#35: Deep chats on life, death and entrepreneurship (ft. Alexis Teichmiller)

Episode Shownotes

Are you looking for a deep and inspiring conversation on life, death, and entrepreneurship? Look no further than the latest episode of the Free Wild Souls podcast, featuring guest Alexis Teichmiller.

Alexis Teichmiller is the founder of the Deeper Life Podcast and a life and business coach, helping women gain clarity on their values and goals. In this episode, she talks about her personal journey to discovering the deeper meaning of life and business.

Main points

How Alexis discovered the deeper meaning to life and business
The impact of unexpected loss on Alexis' life
Going deeper with yourself and living in alignment with your values
Confronting anger and gossip to journey towards self-acceptance

If you're looking for a conversation that goes beyond surface-level success and achievement, this episode is for you. Alexis shares her personal story with honesty and vulnerability, offering insights and tools for anyone on their own journey to a deeper life.

Alexis Teichmiller

✨ Follow Alexis on social media at https://www.instagram.com/alexisteichmiller/

💜 Learn more about her at https://www.alexisteichmiller.com/

🌞 Let’s continue the conversation https://www.instagram.com/emilypeilan/

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Episode Transcript

Emily Peilan: Hello my beautiful humans and welcome back to another episode. Super excited for our guest today, Alexis. So I met Alexis through her company Circle. I love using Circle, by the way, as a platform for courses and kinda like Slack me. You know, a course portal sort of thing. And yeah, we connected through that and she has her own podcast as well, and she spent the last seven years working with six and seven figure entrepreneurs, helping them earn more affiliate income from sharing products that they love.

She currently spends her day at. Circle partnering with brands and entrepreneurs who value community growing their businesses through authentic connections. She wants two podcasts actually. She's a podcast host of the In Between Podcast and also the founder of Deeper Life Podcast, which is a coaching business focused on helping women win in their lives and their careers.

In this particular episode, we dive deeper into Alexis' life how she got to where she is today. She's had such a cool journey in business and she just has a really fascinating story and really inspiring human. So I hope you really enjoyed this episode, and I'll see you on the other side.

So I love that you have a podcast as well. You've got two actually. Thank you. One is your own that you host. It's called The Deeper Life Podcast, and you have another podcast with a friend, a business partner of yours.

Alexis Teichmiller: Yeah, a friend of mine, her name's Astrid. Yeah. Called the in Between.

Emily Peilan: Amazing. So good. And so I'd love to hear like what the Deeper Life Podcast.

For those of you who haven't who aren't familiar with it, we'll link it down below. But I love this concept about going deeper with yourself just deeper in life. And I wanted to start off with , what led you to. This idea of the podcast and this idea, well, not this idea, this concept of going deeper with yourself.

Why was that so important for you and was there sort of a before and after that led you.

Alexis Teichmiller: Absolutely. Yeah, great question. I would say in my, and I actually had you on my podcast as well, which is coming out soon, so I love that we already have context of each other too while we're recording this.

Very similar to you, I grew up in a bit of a tumultuous environment where there was kind of what was happening inside the home and then there was things that were happening outside of the home. And a lot of times, That didn't always match externally. So kind of like the internal and the external and those storylines didn't always match up.

And so I grew up kind of, feeling like I was two different people. I was who I was in the family unit and I was who I was externally. And when you grow up with that, there's like a disparity there. There's like a gap. It caused me how I'm, how I internalized that was that vulnerability and was a weakness.

Being honest, being vulnerable, sharing was something that we didn't do. And I took that with me into my early twenties. And so, I studied marketing and I. Moved to Nashville right out of college, Nashville, Tennessee. Got my first job with a New York Times bestselling author. I was like, I am on the fast track to building an incredible career, an incredible life for myself.

But I was very closed off to myself, my emotions. I would say I was just very career driven at that point in my life. And. I had actually started a podcast when I was 23, back in 2015 called The Laptop Lifestyle, and that podcast ended up doing really well. I would have on all these successful laptop lifestylers who were digital nomads before digital nomads was kind of a thing.

I mean, it was kind of on the cusp of it at 20 15, 20 16. So I ran that for three years and. Mind you, my day job I had ended up leaving my marketing position with the New York Times best selling offer and got a job in tech at a company called Convert Kit. Also working with the Creator Economy online entrepreneurs.

My podcast was all about success and entrepreneurship and making money and having this free lifestyle, right? So my whole lens that I was looking through was business success, like achievement. And there was nothing wrong with that, but I didn't have any internal integration or balance of the professional side of me.

And then the actual personal side of me the feelings side the values side, really unclear what I valued. Didn't really know what my needs were. What did I really want in life other than just to achieve, right? All I wanted to do was win. And I felt this. This disconnect internally of , there's gotta be something more out there other than just making money and being a successful entrepreneur.

There has to be something more, something deeper. Yeah. And at that point I was 25 and had. Unexpectedly lost. One of my best friends, and her name was Abby. She was a teacher, and she just dropped in her classroom in front of her students and her heart just stopped. No, you know, they did multiple autopsies, never really figured out what happened.

Never really got any answers, and it was very unexpected. And so when you experience unexpected loss, like. There's a before and an after of that, right? There's no preparation. There are no goodbyes. There's no processing. You're really just taking every day as it comes to you. Yeah. And that losing Abby in that journey to realizing how materialistic and surface level and achievement based my life had been, and here I lost someone who, at her funeral, There were probably five to 600 people there at the church.

, it was absolutely incredible to see the impact that she had on people's lives. Yeah. And it wasn't about materialism, it wasn't about success, it was about the relationships that she had with people and how she made people feel. Right. Yeah. And I was like, wow. That really also impacted me on a deep level of like, I'm caring about the wrong things.

, yeah, I need to be investing more in relationships and in. You know, going deeper with myself to understand, you know, how I'm motivated and what I value. And so that kind of sent me down this path that I've been on for the last four years and started the Deeper Life Podcast, started the deeper life coaching business.

So I do life and business coaching, helping women get clarity on what they value, what they want, what they need and really helping them create a process and a sustainable plan to help them achieve that, but in a way that actually aligns with. Their values, so they're not sacrificing their values in order to achieve something which is, you know, tough in your twenties, right?

Because you're ambitious and yeah. You wanna just go out and you wanna get yours, like you wanna prove something to the world. And

Emily Peilan: you're so easily swayed by like people telling you you should value this, or you should be going after this. And you kind of come out of your. You know, school years and you are so heavily influenced by all these adults telling you left, right, center, what you should be and do and chase after.

It takes, I think, the majority of your twenties to actually figure yourself out and what it is that you want and you learn by trial and error. Kind of, you know, like most of us, myself included, I was in corporate. For a really long time, and then thinking that climbing that corporate ladder and money and things, that was what we should strive for.

But you know, in the end, if I ask myself, it's like, what really matters in the end? You know, if you were to say die tomorrow, , would you feel like you lived a full life? Right. Did you live in alignment with your values? And I think that really puts things into perspective because you can't be promised 80 years on this earth.

Right,

Alexis Teichmiller: right. Yeah. Nothing's promised. And life is short. And I know that's a very, you know, it's a euphemism, it's something that people say all of the time, but I think I had to learn that lesson at 25 because someone that was very precious to me, lost her life so early. She'll never get. You know, those years.

And so when I get in like a hole mentally, and I think about her, like she is someone that is , you know, I use Compass. Yeah, compass, yes. Thank you for that word. She's like, that compass that kind of helps me guide myself back to North of like, okay, we're getting off track here. Let's get back.

Towards that meaning that we're looking for and give. It's really about permission too, like giving yourself permission to go deeper and to be okay with what you uncover. And that's the thing is like when you go deep, there is something that is unearthing, right? You're unearthing your childhood, you're unearthing your relationship tendencies, you're unearthing your relationship with money, with food, with spending, with consumerism, maybe some of your even like addictive tendencies to certain things.

So, Yeah. That's a part of the deeper life is really looking at yourself with an honest lens and then shifting into self-acceptance for what you find. So it's not even like jumping to self-love. It's going to acceptance first, because sometimes love can come and go. Right. We've experienced that even in relationships, but acceptance when you accept something.

There's that element of , okay, I see all of this. And I accept it, and that feels a bit more final, right? It's like I've gone through multiple layers of acceptance, but I still feel like I am much closer to a holistic acceptance of myself than I was, you know, even three years ago.

Absolutely.

Emily Peilan: And we all have, you know, light and shadow sides as well. And if you kind of just avoid and neglect and you know, the shadow side of you, well, it's still there. You know, you have to sort of, confront it, accept it. And only then do I feel like you can come to balance in your life as well.

Yeah. And also with this idea, like you mentioned, and this is so common but like when women are like striving for success, it's often the masculine model of success. Like push push your feelings don't matter. Hustle, grind it, dominance.

All the things, and it's like more why and I feel like this beautiful rise of like female entrepreneurs in the space is now balancing that as like success can also be being intuitive, being in your feeling in your feminine energy as well. Yeah, and I think that also comes into this balance and accepting some of the traits that.

We perhaps are told are not good in society. So for example if you want to be a successful ceo, it's like, don't feel that's bad. Or like resting is bad. That's for lazy people. And then it's like you're like, oh, I can't rest because then I'm lazy and then that's bad, and then you never rest and then you burn out and then you.

Well, your business dies or something, you know? Wow. So I feel like

Alexis Teichmiller: how did

Emily Peilan: you kind of confront or accept some of these like shadow sides of yourself? What were some of the things that you found or struggled to accept in yourself?

Alexis Teichmiller: Yeah. So Monument actually be anger. Oh, interesting. And I think that's something that I share it now with no hesitation, but I think as a woman it feels like anger.

We're not allowed to feel angry. Men are able to display anger, but women really aren't. And if they are, you know, they're crazy or they're a bitch, or Yeah, they're, yeah, they're psychotic. , you know, you automatically start to label a woman who displays anger. And back to my childhood, the shadow self there, the internal felt really angry because it couldn't match the external.

, I had these two sides of myself and I was angry about the dishonesty, I guess, of myself. And I didn't know that at the time, right? This is through years of therapy and they in books and self-discovery. But I just displayed a lot of anger in my teens. Like mean, just mean angry. And then how I dipped that in through college was through gossip.

And through talking about other people. Yeah. And to make myself feel better for validation. Right. And so, The anger manifested itself in ways that felt more acceptable as a woman. So cutting other people down or, you know, like I said, gossip felt like a better way, which is a terrible way. Yeah. But it felt like a more acceptable female energy kind of way of displaying anger or extreme dislike for myself.

And so how I have helped heal that is to recognize that my anger was a tool that I used in a very sensitive time of my life. And it was how the only, it felt like the only way I could express myself with my family, but I don't have to hold onto that tool anymore. Because I'm no longer trying to survive.

Yeah. That it served me in a season and I can set it down and when I can feel my nervous system start to bubble up and I can start to feel angry, it's usually because some area of my life is out of alignment. And now as an adult, it's my opportunity to take ownership and responsibility for that feeling and do the work to uncover it instead of.

Put that anger onto someone else or shift it into my behavior where I'm hurting someone else. Yeah. So the big lesson in the twenties is like un unraveling the normalcy around gossip and anger and insecurity and inner doubt and how that plays a role in really weakening the connections between our relationships.

And I think something like gossip is used to connect because we're not really sure what else to talk about. Yeah. It's like, oh, well I'm gonna connect with you on, did you hear about like from high school? And that's because we might not have a very deep relationship. And so I've noticed old relationships where the tendency is to go towards gossip.

Yeah. I'm like, oh, wow. We don't have a lot of depth here either we can decide to create that together. Yeah. Or maybe I need to phase out this relationship because it's not really healthy and it doesn't feel like we're able to move past some of those old, honestly, high school tendencies. Yeah. Are

Emily Peilan: the same when I've been back to my kind of where I grew up and I meet up with some of my high school friends again and it's so interesting having spent years away traveling and also then starting my own business and then like kind of going back and talking to some people who might have, some of them who have not changed.

At all. And when you talk yeah, you just go back to high school tendencies and here I am sitting just feeling like, I don't know, somewhat, not so nourished by these conversations anymore, even though they're the exact same conversations we used

Alexis Teichmiller: to have. Right? Because you've shifted, you've changed and your values and how you wanna speak life into people has changed.

And something that I have. Infuse into my relationships is when I've decided that I wanna change my behavior. Yeah. And I know that it's going to require some collaboration. Like gossip is a two person game here, right? Like it's me and someone else. I'm just using a very specific example. And I've done this with some of my friends as well, is.

I will tell them I am trying to stop gossiping and talking about other people. I would love to invite you into this process with me, and maybe you can even hold me accountable when I start to get there or when something comes up. I would love for you to point out, Hey, remember like you said you didn't wanna do that.

So it's also a way to hold the relationship accountable without telling them you need to stop gossiping. Yeah. Really, you need to shift the focus back to yourself and saying, I'm trying to stop gossiping and this can apply to anything. I wanna stop drinking alcohol. I'd love for you to help hold me accountable.

Like whatever, I wanna stop online shopping, I wanna stop, whatever. Yeah. Invite people into the process with you. One, you don't feel isolated in your change. And you're trying to transform. And also that person can support you, hold you accountable, but also know what you are needing and how you're trying to grow.

So they're not going to, for example, if you're trying to stop drinking alcohol, they're not gonna invite you out to a bar. Right. Yeah, exactly. So, so things like that can

Emily Peilan: be helpful. That's beautiful. And I feel like that's really a way to Yeah. Kind of also test the relationship and grow together as humans.

Yeah. That's so beautiful. In terms of like when you catch, cuz I feel like you are a very self-aware person and you've gotten to a point where you can catch yourself out. Like, oh, maybe I'm feeling anger, I'm feeling stressed, I'm feeling X, Y, Z. And then you have the tools now to sort of. Process that reflect on it and then move on.

