July 22nd episode
===
[00:00:00] Stop worrying about getting it right and start focusing on experimentation. What I mean by that is stop worrying about how right you're being in life or how good you are at healing, and start focusing on the experimentation of being a human. Because if you are anything like the high achieving souls that I work with, you've spent way too much time.
In your life trying to figure it out, get it perfect, make the right move, or fix what feels wrong. And this desire to be the best, have the best, create the best. It leads to a shame spiral. And this shame spiral is one of the biggest blocks that I see for so many incredible purpose driven leaders, doers, and deep thinkers out there.
Because shame is one of the lowest vibrations that we can possibly be in. It creates darkness, it causes us to go into protection mode. But when [00:01:00] we start using the experiment theory in life, which I use in my personal life and brought it into my coaching, it begins to shine the light and say, I was doing the best I could.
Now what can I alter? Where can I take the morality away from the decisions of, and stop saying, well, this is right, this is wrong. And instead say. Well, this is how I can get the outcome that I want. This is how I can create the team, the income, the relationship that I want by changing, shifting, refocusing in on a different tool, a different mindset, a different routine.
Because when we begin to approach life as something to experiment with, instead of a constant issue to solve, we reduce the fight or flight, and we begin to shift into this dance with the universe. Being able to be fully present in our life. Notice what works, what doesn't, and shift away from all of the morality that we put on these daily decisions that [00:02:00] holds no weight other than we're just trying to do our best.
Welcome to Rise to Her, the podcast for purpose-driven leaders, professionals, and creatives who are no longer willing to sacrifice their peace, power, and purpose for someone else's version of success. Here we peel back the layers of conditioning, hustle, culture, and high functioning burnout. To reconnect with what's real, your inner wisdom, your intuitive voice, and your soul's truth.
This is where science meets spirituality. Where healing becomes embodied and where success is rede behind through alignment, not performance. I'm your host, Emily Greenway, trauma informed alignment coach, spiritual scientist, and believer in a more meaningful world. In each episode, you'll hear grounded insights, soul led conversations, and practical tools to help you lead from your.
Reclaim your energy and rise fully into the life you were born to live. Because the world doesn't need more people performing. It needs more people fully alive, [00:03:00] less rise.
I.
Hey, love. And I'm so glad you're here. Today we're gonna dive into a concept I created from the fusion of two things that make up my entire being. One, my scientist brain. I am trained in clinical research. I have my master's degree in public health and I love science. And number two, my deep compassion for the human experience.
This is something that I teach my clients and it's something I live by and it's changed everything for me. I call it the experiment theory. It started when I realized that in research, when we run an experiment, we don't expect to get it right the first time. We start with a hypothesis, an educated guess.
We test it, we observe the results, and if the outcome doesn't match the hypothesis, we don't shame the scientists and say, well, you did the experiment wrong. We tweak the variables, we refine the process, we run the [00:04:00] experiment again. But then I started to notice in life when something doesn't go the way that we initially thought, we immediately make it mean something about us.
I'm doing it wrong. I'll never figure this out. This means I'm not cut out for it. Do any of those sound familiar to you? And this is where the brain becomes our biggest block, because our brains are wired to protect us, not to expand us. So the moment we get a result that doesn't feel good, we begin to loop into shame instead of curiosity.
And so when you can take this approach and apply it to part of life where you feel like you're getting it wrong or where you're putting so much pressure on yourself to change or be better, this shines a light. It lifts the load. So let me show you how this changes your life.
Let's say your hypothesis is, if I create more space in my schedule, I'll feel more peace. But when you do that, you don't feel peace. You begin to feel guilty. Maybe you start to get anxious or like you're [00:05:00] wasting time, right? But then the outcome is you actually start feeling really guilty. You're really anxious. You're not sleeping at night. So this is what the old paradigm response would be. So where we begin to shift into that blame cycle, it would be saying, see, space doesn't work for me.
I'm just wired to be busy. I do better when I'm busy. So we shame ourselves. We shut down, we loop, but the experiment response is interesting. I wonder what's influencing this outcome. Maybe you created a space, but you didn't regulate your nervous system to feel okay with being calm or not having something to do.
Maybe you have a subconscious belief that rest is lazy. And if you're not being active, you are being lazy or not contributing to society, or maybe the external noise hasn't changed, you still have so much input coming in that even though you aren't physically having to do something, think something, [00:06:00] produce something.
The external noise is so constant that nothing really shifted in your energetic field. So if we approached it with the experiment response, we begin to just adjust the variables. Maybe we begin focusing on that nervousness and regulation. We're reframing our beliefs, we're trying it again, and this is how you begin to align with your truth by observing without judgment, and shifting from curiosity, because this curiosity.
Opens a portal into so much clarity about how your unique soul, how your unique experience takes form, and how you as an individual can get the outcome that you're wanting instead of just accepting that there's only one way to get the outcome with these particular variables. And if it's not right, then you're doing something wrong.
And with this experiment approach. You start to recognize, I'm just collecting data. This data gives me information to make a [00:07:00] better choice. Whenever I say that phrase, this data gives me information to make a better choice, I am immediately transported back to 2018.
2019. I had just gotten out of a long-term relationship. And I was freshly single and I was dating around. But as I've shared this story with a lot of other people, there's so much shame, especially for women.
Not to say there's not shame for men as well, but just in my experience around figuring out your sexuality, the way you wanna feel in your body, and so we begin to hide our stories, our experiences, in order to make sure no one figures this out. But when I started to take this concept and apply it to this, I said, wow, looking at the data, I was quite literally just trying to figure out how to date as an adult, how to feel loved and feel confident in my body.
And I probably wouldn't make that same decision now, but in that time period, I quite literally was making the best decision I could with the information that I [00:08:00] had. This is a game changer for how you begin to approach your life.
So I wanna shift from what the overall theory of the experiment is to talking about why this matters energetically because. You guys know I love pairing the science with the spiritual and everything has an energetic vibe. If you look at it from a scientific perspective way things magnetize or even the way atoms float or move around us, and shame keeps us stuck.
It is one of the lowest vibrational frequencies that the body can hold. It will freeze the nervous system. And it narrows the brain's ability to imagine new outcomes because you're not able to engage the prefrontal cortex or access parts of the brain responsible for creativity. It also disconnects you from your intuition, from your soul, because it's dark, it's heavy, and the intuition is the divine.
But when you're able to [00:09:00] replace shame with experimentation, you're able to access that curiosity, possibility, higher frequency thinking, emotional neutrality, intuition. And from that space, you can hear your truth again. And when I say your truth, I always refer to that. As the divine messaging, the intuition, the higher knowing, the highest self.
Because when we were able to hear that, we stopped obsessing over getting it right. 'cause getting it right means there's only one way to do something, which is in direct opposition with what it would mean to live an individually aligned life.
This is how I've rebuilt my business, deepened my marriage, and completely shifted how I approach everything from how I launched new offers to my morning routine. Literally, I had a client message me yesterday and she asked, how do you set up your morning with your dogs, with your work, with taking care of yourself?
[00:10:00] What does it look like? And I was really honest and. Said, well, right now it looks like a quick check-in. Where's my body in space? Because I have so much on my plate. And I had an initial thought of, wow, I'm kind of ashamed that I'm not doing more first thing in the morning. But with this approach, I was quickly able to shift in, reply to her and say, but I'm in an experiment to try to figure out what really works for me.
Because right now I'm in a. Flux and flow because we're not in our current place where we're supposed to be living. We're staying with my in-laws. Right now, I don't have all of my stuff and I feel caught in a wave a little bit, and so it's really important for me to continue to refine and experiment with what works for me in this stage, because if not, I would be putting pressure on it.
And so when we put pressure energetically, again, it starts to feel heavy. So shifting from pressure to practice what feels good right now, and how can I create [00:11:00] structures and routines to support that moving forward so that when things get hard again, wild again, when we feel like we're in the wave.
We have the structure and the support already in place, and you can get that once you start approaching it with this experimentation mindset. So I wanna go into the cycle that you can use to continue to refine your alignment in anything. You can use this in your relationships, in your business, in with your teams, how you're leading.
So this is the experiment, compassion alignment cycle. So number one is experiment. Then we go to observe, approach it with compassion, adjust and align.
Because here's what most people do when life is not working. They double down, they're pushing harder, or they begin to spiral into self-doubt and shut down completely. And the moment something feels off, they make it mean I'm not doing enough. [00:12:00] Or that was probably the wrong choice.
Or it's me, I'm the one that's messing up and this is the shame loop that I was speaking about. And your nervous system cannot create expansion from there. It just wants to protect you, which means it starts pulling back, staying small, staying safe, and out of alignment, because safety means consistency.
