What If Your Year Started in Spring? Conscious Seasonal Planning for Business

Alecia St. Germain 00:00
So think about this, if the year didn't start in January, when would it begin for you? What if you let nature, not the hustle culture, set the rhythms of your life and business? This is something that I have been contemplating for a while now, and this year, it seems like it's the right time to have this conversation. If you haven't been feeling super motivated in January, the way that you think you're supposed to be. And now it's February, and all the new year's resolutions that you set have kind of fallen off and or you resisted setting them at all because it just didn't feel right, and maybe you even made yourself wrong for it. I think this episode is going to be a little different perspective that will be helpful for you. So let's dive in. Hey you, leader entrepreneur, business owner, solopreneur, whatever you call yourself. We know you're a visionary business builder, wealth seeker, looking to combine a passion for doing good with leading consciously. It's time to shift from a traditional focus of pure wealth accumulation to one that integrates well being and fulfillment. You're here for a purpose, and it's time to shine your light. So here we go.

Alecia St. Germain 01:39
Welcome to the conscious edge podcast. I'm your host, Alecia St Germain and founder of the conscious edge where I help women entrepreneurs expand their capacity for what they can hold, energetically, emotionally, financially, so that they can build sustainable, joyful businesses and love the process of doing it. So this podcast is such a special place because it's where we get to explore how we build businesses and lives that are aligned, sustainable and deeply human. So we talk about every aspect. And so if you're someone who feels a connection to nature, which a lot of the people who surround me follow me, people who are my clients, we can all agree that we are better when we spend time in nature. And nature has cycles and seasons. So if you have felt pressure like you're forcing yourself into timelines that maybe don't actually fit you. I think today's episode is going to really land. If you are new here, I want to say welcome, and if today's episode lands for you, please take a moment and follow or subscribe from wherever you're listening, we put new episodes out every single week on Tuesdays, and some weeks, I am joined by one of my counterparts, Jen boss, who does monthly Money talks with zengen, where we talk all about money. And then my other counterpart is Jonathan Duggar, where we talk a lot about mindfulness, and we do our monthly mindfulness talks. So I'm so happy that you're here. Do make sure that you hit that follow or subscribe button. Okay, so interesting conversation, little different than maybe some of the things that we have talked about in the past. But the reason I want to talk about this in the beginning of February is because January is, I think, very loaded. It is a time when we are expected, societally, to come off of a period of celebration and for many cultures, and a time when a lot of business shuts down for a few weeks in the United States, and then we're supposed to come back right after January one and be ready to hit the ground running. It's a new quarter. We've got new goals that we set up for the year. And what's interesting is a majority of my clients, including myself, we don't really feel it. We don't feel super motivated. In fact, we feel tired because we're coming off of so much celebration eating foods that don't make our body function optimally, and we

Alecia St. Germain 04:45
aren't quite sure what direction we want to head yet. We may have set some goals at the end of the prior year, but we just don't feel motivated to attack them on top of which I do have to say this being someone who lives in Ohio. Where the weather is the worst that it is. All year long, it's very often that my kids will miss school, and so when I'm attacking goals with this new found motivation, and suddenly my elementary age children are off school, it puts a wrench in things, and it's deeply uncomfortable, it's frustrating, and I don't want to be that way. I have thought about this in prior years, but for whatever reason, this year, it felt like this is the time to experiment with a new way of being and leading in the world, to do something different than what the society dictates is supposed to happen, and do something that's a lot more In alignment with nature. I have always I did not really remember this right away, but when I was talking to my mom about this, she reminded me that I have always been very connected to Earth and animals and the natural world. I to this day, feel better when I am outside in nature. I need to put my feet in the grass. After a long day of coaching, I will like take my shoes off, not in the winter, but take my shoes off, stick my feet in the grass and just let my body decompress. And on top of it, my birthday. I was born on what we celebrate here as Earth Day, and so I think that there's something very in like, I don't believe anything is by accident, and I think that, and I really enjoy the idea that there is something bigger than ourselves that we are connected to, and there's a natural peace to that. So me, being born on Earth Day just feels very meaningful. It's part of like a calling to me to say, okay, there is a natural part that I'm supposed to share and promote in what I do. So not to I try to be very careful not to step too far into the what people might call the woo world, or the spiritual world, but it is such an integral part of what we talk about in our coaching. Because when you believe that you're connected to something bigger than yourself, I just find that life works