Today I’m talking about how I run my business with a balance of strategy and spirit. This has been such a key for me as founder and CEO of my own business empire. And I believe it can be something that really moves the needle forward for you in your business. Let’s dive in!

In This Episode Allie discusses:

• What she means by balancing spirit & strategy 

• The importance of spirit in business  

• The importance of the strategy in business 

• How spirit & strategy work together to give you success

Mentioned in this Episode:

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Courses (Use the code PURPOSESHOW for 10% off!)

The Purpose Show Facebook Community

Up & Up Academy

Clear The Clutter Starter Kit

Mom life. We’re surrounded by the message that it’s the tired life. The no-time-for-myself life. The hard life. We’re supposed to get through it. Survive. Cling on by the last little thread. And at the same time, Carpe Diem—enjoy every moment because it’s going to go by so fast. The typical mom culture that sends us all kinds of mixed, typically negative messages: We shouldn’t take care of ourselves; it’s selfish. The more ragged you run yourself, the bigger your badge of honor. But also, ditch your mom bod and work out. Don’t yell. Make more money. Show up. Be better, but not at the expense of time with your kids. I am putting a hard stop to all of this. While being a mom, running a business, and whatever else you might have going on is hard. It is a lot and there’s lots of giving of yourself. The idea that motherhood means living a joyless, nonstop-hustle-with-zero-balance kind of life where you give and give and give and never take, needs to stop. 

I’m on a mission to help you stop counting down the minutes till bedtime (at least most days). Stop the mom guilt and shame game. Stop cleaning up after your kids’ childhood and start being present for it. I want to help you thrive in work, home and life. I believe in John 10:10 that we are called to living an abundant life and I know moms are not excluded from that promise. Join me in conversations about simplicity, some business and life hacks, spirituality and lots of other good stuff that leads to a life of less for the sake of enjoying more in your motherhood. I’m Allie Casazza and this is The Purpose Show.

Hello beautiful babes! Let’s talk about business today! I want to talk to you about how I run my business with a balance of strategy and spirit. How this has been such a key for me as a founder and CEO. And how I believe it can be something that really moves the needle forward for you in your business. 

First, I want to explain a little bit about what I mean. When I teach business, whether it’s a one-on-one client, mastermind style, or just having lunch with a friend and helping her out with her business that’s struggling, wherever it is, I always teach it within the balance of strategy and spirit. 

Here’s what that means. It’s the balance between the spiritual side of things and the internal side of things. Your mindset, your emotions, your mentality, and something going on bigger than us. 

I believe that God is the Creator of the universe and that Jesus Christ is His Son. But it doesn’t matter if that’s not what you believe here. It can be whatever that is for you, whatever makes you comfortable. If you want to say universe, source—whatever it is for you. 

You do you. I’m not here to try to put anything on you. But it’s the balance between that and the strategy side of things, the more logical side of things. 

There are so many business teachers out there. It’s such a saturated industry, right? A lot of them are a 100% strategy. You can probably think of a couple right now as I’m talking. 

They tell you to hustle, show up, go live every week, be consistent, create content every single day, grow your email list and all these things, right? These very logical things that you can do to grow your business. That’s strategy.

And a lot of other business teachers are a 100% spiritual. They’re leaning all the way into the spiritual side of things and telling you to just manifest what you want and it will come to you. 

I like to balance the two sides because I believe that they work best when they’re married, when they work together. Kind of like Brian and me. They work best when they both coincide with each other. 

Yes, work on your mindset. Focus on your thoughts. Yes, what you focus on expands so be careful where you put your energy. Be careful what you think about. Watch your words. 

Yes, create the life that you want. Pray about it. Manifest what you want. Set goals. Make a vision board. Yes, yes, yes! 

But also do the work. You’ve got to show up. You have to do something. You have to do certain things that are going to help you. And the teachers that are teaching strategy can help you get tools that you didn’t have before to make that happen.

In my experience, when I was first starting I was all about strategy. I really didn’t have any of the spirit side of things. And “spirit” is just my word for it. 

If you don’t like that word you can either stop listening or replace it with a different word. That’s just the word that I use for the inside parts of things versus the strategy. And it starts with an ‘S,’ so the spirit and strategy sound good together.

But I had none of that in my business. I was definitely praying and talking to God but in a very I-feel-powerless-please-just-help-me-tell-me-what-to-do-help-my-business-take-off-kind-of way. My time working in my business was a thousand percent strategy. I was obsessed over conversions, rates, numbers, email-open rates, click-through rates, growing my email list, and getting people to see me. And I was really, really stuck. 

It wasn’t working. I had some success but it wasn’t until I opened up to the other side, that balance, and including the spirit side of things where I wasn’t just talking to God from a place of, “Please help me, tell me what to do,” but more so like, “This is not just my business. This is your business. Work with me. I want to co-create a business that is going to change lives with You. Show me. Guide me. I want 10,000 new email subscribers. I want to grow.” 

I would focus on that and manifest that into my life. I would put it on my vision board. I would imagine what it would feel like if I had 10,000 subscribers on my email list. I would get into those feelings of having those subscribers and be open to receiving new subscribers. 

Because when you open up to receiving something that you say you want, all kinds of limiting beliefs will pop up and you’ll start to think things like, “Well, who am I to have those kinds of followers? What will I say to them?” Then you start to doubt, your ego gets in the way, and all of these things come up. 

I would work through all of that. Journal through it. Pray through it. Talk through it. Really break down those walls to be in a place where I was able, willing, and ready to receive what I wanted—those 10,000 new subscribers to stay consistent with this example that we’re on. 

And when I did that, I would get these divine downloads of ideas, and they would always align with the goal. These random ideas would just pop into my head straight from God himself: I’m going to do this and this is going to grow my list! Oh my gosh, this is so great! I’m going to do this live stream event. I’m going to have people sign up to get access. It’s going to be so fun. It’s going to feel so good. I’m so excited! It’s going to grow my email list.

I would get these divine downloads of ideas into my head because I was in that spiritual place of asking for guidance but being ready and willing to do the work. Aligning myself in the feelings of what it would be like if I had that thing already, which is how manifestation works. Manifestation is very real. It doesn’t need to be super “woo-woo” if you don’t want it to be. 

It’s whatever you need it to be. It’s biblical. Go where you need to go, but this is what I did. If you want to grow your business and be a happy business owner, this needs to be a part of it. 

A lot of people grow their business and they don’t do any of these things. They’re workhorses. They work constantly. It’s not easy and it’s not fun. 

And I want it to be easy. I want it to feel good. I want it to be fun. 

Yes, I’m willing to show up and put in the work. You bet your butt I am. But I want it to feel good and I want to maintain a healthy family life. I want to have that balance. 

I want my work life and my family life to coincide in harmony. I want my life to feel good, easy, full, abundant, and happy. I don’t want to run myself into the ground to meet my goals. 

When I embraced that side of things, I would start to get all of these ideas and that’s where the strategy would come in. I would do the work. I would go with the idea. 

I’d research, what’s the strategy here? What should I do here? What feels right? What’s feeling aligned for me? 

I would implement the strategy to grow my email list and then I would both work and manifest. I used strategy and spirit to grow my email list to 10,000 subscribers or 50K months or whatever the goal was at the time. I like to balance those two sides—strategy and spirit. That’s what I mean by that. 

In my business and in my business story, there were a lot of hiccups. There’s a lot of drama. I always say that my business story could be a movie. It’s so dramatic. It was so hard and so heavy. 

It didn’t need to be that way. It ended up being that way because of the choices that I made, things that had happened in my life, and where I was at as a person at that time in my life. 

You’re a person. You’re a spirit, right? You’re not a body with a spirit; you’re a spirit with a body.  What I’ve learned is when you open yourself up to spirituality—internally, the inner you, your emotions, your mentality—when you open up that internal place in yourself to, “What do I want? Well, I want my business to grow. Well, how much do you want your business to grow? Well, I want to have 5,000 people on my email list.” 

What would it feel like if you had that? You work through all the BS that pops up when you start to go there. You work through your limiting beliefs and your money blocks. You really work through the spiritual side of things. 

You really co-create yourself as a CEO with God. And magic happens. Of course you need strategy. Of course you need to show up and do the work. Of course!

But these two worlds, they will create absolute abundance and magic for you in your life if you use them together. So ask yourself as a business owner, where are you on this scale? What do you tend to lean more toward? What do you maybe need to embrace more? Are you all about strategy and need to lean more into the spirit side of things or vice versa?

The Up & Up Academy is officially open for enrollment for the first time in history! 

I am so excited. I’m jiving all around in my seat because I can’t freaking wait to get everybody in there and start helping you grow your message, your mission, your business, your revenue, yourself!

Online business owners, this membership is for you! 

The Up & Up Academy launched and it is open! It’s a monthly membership for the online business owner who wants to grow. 

If you’ve already got a business and it’s going but you’re kind of stuck. It’s not where you want it to be. It feels like you’re not growing at all or you’re growing at a snail’s pace and you are ready for more. 

You want to go higher, further, spread your message, and see real growth happen both when it comes to money and when it comes to your audience and building a tribe.

This is one all-encompassing course that does a really beautiful job of balancing strategy and spirit. 

We’re going to focus on money blocks, mindset, emotional health, and also technical strategies that you can implement in your business. 

The same things that I did to go from zero to seven figures in 18 months in my business. 

I am going to teach you exactly what I did, but it’s a membership style, so the content is dripped out in monthly chunks so you have a chance to learn a little bit, implement, learn a little bit, implement, and not get overwhelmed. Because how overwhelming is all the teaching and all the business advice out there? It’s is so much. 

This is a one-stop shop. 

Come sign up! You’re going to learn from me. You’re going to learn from other experts. We’re going to give you what you need to launch your business to the next level and beyond. 

There is a founding members price that will not be seen again. You’re going to want to get in now! It’s a monthly payment, super doable. 

alliecasazza.com/upandup. 

I can’t wait to see you in there! Let’s grow your frigging business!

Just to give some flesh to this, I want to go over a few examples of how strategy and spirit can work together on different hot topics when it comes to running an online business: Email lists. There are a lot of strategies for growing an email list. 

As an example, let’s just do one of my favorite ones—put opt-ins everywhere. Put freebies everywhere. Give people an opportunity to join your email list everywhere, every chance they get. Give them something of really high value for free in exchange for their email address. Everywhere, all the time. 

That’s the strategy part of it. Great. That’s great. That’s great to do. Nothing wrong with that. 

The spirit side of it might be asking yourself what do you feel led to give away for free? What’s coming up for you? When you think about your ideal customer, your ideal person (let’s just say that she’s a she) and we think, “What does she really need from me? If she’s Googling and finding her way to this blog post about feeling overwhelmed as a mom, what does she really need from me?” 

I would think about it and feel that she really needs to understand that her issue is not that she needs to get organized; it’s that she needs to get rid of the excess crap in her house that’s causing her to clean up all the time. So, I’m going to give her this Clutter Starter Kit for free. That’s how I created the Clear Your Clutter Starter Kit, which is my most downloaded freebie of all time. 

Maybe you get this strategy about growing my email list, but the spirit side might be, “What do I feel led to say this week to the people who are on my list? Once I get these people on my list, what do I feel led to say to them?”

I’m really intuitively led as a business owner. While I do batch my work and try to plan ahead, I’m also very much intuitive. I will open up my laptop, close my eyes, take a deep breath, and think about you guys, my tribe, my women who need me and ask, “What do they need from me this week? What’s going on in the world? What do I feel like they just need?” 

I welcome God to come in, be in that room with me, and guide me in what to say. And I always feel an inspiration hit. Maybe it won’t hit right that moment; maybe it’ll hit me later that day. But I spiritually make myself available for ideas and downloads and they come.

That’s a really good example of balancing strategy and spirit when it comes to email lists. 

Let’s look at live streaming. Let’s say somebody tells you that a strategy for live streaming should be to go live every single week in order to grow an audience and boost engagement. That’s what you should do. 

They say, “Oh, you’re not seeing growth in your business? You need to go live every single week. You need to grow your audience, boost engagement so the algorithm will like you.” 

That’s the strategy. Okay, great. That’s a great strategy. 

The spirit side will also say, “I also want you to become open to receiving growth in your audience and in your business. Are you even available for receiving growth?” 

Because this person that leader is giving advice to, they may have some kind of internal block where they were told growing up that fame, being seen, being known is bad. Bad things always happen to celebrities or people that have a lot of people watching them. Or money is evil. 

They may have all these blocks about growing. They want to grow. They started a business and  externally they really want to grow, but deep down inside there’s something in them that’s blocking their growth. And that’s really a big piece of why they’re not growing. 

So all of the strategy in the world isn’t going to get them the growth that they really want because they’re resisting it internally. We’ve got to find that balance of strategy and the internal—the spirit side of things. The spirit work there would be becoming open to receiving growth in your audience and in your business. Really working through is there anything in you that doesn’t want to grow? 

You say you want that, but also at the same time somewhere deep down you don’t. Because you’ve been told something. Or you judge people that are seen and have a big following. You kind of hate them. You’re jealous. 

You were raised a certain way where that’s not okay. What are your parents going to think? People are going to look at you differently. You’re worried. You’re fearful. 

You need to be journaling through that, talking through that, working through that with yourself and with God and getting to the other side of that wall. No growth is going to really come and really burst without that spirit side of things being dealt with as well. 

And if it does come, you’re going to sabotage it. You’re going to stop emailing your list and you’re going to lose all your subscribers because you didn’t cultivate them. You’re going to stop showing up live because you’re going to be buried by fear and internal blocks because you didn’t look at it. 

Let’s look at another example real quick. The example is just making decisions as a CEO. What’s the strategy with how to make decisions as a CEO?

The strategy might be to weigh out the options. Read a book about what the founder of Nike, Google, or Netflix did. How they did it. Copy that. 

Or it could be asking what’s the money side of this decision? Where’s the money? Make the decision wherever the money is. Maybe that’s a strategy. There’s almost no strategy here. 

