NK Podcast: Leading H.E.R. Way
What if I told you that building a successful business doesn’t have to mean running yourself into the ground?
Welcome to Leading HER Way, the podcast that challenges the outdated belief that success has to come with burnout.
I’m Nikisha, your disruptive coach, and after 15 years of growing multiple businesses, I’ve learned that working harder isn’t the answer—building smarter is.
Every week, I sit down with powerhouse women entrepreneurs and wedding pros who’ve cracked the code to scaling their businesses while reclaiming their time.
You’ll hear raw, unfiltered conversations, client transformations, and behind-the-scenes success stories proving that your business can thrive without you constantly putting out fires.
Here’s what you’ll take away:
✔️ How to build 7-figure systems that scale—so you’re not stuck in the weeds of your business.
✔️ How to stop being the bottleneck and design a business that runs smoothly without you.
✔️ Social proof from industry leaders who have mastered this shift—and are here to show you how.
So, if you’re ready to work less while earning more, hit play, and let’s create a business that ignites your freedom. 🔥
NK Podcast: Leading H.E.R. Way
Ep 64: Katya Stepanov: The Transformation Portal: Rediscovering Your True Self
What if the key to unlocking your success, wealth, and freedom was already inside you—just waiting to be revealed?
In this episode of Leading HER Way, we dive deep into transformation, breaking free from inherited beliefs, and learning how to make money in complete alignment with who you truly are. Get ready for an eye-opening conversation that might just change the way you see success forever!
Nikisha sits down with the multi-talented Katya Stepanov, a four-time founder, transformational artist, and expert in human design. Sharing her incredible journey from growing up with deep-rooted communist money beliefs to building businesses that align with her soul’s purpose.
Explains how understanding her human design changed her relationship with money, why taking up space is essential for success, and how embracing visibility led to her first five-figure month—without working harder.
This episode is a powerful guide for any entrepreneur looking to break free from limiting beliefs and step into abundance with confidence.
Top 3 Takeaways:
- Know Yourself to Grow Yourself – Understanding your human design can unlock your unique path to success and wealth.
- Visibility = Opportunity – The more you authentically show up, the more aligned opportunities will find you.
- Rewrite Your Money Story – Your beliefs about money shape your reality. Challenge old narratives and create a new, empowering financial mindset.
🚀 Listen now and start making money in a way that feels GOOD!
If today’s episode sparked a new perspective for you, don’t stop here!
Head to our resources page by Clicking Here.
You'll find exclusive FREE resources to help you streamline your business, charge what you're worth, and finally work smarter, not harder.
Let’s make 2025 your most profitable year yet!
Welcome to Leading Her Way with your host and business guru, Nikisha King. This podcast is the ultimate destination for women, creative entrepreneurs, who want to break free from burnout. If you are overwhelmed by client demands and feel like you're doing this all alone, you, my friend, are in the right place alone. You, my friend, are in the right place Now. Let's dive in for steps to take back your time and simplify your workflow. All right, Nikesha, take it away.
Katya Stepanov:Hello, gorgeous Welcome to Leading Her Way. I'm excited today to have a special guest with me, someone who is part of my divine feminine leaders, and we are in a community where we get to be uplifted, we get to be loved on in ways that are so different, and that's so much what we need. How are you, Katya?
Katya Stepanov:I am good. I mean good is not the right word, but I'll say I feel very present today.
Katya Stepanov:Oh, I love that. I love that. Welcome to the Make Money series, and I would love for you to tell our audience, or that special someone who's listening today, who you are and how do you transform the lives of others.
Katya Stepanov:I love this question and thank you for having me on this podcast, nikisha. Anytime that I get to share my story is a gift and so I'll share that. I am, first and foremost, an artist. I am a four-time founder and I love creating portals for transformation, and I do that in a variety of ways. You know the word portal is mystical and magical. Yes, I am mystical and magical, so I am a human design reader and Oracle and I read tarot cards. So that's one portal of transformation. Someone wants to step through that portal of learning themselves and their design and how they can align their life better with their design and their business better with their design. So that's one.
Katya Stepanov:I'm a CEO of Inheritance Project, which is a portal for unpacking your inherited behaviors and patterns, systems and doing organizational transformation change with teams and leaders, but also individuals, so that we do, through our conflict work, our conflict transformation work and through conscious leadership training. And a third portal is that I'm a conscious DJ and event producer and I create this dance floor, where that is a portal for transformation, for full expression, for freeing ourselves from conditioning of how to move pretty or well right or I can't dance and I love especially reaching people who think they can't dance and showing them that dance is not a performance. It's actually your birthright to move your body and free your body and have a relationship with your body and anyone can dance. If they can wiggle any part of their body, they can dance. So that's three different portals of transformation that I take people through and through my poetry. Take people through and through my poetry. I think the poetry I write and my speaking and channeling can be its own portal of healing for people.
