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Welcome to The Guri Show, your go-to podcast for retreat leaders, coaches, and transformation seekers who are ready to create thriving businesses while embracing self-healing, wellness, and personal growth. Hosted by Guri Kaur, this show is your space to learn how to design life-changing retreats, confidently sell your offers, and master the mindset shifts needed to create abundance and impact.
Each episode dives deep into actionable strategies, personal insights, and soulful practices that combine business growth with inner transformation. From self-healing techniques and wellness rituals to powerful tools for scaling your coaching programs, we’ll help you align your purpose, your profits, and your peace.
Whether you’re building your first retreat or scaling to six figures and beyond, The Guri Show is your space to dream big, transform yourself, and empower others to do the same.
Tune in, grow your business, heal your soul, and create the legacy you’re destined for. Let’s thrive together!
Guri Kaur (00:00)
8 years, 8 lessons. This is the kind of podcast episode that I wait the entire
to record because it talks about my lessons, my experiences that happen. also, in a way, subtly communicates that how many years I've spent in this space doing this work that I absolutely enjoy doing and I absolutely love. So this time it's 8 years.
eight lessons. Yes, I completed eight years in this industry in this space back in November or maybe late October. I'm absolutely thrilled to share my lessons, eight lessons with you today. Okay. I'm going to go over the unfiltered truth about what I got wrong and what creates quantum leaps. Okay. So stay with me. Welcome back, beautiful leaders to the Guri Show.
and I hope you enjoy today's episode.
Today is an unfiltered leader-to-leader download of the eight most vital, painful, and exhilarating lessons I've learned over eight years of building the soul-led empire. That's how I put it. I'm talking about the truth that sits beneath the perfectly curated grid or the perfectly created curated
perfectly built website or homepage or just about anything. The truth about messy launches, the mistakes, the quiet strategic pivots, the mindset, everything that actually unlocked the quantum leaps in revenue and impact. Now this isn't just a list of business tips. These are identity shifts.
These are the moments where I had to drop an old way of being, maybe the employee, the perfectionist, and step into the strategic sovereignty of the CEO. So if you're struggling right now with visibility, or if you feel like you're running on a business treadmill that's going nowhere, pay close attention. I'm giving you the map I wish I had on day one.
Okay, let's dive into the eight lessons for eight years of sole-led business growth.
Lesson number one, the CEO's first job is system design, not delegation. I'm seeing so many people talk about delegation
I promote it too. say hire your first VA delegate, but the first job is not delegation.
first job is system design. It can be in the most smallest format, like maybe just a small structure, but it has to be designed. System has to come first. System design has to come first before delegation and outsourcing. Okay, so let me talk about this one limiting belief that I see in this space a
That is,
I can't afford to hire yet, so I have to do everything myself. Now, I have to tell you that I've spent years drowning in tasks,
scheduling, building, rebuilding my pages, sales pages, website, home pages, landing pages, editing my own content, going through Canva, trying to learn from what other people are doing and trying to build it without any skill set and also building my own skill set on the go, but also just trying to recreate what other people are doing.
There's one thing that was pretty clear that the others who were skilled at that thing, I could not replicate their thing because I wasn't skilled at those skill sets. Be it design, be it promotion, marketing, just name anything. So I thought that
delegating meant hiring a VA to take over my chaos. And it's not just VA, it's...
anybody, social media marketer, social content strategist, just anybody who you're seeking, maybe a landing
developer or a copywriter. And I've done it multiple times in the beginning years. So yeah, just talk to me, talk to me about anything and I'll tell you I've done it before. Okay, so, but what was happening was that even though I was building these things, trying to do it all, ⁓
And given the fact that I wasn't skilled at that time in most of the things, I'm not sure how many of you know that I was an economics teacher before. And I quit my job back in 2017. And then I started my own business, started becoming a coach. And I was like, OK, I think I have to learn everything on my own. I have to do everything on my own. So.
Nothing, going back to the story, nothing was working because I wasn't skilled at anything, because I wasn't my graphics, even though I tried to copy from what others were doing or what was working in the market. It wasn't working because my, the depth wasn't coming through, right? So I started hiring. I started hiring a VA I started hiring social media.
content creators, and email marketers and copywriters. Not everybody at one go, but maybe thinking that if a we is not able to solve my problem, then maybe a copywriter would be able to, or a social media content creator might be able to solve my problem. But none of it worked, and let me tell you why.
So the bottleneck in your business the problem that you have to hire someone or not.
it's the lack of process. The problem is not whether you, ⁓ know, the problem is not your schedule. The problem is not
The problem is not your mindset. The problem is the lack of process.