better, and whatever that looks like to you is fine, but I just find it works better and it lifts my spirits so I lean into what works, and even when we look at sole purpose. You may have heard me mention very briefly in some other episodes, I believe that our soul has a calling. Here on Earth. There's a purpose that we serve, and my sole purpose has some very strong Earth energies in it, some of the strongest Earth energies, actually, of kind of all the ways that it breaks down. And I don't think that's by accident. I think that's the nature of who I really am. So it had me thinking about how we want to go about this year. And I shared this with my clients. I've shared it with a couple of different groups of people, and when I talk about this, it really lands for people, like I see heads shaking, yes, it's almost like they recognize it. It's relief. It's meaning making to like, Why do I feel not motivated in a season or time when society says I should be motivated? So there's like, a sense of relief that comes from it as well. So I was thinking about like, what does this January to December model that we follow really reward, and it's about productivity. It's about achieving goals. It's a clear Start and End versus a gradual transition, and it has a very finite feeling to it, but also it's like a defined time for filing taxes. It doesn't actually mean that that is the way business or you should operate. It's a structure that is placed on life in order to define a certain start and stop time for purporting purposes which is such an unnatural thing, and it's one of the things that my family laughs at me, because sometimes I have strange thoughts. And if you followed me for any amount of time, you know I'm a little bit queer. Key. But I was like, I do believe in aliens, right? Because I think humans might be the aliens here on this planet, because we are the most unnatural thing about this planet. And I'm obviously joking, but to some extent, there's a part of me that's like, maybe, maybe we are the aliens, because we are so unnatural in the way that we exist on this planet. When you think about the structures we build, the cars we drive, the computers, the everything, I'm like, gosh, you know, we're just a little different breed than everything else that is here. And so I find that interesting, and it makes my mind think a little bit. But when we I think lean into this idea of maybe seasonal capacity planning is maybe what I would call it, where we take into account our energy levels, what nature is doing when we might feel more motivated versus less motivated, and work that into how we're planning our business and our activities, and how other people who are receiving our business might even feel in the process as well. You know, clients or people that you're trying to do business with may even feel a little less motivated when it's cold outside. So I think that I've decided and let me put this what I'm experimenting with this year that I have not paid as much attention to previously, is starting my new year like thinking of my new year as the beginning of spring, like the first day of spring. I think this year is March 20, like, what if I thought of March 20, I own my business. I can do my reporting and my taxes the way they want me to, but I can build my planning and my business around something different, if I choose, it's my business. So what if March 20 is like my January one, and what would it look like if I started to plan things in that way and connecting my quarters really more to the equinoxes and the solstices. So like summer, we have the longest day of the year. We're going to feel a lot more energy from the sun. It's warmer, it's we're getting just more vitamin D in general. So of course, your energy level is going to feel different. And then looking at winter time, you know when winter starts, we have the shortest day of the year, and it's when you wake up and it's dark, and you go to bed and it's dark. I was listening to a podcast recently about like the perfect day, and what the perfect day would look like for your gut health. And he was talking about going outside and getting sunlight very early in the day, as soon as you wake up, and how it makes you sleep better at night. And I was like, Well, what happens in the winter when I get up and it's dark and I'd rather start my day because the kids have to be at school. How do I do that? And my question for myself was, Do I really want to do I really want to get some kind of device, which was what was recommended, so that I can be exactly regulated on a 24 hour cycle, same time, wake up, same time go to bed, versus allowing myself, because I can, to some extent, the space to maybe follow more of a winter season when it's wintery. Okay, so you think about the energy that you feel during different seasons, right? So winter, which is what we're in right now, and I get it, if you live somewhere south, it may be a little bit warmer, but even then, I hear my Florida people, when it gets chilly, it's cold, like we have to bundle up, right? So I think everybody has their version of what winter looks like, but is this a time when everything is resting when we move into spring. Now things start to emerge. Move into summer. Now your garden maybe, if you're a gardener, your garden is starting to produce fruit and fall. As we move into fall, things are winding down. You're getting the last of your harvest, and now you might even be planting some new seeds for things that are going to come up in the springtime or early summer, like garlic and our tulip bulbs and things like that. And so when I think about the activities that you do in your business, when are you planting your seeds? When are you doing most of. Your visibility and follow up. And when are you