Embracing Entrepreneurship: Magic and Spiritual Practices for Small Business Owners

Megan Hamilton (00:01.78)
I'm Megan Hamilton and this is the Embracing Enchantment Podcast. Well, hello there. You may notice that I am on the tail end of a little cold and so I sound a bit nasally and it's because it's been a busy couple of weeks over here in Embracing Enchantment Central. But recently I took a poll with

the folks on Instagram, and if you're curious, we are at Embracing Enchantment Pod. And I asked what folks would like the next solo episode to be about, and I put in a few options. And number one was what we're gonna talk about today, and that was tools and techniques and spiritual practices for small business owners. The second one was symbols. So we will do symbols at some point.

Not me immediately thinking about some kind of joke to use a drum kit, but anyway, symbols and signs. But today we're going to use small business practice techniques that I use. If you're an entrepreneur already or are thinking of starting your own business, then please take what feels good and leave what does not. So let's pull a card to set the tone.

Megan Hamilton (01:39.042)
you kidding me? All right. All right. Calm down, Taro. What the hell? We got the tower. If you enjoy visuals, you can head on over to YouTube and see the see the image if you if you would like. I will describe it to you. It is a tower. There is a lightning bolt coming from the sky.

that has broken the tower, a crown is falling off the top, flames are coming out, people are jumping out of the tower. But one thing to really pay attention to is the golden yods that are raining down. And what this means is that even though this change, this disruption, this shift, this, you know,

destruction of the Tower of Babel is happening, it is divinely led and it is for something better. And so I guess, you know, we could consider the state of the world and wonder what the F is happening and hope that from the rubble of the destruction of it all,

Something new, solid, more intentional, better built with our values will happen.

The thing about the tower is, so that's sort of, you know, collective. The thing about the tower is it's coming anyway. And if you know it's coming, what do you need to do in order to participate in the dismantling and the rebuilding instead of having it happen completely out of your control on a timeline that you don't love?

Megan Hamilton (03:52.846)
having the carpet pulled out from under you.

All right. I would have, thanks a lot, Taro, I might have chosen something different, but here we go. I also wanted to tell you that I had such a good time in Toronto a couple of weeks ago recording an Embracing Enchantment live for the Women in Media Network celebration of International Women's Day. My guest was Lori Deann, who I have talked about before, AKA Taro Lori. She is the bestselling author of Burn Your Shit, which I've mentioned many times.

and the upcoming big deck energy. I love it so much, which is currently in pre-sale. By the way, the best way to support an author is to buy their book on pre-sale. And that episode will be coming out April 4th. So if you are not yet subscribed, head on over and press follow so that you can get that episode when it comes out because it is fabulous. And it was so much fun to record it.

in front of a really positive and energetic group of folks. And I've also got a couple of absolutely incredible interviews in the pipeline. This is all pinched me stuff. This is the stuff I dream of. so can I just take a minute to thank you for being here? Because when I dreamed of this podcast, mid through the year and kept thinking of...

how I wanted it to go and where I wanted to pitch it. I ultimately pitched it to Sarah, who owns the Women in Media Network and she was game and she's very instrumental in the building up of this situation. And I have got all of my dream folks that were on my list that I've approached so far. I mean, don't get me wrong, the list is long. However,

Megan Hamilton (05:57.292)
I mean, what? And I'm not talking about, you know, your friends and stuff. I mean, some of these folks are my friends, obviously, which, you know, is pretty exciting in and of itself. But I mean, I mean, like, are you kidding me, people? So stay tuned for that. And all right, let's dive in. So why, why me? Why would I talk about spiritual practices?

that I use for small business owner and why would you listen to me? You don't have to. I'm giving you the opportunity to check in to see if this feels like if I'm the right person to be giving you advice. And so I'm going to give you a little bit of my background and then you can decide. So I have been running my public speaking business. Maybe you know that I do that. Maybe you don't. Since

2014. So we're just coming on 11 years and I launched it for real in 2008 and I left my full-time job in 2020. So I've been doing this full-time since then. I'm also a musician and I was an actor. So I've been running small businesses essentially since 1998 when I finished theater school.