And I'm talking about this in the context of delegation. So, yes, in other areas, your mindset, your schedule might be a problem or something to you. You need to acknowledge or discuss. But in the context of delegation and in the context of system design, your schedule, your mindset and everything else, your skill set is not a problem. The problem is the lack of process.
So let me say that. In other
words, you cannot delegate chaos. You must first, and that's my first lesson to share with you, you must first create standard operating procedures and systems. So think of it like this. ⁓ There's a book, I'm sure you've heard of it, Atomic Habits by James Clear. And in the book it says,
something like this. You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. My massive shift was realizing I had to create the manual for my business before I hired the team. I needed to document. How does a
so for instance, how does a client get on boarded? You can't just leave it to someone else. You can't just tell someone, I want you to create a onboarding sequence. No, you have to,
you have to create a process that, okay, when someone signs up, they should receive an email, then this thing, they should receive a form, XYZ. How do I plan a podcast episode? So let's say now, in today's time, I record the podcast, but someone edits it for me. So what does the process of editing look like? Well, I did it first. I edited two of my episodes,
I recorded everything using a tool. I kind of created a PDF out of it. And let me know if you want to know my tool. Put it in the comments or DM me. I'll share my tool set with you. So I created a step-by-step guide. And then I shared that guide with my editor that I want you to follow exactly these steps. So what it does is then, one.
the all the back and forth conversation that has to happen between her and me if I hadn't shared the PDF with her or the steps with her would have been like crazy because then I would be asking her to change stuff you know change the font change the color change this change this light should look like that XYZ but now that I have a process for it the steps
minimized and the outcome is more efficient and it's faster. So I hope you get the idea. Now once I created the systems delegation became a joy. It wasn't handing off a messy plate it was handing someone a perfectly documented recipe. Right? So
your action step is not to hire
it is to spend the next week documenting the top three tasks that eat your energy. Breathe that in for a moment. So I'm not asking you hire your first week, no. Document the top three tasks that eat your energy. And once it's documented, the delegation becomes simple. Okay, let
know.
In the comments, once you're done with watching and listening to this episode, let me know in the comments which lesson stood out to you the most, which lesson you absolutely loved. And if you do that, I have a surprise for you. So let me see. Let me see which, how many people come up with their favorite lesson and are up for the surprise.
Lesson number two, imperfect action is your most profitable asset.
I so many people say or think like that, think along the lines of this. I must wait until this offer or this sales page or this video is perfect before I release it to the world. Now, perfectionism
just self-sabotage in a tailored suit. I know you've heard this before and I know that you also might agree to the fact that
Perfectionism is nothing but self-sabotage, right? But the reason why I am sharing this is because this is the hard lesson. I used to delay things, thinking that once they are perfect, then only my people are going to accept me. Then only I'm able to, I would be able to find my people. But it was just my ego trying to keep me safe and procrastinate things.
So let me put it this way. Perfectionism is the ego's way of keeping you safe from feedback, from criticism, and from the messy truth of real world results. I want to bring in this phrase here, the beta test mentality. Okay. When I first launched my mentorship program, it was not perfect. The sales page was clunky.
The workbook was a Google Doc. I was terrified, you know, but I launched it anyway. If I had waited six more months for perfection, I would have been six months behind on client results, cash flow, and most importantly, data. And data in today's times, you know, is the key. It's one of
key, actually, not the main key. So going back to what I was doing, well, in the...
One thing I want to make clear at this point is I'm talking about eight years and eight lessons. So at any point, if you think that the stories or the flow doesn't add up, it's probably because I might be talking about something that I learned two years ago as opposed to eight years ago. So I don't want you to focus on the timeline, but I do want what I do want you to focus on is the lesson and the takeaway.
Okay, four years ago when I was launching my mentorship program, this happened. I was like, I'm not gonna wait anymore. I'm gonna put it out. But if you go back eight years ago, yes, I was procrastinating things. I was caught up
the learning trap and the perfectionist trap.