Katya Stepanov:I am in awe because, as much as I know you, I feel like that's the first time I heard you share your portal with me, the different portals. I know you're a DJ and event producer. I'm in the world with you where we work on our inner being, and I know about the inheritance group, the business that you do there too. But to hear you speak about it is so different because as you're speaking, the message, I'm getting the underlying tone. You help people transform within you, help them break the bondage of their limiting beliefs, of the conditioning, and you help them to find who they are today through their human design, through their inherited conditioning, through their body movement right and get rid of that. I have two left feet concept, yes, so limiting right To move to dance is just to feel, to let go. And I heard all of that when you were sharing. I was like, oh my God, which is an empowering story. In the first, place.
Katya Stepanov:So I'm hesitant, but I think it's the closest word to what I'm trying to say, which really is freedom, that actually freedom of expression of mind, of opinion, of self-determination. I believe every single human being deserves that kind of freedom to choose their own path, to choose who they want to be. And the world makes that very challenging for us. And so all my tools are tools to help the person find some freedom within their own circumstances and see that actually, maybe some of the things that are keeping them trapped and stuck are inherited or imposed or something that didn't actually come from them. It didn't come from their pure essence, from their heart, from what they're here to do. And once we can recognize all those things and have practices to dance with them, truly dance with them, because they never really fully go away. And I speak about this so passionately. And why do I do this work? Because I've lived this. I come from one of the most intense imprints that could exist, in my opinion, on earth.
Katya Stepanov:I was born in the former Soviet Union four days after the Soviet Union collapsed. So in a way, I am a freedom baby. I was born at the collapse of this empire that nobody thought would ever collapse. So in a way, I am a freedom baby. I was born at the collapse of this empire that nobody thought would ever collapse. Right, and that's my signature is collapsing empire, a new world being built. And what is that new world and that new path?
Katya Stepanov:But it's not something that came easy to me because I came as an immigrant. I was one year old. No one in my family spoke English. My parents were in their 20s. We had no community, no connections, no language.
Katya Stepanov:So there was a very strong survival, poverty imprint that I grew up in the first seven years of my life of, you know, watching my parents go through unimaginable things to try to assimilate into a culture that was completely alien to them and me being the first English speaker, the first one to navigate a world that my parents didn't understand. So I was. It was very challenging on one hand and you know I've gone through my whole trauma victim, pity, pity, party of oh, life was so hard, yes, like that's important and we need to hold face for ourselves. To do that sometimes was actually my greatest gift and gives me privilege now, because most people aren't born, most people are born into a world that they're not aware of the structure of that world and how it's being built, but because I had a home environment that was steeped in post-Soviet communist ideologies and then I was being raised in a capitalist American society, I could see the matrix of both of those right really clearly and so I said, wow, all of this is constructed, it's all made up.
Katya Stepanov:It is. Why did we make it up like this right? There's such a better way to make it up. If it's made up, how about we make up something new that actually serves humanity? So that's a bit more about me.
Katya Stepanov:And the way we made it up was not to serve humanity but serve self. It developed into what it is today because it's self-serving. From a different perspective, which I'll leave alone. But yes, now, based on you being born after the Soviet collapsed, moving to a capitalistic country, how did that affect your beliefs about being an entrepreneur and believing your capability, believing you can actually make money, serving in this form? Human design, event producer, right, like, how did that all play out for you?
Katya Stepanov:This is why I was so excited actually to talk to you about this topic today. At first I doubted it and I was like, should I talk about money if I still really am in the journey of deconditioning myself from these deeply imprinted belief systems? And then I thought yes, because actually I'm sure that someone listening to this is going to resonate with where I'm at right now and see something in this, and I you know. So again, I told Nikesha I would probably cry during this. So it's definitely going to happen.
Katya Stepanov:But the imprint of communism is really interesting because, on one hand, it's rooted in a beautiful ideology right, we're all equal, no one deserves more money than anyone else. That's the ideological backbone of a communist philosophy. But what that actually created in and I'll speak just in my family, right from my experience and not as a generalization, because I'm sure everyone has their own experience of it, but it created a deep sense of disempowerment. Because what are you being motivated by if there's a threshold of how much you can make? And money, whether we like it or not, is our dominant energetic exchange of resources and we need money to travel and build things and live life. So I came from a culture where money was demonized and it was taught to 70 years so like three generations of people in my family that money is evil. Money corrupts. Money turns people into capitalist pigs. All the problems of the world come from money, right.
Katya Stepanov:Yes, not the people, the money.
Katya Stepanov:The money is the problem, apparently, and so I actually. It took me a while, a long time, to wake up to the deeply ingrained, secret belief I had. That aligned with that I only realized it really, I realized, drove me in my early years to be an artist and to be someone who said I'm not going to go into making money, right, I'm going to be altruistic, I'm going to be an artist and I don't need to make money because money is evil, even though I don't. It's just that I don't really understand it right, because there was no education around a healthy relationship with money.
Katya Stepanov:And for my parents and me in the early childhood, there wasn't a lot of money. Right, money was scarce Money. Was this thing we're chasing after that? We never have enough of scarce Money. Was this thing we're chasing after that? We never have enough of that? We're always trying to figure out how to navigate.