And if we're trying to change, we have to challenge consistency. And so this is where the shame loop begins to block our intuition and keeps us stuck in performance mode instead of being able to continually shift and realign into creation. That's intuitive base, and that is accessing that higher self, right?
Not the self that's in survival. I must be protected. So step one is the experiment releasing the need to get it right. We start with the experiment, which means letting go of the need to have the right answer or make the perfect decision. I get that this is probably gonna be the hardest part for most of you [00:13:00] because it means that there's no right answer.
It's releasing that certainty. Where in your life are you requiring absolute certainty? And I want you to start to see how that's a false sense of control and it's actually a mistrust of yourself in the universe. That is what we do when we need to control and have it be what we expect because of an experience where something went wrong in our childhood or we couldn't trust anyone but ourselves.
So in this phase, we are really being kind and putting on our scientist hat, and you can even think of it that way while I'm stepping into a scientist role right now, the researcher, the experimenter. If you're like, how do I do that? I highly recommend you go and read or listen to the book, the Alter Ego Effect, because when we take our stories of, well, I have to have it right, I have to have it controlled into every environment.
It prevents our brain from being able to shift and adapt. But when we put on an alter ego, like the [00:14:00] researcher, the experimenter, we release the stories. It's a really interesting theory. We're able to say, well, I'm stepping into this role, so therefore I have these characteristics, these stories, these beliefs.
Try it, read it. I'll link the book below. Okay? So we're letting go of the need to have the right answers. We're creating a hypothesis. Okay? You act and then you observe. So some prompts that you wanna ask yourself, write these down and I'll put 'em in the show notes as well. What am I trying to create?
What's one small action that I can try? What would feel like a fun experiment here instead of a high stakes decision? The nervous system calms down when there's room to observe instead of judge. And so when we say, what's a fun experiment, we actually activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is slowing down the heart rate.
It's able to access creative parts of our brain and we play. That's what comes online. And that's what we're working with. [00:15:00] It's also why I created the Portal of Joy Workshop inside of Rooted, where we actually are rewiring our brain to play and to get creative and to seek out joy in every moment. And so if you've been feeling down, if you've been feeling like you've been lacking creativity, or you're just wanting to feel better and more alive, this workshop is for you.
It's an eight week self. Pace Workshop that's available as soon as you sign up for Rooted. So it's there with the live calls recorded. All of the journaling prompts, lots of meditations and exercises to take you through at your own pace and to rewire your brain using scientific grounded information, and then bringing in the magic and the mystical so that you can begin to create magic in your own life.
Cool. That's what happens when we utilize play to activate our brain. Use that organ, use that system to our advantage, instead of letting it shift us into shame, pain, [00:16:00] and spiraling. So step one, we're experimenting. Step two's, compassion, observing without shame. This is the most important piece here.
And this is honestly where a lot of us fall off. We run an experiment and then we beat ourselves up if it doesn't go perfectly. But when we bring in compassion, the outcome is no longer a measurement of your worth. It's just data. It's just information. And so we begin to ask ourselves, what did I learn here?
What parts of me got activated? Was there a trigger here? Was there something. That I need to be aware of a story I'm carrying and what am I proud of myself for trying. Because when we approach ourselves with compassion like we would a child or someone we really love, it begins to rewire our brain for resilience.
And resilience is so needed in our world and it helps you be able to take on the human experience recalibrate. And move forward without it becoming just [00:17:00] who you are and something about you. And when we were able to celebrate the data, not just the win or the outcome, we create a safe space to internally keep trying to show up again and again and again.
And that is what begins to create alignment over time. So we experiment, we approach it with compassion, observing the data. Step three is we adjust, we manipulate the variables. So now that you've observed with compassion, you get to tweak it. Just like the scientist, it's not drama, it's not panic, it's just iteration.
And this iteration, this is what I'm doing. And so maybe the experiment was setting a boundary, and when you did it, you felt really guilty. So a tweak you could do would be regulating before and after the conversation next time to come back into your body and release that guilt. Maybe you tried working fewer hours and when you did that, you felt really disoriented and you felt like you weren't getting anything done.
And so a tweak you made would be structuring that [00:18:00] freedom with like a ritual of sorts, maybe a self-care ritual, some type of exercise ritual instead of utilizing time blocks, when we are searching for alignment in our lives of soul aligned living. It's not something we discover, right? It's refined.
