Fast Facts
Author: Diane Young Sussman
Genre: Entrepreneurs and Marketing: Women in Business
Book: Step Up and SHINE: Power and Presence in Action
Bio
Diane Young Sussman is a Transformational Life Coach and Energy Healer who has spent her career helping people manage their confidence and stage fright while growing their businesses. Her passion is to help heal the body/mind and be a strong and loving presence in their speaking and sharing of their work in the world.
Author Accomplishments:
Marketing Coach, Teacher/Trainer at The American Center for the Alexander Technique, Author, Speaker, Movement and Exercise Trainer.
Book blurb
Learn to use your own intuition as the barometer of your business creation and success
Create a clear vision for your success that is grounded in your most confident and authentic, soulful purpose
Uncover and release any hidden challenges that may be sabotaging the growth of your business and keeping you “hiding out” instead of sharing the best of who you are with others
Re-energize your soul-inspired enthusiasm for having the life of your deepest heart’s desires while creating a highly profitable, revenue-generating business
Excerpt
Introduction
“A soul-inspired life is a life that bends toward the whisperings of your inner longing.”
Diane Young Sussman
The time is now. Are you ready for a mind-shifting experience in which you can touch the very essence of your talents and gifts and find a way to bring them fully into the world through your business? If you are not already living your dream by having daily contact with your ideal clients, sharing your inspired message, and transforming lives, you might need to turn up the volume of your visibility and take some new and bolder actions. You have to ask yourself whether you are willing and able to take the steps necessary to unfold a business plan that is a perfect fit for who you are. Are you willing to be the CEO of your own enterprise and the spiritual leader who manages the whole package for the vision you want to bring into the world?
If you have been feeling frustrated because you haven’t felt fully seen or appreciated or had the proper attention paid to you for all of the efforts you have made to increase business exposure, it is time to think bigger.
But what if you never felt you had permission to speak your mind or live fully expressed and so have stayed hidden and quiet? What if you have, until now, only experienced your blocks to abundance and couldn’t clear them? Wouldn’t you be living at a lower level of your potential? How would it make you feel to see others moving forward with their visions and dreams, but you felt you didn’t have access to yours? And how much money would you be leaving on the table to not be involved fully in your life’s passionate work, the work you were meant to do? If that door were closed to you, would you not feel the loss deeply?
I am here to offer you a little mindset-boosting experience that you can take to re-visualize your healing practice or entrepreneurial business. I wish you the best possible outcome for your future. Together we will shine the light on what is not working in your business and find new ways to gain clarity on what you want to accomplish so that you can fully realize your heart-based work, and you can feel the satisfaction of living your life fully and with purpose.
Life is always providing opportunities to face limitations and blocks and to clear them so that you can move swiftly toward the pine path to which you are entitled. The end result is a huge movement toward your goals and dreams and a life well lived. You, and only you, can offer the precise recipe of service that your ideal clients desperately need so that they are able to step up to the life they too are meant to live. Therefore, it is not only for you, but also in service to your clients, that we are seeking clarity about your life’s work.
If you couldn’t or didn’t want to step up to your capabilities, some part of your spirit would remain unexpressed. And, even more importantly, those whom you were meant to serve through your good work would not find you and would therefore not be served.
You are a spiritual leader, a way-shower and guide for others, but if you keep your light hidden and your gifts buried in the sand, nobody will benefit from your teachings. You are here for a reason. As you decide to participate fully in the marketplace, you play in the field of your potential. It is your pine destiny that you will see unfold before you with the precise amount of juice you put into it. Decades could easily pass before you wake up and listen to your inner calling and step forward into your pine path, taking on all that you are meant to do. So why not start now?
We live in community with one another to bring forward the best that life allows. The world is waiting; abundance and growth are available to you at all times. To not believe that you are a part of the greater good of life is to be blocked from your inheritance, and that requires healing. As you heal you can release your unnamed fears and doubts and draw on the support that will awaken you to what is best for you and your potential clients.
So are you living “full throttle” toward your dreams, or do you feel somewhat blocked? Most likely, if you feel blocked, you are bumping up against some attitudes of your personal history where the frayed edges and sharp corners of life have damaged you. Well, again I say the time is now to make some commitments to change!
My greatest joy is to participate with other conscious entrepreneurs in the magnificent unfolding of our world’s evolution. I help those who want to get closer to the full expression of their soul’s pine purpose and live from that rich place to bring their leadership out more fully, easily, and abundantly. No fear, no worry, no confusion or sense of being overwhelmed need be present because all of those lower-level energies will be cleared and no longer competing for mind time.