Katya Stepanov:So I saw what it did to my parents and I didn't want to become that. So I thought that by resisting making money, I would somehow free myself, which I look back now and I can see that version of myself with deep compassion and understand why I believe those things and recognize that that's a choice and it was a disempowering choice for a long time. And so my relationship with money really only started in 2020 with the pandemic, because before that point I was fully in the archetype of firstborn immigrant daughter doing hustle culture, a million jobs in order to just try to make my rent, using my talent in every way possible, but not valuing myself, not understanding how to value myself, my mind, what I bring to the table, so I was always undercharging self. My mind, what I bring to the table, so I was always undercharging, doing a million different things to try to make ends meet and not focusing on how might I live my purpose and be in service and have a relationship with money and how might I befriend money and see money as my friend, money as my ally in the work I want to do in the world, and the revelation that actually the more money I have, the more impact I can actually create, and that it's not about the money, it's about the person.
Katya Stepanov:And I came to a point of do I trust myself? And that became the real guiding question. Because if I believe in myself and I trust myself and I know what my values are, then I'm going to align the money I make with my values and I'm going to make a more beautiful world. So I am on this deconditioning journey. Entrepreneurship, I have to say, comes from even though my parents came to the US and they did go the track of trying to find a nine to five, stable job because as immigrants with a great deal of instability, that was the smartest choice for them. I resisted that my whole life. I've never had a nine to five.
Katya Stepanov:I've never gone down the path of corporate because I knew that that would be a trap for me and that that wasn't my path, and so I have been learning a lot about how to relate to money in a completely different way. And my father, actually, before we immigrated to the US, he had a dream of starting his own business. He's very entrepreneurial. He started the first bodega in Bellows. Before that was a thing like that sold Western goods, so gum and jeans and Barbie dolls. There's like a whole story of them intercepting the Barbie doll truck and like getting all the Barbies in his bodega and then like 200 person mob that came to the door to try to get the Barbies. I mean, this is like you know, the movie that the.
Katya Stepanov:It takes a lot of courage to leave your entire homeland right and all your family and all of your support system and say I can go to the country that I was taught is evil, right, my whole life and I'm going to. I'm not going to listen to that narrative. I'm I see an opportunity here. I'm against the grain and I'm going to do something unpopular and I'm going to believe. And I'm going to believe that I will succeed because I believe in myself and that is the place from which business is born, because we make the things that we see are needed in the world and I, to connect the dots was growing up seeing all the things that were really needed in America that didn't exist. They're all the things I needed when I was a kid. I needed a program to help me unpack my inherited conditioning from the Soviet Union so I could free myself and write my own legacy. So I made Inheritance Project right.
Katya Stepanov:I needed, I saw theater. I was a theater artist, have always been my whole life. I studied acting at the best conservatory in the US and I saw, and I was bored with theater. I saw that everything was on a proscenium that we're performing at the audience. The audience is like 70 year olds that are like asleep in their chair. I was like this is one of the most alive, activist art forms theater and it requires us to reach the people who are in the seats.
Katya Stepanov:And so I said what if we just do everything in an immersive format? What if the audience is in the show? And then I said no, there's no theater like that. That was before Punch Drunk and Sleep no More. So I made an immersive theater company and we started doing immersive theater because I didn't see it in the world right Conscious dance, ecstatic dance. I loved to dance. I was going to clubs and I was like this is not it. Where are the spaces where we don't have to be drunk to move our bodies? Where are the spaces where we can actually connect on the dance floor and we're not dancing to be sexualized or sexualize somebody else?
Katya Stepanov:Yeah.
Katya Stepanov:And so I said, great, I'm going to find those places. And I started finding them. And then I said I want to be a leader that creates more of these types of environments so that people can experience real joy and bliss and ecstasy without substances. And it is possible, it's all inside of us. It's just about getting out of our own way, about confronting like, oh, I'm going to look weird or cringe and that's true about business too.
Katya Stepanov:You are, you're going to look cringe, you're going to feel weird, you're going to feel uncomfortable, you're going to be like what the hell am I doing? Does anybody know how anything works? Turns out, no, we don't, we just do it. We just bravely say I'm going to take that single step, you know, to say I will be the one to do this, and so that's why I hesitate to define myself in any one way. People are always telling me well, if you had to focus, if you had to focus, if you had to focus and I love those people and I know they have my best intention at heart and I'm here to defy that and say actually, I can be a multi-potentialist and have a successful life and career. I can focus on many different things that seem different, but they're not. They're all part of the same mission.
Katya Stepanov:They are. They have the end in line in it. I can hear it and I know it.
Katya Stepanov:Yeah, amy, you shan't present a bit. I don't know if I answered your question.
Katya Stepanov:No, you did, Don't worry about it. This is what the person listening needs to hear. Let it be, let it flow right, let it do its thing Exactly In you, believing that you could be multifaceted. You could do all three, all four, whatever it is, and you one. How do you define success? Is success for you capital? And a lot of entrepreneurs would say it's not capital, but it's the thing that runs your business, it's the thing that fuels your business, so you can go out and do exactly what you were created for.
Katya Stepanov:Yeah.
