Beyond Your Ceiling: The Power of Collaborative Expansion - EP 058

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What if the key to your next level isn’t more effort—but deeper collaboration?

In this episode, I dive into the power of collaboration in business and how the right relationships can take you far beyond what you could achieve alone. I share insights on how the right partnerships can expand your vision, uncover blind spots, and help you integrate new ideas without losing your authenticity.

We’ll explore different types of collaborations — from mentorship and peer support to cross-industry partnerships — and why emotional safety is a key ingredient for genuine growth. This conversation invites you to reflect on the quality of your connections and how they align with your vision. Because when collaboration is rooted in trust and purpose, it doesn’t just grow your business, it expands you.

Episode Takeaways:

• Collaboration can reveal blind spots that you can’t see on your own.
• Integration is about understanding principles, not copying methods.
• Different types of collaborations serve unique purposes in business growth.
• Mentorship relationships guide upward expansion.
• Peer support provides understanding and shared experience.
• Cross-pollination introduces fresh perspectives from outside your field.
• Emotional safety is essential for authentic collaboration.
• The quality of relationships matters more than the quantity of connections.
• The right partnerships can expand your vision and amplify your impact.

Key Insights:

“If you take the time to lean into the depth of those collaborations and to really create meaningful integration for yourself from all the things that you're learning, then you yourself are being transformed in the process. And what starts to happen is that you become the person who can then hold the bigger vision for other people as well. “

“That is what happens in truly aligned collaborative relationships — everyone is expanding everyone else. It's not hierarchical. Everybody is learning and contributing. It's circular, it's reciprocal. Every person brings a unique lens that reveals possibilities to the other people.”

Connect With Me:

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Question for Your Reflection:

What types of collaborations currently exist in your business, and how are they serving your growth?

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Episode Transcript

Your vision has a ceiling, not because you're not capable or talented or ambitious enough, but because you can only see what you can see from where you're standing, from your perspective, from the experiences that you've had. Let's look over here instead and see what might be possible if we change up the way that we're doing things so that they're more aligned with what you're bringing to the table instead of what we see other people doing. And so when we shifted that perspective, it was incredible the kind of opportunities that started to show up and we started to engage with.

Hello and welcome to Pleasure and Profits. I'm your host, Rachel Anzalone, and today we're talking about collaboration as a tool for expansion. Specifically, we're talking about how the right partnerships can help you see beyond the ceiling of your own vision. In the last episode, number 57, I drove to Houston and spent the day with LaGina Harris, founder of The Us Space. And I was lucky enough to be able to record the episode in person with her inside of the space where all of her members were there working.

And I really got to get a sense for what the vibe is there, what the experience is, what the energy is, and what makes it really different from other co-working spaces. In that conversation, the two of us discussed collective rise and community-centered business. We really dug into the why of collaboration and the how of building networks and what community-centered business can actually look like in practice. 

Today, I want to go deeper into something more personal, something that I think is applicable to each and every one of us and our own experience and our own life and our own businesses. The question that we're going to dig into today is what happens when you actually work with aligned people? What becomes possible when you let collaboration expand you beyond what you could see on your own? 

So we are going to explore how collaboration acts as a mirror that reveals blind spots that you can't see on your own. We're going to talk about three types of collaborative relationships and when each one serves your expansion. We're going to talk about how to integrate new possibilities into your work without losing yourself in the process. And we're going to talk about how becoming someone who can hold a bigger vision for others is part of your leadership evolution. 

Let's start our conversation off with this premise. Your vision has a ceiling. Not because you're not capable or talented or ambitious enough, but because you can only see what you can see from where you're standing, from your perspective, from the experiences that you've had. I've shared this story before, but I think it's so relevant here that I'm gonna mention it again. Several years ago, I was working with my friend and client, Lisa Nichols, and she was working so hard to build her business. In fact, I would say, and I have said many times, that Lisa and her team are probably some of the hardest working people that I have ever met in my entire life.

