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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
This experience of tapping into cyclical energy, cyclical energetic alignment, being able to organize my time in this way around my menstrual cycle absolutely unlocked a superpower of productivity of being able to double down on the right things at the right time to get the best results. Welcome to Plenti. I'm your host, Kate Northrup, and together, we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level. Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty. Let's go fill our cups.
Voice Over:Please note that the opinions and perspectives of the guests on the Plenty podcast are not necessarily reflective of the opinions and perspectives of Kate Northrop or anyone who works within the Kate Northrop brand.
Kate Northrup:I was talking with a girlfriend the other day who is a very successful business owner. She makes a lot of money. She has a huge impact, and she is just stepping into allowing her body to take the lead as it relates to her time and energy management and the way she works. And it made me realize that if someone at her caliber in her stage of life and phase of business success doesn't know about sort of feminine energy, time and energy management principles or has yet to fully incorporate them. As much as I've been teaching cyclical planning and and talking about the menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle and the way we can work with our natural energetic ebbs and flows and pulse of life force that runs through everything.
Kate Northrup:Like, I've been teaching about that and talking about it and practicing it for a long time, but I continue to realize, like, this is not common knowledge. And so I'm gonna keep talking about it even though, missus you know, for any business owner out there, it's just a reminder that we may feel as though we have said something a 1000000 times. But the truth is, any one of us is talking to a very small portion of the population. And so so many people do not understand, especially women, do not understand how to work with the superpower of their bodies to get more done without burning out and to get more of what matters done while conserving their energy or while even renewing their energy. So what am I talking about?
Kate Northrup:I am talking about the most powerful time and energy management hack or strategy I've ever come across, and I didn't really come across it. This is where we all came from. Right? And so what I love about this particular topic, especially when it comes to productivity and time management, is that most time management systems or strategies, like, when we read about high performance, when we read about productivity, these systems are were usually created by someone's frontal lobe. Like, basically, someone's, you know, cognitive intellect, conscious cognitive intellect.
Kate Northrup:And so it's it's more from, like, a cerebral perspective. What I love about the system that I'm going to talk a little bit about today is that it is bay it comes from the inside. It is literally the origin of who we are as humans, as animals, as beings of the Earth, and it really connects to the part in all of us that is greater than all of us, kind of the grand mystery of the origin of life itself and how the universe and and certainly the planet planet Earth and the solar system work together. And so as opposed to being some system that somebody just made up, if this is a system that is already working in our bodies, and so when we use it as opposed to working against it, we get into a really beautiful momentum. So, first, I wanna tell the story of how I personally began to use and embrace cyclical living.
Kate Northrup:Some people call it cycle syncing, but essentially aligning my life with the ebbs and flows of my menstrual cycle, but also the lunar cycle. Now that may feel like certainly, when I first heard about it, I was like, I don't have time for that. I'm too busy. Right? Like, I got shit to do.
Kate Northrup:I'm running a business. I have a lot to do, so I can't reorganize my life according to my menstrual cycle. Like, that's ridiculous. Now, hilariously, I was raised by a woman who was one of the pioneers of teaching this work In my mom's book, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, the first edition of which came out in 1994, her chapter on the menstrual cycle actually dives pretty deeply into the 4 phases of our specific types of energy that we will experience over the course of the month and how each of the phases of the menstrual cycle has to do with a a particular hormonal experience that primes us for a particular kind of energy mentally, physically, emotionally, and how each of these four phases is uniquely suited for a particular kind of productivity. So, like, I kinda knew this because I was raised in that soup, and my mom really tried to just pass along the wisdom of the menstrual cycle, but I wasn't really into it until I well, actually, when when I got my period, I was devastated.
Kate Northrup:I think I was 12. I was devastated. I laid in bed and cried all day. I just had so much grief, which is really interesting. And I was like, mom, do not tell dad.
Kate Northrup:And also whatever you do, you are not allowed to invite your friends over and try to bless me. Like, I was just, like, a hard no on any kind of meaningful ceremony of, like, stepping into womanhood. I hope my girls will let me do something like that, but they may not, and I will fully respect it. Because we come to this we come to this when it is our time to come to it. My time was after I gave birth to my first daughter.
Kate Northrup:My period came back when I was 13 months postpartum, and I had had an extraordinarily rocky first year of motherhood and a pretty rocky pregnancy and a and a traumatic birth experience. So this was a really hard time in my life. And so I was 13 months postpartum, I was still nursing her, and I got my period back. And for the first time in my life as somebody who has a period, I was excited. I was 33 years old, and I was excited about getting my period for the first time ever, which was which was cool and unexpected.
Kate Northrup:And I became so focused and committed to paying attention to my cycle for the first time in my life. I mean, when Mike and I were dating, I remember, like, once a month, I would be like, Oh, God, I gotta go to Walgreens. Like, I have my period. I need to we need to go get something. And he was I remember this one time after that.
