09. From Burnt-Out High Achievers to Spiritual High Performers, Embodying the Spiritual CEO

In this episode of 'Reality Shapers,' Michael Edwards dives deep into the intertwining experiences of the burnt-out high achiever and the struggling spiritual entrepreneur. By defining these two archetypes, Michael reveals the tension necessary for true balance and how awareness and inner work can help individuals break free from their loops. Through his exploration of spiritual and practical energy alignment, Michael leads us toward becoming the spiritual high-performance CEO, integrating the masculine doing and the feminine being for unparalleled success and fulfillment. Key insights include the significance of energetic blocks, balanced tension, and the interconnectedness of all aspects of life.

00:00 Introduction to Burnt-Out High Achievers and Struggling Spiritual Entrepreneurs

00:32 Welcome to Reality Shapers Podcast

02:11 Understanding the Burnt-Out High Achiever

05:28 Case Study: The Executive Team Leader

09:13 The Importance of Self-Relationship in Achieving Goals

17:44 The Struggling Spiritual Entrepreneur

26:21 The Trap of Validating Beliefs

27:36 The Loop of Consciousness

28:18 Justification Stories and Blocks

29:38 The Subconscious and Baby Logic

32:15 The Density of Consciousness

33:54 Seeing Ourselves Fully

39:29 The Spiritual High Performer

41:11 Mastering Energy and Balance

43:04 The Fascial System and Counter Technique

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

The burnt-out high achiever because they're so focused on what they're doing. They obsess over what they're doing and not doing, which is only one side of the equation. That's not what creates balance. Balance is created through tension Versus the struggling spiritual entrepreneur. They're so focused on ease, they're trying to ease their way out of everything. They're trying to let go of this and let go of that and surrender to this and surrender to that, and they're so focused on ease that they're again not getting that tension. We need tension between two forces in order to have balance.

Speaker 1: 0:32

Welcome to Reality Shapers, welcome home Reality Shapers, the podcast. That's all about mastering your energy and becoming the shaper of your reality. Today, I'm talking to you about some of my favorite things. I'm talking to you about the different archetypes that I see and how we can kind of move from these incomplete versions and archetypes into being the spiritual CEO or the spiritual high performer. So I'm going to be breaking down what I call the burnt out high achiever and the struggling spiritual entrepreneur, which are two archetypes that I find. I'm going to be breaking down what I call the burnt out high achiever and the struggling spiritual entrepreneur, which are two archetypes that I find I'm finding more and more that I'm working with in my business and as clients. There are very, very specific telltale signs of these people. I've really lately been finding a lot of value and I've been getting the feedback in things that I've been running from the amount of value that people get when I kind of put things into these archetypes and allow people to self-identify, because we immediately go oh, that's me. And the ultimate goal of this conversation is that you can self-identify what aspects might be showing up in your life and also how you can shift out of it. Because, as I'm often talking about without awareness, we are kind of doomed to repeat things at the same level of density that we're operating at. So we might feel like we're seeking answers, we might feel like we're seeking out solutions, but we very often just keep going around in this invisible loop and I'm going to help you see some of the evidence that you're on this loop so you can break out of that loop today.

Speaker 1: 2:10

So I think first we'll start with the burnt out high achiever, and this is the person who really, you know, has been high achieving, goal oriented, their whole life. They've often done a lot of really, really incredible things. They've often got an incredible amount of success. They've got some money and wealth to show for what they've done, they've got huge accolades, they've got just incredible chapters of their life and things that they've risen through and created, and they very often don't feel any of those things in the moment. In the moment, they often feel burnt out, they feel unfulfilled. They might feel like a lack of having achieved anything, even though, consciously, if you point out to them and have them look backwards at all of their achievements, they will look back and be like oh yeah, I did do all of these things and this person often has.

Speaker 1: 3:17

They're missing the spiritual component, and if you know about energetics, you would know that I'm talking about the feminine as well here. So they're missing the spiritual component and to me, the foundation of spirituality is this awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. So that means the interconnectedness of ourselves, the interconnectedness of us and all of the things around us. It's this awareness of interconnectedness, and so the opposite of that is separation, and so this person is living in separation, which often looks like compartmentalizing a lot of different parts of their lives, which is why they are stuck, are stuck. Compartmentalization is why this person is stuck.