And as someone who self-describes as a good student, Lisa was looking at what other people in the digital marketing space were doing and trying to replicate their funnels, their campaigns, their strategies. She was trying to build her business the way she saw other people building their businesses. I worked with Lisa for several years and over time as I was watching this, something just felt out of alignment with all of it. And it just, it didn't seem to be working the way that she wanted it to or that, that we sort of expected it to. 

And it didn't seem to be working for her the way that it was working for other people. And it certainly wasn't producing the kind of results that we thought it could or should based on who Lisa is and who she was at the time and the size of her following and all that stuff. And then I realized that there was something that I could see because of the role that I was in that she couldn't see from inside of her own business. And what that was… was that she was trying to emulate people who didn't have her platform or her experience or her existing audience or visibility. 

And so she was working really hard to build products and programs and funnels and a team that aligned or matched with what those people were doing. But because those people were starting from a different place, had a different set of experiences, had a different set of skills, she was benchmarking herself against the wrong people. And by doing that, she was missing a much bigger opportunity that was right in front of her. And so we were talking one day, and the theme was sort of around this, like, I don't know why this works for other people, but it's not working for me, or it's not working in this business. And I realized this, and I said to her, “I don't think you're playing the game wrong. I think you're playing the wrong game.”

And what I meant by that was that I thought we were playing too small. I thought we were focusing on the kinds of things that a beginning life coach would focus on or somebody who was just getting started in terms of trying to build their visibility and build their platform. But Lisa already had all of that. And what we weren't looking at because we were so focused on those things was bigger opportunities that maybe were available to her that weren't available to these other people because they hadn't had multiple New York Times bestselling books, because they hadn't been in a massively popular video that came out and sort of transformed the world of personal development. And because they hadn't done things like been on Oprah or Larry King or had the kind of visibility that she had built over the years. 

And so when we shifted that perspective, it was incredible the kind of opportunities that started to show up and we started to engage with and explore. There were the kind of opportunities that would not show up for some of the people that we were trying to emulate who were just getting off the ground, or who were really focused on digital marketing as their business versus transforming lives and impacting people in the way that Lisa is really focused on. 

And so this is what I mean when I say that your vision has a ceiling. Lisa is brilliant. She is strategic and hardworking, as I said, but she needed someone from outside of her own head to say, “Hey, I think maybe you're aiming at the wrong target. So let's look over here instead and see what might be possible if we change up the way that we're doing things so that they're more aligned with what you're bringing to the table instead of what we see other people doing that maybe has a cap on it that's completely different from your cap.”

I had a similar experience myself last year, which was that I was at a business event and as I have shared the past, I am not somebody who loves going to events. I'm super introverted. I don't do well with small talk. I'd much rather be in intimate settings than with big groups of people. But I showed up at this event and something really interesting happened. I ended up sitting in on a talk that wasn't actually even about a topic I was particularly interested in. I honestly didn't really know much about what the topic was, but I was really attracted to the energy of the person who was speaking. 

And most of the other talks during this breakout time were sort of very tactical marketing things, stuff I was really familiar with, they didn't feel like they would be particularly expanding or engaging or interesting for me. And so I thought, I really like this person. I'm just going to sit in and hear what they have to say, what their perspective is, what the angle is that they're bringing to the work that they're doing. And just sort of get a sense for like, what is it about this person that I find so interesting or attractive in their energy?

And so I sat there listening to them talk about their vision and about how they were serving their clients. And my mind just started expanding, not because I wanted to copy what they were doing. Their work was in a completely different space than mine, but because I could suddenly see the principles of what they were doing at work in their work. And I could see how that same energy and those same perspectives and the same sort of strategic approach approach that they were taking could be applied to what I do as well.