Kate Northrup:It happened several times. He was like, so doesn't that happen, like, every single month? Like, isn't there a way you could know when it's going to happen? And which is hilarious cut to us, like, years later running a company that with one of the core tenants is cyclical planning and, like, aligning your life with your menstrual cycle. But anyway, so I'm 33, get my period back.
Kate Northrup:I'm fully committed to honoring it, listening to it, learning everything I can about it, and I started a very simple journaling practice. And this journaling practice, every single night, I would just write down what the date was, what phase of my cycle I was in, what phase the moon was in, and how I felt energetically. So what what was my emotional energy like, my physical energy, my mental energy, and my sexual energy, and my creative energy? Like, what were these different kinds of energies like? Was I exhausted that day?
Kate Northrup:Was I fired up? Was I cranky pants? Was I, like, really happy, go lucky? Was I feeling, like, nostalgic? I would just kinda write a couple of quick notes down.
Kate Northrup:And what I noticed is that my postpartum anxiety and insomnia, which had been plaguing me since I had given birth, melted away. When I began to research the nervous system, I realized this is years later. I realized, oh, the reason that my own practice of cyclical awareness healed my postpartum insomnia and anxiety is because the dependability of my own cycle was making me feel safe. Like, I was look I needed, I was craving, longing for, sort of desperate for, quite frankly, in those early days of new motherhood. I was desperate for something I could depend on because everything in my life was completely different.
Kate Northrup:You know, I had a sick kid. It was like a whole it was just, oh my god. She didn't sleep. Nursing issues, mastitis, right, like, on and on and on and on. It's just, like, unpredictable thing after unpredictable thing.
Kate Northrup:And then my cycle came back, and it was something predictable. Like, I could kind of know how I was going to feel, give or take, at a certain time throughout the month. And it my body became something I could depend on, which was an incredibly healing experience given the fact that so much of what was difficult about that, the birth and pregnancy and early motherhood was that I felt like my body, what I was having physical experiences that felt out of my control, and they felt so profoundly unpredictable. And I had never had an experience before that time in my life where I couldn't overcome a challenge by just trying harder, working harder, putting in more effort, or being smarter or more capable. Like, my tools did not apply to the particular situation, and what actually was required was more stillness, more honoring, more inner listening, surrender.
Kate Northrup:And though that was a skill set that I just had yet to develop, but my my real entree into it was tracking my cycle, paying attention to what was going on in my body, and then actively organizing my life, particularly my tasks, around what kind of energy I was experiencing at any given time of the month, to capitalize on the hormonal experience I was having to be able to do the right kind of things at the right time to get the best result with the minimal amount of effort and energy expended. As a new mom, I had very limited energetic reserves. I was deeply, deeply exhausted, and I was running my business. I had this baby, and it was just a lot. And so I didn't have, like, all this extra energy and time to just be, like, going for it full, you know, guns blazing or, like, full bore in all of the areas of my life.
Kate Northrup:I just I, like, had this minimal collection of energy, so I needed to manage it better than I had ever done before. If you're a parent, you may also resonate with the idea, like, before I had kids, I thought I was busy. Like, if you had asked me in my twenties, I would have been like, yeah. I have so much going on. And I would actually tell people that I was had was, like, too busy to do certain things.
Kate Northrup:And I'm, like, I literally don't have any idea what I used to do with my time where I thought I was busy before I had kids. And so when I when I had my first daughter, and, you know, and other people might relate to this whether you're a parent or not. You know, I've had friends with with dogs with special needs where, like, suddenly it takes over their whole lives or they have a chronic illness or they're caring for a sick loved one. Like, there's a there's a lot of different scenarios where this happens, where suddenly all the things that you used to fit into your whole life now need to fit into a smaller percentage of time, and parenthood was one of those times. And so this experience of tapping into cyclical energy, cyclical energetic alignment, being able to organize my time in this way around my menstrual cycle absolutely unlocked a superpower of productivity, of being able to double down on the right things at the right time to get the best results.
Kate Northrup:And I will tell you that year so I started organizing my life like this and organizing my time like this in the fall of 2016. And by the end of 2017, we had had our 1st $1,000,000 year in the company, which was not by accident. I absolutely know that honoring this feminine cyclical energy in my body as the leader of our business shifted the way our business operated for increased efficiency, increased momentum, way less wasted energy. We were no longer wasting energy through pushing and grinding and having, like, random splatters of energy and productivity all over the place. It was like a much more focused, systematic, much more clear on roles and responsibilities and our offerings and our core messaging, like, forward momentum.