Speaker 1: 4:07

Okay, so when I meet this person, they're very often because they're so goal-oriented and mission-oriented, they're very often working on creating the next wave of success in their life, but they're using the same tools that they've used in the past so hard work, grinding, like you know, pedal to the metal, like, get into this season of of whatever, and they're pushing, pushing, pushing, grinding, grinding, grinding, trying to get to that next season, using the same tools that got them to where they are. And this is the very reason that they're spinning the wheels like I literally feel, like this person often feels to me like a Jeep in the mud, like the gas pedal is on full, the wheels are spinning their full acceleration, but they're not going anywhere. And this is where this like mental feeling like you're on a hamster, on a wheel, feeling like you're stuck in the rat race. Where all of this comes from is because we are one whole one being and we can only get so far, while we're just pouring our energy into one area of our life. And then it becomes I link it to universal laws and it becomes more about what you're a match for and you can't become a match for the next thing while you're still compartmentalizing certain areas of your life.

Speaker 1: 5:28

So I she had done incredible things, she had an incredible position, she had incredible success in her life and she had really struggled with some self-image stuff and she also struggled a little bit with interpersonal relationships at work and she also was kind of in a relationship that was not so great. And I remember she said this thing to me in the beginning about when we were kind of going through and you know, fleshing out the working together agreement for our coaching contract we because I was calling myself a coach back then she said this thing to me which was I just really want to focus on the personal stuff and I'm not really worried about work. Like, work is good and later, if we have time for that, then maybe we can work on that a little bit at the end, kind of thing. And I remember just laughing to myself about what a funny idea that was at those things being separate. But I never said anything to her about that because you know I knew that that wouldn't be, that she wasn't ready to receive that yet.

Speaker 1: 6:58

And as we did this work, you know we did hypnotherapy, we did unconscious work, we did self-esteem work and I watched her really blossom. She blossomed in so many ways. It was so beautiful and so incredible. And I remember later in the journey when she's all these because there's always a ripple effect, right Like that's the beautiful thing about when we really truly do this inner work is there's a ripple effect to all these different aspects of our lives. And you know, one of the things that happened is that she ended up becoming more of a leader in the workplace and all of her work relationships got better. And she did end up asking me later on, you know, okay, well, everything's good in my life. Now I'm having this trouble with you know, this guy from accounting, can you talk me through dealing with that? And I was like, absolutely, and this relationship, that wasn't good.

Speaker 1: 7:51

I could see in the beginning that she probably needed to leave that to become the person she wanted to be, but I never said that, I never influenced that, I never told her that. I just guided her into this more full expression of who she really was, back into her authentic, strong personal power. And she ended up, I remember she said this thing to me was like this guy is so needy, like, oh, really, what a surprise. And then we had this conversation about how she was a match for that in the beginning and why that made sense. But when she shifted, when she grew out of that, she suddenly felt all the contrast of like, oh this, this isn't actually, this isn't actually for me, and I don't even know why I needed this, this is a drain on my energy. And I remember her laughing with me about how kind of silly it was this idea that she had had of, you know, the personal and the professional being separate. I remember in her exit interview she said this thing. She laughed, she literally laughed, and she was like remember when I said, you know, that I wanted to work on the personal, as if the personal and the professional were separate, and we laughed about that. But I never told her that. I never told her that in that whole journey she just realized as we worked on all this stuff she had been avoiding, and then her whole world started to improve.

Speaker 1: 9:13

And so our ability to show up in relationships, which is a reflection of our relationship with ourselves, has a huge impact on our ability to achieve our goals, has a huge impact on our ability to create the things that we want to create in life. And we're only a match for a certain kind of person as long as we're compartmentalizing and I see this person all the time who looks great on the surface. Very often I hate to say this, but I'm just going to say it like it is Very often this person is faking it to some degree, and what I mean by that is you know they're showing up on social media or you know, at least socially. On the surface it looks like they have a perfect life, but behind the scenes there's all of this stress in their marriage or in their relationships. There's these interpersonal problems that they're consistently having, and they may not recognize that they are the key ingredient, they are the common denominator of all of these interpersonal things that keep happening in their lives and they think that they can just sort of ignore all of that. Or we have justification stories, right? So they often also have a lot of justification stories about why that keeps happening, about how other people are unreliable, or it's so hard to meet good people, or you can't find good help, or whatever. They've justified the reason that they can't keep having these problems with people, but they're so success-focused and they're like I'm not going to deal with that, I'm not ready to unpack that, and that is the limiter on success. It doesn't matter how hard you work, it doesn't matter how hard you grind, it doesn't matter how many different strategies you adopt. You are capping your growth at a certain point when you're not improving your relationship with yourself and when you're not improving your relationships as a whole, because who you're being is what creates the energetic match cannot match with that next level person as long as you have this deep, deep avoidance still going on inside of you.