maybe planting some seeds for the springtime, clearing away dead, letting the dead fall away. And then, when is rest? So very often that the especially the type a women that I work with, it feels like you're in summer mode all the time, and it's exhausting, because what happens if you don't replenish the soil? If you don't grow deep, stable roots, your productivity, what you produce, the fruits of your labor, start to diminish when you're not really taking good care of yourself, and you're just constantly in a state of going and going and going. So I want you to think of what if. I just want you to play with this, like, what if winter, instead was really saying, this is a time of rest. This is when we want to start our vision, any lessons that we are taking away from the previous year. This is the time to integrate them and think about, what will I do differently? And that's exactly what I'm doing with you here right now. As I'm explaining, this is last year I realized that I had some imbalances in my summertime months with how I did my work and what kind of work I chose to do, and it interrupted my time with my kids being off school. There was other things, like learning that I didn't really feel like working on January one, so there's some key things that last year taught me that I'm taking into this year, and I'm using this quieter time in my business to make sure that I've got doctor's appointments scheduled for myself and My family for health reasons to make sure that we have those deep, healthy roots for the business that I'm building right setting me up for the business going forward throughout the year, and allowing more time for Sleep, allowing it to be a time when maybe there's a little bit more weight. That's, I mean, everybody talks about how during the holiday season, you pack on a little bit more weight in the celebratory mode, and then you make yourself wrong for it in January and say, like, I got to go to the gym January, the gym is so busy January one because I want to lose the weight. Well, what if it's supposed to be there so much of nature does that right before the winter season as a mode of protection.

Alecia St. Germain 17:59
And then what if, in the springtime, as you're starting to put more energy out there, what if that is the time that's going to feel more natural for you to shed some of that weight? I'm not saying anybody is doing anything right or wrong. I'm just offering a different perspective on how maybe we think about what we have to do, and how we make ourselves wrong for how our body looks, and then we make that part of our New Year's resolution, or we make ourselves wrong for decisions that seem quite part of nature, or things that are happening that are quite part of nature. So now as spring comes up, this is time for those planting and experimentation and emergence and thinking about what kinds of goals or actions belong in spring. These are things like maybe perhaps planning for more, reach out and interacting with individuals, doing maybe more visibility, speaking, planning out campaigns, or any kind of new marketing that you want to do, putting in place, what are the things that you'll want to take action on and execute On as the year goes forward? This is about giving yourself, maybe the space for some creativity to come into play, to experiment with what works, without being attached to the end result. I think so much of what happens is we are so results oriented in our society that we don't allow ourselves to play. We don't even allow ourselves to be bad at something that we enjoy long enough to get good at it. We just say, Oh, I'm bad at it so I don't get to do it, because it's all about productivity. It's all about the things that I am good at doing, even if I don't enjoy them. And so I look at Spring. As a time, maybe for assessing even, what is it that you don't enjoy doing, even if you're good at it, and maybe that now that means it's time to train someone else to do the things that you don't enjoy, that they're probably better at anyways, with a little bit of training. Or maybe it's time to outsource some things that you don't enjoy doing and you don't know how to do that well, like me bringing in Jen boss as my financial strategist, really, and my person who really gives me the information that I need in order to make good decisions in my business, because being in numbers isn't something that I have traditionally enjoyed, nor was I good at it. So outsourcing that really to someone who is the expert, this is the perfect time to really assess and put into execution and activity, taking action on hiring people who are going to help you in your business, and allowing yourself the space to get good at something, even if you're not right now, summertime becomes that time for visibility, growth, expression, when you're really out there, life is like. You have so much energy. The sun is bright. You're in a fun mode. And somebody might be thinking like, well, if I'm in a fun mode, why would I want to be doing business? Because it's fun like, if you're doing your business from a fun place, how many more people are going to want to be in your space when you're enjoying life and you're happy? I don't think that business necessarily is that doing it from a heavy place. I have to go get it. I'm not money follows. I think that doing it from a joyful and fulfilled place is what's going to pull more business to you than anything. Versus doing it from a heavy driving have to follow some societal standard sort of way of being, where my results are, my self worth, that's such an unhealthy place to be, and it's not fulfilling just going through the motions. I recently saw a post from a high achieving person that I'm familiar with, and I've always had in the back of my mind, you