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5.1 | Get Resourced for the Revolution

>> Isha Vela: Welcome to Waking Up Wealthy, the podcast for visionaries and rebels who are ready to revolutionize their relationship with money and create powerful collective ripples with the money they make. I’m your host, Isha Vela, trauma psychologist, somatic practitioner, financial professional and minimalist, bringing you practical money tools, unconventional wealth perspectives, and Aquarian era business strategy to guide you in building wealth that’s aligned, ethical and empowering. Let’s wake up to the true meaning of wealth together. Welcome, dear listener, to season five of the Waking Up Wealthy podcast. And even saying that makes me feel so happy because I finally have a name that matches what I want to teach and how. I want to shift the energetics around money and making more and just living living in a way that is wealthy. I really appreciate you being here. In fact, yesterday I got the download that this podcast is going to be one of my main ways of communicating with you. I’ll also have a presence on social media, but as you know, it’s this podcast where I really get to get real and intimate with you in ways that the social media scroll doesn’t really allow. With all the changes happening on social media, I just felt like it made more sense to put my focus here and on YouTube if you’re watching. In other words, on platforms where I still felt a sense of ownership. And I also don’t want to scatter my energy on multiple platforms. It’s just not efficient. And besides email, this podcast has always been my favorite way of communicating with you. And I honestly had a challenging time starting this season just because I wanted it to be meaningful. I didn’t want to talk about money fluff. I wanted to talk about real life. I wanted to talk about what’s happening in our economy and how that affects our relationship with money. I wanted to provide you with real skills that you can use. Each of these podcast episodes for me is a master classes. I don’t need to sell you anything. This is just a master classes. I just want to inform you, just want to provide the information. And so in the wake of the Los Angeles fires, the inauguration of the president, I wanted this episode to be, punchy kickoff session of thing. And this could have been three different episodes. Honestly, it’s so packed with, resources in terms of inner resourcing and how you want to be thinking about your next moves, the next four years, let’s say, yeah, the usefulness in this episode is receiving three important ways to be resourced and ready in this Aquarian era. Mobilization. I say a mobilization. It’s not a fight, it’s not a battle. I don’t want to get into that mindset, but it’s really about organizing and getting smart, about how we use our energy. and it’s about making smart moves with your money as well, in your life and in your business, because health is. Well, it’s about making smart moves with your body and your nervous system and your creative energy.


Focus and attention are the keys to success, according to Mike

Let’s first talk about focus and attention. This is the first piece. For those of you who are newer to me, I want to share that over the last year, I paid back $18,000 worth of debt. I traveled to the desert for work from the east coast four times. One time with my children. I fed and clothed and housed my children, paid for their extracurricular activities, and managed $8,000 worth of medical bills. And this is, as you know, as you can imagine, no small feat as a solo parent in the United States. I also paid rent for a small hotel in Bali, where I will be moving to in six weeks. This past year, I also received two promotions based on a certain level of productivity in my business, which will allow me to make more money for the same amount of effort. And I did all of this without credit cards and without burning myself out. When I look at how I was able to achieve that, it really comes down to focus and attention combined with nervous system capacitation, the somatic skills that I learned in my training. It’s just like it’s all informing me and I just want to pass it on to you.