Katya Stepanov:So, when you think about that generating revenue how do you make money? What does making money even mean? Because everyone has a different way, right? Some people are very hard. They think working 12-hour days, 40-hour days you don't have that many hours in a day, but they somehow feel like they do that. They think that's making money. Right, they're doing all the 80% and not the 20 that leads to the 80%. So for you, what is that for you?
Katya Stepanov:I'm going to bring this question to the world of human design because everything changed for me around how I make money when I learned my design.
Katya Stepanov:Hmm.
Katya Stepanov:I am a 5-1 mental projector and for those for whom this is a foreign language, please find me. I will explain human design to you. It's one of my favorite things to do, because this tool freed me on a level that nothing else freed me. That's why I'm so passionate about it, but because I believe information is not Knowledge is power. When we know about how we're designed now, we're empowered to make different choices that are more aligned with our natural way of being.
Katya Stepanov:And.
Katya Stepanov:I really believe every single human being just as unique as your fingerprint. You have your unique blueprint and there are things that will work for you that won't work for someone else, and there's things that work for someone else that won't work for you. And we're always comparing ourselves and thinking, oh, the way that person does it is how I should do it. And then, when it doesn't work for us, we're like why isn't it working? So human design solved a lot of this for me and I'll explain about myself. I'm a 5-1 mental projector. This means I don't have a defined sacral center. I'm not designed to have the same amount of energy every day, so I try to make money through a 9-5. I would burn out and get sick and I would ask. I would be like why is this working? Why can't I? Just, you know right. So that doesn't work for me. As a projector, I need to wait for invitation for every single thing that's aligned for me in my life. This is a gift. In some ways. It's challenging because I can't initiate. I can't just be like, oh, I see this person and they resonate with me. I'm going to go like, try to connect with them. That doesn't work for me.
Katya Stepanov:I have to work on making my gifts visible, as visible as possible. So I make money by showing up publicly in my gifts, by creating an event right and leading and facilitating it, by being the DJ that's serving the music, by speaking the poetry by. I show up on my social media and I share. It's my platform. I don't need permission to share on my own platform, right? I make what I do visible and people find me. People invite me. They come to me and say will you DJ here? Will you come?
Katya Stepanov:I love Inheritance Project. My company could use that. I wait for them to approach me because if they're approaching me, then they recognize my talent and they want specifically me because they understand my value and now I can negotiate from a position of empowerment because they understand my value already. I don't have to prove my value to them. I'm not trying to get them to like me. I'm not trying to chase. I don't chase anybody anymore. I spent 20 years of my life chasing opportunities and being like why am I not invited to that and I should show up to this and I should go out of my way to force myself to talk to this person. Wow, I don't do that at all anymore, and it was very hard to change this habit because we are taught that we should be proactive. So this is why I'm saying, if there's another investor who's listening to this projectors are not generators. We're not designed to like chase after things. You'll not find success like that.
Katya Stepanov:Got it.
Katya Stepanov:We will find success by seeing ourselves really clearly and what we're good at, and making that visible. And that can be done in a million different ways. How to gain visibility right and as soon as we're visible. It's about trusting that all the people we're meant to serve are going to invite us to help, wow so good.
Katya Stepanov:So I started making money, true, like night and day. I'm saying, you know now I had and it's not crazy, but in this year I had my first like five figure month I had. I never had that before, right, and it came. And it didn't come from working more, it came from make, just working on the vulnerability of making myself more visible. So withstanding being seen, and that is the muscle that I'm working on, especially now in my life as a creator that if I want to be a creator, I need to be very comfortable being seen in all of my dimensions, being seen in all of my dimensions, and the more vulnerable and the more seen I am, the more business will flow to me because people will resonate with me and my frequency and my gifts. And those are the people I'm here to serve and nobody else.
Katya Stepanov:I love that. That is so good.
Katya Stepanov:There's one other nugget, which is projectors. Our gift on this planet is the way we see things. Projectors, our gift on this planet is the way we see things. It's we see things other types don't see, and we see other types better than they see themselves, so we can recognize another person's gifts, sometimes when they don't even recognize it about themselves. That's what makes me a great coach, because I can see this person's unique gift and try to help them see that about themselves and align their life in a way that that gift can be visible to the rest of the world. And so once I stopped calculating my value based on the number of hours I work, because that's not the value I give. There's a great story about a designer, this amazing designer who drew the Nike logo. Do you remember? Do you know this story?
Katya Stepanov:I know the Nike story, but yes.
Katya Stepanov:For those who don't know this person wanted this designer to design the logo and they had a lunch and this logo came through and was channeled and she put it on a napkin and she said that's going to be like $2 million. And the person said what do you mean, $2 million for the napkin? And she's like no, $2 million. For the 20 years of experience that I have that I could even channel this logo on a napkin for you in five seconds. That's what you're paying me for. You're paying me for my wisdom and my intuition, which, honestly, is priceless.
Katya Stepanov:I just have to put a price on it because we live in this reality, right?
Katya Stepanov:So I, even when I price things, like I think about it differently now that I know that my superpower is I can do in one hour what it would take somebody else to do in a month, so I don't need to work a month to make that income.
