Attract Abundance with Heart-Centered Business Alignment with Pipsa Valkeila

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode I chat with Pipsa Valkeila, a business mentor who helps conscious and compassionate women entrepreneurs go from overwhelm, burnout, hustle and scarcity to authenticity, peace, excitement and abundance.

Going from being one of Finland’s most influential sustainability advocates with over 10,000 active readers and mentions from the biggest media platforms of the country, she has grown to become a mentor, helping entrepreneurs get incredible results in alignment, impact, wealth and happiness.

Meet Pipsa

Episode Transcript

Welcome, everyone. I am here with Pipsa Valkela, who helps conscious and compassionate women entrepreneurs go from overwhelm, burnout, hustle, and scarcity to authenticity, peace, excitement, and abundance.

Her path is interesting because she’s going from being one of Finland’s most influential sustainability advocates with over 10,000 active readers, and she’s grown to become a mentor helping other entrepreneurs get incredible results with alignment, impact, wealth, and happiness.

Welcome, Pipsa!

Hi, it’s wonderful to be here.

All the way from Finland. You are my first guest from that area of the world.

I’m glad to be the first one.

Pipsa, this is a topic we haven’t really covered yet, but I think it’s so important because it speaks to how critical mindset is when it comes to your business, your life, your relationships, pretty much everything. But it’s one of those things we don’t see it, we can’t touch it. It’s hard to kind of conceptualize, and a lot of people don’t spend enough time understanding how to cultivate an abundant mindset.

I love that we are going to dive into this and talk about how you help entrepreneurs open up their mindset and lean into this for their businesses. Yeah, I’m glad to be here and talk about it. The first thing I’d like to do is kind of talk about your background, your businesses, and what brought you to this point where this became your mission.

Yeah, of course. I have been in business since 2014, so for a while now. And I have tried a lot of different things.

In the beginning, I just did anything anybody would pay me for. I would just go and do it. But the majority of my business life, I have been a sustainability influencer here in Finland.

I did that for four years, and I was one of the biggest influencers in that sphere here in Finland. It started when my first born was born, my son. And I had this sustainability awakening, so it was kind of funny.

I just started an Instagram account, and all of a sudden, I had this huge following, and I was doing all of this stuff, so it kind of just happened. But what I found was that I was attracting a lot of women who wanted to change their life and start living their values and start changing their mindset and creating their own reality. And they didn’t have the tools to do that.

So even though at first, I was writing about top tips to eliminate waste or stuff like that, it really fast. It turned into kind of this mindset stuff and giving out the tools to actually go and do that stuff that I was sharing because people were lacking the courage and the tools to navigate those discussions and navigate all of that, all of the expectations of society. So it kind of evolved into me talking more about values and transformation and change.

And a little bit over a year ago, I burned out in the social media world. It was wonderful being there, but the platform was really not aligned with who I am and how I like to communicate with people. It was really hard for me to have this fast paced short, like putting everything in little boxes kind of life.

So it kind of forced me to take a break and think about what I want to do and how I want to do business. I still had the same audience, but I created this mini course called You Get to Choose. And I had some people go through that and then I realized that I was really attracting a lot of entrepreneurs and I feel that there is a different kind of way of living or thinking.

When you are a business owner, there is already the knowledge that you get to choose and you don’t have to live the life that is drawn out to you. And I really enjoyed that and I really started seeing the transformation I could provide to them and how I could help them lean into who they are and start taking care of themselves and then attract a lot of abundance. And the abundance part was kind of like a coincidence at first because it was just when they were aligned and they were at peace and they were happy and doing things like the way that feels good to them, then it just started flowing.

So at one point, I then decided to just quit my whole Finnish business and start in an international one. Now in my work, I am mentoring conscious and compassionate women business owners, create lives and businesses that are aligned and abundant and help them create impact and bring more heart into the world. So that’s where I am right now.

So alignment comes first and then the abundance seems to be a delightful side effect of being in alignment and doing the things that support what is important to you and how you want to live and show up. And when you do that, it’s almost like it makes it easier, right? It kind of opens things up and it allows you to receive things. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think it’s kind of magical. And when you are aligned, I think people feel it, people around you. They want to be close to you.

And then also, of course, you start attracting customers that are clients or anybody who is in tune with the same kind of energy. So I’ve been really happily surprised how easy it is to let all that abundance flow in when you are who you are, when you’re not where you’re not hiding behind the masks or the expectations or anything. When we talk about alignment and that’s your values, what you’re doing, how you’re communicating, you mentioned being on social media, it wasn’t in alignment for you.