know, yeah, you achieve so much, but what I see is you grinding and grinding and grinding and ignoring like fulfillment and even doing things that are supposed to be fulfilling but weren't, And so going through the motions and doing things that are supposed to be fulfilling doesn't mean it's fulfilling for you that's a disconnection from Soul, that's a disconnection from your body. And so I think summertime seems like the perfect time when you're so joyful and feeling your best potentially, is a great time for harvesting your whatever it is that you do for increasing that revenue. So I'm kind of planning that summertime will actually probably be one of my more busy times for bringing people into coaching, because that's the energy that I'm going to bring. Now, what that means for me from a summertime perspective with my kiddos, I don't want to sacrifice that. And so last year, what I did that did not work. Last year, I scheduled like a little bit of work every single day so that my kids, they're a little bit older now, third grade, sixth grade, so they can handle some things without me being 100% like present, so I can do More work when they're home. Now, but what it did was I was always had an appointment or something every single day that I had to do. So it made it so we couldn't go to the zoo. It was hard to get to the pool. We couldn't do any of those fun, joyful things. So this year, looking at summertime being a high visibility, high growth, high expression, being out there, but also looking at mindfully, how do I do this in a way that is going to

Alecia St. Germain 24:30
optimize my time when I'm working and optimize my time when I'm having fun and doing a different kind of Summer thing with my children, and so that's the problem really for me to solve this year, is, how do I solve that and make it so that they're just not in the house on TV, like really doing their own thing and not really having any kind of supervision, because I'm so focused on working. Right? So I get to solve for that, and I don't have the answer for that just yet, but I'm thinking about different ways that I'm going to handle that. Now, when we move into fall, this is the time for harvest, discernment, release, and so this is the time to I think that you're still continuing to harvest. You've done so much work in spring and summer that there's a little bit left on the vine Right. So there's like my lettuces will grow all the way until December 1, even in my garden in Ohio, if I do some summer planting for Fall Harvest. So any summer planting that you did for Fall Harvest, you're finishing up, and you're preparing the beds for winter. You're wintering everything, right? And so cleaning out what doesn't serve you anymore, and doing those last harvests and really preparing for this celebration time. And I really do love the December holiday, to me, the kickoff of winter, when I think about when a lot of the celebration in December happens, regardless of religion. It's a very festive time. I know that the holidays are not joyful for everyone, but maybe a little shift here in thinking about this is the end of a growth season, right? You've had your spring, summer, fall. We have ended the growth season. We have had a wonderful year. If things turned out the way we hoped they did, and it's a celebratory season of all that we have harvest and harvested and created for the year and preparing now in our celebratory time, packing on the pounds, eating the cookies, having A great time. And so now it's that time for us to enter into deep rest and go back into restorative energy, integrating what we've learned from the year and then planning for the next year instead of that January. So little different take on maybe how you might think about your year. So I am looking at this type of leadership. I'm very big on on the Compassionate Leadership. And at first I thought, well, is this earth led leadership? Right now I'm making up my own terms. But when I was thinking about the idea of Earth led leadership, or nature led leadership, I don't want to follow that practice, because I don't actually think that component is very human, because nature can be quite cruel, and I don't believe in that for humanity. I think the element that we as humans get to bring to nature is the humanity aspect of it, the compassion piece, the want to relieve suffering that we see, and that's so much part of Compassionate Leadership. So know that from one perspective, I really look at seasonal capacity planning as not being it is in a certain flow. But this is not passive. When we think about this is intentional. This is planning. This is taking action. This is doing things, but doing it in a rhythm that is probably going to be more aligned to your natural energy as you fit into how nature works. But the other component of Compassionate Leadership, really is the human aspect that we bring to what we do. So having compassion with ourselves, even for not feeling motivated in the winter months, and maybe allowing ourselves to go into the different seasons. The resistance that I think is going to come up for a lot of people in following a rhythm like this is that during times of rest, if you're a type A personality, it's going to feel dangerous and so like really experimenting and seeing, Will everything really fall apart? If I actually slow down and rest a minute, Will everything fall apart if I experiment and allow myself the space to do things and try new things without attachment to a particular outcome, that the time that I try something is not the only time that I'm going to try something, and that if it doesn't work, it's the end that we allow ourselves the space to call that maybe the beginning of the emergence of. Something growing. So I think that that piece of