Megan Hamilton (07:22.751)
In 2020, I took a program called Make It Work Online that allowed me to build my business in the ways that felt right to me. It was a very different road than most of the stuff I'd seen out there. And then I worked with Jericho Mandibur. If you don't know Jericho, they are one of the most magical people I've ever met. And they're getting their masters right now in...

I believe social work, but I coached their TEDx talk called the world needs weirdos. And if you have not seen that, head to YouTube and look it up. is actually let me make a note to I can also link it in the show notes. How about that's easier? It is extraordinary and they are a incredible force in my life and they helped shape.

sort of how I was going to be marketing. And then I took a program called Rebellious Success with Erica Tebbins. And Erica taught me that I could build the kind of business that I wanted to build. I could be myself, I could be weird, and I could be not weird, and I could make offers that felt really great to me and didn't feel icky. It meant that I didn't have to do.

corporate seminars with very dry material and sort of, you know, help people learn how to pretend to be confident, which, you know, is a whole other story. But what those three trainings specifically, and I've taken tons and tons of different programs, let me really lean into the fact that I did not have to put on a persona.

for this business of mine. And what that allowed me to do was lean into my full self in a way that I never had before. I think that that's one of the benefits of social media. And one of the drawbacks is that you can really learn a lot about somebody by how they're showing up. You can know intuitively, I trust this person or

Megan Hamilton (09:48.686)
I don't know. This something about this doesn't feel great to me. And then you can make your decisions accordingly. having to be on social media, having to talk about my business, because most of my business is online, meant that I had to get through a lot of old garbage and old stories about myself that otherwise would have, again, had me doing these boring corporate workshops.

where I help people figure out their how to drive sales and numbers and I mean I can do all that stuff and I do now that I've developed my business in the way that I wanted to I can show up as myself because I've already proven that I can do this work but I also get to pick and choose where I bring myself to which is great. I just decided at one point I don't want to feel icky about things anymore.

I don't want to feel, I want to make my own decisions. I want to show up in the way that I know is the right way to show up, not the way I'm expected to show up. And I want to stop masking, essentially. And if you are a neurodivergent person, then you might know what I mean when I say that. And so,

Megan Hamilton (11:14.653)
One of the things that I think is imperative to talk about before we get into the practices.

Megan Hamilton (11:24.733)
is, am I still recording? What the heck is going on here? The Riverside platform has changed a little bit, so I think we're still good. Hello, hello, hello, hello.

I think it's imperative to talk before we get into practices is that your business needs to be aligned with your values. That is my opinion. If that is not your opinion, then that is okay. But you may not love this podcast episode. If you're here, I'm guessing that you care about living a good life, that you feel a connection to magic and or spirituality and that you care about your fellow human beings and want to be a good person. Okay, that's the assumption I'm making.

as I start talking about this stuff. This is important because there are a lot of business gurus out there that will teach you how to make money. And you will make money, but you will be taking advantage of folks or taking advantage of yourself. So before we even get started here, my best advice, know why you're in business, know who you're doing it for and why, know what you sell and how it's

supports people? Even if it's just a fun thing, what is it bringing to their lives? Why do care about it? Why are doing any of this? And carry your values like precious diamonds and be explicit about them to attract the kind of people that you feel great to support.

And I talk about this in, another reason that you might take what I'm saying seriously is that I have run a program for small business owners. We're currently in our fourth cohort. It's called Thriving Visibility. And it brings my speaking training into the program.

Megan Hamilton (13:27.273)
as well as helping folks learn how to be more visible, which is one of the biggest challenges of small business ownership. You can be amazing at whatever it is that you do, whether it's making candles, whether it's giving tarot readings, whether it's being a lawyer.

Megan Hamilton (13:48.344)
but that's just a small part. Business ownership involves getting out there. It involves being visible. It involves networking and talking about your business and potentially social media. And those are the places where a lot of people really, really struggle. So this program that I developed and have been running again for a few years now helps folks develop

their confidence with visibility. And we end by writing a speech like a TEDx style speech. I'm also the speaker advisor at the TEDx here in Kingston, TEDx Queen's U. So I've done a lot of TEDx talks. what is helpful when you are writing a TEDx style talk about your business is it helps you really get clear on what it is you do.

why you do it, who you're doing it for, and why it's so important to you. So here's the first thing that I wanna talk about, shadow work. So there's another podcast episode about shadow work, and I have a workbook called Me and My Shadow.