Speaker 1: 11:07

And I have another kind of friend and colleague who is incredibly successful, has built multiple multi-million dollar businesses, and we used to have these conversations about team and about people and she would say these things to me about oh, it's really hard to find good people and good help and I'm constantly let down by people and it's so frustrating. And I was like, oh yeah, people are such a problem. And I had kind of started to suspect after observing her for a while that maybe she had a role in this. And of course the thing is we always have a role in this. But I ended up doing some work for her and I remember the communication was not great and then she got mad at me about something and she treated me like an absolute piece of garbage, like I was shocked shocked to the core by this behavior and I immediately knew. Well, first of all, I was like I will never work with you again and second of all, I immediately knew this is why you're capped in your growth, because this is how you're handling conflict in relationships, and so the kind of person that you can call in is so limited, because anybody that has a certain level of self-respect will not take that kind of behavior. And this is kind of an extreme example. But these are the kind of blind spots that we might have.

Speaker 1: 12:33

And also, I want to mention too, a trap that we can fall into here is I talk about this a lot in my work is we often trade what I would call the reactive nature of something for the repressive nature, and so I'll give you the example of anger and reactivity. So a lot of people will maybe recognize this kind of behavioral pattern and go, oh, I'm lashing out at people, I'm showing up and behaving in this way. That is not great. Maybe the HR department gets involved in a workplace, and so we go to these communication classes, let's say, and we learn to breathe through our anger and we learn to not react, but we don't learn to respond. And because the problem air quotes is anger, the solution becomes not anger, and so this person becomes fixated on just not getting angry right. And so what happens is that they see that as the end goal, and so they might do all this leadership stuff and learn all these communication skills with the end goal of not getting angry.

Speaker 1: 13:37

Well, very often, when that happens, what happens is this person goes from being reactive and angry to being a people pleaser, and they become a people pleaser because the only way that they know how to not get angry now is to suppress their anger, is to breathe through it and to not fully voice their need or whatever the communication is. So they've traded the reactive nature for the repressive nature, and I particularly see in this archetype the burnt out high achiever that they do this in so many areas of their lives and they're so focused on the work, on the doing, that they create this illusion in their mind that they're moving forward and that they're growing, when they're actually just have all of these different things. Might be with relationships, might be with money, might be with their health, might be with all kinds of different things about how they show up, how they manage their time, where they're just flipping these switches back and forth between the reactive nature and the repressive nature and they're convincing themselves that that's growth. But it's not. It's just flipping all of these things. It makes me think of epigenetics, right? Genes. That are these keys that get flipped on and off. They're just flipping these things back and forth between reactive and repressive, reactive-repressive and they don't understand where they're not actually moving forward.

Speaker 1: 14:59

And this is where bringing in more of that spiritual component, the understanding of the interconnectedness of all things, the understanding of my personal energy field and how it influences how I show up in the world and how the world responds to me, is everything. Because once we understand that, we can start to move into the higher expression. And so in this example, with communication and anger and people-pleasing, the higher expression is communication, is powerful, succinct communication, is learning to express myself more clearly, which very often has a lot to do with understanding which core wounds that we carry, because our core wounds are going to influence the way that we communicate. So I just broke all of this down in a masterclass called the Miracle Mile. If you haven't watched it yet, you can check the link below and register for my free live events and you will get sent the free replay. I break down how our attachment styles influence our communication and how they influence our self-sabotage as we're going after our goals and as we're going after what we're creating. So if you're interested in getting that, send me a message or check out the link in my bio, the link below this video, and you can register for my free masterclasses and you will get sent a copy of that.

Speaker 1: 16:25

So looking at the burnt out high achiever as a whole, hopefully you can start to understand that this person is often not solving their problem because they're seeking from this place of doing. They're seeking from this place of pushing. They're seeking everything in the masculine, in the outer world, and the problems that they have are in the inner. They need to learn to be a higher frequency expression of themselves, to change their energy field, to literally understand where the blocks are in their energy system which are going to show up as unconscious and subconscious beliefs and programs that are sabotaging their success, and release that so they can move into a higher expression of themselves. And so some of the I kind of talked about justification lies already, but some of the beliefs this person will have, that will be sabotaging them, are a belief that it's a time management thing or that it's other people, or that they just have to push harder. And that's because these are their tools from the past and this is not going to help them move into the next version of their success. They really have to understand some of these more feminine tools, and I mean feminine in the energetic sense, in the who they're being.

Speaker 1: 17:44

The next archetype I see a lot of is what I would call the struggling spiritual entrepreneur, and this is kind of like the yin to the yang of the last person. This is kind of the opposite. They have the opposite piece of the puzzle, but they're missing these same kind of pieces, and so they relate everything to their inner world. They're all about their energy, they're all about their thoughts, they're all about who they're being. But somewhere along the way, probably without realizing to the degree which they've done this, they've demonized the masculine, they've demonized doing. And this happens so much in the spiritual community where there's like this I call it this immature oppositional force between doing and being and there's this belief that doing is bad. I hear this story all the time.