Time is your most valuable asset, which is why most people want to make money

You’ve probably heard lots of different people on the Internet talk about what is your most valuable commodity. First, the narrative was all about money, money, money. And then people were like, oh, no, it’s actually time. Time is your most valuable asset, which is why most people want to make money. Money gives people the freedom of not having their spend their time working for someone else. Also, everyone wants the freedom to own their own time, to engage in activities that provide them a sense of joy, a sense of connectedness. And you probably decided to become an entrepreneur because, you wanted to own your own time and not letting someone else dictate how much that time or how much your time is worth. But what you do with that time is even more valuable because you can spend your time, the time that you have distracted, stressed out, mindlessly scrolling through social media, or you can spend it focused, fully present, experiencing sense of connectedness, feeling passion, pleasure, experiencing someone or something you love. And so for me, that means that your energy, your life force is your Greatest commodity without life, right. You’re not alive like that. Your life force is your greatest commodity. And your energy, that life force is moved. In other words, it’p. You pull it inwards or it gets pulled out of you through your attention and focus. For example, let’s say when we’re in a state of flight, our energy is pulled outwards almost like energetically through our eyes. We’re focused, we’re scanning our environment, we’re figuring out is this safe, is this person safe, what’s going on. We are all very strategic in our visual space. Scanning the environment. So the energy is going up and out of our bodies. About, think about the last time something big happened in your life. Of course I’m imagining this grabbed your attention. This something in your field, was some form of emergency, some sort of a stressor. Could have been a smaller thing or a bigger thing, but in some form your survival instinct was activated. This will pull your energy and focus away from your ground. It pulls the energy up and out of your body. you’re pulled out of your ground, you’re pulled away from your center to your emotional brain. You’re experiencing all these different emotions. High sensation. Your energy is coming out of your eyes, you’re scanning, you are trying to plan strategically so you can figure out what to do next. You’re getting to a coping space and you can feel like just the way that I’m talking right now, I’m trying to communicate the intensity of what that feels like. This is a kind of anxiety, it’s the anxiety that tries to prevent a specific outcome from happening. But it’s not necessarily efficient because it’s a fear based state. It’s a state of fear when your attention is hijacked. You become the secilibraded, you get off center. Think of this as losing your footing or losing your contact with the ground. You’re so on shaky ground. I used to demonstrate this in my office when I had an in person office. I used to have people stand and I used to push them and then they sort of like they would get thrown off their center. And I was like, okay, so now ground, we used to do a grounding exercise and then I would push them and they would be unmovable. And so people got to really feel in their bodies what holding their ground was. And they’re literally crouching, getting closer to the ground and sort of hunkering down, right? Getting lower and more focused instead of like having your energy shooting up out of your body. So when your Attention is hijacked, you lose your footing, literally, right? You lose your contact to the ground. And this administration seems to employ this tactic of throwing you off your ground quite a bit, activating fear through your survival mechanisms, creating distractions, keeping people confused. And in a flurry, people are running around online right now hosting. People feel a sense of urgency, and it’s a form of emotional abuse. It’s meant to wear you down, to activate helplessness, which is a form of disempowerment. It reduces your capacity and in some cases even immobilizes you in situations where it might touch on an old trigger. However, by seeing it for what it is, by seeing this tactic for what it is, it allows you to create just enough distance from it to support you in grounding back into yourself, finding your way back to, okay, what is really happening here? Which is a form. This is a process of regulation. Right? The other day, for example, when there was a lot of, stuff going on, like, with trans people, and I just started to think about all of my friends, I started to think about my children, my children’s friends, family members who are trans. And I just was, I just felt like this fear in my chest and I was like, all right, this is not helping. And I took myself to the gym, and I just left it on my bike. I left it on my bike. And it’s not that I’m like, okay, well, I’m not feeling the fear. I’m not going to do anything about it anymore because I’m not feeling the fear. It’s like, no, I still feel like something needs to be done, but I’m not doing it from a place of like, oh, shit, oh shit, oh shit. Right? This is the difference. You want to stay connected, Go to my website, www. Doishhavela.com and download Prosper, my three part money course that dissolves money shame and dives into the five most common unconscious beliefs that get in the way of making more of it. You can also sign up for a free financial strategy session where someone on my team will guide you through the six steps of financial independence and provide you with a tailored holistic plan to build wealth ethically. All of those links and more are in the show notes. And as we move through the next four years, I want you to mind your attention. Where is your attention? Where is your focus going? Are you the kind of person who grabs their phone first thing in the morning and looks at what’s happening on social media or gets the news, stop doing that because that’s like eating, hop rocks for breakfast and chasing it down with some bacon grease. O. I don’t know, something bizarrely unhealthy and ultimately self destructive. Start your day with intentionality, clearing any emotional residue from the day before or whatever you gather during the night. I tend to wake up with a lot of emotional residue that I work out in my sleeping hours. So movement and breath is a vital, non negotiable part of my morning. I give myself the space to feel through any emotions or fears that are occupying part of my capacity so that I can create more spaciousness for the things that I want for my intentions. and you may want to think of this like you’re cleaning out a space or let’s say redecorating a room where every morning you move out the boxes of the things you no longer want. You clear the space so that you can bring in the beautiful furniture and the gorgeous, wall hangings that you’re going to be putting up on the walls. When it comes to specific somatic skills, it really doesn’t matter what you do, as long as the energy is moving through your system. I’m not going to be like, okay, well, box breath works, or this works, because every body is different and everybody responds differently to different techniques and modalities and interventions. I feel like we complicate things by thinking it has to be a specific technique. But it can be just as simple as moving your body, taking nature walks, kickboxing, dancing, lifting weights, running, yoga. You get the picture, right? As long as you’re moving and breathing while allowing yourself to feel, that’s really all that matters.