Like what, for people who aren't there yet, like what were some of the things that really helped you get to where you are now?

Alexis Teichmiller: Yeah. I love this question and I, what I have learned is through therapy, going through the deeper work, it's not to avoid bad things happening to you. It's not to build a life in a way that you're never going to get your feelings hurt, you're never going to experience pain or mental health issues.

Those things are a constant, right? We know that they're going to happen in our lives. I think that one of the benefits of doing this deeper work and learning what your tools are, your healthy tools is so that you can shorten the gap. Or the timeline that you're in that place. So it's like instead of me spiraling for five months, I might now spiral for three to five days.

Or one day or one hour depending on what it is. And so I'm not staying in a place for a long time that I know is unhealthy for me. I'm acknowledging it. I, so a couple of the tools that I use is, I use a gratitude journal. It's really helpful for me to It's kind of a tool I use because I struggle with depression.

And so when you're, when you have depressive tendencies or you struggle with depression, gratitude feels like a joke. I'm being very honest where it's like, why would I be, why would I be grateful? Because I feel like what's the point of even this job or this being here or, you know, life isn't how I want it to be.

I'm not grateful. Right. Yeah. So gratitude is a big one that I have picked up over the last three or four years. Journaling, freehand. Journaling has been really helpful. No prompts. Just literally getting my, what's in my head done on paper can be really beneficial. Also, I have about two or three trusted people in my life.

That I can go to when I'm really in it that I can process things with and uncover. But I think something that's really helped me is looking at the dots. So like looking at how, okay, what triggered this. Why am I feeling this way? How am I reacting? Am I happy with that reaction?

Does that reaction actually align with my values? Okay, what do we wanna do from here? And so not every trigger or every, you know, painful situation that you might encounter and needs a plan, but some do. And so need to get out this energy I'm feeling today I'm gonna go to the gym or I'm gonna go for a long walk. Like your body needs to release the tension that it feels when you're triggered or when you are, you know, going through a difficult time. So giving yourself permission to move, to talk, to write, to like really express and it's a release.

Yeah, like how are you releasing? And so you can cope in ways like overspending, alcohol, drugs, done, all of that. Yeah. And I know that those are some of my tendencies. So I can tell, oh, and I'm gravitate towards if I'm gravitating towards those, I'm like, okay, what's going on? We've got some internal work we've got, we need to do a bit of investigation.

Yes. Why am I, you know, going towards old coping mechanisms that I know don't serve me anymore. And it's just really. Being kind to yourself, but being honest. Yeah. I think like the highest form of a deeper life is extreme transparency with yourself.

Emily Peilan: Definitely. Have you read that book? The Body Keeps the Score.

Alexis Teichmiller: I have not, but I've heard so much about it. I need to read it. Yeah.

Emily Peilan: That's really interesting because it's like this concept of. When you go through, it doesn't have to be traumatic experiences, but anything that makes you feel a lot, it could be grief, it could be a heartbreak or something, you know?

And so many of us we hold that in our bodies and those emotions, that memory, it kind of actually gets held and not released. And so when you are talking about like, Working out or journaling or, you know, it's basically a coping mechanism, but like a way for your body to like move that emotion out of you.

But unless you really deal with that internally and release it completely and accept it, it will always be held in your body. Yeah, so that's why I think therapists really help as well, or people who specialize in like trauma related cases. But yeah, that's a really interesting book and highly recommend.

Alexis Teichmiller: I need to read it. I need to add it to, I'm actually reading right now, the Defined Decade. Have you heard of that? Oh, I read it. It's great.

Emily Peilan: Yeah. For anyone. It's so good. Anyone in their twenties, right? Like if you're in your twenties, read the book. It's. It gives you a lot to think about, and for me it's kind of like I'm nearing my thirties.

I'm like 27, 20 28, and it's like, okay, like your thirties, you have to start preparing for it now. It's not like when you turn 30, you're suddenly gonna stop being a poor broke 20.

Alexis Teichmiller: You know? Yeah, you're

Emily Peilan: right. I guess. Yeah. Well, we kind of think, oh, when I'm 30 I will, when I'm 30, I will get my shit together. But if you haven't got your shit together now, you are not about to suddenly flip that switch and get your shit together when you're 30. It's almost an accumulation of what you've been doing in your twenties.

Alexis Teichmiller: It's a really powerful book. I highly recommend it. I'm 29 and I thought, you know, I picked it up. I'm, I have a co-working space that I go to and work out a couple days a week just to get out of the house again, like realizing if I'm spending too much time at home, it's not good for me. So, going to the co-working space and they have a library there and that was one of the books I borrowed from the library.