Katya Stepanov:I need to understand the value of what I do in a different way and only work with people who also see that and recognize that about me, where I try to prove it to them and if I feel that like ooh, this person doesn't really recognize or see me or value me and I'm kind of in a proving it pattern. I catch that really quickly and I just trust that that's not aligned and I need to end that relationship and make space for someone else to come in who does see me and does want to work with me. So I never had to market to be a coach. Sometimes I even think I'm like am I doing something wrong? I should probably post something on social media. You know like like I, I get trapped in the, in the narratives myself sometimes of like you're doing it wrong, you know Right.
Katya Stepanov:And actually, if I really reflect on the months that I made the most money, they were the months that I worked the least.
Katya Stepanov:Now I want to take it back to something, because there's two things. One, make money. I had to learn how to show up that part of showing up and being visible so someone reads and understands your frequency. A lot of people won't understand that, some will, and they will then see you and know that you're for them. Yeah, then that speaks to someone who values what I can do in an hour compared to them winning in a month. Because, whatever that transformation is, they desire it now. Yes, because they require it now. They don't require it in a month. They don't need to be with you for a whole year. They need a fast transformation.
Katya Stepanov:One and a half hours. This is my human design. Readings are 90 minutes and I think my favorite testimonial is I just read it for the co-founder of Divine Feminine Leader, olivia, and she said to me this 90 minute session was more transformational for me than tens of thousands of dollars I invested in coaching programs Because it's about how you walk out of that room, what you walk out of that room understanding about yourself and seeing about yourself which I'm a master of a specific system, the human design system. So I'm like here's this toolbox that could help you so dramatically in such a short amount of time and it's this incredible gift of information. So I also had to learn about myself. There's a lot of different types of people and we and there's so there's millions of souls on earth we all need each other and there's abundance for everyone, like there's going to be. You may be totally different from me, and so there's going to be a totally different way that you work that works for you. So it's just about also knowing who you know, knowing our unique design. That's why it makes it so. That's why it's so important, because I'm not a I'm not a traditional coach in the sense of like a little bit every day. I'm like a hero's dose of mushrooms. So you come to see me when you're ready for a deep, immediate knowledge. Download right, like what you said. They need it now, in this moment. It's going to activate them. It's destiny we were meant to meet. Those are the people that I tend to serve, that they find me and they go you, literally.
Katya Stepanov:At Art Basel I played with this, just I turned up the volume on it a little bit. I went to Art Basel. I only went because I was invited to go Again. I wait until someone says you should come here and do this, and I said I'm not going to approach anyone at this event. This is a networking event. I was like what if I try to really live my design and go and be in different places, like be and do what I want to do in that room without regard for anyone else? So the great music's playing, I'm dancing, right? Oh, if I need a drink, I'm going to go over here.
Katya Stepanov:I didn't approach a single person and I cannot. I truly I'm telling you single person and I cannot. I truly I'm telling you five different people who are incredible human beings that I'm so grateful to know now showed up in front of me. Truly, they would like come stand in front of me and go hi, and I'd go hi and they would go. I love your energy.
Katya Stepanov:The same sentence across. Like these are people in different locations, they don't know each other, right, but I'm listening and I go. Great, this person sees something and recognizes something in me. So the person I'm supposed to talk to in this room is best person. Here they are. There's no guessing, there's no FOMO, there's no connected with 16 other people that were like they were not the ones in that moment that I needed to connect with. It was this person who was magnetized to me and just listening to who's finding me and how can I see why and meet them where they're at, which is also why I don't have like traditional pricing structures. Right, let me meet you where you're at. You know it needs to be an investment for you. So you take it seriously. Yes, everyone is at a different point and I'm not going.
Katya Stepanov:If I feel I'm destined to serve you, I'll always find a way to make it possible. So I think that's the other difference of success. Like how I measure success, you asked that question. I measure success on how much do I feel like I'm living my purpose today. Am I doing tasks that don't feel like they're actually aligned with my purpose? Then I don't feel successful. If I'm doing things that I know I'm supposed to do, like talking to you on this podcast, today's already a successful day because I'm doing things that I know I'm supposed to do, like talking to you on this podcast. Today's already a successful day because I'm note up, invited to share some wisdom and whoever is meant to receive it is going to receive it, and then they'll find me and that's the way I'm designed to live. So I can feel that.
Katya Stepanov:I love that. It's so interesting because before our call or our podcast recording, I was on a call and I was speaking to someone about making money and networking because they need more lead gen. Right, we use all the business lingo, but deep down, it's the same thing. You need to attract people to you, yeah. Who sees your value and wants to pay you for your value? Hello, just in case, I'm going to turn all of this into the language some you for your value. Hello, just in case I'm going to. I'm going to turn all of this into the language Some people speak, yeah.