I walked away from that event not with practical, tactical tools to implement, but really feeling like my mind had been blown and that my perspective on so many things had been transformed around what I was working on and how I could be approaching it differently. And so unlike many events that I have attended in the past, I didn't come home with a notebook full of tactical, practical things to try to implement or to research further. Instead, I came home with this internal shift that really guided me to understanding that I couldn't go back to doing things the way that I had been doing them because my ceiling had lifted and I had a whole new perspective on how I could do my work in the world. And it was a perspective shift that I could not have gotten to on my own because I needed to see an example of somebody else who was doing things differently than I was doing in order to be able to see through their eyes of what might be possible.

And so the question is, why is this so common? Like, why do we have these blind spots? And I think there are a few reasons for this. One is that our vision is often clouded by our own fears, anxieties, and assumptions that we have internalized based on our own experiences. And so we're often limited by our past experiences, both by what has worked and what hasn't worked. And what we believe is possible for ourselves is often shaped by all sorts of beliefs we have about ourselves, many of which we inherit from our families or our culture or early life experiences. And at the bottom of all of that is this, that we can only see the possibilities that exist within our current frame of reference. 

There's a great video that was circulating somewhere, I don't know, on Instagram or something, where a tall person, I think, was in a department store at a Target or something, and they brought themselves down to like what the sight line is of a five foot tall person, which is how tall I am. And what that experience was of like looking from that perspective. And then they stood up or like raise themselves up to their own height of what is the perspective from a person who's like, I don't know, 6’2, 6’4, 6’5 whatever. And just how completely different that experience is based on that, based on the perspective that you're coming from. 

It's like, you don't even know that there's something to rose over. If you're five feet tall, you can't see that far, but somebody who's a foot taller than you can see that and they can share that perspective with you so that you know that it's worth going to rose over, right? It's worth continuing on the path to get to the thing that you want because they can see that it's there when you can't actually see that it's there. You're still sort of hunting blindly for what might be a possibility.

And so we often benchmark ourselves against people who are at our level, not people who are already living into the next level or living in the space of that different perspective than the one that we're carrying.  Another way to look at this is, you know, the saying that you can't read the label when you're inside the bottle. You need somebody outside of the bottle to read the label. And that's why surrounding yourself with people who can see beyond your current ceiling is so powerful. They're not inside the bottle with you. They can read your label. They can see the possibilities that you can't access on your own. 

So if collaboration helps us see beyond our own ceiling, then the next question is, how do we choose collaborators strategically? Because not all collaborations expand us in the same way. And not all collaborations are created equal. And I don't mean that some are good and some are bad. I mean, they serve different purposes in your growth and in your business. 

So let's talk about three different types of collaborative relationships. I'm sure that there are plenty more, but let's focus on these three for our time here today. The first type of collaborations I want to talk about are peer collaborations. These are collaborations with people who are roughly at your level, facing similar challenges, building similar kinds of businesses, or doing similar kinds of work.

And the value and these types of collaborations is enormous in terms of getting mutual support, not feeling alone, feeling like, you have a community that you're on the path with in terms of sharing resources or troubleshooting together, in terms of celebrating wins and even commiserating over challenges. Some examples of these types of collaborations include mastermind groups, accountability partnerships, colleague relationships. In my years of entrepreneurship, these relationships have been incredibly valuable to me. And here's something that I've noticed. Sometimes peer collaborations can keep you comfortable at your current ceiling. If everyone in the room is facing the same challenges and operating at the same level, then you all might be missing the perspective of someone who's already solved the problem that you are struggling with. This doesn't mean that collaborations aren't valuable. They absolutely are. But they're just not the only type that you need. 

The second type of collaborations are mentorship collaborations. So these are people who are ahead of you in some dimension. Maybe they're further along in their business growth. Maybe they have a skill set that you're still developing. Maybe they're navigating a transition that you're just entering into. And the value that they can bring is that they can see your next level because they're already living it. They've already been where you are and they know what's possible on the other side of it. And they've had their own experience of attempts and failures and successes that they can share with you so that maybe you don't have to make the same mistakes that they made. 