Speaker 1: 18:33

This person very often has a story where sometimes they used to be the burnt-out high achiever and now this is the pendulum swing into the other side, right, where they used to have this high-achieving corporate sales job. They used to be all about the achievements and then they found spirituality and then they found themselves and then they found the power of being and they're all about being and feminine flow and lean back and goddess energy and they understand to a degree the universal laws, but they don't understand the degree into which they fit into this kind of more holistic whole view of how we need to show up. And so very often they have this understanding that they want to be in the being. It is about the experience that fulfillment doesn't come from achievement, that it comes from this experience of who you are. But then they're caught in this kind of weird game where but they do still have desires.

Speaker 1: 19:37

Okay, reaching our potential and becoming the full expression of who we are and who we came here to be, it makes us happy. It's literally what we're here to do is to become fully self-expressed in this lifetime. That's what self-actualization is, the final step on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And so when we over-prioritize the being and we have this kind of wounded relationship with the masculine and the doing. We constantly move away from that, we constantly avoid that and we miss the very things that are meant to support us. And so masculine and feminine energy is, quite literally, the masculine structure holds the feminine flow and being.

Speaker 1: 20:23

I recently had a conversation with one of my very dear friends who's one of Bob Proctor's protégés, and she was talking about the reason she thinks that a lot of spiritual entrepreneurs aren't making the money that they want is because they lack those masculine structures. That they want is because they lack those masculine structures. And so very often we demonize the thing that's wounded us in the past, without the recognition of how to bring that into harmony. It's about the harmonized relationship with the masculine. It's about the harmonized relationship with doing. And if we look at this from an energy perspective which I look at everything from an energy perspective literally, the way at everything from an energy perspective, literally the way our chakra system operates, is that we bring down energy from the divine through our crown chakra, through our chakra system, and then into the earth grid through our root. We're literally meant to pull energy down through our system into the earth grid and it moves into the earth grid through how we show up in relationships, how we interact with people, how we interact with situations and what we do.

Speaker 1: 21:32

So if there's no doing, if we remove that last piece, then it doesn't matter how beautiful and how divine all the energy that you're channeling and pulling down is, it's just all of this unrealized potential, and that's where a lot of people get into this state of frustration and then they feel unrealized. And now it's a new kind of unfulfillment. It's not the unfulfillment of I'm so busy that I'm burning myself out. It's the unfulfillment of what I see. The potentiality that I'm connected to within me isn't being expressed, and it's because, again, in our energy field, there's a literal energy block which is going to manifest as unconscious and subconscious beliefs that are going to direct us away from doing the very things that we need to do and being who we need to be in order to take that vision, that expression of who we are and what we're pulling from the field into physical reality and making it happen. You've got to make it happen, and the beauty is when you understand this and you move into this from a place of maturity.

Speaker 1: 22:34

What starts to happen is one we realize that we have to make peace with the masculine within us. We have to become that own support for ourselves. But then and this is part of becoming the spiritual CEO is that we actually get to bring in those supports from other people. We get to bring in those supports from experts and from team and from all these things, and so it's not that we have to live in this state of doing, but we have to value it, because if we don't value it, how can we value someone that's going to do that for us? If we don't value it, how are we going to value someone that's going to bring those services and bring those supports into our life? And because of that lack of perceived value, the money doesn't flow the way that it's meant to, and then it just gets stuck in our field.

Speaker 1: 23:23

There's all these things stuck, and so this person that's maybe had the intention of moving from being the burnt out high achiever to being the successful I call it the spiritual high performer has actually just become the struggling spiritual entrepreneur, and they've just switched the blocks right. So if we think about it energetically in terms of chakra as the burnt out high achiever, all their blocks are up here right, they've got like heart, throat, third eye, crown chakra block, block, block, block, block different ways. I mean there's a million different ways that this can manifest in someone and that's why so much of my work is about teasing this out and helping people get unblocked and back on mission and living authentically and in alignment. And then, you know, in the struggling spiritual entrepreneur it's all these lower blocks, right, it's like identity, sacral, and sacral is such a huge one. I cannot tell you how often with this person it comes to something to do with sacral, with creativity, with where they're putting their life force, energy and then, of course, the root chakra safety, security, action, support, the way that we're showing up in the material world.