I have been using ShadowWork in my business for years. I would say it's practically the number one spiritual, magical, know, tangible practice that has helped me grow as a person and consequently as a business owner.

And let me just take you back to 2024 for a minute. That was one of the hardest years of my life. I know why that was hard. Other people from the outside might see it and be like, what was so hard about that? I had a lot of difficulty in my business in the first four months of the year to the point where I wasn't sure if I was gonna have to quit.

Megan Hamilton (16:06.247)
I had been doing it at that point for a number of years. Everything had grown. Every year I was growing. The year before I had had the best year in revenue that I'd ever had. And so I just expected that would be how we went. And that did not happen.

In fact, was so challenging and

Everything that used to work was no longer working.

And what it did was force me to really ask myself, how much do I wanna still keep doing this? Because I had to reorganize so many things that I had already thought that I had come to grips with. My self-worth tied into how much revenue I could generate. My ability to help people.

because when you don't have clients, you're not helping people. And that's a huge part of what I really enjoy doing.

Megan Hamilton (17:20.333)
I should it's not that I was making zero money. It's just that I was it was not enough to you know sustain All of the things that you know are in my life. I have a child. have a husband I have a dog. I have a cat. I have a house. have a car I mean those listen, I know that those things are incredible things to have but I was

going into debt and trying to figure out whether or not this was sustainable and if the tides were going to turn. And not only that, I wasn't sure if I was good at this anymore as a result. And so like the tower, I needed that jolt in my life to be able to really

grind down and rebuild. I had to realize, what is money to me? I'm so fixated on all the time.

constantly chasing money goals, constantly trying to figure out where the next one, two, three, four, five, six, seven months of revenue are gonna come from.

And I realized...

Megan Hamilton (18:50.113)
that so many of the things that I thought were important, so many of the things that I thought I wanted, I didn't actually want.

And so you may recall that for me, the year 2025, the word of the year for me is magic. And I've been focusing on pentacles, but not pentacles in terms of money. And we're going to talk about money because money is really important to talk about. But pentacles in terms of my body and resources. But what resources really mean, not just like

having money to get resources. So that could look like relationships. That could look like a backyard garden. That could look like.

shed or tools or you know all kinds of things.

Megan Hamilton (19:51.016)
All of this and deepening my spiritual practice meant that on the other side of 2024,

I was.

I don't want to see a different person, but I was much more clear about who I am and what I want. And I already thought I was pretty clear about those things.

Megan Hamilton (20:23.201)
That's what I mean when I talk about the ups and downs of small business. That's what I mean when I talk about personal growth. like, growth often sucks. It's painful. It's digging up stuff that you really wish would just stay in the background in your subconscious. It's acknowledging mistakes you've made. And it's actively working.

to change the direction going forward. And this stuff is hard. It feels bad. I cried more last year than I have cried. I had a lot of very uncomfortable things come up for me and I had to work through them because I decided I am going for it. So that is the place from which

I really dug into my tools last year and these are the tools I'm going to share with you if you're a small business owner and you happen to be going through a difficult time. And if you're not either a small business owner or going through a difficult time, you might want to pick up a tool or a practice or two just so you've got it when things hit the rails because we know and my friend Shulamit Bear-Levtov

The entrepreneur's therapist says this all the time. Shit's gonna hit the fan. So do you wanna have a practice in place to manage it when it does? Or are you gonna be raw dogging it? The answer's the former, by the way. Raw dogging it. Man, is that not fun. All right, so back to shadow work. Like I said, business ownership is so much inner work. It's more than you think.

You're gonna have to show up when it feels hard. You're gonna have to stretch outside of your comfort zone to build, to dream, even to allow. Colin Bedell, who was a guest on the podcast once said, yeah, go ahead, manifest. Manifesting is awesome. But if you don't have somewhere to put all that you're trying to manifest, if you don't have the vessel to carry it, it's not gonna happen. What does that mean?