The most important feeling that we need to feel through is fear

And I think that the most important feeling that we need to feel through is fear. And this applies to you growing your business and stepping into uncomfortable areas of new growth where you’re having to develop a new identity as someone who makes more money or someone who wants to make more money or someone who wants to. Being a certain aspect of leadership, all of that can bring up fears. Fears around visibility, it feels around being seen or being canceled. Da, da, da. so it’s always working with the fear. Massaging the fear out of your body through movement and breath work. Yeah, Having focused attention and regulation are the two major skills for you to succeed at, whatever you want to do. and this is something to practice every single moment of the day. And they’re necessary for thriving. And it’s really, really, really important that you thrive, truly thrive in the context of the changes that are happening in the economy, in our culture. In this Aquarian era and the Aquarian era, I think that a lot of people, myself included, had this idea of it being a little bit like, oh, unicorns and rainbows, here we come. It’s going to feel so good. And in a way, I still believe that. And there’s going to. Because the next 20 years are ushering in seismic changes. So it’s kind of like, okay, change is challenging for most people. And I’m guessing this is not going to be any different than any other change that you have in your life. Even the change that you like, that you want to have happen. When you think about thriving in the context of those changes, that thriving is resourced, feeling resourced, thriving. Yes, there are stressful things happening. But you know what? You are in your joy, you are, focused on the people that you love. You are focused on community and connection and giving and receiving. However you define thriving, which I’m guessing if you listen to this, you kind of define it in a similar way than I do. Thriving, or feeling resourced, is a state of being where you feel like you can metabolize the stress of what’s happening around you, the shakiness or the wobbles. You have the capacity for the full range of your emotions and maybe even you are able to support other people. You can be connected to joy and be present even when life circumstances aren’t ideal. And I’m sharing all of this with you from the perspective of someone who grew up in a home where there was emotional and physical abuse. There were real abuses of power in my home. And as shitty as that was, there are some real motherfucking skills you learn in situations like that and you learn how to deal with fear. unfortunately, I learned how to bury my fear. but, on the flip side, on the positive side, I also learned how to preserve essential parts of my. That authority figures are trying to break down via fear tactics. And so I have since learned how to feel my fear and also still use the skills that I learned to m. Get ahead and do the things that I want to do and manifest and all that kind of stuff. Right, right. The skills of preserving that untouchable part of yourself, maybe soul, or maybe like working with the fear and digging. Right? Like moving through the fear and beyond it to this sense of feeling safety within yourself and feeling that essential trust. This is sort of, the foundation of doing anything. And learning that skill forces you not to give in into fear while staying obsessively focused on your goal, feeling the fear, moving through it and not giving into it, not collapsing into it in a healed expression of that trauma, you actually do allow yourself to feel, like I said, without giving into it. The conclusion of all this is be mindful about your attention and your focus both on how you direct it and where you direct it.


Let’s talk about communication and community. Business has always been about relationships, so make them a priority

Let’s talk about communication and community. I could split this, like I said, into three different episodes, but I’m not doing that because all this needs to be talked about right now. I feel like this needs to happen right now. In the wake of the new ownership of TikTok and what’s been happening on Meta, I’m going from the assumption that free speech is not really free. So not surprised. it hasn’t been and it’s less free now. And so a lot of people are leaving Meta. Ah, without really understanding the importance of communication and community and how that’s going to be an essential part of how we are moving forward, not only in life, but in business as well. So the reason why social media platforms are so vital to our society is because of how communities are formed and how information is disseminated. Right? It’s like in an instant. And I want to take marketing off the table for a moment because we can make this a conversation about, about marketing and getting your stuff out there, but it’s really about creating community and sharing information with them. You don’t just rage, leave a platform. this is where, you know, some of the emotional regulation pieces come in. And, and mind you, I’ve been tempted, right, I’ve been tempted lots of times, but really think about what you’re doing. don’t cut yourself off from community and potentially your own livelihood because of these changes that you see happening. be discerning about how you use social media. Maybe you want to put your energy in another place or at least create some diversification. If you’re on Facebook now, maybe keep a foot in Facebook and ramp up Blue sky, for example. Or maybe you start putting energy into your YouTube or funnel your TikTok followers there just over the next year. Make those changes slowly. Don’t just cut yourself off and cut off your people. You want to have many ways for people to find you baked into your business model, which beyond social media can include networking, word of mouth, collaborations, in person, connections. And that’s going to be more important than ever is your relationship skills. So really honing those are going to help you succeed in life and in business. It’s going to help your children too, right, because you’re going to be able to communicate in a more profound way with them. Those intimacy skills are key. So all of those things I just named, right? The word of mouth, collaborations in person, connections, those are all relationship based. So I don’t want you to miss the forest for the trees with these social media changes. Business has always been about relationships, so make them a priority. If you decide to shift your business strategy in your funnels, it’s always about continuing to grow and nurture that community and how you choose to communicate with them. And when you think about it, financial safety, both on the investment side of things and on lead generation, which just simply means visibility and getting your services in front of new people, exists with diversification. That’s how you create the safety is in spreading the channels, but not necessarily scattering your energy. Does that make sense? Diversification minimizes the risk of your income being inconsistent by spreading it over various strategies or accounts. diversification is also never relying on one stream of income for your livelihood. You’ve heard me say this various times. Maybe you need to hear it again.