Speaker 1: 24:29

And this person often has misguided, although well-intended, spiritual beliefs and beliefs about manifestation and the law of attraction and they have kind of an immature, I would say, understanding of the universal laws where they might have a belief that what they put out comes back tenfold and so maybe they're tipping 25% when they actually don't have the ability to recoup or regenerate that revenue in their business. They might have the belief that they just have to give and give and give and give and it's going to come back somehow through the field, magically. Now, the law of reciprocity is very real, and so we do want to be giving, we do want to be philanthropic. Those are some of the key features of the spiritual CEO, but what's key, the key difference, is that that person deeply values their worth, they deeply value their services and they deeply value what it is that they bring into the world. And so while they're giving giving, giving they're also receiving, receiving, receiving because they see themselves in their worth and they have these structures the masculine structures in place for that money to come in. Money pathways are open, the business is online.

Speaker 1: 25:49

I'm going to say brainwashed, because that's just how I feel this person might have been brainwashed to believe that they need to just invest, invest, invest in mentorship, and that if they spend their last dollar, they just need to find the right mentor, go all in, and they're only all in if they spend their last dollar and risk it all, and that's the only way to become successful. And this person might have be in a pattern of investing, thinking that things are going to come back because people are kind of selling them. It's not even that people are selling them. This is something very interesting that I learned from one of my mentors is that people will pay more, or are more likely to pay, to have their beliefs validated than to pay the person that's actually going to bring the growth that they need, and I 100% can see at times in my life where I've fallen into this trap.

Speaker 1: 26:43

It's like, well, I believe I want it to be this way, and what this person is saying it might not even be what that person's saying, it's just what I perceive that they're saying, based on who I am at that moment. So I might believe that I can pay this person and learn from them and create this success this way, while avoiding this thing, this wounded relationship that I have with the masculine. So let me go here, only to be disappointed later and maybe even to blame that person, without realizing this was actually me, from quite a low state of consciousness and a low state of awareness, looking to be saved. I was actually in this kind of victim paradigm and I was looking to have my beliefs reinforced to get around this thing that I'm trying to basically move around the block in my energy field instead of clearing it, and so I just, no matter what I do, again I end up in the same place, and so I hope you can see both these archetypes, how they get stuck on this loop.

Speaker 1: 27:42

How they get stuck on this loop where they're trying to do the things that they know to do but they're not actually moving forward in their life. And it's because everything that they're doing is on this same density of consciousness, right, and so I would say the burnt out high achiever because they're less aware of this stuff. They're often trading the reactive nature and the repressive nature of things, the struggling spiritual entrepreneur. They have more awareness of that, so they're less likely to be doing, to be so easily trading reactive and repressive nature of things. But the two things that they're doing is that they are not. They're being run by their justification stories. They don't realize where they've taken on beliefs that are actually justifications of their wounds and of their blocks, and so now they think that they're expressing themselves more highly, but they're actually just navigating life in a way that moves energy around their blocks without actually clearing those blocks.

Speaker 1: 28:40

And if we don't clear those blocks, no matter how much we do, how much we try to do, how much we try to think positively or raise our frequency or take all this action or do all these things, we're not actually going to be able to get to the next expression of ourselves, which is going to be the version of us. That's going to be the match and that's going to co-create the level of success and all of the beautiful things that we desire in our lives. So do I have one more point here? Do I have one more point here? Oh yeah, and this person very often also has overly associated who they are with the result that they have. So they'll have this belief of like well, if I was a better person, I'd be more successful, if I was more in my power, I'd be more successful, if I was more positive or something, I would be more successful.

Speaker 1: 29:35

And you've got to be really careful about these kind of beliefs, because the subconscious loves what I like to call baby logic. And so baby logic is this very simple if this, then that logic and all of that baby logic gets read backwards, it's the mind. It's kind of like, I don't know, like an old VCR or something like it can be played both ways, and that's what the mind does. We consciously only play it in one direction, right, but our mind is playing it in both directions. So if we believe being a better person will make us more money, then the reverse of that belief is if we don't have more money, we must not be a good person. If we believe that being more in our power would make us more money, then if we don't have more money, that must mean that we're not in our power. That could go on for this forever. If we believe that people who are wealthy are bad, then it's like don't become wealthy because you don't want to be bad, and this again links to our core wounds and our subconscious and unconscious does all these dances which are really just a manifestation of what's going on in our energy field. But none of that is true. None of that is true, and you simply just have to look around the world. There are people that aren't good, people that are making lots of money, there are people that are all kinds of things. Whatever you believe, there's a person, there's many people that are the exception to that rule, and a lot of people my dog's trying to ruin my light A lot of people who have been in the spiritual world and have had a lot of spiritual mentorship have these beliefs that are not supportive, where they don't realize it, but because of what they've taken on, they've started to believe things that are not supportive, where they don't realize it.