Megan Hamilton (22:52.311)
You got to do the work. You've got to be able to receive the gifts that are coming. And that is a tough, tough lesson to learn. You're to go through huge dips and you're going to go through huge milestones. And the thing about milestones that nobody ever tells you is they're scary. Your dreams coming true is scary. One of my clients,

Megan Hamilton (23:25.107)
who did a TEDx this past January, when she was going through a difficult time, and she's talked about this publicly so she doesn't mind if I'm saying it, when she was going through a difficult time and she was feeling so nervous about giving this TEDx talk, I said, it's actually really hard when your dreams come true because then you got to do it.

Megan Hamilton (23:51.054)
The other side of that is sometimes you'll reach those big goals of yours and then think, is that it? Have I peaked? And that's how I felt. I felt that for a lot of 2024. I thought, all right, I had like had this incredible year. had really worked with some amazing people. I had done such meaningful and wonderful work and I had, you know, earned

what I deserved for that work and then stuff was really a struggle and I thought, okay, well, I think maybe that's it. I don't know. And I had a reading actually with Sarah Faith Gaudestiner and you might know her as the Moon Studio and she'll come up later too. But one of the things she said to me in the reading and this was in April was

You know, things might not start to get better until November. And I was like, November? But it's April. Things are already really, really not great. But what that did for me was to help elongate my expectations and just say to myself, okay, well,

I can keep going, I can make this month work, okay, I can make this month work, somehow I made it all work. And I kept wishing I would get to the other side and be able to say, I made it through, here's what I did. And here I am saying to you, if you're struggling, I made it through, here's what I did. Take whatever works for you and leave what doesn't.

So back to shadow work. I will link to my free shadow work workbook. You can learn about what it is, but essentially it is getting very, very clear with yourself about who you are, what you want, what you need to actually deal with in your subconscious. By the way, this is not a one and done. This is forever going forward. But it doesn't mean that you are constantly.

Megan Hamilton (26:07.405)
getting into all of the junk in your subconscious because that would be terrible. It just means that when stuff comes up, you take a look at it, you analyze it honestly, and you are very clear and incredibly compassionate with yourself about what's going on and what needs to be done and what you're capable of doing because that's really important to pay attention to as well. Journaling.

So my practice involves journaling, shadow work, and tarot cards pretty much every morning.

For journaling, I write my commitment statement and here's mine. You can take it if you like it or you can do something new. I commit to trusting that what I put out will come back to me in expansive growth. I commit to action, to justice and to doing the next right thing.

So every day I commit and recommit to trusting that what I put out in the world will come back to me in expansive growth. And that growth could mean revenue, personal growth, abundance, opportunities.

but it means that I'm conscious of what I put out into the world because that is what comes back to me and more, right? Same with the principles of manifesting, which we will also be talking about in just a sec. For tarot,

Megan Hamilton (27:48.43)
I, so when I'm doing my journaling, I sort of free form after I write my commitment statement, I free form what's going on in my mind. Sometimes I talk about stuff that's happened. Sometimes I talk about how I'm feeling. Sometimes I try to figure out how I'm feeling about something. Sometimes I get an idea for a project. There are all kinds of things can happen when I'm journaling, but I let whatever wants to come out, come out. And then I move on to tarot.

And for me, I call in the seven directions and my ancestors and I have a little conversation. I'm always asking for justice, always asking for miracles and an end to suffering. And I pull three cards and a shadow card. So whatever the three cards are telling me, I journal it out. And then the shadow card is gives me a prompt.

of what I might take a look at in terms of my subconscious. So for example, today my shadow card was the fool, which was really interesting because that came to me in a horoscope yesterday.

to imagine the fool card and that is, you know, get the bravery to try the thing, to take the leap, to go for it. That, you know, that helps trigger some of the shadow work sometimes. And again, you do not have to do shadow work every day or it doesn't have to be intense, for example. OK, it's when you're feeling guilty, it's when you're feeling shame, it's when something really icky comes up. And and I highly recommend.

regime of shadow work therapy with a licensed mental health practitioner and somatic work. Those three things got me through last year. If nothing else those three things absolutely got me through last year and continue to get me through.

