Episode 174: Committing Until It Takes with Kimberly Spencer

By Sarah Walton | May 2, 2023

Today’s guest, Coach Kimberly Spencer, has this belief in her business and with clients that the reason you don’t have what you want is because of the story you’re telling yourself. Her life’s work is proof of that.

What Kimberly does is really look at the cobwebs of your unconscious in your business and figure out where you are holding things back. She's been able to expand her life because she started asking better questions, changed her environment, and changed who she was hanging out with, which I believe is so critical to your success. She was able to transform every single aspect of her life that she wanted to transform.

Kimberly is an award-winning trauma informed coach and trainer. She healed herself from bulimia and years later also healed her relationship with money to turn her business around. She shares openly about her first 18 months making no money despite the perfect website, photoshoot and marketing that all “successful people” have.

Now, she runs a successful coaching practice helping people with their old stories, heal their past, and start living life on their own terms.

Committing to what it takes

Kimberly’s journey started in Hollywood as a screenwriter. At the time, she’d been battling bulimia for about 10 years. A friend introduced her to Pilates and for the first time, she said she felt good in her body.

“That was such a foreign sensation to me, where I felt strong, I felt confident … I felt guided and supported,” she says. This led to her teaching Pilates in her own private studio where she was surrounded by multiple different belief systems every day.

She said seeing different stories come into and out of her space allowed her to shake up her own story about what was possible.

“I saw a correlation that it didn’t matter whether somebody was technically fat or technically thin … what mattered was their mindset around how they thought about their bodies.”

From there, Kimberly helped launch an e-commerce start-up. But three months before her wedding she was asked to be bought out by her partner. She didn’t have a business anymore and felt like everything had been ripped out from under her.

She’d been an actor. A screenwriter. A Pilates instructor with her own studio. She’d healed from bulimia. She’d healed from narcissistic relationships. She’d been in pageants. She realized her through line was a holistic success piece and she decided to start her company Crown Yourself.

She bought the equipment. She bought the domain and website. She did the photoshoot. And for a year and a half she made $100.

Watch: Stop Fighting for Your Limiting Beliefs

Money and body parallel

Kimberly says it wasn’t until she found out she was pregnant in 2016 that she realized the beliefs, the habits and the attitude she had around money and her business ran parallel to the beliefs she had about her body a decade ago. That’s when she realized she had a process to work through for her business.

“Our brains are wired to survive, and so by exposing yourself to new belief systems … they’re exposing themselves to new possibilities of how to survive in this world. Our brain is wired to survive, not to thrive,” she says, recalling her time teaching Pilates. “You cannot change in the environment that made you sick.”

She notes shifting your environment can be a massive transformational piece because your external circumstances will always reflect your internal circumstances and vice versa.

In her journey to healing from bulimia, she pointed to three things that helped her overcome: Environment, future self, and banishing blame. She said it started with her taking personal responsibility.

“I had to start questioning my own behavior, stopped judging myself when I defaulted to what I had known as the default, which was binging and purging, and instead started asking myself some new questions,” she says.

She said she had to give herself so much grace and so much compassion and recognize and take the time and say, “It's going to take as long as it takes, but I'm committed to it taking.”

Watch: Motivation Is a Skill

Radical ownership and the just world bias

Dropping a victimhood mentality is almost always the first step to healing anything. Kimberly says it can really suck to look into the mirror and take radical ownership of your current state.

She wants to make it clear that self-blame, which she sees a lot in high achievers, is not ownership. If you’re blaming yourself, you’re making yourself the villain instead of the victim. She says it’s a common place to go when you’ve experienced childhood trauma.

It comes from a messed-up belief system with your just world bias. The just world bias is the belief you hold as a child where you expect the whole world to be fair. (We know this isn’t true as adults.) When you’ve experienced childhood trauma or abuse, you can recognize that isn’t fair, but there is a belief that you must have done something to justify it. (You haven’t.)

There is a space in radical ownership where people might get pushed to the point of putting themself at fault for their past. This is not true. Your past is not your fault. But you are responsible for healing and moving to a place of acceptance because acceptance is a neutral emotional state. Whereas as a victim, you’re projecting out and as a villain, you’re projecting in. There’s guilt and shame in both directions versus true ownership.

Acceptance means you’re just at the starting line. It’s neutral. We’re all humans going through this experience; we don’t get to decide until it’s on us to choose the response. And that response is the moment in which we have the shift of power. We can shift it from experience being done to us to having some say in what the end result is.

Kimberly says it’s key to understand your value system and why something is important to you. For business owners who are struggling to make money, the question to ask is: Why is money important to you?

She points to healing from bulimia as an example. She says her value on health and feeling whole in her body wasn’t there. Instead, she was focused on an outward perception of how she thought she needed to look. Similarly, with her business, she had to stop blaming her former business partner and had to take full ownership of the financial debt that she had got herself into over a year and a half.

Goals and ownership

Kimberly says she goes against the grain of some coaches, who are very intent on setting goals and affirmations. She says most people starting their business are not personally developed enough to maintain the responsibility that comes with a six-to-seven-figure business.

“One of the biggest things I see with a lot of business leaders is that they want to achieve the next level of power, influence and money, but they have to simultaneously accept the amount of responsibility that’s coming with it and stop telling themselves a bullshit story of how overwhelmed they are,” says Kimberly.

In balancing being a new motion with her new business (that at this point had made $100), Kimberly went back to the idea of committing to the commitment. She eliminated arbitrary timelines and reassessed the level of responsibility she could commit to.

If you’re struggling, she asks you to look at whether or not you’re able to respond at the moment to the next thing rather than react.