Right, so going back to where I was, imperfect action gives you data and data is truth. Perfection gives you zero data, only anxiety. And the difference between a successful, a profitable, or if you want to call it, a six-figure business owner, whether you are into retreats, whether you are into course creation or any other kind of ⁓ business, and a six-figure dreamer.
is often measured in how quickly they're willing to put out the ugly first draft. And yet, and also, yes, you have to improve on it. You have to take that feedback, collect data, and then improve on it. But do not
perfection based on assumptions. If you put out something very simple today, maybe it's just a text-based post.
and you find that people are engaging to it. People are taking action. It's data. It's telling you that the messaging is working, but it doesn't mean that you don't go out and try other things, other formats, or improve on the messaging. It doesn't mean that that's the end of the world. Like you nailed it. Now you're going to have $1 million just from that one post. No, you have to go out and put that message out in front of different people.
more people in different platforms, in different formats, so that you can test further that, ⁓ if I want to go from here to where I want to be, what's actually going to stick out for longer? Anyway, so don't seek perfection, seek feedback. Launch the beta, get the data, then get it right and prove.
lesson number three the path to expansion requires detachment and I know that so many of us get detached to get attached to the outcome the process that we forget that
behind or underneath or walks along with detachment. have to keep, you have to attach yourself to goal and then detach yourself from them to keep moving forward.
So something like this comes up for people. I must control the outcome to be successful. We are often so personally identified with our offers and our results that when something fails, a low converting launch, a retreat that didn't fill out, then didn't sell out, a challenging client, a bad review, it feels like a catastrophe.
catastrophic failure of us. Let me talk about one spiritual attribute here.
Don't let one failed launch, one bad client, or one logistical nightmare define your worth or stop your movement.
Detachment allows you to extract the lesson without internalizing the word. And this happens not just in our workspace or in our business space, it also happens in our relationships, like something that our child said to us, something that our parents said to us or told us that we didn't like, maybe a fight or an argument with your partner.
made you feel like you're not good enough and then you internalizing those words and you keep connecting those words with your self-worth and you internalize the basic self-belief that you're not enough and you keep
you know, reiterating the fact that this person said this to me because I am not good enough. However, if you just separate yourself, if you just separate or detach yourself from the whole thing and you say something like, well, what this person said is coming from their own set of rules. It is something coming from their own set of beliefs. Yes, this person is hurt and we can solve this. We can sit and talk about this matter.
and come up with a solution, it has
to do about me. Yes, it has something to do about me, but not about what I believe about myself. So, yes, let me switch back to, well, I was looking at the airplane going in the sky and through the window anyway.
Guri Kaur (18:04)
So, detachment allows you to extract the lesson without internalizing the word. Because your mission is bigger than your mistakes. Look at the mistake, extract the SOP change, go back to lesson 1, and move on. Don't get hung up on one mistake. The market rewards persistence, not flawlessness. Now, that brings
to lesson number 4.
Another exciting lesson. Your next level is hidden in your current incomplete answers.
I see, I hear this a lot. I must have 100 % clarity and all the answers before I can confidently charge higher prices or lead a retreat.
Now
This is the classic student mindset trying to run a CEO business. What I want you to acknowledge here is embracing the void. If you wait for absolute certainty, you will wait forever
the world moves too fast, my dear. The job of a soul led leader, the job of us all is not to be a know it all, but to be an expert question asker.
and a courageous space holder. My biggest shifts came when I launched programs and retreats that felt slightly beyond my current capacity. I remember I launched this weekly membership once one and a half years ago, and I didn't have all the answers, but I learned it on the way. When I launched it, I didn't expect 50 people to sign up, but they did. And once they did, that's when the job became to
understand what's gonna happen next. And now you might be thinking that, but you should have figured it out before. Yes, now I know. But if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have had clarity the clarity that I have today. I remember the retreat I once hosted and it felt like just beyond me because the venue was so expensive.
But I was like, no, we have to go in and we have to create. We want to give this experience to our our participants. The truth is, you don't have all the answers yet, and that is your biggest advantage because you're agile, you're in the process and you're learning alongside
So your expertise is not the sum of what you know.
Your expertise is the depth of the transformation you guide your people through.
Your client needs the next 10 % of the answer. And you already hold that. Launch the thing. Your expertise will meet you on the road.
That being said, let's move to lesson
five. Pivot when needed, but always from the root.
Changing direction doesn't mean that you failed at the last direction. No. Changing direction means you are responsive to data and growth.
Let me talk about this retreat pivot for a second. For years, my business was purely one-on-one coaching and online courses. I think that's the case with like so many of coaches out there. It started with one-on-one and switched to
online courses. Well, some people get stuck at one-on-one and it's not at all scalable. Initially, well, it is successful. I still have one-on-one clients, but I felt a ceiling. I felt that the deep somatic energetic shifts required physical immersion and the market data was there. My clients were asking for a deeper connection. My soul was asking for richer experiences.
So I pivoted and I added luxury retreats to my services. Not only that, I added retreats to my coaching offer. This wasn't a random decision or anything. It was a pivot from the root of my purpose, from my mission, which was to create, deep and sovereign shifts And that still holds true. The retreat format was simply a better vehicle for that core.
So, look at your data. If something feels heavy, exhausting or misaligned, It could be your pricing, your niche or your format. Use the information you have now to inform the path forward. Do not let attachment to an old structure choke your growth.
with that being said, let's move on to lesson number six.
Strategy is dual track - massive action and visionary seeding.
Guri Kaur (23:07)
my God, I love this one. Okay, I was talking to one of my friends who I met on an event recently and last year and we were hanging out on the Zoom call and I told her, we were having this conversation, great conversation and somewhere in the middle of the conversation, she said, sorry, I told her that ⁓
you know, start with something that works, like create something, create the bridge that works. And then think about your two year or five year vision. And she was like, really? I'm like, here's the thing. Most people start with their six year or five year vision, and then they come reverse-engineer it back to
what they need to do now. What happens with that approach, and I'm not against it, I do it myself too, but hear me out. What happens is that when you start from a two-year vision and you condense it down to now, you almost suddenly feel that you have a lot of tasks to cover or cater to, or you have a lot of things to cater to.
everything suddenly becomes overwhelming. for instance, let's say you're doing some vision boarding and you're working on this on this huge two year goal and you break it down into milestones and suddenly you feel my God, in three months, I need to be at this. I need so let's say you are at zero right now.
and your $1 million two-year goal brings you down to having at least 10k months in the next three months. And suddenly you're like, oh my god, how am I supposed to be at 10,000 months in just three months? And that's when the overwhelm kicks in. That's when the self-doubt kicks in. That's when the procrastination kicks in. Everything starts to tell you that you're not going to be able to do it. So then what's the...
What's the solution? Well, think about what you can do in the next three months and build that thing, right? Build that one process. For example, I'm going to write one chapter or I'm going to launch this program in the next three months. I'm going to launch it.
with the minimum tech involved. And I'm going to see if it's working. Well, do it. Start talking about it in the first month. Put out the offer in the second month. Get some enrollments in the third month. Get people to sign up and watch the thing and go through this journey with you in the third month.
And if you in the three months, the whole energy is out, the whole journey is out. And now you'd have some evidence that this thing works. Start from there. Now, when you have something that works, then go on and build your vision and then see, okay, I have something that works. I can build my SOPs around it. I can hire more people. I can weed out the
⁓ the procrastination, the perfectionism from it. And now I have this product that works and I'm going to double down on it. So can make that money faster. That's it. That's all you have to do. So massive action and visionary seeding
I hope that sits well.
So I'm going to give you another way, which I like to call dual track strategy. So there's track A, which is start small, take massive action. For instance, if you have a 90 day launch goal, let's say you want to launch a new course, a retreat sale, that is your hyper focused massive action sprint.
You go all in on content marketing, messaging and sales for that finite period. This is your immediate cashflow focus. Track B. Start big, take small actions, which I like to call the visionary seed. Now imagine a big, audacious visionary goal. Let's say a Ted talk, the first million, a book deal, buying a retreat center in
Mexico or Sedona. Now this is three years down the line or two years down the line or five years down the road. You cannot take massive action on this daily, but you must take small consistent
Want the TEDx talk? Well today's action is following three TEDx speakers and researching application dates. That's it.
won the million, today's action is revising your personal budget to reflect the CEO who holds a million. Now you might be thinking like, well, Guri, that's reverse engineering, right? But you told in the beginning that reverse engineering doesn't work. I didn't say that. What I said was work on the smallest thing or the creates the smallest thing that is going to work for you and focus on just that. And once it starts working,
then link it up to your bigger goal. Then go, okay, how can I scale it? How can I make it bigger so that I hit my goal in less than two years?
So if you have any questions about this, please DM me and we can always sit and see what's gonna work for you. But the impact here is that you must be working if you could. Well, I try to do that. And I always do that. It's not like I try to do that. I always do that. That's actually my go-to strategy. So this is something that I share with my paid one-on-one clients.
Now that we are having this conversation, I'm sharing it with you as well. And I love to share it with people anyway. So it's not like you have to be my one-on-one client. personally work on both tracks simultaneously. And that's just me. It doesn't have to be you. OK? The massive action keeps the lights on and validates the process.
Small visionary actions create the energetic trajectory for my soul's destiny.
Lesson number seven. that's we're getting close. That's number seven. The currency of your brand is consistency and truth.
and so much more beyond that actually. Now, what people think is that they need a complicated marketing strategy and a viral post to be successful.