You can move swiftly toward your dreams and goals and create simple systems to follow that will make your life easier and your business flourish.
The one thing we have available to do the perfect next thing for our businesses is simply to listen to what needs to be expressed. Business happens one step at a time. Knowing, and taking action on the right next step, makes all the difference for the outcome.
You are building your dream business from a place of deep inner knowledge and trust. You are doing your marketing from a place of clarity and faith. You are looking outside yourself for opportunities that may not even feel like opportunities in the moment, but you are guided by your listening and your intuition.
And here is a secret. You don’t have to have everything in place before you get out there and start to speak about what it is that you do. In fact, you must start speaking before you think you are ready, because only then do people and circumstances come into view when opportunities are revealed to you as exciting next steps. Your success is measured not by having all of the pieces in place beforehand but by acting on trust and faith that you will be given help because you have the vision.
In a sense, you are connecting with other people through your inner guidance. Think of it as an aligned knowing. Your inner guidance reveals what is at your fingertips! Have courage; there really is no better way or better path than following your intuition to get what you want in life.
Yes, you must clear the resistance, as it inevitably comes up, and listen quietly for which doors to start opening. Ultimately, we are here to support and assist each other in our spiritual development, and the best way possible to that end is to create from your own voice first, which inspires you and allows you to connect with what is most meaningful for you.
It is my intention to help you activate a deep desire to go after your imaginative vision so that you can take on the activation of your own soul’s gifts.
All of your experiences matter because this is the way you learn and change. You are guided both by the mistakes you have made, the obstacles along your journey, and all the magic that has shown up for you along the way. There are many synchronicities in life that lead you in the right direction. If you have to go down a difficult path for a while for your soul to grow and mature, then that is what is up for you. If you take the easy path through a deep faith in the Universe to have your back, all the better.
I believe we all have the potential to live from a connected center of belonging, one that creates unity instead of separation, where we can strive to serve with more determination and depth and participate in a healed vision of the world. How we tap into those resources and continually evolve brings sweetness to our lives as well as more clarity and understanding about how life serves us and how we serve life through helping each other to thrive.
There is no need for competition, judgment, or suspicion of others. We can grow even through the bad things that happen, which may be just as important in our evolution. We have the option to take on as much responsibility for spiritual growth as we choose.
So my question to you is: Are you living a soul-inspired life? Do you know who you truly are, what you have come here to complete or to begin? Have you asked for help through whatever form it may come: books, dreams, meditation, spiritual teachers? And do you have the courage and the drive to go further, deeper?
If you are frightened to go through what you perceive as uncomfortable experiences, feel the fear and do it anyway so that you can break through the tough first layer of procrastination and fear and then be prepared to be surprised and delighted. See yourself going for a ride into the places and circumstances that open the curtain and reveal your fortune because they are the next best steps in the unfolding of your life journey. This is where you get to be the driver and the creator and where full expression is the gift.
You need a strong conviction and a clear sign post or two along the way. There will be challenges, of that there is no doubt, and part of your mind may be very determined to keep you safe and will do its best to keep you in the familiar and protected regions of your present-day existence. Your ego is not very interested in intrigue, mystery, or danger, so the choice to act upon your gut feelings about what comes next will have to be much stronger than the quick-fix choices that keep you protected. Those quick-fix choices will keep you invisible and prevent you from being seen, heard, known, and remembered.
This vision often feels hidden and obscured to you, but if you could really touch and awaken it, this could be the true voice of your pine nature calling you forward.
Imagine having the insight and inner resources to be listening to your eternal self, not the ego self that is always fearful and never challenging you. Imagine quieting the small voice inside that tries to keep you small and protected; instead, feel yourself listening to the voice of your heart that says, “Yes, this is what I want! This is the way! Go here!” even if it might seem scary or dangerous or wrong.
What could happen if you were to take action on the opportunities that are right in front of you? It might cost you an investment in time, money: indeed, sometimes more money than you ever imagined spending. But it could lead you closer to your goal. And the reward would come back to you one hundredfold.
So, if the opportunity eludes you or, worse still, doesn’t present itself as an opportunity at all, what happens? You stay just where you are with all of your ideas and imagination faltering because you don’t have a means of expression. Dreams dashed, the picture fading.