And I was like, well, I'm 29. Is this gonna be helpful for me? Like, yeah. You know, I'm am in my late twenties, like, I'm on the cusp

Emily Peilan: of 30. What, and what was the takeaway for you? What was your biggest takeaway?

Alexis Teichmiller: I'm really proud of myself even though I, even though like I, you know, had my own set of struggles throughout my twenties, I feel like the way that I built relationships and that personal capital that she was talking about in chapter one or like section one, even like the love chapter.

My, my husband and I were together for five years long distance before we got married. Because we were both committed to each other and we were actually equally committed to our goals. And so I moved to Nashville, built a marketing career started a blog podcast. He went to undergrad and ended up getting in his master's in geology.

And like we were both very focused on building, using our twenties. The time that we had to build and gather everything that we could so that when we decided to get married, it was like, it was a very active choice. And we were both in a place professionally where we paid, you know, for the majority of our wedding.

Like we were able to go to Thailand for our honeymoon, like we were at a place financially where we could afford those kinds of things. And just made it, made a lot of sense and I. I just wasn't gonna sacrifice anything for my partner, like at that point, dating. Now as a married, as a wife, yeah, I would, and I have sacrificed things for my partner and he for me, but there's something about in that dating stage where I'm like, I'm not moving to Colorado to live with you while you get your masters.

Like, yeah, this is, these are my twenties and I'm going to be meticulous with how I spend them. And I

Emily Peilan: think that is, that's actually one of perhaps

Alexis Teichmiller: the biggest

Emily Peilan: regrets or mis not mistakes, but regrets from women who married too early. And there's, it's always like an expectation from the female side to like, give up everything and like, Move to be with a man or something like that.

But then it's like when they get into their thirties and forties, they start regretting all the things they could have done. And I think that is the worst thing you could do to your partner is to blame them. For something that you chose to

Alexis Teichmiller: get right. You end up resenting them. Yes. And that was the biggest thing.

Like we walked into every decision that would say, if we do this, will we resent each other? Ooh,

Emily Peilan: that is so powerful. Yeah,

Alexis Teichmiller: like he's like, if I get my master's and we push off marriage for two and a half years, are you going to resent me? And I said, no. And I said, if I stay in Nashville and I don't move with you, are you gonna resent me?

And he said no. Wow. And so by keeping that commitment to each other Yeah. By, and also by recognizing like on the other side of sacrifices that we don't really wanna make is a lot of regret and usually resentment towards your partner. Yeah. So we didn't do everything perfectly by any means, but like Yeah.

I would have people ask me, so when are you even in Colorado? Like, when are you gonna go move to you with Matthew? And I was like, when I'm married. Yeah. Like, you know, and I don't have anything against people living together before they're married. It was more of like, The most feminist thing I could do was for me to be on my own and make my own money and build my career without a partner.

So good. So, and

Emily Peilan: I'm so curious because like, that's such a beautiful story and that you committed to each other and to each other's growth as well, despite being apart for five years. You said before kind of Yeah. Getting married. What did you. Like how did you keep that relationship alive?

While being

Alexis Teichmiller: apart? Yeah. That's a great question. Well, we had a very deep love and we also recognized, and this might be controversial, but I don't believe that love is enough for a successful relationship to work. I think that you need respect, you need commitment, you need extreme honesty, and you need consistency.

And communication to make a relation, a healthy relationship work. And so I think what kept us alive was we figured that out really early on and we were re we dated actually a little bit in high school, so we had this foundation built, but then we were separate, you know, we were doing our own thing all through college and then got together in our early twenties.

So we had a bit of like, already, we had history together, which I think helped with trust for sure. But I think we were both a big element that kept the relationship alive is the belief that we had in each other and still have. But like I believed in his dreams just as much as he did, and he believed in mine just as much as I did on, even on the days I didn't believe in myself, he believed in me for me, and vice versa.

Yeah, and I think whenever you have someone in your life where you just have that like. Equal belief in each other. You don't manipulate each other and you don't, you know, you don't kind of try to get each other to do what you want. You want what's best for your partner. And I think that we were able to carry that through as a common thread throughout the relationship.

And so it really kept a really honest energy throughout the long distance. That's beautiful. And we have lots of talks too of like, yeah, you just wanna be together. Are you still, do you still want this? Like, you know, don't think that we didn't have those kinds of conversations too. But I think that was a big help of like even just doing that every six or seven months of like, hey another six, seven months of long distance.

Like still checking. Are we aligned? Are we aligned? This is what you want. Are we working towards marriage? Are we not, is that something that you still want? Like just being able to have those conversations? I know that feels really logical and like unemotional. Yeah. But there were definitely emotions there.

But I think the logic piece too of like, we are long distance and I don't, we don't wanna waste other's time. Exactly. So let's like, let's be brutally honest. Yeah. Now we're married. We've been married for three years and it's been great.