Katya Stepanov:Right and in understanding that she's in a community where they they got to know her personally, loved her, value her and referred her. Then we, as in our industry of events and hospitality, she shows up there but somehow she's not converting right. So I said you got to kind of do the same thing there when you go, you got to connect right, because people are not of money, ching, ching, transaction or relationship, they're connectors right. And even when you go there, I usually go into the room where I know people, but I know them because I actually want to connect with them, or my energy shows up because I believe my spirit always walks in the room before my human being. I walk into the room and there is something that people come to me and they say the same thing Like I love your energy, oh my gosh, like I've done it many times in rooms of 500, 1,000.
Katya Stepanov:My people always find me and it's because you're not afraid to show who you are, and I think that's the other piece. So it's not enough to just show up in a room and be hiding inside yourself. That's not going to work, no. But you pop in a room and I notice you because you know yourself. You've got this beautiful red hair, these glasses. You let your energy shine out so that it can be. It's like a lighthouse can't guide anyone if the lights are off. Right, yes, you can't. No one's going to find you if the lights are off and you're a lighthouse. You know You're a lighthouse, you know. So how do you do the inner work to shine your light? Purely Because people feel it. They do.
Katya Stepanov:They resonate with it. If you're not confident, if you don't feel like you can do what you're doing as a business owner, they're going to feel that and they're not going to trust you. They're not going to want to pay you what you're asking. You can't make money in that frequency of energy.
Katya Stepanov:You can. It's going to be really hard. Yes, yes, it's not sustainable. It's not a sustainable thing. You will burn out.
Katya Stepanov:In other words, because of what you're doing, but you're not even going to be doing actions that align with you, like you said. It wouldn't align with you, it would feel very different, like it's a struggle, and I did that, so I know exactly what you're doing, cause I didn't know who I was.
Katya Stepanov:Yes.
Katya Stepanov:But as I started to become confident in what I can do and who I am, I was like that's where things change, that's where showing up was even easier. Right, like taking up space. This year my theme is take up space, and it's not like I wasn't doing it before, because, promise you, people walk up to me and keep saying I saw you on Facebook or somewhere. I'm like I only did a couple of videos, I wasn't even consistent. But what happens if I show up every day? What happens if I show up every day?
Katya Stepanov:What happens if I pour, what if I devote myself to being seen and allowing my soul to be seen by the world around me, which really is a relationship for me. So the other piece I'll share is I came from a communist background where for almost a hundred years my family and ancestors were forcefully disconnected from God, from any sort of spirituality. Spirituality was demonized in the Soviet Union so that they could control the masses and make the government their religion. This is how they did it, right. It's mind control, because a human who feels a connection with source and God cannot be controlled by external forces. They have their own relationship with their own guiding light and their own inner compass. And I have done a lot of work to even say the word God out loud my God, honestly. Like the 12-year-old me would be like cringing listening to 32-year-old me talking because I was so. I knew I was connected to something beyond my awareness, but I was.
Katya Stepanov:I saw what religion did in the world throughout history and I was like that doesn't resonate for me and I didn't see any examples of spiritual business people, right, who were actually connected to their soul's purpose. I saw a lot of people trying to make money at the expense of other people, which is something that that's why I thought money was evil. I saw the behaviors and tactics of unhealed people in the world who do create pain and tragedy all around them, and what's interesting is, as soon as we see ourselves differently, the world will echo it back to you. So, about taking up space, I think there's two pieces. There's deciding that you're us, made ourselves visible in early ages and were shut down or bullied right, or dismissed or rejected, and so we have this wound around visibility, where we're like well, if I show this, I'm going to get rejected. Yes, and it's completely normal to feel that way.
Katya Stepanov:And I also have that protector part that comes online when I'm about to share something vulnerable. That's like oh, what if someone doesn't like it, right or whatever? And I go. Thank you, thank you for trying to protect me, but I'm a big girl and like, if someone rejects me, I'm going to be okay. And what happens instead every time, like every time that I do it, that's not what happens. What happens is an overwhelming response of positivity and reinforcement. When I go, I'm going to dance a little bigger on the dance floor today and I'm going to. Who cares what anyone thinks about it. I swear I've had people come up to me after and go hey, I really want to thank you because the way you take up space gives me permission to take up more space. Way you take up space gives me permission to take up more space, and so you become the permission slip for other people when you show up more authentically as yourself.
Katya Stepanov:So true, I love that. You become the permission, that is, I'm taking that one in.
Katya Stepanov:So I'm the permission slip for all the multi-hyphenate, out of the box, unlabeled people who don't want to do just one thing in their life. I feel to say, yeah, me too. And I'm a permission slip for you and don't let anyone rob you of your multi-passionate, multi-dimensional beingness. Just as much as we need experts, we also need generalists. We also need people who know a little bit about a lot of things that are well-rounded. So we need all of us. And if you feel more like oh, that resonates with me and I am a generalist and I want to do lots of different things, don't let common business knowledge get you down. That like just shut down all your other passions and only focus on one thing for the rest of your life, you'll never be successful.
Katya Stepanov:Yes, so true. What I'm going to ask you is to share three actionable steps that our beautiful audience can take to either help them get in tune with self so they can start making money, or be comfortable with defining who they are and know that, whatever pathway they take, money will come to them abundantly. So what are your three actions that you would love to share with us?
