This past weekend, I hosted my friend Angela for a 1:1 in-person intensive here in Costa Rica, and she gave me permission to share the details with you so you can get the “eyes wide open” benefits of what she learned.
If you want to see the gorgeous photos, you can check the LIFTed Advisor highlights tab on my insta.
First, it’s important to note: I don’t work with private clients these days.
Nearly 6 months ago, I completed with my last private client when I realized I needed to make my Company my one and only private client. I needed to give myself what I was giving others, stop interim CEO’ing for both my Company and a few others, and step back in as Full-Time CEO of my own Company.
Boom.
It was a massive turn-around on many levels.
My Company has had a huge uplevel, we’re hitting our numbers month after month, serving at another level, and have a happy team and happy clients.
But, then, I came to Costa Rica, and had this super fancy house with extra space (some people call it the big sexy house because the ceilings are so high and the views are so sexy), and a free weekend ….
And I had been wanting to support Angela to bring her own next level work into the world for sometime, and so I texted her and said … you ready? She said FFY … full fuck yes, I’m ready.
The one important thing was that we had to make sure that this was not going to be just another “coaching” investment for her. She’s invested a LOT in coaching over the past couple of years, but all that coaching wasn’t getting her past where she was.
She’s already super high performance.
She brought in just shy of $1M of revenue last year, by herself. Let me say that again, by herself.
Angela is a savant. Incredibly smart, efficient, doesn’t need much sleep, has an amazing market that she loves to serve (lawyer for the LGBTQIA+ community in Philly), and can serve them single-handedly because she’s leveraged some tech and some systems she’s created to be able to do so by herself.
But, because she’s gotten so good at doing what she does ALL ALONE, it’s been very hard for her to stop doing what she does.
It’s all dependent on her.
And, she wants to leverage + scale because the LGBTQIA+ community needs more great lawyers like her, across the US and the globe.
Plus, I want her to train my lawyer community on how to do a better job of serving the LGBTQIA+ community because they are growing and surprisingly underserved by the legal community.
So for all of those reasons, it was a win/win for Angela to pay $25k to spend the weekend with me, and get my help with her business.
Truth be told, Angela didn’t just spend the weekend with me, but with me and my community down here in Costa Rica. I don’t do much alone these days. I know my strengths and then I bring people in to complement my strengths and serve alongside me. It’s one of the ways I’m able to get as much done as I do, and make the biggest impact possible.
And, this is one of the key tenets of the idea of “we create the economy” — we do not create a new economy by trying to do everything ourselves, but instead by paying others to work with us to do what they do great, and to just do our part, what only we can do.
Getting clear on what is yours to do is critically important in this “we create the economy” model.
My part to do was to say yes to working with Angela, and make sure she received my support to see where she could create systems in her law practice to free up her time, energy, and attention so she can shift from a 1:1 model (all dependent on her) into the foundation she’ll need to begin to serve “1 to many” and impact many more people with her genius.
My partner in supporting Angela was Amanda Goolsby, my “wifey” (non-romantic life partner), future podcast partner, and the best VIP day partner a gal could have. Amanda was instrumental in the growth of Orange Theory Fitness, so she KNOWS business, and she’s the one who makes sure that we incorporate health and body and movement and nourishment into our VIP experiences.
So, what actually happened during this VIP weekend with me, Amanda and Angela?
Well to begin with, Angela’s calendar went from blank to not blank … and she’s feeling more freedom, not less.
You see, Angela had achieved what many business owners want, at least what they think they want: a million dollar business, and a completely open calendar.
Except that desire for an empty calendar is a false flag of freedom that’s actually a trap created by the rebellious teenager inside of us that is driving the desire for freedom.
If you have a part of you that is a “don’t tell me what to do” part, and that thinks things like “if I have a lot on my calendar, I feel trapped” and has built your business to support your empty calendar, congratulations … you’ve hit a level of success that few ever get to, AND that empty calendar is keeping you trapped.
How can that be? Read on …
So we spent the first morning of our time together looking at what she really wants.
I first began to do this for myself in 2010 when I had achieved all of my first level of success, and couldn’t go any higher.
On paper, I was free.
I had created 2 million dollar businesses, was “first level” famous as a family financial and legal expert on TV, and was in a relationship with the love of my life.
Yet, I cried everyday because I felt so empty and lost inside, and I had no idea why.