Speaker 1: 31:20

But because of what they've taken on, they've started to believe things that are disempowering them and they've either been gaslit and are now gaslighting themselves to believe that it's because they're not more in their power, because they're not more this, because they're not more that it couldn't possibly be, because they haven't learned a proper marketing strategy, or because their mentor normalized this business wound and they took that on as truth in the teaching, when it was actually a huge justification lie. But anyways, I digress. And one of the reasons these people also don't progress is because they see each other. They're both operating at the same density of consciousness, and so remember what I said earlier we don't ascend because all the solutions that we look for are on the same density of consciousness that we're operating on. And so the struggling spiritual entrepreneur and the burnt-out high achiever they see each other because they exist on the same density. They exist on the same density as someone who is incomplete, as someone who has part of the puzzle and not all of it, and because it's easier to see things outside of ourselves than inside of ourselves. They see the flaws in the other person and they see that as the reason to not learn what the other person has learn what the other person has.

Speaker 1: 32:53

So what I mean by that is that the burnt out high achiever sees the struggling spiritual entrepreneur who's all about love and light and inner work but doesn't have the goals that they want and they go. Well, it can't be about love and light and all this inner work because that person's doing that and they don't have what I want. Not realizing that. They see that because it's a mirror of who they are. It's like an equal opposite. The same thing with the struggling spiritual entrepreneur and that's why the people get stuck here as well is because they see the burnt out high achiever and they go. Well, that person's just grinding, grinding, grinding. And now that I'm sensitive to energy, I can feel their energy and I can feel how off and dysregulated they are. And if that's what success is, I don't want success that way. And that's the bigger loop, that's the whole loop of this density of consciousness, that's the whole pendulum. And so, talking about repressive and reactive natures, these archetypes on the macro are repressive and reactive natures of being on this level of consciousness. I also want to mention that one of the reasons this happens is because we don't see ourselves, and it's so easy to not see ourselves and not see the fullness of who we are.

Speaker 1: 34:10

And I'm going to tell you a story about this. That really is where I really understood this. So when I was younger, sometime after I had graduated I can't remember, I was either 19 or in my early 20s my parents paid for this thing for me to have sorry, this thing's itching my eye my parents paid for me to have this basically like aptitude test through a university. It was, I think, like $350. And you know it was supposed to test like my intelligence and you know how likely I would be to be happy and fulfilled and successful in all these different careers. It was through the University of British Columbia, ubc. So it was quite a reputable thing and I didn't really put much stock into this. Honestly, my parents know this story but they don't know this part of it I've never shared.

Speaker 1: 35:04

But I went to this test completely sleep deprived I don't think I slept at all, maybe one or two hours completely hungover, completely wrecked. I remember getting, you know, a big Starbucks and just going to this test and being like I don't know what I got myself into and doing this very, very long test and just kind of having feeling like I had no idea. But you know, just doing it and leaving, and my mom back then really knew that she had to nag me to get me to go to things. Then, after you do the test, there's this appointment and you go back and you speak to this lady and kind of like a career counselor, kind of a vibe, but more high end, and I just assumed that it was going to be a bunch of negativity and like, oh, whatever, because I hated school and I avoided school whenever I could. And it's funny because I'd always been reflected in my family and by people that knew me how smart and inquisitive I was. But I just I did not enjoy school and do well a lot of the time in school, and so I just assumed that it was going to be kind of the same kind of lecture that I would get from school of like, oh you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you need to try harder and whatever.

Speaker 1: 36:20

And I got there and this lady was so lit up and she said I've been waiting for you to come in. I'm so excited to talk to you about this test you scored in the top 0.001 percentile of all people that we give this test to. And she basically went through and told me all this stuff and I remember she really emphasized she's like but you are wired for success, like you're, you know. I remember she kept saying methodical. You're so methodical about how you solved all of these problems, like very high intelligence, very this, very high, this, very high, that, very high, this, and you're probably going to be most fulfilled in these areas. But you're probably going to be very successful no matter what you do.

Speaker 1: 37:05

And she was so lit up about it and I didn't believe her. I didn't believe her. I didn't believe that that was true, even though I went on to have a lot of success in dance and a lot of things that I did. I really did not believe that until much, much later, when I was doing my RTT and my hypnotherapy training, I was getting this reflection of how skilled I was and how quickly I was picking up the work, and I can't remember how this came about. I know that I was researching a lot of Joe Dispenza and Bruce Lipton at the time, but for some reason I got into looking into geniuses and basically the cliff notes of what I learned is that people that are gifted or that are brilliant or really good at things, often, unless they're found, unless they're in the right place and someone finds them that really understands who and what they are, they end up having really low self-esteem, really low self-belief, because they don't sort of fit the average. And so in one way or another, there's a bunch of internalized beliefs about how we're not good, because when the bar was here or when the test was here, we couldn't do it. And I mean, I look back now.