being compassionate with yourself to try something different, and that type of leadership that is both drive, like I don't want to say driving, but very intentional. I think the word that I want to use is it's intentional, and it's moving you forward, and it is planning, and it is strategic and it is logical, because I think nature, in some ways, can be very logical, almost overly logical, to a point that it's cruel, but then also having the compassion and and the mindfulness really to say, like, how am I feeling? Let me check in, when the with myself. Am I taking care of my body? Am I taking care of other people in my space? How am I setting everyone else up to win and really deeply connecting with other individuals so that we're all moving forward together. It doesn't mean that everything's going to feel good all the time. You know, winter is brutal and it's uncomfortable, and letting go of things that no longer serve you doesn't feel great. Holding people accountable when they don't keep their word and do what they say they were going to do. All of those things are uncomfortable, but it doesn't mean that we bypass it or avoid it, and that's a big piece. Is like putting up a boundary so that you don't have to deal with something. Is not leadership, that's avoidance, but saying what you need clearly holding people accountable that is actually being in leadership with someone that is actually having maybe compassion for what the situation is with them, but also not sacrificing yourself to make everybody comfortable. And so those are some of the pieces that you have to navigate as you go forward. So what I want you to think about is, what season are you actually in right now, regardless of the calendar, like, if you think about what you're doing in your business, are you practicing winter season in winter, or are you acting like it's supposed to be summer and you're supposed to be harvesting everything and then making yourself wrong for it, and being frustrated with not finding clients because they don't feel like being in summer right now? So really asking yourself, honestly, where are you and what if you actually honored the season that you're in honestly? What if you maybe asked yourself, Do I really have to be in this calendar that has been created for us. It was the human way of making meaning. And why January one? I don't know. I don't know exactly why that was picked. I'm sure that there was a good reason. I haven't gone and researched it. So maybe on a future episode I could give you that answer, but or if you know the answer, maybe you could email me or DM me on Instagram and tell me what the answer is, but it's just an arbitrary thing that we created in order to meaning make time. And I think that to some extent it works, but we've created maybe some errors in how we should feel that are resisting nature. So I want you to just play with this. Maybe, if this landed for you, play with this a little bit and see how does it shift the energy that you have for your business? What I have found is I've become more productive. I've had more output and more focus and more creativity and created better results by allowing myself space to rest than I ever did trying to push through hard things exhaust myself, have January one sort of momentum so just something to think about. So if you enjoyed today's episode and you have not hit follow or subscribe, please do so from wherever you're listening to

Alecia St. Germain 34:31
thank you for taking the time and honoring just this different way of thinking. And if you want to run your business in a different way and start to think about how you plan and execute things in a different way, I highly encourage you to reach out to me. You can do that. I think the best way to get me directly is to just reach out on Instagram at Alecia St Germain. And tell me what landed for you from this and maybe why. Now might be the time that you're thinking about running your business from a different style of leadership and doing things in a different way than you have been doing them, not with the intention of playing small, but actually with the intention of creating a life and a business that really aligns with who you are as a person, what you want in life and what's important to you instead of what you think you're supposed to do. And my guess is that you've amassed a certain level of success by just doing what you were told to do, and you have a lot of skill and knowledge that you've built up that is working, but success isn't feeling like how you thought it would. Maybe it's a little bit heavier, a little bit more stressful, and even though money is working, you still have anxiety about whether it's enough, or whether you're enough, these are all things that I help my clients with at the conscious edge, and I would love to hear from you. So with all of that being said, I'm sending you so much love. And if Jonathan were here, he would say, be well, thanks for listening to the conscious edge podcast. Make sure you subscribe and take a moment to be kind and share this episode with someone you care about. Leave a review to help us bring more compassionate leaders, building businesses and creating wealth to the table. And For show notes, head over to conscious edge. COMM, forward slash podcast. This podcast and the linked materials are presented solely for general information, educational and entertainment purposes, and should not be taken as personal or medical advice or any kind of mental health treatment. Please consult a medical or mental health professional if you feel you need such services. Please be advised that all investing and entrepreneurial endeavors involve risk, and the use of the education and information on this podcast and linked materials is at the user's own risk.