Soul Alchemy, Business Trauma Responses & Joyful Marketing with Simone Grace Seol
I’m delighted to have Simone Grace Seol on this week!
If you don’t know Simone, she is a life coach and business mentor based in Seoul, South Korea. She hosts the Joyful Marketing podcast and works with coaches all over the world to create a revolution in love-based marketing.
& as she puts it - she teaches life coaches how to not market like a weirdo, so people actually want to buy from them.
And just to be clear — this podcast is not for life coaches but magical online business owners in general — so what we talk about today is for all of you ;)
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“If your business feels hard because of the nervous system or the brain you have, it’s probably because there’s an even more important thing that you have to teach the world.” - Simone
Simone shares about the range of emotions she’s experienced since becoming the Life Coach School’s first non-white coach to create $1M in revenue in a year. (04:30)
Since hitting $1 million, Simone feels more solid and grounded — like a spiritual heavy-weight. Like she’s become who she was meant to become, not just in terms of success, but in terms of her spiritual growth as well.
Since then, it’s been a full spectrum of experiences. She’s still had significant emotional challenges in her business that have sent her spinning, but she knows this is where she’s meant to be.
Simone equates her business journey to a video game. When you get to the next level, there are always new challenges and unexpected obstacles, but she knows that she has earned her place here and she is ready to play.
The biggest difference in this new stage of success is that a lot more people know her and have opinions about her, and now she’s stewarding a much bigger community of people who are paying money to work with her. So she has learned how to hold a powerful enough space for all those people to realize their own dreams and growth.
At this point, Simone says that her ultimate challenge is to expand her ability to love herself and support herself not in spite of her flaws and the mistakes she makes along the way, but because of them.
“Every next level of your business is like the next level of a video game, with its own monsters and obstacles — sometimes you die and you have to start over. But I know I belong on this level. I’ve earned this level. Let’s play!” - Simone
On how she flipped the switch from one-off $38 tarot readings to being a 7-figure business owner in less than 2 years. (46:30)
Grace attributes a lot of her success to newly coming out of her Saturn return, where she was constantly in a state of intense alchemy and transformation. Her Saturn return was a profound process of shedding a layer of skin and stepping into herself, and now she can lean more fully into the things that benefit her that her ego wants to reject — like selling and vulnerability. She’s worked hard at coming to love those things she previously didn’t enjoy. In the process, she healed so much of jher trauma and discovered a new strength in herself that she didn’t know she had.
“If it wasn’t for my Saturn return, I wouldn’t be where I was today. But me achieving success inside my Saturn return looked different from what my success looks like now.” - Simone
On what she calls “Trauma informed neurodiversity honoring love based sacred marketing,” and how we can have trauma responses triggered by our businesses, like freezing, flight, or fawn. (26:30)
Grace is the poster child for how ADHD and other neurodiversity doesn’t have to hold you back, it can just be another part of your soul and business journey.
At the end of the day it’s you and your soul and everything is just a mirror showing you your relationship with your own soul. That’s where these trauma responses come from, they’re a sign that there is healing work you need to do, and they will appear in any area of your life that’s important to you, including your business.
Here’s what she has to say about trauma responses look like in your business:
Flight: looks like constantly needing to hustle and do more things for your business, always needing to be working on the next big thing, and being unable to rest. Also, avoidance and procrastination are flight responses
Fawn looks like people pleasing, telling people what you think they want to hear, and avoiding confrontation even when its what you need to say your truth
Freeze: is your brain totally goes empty, like when you just can’t bring yourself to write copy even when you sit down to do it
Fight: Looks like wanting to argue with that rude comment or the person whose opinion you don’t even really care about because you want to prove you’re right
“The biggest pattern that I attribute my success to is my ability to look at what’s hard, look at what’s triggering, and to say, ‘Let’s stay with this. Let’s figure out what’s on the other side.’” - Simone