It is said that when you say yes to your dreams and desires, really say yes to them, the Universe will conspire to bring you exactly what you have asked for because you have made the decision to say yes. If you waver on that decision, the energy of the activation dissipates, effectively saying you actually don’t want what you are saying you want. It is saying no to the possibility. Then the desired object acts like a wavering target that cannot be found and therefore cannot present the appropriate resources to you to fulfill your intention.
The very first thing you must do is to connect with what you most desire and choose it, no matter what. It is not for you to know how things are going to unfold, only that you place your attention and your intention where they can take root.
You soul is whispering to you to grow. You will inevitably be faced with all of your resistance anyway so just allow yourself to expect road-blocks. The creative mind looks at these blocks as creative problems to solve. Do you need more support? Do you need a personal assistant or a technical wizard to help you? Do you need more structure, a container to bring the idea to fruition? Do you need a business coach or personal empowerment coach to help you keep your mindset in a high state of vibration? Then get one.
Don’t listen to that other voice that tells you that you cannot afford the things you need right now. Hire these people. When you do you are saying out loud that you are serious about your dream, you are a professional. You are also saying to the Universe that you know you can’t be a one-woman show and try to do it all yourself, that you live in community of like-minded people who bring each other forward. You will find the people to help you if you ask. You will find the money to pay for them because their job is to help you bring your vision forward.
The cost of not doing this is much greater than the reward for making the decision to receive help. It is not about “I can’t afford it.” If you go to the rational part of your thinking mind too often, you choke off the parts of your vision that require assistance to flow properly.
You give of yourself, your gifts, and your light, and the money eventually comes back to you in the form of clients and revenue. You go out and ask for the business, and money is the return. You get yourself seen, and the people who are meant to work with you will be excited to be in your presence; they know that you are the one who can help them solve their problems. If you are too scared to put yourself in the limelight because you don’t feel quite ready, they will not know you are available. It is that simple. You have no choice. You have to get over yourself! You have to start dancing in the flow.
What if you were a life coach and you really wanted more clients to work with but you didn’t have your own coach because you didn’t believe you had the money to spend on that level of support for your business?
Or what if you were a massage therapist or nutritionist who has not received a session of your own for so long you are forgetting your craft? When you step out in faith and do what you love everything starts to fall in line for you. However, if you hold back and don’t give yourself the same caring treatment you are offering others, this too will be noticed on some level, and your alignment will be somewhat off.
The other downside of this approach is that you will inevitably attract people who themselves have issues with money or what I call a “lack” mentality. People who will expect a lot for a little, try to take advantage of your time and resources, or think they can receive your services free of charge.
The congruence in your energy is connected to your integrity. It is grounded in your trust and faith in the flow of life, which includes the flow of abundant resources that we all get to enjoy. As you understand this principle, you will have much more courage to trust that the invisible connections of nature and the Universe are connected to you.
This is an energy-management concept. So, if you are having trouble attracting the people you want to work with, you might first look into this area and see if you can change your attitude and trust that things will work out for you if you put yourself forward.
However, if you know your value and you are willing to invest highly in your learning and healing, you will attract high-level, high-paying clients who are happy to receive from you, refer you to their friends, and use the wisdom you give to create abundance in their lives.
Another way “lack” mentality shows up in your life is in living small. Because you have the attitude that you “don’t have the money” to pay for what you need, you attempt to try to do everything yourself and get easily overwhelmed and confused. Then, the ability to show a clear and consistent brand and presence is obscured, and you won’t have the success you envision for yourself.
You get easily discouraged, and you may start to lose faith in your work. You might feel like a failure and be on the edge of giving up. Your inner guidance will always lead you away from that kind of thinking, but you don’t listen. Your mind says you cannot pay for support but your guidance is whispering to take the leap of faith to get to the next level.
It is so close, yet you are afraid to jump and break through. So what voice are you listening to? Listening to your inner guidance has to do with generating a higher vibrational output. Let me explain. Everything in life holds an energetic vibration. Think of how a telephone rings or a cell phone vibrates when someone is calling. The vibration has an amplitude or frequency rate. When your heart beats quickly it has a high frequency of movement. Energy vibrates also. Light is a high vibration, sound a lower one. When you can adjust your energy frequency, you can hold more light, and this is a good thing.
Begin to notice how you feel physically when you are depressed, angry or resentful, and when you are feeling happy. Joy and ecstasy hold high frequency, and upsetting thoughts hold a lower frequency. Your thoughts actually affect your biology. This is why healing modalities such as Energy Work and Reiki have proven success records. You can actually change your frequency by changing your thoughts, thereby bringing more freedom and ease into your life. The challenge is to keep listening for your inner guidance and clearing the dense and heavy energies as they inevitably come up in the form of reactive resistance and self-sabotage. You are teaching yourself to activate a higher level of energy that supports a new level of self-approval and enthusiasm.
There are blocks to abundance that take the form of guilt and shame, of feelings of loss, beliefs transferred from parents and guardians and within the culture itself that keep us from living and behaving in more expansive ways. My observation and experience is that life will constantly bring up negative emotions for us to clear. This is how the mind works; it gets locked into your history and keeps recreating and embellishing thoughts and stories to support loss. The soul’s journey is all about giving you experiences in order to clear past attitudes and beliefs so you can evolve and experience a larger and fuller expression of life.
The goal, of course, is full mastery of all that you do. Why should other people become masterful and you remain a servant to your fears? If you continue a course of lack and scarcity and not believing in yourself, you will not have the momentum necessary to get out and share your gifts. Why not live to the fullest possible expression of your potential? As you meet your pain and suffering consciously and head-on, you have an opportunity to shift your consciousness to that full expression.
It feels like freedom, beauty, and pleasure. It looks like harmony, music, and dance. It is you in flow and in full playful expression, a manifestation of your bigger, wiser self. Its vibration is so full of light that you radiate. People see you as a beacon of positive energy and feminine presence, and they are drawn to you. You become magnetic! People are filled by your energy, and you are setting an example for them to become magnetic themselves.
As you step into your mastery, you begin to see many old ways of being to fall away. People who kept you down disappear from your life. Opportunities and synchronicities that never before came your way suddenly appear, and you see your influence grow. You are living in a higher vibratory field, and what you want is easily available to you because your attention is moving in a more defined and refined way.
You let go of your frustration, confusion, and that which overwhelms you and welcome more simplicity and ease into your life. You are, in fact, dancing with the natural forces of nature and the Universe to assist you in becoming what you want to be. You will release the old, worn out patterns that no longer serve you but were just what you inherited from family and society. Why not make a concerted effort to change all that? You will have so much more available to you. You will be listening to your own drummer, leaning toward the whisperings of your own soul.
Interview
Tell us a bit about your success journey, as it relates to your area of expertise:
- What is your book (or podcast) about?
My book teaches a simple way to connect more deeply with your own inner knowing so that whatever business you are marketing has a connection to meaning and soul. I spend a lot of time speaking about energetic alignment, first with yourself, and then with your ideal client, so that as you create your marketing plan, you are very sure that you are reaching the people you are most able to help, and you are also being very true to your own soul’s calling. Everyone is so different, and unique, but when we start businesses, we are usually trying to fit into someone else’s ideas for how to be successful. My approach is to be very connected to your own soul’s longing first, and lead with that.
- How did you come to write your book?
I was inspired by a talk that a marketing coach gave about the value of writing a book so that you have something tangible to share about your point of view. You can then use it as a jumping board for speaking and offering your coaching. But a book is a very special thing in itself. It is a way to share your truth with your reader, with the hope that they will connect with your message and change their lives accordingly. I am a transformation coach, which to me means, that I am in the business of changing one’s life for more joy, happiness, abundance, and freedom. This opens a great deal of potential for your reader.
- Who is your ideal reader?
My ideal reader is probably someone who has already done a lot of personal development work, has a spiritual approach to life, and is wanting to go deeper, either personally or professionally. She has a lot of self-awareness already, and is open to taking bigger risks to become known in her chosen field. She has a home life, and most likely is married, or at least has children she is caring for. She is also in business for herself, or wants to be. She has connected with a burning desire to do her “dharma”, in other words, to be the vessel for the pine that is truly hers and that only she can do, which fills her with joy and meaning.
- Tell me about your unique approach to building a business, according to this book.
I have 5 Keys to coming into alignment and embodying your soul-connected business. They are all energetic approaches to organization and productivity, which then lead to being more confident and ready to make yourself more visible through public speaking or video, or networking. They all lead to feeling more comfortable, poised, and engaged with your audience and with your messae. They inspire you and encourage you to go out and ask for opportunities to share your work.