Megan Hamilton (29:56.33)
Another thing that is a tool is time, allowing time to happen. Things don't always happen on the timeline with which we would like them to happen. You very rarely will say, I want $10,000 and then in two seconds, $10,000 comes to you. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm saying that there's a lot of other stuff happening that you are aware or not aware of. And

Sometimes there are other things that need to be in place first before the thing you're manifesting or better will come to you. Something else that really helped me last year was ancestral work and working with altars. And I talked about that again in another podcast episode. And so learning about my family and learning about what everybody did meant that when I needed some support with something,

I knew I had somebody that I could call on to ask to help me with whatever it was. So you might remember that I found out that my great grandmother was an elocutionist, a public speaker. Pretty wild. So she might be the one that I call on when I have to give a presentation or a pitch or a talk or MC an event or do a live podcast episode.

and it helps keep me connected to my roots and also to the...

energy that I come from. Right? You want to see some strong people go back and look at your grandmothers and your great grandmothers. Take a look at some of the stuff they had to go through.

Megan Hamilton (31:48.429)
Whenever I'm feeling like life is a little bit tricky, I go back and I look at some of the things they had to do.

And I think to myself, I think I can handle this. I think this is not having to take a train in the cattle car in the dead of winter when a baby needs milk and then having to go out into the frozen tundra to find milk for a baby. Whatever I'm doing is not as hard as that. Rituals. Every new moon, I think about what I want to manifest into my life.

Megan Hamilton (32:29.587)
So that could be something as simple as, you know, a new chair. I don't know. I'm just making something up. And it could be something as complex as a new house. And then, you know, you've got a there's lots of different things that you can do for manifestation and.

actually in Lori's book, Burn Your Shit, she's got a manifestation exercise. There's all kinds of fun stuff you can look up on the internet in terms of manifestation practices. But I like to generally manifest on the new moon and release on the full moon. That's how I learned how to do those practices. And when I release, it is usually letting go of behaviors of

patterns of guilt, sometimes of relationships, sometimes things that are

no longer in your best interest or that you've come to realize are not supporting you in the way that you thought. They might have at some point and now they're not. So you can even do that with small business practices. I am going to let go. mean, at some point last year, the year before I took down all my online courses. I just felt like they were too cluttered. I loved them. I had put so much work into them, but I found that

I had to make a choice between trying to focus on those in terms of what I was offering in marketing or some of the more hands-on one-to-one bigger group sessions that I really enjoy doing. And so on a full moon, I took them all down from my website and it felt great. But what that also does is just keep you intentional about what you want.

Megan Hamilton (34:37.727)
and what you don't want. And we don't always take the time for that. And so every year when I'm getting ready for the new year, and there's a lot of different ways you can look at the new year. For example, January 1st, that's often when I start my business planning, but the start of Aries season, which is my season, is a lot of people's new year. It's the start of the astrological new cycle.

And then some people look at Halloween or Samhain as which is New Year. So there's lots of different places that you can start again. And then a lot of people really relate to September as a fresh start. There's always time to to start again. But what I like to do is get a calendar ready and I put all of the important dates on the calendar. And I like to have a paper calendar month by month in front of me. It's right over here. I've got the new moon and the full moon.

what times they happen. I've got pagan holidays, equinoxes, other important dates, and those help me because I make decisions based on those. When I do a shadow workshop, it's gonna be on a new moon or a full moon. I try to do it on the full moon or around the full moon as much as I possibly can. And that's how I make some of my decisions.

Megan Hamilton (36:03.339)
a vision board.

a vision board helps you tap into what you'd like your life to look like. And yes, you can do the fancy vacations to wherever, if that's something that feels really exciting to you or the new car or the house or whatever it is. But I also like to do...

Megan Hamilton (36:34.029)
can I say this? I pick colors that I really respond to because for me, manifesting, visioning, and vision boarding is all about tuning into how I want to feel.

So what you might do if you're like, I'm gonna manifest a trip to Jamaica.

You might say to yourself, why do I wanna manifest a trip to Jamaica? I want to feel abundant, I want to feel relaxed, I wanna feel like I'm treating myself, right? So then we tap into why there's certain things that we want and what they mean to us. And then for me,

After I do that with the vision board or the manifesting, I try to let go of the specifics and instead, and not every time, I lean into the feeling. And that helps me understand what I'm actually looking for. So again, ease, treating myself, relaxation, sunshine, the Caribbean ocean.