Katya Stepanov:Okay, the first is learn your human design. Number one. I'm going to recommend it, even if you don't book a reading with me. There's free resources on the internet to learn your design and the more you learn about yourself. And so that could be through human design, that could be through astrology, that could be through therapy, that could be through, you know, being a psychonaut and going into just any work that is internal mapping work. What's the map of my inner being and what's authentic to me? Really? Who am I? How can I draw the constellation of myself?
Katya Stepanov:and understand who I am. I would say that's a really actionable lifelong journey and you're never behind, You're always on time discovering new things about yourself, and the more you know about yourself, the more you have confidence in what is for you and what's not for you. And discernment is such a gift because we can waste a lot of time trying to follow someone else's coattails Right and then being like that wasn't even that was them, that wasn't for me, and then being like that wasn't even that was them, that wasn't for me. Right, Exactly. So that's number one actionable step and of course, I love doing it.
Katya Stepanov:So you'll get my info if you're listening, yes, on the show notes, we'll have your info. They will contact you.
Katya Stepanov:Let me know if you want that. That's the first. The second step is to build your confidence, which you can do in so many ways. So it's often about doing the thing that you envy in other people. Let that be your compass. Like if you're scrolling on Instagram and you see a singer and you're like I wish I could sing, guess what it means. You need to learn to sing a little in your life and start getting comfortable with your own voice. Right? You want to dance more? Like.
Katya Stepanov:Dance is an amazing tool for building confidence, right, because you get in tune with your body. So any practices like going to the gym, singing, dancing, creative writing, poetry you know doing and stretching outside of your visibility comfort zone to get that positive reinforcement so that you can train the muscle of your body to say it's safe to be visible, it's safe to be confident, and I know who I am, so nothing can get me down, right. So those two steps are, I think, like a little bit, and it doesn't have to be like you don't have to go away for a month and do dance training. Like you can just dance for five minutes today In your home, anywhere your home, put on a song that you freaking love and just get down Like it's going to make you money, I promise.
Katya Stepanov:So step number two is that I would say, and the third is writing your narrative yourself.
Katya Stepanov:So there's so like understanding and doing a little bit of journaling Journal out.
Katya Stepanov:Ask yourself, what are all the narratives that I, that my brain, can come up with of reasons why I can't make money? You know that, that belief I can't make money because it's not going to feel fun to do that first writing piece, but it'll be very revealing to you of all of the subconscious narratives that you have in your mental field and in your emotional field about money, and so you can see them so that you can be like, cool, I can confront what is here is my money story. That plays in the background, because what we know about the brain is that what we repeat gets etched deeper and deeper into our neural pathways. So if we don't acknowledge the subconscious narrative that's constantly playing on loop, it's just going to get stronger and stronger. But if we can see it, then we can interrupt it and we can write a new one, and at first it's going to feel clunky. It'll be like I read my money narrative once a day and I don't believe a word of it. Okay, and that is a necessary step in the process.
Katya Stepanov:It is.
Katya Stepanov:And just know that. It's just like the first time you go to the gym, and if you're like, oh, that was intimidating and I'm never going back, well, I'm sorry, you're never going to get stronger, right? So if you are committed to having a better money narrative, write what it is that you want your narrative to be. How do you want to feel about money? How do you want to believe about money, what do you want to feel? And write it out and read it to yourself and read it to yourself, especially on days where you don't believe it. Like I'm having a really hard 24 hours, you bet I'm going back to my notes app and I have this note of affirmations about money. I'll read you just a few because I think they'll be fun for people and maybe some of these will resonate with the group.
Katya Stepanov:So I have people love to pay me. People love to pay me. Oh, I've been working on that one a really long time. We do. People love to pay me. Self-care is a profit-generating activity. Yes, the more fun I have, the more money I make. So these are just three. Right, that could be. You could start right there. Those three are really big. So if you start saying that to yourself every day and practicing it, it becomes your new baseline, your new default mode network in your brain.
Katya Stepanov:And when you say it, say it with confidence, don't say it in a low energy way, right? So make sure whoever's saying it stand up straight, take a nice big breath and get really excited, because people love paying you, people love to pay me.
Katya Stepanov:All the time. The level of resistance I felt when I first wrote that down was like 150. Because it comes from the sneaky programming of everyone's poor, everyone's struggling with money. It's hard for everyone to come up with money because that is the narrative they want you to believe, to keep you small and disempowered. And they secretly all make money while you're not believing in yourself. Yes, so don't let them win, you know, don't let them win. And people love to pay you, especially the people who you're a gift to. They're like. Now I have clients who are like. I wish I could pay you more Exactly, yes, and one day you will Exactly, because that's what we're doing right now.
Katya Stepanov:That's what we're helping you do Work on your inner mapping so you can make more money. You can make any amount you choose money. You can make any amount you choose, and the choice is up to you, based on who you are and who you believe to be. That is it. It starts from within. It doesn't start from outside.
Katya Stepanov:No.
Katya Stepanov:Just because we're in recession doesn't mean you can't make money.
