How do you keep believing in the work when the money hasn't shown up yet?

 

How do you keep believing in your work when nothing has landed in weeks?

How do you finally get into your creative groove at 1pm, look up, and it's 2pm and it's school pickup, and you have to close the laptop and go be a whole person in the car line?

How do you come home from a day where the invoice didn't come through, make dinner, be kind, and not let a single bit of it land on your kid?

Those are the questions I want to sit with today. They're the ones I get asked the most and the ones almost nobody answers honestly.

I'm also going to give you something we do in week five of Tabernacle. It takes about ten minutes, and you can do it tonight.

You've been told to work on your mindset. FEEL wealthy, trust the flow, believe it's already yours, and the clients will come. And I've watched so many talented women sit inside that instruction for years, trying really hard to feel something their own eyes couldn't confirm.

Of course it's hard to believe in your work when everything in front of you is telling you not to. The Instagram post flopped. The launch got three replies. The number in your account.

Am I failing spiritually? Or am I looking at a very small, very recent slice of the evidence and drawing a conclusion about my whole life's work from it.???? (guilty)

Here's what happened to me this week.

I posted about my trial reels not hitting. Views were low, I said so out loud in an IG story, and I felt exactly the way you'd expect.

Then a message came in from a woman named Ashley. She told me she doesn't usually "like" my reels. She just watches. And she said my content kept making her think, "I wonder if Erica could help me." Then she said her psychologist, who used to be a graphic designer, looked at my page and said "Wow, she's the real deal," and followed me.

She'd been sitting there the whole time. Watching. Deciding. And I had no idea, because none of that shows up in a view count.

The evidence was already there. I just wasn't looking at it.

So here's the ten-minute thing.

Open a folder on your desktop and name it PROOF (I called mine the HAPPY folder) . Then go collecting, and collect two kinds of things.

The first kind is what people have told you. The message from the woman who still thinks about your class. The screenshot of someone asking your price. Your friend who said "I would pay for that" out loud at dinner. The comment. The reply. The student who came back a second time. Yes, use these on your website as testimonials. But save them somewhere private too, because this set is for YOU.

The second kind is your own material, and this is the part people skip. Your origin story. What actually got you here. The failures that came before the good part. The transformations you've personally been through, because those are almost always the exact ones your audience wants. Your mistakes. Your realizations. The moment your perspective changed. The client who had a real before and after.

That second folder is where your business actually comes from. The transformation you went through is what your audience is looking for, and the stories that built your point of view are what make people choose you over someone with the same certification.

 

This is what this newsletter is really about, by the way. The creative doing, the spiritual care, and the business decisions are not three separate departments. They're one thing. Your story is what sells your work.

So let go of unlimited money for a second and think unlimited resources instead. Guru Jagat called her whole world creation culture, and her point was that a genuinely creative person just keeps creating. There's no reason to clench, or protect, or move from scarcity. You let it come through you even when you don't feel ready or qualified.

And your Proof folder is the receipt.

 

Which brings me to Alba, my favorite proof of this from the cohort that just wrapped.

Alba left her corporate job in Zurich. Yes, she felt called to pour more power into her dream but she specifically said she "left out of self-respect". The universe more or less forced her hand, and she listened.

She came to me with the medicine already in her hands and nothing built around it. Her brand at the time was a delicate contour-line rose, thin fonts, pale neutrals. Pretty, and so wrong for a woman whose entire work is helping other women go from trapped to POWERFUL. So we rebuilt it in deep reds and burnt orange, with marks that looked like a human hand made them.

Her first circle filled. The next one filled too, and half that room had never heard of her before. Now she's leading a three-day pilgrimage to the cave in France where Mary Magdalene spent her last thirty years, and it's nearly fully booked.

None of that happened in a tidy order. She was tending to herself, and making the work, and making real business decisions, all at the same time. That's the actual answer to the question I opened with. You don't wait to feel abundant and then build. You build, and tend yourself, and decide, and the feeling arrives somewhere in the middle of all three.

 

Quick housekeeping.

The paywall is off this week and next. Think of it as Inside Tabernacle PTO. To my paid subscribers, you're the reason I get to do that, thank you. To everyone else, come in and stay a while.

Next Sunday I'm pulling the curtain back on something I caught this week. I listened to a woman sell me her program for a solid hour without pitching it once, and I went back and mapped exactly how she did it. You'll recognize it in about four seconds.

And on August 26 I'm running a free hour called Sacred Side Hustle.

It's the designer's version of everything above. How a personal brand actually gets built, piece by piece, so your work looks as serious as it already is.

Even with all the proof in the world you can still be passed over if the work doesn't look like it belongs to you. That's the conversation I want to close for you in an hour.

There are gifts too!!!! I'm not telling you what they are yet :) But you will want to join live to receive.

Save the date and come sit with me. jagoyoga.com