You didn’t start a business to feel like you’re constantly pushing a rock uphill.

And yet, somewhere along the way, many entrepreneurs find themselves forcing systems, schedules, and strategies that quietly drain their energy, their joy, and their income.

In this episode of the Be More Business Podcast, I invite you into a deeper conversation about force versus flow, and how your temperament plays a powerful role in which one you’re living inside of.

We’ll explore how force shows up first in your body, long before it ever appears on your calendar or to-do list, and why working against your natural operating system is far more expensive than most entrepreneurs realize. I’ll walk you through how to recognize resistance, how to listen for the wisdom hidden inside it, and how to begin transmuting force into flow through small, intelligent shifts.

This is not about hustling harder or following the latest productivity trend. It’s about learning to work with your rhythm, your capacity, and your temperament so your business can finally support the life you want to live.

If you’ve ever ended the day exhausted, resentful, or wondering why success feels heavier than it should, this episode is for you.

Visit this month's resource page at https://bemorebusiness.com/episodes/re-sourcing-your-business/

This is the Be More Business podcast, where wisdom and innovation merge to create a business that supports the life you want to live.

Here's your host, entrepreneurial, wise woman and cyber sorceress, Kimberly Beer.

So today I'd like to have a serious conversation with you about looking at where you're forcing things through your business and where you are actually working in flow.

So in this entire month of the Be More Business podcast, we have spent a lot of time looking at temperament.

And temperament plays a big factor in whether we are forcing ourselves to work a certain way, to run our business a certain way, or whether we are living in flow.

In my experience, most entrepreneurs actually start their businesses so they can live in flow, myself included in this.

A lot of times the people who become entrepreneurs don't fit well into the modeling of how everyone else does things.

So we end up owning our own businesses because this is where we can create flow and then the quest is a noble one.

And yet we tend to then come into our business and start to create systems that feel forced for us, where we're working in a constant resistance versus following the feel of how things should go and into our own flow.

And there's a ton of reasons for this.

Many times they aren't even self generated.

Sometimes they are, sometimes it's us going, that's the way I should do things.

And kind of creating our own, becoming our own worst enemy, let's put it that way.

Other times it may be due to a family script that we're still carrying around and many times don't even realize we have with us.

It's a limiting belief, maybe it's a cultural, you should be doing it this way.

In the business world, we tend to get into a lot of this.

This is the best practice and you should always do it this way.

This is the trend, this is what everybody is saying.

And what I want you to realize in this particular moment as we're having this conversation is many times what everybody is doing really only encapsulates something like 30% of the population.

So that means the majority of the people are actually doing it a different way.

If you stop and think about it a moment, the people who get really, really good at doing it a different way, they are the disruptors.

And disruption, many times is the catalyst that moves individual or that process to a whole nother level, then it becomes the best way to do things.

At the end of the day, what I want you to recognize is where in your business are you feeling that resistance?

Where does it feel like you're pushing a rock up a hill versus where does it feel like you reached the crest of that hill and now the rock has taken on the momentum of its own.

And basically, now it's your job to guide that rock as it glides downhill into whatever position you want it to be in.

That's what flow feels like.

Force feels like what you have to do to push the rock up the hill.

Now, I'm going to lie to you.

A lot of business is pushing a rock up a hill.

So there is a moment, however, where it will crest and it will come down the other side.

What we want to do is to try to create systems in our business that either shorten the hill, that we have to push the rock up initially, or we want to create systems that eliminate that initial resistance or lessen it as much as we can so that we get the flow of everything flowing down the other side, everything rolling in the direction we want.

All right, I'm going to quit beating the hill and rock metaphor, and let's move on to kind of feeling into what force actually feels like.

Force.

Usually the feeling shows up in your body before you recognize it.

And many times we ignore it.

Because here's the thing, our conscious brain loves to chatter in our ear about how we need to do it this way, and, oh, just ignore that.

And a lot of times we don't even stay as tuned into our bodies as we really should, so we don't recognize when we are in a forced situation.

But here's the importance of this, and I probably should have mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I want to mention it here and now.

The reason why you need to listen to this episode, the reason why you need to make some changes in your business is because the energy output that it takes to maintain a system that you have to force is so great that it steals your time, it steals your happiness, and it steals your money.

When you are in flow, things go easier.

You end the day with more energy.

