It all started last week when I was running the first of a series of energetic up-levelling classes around visibility with our School of Visibility students.

The classes take you through a process to identify your visibility ceiling; the place you just can’t seem to break through in the pursuit of being seen and heard by the people you’re here to reach.

That might look like reaching 1,000 subscribers, or 10,000 IG followers, or getting people to engage with your social posts, or scoring an interview on the podcast you really love.

Whatever it is, in the class you start by establishing where you currently are and then you work through a clearing process that sees you raising your energetic ceiling. That means that when you do hit that 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 you can comfortably sit in that level of visibility without freaking out and sabotaging yourself.

Three classes make up the series; I am seen, I am heard, and I am fully expressed.

To ensure my own energetic ceiling doesn’t impact on the students, I always run myself through the classes before I facilitate them (which means I’ve taken myself through the I am seen, I am heard, and I am fully expressed processes multiple times over the last 3 years).

For a long time I didn’t really think about how they were affecting my business and life. I felt better about speaking up and being seen and heard, and I knew things were shifting.

That was enough for me.

But recently I’ve been noticing big changes in my own behaviour and after last week’s class I realised that these changes have, in large part, been due to the energetic ceiling work.

Here’s how…

The first time I ran the ‘I am seen’ class, I saw an almost immediate shift around my visibility. In the online world, people with large communities started mentioning me in a whole lot of random and surprising ways. For a while, everywhere I looked someone was either recommending me, mentioning my name, or inviting me to be interviewed.

My post ‘I’m not depressed, I am enraged’ that had well and truly finished its social media cycle following its publication months before, suddenly picked up steam (seemingly out of nowhere… isn’t that always the way with energetic shifts?) and ended up being shared over 7,500 times and shown to over 1 million people.

Students started telling me they’d first come across me via my Instagram account at which point I felt like the universe was taking the time to deliver me a much needed lesson known as Visibility 101.

It went something like this, ‘See Samantha? Visibility over here, means sales over there. You try now and see if you can join the dots.’

The effects of ‘I am heard’ were different. As they took effect, I found myself gaining clarity around what I wanted to speak about in emails, on the blog, in the SOV curriculum, on social media posts, and to friends and family. I uncovered and eliminated a lot of things I’d been writing about because I thought ‘I should’.

I also became far less willing to have conversations for the sake of it or because I’d previously felt some imperative to have them. The kinds of conversations that went by the wayside ranged from conversations about the weather with perfectly pleasant people, to conversations with sexist men who occasionally make an appearance on my Instagram account.

I immediately understood why the ‘convince the sexist man of your feminist perspective’ discussions dropped off (#completewasteofmytime), but initially I didn’t know why the pleasant but ultimately insignificant ones about the weather and other such niceties disappeared as well.

Over time I came to realise that space was being created around me, in my energy field, and brain and heart, for more meaningful words to be expressed. While pleasant but ultimately meaningless conversations were taking up space, there was far less room for words that really matter.

My speaking style also became much more direct. I dropped the good girl habit of pleasing others and just let people experience the fullness of my words. I stopped worrying about whether they liked what they heard or not, because really, that’s so far out of my control it’s not worth worrying about.

Instead I focused on developing clear thoughts and delivering them with pure intention. I can’t tell you beneficial and freeing it is to frame your conversations and your writing in this way.

The impact of the ‘I am fully expressed’ class has been different again. This one came as a surprise because I already felt quite… expressed. In many ways I’ve been in a frenzy of creative output for the last decade, producing all sorts of wonderful things from programs to classes to a podcast and weekly blog posts.

So if you’d asked me before doing the ‘I am fully expressed’ work whether there was much room for movement in this area, I would have said no. I felt good about my self expression.

And the shift that’s occurred has been in the form of a refinement, or redirection, rather than a radical 180 degree turn around. What it has done – and this has made all the difference in the world – has been to bring my method of self expression more fully into alignment with my visibility desires.

I completely changed up the way we delivered our programs here at the School of Visibility. We used to offer a range of different programs at different times of the year and suddenly that felt overly complicated and limiting. It became obvious to me that if I was going to be fully expressed when it came to visibility, I needed to create a one stop shop for women. A container for everything, giving people the option to pick and choose the components of the curriculum that best met their needs and challenges.

In creating that I not only felt more fully expressed in the business, I actually created more time. As everything became more streamlined from a programmatic perspective, time was freed up to write and explore other forms of self expression.

The ‘I am fully expressed’ classes have shown me that the more fully expressed I become with the programming side of things, the more value I’m able to provide to SOV students, and the more opportunities arise for me to be fully expressed in myriad other ways.

Every business owner needs to be working from the fullness of her potential in order for her business to do the same.

That might look like changing your business structure or writing a book. It might mean it’s time to produce that documentary or podcast or web series you’ve always dreamt of creating.

Each of us has a unique visibility path.

Taking the time to expand my tolerance for being seen, heard, and fully expressed has shifted my focus toward a much more deeply aligned visibility path. One that I can now truly say is fully expressed.

If you’d like to experience the energetic up-level classes for yourself, they’re one of the core components of our 4 part curriculum at the School of Visibility. Check it out here.