I could do whatever I wanted. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
It took me hiring an interim CEO to run my Company, cut all my overhead by half, and get on the phone with me everyday and ask me “Lex, what do you want?” As I whined back, “I don’t know.”
It took me walking away from everything to find out.
The good news for Angela is that she doesn’t need to do all that because instead she came out to Costa Rica to work with me and Amanda to get clear and create a plan of action before she “Kali-Ma’d” everything to find out what she really wants.
It turns out, Angela is actually very clear.
I’ve heard her talking about what she wants for the 2 years since I met her.
And, yet, I’ve also watched her continue to hire one coach after another, and still not create it.
So, here we are … in Costa Rica, mapping out the path to get there.
As soon as we sit down and I ask Angela to show me her calendar, the first thing I see is that Angela is too free. There’s nothing at all on her calendar.
A blank slate that feels like freedom, but which is actually keeping her from achieving her dreams, spinning around amongst the options and the freedom, like a wild top without any containment.
Too much choice, and too much freedom, can keep us from having what we really want more than anything.
It’s a level, a stage, and not the final destination.
The path to creating what she wants could even look and feel a whole lot like a constriction on her freedom.
Discipline.
Focus.
Hiring a team, and becoming the leader she has no training to be.
Mastering her calendar.
Changing the way she does things so that she’s not the only one doing everything, and has an army of people working alongside her to at least partially replicate what she can do single-handedly.
You see, Angela is a savant.
She’s one of those geniuses that so many lawyers are who can handle a massive amount of information in her head.
She can attract 1:1 clients, and track details in a way that allowed her to serve over $900k of clients last year, by herself.
Savant.
But, that leaves her zero time for anything else.
Which means she hasn’t launched her Caravan of Hope (an annual tour during Pride Month across the US to provide legal services to underserved LGBTQIA+ communities), yet.
And, she hasn’t created her training program to teach lawyers to serve the LGBTQIA community, yet.
She hasn’t run her virtual summit, yet
Thanks to our work together this past weekend, all of that will now happen this year.
For Angela to go from a 1:1 model, in which she serves approximately 100 to 120 clients or so per year, to a 1: many model in which she serves thousands of people in a year, something’s got to give.
It’s the same thing that needed to give for me to make my own leap of impact back in 2010, except I didn’t know that’s what Life wanted … and so instead of learning to get disciplined in service to more freedom, I indulged the escape fantasy, killed everything I created, and moved to a farm to find out who I was, if money didn’t matter and I had all the time in the world.
It was an important time for me to grow up and get into right relationship with time and money, and what I learned is that discipline creates freedom, and that there is a way to be a leader that creates more expansion of capacity, rather than less.
I needed to detach from my ideas of what freedom was – a young, rebellious, almost peter pan type of freedom — into a next level understanding of true liberation. A turn of the wheel. A leveling up.
Each turn of the wheel will require letting go of what you’ve always done to liberate yourself into something new. Detachment. It’s the 3rd stage of the 4-stage spiral path I call the Journey to Financial Liberation.
It’s the case for Angela as she goes from 1:1 to 1:many, and it’s the same for me as I go from a 7.5M/year serving 1:many to over $10M/year and serving many millions …
The last time I attempted a leap this big, I dropped it all, spiraled down for a bit, and
Letting go of what you’ve always done to liberate yourself into something new.
It’s confronting as fuck because it seems to take away freedom, rather than give you more. And, it seems to cost you money, rather than give you more.
The detachment stage of the journey is a paradox.
When I was here last turn of the wheel myself, I just dropped all of it and walked away because I didn’t know how to do it otherwise. Many do exactly that …
Now, what I’m guiding Angela to do, and what I’m doing with myself, is to detach from an old, limited, almost teenager-like, immature idea of freedom, and step into the next level of liberation.
Adulthood.
Eldership.
Growing up.
And, yes, for Angela, at this time, that looks like discipline, focus, going from a blank calendar to a VERY FULL, VERY SCHEDULED, MASTERY OF HER CALENDAR, and next will be mastery of her financials at a very detail level too.
To the part that has to detach, the rebellious one who got us here to the top of this first mountain, it can feel like death.
It is. A death of a part that needs to die, so that something new can be born.
It’s a new life.
It’s a new level of liberation that is far beyond what the rebellious teenager ever could have accomplished on her own, no matter how smart or savvy she is.
It’s time for new skills.
It’s time for new choices.
It’s time for a new willingness, and new abilities.
Liberation.