Speaker 1: 38:22

People in my life always comment if they're ever watching me learn something, because a lot of the times I watch videos on double speed and people will be like, how can you understand that person? And I'll say, well, it's on double speed. And they'll be like, well, why? And I'm like well, because that's the speed that my brain works at and I feel like listening to people's talk in a tutorial at a regular speed. Just it's like watching paint dry, you know, and it's the reason that I've been able to learn all of these incredible skills in my life so quickly. But the important thing to understand is that I did not believe that for most of my life I didn't believe that I was smart. I didn't believe that I, you know, I just I didn't. I didn't see myself.

Speaker 1: 39:05

And so part of both of these archetypes the burnt out high achiever and the struggling spiritual entrepreneur part of their journey is to really deeply see themselves, and in really deeply seeing themselves, they can also see where they're going and who they can be Thank you, marita when they can be. So the spiritual high performer, as I like to call it, or the spiritual CEO, is this archetype. That's complete. They're really grounded in the practical. They understand how to execute on their visions and their ideas and they understand the feminine. They're great leaders. They're so great with people. They value their time and because they value their time, they value money as a resource and they really value leverage. So they value the ability to leverage what they have in really positive ways that are conscious and impactful for the planet.

Speaker 1: 40:20

Now, this person also has balance in their life, but they have balance in a very different way than the other two archetypes see. So the other two archetypes have this immature relationship with balance where they think that it's about how much we add or how much we take away. The burnt out high achiever always when I start with them have all these weird beliefs about time management and they'll be like well, I need to get back into this habit of doing half an hour in the morning, of time blocking. And if I time block every morning and spend all this time on productivity then I'll be more productive. But they don't, because the value of that half hour is the half hour and when we add time management systems that take a ton of time out of our day, it's not productive. I'm telling you, the really successful clients that I work with, they don't do things like that. Clients that I work with, they don't do things like that.

Speaker 1: 41:10

So, the spiritual high performer, they have balance through tension, not through adding and subtracting through tension. If you think about what balance is, balance is created through tension. If you think about I don't know why, this is the analogy that came to mind. But if you think about two teams pulling on a rope, doing like a tug of war with a rope, well, it doesn't move as long as they're both pulling equal tension right. Once one side pulls harder or has more members, they're able to pull the other team over into the mud. Same thing with scales. It's not just about what you add and subtract. It's about the tension between them being equal. That's what creates the balance.

Speaker 1: 41:56

So the burnt out high achiever because they're so focused on what they're doing, they obsess over what they're doing and not doing. They obsess over what they're doing and not doing and what they're adding or subtracting from their time management, which is only one side of the equation. That's not what creates balance. Balance is created through tension versus the struggling spiritual entrepreneur. They're so focused on ease, they're trying to ease their way out of everything. They're trying to let go of this and let go of that and surrender to this and surrender to that, and they're so focused on ease that they're again not getting that tension. We need tension between two forces in order to have balance, and so the analogy and story that I like to think of with this is when I was a choreographer and a dance teacher.

Speaker 1: 42:46

A lot of what I learned in my younger years was a lot about muscles. We used to learn about the hamstrings and how you had to engage them to stay on your legs, and how we had to do a million calf raises to get better at rises, and so you, you know you can have a higher, what's called a demi point, and it was this very muscle driven approach. And then, as I got older, I started to work with a lot of physiotherapists and I became more world-class at what I did. I got to work with a lot of world-class body workers and I learned all about the fascial system, which is all the tissue that holds the muscles, and this is our understanding of this. Basically, human understanding of this has really evolved in the last decade or two decades.

Speaker 1: 43:28

When we were young when I was young they used to think of the fascia as just this thing that you cut through to get to the muscle, and now we know it's one of the most important systems in our body. Our body is made of this series of fascial slings or fascial lines, and we're this network of basically intelligent systems. So something that happens in the heel will also affect your head, because through the superficial back line and the deep front line, our head is connected to our feet, and so that's why you can have, you know, like a fascial adhesion in your left calf and you'll feel it in your right suboccipital because it's moving. There's this constriction through your whole body, and so as I started to learn about fascia, I started to have this less muscular approach to teaching dance and to dance and it became more about understanding the fascia and flow and ease and less about like this clenching, and my dancers started to get longer and leaner and have more beautiful elongated lines, which is really what you want in dance, and these kind of overdeveloped muscles started to go away, which is really what you want in dance. And these kind of overdeveloped muscles started to go away.