You need to diversify your money beyond 4.5% inflation

Now let’s shift into the third piece, which is a little bit about money moves as the final segment of this episode. And of course I haven’t received a clear vision of what’s going to happen. I do have my people talking to me, but I haven’t gotten a clear sense of what’s going on. I’m as much in the dark as you are. And of course whenever I do get a download, I will make an episode about it. but what I do know is that inflation is going to continue to be a problem. And of course I say this in the context of the United States. We are here, inflation is at 3%. I’m sure in Britain it’s been higher. in Canada I’m not sure what it is, but, ye, as long as the Federal Reserve continues to print money, it devalues the currency. And also with stuff going on with immigration, I’m guessing that the price of commodities, food for example, are going to continue going up. So not only will your money be worth less over time, also shit’s going to get more expensive, which is why you need to be putting your money into vehicles or accounts that are yielding much more than 3%. Right. I know that we’ve talked about high yield savings accounts and that that’s very important, but that’s only like, you know, 4.5%. So you’re only making a, percent and a half more than the rate of inflation. You want to diversify maybe into crypto Strategy, which I believe is an aspect of the new currency. Gold, silver, real, estate continues to be, a, good investment as long as there is a return. I’m not talking about moving into a single family home. I’m talking multi units, things like that. And with crypto, I know meme coins are really big right now, but I’m more of a stablecoin and major project kind of person. in addition to diversification, I want you to also get into the mindset of being an activist with your dollars or whatever currency corresponds with your country. you’ve probably felt the squeeze of capitalism over the last five or six years. I certainly have. And part of being a conscious steward of your wealth is being able to direct your dollars to companies and products that are in alignment with your values. I recently published a list of companies that support the new old administration, which you can boycott if you feel like doing that. and doing any sort of boycott can require, getting a little bit of uncomfortable as you shift, getting creative about where you shop and things like that. But keep in mind that even though you may feel the squeeze of capitalism, you can squeeze right back. I always tell my kids that we are a lot more powerful than we think, and people in power need us a lot more than we need them, believe it or not. And final message, you need to be making more money, period. And not just because of inflation. yes, the cost of food is going up, but I see a lot of people making just enough to get by for themselves. And if you want to have influence and truly change the systems you don’t like, you’re going to need to do better than that. I was at a conference this past year, I believe it was in January, where I heard someone say that making just enough to provide a comfortable life for yourself is selfish because you could do so much more with more money. That really hit home for me because that is really my approach. and my desire to make more is really not for my comfort. I do want more influence and power because I trust myself with it. I know what my requirements are for living. when it comes to how much money I need to thrive. I know what enough is for me. I know where that line is. And I think that part of my work in the world is helping people find out what that is for them or to begin to feel that with them themselves, a sense of enoughness where they can be in overflow with a lot less and then give whatever the surplus is or use or mobilize or steward Whatever the surplus is. Yeah. And so whatever an overflow, it gets to be redistributed or shared or like, yeah, we do something that benefits the collective in some way. Yeah. I just feel like now more than ever, it’s so important to protect yourself not from a place of fear, but from a place of this alert awareness. This, when I say waking up wealthy to be just awake to your power, to be savvy with money, to be aware in an alert, attentive way. and it also is about protecting your income, protecting your joy, protecting your business, protecting your assets, protecting your freedom, protecting other people’s freedoms, protecting your boundaries, protecting your health, your creativity. Like I said, Aquarian times will guarantee massive changes. And the task is to stay flexible, open, and nimble. And so when I imagine this, if you’re listening, you’re sort of like, you’re a little bit like this, I would say, like when the wind blows the reed, like a reed or a blade of grass, it bends, but it doesn’t get uprooted. It doesn’t get, like, pulled out and fly away. It stays rooted. It just kind of bends and moves. Right. So I want you to be nimble and flexible in that way and open. I want you to nurture your nervous system. It’s truly like the ground beneath your feet, essentially. And I want you to break up with shame and fear a little bit more every day to become that unapologetic, bold leader that you came to be. and honestly, being uniquely, yourself is the greatest act of resistance. Your innovation is your real legacy. Make art. Create solutions that widen the scope and vision of what has been thought would be possible up to now. And also make space for rage and grief so that you can really tap into your power, power of your love, the power of your leadership, and use that to fight for your community. Exercise your creativity and joy muscles alongside your physical body. But that creativity and joy and play is so important to feeling nourished and resourced and alive in a system that challenges us to kill parts of ourselves, to automate what cannot be controlled or that isn’t like, isn’t linear. So this is your anarchist workout. This is your protocol. I want you to be consistent about your reps and stay connected. All right, that’s it for us today. And, sending you lots of love and I’ll see you on the next. Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Remember to hit the subscribe button to get notified of new episode. ##odes dropping on the new and full moons of each month. And if you haven’t already, leave us a five star review on iTunes to make sure that everyone who needs this transmission receives it. Until the next episode, I’m sending you fierce, fierce love.