What I think is super interesting about these mentorship type of collaborations is that you might find some of these within your peer collaborations, where if you are with a group of people who have sort of a variable skill sets, that there might be someone within your peer group who generally speaking is a peer, but is farther along or has had some experience in an area that you haven't had yet who then can mentor you and support you. And so I'll talk more about this in a second, but there's so much value in being in sort of networks and collaborations and groups of people where there are people at varying different skill sets and with varying different types of skills and sort of everybody brings something to the table that makes it truly collaborative instead of a space where everybody's sort of doing the same thing. 

I know I've had this experience myself where I joined a group thinking that it was going to be people from sort of all different industries. And then once I got in, I realized, everybody in here is in coaching or personal development or digital marketing. There have been many versions of these where I'm like, well, I don't want to be in a group full people who are all doing the same thing as me. I want to be around people who are bringing some different perspective to the table. 

Now, what can be challenging if you are in a group of peers where there are also mentorship opportunities is that mentorship collaborations require a level of vulnerability, that sometimes can be a little bit uncomfortable if you're with your peers and you're not with people who you fully trust or that you know really support you no matter what. And so in these types of relationships, you have to be willing to be the student, to be the beginner and not to be the one who has all the answers. It can be so incredibly easy to stay within our zone of competence or to feel the pressure to present as if we have it all together and we have all the answers. 

When we're in peer groups where there is any sense of like competitiveness or it doesn't really feel supportive or mutually beneficial. And so sometimes what we really need is to be with someone who can push us to focus on the things that make us uncomfortable, you know, what are the spaces where it's okay for you to say like, I don't actually know how to do this, I need help with this or, you know, to ask those questions without feeling any kind of pressure that you need to keep up. But sometimes we really need someone around us who's going to push us to focus on the things that make us feel a little bit uncomfortable because that's where the growth opportunity is. Mentorship collaborations will do that. They will push you towards your growth edge. 

The third type are cross-pollination collaborations. So I mentioned this a little bit before. This is where people from different industries, different backgrounds, different approaches, people with different strengths and often at different levels of experience and expertise, and they come together to support each other in really unique and interesting ways. So the value of this type of collaboration is that people bring frameworks and perspectives that you would never discover on your own if you stayed within your own industry or within the niche or only with the people from the backgrounds that you came from. 

These are the kinds of perspectives that you would really just never discover on your own if you weren't interacting with people from different places and different spaces. So these types of collaborations will help you see your work through an entirely new lens. And this is what I was describing from that experience earlier, where I sat in on a conversation that was about something completely unrelated to my work, but listening to this individual talk, was truly like I just downloaded an entirely different way of operating that I could take what he was applying in his industry and see how that overlaid with my industry. 

But it was something that nobody in my industry was talking about or sharing. And if I hadn't exposed myself to this conversation that was truly a cross-pollination opportunity, I would never have gotten that perspective. And so I've mentioned this in every single one of these, these different types of collaborations several times. 

And it's something that's really important to remember in all of this is that all three types of these collaborations involves some level of discomfort. And if they don't feel a little bit uncomfortable, then they're not really serving your expansion. Peer collaboration, for example, might feel uncomfortable because you're being vulnerable about your struggles with people who are at your level. But the only way you're going to learn something you don't know yet is by being vulnerable in that way. 

Mentorship collaborations can feel uncomfortable because you put yourself in the position of being the student, you know, the learner and that can be really uncomfortable if you're a person who's used to being like the leader, you know, the one who excels, the one who's sort of steering the ship. And of course, cross pollination feels uncomfortable because you're outside of your familiar context. You have to really dig deep to see how what you're learning can be applied to your industry or your business or your unique situation in order for it to be useful. And so it really pushes us to think outside of the box.