I love that you said this, like putting all your thoughts and ideas and content into little boxes. I mean, literally and figuratively, right? So you’re really compartmentalizing parts of your business and that does make it hard to let people get to know you holistically because you’re putting things here, there, there, there, there. But if people want to get to know you and they want to see if they are aligned with you, we don’t really… I don’t know if anybody is using that phrase, right? They’re not like, hey, I’m on social media to see who I am aligned with.

But you know when you vibe with somebody, when you connect with, when you click with them, right? That’s a term we use. So when you click, you’re attracting the people that you vibe with and you’re repelling naturally, right? It just naturally happens that the people who are not vibing with you are going to go look for somebody else, right? It’s a no harm, no foul, but you’re just not their people and that’s fine, right? Because that makes more room for the people who are. And it brings a lot of ease into your business when you can just be you, do the things that you enjoy that are fun for you, that are easy for you.

And attract the people that you want to have around you. Yeah, it’s really amazing to realize that when you are who you are without any masks, there’s so many people who just want to give you money just to be around you. And it’s enough for you to be who you are and know what you know to let all of that in.

You don’t have to be anybody else. You don’t have to go get another degree or anything. It’s kind of magical.

It’s interesting that you said that because two things. One, you said it’s amazing how many people just want to pay you for proximity to you being you. And that we’re always doing that self-validation, right? Like we have to feel like we’re worthy of earning this money by having a credential, doing a training, going through some rigorous process to prove.

We have to prove to somebody that we’re worth receiving this money and that’s not even the case is what you’re saying. Yeah, absolutely. And I have a great story about this because when I burned out and I started digging into spirituality for the first time in my life and I didn’t have almost anybody to talk to about this kind of stuff.

Nobody in my life was talking about energy or vibrations or the universe or chakras or whatever. Of course, online you can find anybody, but in my life. And then I found this woman who was doing acupuncture and shiatsu and I literally drove once or twice a week, three hours just to be near her, to be around her energy.

And that was who she was. She was talking about all of this stuff and I really wanted to dig into it. So I drove so many hours of a week just to be close to her.

And also I was really surprised or like I would have paid her thousands of dollars to just be around her energy. And then I was like, you’re only charging like 70 euros for this, like I would pay you anything just to be close to that energy. And I can see that around me everywhere now that people really need that.

They need to find people who are where they want to be. That’s a good point. Especially after the pandemic where we’ve had so much time without people and now we’re really craving that connection.

I think we’ve gotten a lot of clarity about now we’re saying, okay, we can be choosy about who we want to spend time with and it’s worth it to us to find our people and we’re willing to pay for that. I think a lot of these things came to light during the pandemic and it’s great that we can now just have that clarity. Yeah, I think so too.

It’s amazing to now be able to do it in real life. All the things we learned during the time. I mean, right, this is very meta because your whole journey was about finding this alignment and now you’re teaching others to bring this into their life.

So let’s look at the flip side. If somebody is out of alignment, by alignment we mean living and doing the activities surrounding themselves with the people who share values, paying attention and putting their energies into the same things that are important to us. So when we’re not doing that, when we’re spending time with people who have different values or like to do different things or have other things that are important to them, what happens to us? I think overwhelm is the first thing and then when it moves, then it turns into burnout or maybe a midlife crisis.

When you are out of alignment and not in tune with who you are and what you want and what you need, you’re kind of pushing a border up a hill. You kind of have to force everything and everything you need to create like outside motivation to just do the things you have to do and it’s like the opposite of law. It’s just contraction and it’s hard and it’s all exhausting and actually my burnout was one of the greatest things that happened to me because it forced me to… Like I had been living so long wanting to grow but didn’t have the courage to grow to change.

And so then at the end I burned out and now I think it’s amazing because it forced me to stop and re-align, re-center and start again. So yeah, that’s the heightened version of it but I feel overwhelm is such a thing. Everybody’s busy and overwhelmed and doing everything.

I think that’s a sign of that like when everything is important, nothing is. Oh, absolutely. So energetically, it takes a lot out of you to be in the presence of people who are not your people.