I mean, you know, it's hard to replicate like the whole experience of Jamaica into like something you could do at home. But what it lets you know is what you're looking for and what you're craving, because if you can't manifest and listen, you know, there's so many people who are like, you've got to use the specific language when you're manifesting. You've got to pretend as if it's already here and talk about it as if it exists. And yes, absolutely. But there's not, I don't.

Megan Hamilton (38:25.281)
The way I work with magic and the way I work with spirituality is there's not really a wrong, right? Like you can fuck up and then come back. It's okay. You can forget to, if you've called in the seven directions, you can forget sometimes to release them and you're not gonna like mess up the rest of your life. That's how I see all of this. That's the frame.

through which I live all of my practices because otherwise it is just way too stressful.

And so with manifesting, again, it's just really important to know how you feel about something and why. One of the things I loved recently was Carmen Spagnola, who was a guest, talked about, and I think this is on Instagram, the spirit of her business. And she created an altar for the spirit of her business and asked the spirit of her business,

what it needed from her, what it wanted. And I loved that because sort of like, so another program that I have is called Arcana Pathfinder and that's where I combine coaching with tarot. And what the tarot piece does is it takes away the pressure of the like focus on whatever it is that you're trying to do and puts a lens and a framework.

through which to look at it. So for example, if you're like, I don't know how to take the first step in my business. And let's say you pull the two of swords, you'll know, okay, you need to make a decision. Again, you're up against one thing or the next thing you need to need to make a decision and that will kickstart the rest of the path.

Megan Hamilton (40:24.799)
And so I love the idea of asking the spirit of your business, what does it need? What does it want? What would it have you do? It takes away the pressure of you having to figure it out all the time, even if it's just a mental metaphor. Just make it witchy. That's fine. It's fun. And you might actually do it. Now we're gonna start talking about money. And this is such, this is such a, this is such a big topic. So.

Megan Hamilton (40:53.781)
in most of the circles in which I run.

we would call ourselves anti-capitalist.

Megan Hamilton (41:04.533)
And a lot of people in those groups hate money. Money's evil, money's this and that. I don't see money that way. I see money as an energetic exchange. Now, listen, people need money. Money, we live in capitalism. We don't actually have that choice.

you need money to eat most of the time. I mean, you might live off grid and like absolutely have no need for money. Maybe. I don't know that that's possible in this day and age.

Money is in my mind, that you bring in through, know, so like if you're doing good work, it's going to bring in good energy and then you get to then choose where that energy goes. So when I'm thinking of manifesting, if I'm thinking of money, I'm thinking more of what I'm going to use the money for. So, I mean, I love

to support other small businesses whose work I align with, or that's fun, I mean, not or, and, that could be fun or really helpful, or they're doing good work in the world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I love that. I love having enough money to support mutual aid. One of my favorite things is when I know I've got extra money hanging around.

You know, when I say this, I'm just saying like, we're fine, but we are not like.

Megan Hamilton (43:02.761)
money is still something that we have to focus on, that we have to be intentional about. But if I've got an extra 20 bucks and somebody that I love is like, hey, this person is trying to make their rent and there's some kind of mutual aid link or a GoFundMe, I love going in there and putting that 20 bucks in there. It's one of my favorite things to do. Or, you know, if there's catastrophes happening around the world or I don't know, like genocides.

then you can support the feet on the ground folks that are actually bringing relief to the suffering that's happening. That's how I see money. People will talk about money flow and money mindset and scarcity mindset and all of those things are really important.

but a lot of them can be solved with shadow work.

Megan Hamilton (44:00.972)
Okay, that's what I'm gonna say about that.

one of the things that has been really fun and I actually did it today and I've taken a few different spiritual courses on money. I have taken, I did one with Biddy Tarot. I'm not following Biddy Tarot any longer. She made a post about how she didn't want to be political and I just thought to myself, this is not the right time in history for this. And so I took a break. I'm not saying I'll never go back, but just did not.

fit with where I'm at right now in the world. Another course I took was called Money Alchemy and that was with Sarah Faith Gaudestina who I referenced earlier. I actually wrote to Sarah to see if, because I didn't see it on the website anymore, I wanted to send a link and it's down but she, so I said, I asked her if something else was coming and she said there absolutely is and to get on her newsletter for the Moon Studio.

if you are interested in whatever workshop or course is coming up again. So I will be sure to link that in the notes. And I also did, I did another one.