And I think it's really crucial to distinguish here between discomfort and what might be lack of safety or a feeling that an environment is unsafe. And so, as I mentioned, you know, there's a level of vulnerability in all of these, and you really need to ensure that you are surrounding yourself with engaging with, you know, sometimes these are, you know, paid opportunities. Sometimes they're free, but that you really need to be so selective about who you're choosing so that you feel a sense of safety.

In order to really get the full benefit of those relationships, you need to know that that person has your best interest at heart and that they're going to support you through the process that you're in with them. And that means that you need to feel emotionally safe. You need to be around people who are emotionally mature enough and deep enough in their own work that they can look at their own shit and know what's theirs and not be projecting it onto you or not be steamrolling or being critical because they have some agenda that doesn't align with the goals of like what you are looking to get out of the relationship. 

And also to be really clear that you're not spending time around people who are projecting their limitations on you. I know I've had this experience myself where I thought I was sharing a vision with somebody who was truly a peer who, you know, could see and understand the vision that I was holding. And what I realized in doing that and receiving their response was that, they had a very limited view of me based on their limited view of themselves. And that can be really, really tricky to navigate with somebody who is a friend or a family member. And so very often this involves finding new people, new relationships with whom you can share your vision, who don't have an outdated idea of who you are based on what they've known of you for the last five years or 10 years or 20 years or whatever. And also that they're a person who has a big vision for themselves because it will feel perhaps like it's overshadowing their vision or their expectations for themselves. 

So as you think about your current collaborations, here some questions to ask yourself. Do you have peer support? Do you have people who get what you're going through because they're in it too? Do you have mentors who can see your next level, who've been there, who have experience and who are able to share with you the challenges they faced and what they found works and to guide you through finding your own solutions based on who you are and what suits you, but also based on their experience of having gone the path before you. And do you have cross-pollination happening? Do you have people from outside of your bubble who bring you a fresh perspective?

If you're missing any of these types, then that might be exactly where you need to focus your attention in terms of seeking out new opportunities for collaboration in order to help you and your business expand and grow. 

Okay, so now you have found these people, these collaborators, and you're having the conversations and your mind is expanding. Well, what happens next is where sometimes things can go a little bit haywire. So let's talk for a minute about the difference between integration and imitation. 

Imitation says they're successful doing X, so I should do X also. Let me copy their strategy, their offers, their messaging. Integration, on the other hand, says that their success with X reveals a principle that I can apply in my own unique way. Integration means asking questions like, what's the underlying truth here? How does it illuminate something that's already present in my work? Or asking questions like, what pieces of this are relevant to me? And what pieces are not relevant to me? 

And when we're talking about satisfaction strategy being at the root of all of our efforts, one of the big questions to ask is, are these tools, tactics, efforts, principles aligned for me? Or which aspects of them are aligned for me? Which of them am I going to choose and use and integrate and which am I gonna leave to the side because they just don't fit me or my values or my goals or what's really important to me? 

So this very often means that instead of focusing on specific tactics, we're noticing the energy behind what the person is doing, the way they're thinking about their work or the scope of their vision. The principles that they're operating from. And sometimes it means specific tactics or tools, but almost never in my experience is it taking something and replicating it exactly the same. So even when we are looking at something as simple as like a digital marketing funnel where you could replicate somebody's exact process tactically, you can reverse engineer what somebody else has done. You could buy somebody's  funnel plan, their template.

But then when you're looking at it, you might think, well, they're a little more aggressive in this messaging than actually feels good to me, or gosh, they're sending out 12 emails in this time period and that feels like way too many for my audience based on who my customer is, or what my people are used to experiencing from me, or what feels good to me to be writing or creating, or the energy that I wanna be showing up with. It doesn't fit my style or it doesn't fit my taste. If I received this sort of experience, I would actually be turned off by it. And I think my customers might be too. And so I'm going to tweak and adjust and change this so that it fits me and it fits my audience. 

And sometimes when we're integrating instead of imitating, what we'll find is that we're making a choice between what is a proven tool, a tactic, a strategy and what feels more aligned for us. So it requires coming back to yourself and asking, how do these principles apply to what I'm here to do? What would this look like in my voice, in my business, and aligned with my values? 

If you find yourself inspired by a collaboration, here are some questions that will help you integrate rather than imitate. Question number one, what is the underlying principle here? Not the tactic, not the specific strategy, but what's the deeper truth at work? What's the energy or philosophy that's making this work? Number two, how does this principle illuminate something already present in my work? This is about expansion, not addition. You're not trying to bolt on something completely foreign to your already existing business. You're asking questions like, what's already here that this insight helps me see more clearly? Or how could I implement a piece of this into something that I already have in order to make it perform in a better way? Question number three, what would this look like in my voice, in my business, in my values? This is where you translate those principles into practice in a way that's really authentic to you. Because if it doesn't feel like you, then it's not integration. It is dressing up in a costume. 

And on this note, there is one thing that I have seen again and again and again over the last 15 plus years. And that is that you could take the most sound strategy, the most proven tactic, and if it doesn't align with your values, then it's either not gonna deliver, it's not gonna perform, or even if it does, there's gonna be some catch, some hang up. It's going to have a negative consequence in some other area of your business, even if that is just making you feel cruddy or crappy because you implemented something that felt like it was out of integrity for you. 

And so when we talk about imitating someone, it's easy to just go plug and play. I'm just gonna duplicate their process. When we're talking about integrating, there's a lot of discernment, a lot of experimentation involved, and sometimes that can be a little bit messy. You might try something and realize it doesn't work as well as you thought it would. You might forgo a piece of information thinking that it's not super critical and then find out later that it is and you just didn't fully understand why or how. And also imitation can happen pretty quickly. You could look at what somebody else is doing today and replicate it tomorrow. 

Integration takes time. Integration takes review and analysis and again, discernment. It takes critical thinking. It takes that testing, all of this can take time. And so sometimes we can be inspired by these collaborations that are just planting seeds, that are going to piece by piece, little by little over time, germinate into creating something that's really meaningful. And this is why I feel really strongly that there is no wasted investment. There is no wasted investment of time or money and having learned something in a course and a program, in a relationship, in a mentorship that even if it's not relevant right now in this moment, you're going to use it down the road. It's going to inform something for you a month from now, a year from now, five years from now, whatever that length of time. 

And so you may find that in collaborations, you're filing things away. Like this piece of information feels important, but I'm not entirely sure what to do with it right now. And then you find six months later, ah that's where this fits. That's where that piece of information plugs into what I'm creating that's uniquely mine. 

And this is how real transformation works. It's not by imitating somebody else. It's not by replicating somebody else's work. It is by learning and discerning and integrating and over time allowing for that integration to transform the work that you're doing into something that is more expansive and more meaningful. 

You might remember in episode 50 with my friend, Krissy Shields, we talked about gardening and tending, and she said something that really stuck with me. Some plants need a full season. You can't rush them. You know, there are things you could put in the ground in certain locations, depending on the conditions that are gonna root and grow super quickly and produce fruit in a very fast way. And there are other things that you're gonna plant and it might take a year or two before they fruit for the first time. And so you can't rush those things, right? You have to take into account all of the variables, including the soil, the sun, the plant itself, the amount of care that you're giving, the weather, there's sort of all these factors that go into that. 

And the same is true with integrating insights from collaborations. You have to trust your own timeline and be aware of your own variables that will affect the outcome, when and how those opportunities for expansion actually come to fruition. And so one more thought here for you, based on my own experience, is to be mindful about collecting collaborations the way that some people collect courses or programs or trainings. If you are going to event after event after event, if you're involved in 16 different networking groups, if you're having conversation after conversation after conversation, and you're sort of just collecting those phone numbers, you're collecting the names, you're collecting the connections, but you're not actually taking the time to pause, to integrate, to go deep with any of those relationships, with those conversations, to really internalize or integrate what you're learning from those collaboration opportunities, then I think you're losing out on the true benefit. 