Speaker 1: 44:40

And I eventually came across this dance technique method called counter technique, which was like the most genius expression of all of this put together. And so what counter technique was, to just very briefly explain, is this methodology where I would describe it as almost zero effort, and so, basically, what you would learn to do is to dance and to do all of these big, huge, sweeping movements and you would be able to move bigger than you'd ever moved before, but with almost no effort. So it would be all about how much can I, instead of, like, lifting my arm and using my shoulder, it would be how much can I lengthen this arm? Like, how much can I lengthen this arm, lengthen this arm, lengthen this arm to get this line. And I remember, because I was a little bit older when I started learning this. So my joints and just my body was not what it was when I was 18. It was incredible.

Speaker 1: 45:34

I suddenly, at 35, could jump higher than I was able to jump when I was 19. I suddenly was able to do things that I hadn't been able to do in years, and with one one-hundredth of the effort, because this technique was so intelligent. It was all about utilizing the mechanics of the body, utilizing the fascial lines, utilizing weight and direction of space direction of weight in space. So instead of using my muscles to push and run in that direction, I would start lifting my head and I would fall in that direction, which creates forward momentum, and then I would just allow my body to facilitate that, and then you would jump the same way. So you'd take this forward momentum you have, and then you'd redirect your weight through, like your spiral line in your shoulder, and now suddenly you'd be in a jump without having to do this big push off from your legs. And so it was kind of this almost like swinging utilization of movement and motion and the intelligence that exists within your body to do these incredible things.

Speaker 1: 46:38

And that's what understanding your energy is. That's what marrying the masculine and the feminine in this balance of tension is is it's the ability, without any blocks in your field that create constriction, to utilize your energy, to flow it into doing these huge things, bigger things than you ever did before when you were in either archetype. But because everything is being utilized in this network of intelligence that is ourselves, our bodies, our beings and the reality that we live in. That's literally how we shape our realities. We become the master of our energy field and with the utilization of where we direct that energy and how we calibrate it, we do bigger and bigger and bigger things with less and less effort. And that is what the spiritual high performer, the spiritual CEO, understands and has developed and is continuing to develop mastery in that these other two archetypes and many others don't understand. And so, first, in seeing the wholeness of who we are and in seeing the wholeness of the reality that we're living in, this gives us one of the biggest clues and one of the biggest steps to move into this version of ourselves.

Speaker 1: 47:58

And everybody has this, every single person. If you have the I'm defective core wound, you're telling yourself right now yeah, but that's not available to me. That's bullshit, that's just a core wound speaking. It's available to me. That's bullshit. That's just a core wound speaking. It's available to you. It is available to every single person. Every single person has the ability to realize this aspect of themselves within them and, no matter how good things are, they can get better. They can get better, they can be more easeful, they can be more enjoyable. You can have a better experience of life while having incredible success.

Speaker 1: 48:36

And activating this archetype, this higher expression of who you are, is a huge, huge, huge part of it, and this is really what my work and my world is all about, especially lux, my mastermind, lux, familia, familia, the home of the luminary. It's literally for this person that's becoming the spiritual high performer that wants to master their energy field, that wants to master their personal energy, their understanding of universal laws and the network of intelligence that runs through us and our beings and through the universe, to be so intentional about how they operate and where they direct their energy, to do bigger things than they've ever done before. This is what Lux is all about, and right now I'm inviting in new members. So if this appeals to you, I invite you to fill out an application or, if calls are available, to book a call and come and speak to me about if you're a good fit for this.

Speaker 1: 49:42

I am very particular about who comes into this space, because we have to be in this space of growth and expansion and forward momentum.

Speaker 1: 49:49

It cannot be for someone who feels like they're really stuck.

Speaker 1: 49:53

If you feel like you're stuck, the essence has everything that you need in it to get unstuck and to get back in your magic, should you be the person that chooses to utilize what's there. But for those of you that want to go all the way, for those of you that want to become the spiritual high performer, that want to self-actualize, that want to become the most amazing you in this lifetime, that want to remove everything from your energy field, from your unconscious, from your subconscious, that's blocking you from becoming the highest expression of who you are and having a life that is filled with success and fulfillment and just a dance of all the magic and possibilities of what life can be, then I invite you to. This might be your time to become a member of Lux and come home to this beautiful community of spiritual high performers. So thank you so much for joining me today for this beautiful talk. Thank you for joining me today. My name is Michael Edwards. I'm sending you so much love and bye for now.