knowing I didn’t want to work for someone else.
Since then, I’ve been through countless branding iterations, started to create multiple products and courses that never made it to the light of day. I’ve tried handmaking products to sell, importing products, offering coaching then deciding against it and taking it off my website. I’ve tried various different social media strategies and techniques that have failed miserably and paid for advertising that flopped and lost me money. With all those fails though, I learned how to improve. I learned what does work, what’s worth my time, what is worth investing in. Even now I’m still learning and I hope I continue to, no matter how old my business gets.
Failure leads to growth
The sting of failure only lasts for a moment and how you deal with it depends on your own perspective on what it means to fail. Often, it’s simply the embarrassment of failing that keeps us from taking risks, we don’t want others to know that we’ve failed.
That is especially true for entrepreneurs. Our businesses are our babies and we don’t want to prove the haters or non-believers right. We don’t want to show that we couldn’t make it work. So how can we get around that? We keep going, we keep moving forward, learning from our mistakes, understanding why our failures happened and how we can prevent them from happening again. Nothing makes bitter people angrier than when you refuse to give up and don’t allow your setbacks to stop you from achieving amazing things.
> “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. ”
— Thomas A. Edison
Think about your own failures in life and work, how have you moved past them? Was the fear of failure worse than the actual failure itself? We can often resort to chaos thinking when taking a risk and it makes things seem like the end of the world even when it’s not, so when you’re worrying about failing, try and think about what the worst outcome could be and be realistic about it. You’ll usually realise that even if things go wrong, there are multiple ways you can rectify your situation or recover from whatever failure comes your way.