It could be really tempting to sort of take in all that information and keep ourselves really busy taking in all that information and never actually implement any of it. If you're anything like me at all, then you understand, like, I would rather have deep, meaningful conversations with a handful of people and take the time to be thoughtful about integrating and digging a little deeper and continuing that conversation, teasing out the nuance and really exploring what that means rather than getting quick superficial insights from 52 people, right? For me, it's always about quality over quantity. 

And if you do that, if you allow for that spaciousness, if you take the time to lean into the depth of those collaborations and to really create meaningful integration for yourself from all the things that you're learning, then you yourself are being transformed in the process. And what starts to happen is that you become the person who can then hold the bigger vision for other people as well. 

And this is, you know, a little side note, I'll get on a soapbox for a minute. This is where I think very often paid coaching and paid mentorship relationships break down and sometimes even paid like “masterminds” they break down or they lose their value because they're being led or facilitated by someone who isn't actually, hasn't actually integrated this stuff themselves and has not transformed themselves into a person who can hold that bigger vision and support the collective growth.

Instead, they're being sold by people who saw an opportunity to make money, who learned from some other coach or mentor that the way to do it is to create this specific container, but they're not actually ready to deliver that type of work because they haven't actually done the integration work themselves in order to be able to hold the vision for somebody else of what's possible for them. Okay, enough of that off of my soapbox. I won't go on a full rant.

But on the flip side of that, when you have experienced someone seeing bigger possibilities for you than you could see for yourself, something shifts and over time you become capable of doing that for other people as well. And so this is part of your evolution as a leader.

And I wanna be really, really super clear that this is not about fixing people. This is not about imposing your vision onto someone else or telling them what they should do. And I will fully confess, I have fallen into this trap myself more times than I care to admit, both in personal relationships and in client and work relationships where I felt I could see the bigger vision for my client or for a partner.

And I was holding that vision and really encouraging them and probably pushing and or nagging or trying to drag them to that vision, but they couldn't see it themselves. And they weren't willing to do the work to get there or they had some thing that was preventing them. There's some level of fear or discomfort that really was prohibiting them from taking those steps. And you can't do the work for them. They have to choose to do it for themselves. And so your role as a leader is to witness their potential, reflect it back to them, and then ultimately getting out of the way and allowing them to either choose to act on it or choose not to act on it. And that really is their choice. 

I find that this is often a really important piece of the work that I do with my clients. Often they come to me trying to build their business in a very specific way because that's how they see everybody else doing it. And often I can see what they can't because I'm outside the bottle. I can read the label and I can see that they're not playing the game wrong. They are playing the wrong game and not because what they're doing is bad or wrong or incorrect, not because somebody told them the wrong way to go about doing it or they bought a wrong program or some other strategist or advisor was incorrect, but because that particular strategy, approach, et cetera, doesn't actually match who they are, what their values are, you know all these factors in the satisfaction strategy, what's important to them, how they wanna show up, sort of all the factors that make their business uniquely theirs, that they're often trying to implement some strategy that doesn't actually fit who they are or where they're at.

Or they haven't taken the time to get that clarity for themselves. And so they're trying sort of all these little things. But when you're doing that, it's like trying to win a game and you don't know the rules and you don't even know what winning looks like because winning for you might look completely different than winning for somebody else. And so it's clear to me that my role is not to give them a blueprint that everybody follows. And it's the exact same thing is to help them to learn to discern what's important to them, which game they're actually here to play and what winning looks like for them and then how they can best play that game utilizing their gifts, their talents, their experiences, all of that in order to create something that is uniquely theirs and is uniquely successful for them. 

