Episode Summary
I picked up knitting and it taught me how to run a better business!
Staying open and curious to new things really can make a world of difference and this is exactly what knitting did for my spiritual business. It allowed me to expand beyond my limiting beliefs and stay present with the true essence of my mission.
Join me on today's episode of the Answer Your Unique Calling podcast where I tell you the four important lessons that knitting has taught me about breaking through limitation.
Today we're talking about:
- 4 important lessons that you should know if you’re feeling stymied in your career (yes I learned them while knitting!)
- Are you unconsciously losing your presence while consumed in the ‘have-to’s’ of business & life?
- What the ‘beginners mind’ can teach us about necessary curiosity and building a spiritual business
- Why so many spiritual entrepreneurs struggle with digital marketing
- Noticing patterns from the past to create a better future
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Episode Transcript
Julian Crosson-Hill 0:11
This is the Answer Your Unique Calling podcast. This is a podcast for change catalysts. Those that believe we can change the world and that the way things are isn't the way they have to be. Through this podcast, I share tools, tips and inspiring stories for breaking through limitations, creating meaningful change, and embracing and trusting your deepest truth. I'm Julian Crosson-Hill, Certified Spiritual Life Coach, Human Design Specialist and founder of Priest of Inanna. I help spiritually minded professionals discover and embrace a life of possibility, freedom, meaning and impact. Welcome, and thanks for listening.
Hi, and welcome to this week's episode. I recently picked up knitting again, I have a love hate relationship with knitting. Let me tell you a little bit about it. I'm not a fast knitter. Sometimes I pull my stitches way too tight, and I really struggle to get the needle through the next stitch to make, you know, to continue my knitting. And I've been working on a blanket. I had bought some yarn and thought I'd like to make this this blanket. I've frogged it like four times now because I keep getting off and doing the wrong stitches in the wrong place. And screwing up the pattern.
I recently started knitting again, it's been going much better. And I did a few things differently this time, I used to always knit in front of the TV. And I've been just knitting as part of a meditation or just having some quiet time or space. So rather than trying to spend the entire evening knitting while watching Netflix with Neal, I'll sit on the couch and spend 15- or 20-minutes knitting and then put it away. I'm doing it in these little spurts and just making space to do that.
The other thing I did is that when I started this project, again, I went out to YouTube and even though I know the basic stitches, I watched a couple tutorials for beginners just to just to see if there might be something that I could be doing a little differently. And I did discover a couple things about the direction that I was taking my yarn around the needle and things like that, that seemed like they would work better for me. So why am I talking about knitting? I'm sure you're asking yourself that.
Well, I learned several important lessons in my reapproaching knitting. And I think that they apply to, to all of life really. They apply to our careers, if we're feeling stuck and stymied in our career. They apply to our spiritual businesses, if we're solopreneurs. And they apply in a lot of ways, even to our spirituality and our spiritual path. And so I thought I'd share a few of the things that I learned through picking up knitting again recently. And for those of you that know, my human design type as a manifesting generator, of course, it's no surprise that I'm picking up a new hobby here.
So the first thing that knitting, coming back to knitting has really taught me is the importance of presence. It's the importance of being fully present in the moment with whatever it is that you're doing. So as a manifesting generator, I am designed to multitask, and I'm an unrepentant multitasker. But what I'm learning and what I learned through my knitting is that some tasks need your full attention. You need to be present for them. And the reason that I so often would lose count of stitches or think I was on a different row than I was and work the wrong pattern is that I was doing it while I was also watching TV or doing other things, and I wasn't paying attention to the task that I was doing. It wasn't being present. My mind was somewhere else. And I was sort of automatically on autopilot trying to knit this blanket.
And I think that that's an important lesson that we need to think about. Because in a lot of areas of life, we can be very unpresent. So spiritual business is definitely in line. I think sometimes when we're trying to get our message out into the world, we can do it almost unconsciously. We feel like oh, I have to do a I have to do this YouTube video. So I'm just gonna put something together and get this done really quick. And we're not really present with what we're doing in our business. And I think this is really important for spiritual entrepreneurs, because if we can't be present in the things that we're doing, like our social media, or writing a blog post or those kinds of activities in our business, How are we going to be fully present with our clients? If we allow the time that we're spending in our business to be one that isn't of presence, it starts to dilute our message and dilute the impact that we have, when we're with our clients. We start to feel like, well, I know I'm working with this client. But I can kind of do this other thing at the same time, which is not giving the client our full presence, it's not giving the client, what we went into business to do, and to provide and to give. So, presence can be really important there.
I think presence is also important in other ways, like in our relationships, how many of us, pick up our phones and sit and scroll mindlessly, rather than being present with our partners, or with our children or our families? So there's lots of things that pull us away from presence. And when we're not being present, it's easy to lose track of where we are. And so, picking my knitting back up and really being present with it has really shown me the importance of setting aside time to be fully present.