You take that more energy home to your family onto whatever it is that you're doing next to being around your animals, to your friendships, to every place in your life, to your own personal happiness included in that.

And also, it affects your bottom line.

When you are working in flow, things also align with that flow.

And your money is one of those things that aligns with that flow.

So why we're having this conversation today in a business podcast is because we want to look at how we can create more flow.

The first step in creating more flow is recognizing where force is living so now let me get back to the point that I was just making.

So force will show up in your body before it shows up anywhere else.

The first way to start to recognize that is to tune into your body and stop ignoring it.

Force has a texture, it has a feel, it's a tightness in your jaw.

It is a more clipped breathing pattern.

It is your brain going 100 miles an hour.

It feels short circuited.

So if when you are going through your day for the next week or so, pause every now and again and just check in with your body.

Is your jaw tight?

Are your shoulders feel like you're carrying a huge weight there?

Are they sore?

If you just let them relax, how does that feel?

Just check in and see where you are bracing in your day and where you are feeling in flow and feeling like you're in a dance and a rhythm.

Because flow is in your body long before it shows up on your calendar or on your to do list.

So again, I want to mention that force is not often, not always self generated.

There are so many reasons why force happens.

Another important reason is when you're working against your temperament, which is what the last few episodes of this podcast have kind of been dedicated to, is to helping you understand your temperament and to start to look for understanding how you operate in the world, what your operating system would prefer.

And all of us have slightly different operating systems, but yet we want to contain ourselves into that best practice or the trend that is going on in whatever it happens to be, whether it's in our industry or time management or productivity, if it has the word hack in front of it or behind it, I guess if it is a hack question, whether or not that's actually going to be inflow for you, because again, it's a small percentage of the population that can take advantage of that.

So how do you start to undo it when you recognize force in your business?

How do you start to shift that to transmute it from feeling forced to feeling in flow?

So to start, we have to understand this is a big, giant experiment and I want you to approach it that way.

Approach it with curiosity.

Approach it with, I am going to take on some changes.

Like I have an extended test drive on this change.

And if it doesn't handle and perform the way I want it to, if it doesn't put me in flow, I have the perfect right to return that to the dealership and say, I don't want this particular vehicle.

It's not going to work for me.

I want to try that one over there.

So don't sign the paperwork until you know the flow is working, and even then, reserve the right to make tweaks and changes.

Here's a story about that.

I have a friend who bought a truck and she's very excited to have the truck, but the truck had the wrong upholstery in it.

And so she had him change the cloth seats to leather because she has dogs.

And she wanted her dogs to be able to get in and out of the truck and feel good about being able to clean and being able to have, you know, hair gets stuck all over the cloth seats and dirt, and it's much harder to clean.

Leather is actually much easier to clean.

Now, what surprised me is I've never had anybody change the upholstery in a vehicle before.

Kind of figured what you got on the dealership floor was what you got, right?

So this is the true of this test drive metaphor that I'm giving you here.

Feel free to ask for the upholstery to be changed to whatever it is you want.

If you want leather seats and that particular vehicle has cloth seats, have it changed.

If you don't like the rims, change them out.

Whatever it happens to be, reserve the right to make the changes.

That will create more flow.

Because here's the thing, you start to feel release a little bit at a time.

So flow doesn't happen like a switch, right?

You don't immediately go from forced to flow.

It can happen.

Hold that possibility open.

But for most people, you're going to end up having to make little tweaks until you get whatever system in your business, including your business model, could be the entire thing from the top down needs a little bit of shifting.

Also, for the folks out there that are a little neuro spicy, you may have to do a lot of experimentation and even think way outside of the box, which is your superpower, by the way, in order to get to where you feel like you are working in flow.

So starting to recognize what force and what flow means for you is the very first step in order to make this transition in your business.

So check in with your body.

Is your body feeling good about a situation or is it feeling like you are tense or carrying a lot of weight on your shoulders?

And many times these things are very subtle because here's the thing, to get to the age where you own a business and you're listening to my podcast, you weren't born yesterday and you have built up a lot of talent around being able to work in forced situations.

So flow can even feel super uncomfortable in the beginning.

It can feel weird.

It can feel like, wow, that shouldn't work that way.

And also our cultural expectations play into this.

Like, you need to work hard in order to be successful.

And one of the hardest mindset shifts that I have ever made, and I'm going to be honest and really call myself out here, still making, is that I don't have to work.