And now that is not to say that there is no place for learning the tactical and practical and strategic things. I think there is so much value in investing and learning all this stuff. And the important thing is as you learn, as you develop over time, is to learn to discern which aspects of those are relevant for you and which are not, to be able to tune in and say like, oh they're teaching this thing that actually doesn't feel like it's a good fit for me. And I know they're promising X result, but whether that result comes or not, I don't want to go about doing it the way they're doing it. And so I just know that's not for me, right? And that's how we get clearer and clearer. 

And mistake I often see, and again, I don't think anything's a mistake. Everything's a learning process, right? It's all data. But a pathway often people go down is learning and imitating, and maybe things aren't working the way they want. And so they throw everything out the window and they go to creating completely from scratch. And then, unknown way that's never been done. That's just sort of like their unique, download, which I think is brilliant, for creative pursuits. And there are things to be learned from what works for other people. And so, there, in my mind, there is this sort of sweet spot for everyone where it's like, how can you take the tools and the tactics, the tactics and the blueprint and bring your own unique insights and downloads and energy to it? And create the version of that that works for you and the way that you want to work and the way that you want to show up and in the game that you're playing and to produce the results which is the definition of success that you are looking for. 

That is what happens in truly aligned collaborative relationships, whether they're with peers or with mentors or in these sort of cross-pollination environments is that everyone is expanding everyone else. It's not hierarchical. Everybody is learning and contributing. It's circular, it's reciprocal. Every person brings a unique lens that reveals possibilities to the other people. 

And this I think illustrates perfectly the very definition of what I believe feminine leadership is, which is that as you grow your capacity to hold a bigger vision for others, that you're creating conditions for collective expansion, that you are expanding and the people around you are expanding. And it's reciprocal and you're supporting and feeding each other and everybody rises in the process. Because when you help someone else see beyond their ceiling, then they go out and do the same thing for others. And those people do it for others. And this is how movements happen. This is how paradigms shift. This is how we change the world. It starts with one person seeing the possibility for another and then reflecting it back to them. And then it just ripples outwards from there.

Okay, so let's bring this all together. We've talked about how collaboration reveals the ceiling of your own vision, how you need people from outside of your bottle to read your label. We talked about the three different types of collaboration. Peer relationships for support, mentorship relationships for upward expansion and cross-pollination relationships for innovation. We distinguished between integration and imitation and how integration asks you to find the underlying principles and translate them into your own unique experience. And we talked about how as you expand, you become capable of holding a bigger vision for others, creating this beautiful reciprocal growth cycle. 

We explored what happens when you actively collaborate with aligned partners, when you let yourself be vulnerable enough to be the student, when you allow others' visions to expand your own, when you do the hard, patient work of integrating the new possibilities into your existence without losing yourself in the process. And all of this together is how you move beyond your ceiling, not alone, but together in collaboration with aligned partners. 

So here's what I invite you to consider this week. First, who in your world sees a bigger vision for you than you currently see for yourself? And when was the last time you had a real conversation with them about your vision and about what they see that's possible for you? Second, what collaboration or relationship is calling to you that feels just uncomfortable enough to be at your growth edge? Not unsafe, but stretching you a little bit beyond what's comfortable for you. And third, if you've been collecting connections without actually activating them, what's one collaboration that you could deepen into right now? What conversation could you initiate? What partnership could you explore? 

I invite you to consider all of these because I believe that your next level of impact, of profit, of pleasure is not something that you have to figure out on your own. I'd be willing to bet that it's already visible to someone in your sphere, in your ecosystem, who can already see what you can't yet see for yourself. Your work then is to find those people, to find meaningful ways to collaborate with them, and to let yourself be expanded through that process. 

Thank you so much for being here with me today. I would love to hear about your experiences with collaboration. What's expanded you? What you're working on integrating? Who's helping you see beyond your own ceiling?

You can always reach out to me at [email protected] or find me on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn at Rachel Anzalone.

And until next time, remember your pleasure is your power. Take care.