The other aspect or the other lesson that I really learned is about beginner's mind, which beginner's mind is kind of a Buddhist concept. And it's one that's come up a lot in my personal studies in the Akashic records. And beginner's mind is really about approaching, approaching it as a beginner, assuming that we don't know. Because we learn certain things in our lives, we learn certain approaches, we think we know things. And we then sort of act. It leads us into this non presence of acting instinctually, acting unconsciously. And we make assumptions based on the knowledge that we have. So when we approach a task with beginner's mind when we say, Okay, I think I know this, but I'm going to be curious, and I'm going to approach this as a beginner, we gain more insight. We gain fresh insights that weren't there before. When we allow knowing to be more of a process than an endpoint, we gain a deeper understanding of whatever it is that we're trying to know.
And I think in spiritual business, this is especially important we, we go, and we learn a method of marketing. Qe learn a certain way to do things, and then we just sort of assume that that's always how we're going to do it. We know it, so we become closed to other possibilities. And this is why so many spiritual entrepreneurs struggle in their business around their digital marketing, why they're doing things that they don't enjoy, like showing up on social media, when it's not really what they want to do. Because they know that that's what they have to do to market their business. And approaching it from beginner's mind. and from a beginner's mind being like, I don't know how to market my business. I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if there's a different way to do this.I wonder what I could learn by trying this. That's a better approach. And when we come from beginner's mind, we're coming to whatever it is that we're doing with a sense of humility, and a sense of openness to learning.
The other thing that I learned from picking knitting back up again, is that sometimes we have to be willing to revisit things that were hard or that didn't work. This has been something that in my business, I've had to really, this has been a lesson I've had to learn. There have been things in my business that I've tried, and they didn't work, I've had launches that flopped, or I did programs that didn't really do what I wanted them to do. I've tried some different digital marketing techniques that were really difficult or that I struggled to be consistent with. Through this experience of revisiting knitting, and in particular, revisiting this pattern that had been giving me a hard time, I've realized the importance of being willing to go back and revisit those things that were hard, and there's things that didn't work, to see if there's a different way to do it.
Sometimes we get frustrated with things and of course, with most of us in the world being generators and manifesting generators, frustration is that big one that drives us to often give up right before the breakthrough. So we shelf things, we decided that they're not for us. I think that a willingness to go back and revisit those things, to look at them with fresh eyes, to approach them with beginner's mind allows us to find the hidden gems in the things that we gave up on because they were difficult. So being able to go back and revisit something that was hard and approach it in a new way, is a really important lesson.
And finally, I think the other lesson that I really learned from this is, I have friends who knit and they're great at it. They knit really fast. They turn out tons of work, and it's, it looks beautiful. They're quick, and they just seem to be able to sit there and automatically do this without even thinking about it. And I've always wanted to be one of those people. I love knitted goods. I think they're, they're just so unique and so enjoyable to wear things that are knitted, to have things that are handmade, and I've always wanted to be one of those people. But I've always been a slow knitter. So I just kind of had gotten to the point where I was like, Well, I'm gonna buy a lot of knitted things. And maybe I'll pick it up again, someday, but I'm never, you know, I'm getting too old to really ever be that good at it. And I think that this lesson has really taught me that it's never too late to begin again. And this beginning again is really important, because I see a lot of people who get stuck in patterns, and they believe that it is too late for them to make a different choice to start over to start again.
So, people build their spiritual businesses, and they're not doing what they want them to do, they're not going in the direction they want. And maybe they have to go back to working at a regular job, or they have to make some change. And they think that well, the spiritual business, it's just always going to be this small side hustle, it's always going to be this thing that I do kind of off on the side. And they think that it's too late to begin again, if your business isn't going in the direction you want it to. If you are in a rut, it's never too late to revisit that and say, Let's start over. Let's do it again. Let's begin my business again. I'm going to start my business over whatever that looks like. And it's not truly starting over from scratch, but it's beginning again.
And I think it's the same thing in your career. If you're feeling stuck in a job that doesn't fulfill you or you want to do something different. There's no such thing as it being too late to begin again. You can always find a way to take the skills that you've developed and apply them in a new and interesting way to start over. There's no such thing as it being too late to begin again. Those are the things that I learned from picking up knitting again.
So just to recap, it's beginner's mind, being present, it's never too late to begin again, and revisit the things that are hard. I hope that these insights gave you a little bit insight to maybe some situations in your life that you're struggling with, and ways that maybe presence or beginner's mind or beginning again could be helpful to you.
This has been the Answer Your Unique Calling podcast with Spiritual Life Coach, Julian Crosson-Hill. Help others discover this podcast by leaving a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Did this episode speak to you? Is there something you'd like to hear more about? Have a suggestion for a guest you'd like to hear? DM me on social media or use the contact page on my website to let me know www.priestofinanna.com. That's priestofinanna-- i-n-a-n-n-a.com. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at Priest of Inanna. And don't forget to check out the Soul Expansion Soundboard live every other Friday at 12pm. Eastern on YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn