174. Committing Until it Takes with Kimberly Spencer

Content warning: The following episode contains a discussion regarding eating disorders.    Today's guest, Kimberly Spencer, has this belief in her business and with clients that the reason you don't have what you want is due to the story you're telling yourself. Kimberly looks at the cobwebs of your unconscious in your business and figure out where you are holding things back. She expanded her life by asking better questions, changing her environment and changing who she was hanging out with. She was able to transform every single aspect of her life that she wanted to transform. Kimberly's journey started in Hollywood as a screenwriter. At the time, she'd been battling bulimia for about ten years. A friend introduced her to Pilates, and for the first time, she said she felt good in her body.  "That was such a foreign sensation to me, where I felt strong, I felt confident … I felt guided and supported," she says. This led to her teaching Pilates in her private studio, where she was surrounded by multiple different belief systems every day. Seeing different stories come into and out of her space allowed her to shake up her own story about what was possible. "I saw a correlation that it didn't matter whether somebody was technically fat or technically thin … what mattered was their mindset around how they thought about their bodies." From there, Kimberly helped launch an e-commerce start-up. But three months before her wedding, her partner asked to buy her out. She no longer had a business and felt like everything had been ripped out from under her.  She'd been an actor. A screenwriter. A Pilates instructor. She'd healed from bulimia and narcissistic relationships. She'd been in pageants. She realized her through line was a holistic success piece and decided to start her company Crown Yourself. She bought equipment, the domain, and website. She did the photoshoot. And for a year and a half, she made $100. Kimberly says it wasn't until she found out she was pregnant in 2016 that she realized her beliefs, habits, and attitude around money and her business ran parallel to her beliefs about her body. That's when she realized she had a process to work through for her business. "Our brains are wired to survive, and so by exposing yourself to new belief systems … they're exposing themselves to new possibilities of surviving in this world. Our brain is wired to survive, not to thrive," she says, recalling her time teaching Pilates. "You cannot change in the environment that made you sick." She notes shifting your environment can be a massive transformational piece because your external circumstances will always reflect your internal ones and vice versa. In her journey to healing from bulimia, she pointed to three things that helped her overcome: Environment, future self, and banishing blame. It started with her taking personal responsibility. "I had to start questioning my behavior, stopped judging myself when I defaulted to what I had known as the default, which was binging and purging, and instead started asking myself some new questions," she says. She had to give herself so much grace and compassion and recognize and take the time and say, "it's going to take as long as it takes, but I'm committed to it taking." Dropping a victimhood mentality is almost always the first step to healing anything. Kimberly says it can suck to look into the mirror and take ownership of your current state. You are responsible for healing and moving to a place of acceptance. Because acceptance is a neutral emotional state. Whereas as a victim, you're projecting out, and as a villain, you're projecting in. There's guilt and shame in both directions versus actual ownership. Acceptance means you're just at the starting line. It's neutral. We're all humans going through this experience; we don't get to decide until we choose the response. And that response is the moment in which we have the shift of power. We can shift it from experience being done to us to having some say in what the end result is. In balancing being a new mom with her new business, Kimberly went back to the idea of committing to the commitment. She eliminated arbitrary timelines and reassessed the level of responsibility she could commit to. If you're struggling, she asks you to look at whether you can respond at the moment to the next thing rather than react.   ===== Connect with Kimberly Spencer ===== Website: https://crownyourself.com  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crownyourself.now/  Youtube: https://youtube.com/c/crownyourself  Other Game On Girlfriend podcast episodes you might want to check out:  Sick of People Pleasing? Childhood Trauma Might be the Source with Kalpa Gupta: https://sarahwalton.com/people-pleasing-trauma-response/  Your Body is as Important as Your Business With Angelica Ventrice: https://sarahwalton.com/womens-gut-health-love-your-body/  Understand Why You Eat What You Eat With Audrey Zona: https://sarahwalton.com/audrey/  Stop Fighting for Your Limiting Beliefs: https://youtu.be/TpfsfssQ-x0  You can check out our podcast interviews on YouTube, too! http://bit.ly/YouTubeSWalton