Well, you don't. What you need, number one, well, you need a lot of things for creating a brand that stands out, that works. But today in this episode, I'm going to point out one thing.
You need a memorable, relatable, and consistent personal brand built on your core truth and your core values. Your brand is the emotional promise you make to your audience. The greatest thing I've ever did was stop trying to be the perfectly polished coach and start being Guri, Guri Kaur, the woman, you know, the woman who mixes spiritual
spirituality, identity, and strategy. Who is vulnerable about her past, is fiercely honest about what works, and provides depth. I think one of the things that make me me, and one of the things that I always wanted for my personal brand to have, is the depth. I never share.
surface level stuff. I say never, I'm not talking about reals. I'm not talking about, ⁓ this four line post that I did on Facebook. Whenever I'm sharing, I'm sharing bigger. I'm sharing deeper. And that's one of the values that I want my brand to hold. And because I have those values. So if you ever get on any of my workshops or if you ever signed up for a training or a course, you will see the depth in it.
you will see that I overshare sometimes.
We are talking about brands. let's, wanted to give you another, another nugget, golden nugget actually is Nike. When Nike was defining their brand, brand values or, you know, the brand concept, the first thing that the the founder thought about is I want people to associate Nike.
with greatness. And so then they found all these associations that people related with or associated with greatness at that time. One of the example is Michael B. Jordan. While people related and I'm talking about in the sports space, people related Michael B. Jordan with greatness. And so when Nike associated with Michael B. Jordan, they found that people people associated greatness with Nike as well. And today we buy Nike because we know that's going to be a great product.
So people buy you your associations, not just your formula. They buy the way you make them feel seen, challenged and inspired.
So here's what I'm going to leave you with. Ask yourself, is my content making me
relatable? Is my content making me stand for my values and my associations? Or is it making me inaccessible or making me stand out or stand for the values that I don't even associate myself with?
So the most powerful content is the simple truth you are processing in real time.
And that is the magnetic pole. Okay. Well, I think that's lot of nuggets in one episode, feel. I feel like that's a lot of nuggets in one episode.
Okay, now.
Lesson number eight. Value is measured in client results, not time spent. ⁓ my god, that's just blowed my mind. Okay, the limiting belief here is the more I work on the offer, the more valuable it is. Well, this ties back to the martyr identity.
The real measure of value is how fast and effectively your client gets a result. And I can tie it back to everything we discussed before, like all the seven lessons that we discussed before. But for this one, I'm gonna try to separate it out from everything else.
So this is also the productization mindset. I don't know what's going on with my pronunciation these days. productization. Okay, I can say that. The goal is to create something that helps your clients get results faster. This is where your system's SOPs frameworks, like the SIIISOUL™ method, becomes immensely valuable.
They are shortcuts to the desired outcome.
You may need to take time off maybe a sabbatical. Yeah, I totally believe in that. Sometimes I'm like, take six months, I'll work on this thing, Spend a year creating something truly valuable, systemizing it, and then come back and commit massive action to marketing and messaging that all.
So because the ultimate goal is to decouple your time from your value. Your system, your wisdom, your framework, that is the asset that creates scalable wealth, not the hour you spend on a call. I see so many people who are stuck in one-on-one struggle with this because they feel that, ⁓ this is what my client is paying me. Yes, they are paying for personalization and your personal time, but they are also paying for faster results. They're also paying for frameworks for systems And that's why I said that this one, well, all of these lessons can be related to each other, but this one specifically.
Okay, that brings us to the closing argument or the closing invitation. My beautiful leaders, these eight lessons weren't learned in a clean straight line. They were learned through messy launches, messy marketing, messy sharing of offers, ⁓ messy experiences, you know.
struggle, traveling, creating stuff, working on stuff, humbling retreats, lots of tears, lots of arguments with my partner also. The common thread though, through all of them, is the willingness to shift the inner operating system from that of the student or the employee.
to that of the sovereign CEO or the conscious CEO. I want you to take this moment to reflect on your own journey. And if you remember, let me know in the comments, in the DMs, which of these eight lessons is currently your biggest energetic block. If you share with me your favorite lesson from this episode,
I told you quite a few times throughout that I have a surprise for you. All you have to do is drop me a DM. Which limiting belief are you ready to shift today to propel your business forward?
I am so deeply proud of you for showing up for this truth. The work you do is vital and the world needs you fully expressed and strategically sovereign. So if this download landed for you, would love to hear your biggest takeaway. Send me a DM with the number of the lesson that hit home hardest.
Until next time, stay true, stay open and stay in your soul's rhythm.