You have… I mean, it just takes a lot… I don’t know but obviously the same but it takes a lot out of me to have to spend time and do things that do not align with me and naturally we just start to… Like you said, resist or put up kind of like walls and that takes a lot out of us and that leads to burnout. The more energy you have to put into doing things you don’t want to do or being around people you don’t want to be around, it’s just it costs you and energy and eventually your health. Yeah, I absolutely feel that and I also have some health issues that now that I think about them I can see how my body was trying to tell me in different phases of my life like slow down or change or stop this but then I wouldn’t listen and eventually it would break down and now I’m healing those or trying my best to heal them but yeah, it’s amazing how wise our body is like our emotions and all of the symptoms in our body they’re all here to help us like all of the negative feelings that you are feeling are or just your compass saying that this isn’t working look at this thing this isn’t working.

On the flip side of that your body also tells you when it is working. Absolutely. You can feel it.

You feel good. You feel energy. You feel happy.

You feel peace. I assume is like the most prevalent sensation. He’s looking forward to the work that you’re doing.

How many of us get up every day and we’re like, oh, it’s the slog. What’s on my to-do list? Oh, don’t want to do that. Don’t want to do that.

Hate doing this. Hate doing that. And a lot of us for a lot of us like in this hustle culture we’ve been programmed to think, okay, well, you know, you just got to do this.

You got to do this. You got to do that. And then the reward, it’s all worth it at the end.

When you get to this point, this magical made up point, when you get there, guess what? Everything’s going to be great. It’s going to be easy once you get to this point. But guess what? When you get to that point, you’re either so exhausted, burnt out, stressed out, done.

Or you get to that point and you realize that was a total lie because now you’ve got a whole new list of things you don’t want to do. People you don’t want to talk to, tasks that you hate, and things that get on your calendar that you’re like, are these really necessary? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I used to think that I was a person who just doesn’t have the energy to work a full entire day.

It’s like, I’m just not that kind of person. But now that I’m working, like truly in alignment with myself, I could just work all day and just be happy because I don’t have to force anything. It’s just flowing out of me and it’s easy.

And yeah, and the culture of the world is that everything has to be hard. You have to earn the right to be happy and earn money and work hard to get to those places. But in reality, it doesn’t have to be like that.

You brought up something interesting that work has to be hard and you have to earn it is so ingrained in us. How hard is it in your experience? How hard is it to deprogram from that belief? Very hard, but it helps when you surround yourself with people who also think the way that you want to think it makes a huge difference. But then if you’re just alone trying to change those thoughts and then you’re surrounded by everybody who’s just like hustling away, then it’s maybe even impossible or at least really hard.

So you need to really make big changes in order to change some of these beliefs like to the people who you are surrounded with and to the things you consume and the social media as you follow and everything because it’s everywhere. You have to kind of shield yourself from it, at least in the beginning, in order to make it really seem like it doesn’t have to be like an hour of work. It was an amount of money.

It absolutely doesn’t have to be like that. But that’s how we’re brought up. So most of our subconscious beliefs are formed before we’re seven and those are so deep in us.

And I think these are one of those that you have like since you’re born, people are teaching you that you have to earn anything in this life, even though that is not true. It is hard work, but it’s absolutely worth it. And then when you start seeing it in your real life that you start attracting all of this abundance without having to really push yourself.

It’s amazing confirmation that it doesn’t have to be true. The community that you surround yourself with, the content that you consume and just the environment that you’re in factors into your beliefs around work, hustle, ease, joy, abundance. I love that.

Let’s talk about the work that you do specifically. Tell us what it looks like when you work with your clients to help them find alignment and tap into abundance. Yeah, I’ve been doing one-on-one mentoring until now, but now I’m changing it into a course structure.

So I’m bringing everything I have learned from working with these amazing women and creating this package that anybody can go through at their own time. The first thing to do is to realize that these beliefs are not true and to realize that the basis for everything is that you feel good and that you live your life according to what feels good to you. And that’s kind of huge because we are programmed and as a society, there’s so many expectations for us to just do everything for everybody, especially women.

So I think that’s the starting point to start actually living your life and starting to be conscious of those beliefs and to realize that they are beliefs, that the thoughts that are in your head are actually not true. You have just taught them so many times that they feel like they are true and then start switching them around. So that’s where we usually begin the journey.

By cutting out things and starting to rewrite those beliefs. You mentioned that a lot of these beliefs that we have are grooved into our subconscious long before we have any idea what’s in store for us down the road, right? The things we believe about work, money, attention, enjoyment, deserving rest, things like that. The messages that we’ve received, we’ve taught them so many times.