Emily Peilan: Oh, beautiful. I love that. And so you guys are like not doing long distance anymore though.

You kind of got married and you kind of moved in together.

Alexis Teichmiller: Yeah. Okay. We got married and moved in together. We got married and we actually moved to Houston for his job. Yeah. And then, The pandemic happened and then two months later he moved to South America and we did long distance marriage for two years.

He had a rotational position as a geologist where he would work in South America for 30 days and then he would be home for 30 days. But whenever he was home, he didn't work. Like, it was like a, it was like a rotational job that whenever you're there, he worked 24 7 for 30 days, and then whenever he was home he was off.

And so we traveled, we got our very first investment property. We gutted a rental house, and we have a tenant in our first real estate investment property. So like we were aligned in that. Like, it was like, okay. It sucks that you're gonna be gone for a month whenever you're home. We're going to Europe.

We're, you know, like it felt very worth it because when do you get that amount of time off work exactly. To be able to build and work on some of your dreams like travel and in his case, an investment property was one of his dreams. So we're like, Let's make it happen.

Emily Peilan: Oh, I love that. Oh that's so beautiful.

Beautiful relationship as well. Thank you.

Alexis Teichmiller: Aw, lots of ups and downs, but it's one of my most it's like one of the things I'm most proud of actually. Yeah. Aw,

Emily Peilan: that's so beautiful. And so going into next year, like what? Yeah. What's in store for you next year and what does success look like?

Alexis Teichmiller: You know, that's a great question.

If, you know, let me know. I think even at, even, you know, almost 30. You know, I feel really good in my career. I work for a company called Circle and I'm our partnerships manager and my role is kind of developing and shifting a little bit into the new year, which I'm really excited about. So from a career perspective, feeling really solid.

The entrepreneurial side of me, I've always had a side hustle. Like right now I have coaching clients and the two podcasts. Just trying to figure out like, where do I wanna take that? I think it's kind of reached a point where I've gotten where I've kind of wanted to go with it. And so I'm trying to figure out do we scale?

Yeah. Do we maintain, like what are our goals here? And so something I am walking myself through right now it's a four step vision casting exercise. So, do you wanna walk you through with

Emily Peilan: Yeah, briefly, please. Okay. Oh, I'm intrigued.

Alexis Teichmiller: Step one is ideation. So you give yourself, you know, I, I did it in about 30 minutes, but give yourself 30 minutes, an hour, how much, how, however much time you need, and just write down any and everything that could make you happy, fulfilled, aligned with your values, and that makes you feel like a real extreme sense of purpose.

And so I just wrote, I just started writing and I came up with like 45 ideas. Right. Wow. We didn't think about how we were making money. We didn't think about the plan. It wasn't even possible. What would I need to make it possible? We're an ideation stage, and I think this is where a lot of times when we're, you know, building goals, building businesses wanting to be remote, be a digital nomad, we get stuck because we put it in, is this possible?

Emily Peilan: Put a box, we're like, which box will it fit into? Instead of like, what kind of box can we create to fit what we want?

Alexis Teichmiller: Exactly. And so ideation is a stage without limits. And then stage two is refinement. So I do these in different stages on different days because I've realized whenever I try to do a vision casting in one day, I get very overwhelmed.

So step two is I go through all of my ideas and I circle. Or highlight the ones that really like, kind of give me like the, there's like something, there's some sort of energy to it, you know, like there's like, that feels like magic, like something there is very interesting. It feels challenging. I have no idea.

You just kind of refine it down. So like maybe I would take 45 ideas and pair it down to me to Maybe five to seven, maybe 10. But kind of, kind of get, funnel them down. And then from there step two is all around building a plan or building a goal for that specific idea. So, okay, if let's say we have seven ideas that we could do, that would bring us a lot of fulfillment.

Okay, now let's kinda make a plan here. What resources would I need? What kind of support would I need? What would I need to learn? What kind of knowledge or skill might I have to learn to do that? What would I need to save? What does this kind of look like? And then from there, as you start to kind of formulate the plan out, you can kind of even pair those seven ideas maybe down to two or three or four based on what those plans are.

Because sometimes when we start to get into the details, we realize, okay, maybe that's actually not a year. One thing, maybe that's something I wanna work towards in three years. But I'm gonna actually set that aside for right now. And then step four is implementation. So now that I know what ideas I want to take action on, And I know the plan around them, or at least a loose plan.

Let's look at how do we implement this plan into the next six months of our lives and what does success look like? Is it money? Is it is it an amount of clients? Is it being able to take that trip you've always wanted? Like it doesn't necessarily have to be business related. But yeah. And then. With those extra ideas, break them out in something that you might wanna work on in two years, three years, five years.

