I was talking with my coach about feeling the need to change how I operate business in certain aspects. She asked me a simple question, why? In this episode, I interview you on your square pegs - areas where you are forcing and not flowing.
Welcome back to Inner Warmup where your inner work begins. My name is Taylor Elyse Morrison. I'm the founder of Inner Workout and you as always are our expert guest. Thank you so much for being here. Let's kick things off with our grounding, our centering activity. What I want you to do is pretty simple, is ball your hands into fists, squeeze as tight as you possibly can. You might have some organic movement happening, I find that like, my arms, extend and stretch a little bit. Hold it for three...two...one and release. Let those fingers extend, feel that energy coursing through your hands maybe into the tips of your fingers. I really like doing that, there's something about like holding on so tightly and letting go, that I feel even a shift sometimes at the energetic level, which is perfect, because that's what we're talking about this month, is our energetic dimension. And the question that's on the table today for our interview is what's your square peg?
You might be wondering, okay, cool, interesting question, but tell me what the square peg piece is? So another way of thinking of like, what feels out of place or where are you forcing it? To bring a Mean Girls reference in, where are you trying to make fetch happen? And these square pegs, these places where you are just like ramming your head against the wall, you're trying to force yourself into this container that wasn't made for you. It often comes from outside expectations, right? It comes from who you think you should be. For me, it's when I try and take on someone else's expectation of what a wife should look like, or what a business owner should look like or I don't know, what a writer should look like. And when I am so focused, and I'm placing my energy on what I should be and I'm trying to bend and twist and shrink myself to fit that mold, it really does not feel good...it's uncomfortable. And sometimes it's a glaringly obvious uncomfortable, where I can know, within a couple weeks or a month oh, this is not right. And sometimes it's more subtle. Sometimes I can get so locked into something that I forget that there is another way, that I get to choose another way. When I was sitting to reflect on this question before kicking off our interview, I thought about how many square pegs I had, especially when I was younger. Like that time of middle school and high school where everyone's figuring out who they are. And we all just desperately, desperately want to fit in.
I remember feeling like my body should look different, feeling like my personality should be completely different. And thankfully, I've worked through a lot of that but it doesn't mean that square pegs don't keep popping up. More recently, I was having a conversation with my coach and we were talking kind of strategically about how I should, there's that word again, how I should run the business. And I really like to...I like to respond, I have strategy. But I also like to leave room for the organic. And that's really what happened with Instead, I had this inkling of an idea and I talked to people and it just became so clear that it needed to be birthed into the world through this deck. And so we made space in the schedule for the year to be able to launch this Kickstarter and that felt so good and so energizing and so fun. And now to see that people have it and it's a tool that they use that is just completely unbelievable. It's still strange to me when people post photos on Instagram and I get to see it. And so it felt like well, Instead was great and that was how it was supposed to happen but going forward, I really need to be looking much, much further out. I can't turn around something in six weeks. That's not what I'm supposed to be doing as a business owner. I need to be thinking about like, what I'm going to be doing in the next three years or five years.
And to a certain extent, that's right and I do have a vision of where I'd like to be in those areas, or I guess in those time frames. But what I loved about my conversation with my coach is, I was telling her like, I need to change my strategy, this isn't going to work in the long term. She just kind of looked at me and said, why not? Didn't this work for you? And didn't you enjoy working this way? So why? Why do you have to change? What if this is just how you like to work?
And I could add to that, like, what if that's just how my energy likes to flow? And so I was so grateful that I brought that to my coach, that I had her in my self care support system. So that she could, before I even got to the point of trying to force something, see that I was headed in that direction, and reel me back in and say, hey, wait, you actually get to have some choice here, you don't have to force yourself into that round hole. And so that's what I want you to be thinking about today. That's what I want you to be doing for the people that you're in community with.
And, like my coach said, she just asked me a question, like, why can't it be that way? What if that's the way that you like to work, and then we had this whole conversation from there. So it doesn't have to be you're forcing yourself into a round hole or this is your square peg. It can just be a question, why does it have to be this way? A question that you ask to yourself, or ask to people that you were in community with. And if it wasn't clear, the reason that we're talking about square pegs, and we're talking about forcing stuff, is because when you're forcing, you're not flowing. And if we're talking about our energetic dimension, and working towards a place where we have a free flow of energy, then we've got to be able to identify the places where there are blockages. The places where we are putting so much energy into something that isn't even getting us to where we want to go, that isn't making us feel the way that we want to be. That isn't authentic to us. It's something borrowed from other people. We've got to be able to let go of those things.
And when you can see your square pegs and know what they are, you can start to divert your energy. And then all of a sudden you're freed up to start flowing again. So I want to give you a chance to reflect on this week's question. And if you are listening to this and you're like, I just don't feel like I have any square pegs, maybe think about this, what would I change? If I could change anything in my life, what would I change? Or what do I feel like I need to change and those might start to lead you to your square pegs. So the question on the table is what's your square peg? And if you're stuck, think about what you would change or what you feel like you need to change and see if that can start to direct you to your square pegs. Okay, I'm excited to hear from you. I'll give you some chance to reflect
Thank you as always for your time and for your expertise. If you'd like to continue to the conversation you know you can always come hang out in our free online community and I will sit down with you next week. Take care!