Katya Stepanov:No, Actually, all of the most incredible innovative companies were founded in recession.
Katya Stepanov:innovative companies were founded in recession. I was founded in 2009.
Katya Stepanov:Yeah, I started an inheritance project in 2020 when the pandemic happened and everyone was like this is the worst time in the world to start a business. Let me tell you, I booked my first $20,000 contract in the first two weeks of starting my business, because I was like of starting my business, because I was like we need this now. I don't care who says what right it's like so, but also follow the inspiration when it's happening to you, not later, not 10 minutes from now, like, if you're hit with a wave of energy to do something, cancel your plans and do it. Like follow the source, because it is a little bit sometimes like catching the wave. You know you don't ride the wave when it comes. You're going to be a little bit chasing the wave later.
Katya Stepanov:So, I think the confidence to cancel plans, the confidence to go your own way, the confidence to say thank you so much for that piece of advice it's not for me, you know, whatever it is. So that's the other last piece is, I'll say people love to give advice to each other, unsolicited, and I love to add, especially when I'm around someone who I can tell is having a really hard time or struggling and they're in a really negative spiral and a negative field and they're saying a lot of beliefs that could influence me. I have an open, I have a lot of open centers, so I'm very careful about influence me. But one protection I have is that I just always add at the end of the sentence for you. So someone will be like, yeah, and money's just like so hard to make In my head I go for you.
Katya Stepanov:Yeah, that's a a good one, that's a really good one because there is a lot of unsolicited and I have to get comfortable saying for you, because I'm always, I'm always vocalizing the opposite.
Katya Stepanov:I know in my I just do it in my head like not.
Katya Stepanov:That's why I said it's good for me because I need that, because I will vocalize well for you and then I would share my, my idea of it. Doesn't always have to be that way, but I want to be like you.
Katya Stepanov:I want to say for you in my head and let it go Sometimes that person just needs someone to hear them in their sorrow, and that's important too. And I don't want to dismiss their experience, but I don't want to internalize their experience as true, because everyone has their own truth. So I just have to decide what my truth is and really be strong in that every single day and not compromise on my truth. And I do think if you're making, if you and your body know that you're making money at the detriment of somebody else this is the last thing I'll say If you don't believe in what you're selling and you're just selling it to make money, if you know that the product isn't actually that good and you're like, well, whatever, that will come back to haunt you. It might not happen in the right way, but it will.
Katya Stepanov:It may happen generations into the future, but you have to remember every choice you make impacts the seven generations that are coming after you. So if you don't want your children, your children's children, to suffer for the karma that you build in this lifetime, get really clear on whether you're making money in integrity or not in integrity. And if you're someone who has a lot of money and your family made it through not so great means, which a lot of white people in America have to grapple with, that I happen to come from a totally different white culture that did not have this experience, but I have a lot of friends who have a lot of shame around the money that they have, and if someone's listening to this that feels that, I want to say you're the cycle breaker. You get to give that money to people who you actually think are making progress in the world. So there's always a way to balance the scale and have the resources to give.
Katya Stepanov:Give them. Give them to the people that you're inspired by that are doing the work to undo whatever damage your ancestors created. That will also bring more aligned, clean, pure money back to you in your lifetime that isn't carrying a frequency of pain, suffering, torture, death all of the things that money can bring with it sometimes.
Katya Stepanov:Yes, Katya, it was a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much. Thank you for allowing it to flow, thank you for sharing, thank you for being open, and I love the fact that you thought you were going to cry. I know right, and I love the fact that you thought you were going to cry I know right. You were so in it that your gratitude was so much higher than the pain.
Katya Stepanov:Yeah.
Katya Stepanov:And the fact that you were able to share so much of who you are and give. You can always cry in that moment, but this moment for you, it was through. Yes, you were just being used to deliver a message to someone who's really in a challenge moment.
Katya Stepanov:Story of my life. May source use me well. This is the other thing I always say at the start and end of every day. I am a vessel and what wants to come through is what needs to come through, and I'm so grateful to be visited by messages at all, to get to receive at all, to get to have this experience of aliveness at all. It's the greatest gift. It's literally the greatest gift on earth. Thank you for having me and letting me share.
Katya Stepanov:I appreciate it Everyone who's in the audience. Thank you so much for taking time to just listen to our episode today and I truly hope that you look in the show notes. You could find places where you could find Katya on social media Instagram, wherever she lives. You're going to find that there and, of course, we have our resource page. You can go there to find out when we're having our next in-person workshop, or I should say in Zoom person workshop, but we're going to have something coming up on February 19th and I want to make sure for all entrepreneurs who are growing that you get to be in that room. Thank you once again, Katya, and I will speak to you later.
Nikisha King:Thank you. Thank you for joining us today on Leading Her Way. We loved having you with us. Thank you for joining us today on Leading Her Way. We loved having you with us. Remember each action you take, no matter how small, adds up to big results. If today's episode fired you up, hit subscribe for more insights and visit our resource hub, which is linked to the show notes. There, you'll find tools to streamline, organize and grow your business. Keep moving forward and we'll be right here to cheer you on next week.
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