Kate Northrup:And I credit stepping into a new relationship with my own physical energy and my own cyclical energy with being the catalyst of that change. The other thing that I have experienced personally, and I've seen this happen with other people I've worked with, clients of ours, is that when we begin to honor the pulse of energy that is running inside our bodies, whether we have cycles or not, but when we begin to actually honor our life force and our energetic ebbs and flows and use what's happening in our bodies as information, as guidance for how to move through our days, as opposed to the way we've been conditioned, which is that our bodies are in the way of our greatest work. Right? That our bodies are something to overcome. And even many spiritual traditions condition people to believe that our bodies are a problem, and we are meant to like, the highest spiritual calling is to transcend the body.
Kate Northrup:In my experience, the the deepest spiritual experiences have been, for me going deeper inside my body. My friend, Megan Watterson, who's the author of Mary Magdalene revealed, says that our bodies are our soul's chance to be here, which I absolutely love. Right? That, like, the point of being human is not to transcend the body. The whole reason we're here is to experience being in a body and the joy and pleasure and majesty and fullness that comes from being fully in our body.
Kate Northrup:So from a productivity perspective and from a magnetism perspective, when we honor our cyclical ebbs and flows, whether that's in concert with our menstrual cycle or the lunar cycle or both, because all people are at different, you know, menstrual statuses in their life, some people never have a period, right, like, depending on your anatomy, your gender, all of those things. Right? But all of us have the lunar phases, and all of us have the greater kind of framework of the seasons here on planet Earth to guide us in the fact that there are 4 key phases to creativity. There are 4 key phases to a year. There is a season for springtime for planting, right?
Kate Northrup:There is a season for full bloom. There's a season for harvesting, and there's a season for laying fallow. Now the problem with a patriarchal work world is that we only honor the springtime and the summer seasons. We are supposed to be just planning and launching and planning and launching and planning and launching or planting and blooming and planting and blooming. Right?
Kate Northrup:But in nature, we don't look at a flower who that is, like, withering at the end of the season and going back to see it, and we don't look at that flower and say, like, what's wrong with you? Why are you not blooming all your lap long? Or we don't look at, you know, an oak tree up north, and when it's dropping its leaves in October November, we're not like, god, what a lazy ass tree. Like, what's wrong with you? We just know that, you know, deciduous trees just drop their leaves.
Kate Northrup:During that season, there's a time for letting go. There's a time for turning our energy within. And then during the winter, when the trees are not sprouting leaves, we also know that that is, like, completely appropriate and actually necessary in order to have leaves and acorns and whatever in the spring and then in the summer, Right? It's part of the life cycle of the tree. Part of the life cycle for all of us as humans is having built in phases for going for it and external visible productivity and results and then pulling back and a time for introspection, for rest, for recalibration.
Kate Northrup:And our bodies, if you're someone with a period, your body has this incredible embedded system already working that tells you exactly when during the month is the time for rest and reflection. Exactly when is the time for new beginnings? Exactly when is the time for being out there cross pollination, full bloom? And exactly when is the time every single month to pull things back, to bring things to completion and prepare for rest again? And so if you follow your menstrual cycle or if you follow the lunar cycle, there is a specific time for everything.
Kate Northrup:And when we honor that, and we begin to even pay 5% attention to it, we become more magnetic because we are living in integrity, in alignment with our design, with actually what the rhythm of life that is responsible for our lives. Every single human body came here to Earth through a womb, and what was responsible for the fertilization of or for the egg itself and conception was at some point, cyclical nature is embedded in every single one of our bodies, no matter our menstrual status, no matter our gender expression. And when we use this rhythm to organize our lives, we get a lot more of what matters done. We get a lot more momentum and progress, and we minimize time wasted, we minimize energy wasted, and we minimize friction. So we get a lot more done in a lot less time.
Kate Northrup:We get a lot better results with a lot less energy, and it is the greatest time and energy management hack of all time. So if you wanna get started with this and learn how, like, more of the nuts and bolts, First of all, you can get my book, Do Less, which talks all about this. 2nd of all, I have an upcoming master class on how to do it. More on that later. Make sure you're on our email list to get notified.
Kate Northrup:And then 3rd, there's an episode of Plenty, episode number 53, and that episode will go deeper into the nuts and bolts of how to actually do this. So you can listen in there, and that will be in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Plenti. If you enjoyed it, make sure you subscribe, leave a rating, leave a review.
Kate Northrup:That's one of the best ways that you can ensure to spread the abundance of plenty with others. You can even text it to a friend and tell them to listen in. And if you want even more support to expand your abundance, head over to katenorthrop.com forward slash breakthroughs, where you can grab my free money breakthrough guide that details the biggest money breakthroughs from some of the top earning women I know, plus a mini lesson accompanying it with my own biggest money breakthroughs and a nervous system healing tool for you to expand your abundance. Again, that's over at kate northrup.comforward/breakthroughs. See you next time.