Megan Hamilton (45:15.145)
And I can't remember right now. But the one I did today was from Molly Donlin, who was a guest recently. And it's called it's a money bowl exercise. And it is so much fun. And you can find it on YouTube and I will link to it. And what it does is it just gets you thinking about the kind of fun stuff you could do in your life. And it's, you know,

often you'll need money to do it. And so, you know, maybe there's like a tea creator that you just really would love to try their teas, but it's kind of, you know, outside of your budget. So you might think about manifesting that or keep going back to vacations because we seem to...

always want to manifest a vacation, I can tell you as well that...

Vacations aren't, vacations are fun, don't get me wrong, but you gotta get your life straight in order to really enjoy a vacation, in my opinion. Right, you can escape for a few days, it's fun, but you're still in the same situation you were in before. Anyway, I don't wanna yuck anyone's yum about vacations. Let's just talk about marketing for a minute. If you're not,

supporting small business owners as a business owner. So I'm speaking right now to the business owners and entrepreneurs. If you're not supporting small business owners, it's probably really easy for you to get into the habit of thinking about talking about small business ownership because you're probably following a lot of small business and entrepreneurial influencers. And what I've noticed with folks who don't

Megan Hamilton (47:16.269)
have products or services for small business owners, they might talk about small business ownership more than you might expect because they're surrounded by it. So you wanna be intentional in your marketing about who you're following, but also what you're putting out and is it speaking to the people that you're trying to reach?

Megan Hamilton (47:47.246)
With marketing, there's a lot of marketing that works, but it is unethical or extractive or manipulative. And I have stopped following some big small business influencers because I realized at some point, this feels icky. And I'm talking...

people who you would otherwise think are aligned values-wise.

spiritual leaders.

Megan Hamilton (48:27.755)
Yeah, and at this point, I don't care. I'll just unfollow. I'm like, yeah, no, I don't wanna, this doesn't, I don't like this. I'm not gonna follow it anymore. But also weirdly, it is hard to do that sometimes, especially for the big ones, because you're like, what am I gonna miss? And then you're like, it doesn't matter. I'm gonna miss stuff that is misaligned anyways. So I like to be very intentional about what I let in.

in terms of who gets to influence me in terms of how I run my small business.

Megan Hamilton (49:12.543)
And I think that's the gist of it. That is a good place to start. so shadow work, journaling, tarot, money workshops from spiritual practitioners, ancestral work.

Megan Hamilton (49:33.492)
manifesting with the moon and visioning and vision boarding, I would say those for me are the key pieces that really got me through what felt like a very difficult year for me last year. And not only that, I feel so much stronger, so much clearer on the other side of all of that. And also,

If you're in the struggle, things turned around for me. I'm definitely not where I was. It's better. In all the ways. On the other side. And I'll leave with this. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart and it is not for everyone. And that sucks, but it's true. But for those who are willing to give it a try, in my opinion,

It has been some of the most rewarding personal growth I have ever experienced. I see failure differently. I don't actually think of failure as failure. I think of it as a learning opportunity. I have a different mindset around money and scarcity. I understand why I do this more deeply and it's meaningful and deep work.

Megan Hamilton (51:01.545)
And I just realized I should have put this in my notes, but I am going to be running a new cohort of Thriving Visibility starting in September of 2025. And I will link to that in the show notes as well, if you're curious about the program. And you should also know that the program features workshops from Colin Biddell, Amy Miranda, Ilona Pamplona.

Tara Lori, Erica Tebbins, and Shulamit Bear-Levtov. There's a lot of incredible stuff in the program. Okay, you can find all the information and takeaways from today's episode in the show notes or at embracingenchantment.com. Subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts and we'd love for you to leave a review. You can also leave a voice note at embracingenchantment.com and we might feature it.

in a future episode. You're going to want to make sure you're subscribed because we have some exciting episodes coming up with Tarot Lorry, episodes with the psychic medium and a scrying expert, and an episode with one of the most well-known people in Esoterica and Witchcraft today. You can catch up on previous episodes where we talk with Colin Bedell and Cult Mother, episodes about Tarot, human design, the question of whether magic is real,

and so much more. Until then, here's to building an enchanted life. Bye.