Maybe the strategy could be the way that you deliver the decision that’s made, the way you speak to people. But this is a spirit issue and we can’t ignore that. 

I’m a mom and I’m a CEO. I have a lot of kids, but I have never ever made more decisions in a day than in my business. Basically all I do is make decisions in my business. That’s my job.

I cast vision. I feel into what my tribe needs from me. I make decisions all day long. It’s exhausting. It’s a lot. 

We have to have the spiritual side of things. The spirit side of things would be, okay, this decision has been put in front of you for your business. What do you want to do? 

Think about doing the thing. Think about saying, “Yes,” to this opportunity. Think about saying, “Yes” to this decision. Do you feel yourself contract, tighten up, and feel negative? 

Or do you feel yourself expand? Do you feel yourself rise up? Sometimes I’ll close my eyes and I’ll feel into the decision and then I’ll ask myself how I feel if I do it and I will expand so much. My shoulders go back and I almost feel my chest moving forward. 

I heard something about this from Marie Forleo recently (if you don’t follow her you need to) and she said it beautifully. She said, “Your heart is beaming forward toward the decision because you just know internally, “Yes, I want to do this!” 

Or, in the opposite way, you feel your shoulders tightening up and you feel yourself kind of fall inside. You’re totally contracting. It’s just not what you want to do.

Because deep down you know what you want to do. You know what the right decision is. You just have to unbury it. And the way you unbury it is by just getting still for a minute and asking yourself, “Imagine if I said ‘Yes’ to this…” And then just see what comes up.

That’s how you listen to your gut. That’s the side of making decisions as a CEO and that’s really the only side that we need there. Do you see what I’m talking about with this? 

Yes, there’s a place for strategy. I am so big on strategy. My strategies in growing my business are rock solid. They are the best. 

I’m so proud of my strategies in running my business, growing my business, and how I built my empire. I’ll tell you a strategy all day long. You can bet your butt you’re going to get a lot of strategy from me.

But we cannot negate or ignore the spiritual side of things. You are a soul with a body. You are feeling and you need to look at that. You need to listen to your gut. You need to use the power of your mind and your thoughts to reach your goals.

Work through your ish. Journal out the stuff that’s keeping you blocked and stuck. Open that closet door and look at your internal problems for what they are. Work through them. 

That balance of strategy and spirit—that is what I’ve done. Everybody wants to know the secret. How did you do this? 10 years of work in just a couple years? How did you do it? 

This! The balance of strategy and spirit. You cannot ignore the internal world. You cannot ignore the supernatural. You can’t. It’s very real. 

God created the universe to work this way. It’s like a big magnet and if you are negative all the time, if you ignore the spiritual, if you just dive into strategy and force this to happen, you’re just going to get frustrated.

And if you do make any growth, it’s going to come at such a high cost. The cost of your health—physically, emotionally, mentally. The cost of your relationship with your spouse, with your kids, your family. Happiness and balance, it’s all going to be lost. 

There’s another way. You can get wealth that way. You can grow a business that way, but is that what you want? Or would you rather come over here to the wild side and have ease, flow, feel really relaxed and at ease, feel good, feel like you know how to make decisions in your company?

You know the strategies. You’re doing them. But it all feels really good, easy, and light. 

Yes, you’re showing up. Yes, you’re doing the work. You’re working on your business every day. 

But you’re also spending loads of time with your family. You’re feeling really positive. You get to decide how you grow and how fast it happens. There are no rules except the ones you set for yourself. The only ceiling that exists is the one you set for yourself. That’s the ceiling. 

We serve an abundant God. He created an abundant world. It’s all there for you if you just get open to receiving it. 

Call me “woo-woo.” Unfollow me. You do you,babe. You want to know how I grew my business? You want to know the fastest, best way to grow a business, to grow a company that makes impact? This is it, and I’m your girl. 

If this is resonating with you, I am your girl. Get your butt into the Up & Up Academy. I’m going to keep harping on it because I know that if you’re listening still and this is resonating with you, that’s where you belong.

Thanks so much for hanging out with me! In case you didn’t know, there’s actually an exclusive community that’s been created solely for the purpose of continuing discussions around The Purpose Show episodes. It’s designed to get you to actually take action and make the positive changes that we talk about here. I want you to go and be a part of it. To do that, go to alliecasazza.com/facebookgroup. 

Thank you so much for tuning in! If you’d like to learn more about me, how I can help you, how you can implement all these things and more into your life to make it simpler, better, and more abundant, head to alliecasazza.com. There are free downloads, online courses, programs, and other resources to help you create the life you really want. 

I am always rooting for you, friend! See you next time! I’m Allie Casazza and this is The Purpose Show.