I don't have to bust my ass.

It can be easy.

Like, it can be easy.

Work can be easy.

It doesn't have to drain you at the end of the day.

And that's another place where you can recognize whether you've been in force or flow is at the end of the day, force feels like, drained.

Like you just don't have anything left in the tank.

Flow actually fills your tank back up as you move through your day.

So you end your day with as much energy or possibly even more, depending on your temperament type, than you did when you started it.

That is another key factor in it.

So force and flow recognize where you're in it and where you're not.

And then, even if you can't quite pinpoint it, start experimenting with where you can make things one degree easier.

Flow activates when your tasks become more friction friendly.

In other words, they.

They start to break down those resistances that are showing up.

And when you ask yourself, how could I make this 1 degree different or 1% different or 1 tiny tweak different, you can start to attach to how you could create change to make it more inflow for you.

Tiny pivots really do create momentum.

And momentum is the gateway drug to flow.

So you want to think of it that way, one small change at a time, and feel the results.

Taste it.

See if it has a good aftertaste or a bad aftertaste.

Did you leave it feeling drained?

How do things feel in your body?

Is your jaw tight?

Are your shoulders stiff?

Does your back hurt?

Are you snappy at the end of the day?

Or do you leave feeling happy?

Are you feeling like you don't need a massage because your muscles are all happy?

Is your jaw loose and open and are you feeling perky?

And whatever that means for you?

For me, it's that I want to go out and talk to people.

So for an introvert, it might be the exact opposite of that.

Whatever that is for you.

Also, look at the emotional echo that resides throughout your entire day.

If you feel depleted, unsteady, if you feel contracted or crunchy or resentful of your clients of your business.

And believe me, I know a lot of entrepreneurs who do have to work through being resentful of their business and their customers.

That is a very tough emotion as an entrepreneur to work through, but it's also one that happens to, I think, almost all of us, if not all of us at some point in time.

What we want to look for is an emotional echo that leaves us clearer, steadier, softer, feeling more comfortable, feeling more energetic, because that emotional echo is a way that we can track whether or not we are work.

Have spent our day forcing through things versus flowing through things.

A couple of other things I want to leave you with are more like tactile.

Sometimes force and flow are not about what is happening, like the task or the system itself.

It's more about the speed at which that task or system happens.

So it has to do with the tempo, not the actual situation.

As an entrepreneur, there's going to be stuff in your business you don't want to do, and there's going to be stuff that you have to do that goes against your temperament.

And there are times that you are going to need to use force to show up for something.

But here's the key to that.

There are times that you can make that easier by changing the tempo or the rhythm of whatever that happens to be.

Slow down, speed up, chunk it out, put it in a batch.

And my personal favorite is to ritualize it.

And so let me give you an example of how I ritualize something that can get forced in my business.

When it's done right, I do it in flow and I love it.

But if done wrong, it feels very forced to me.

And that is coaching calls.

I have put my coaching calls on a single day.

So I do all of my coaching calls on Tuesday.

I start my morning by running groups and then I do private calls for the rest of the day.

There's a couple of things that happen in that.

So first of all, I step into that part of myself of as into coach, consultant, group facilitator.

Kim shows up on Tuesday mornings because she knows that's her day and I've done it for years now.

So she prepares for that.

That part of me.

I know I'm talking about myself in the third person, but it's okay.

That part of me is preparing for Tuesday, probably on Saturday.

And by the time Tuesday rolls around, it's very easy, very flow like for me to slip into that particular rhythm.

Another thing that happens is because that is ritualized on a Tuesday, it becomes easier for me to flow through my week because I know Tuesdays are not a day that I'm going to sit and have a conversation with you all.

I know Tuesdays are not the day that I'm going to wake up and go work on my novel.

So those things have a rhythm and a ritualized day and a flow day that they get devoted to them and they don't show up.

The flow shows up for me to spend my morning working with my groups and spend the rest of the day working with my private clients.

One on one or in combination.

That is a way that I can take something that can feel really forced if it's not done right and move it into something that feels very much in flow with how my week goes.

And I will tell you, I can identify when it gets out of flow because there are times that there is a fifth Tuesday in the month and I don't meet with a lot of those people that I meet with because we do four Tuesdays in a month.

And that fifth Tuesday feels weird because that ritual doesn't happen on the same rhythm.