And so then you start to have this vision of like what you're working towards instead of just being so heads down in the here and now. And I, I'm all about being present, but I also think that if you don't necessarily have a clear picture of where you're going, you almost feel like frustrated in the present because you're not really clear on what you're working towards.

And overwhelmed

Emily Peilan: as well. You're like, oh, all these things. But like, where is it actually going? Is it actually working? And then, you know, having that long-term vision and breaking it down and working backwards, you're like, okay, like I know that everything I'm doing is for this long-term goal. Yeah. So such, oh, this is a great place to wrap up the episode.

And one last question I wanna ask and I ask all my guests this question, what does living a free world and soulful life. Mean or look like for

Alexis Teichmiller: you? I love this question. I love your brand and everything that you've built and the place and the physical place and the digital place that you've built for people who are attracted to that kind of lifestyle.

I absolutely love it. For me, it means living in full acceptance, full alignment, and without shame in who you are. It's really embracing every aspect of yourself and so that you can live a holistic life that feels free, that you can bring your depth, that you can bring your playfulness to. And there's a sense of adventure and exploration there as well of being.

Now, once you've fully accepted, now it's looking at the world around you and looking at like, what's next what's out there for me and not feeling stuck.

Emily Peilan: And you can feel like you can be a bit more bold and courageous just knowing who you are. Absolutely. I love that. So beautiful. Well, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you for sharing your stories and experiences and yeah, maybe get you back on the podcast at some point in the future.

Alexis Teichmiller: I would love that. It would be an honor. Thank you so much for having me on

Emily Peilan: love. Thank you.

I love that conversation so much and I hope you did too. If your curious to find out more about what Alexis does, I will link her Instagram handle and website below. It's at Alexis ty Miller. On Instagram and Alexis ty miller.com is her website. She's also offering a 30 minute free clarity call for anyone who is interested in coaching with her.

And the link is also linked below. So Alexis ty miller.com/clarity call. I would love to hear. What resonated with you the most in this episode? Shoot me over a DM at Emily Palin on Instagram. And if you enjoyed this episode, I would love for you to take a screenshot or to share this episode with one person who you think would resonate or would just benefit from this episode.

From the story. You know, stories is what? Makes the world go around and it's how we share wisdom and lessons. So thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing, and I will see you in the next episode. my friends. .

my beautiful humans and welcome back to another episode. Super excited for our guest today, Alexis. So I met Alexis through her company Circle. I love using Circle, by the way, as a platform for kinda like courses and kinda like Slack me. You know, a course portal sort of thing. And yeah, we kind of connected through that and she has her own podcast as well, and she spent the last seven years working with six and seven figure entrepreneurs, helping them earn more affiliate income from sharing products that they love.

She currently spends her day at. Circle partnering with brands and entrepreneurs who value community growing their businesses through authentic connections. She wants two podcasts actually. She's a podcast host of the In Between Podcast and also the founder of Deeper Life Podcast, which is a coaching business focused on helping women win in their lives and their careers.

In this particular episode, we dive deeper into Alexis' life how she got to where she is today. She's had such a cool journey in business and she just has a really fascinating story and really inspiring human. So I hope you really enjoyed this episode, and I'll see you on the other side.

So I love that you have a podcast as well. You've got two actually. Thank you. One is your own that you host. It's called The Deeper Life Podcast, and you have another podcast with a friend, a business partner of yours.

Alexis Teichmiller: Yeah,

a friend of mine, her name's Astrid. Yeah. Called the in Between.

Emily Peilan: Amazing. So good. And so I'd love to hear like what the Deeper Life Podcast.

For those of you who haven't who aren't familiar with it, we'll link it down below. But I love this concept about going deeper with yourself just deeper in life. And I wanted to start off with like, what led you to. Kind of this idea of the podcast and this idea, well, not this idea, this concept of like going deeper with yourself.

Like why was that so important for you and was there sort of a before and after that led you.

Alexis Teichmiller: Absolutely. Yeah, great question. I would say in my, and I actually had you on my podcast as well, which is coming out soon, so I love that we already have context of each other too while we're recording this.

Very similar to you, I grew up in a bit of a tumultuous environment where there was kind of what was happening inside the home and then there was things that were happening outside of the home. And a lot of times, That didn't always match externally. So kind of like the internal and the external and those storylines didn't always match up.

And so I grew up kind of, feeling like I was two different people. I was who I was in the family unit and I was who I was externally. And when you grow up with that, there's like a disparity there. There's like a gap. It caused me how I'm, how I internalized that was that vulnerability and was a weakness.