It can always get closer to that highest self, but most people never get there because they quit before. They adjust the variables. They think, well, I didn't discover it this time, so I don't know what to do. Instead of looking at it and saying, how can I refine this to work in my favor?
And then step four is aligning, letting the results show you the way. And this is where the magic happens, because after enough experiments, enough compassion, enough refinement, you start to feel it, which is the key here. You start to feel it in your body, that natural click decisions feel easier. You begin to trust yourself more.
You begin to move with like a sense of ease rather than urgency and needing to fix [00:19:00] it. Because we start to recognize that alignment is not just a one time destination. It begins to become an energetic frequency in your body that you are attuned to. That's what you do in Reiki. You begin to attune to frequencies, and the more you operate from compassion, from experimentation, the more often you tune in to alignment.
You're quite literally setting your ability to tune in to what works for you, because we don't manifest the life from just getting it right. We begin to manifest when we're available, when we're in an aligned energetic frequency, so that we're receptive to what the universe has because that shame, blame, spiral.
It is not doing us any good guys. It's keeping us hidden. It's keeping us in the dark and it's making us feel like shit. This is not a one and done process. It is a cycle that you can trust over and over again, and you can use this [00:20:00] cycle with anything. Your business, your healing, your relationships, your routines.
Every time something doesn't feel good, you can ask, what am I experimenting with? Where can I observe with compassion? What variables could I adjust? Should I adjust? And what's starting to feel more like me? These are the questions to begin your experiment. And it's going to set you free.
And it is such an incredible approach. So when you're feeling that shame, that blame, that spiral, tap into these questions. And so if this is resonating, you're saying, yep, I gotta shift, but I don't know where to start and I keep blaming myself. I want you to ask yourself, what hypothesis am I holding right now about how my life should be? Is that if I find the perfect job, I'll finally feel good enough. If I make a certain amount of income, I finally won't feel stressed. If I set boundaries, will people leave me? If I work harder, I'll finally be good enough and then ask, what variable [00:21:00] could I gently experiment with this week?
We are not doing this to force a different outcome ' but we're here to observe what happens, to collect the data from our lived experience to be fully human and fully present so that we can then tap into that higher sense of self. This is where self-trust is born. And we are sociologically conditioned to mistrust ourself.
So this is quite literally an act of resistance in practice, and this is one of the biggest pieces that I work with my one-on-one clients with, is being able to trust themselves, tap into what they're feeling, know that it doesn't have to mean anything about them, but it's just information to help guide them.
To a life that feels more peaceful. More abundant, because our brain doesn't get to dictate the show except for a lot of us. That's what we're allowing to happen. We're allowing. A wounded inner version of us, often from childhood, be in the driver's seat instead of looking at it with this experimenter lens, seeing what protective parts are [00:22:00] coming up and saying, now how can I adjust to make myself feel more safe, but also step into a version of myself that is healed and whole?
Because guys, you are not someone that's broken that can't figure it out. You are a soul. In a body, running an experiment. So I want you to let it be sacred. Let it be playful, let it be real. And if you're craving a space to run those experiments with support, with guidance, with a community of people that get it, that are on their journey of living an intuitive life that feels like theirs, that is what the Rooted membership is for.
Inside of Rooted, we host the portal of Joy. That eight week workshop, which helps you recalibrate your brain, your body, and your energy to finally feel good, playful, and creative again, shifting the brain out of the shame loops and into that natural state of curiosity, presence, and joy.
You were not meant to live a life that's heavy. You really weren't. You are here to experiment your way into [00:23:00] one that feels like you, to be the human that your soul decided to be. I love you. I see you and I'll see you inside the next episode. If this resonated, I would love for you to share it with someone.
Leave me a comment on whatever platform you're listening to, and I would love for you to leave me a five star review if you enjoyed it. It really does help me out a lot. You can come hang out with me on Instagram at Rise to Her, and until then, I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thank you so much for being here, for listening, reflecting, and rising into more of who you really are. If this episode sparked something inside of you or reminded you, you're not alone, then you're exactly where you're meant to be. To keep the conversation going, come hang out with me on Instagram at Rise To Her.
I always love hearing what's resonating for you, and if you're craving a space to explore intuitive soul led living with others who get it. Our community is growing and you're always welcome. Until next time, trust yourself, honor your rhythm, and [00:24:00] keep rising.