So it breaks the rhythm.

It breaks the tempo.

Try that thought process out.

Another one that I think.

Another tip that I have.

Especially for people who are the spontaneous and meaning driven type workers, following the feel of the magnet that pulls you toward something versus saying, I'm going to go over here and do this thing because it's on my to do list today.

The working with the capacity based time planning thing is wonderful for spontaneous and meaning driven workers because that rigid schedule can sometimes pull, sometimes pull you away from the thing that makes the most sense for you to be doing.

It may look inefficient on a piece of paper, but in reality, when you're doing it, when you follow that magnetic, yes, when you follow the pull, you actually are working in flow and you'll get more done faster and it ends up being a much more efficient way to do it.

So in your experimentation, if you are especially a person who is that spontaneous type of worker that really needs a lot of that flexibility, who finds resistance and rigid systems, or you're the meaning driven worker, this is really important for you.

Start to follow the magnet and the pull.

Also recognize when the magnet or the pull is your pull versus someone else's.

That sometimes can be a really hard separation to make for both spontaneous workers and meaning driven workers because of the ramifications that may have happened in their past and a lot of cultural expectations around being told what to do versus following your own kind of northern compass.

If it feels weird or things don't turn out Right at the end of it, ask yourself, was it really my magnet, or was it somebody else's and their magnet just happened to be stronger?

Or more likely, I allowed it to be a little stronger.

All right.

Another thing about force, force is full of information.

So whenever you encounter resistance, resistance is wisdom.

And whenever something is forced in your business, there's usually a answer waiting to reveal itself about a change that could really, really manifest something big and beautiful for you.

So whenever you recognize resistance, whether it's resistance to changing the system or whether it's resistance because you feel like you're forcing something in your business, stop and listen to yourself, because your intuition may be trying to get your attention.

And it's just whatever systems your conscious mind, the people around you, your past traumas may be coming up to kind of mask that as.

As not what it really is, which is the answer that you've been seeking to get the flow into your business.

There's a lot of ways that you can explore this.

You can explore it with a coach or a consultant.

There's a lot of people that specialize in working with individuals around understanding where, for example, their family belief systems come in to play in their business, or where their own limiting beliefs might come in, or where unfinished business.

Those are kind of the.

The wheelhouses of my gestalt background coming up and saying that whenever you see resistance to something in your business or whenever you have resistance to something, there is wisdom there, there's data.

And if you'll take a moment to look at it, a lot of times that answer that you have been seeking is in that resistance.

And understanding it will unlock the door that you've been looking to unlock.

All right, my final piece of wisdom here is around stress.

Being an entrepreneur is a stressful experience.

Running a business is stressful.

Dealing with customers is stressful.

Working through your financial situation, especially in the current economy, is stressful.

There are a lot of external stress factors in a business.

Stress has been up for me a lot lately in learning about it and learning the good part of it and the bad part of it.

And I think we've spent a lot of time in our world telling people that stress is horrible and you should avoid it.

But my guess is, if I had to guess, if I were a mind reader, I would say stress is probably what got you to be an entrepreneur to begin with.

Something happened that was a stressful situation because usually problems are, and entrepreneurs are problem solvers.

And so you harnessed that stress and created a business from it.

When you are looking at force and flow in your business, there's a difference between stress and a problem to be solved and force in the end result.

So force drains your energy.

It is not good on the system because it slows everything down.

Stress, on the other hand, can actually work for you as well as against you.

So it can actually be the place where that wisdom, the resistance, gets unlocked.

It can become an activation instead of a corrosion.

So learning to identify the difference between where there's stress in your business and where things are forced in your business and recognizing that one is something to be transmuted and the other one is something that that could possibly be harnessed and utilized to create more flow is.

Is an art, but it's a mindset shift.

I've been an entrepreneur for 30 years at this point, well over 30 years actually, and this is something that I think is an evolution for entrepreneurs is to start recognizing the difference between when something is stress that is a catalyst and force that is a drain.

Start to piece that through in your day to day and look at stress as something that you can utilize when it comes up and also look for force that needs to be transmuted into flow.

I hope you've enjoyed this conversation today.

Thank you for hanging out with me and I'll see you in the next episode.

Thank you for listening to the Be More Business podcast where wisdom and innovation merge to create a business that supports the life you want to live.

For more resources, courses and inspiration, visit Be more business dot com.