70. Integrating What We Have Learned with Erica Courdae
Learning and Integration
In brand visibility work, so often the focus is on the tangibles, the things we need to learn.
We seek out new information, listen to new podcast episodes, take new workshops, and more.
And all of that learning is amazing. But it’s also incredibly important to take the time to integrate what we’ve learned.
What becomes possible when you take the time and space to revisit that new information and figure out how to incorporate it into your life, your business, your brand, and your visibility?
Erica Courdae interviews India about what she’s been learning and integrating.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
How integration can require letting go in order to become who you want to be
How pushing back against hustle culture intersects with imposter syndrome and perfectionism
Why you need to exhale your creative ideas
How India is decolonizing her work and life
Integrating and Essentialism
On the Flaunt Your Fire® podcast, India says that for much of her life, she’s been focused on doing and producing, and thinking that integration was a process of putting into action what she’d just learned, but her definition has shifted.
She now says that integration includes “figuring out what you’re becoming based on what you’ve learned…asking yourself what do you need to embody in that process.”
Erica adds “I feel like you can’t even talk about becoming without acknowledging that sometimes it’s an unbecoming, it’s a letting go of.”
India agrees and says that as part of the Pause on the Play®, the Community’s conversations around minimalism and essentialism and reconnecting to what is essential from last year, she released a lot of physical things from her life, but also let go of head trash that had been taking up space.
That experience of learning, integrating, and taking action within community, made her realize that “I’m the type of learner who can default to…I need to create this checklist and check the things off…But that community piece really does make me pause to take a look at the more emotional pieces, the more becoming pieces.”
She recalls writing a blog for Erica’s business years ago about minimalism with examples from her life that missed some of the nuances and aspects of privilege that exist around the concept of minimalism, but revisiting those concepts now having learned and integrated, “I came back to it with a very different energy than I ever have. And it feels more like home for me as somebody who does identify as a minimalist and essentialist than it ever has.”
That carries through to how India uses her influence to expand the conversation around minimalism or essentialism, in contrast to many influencers where “a lot of it is still coming from an energy of you need to buy these things and you need to do it this exact way…and that is so not true. That’s not what the concepts were originally.”
She continues, “Breaking up with those ideas that honestly brings us back to consumerism. It’s so insidious how you see these very abstract…concepts of oppression and racism make their way into things that are actually supposed to create freedom.”
Time Freedom and Imposter Syndrome
When it comes to freedom in business, one of the things India has been thinking about is time.
After a workshop by Ashley Gartland in Pause on the Play®, The Community on gaining time freedom in your business, India was thinking about how “there’s so many systems out there you can use in your business, and yet we don’t pause to ask ourselves, is the system creating more work? Or is the system working for me and the life I want to have?”
She says that segmenting parts of our lives and segmenting our lives from our work causes people to miss the bigger picture and creates more work and more hustle rather than less.
“I don’t think anybody created a business to spend their entire life revolving around their work…And so much of the systems that are in place are really there to create more output, more hustle. And that doesn’t feel like freedom to me.”
Erica adds that rejecting hustle culture is where imposter syndrome can come into play. “The imposter is not who you’re becoming, it’s who you’re letting go of.”
India agrees and says, “the imposter has completely told me that I needed to do those things and has also allowed me in the past to build my life around what’s happening with work.”
Now, she says, “I love what I do. I truly enjoy it and it fills me up and my life has to come first. And allowing my life to come first actually keeps me excited for the work that I do.”
She is also working past what Amenah Arman has talked about as toxic humility and humbleness, that has come up as a result of conversations within the Community.
In the past, India would have been afraid of sounding like she was bragging if she confidently said, yes, “you can ask me for an idea for something and then I can strategically figure out how does it make sense for your business without a lot of difficulty”.
Her imposter would make her think that it should be hard to come up with those ideas, and that solutions shouldn’t come readily or quickly. “And so that took things that maybe could have taken me ten minutes for a client, and then the myth of more, let it take an hour to come up with this concept…And I’m like, no, I had it figured out ten minutes ago.”
Exhale Ideas
Because imposter syndrome and perfectionism tend to go hand in hand, Erica asks India if there is anything she’s been integrating to keep perfectionism at bay.
India said the simplest thing that has stuck with her from her conversation with Amenah Arman is the concept of creating as inhaling and releasing it into the world as exhaling.
And in some instances, the need to fully inhale and exhale is a literal process she’s realized she needs to tend to more.
As part of an ongoing trauma healing process, India had biofeedback testing done, and it revealed “that I would benefit the most from paying attention to my breathing.”
She continues, “what I want to integrate is a reminder, that when I’m taking my daily time to notice my breath, and to ask myself, am I breathing in for the same amount of time that I’m breathing out?”
She asks herself if tension or dysregulation in her breath is reflected in ideas that maybe need to be released. Because of that reminder, she’s realized that, “I absolutely need to sit at my desk at the end of each day…and write out all of the ideas and thoughts and get them out of my head.”
Integrating that practice means, “I wake up with a clear mind. Then I feel like I have a clear direction of which of those things to do first.”
How India Flaunts Her Fire
India is Flaunting Her Fire right now by decolonizing herself in her life.
“It’s one thing to look at how outside systems oppress people, but it’s another to really take the time to see where are you doing that to yourself? Where are you using those tools on yourself?”
She’s applying this lens to both work and life, from taking vacations to asking “where do I still have an opportunity to be more myself?”
She admits that this is challenging work, but that it lights her up. “It funnels into everything that you touch, everything that you do. So it’s been worth it.”
Ready to Dive Deeper?:
How would your business change if you could attract new clients who shared your values, if you could get out of the hustle of content creation and focus on building meaningful relationships that turn passive followers into fans, fans into clients, and clients into lifelong referral sources?
Every month inside Pause on the Play® The Community Erica and India host a live Q&A session where you can get live, individualized feedback and support so you can do exactly that.
Membership gets you access to the live sessions, as well as replay videos from past Q&As, workshops, and community support.