The first is to “begin where you are” and take stock of how you came to be where you are now. It is a form of pausing in your life and becoming aware of what decisions and circumstances brought you to the present. In this way you can ask the most important question of all and that is “who am I, what am I doing?” with no excuses or identification or projection. This is actually a very challenging thing to do because we are imprinted from early childhood to comply to others’ stories about life, in order to fit in and feel safe. Just be in the present moment, and ask yourself what you really, really want in your life. It is always very personal at first. You have to take full responsibility for where you are now, to get to the next place. It is not as difficult as people make it, because what we are really dealing with is all of the fear that comes up when you are about to make a breakthrough and choose a bigger and more visible presence in the world.
The second energy principle is what I call “radical self-care”. We usually feel guilty in taking time for ourselves. Especially women, when there are a lot of responsibilities to carry, and we are taught to think of others instead of ourselves. There are so many negative voices that sabotage our forward motion in creating more leadership, and our ideas of leadership tend to be modeled after male models, because that is all we know. All of this has to be addressed. There will be quite a lot of old baggage to release and clear, and hopefully a new and healthier paradigm in which to move. I call this the feminine leadership path, and it is quite different from the old model of working. It is actually a healing process that brings you back into yourself first, very grounded and solid, with good boundaries. But of course this also requires that you listen to your own voice, and start to strengthen that voice.
The third principle, is learning and using simple energy practices every day that help you increase your frequency and be the person who can hold the energy for others and be seen as a leader. This also requires you to greet those “gremlins” of self sabotage, distraction, confusion and overwhelm. I talk a great deal about all of this in my book.
I have 5 Key Energy Practices in all, and then the book starts to focus on how to be a powerful and enigmatic public speaker. It is well known that the very best way to build a business it to be more prominent in the public eye, and I help women feel more and more secure in themselves to do just that.
- With all the information you’ve shared with us today, what are the top 3 tips you can offer our listeners that will allow them to take action on what they’ve learned?
The number one thing to focus on when deepening your sense of self and value in the world, is to let those niggling feelings and inspired visions that you carry with you all of the time take a more prominent role in your life. We all have a desire, a passion that may not be clear quite yet, but is there just the same. This is your soul whispering to you to grow, and it will also give you a direction in which to move to begin a new course for your life. We usually push down those thoughts and feelings, and get way-layed on our path because of it; as Henry David Thoreau has said so eloquently: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” Don’t let that happen to you. Don’t watch your soul wither on the vine.
My second tip is to start to take some inspired action on those visions. It doesn’t have to be massive, but it does need to be something, ideally something every day. You can always notice how you are feeling about the discomfort and give yourself encouragement, but do it anyway. We live in a field of great possibility, and it is often our own minds that short-circuit and cause us the biggest obstacles. It is as though we don’t have a large enough container to hold the vision, so we pretend it is not important. No. Get the vision out there in the world, even if it is just one step at a time. Later you will have created enough momentum to give it life outside of you. This is the very same activity one must go through in writing a book. At first you have just a little spark that is taking form, and as you go along, that spark grows into an ember and then a fully manifested reality. It is the creative process living inside of you and finding the right expression.
The third tip I will share is to get some help. Don’t try to be a one person show and do everything on your own. A business owner needs to know when they can’t do something, or don’t want to put in the time to learn how, so knows how to allocate resources at the appropriate time so that the momentum for the project is not lost. I have listened to my own intuition about this many times, and even though my ego said I didn’t need the help, I found over and over again that when I looked clearly, there was a time to go outside of my comfort zone and spend the money to get the help I needed. For me, getting a good editor for my book was necessary, and although I did not at first think I would need the extra expense, she was worth every penny I spent! I can think of countless times I had to cross this hurdle, and every time I was rewarded with a new opening, a new opportunity, or more success. And besides, the community is worth so much as well.
- What is the best way for our listeners to reach you?
I can be reached at www.soulconnectioncoaching.com/bookresources. On this page you will get the opportunity to listen to the Audios I have prepared for my readers from the chapters of the book.. You can also get a link there to buy my book Step Up and SHINE: Power and Presence in Action at a 20% discount! I hope you will think of a friend that could benefit from this material…
Diane Young Sussman, Author of Step Up and SHINE: Power and Presence in Action, available through Amazon.com
Connect with Diane
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Please go to my website www.bodymindbalance.net to get tips on how to move with less tension and more ease, and go to www.soulbrightcoaching.com to receive a FREE Audio on Stepping Into Your Brilliance!