Like you said, we believe them. You give your clients a place where you can help them evaluate what it is that they believe and examine some beliefs that are not serving them or that keep them kind of stuck out of alignment to help them understand or realize, you know, the calls are coming from inside the house. I’m the one that’s been keeping myself stuck and we’re not pointing any fingers because we’re all victims of this culture and this belief system, right? This is what we’ve been told but it helps us to know that there are other people out there who’ve already gone through this, who’ve already rewired these thoughts and these beliefs for what we’re entitled to without having to work hard to get it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think really looking for proof of the opposite of your limiting beliefs is key. Like one of my favorite things is to google and find ways about how the world is full of money and I find insane things and I love it.

I just love confirming to myself and seeing how much money there is in the world by seeing, like what kind of crazy things people use money for and how much there is extra money in the world and stuff like that and also looking for proof that there are people who are making a lot of money and creating abundance and impact in huge ways and kind of seeing that, you know, if they can do it, of course I can do it too. And I think that’s a big part. That is key because finding ways to disprove beliefs that you have in your head is like the first step to saying, okay, it’s been true to me because I thought it was true, but here are some examples of it not being true and that’s just like mind-blowing.

I know for me, the messaging I received was, you know, go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a job, do the thing, work for somebody else to have job security, make sure somebody else pays you. This is the way, this is how we identify ourselves as successful. And what you’re saying is the world is your oyster, right? I mean, the money is out there.

There’s a million and one different ways to earn it. People are paying for things. There are people who don’t have a degree, who don’t, who didn’t check all those boxes, who are making a ton of money.

So that’s not a requirement. Don’t have to do all these different things to be whatever your version of successful is. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think there’s a big portion of those people who are really successful, don’t have any formal education, because they don’t have, they haven’t kind of put themselves into this box. They have already seen different ways to work in the world. And this was the same for me when I was studying for my master’s and I actually stopped after my bachelor’s because I didn’t feel the need.

But I was just working on my bachelor’s and I started my business and I started making so much money and I could just save my price and people would pay me. And at one point I couldn’t, I had to turn down work because I couldn’t work so much and it was really mind-blowing to me to realize nobody ever asked me about my studies or my education or anything. They saw what I was doing and they were like, okay, here’s the money.

And yeah, it’s insane how ingrained it is in our system to believe that you have to have this huge high degree and a lot of experience before you can even do anything. That’s just not true at least in my experience. You know what, I’ll tell you.

So I went to school for computer science. I have a degree in programming. And for me to get jobs, I needed that piece of paper.

For me to do the work that I do web design, I do tech support for other businesses and other, and I do some technical literacy and empowerment courses. Not one single person has ever asked me what my credentials are. Literally, nobody cares that I went to school and I spent all this time and hours and energy and it was awful.

But that I spent all this time and money getting these degrees and having this experience in corporate, nobody cares. They care about the results. They see that I can get them the end.

And like you said, so many people have had immense financial success without formal degrees because they, one, either never had that belief ingrained in them that it was necessary or they did, but it was disproven because they saw other people. They were looking for examples of how it can be done without getting that required piece of paper. The piece of paper is for us.

It’s so we feel validated. It’s so that we feel empowered to ask for money. How messed up is that? Yeah, absolutely.

So you’re turning your program into a course in order to help more people understand the importance of alignment and how it leads to abundance. And I think that’s great because that also gives them a chance to go through it at their own pace. And I’m going to put the links to your website.

You’re not on social media anymore because it is out of alignment for you, which is great. I love that you have that boundary. So I’m going to put the link to your website in the show notes and also the link to your course so people can check it out.

And then you have a free gift for our listeners. This is the six things blocking your abundance and how to fix them, a guide to the conscious and compassionate entrepreneur. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s in there? Yeah, I created it as kind of like a starting point into looking into this alignment and abundance stuff.

So it contains six different things that block your abundance and kind of how to work through them. And I think it’s a great place to start digging into this kind of stuff and seeing also how I work. And if you are aligned with my kind of style and then when you download that you will be added into my newsletter list and I write great newsletters every week.

That is my main, that is kind of like my substitute for social media. I’m focusing on the email. Those have been really loved by people.

So then you can kind of come into my sphere through that. Pipsa, this has been so great. I love this topic and I love that we are shining a light on the importance of alignment.

That feeling of ease and joy in your life, your environment, your community, your work, your home life, everything allows you to have the space to build the kind of life that you want. I love this. I really appreciate that you took the time to come and talk to us about this.

Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for listening. And if you liked this episode, go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and be sure to subscribe so you’ll be notified when the next episode is live.

Check out our show notes for this episode where you can find any of the links and resources that were mentioned during the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you in the next episode.