Being honest, being vulnerable, sharing was something that we didn't do. And I took that with me into my early twenties. And so, I studied marketing and I. Moved to Nashville right out of college, Nashville, Tennessee. Got my first job with a New York Times bestselling author. I was like, I am on the fast track to building an incredible career, an incredible life for myself.

But I was very closed off to myself, my emotions. I would say I was just very career driven at that point in my life. And. I had actually started a podcast when I was 23, back in 2015 called The Laptop Lifestyle, and that podcast ended up doing really well. I would have on all these successful laptop lifestylers who were digital nomads before digital nomads was kind of a thing.

I mean, it was like kind of on the cusp of it at 20 15, 20 16. So I ran that for three years and. Mind you, my day job I had ended up leaving my marketing position with the New York Times best selling offer and got a job in tech at a company called Convert Kit. Also working with the Creator Economy online entrepreneurs.

My podcast was all about success and entrepreneurship and making money and having this free lifestyle, right? So my whole lens that I was looking through was business success, like achievement. And there was nothing wrong with that, but I didn't have any internal integration or balance of the professional side of me.

And then the actual personal side of me the feelings side the values side, really unclear what I valued. Didn't really know what my needs were. What did I really want in life other than just to achieve, right? Like all I wanted to do was win. And I felt this. This disconnect internally of like, there's gotta be something more out there other than just making money and being a successful entrepreneur.

Like there has to be something more, something deeper. Yeah. And at that point I was 25 and had. Unexpectedly lost. One of my best friends, and her name was Abby. She was a teacher, and she just dropped in her classroom in front of her students and her heart just stopped. No, you know, they did multiple autopsies, never really figured out what happened.

Never really got any answers, and it was very unexpected. And so when you experience unexpected loss, like. There's a before and an after of that, right? There's no preparation. There are no goodbyes. There's no processing. You're really just taking every day as it comes to you. Yeah. And that losing Abby in that journey to realizing how materialistic and surface level and achievement based my life had been, and here I lost someone who, at her funeral, There were probably five to 600 people there at the church.

Like, it was absolutely incredible to see the impact that she had on people's lives. Yeah. And it wasn't about materialism, it wasn't about success, it was about the relationships that she had with people and how she made people feel. Right. Yeah. And I was like, wow. That really also impacted me on a deep level of like, I'm caring about the wrong things.

Like, yeah, I need to be investing more in relationships and in. You know, going deeper with myself to understand, you know, how I'm motivated and what I value. And so that kind of sent me down this path that I've been on for the last four years and started the Deeper Life Podcast, started the deeper life coaching business.

So I do life and business coaching, helping women get clarity on what they value, what they want, what they need and really helping them create a process and a sustainable plan to help them achieve that, but in a way that actually aligns with. Their values, so they're not sacrificing their values in order to achieve something which is, you know, tough in your twenties, right?

Because you're ambitious and yeah. You wanna just go out and you wanna get yours, like you wanna prove something to the world. And

Emily Peilan: you're so easily swayed by like people telling you you should value this, or you should be going after this. And you kind of come out of your. You know, school years and you are so heavily influenced by all these adults telling you left, right, center, what you should be and do and chase after.

It takes, I think, the majority of your twenties to actually figure yourself out and what it is that you want and you learn by trial and error. Kind of, you know, like most of us, myself included, I was in corporate. For a really long time, and then thinking that climbing that corporate ladder and money and things, that was what we should strive for.

But you know, in the end, if I ask myself, it's like, what really matters in the end? You know, if you were to say die tomorrow, like, would you feel like you lived a full life? Right. Did you live in alignment with your values? And I think that really puts things into perspective because you can't be promised 80 years on this earth.

Right,

Alexis Teichmiller: right. Yeah. Nothing's promised. And life is short. And I know that's a very, you know, it's a euphemism, it's something that people say all of the time, but I think I had to learn that lesson at 25 because someone that was very precious to me, lost her life so early. She'll never get. You know, those years.

And so when I get in like a hole mentally, and I think about her, like she is someone that is like, you know, I use Compass. Yeah, compass, yes. Thank you for that word. She's like, that compass that kind of helps me guide myself back to North of like, okay, we're getting off track here. Let's get back.

Towards that meaning that we're looking for and give. It's really about permission too, like giving yourself permission to go deeper and to be okay with what you uncover. And that's the thing is like when you go deep, there is something that is unearthing, right? You're unearthing your childhood, you're unearthing your relationship tendencies, you're unearthing your relationship with money, with food, with spending, with consumerism, maybe some of your even like addictive tendencies to certain things.

So, Yeah. That's a part of the deeper life is really looking at yourself with an honest lens and then shifting into self-acceptance for what you find. So it's not even like jumping to self-love. It's going to acceptance first, because sometimes love can come and go. Right. We've experienced that even in relationships, but acceptance when you accept something.

There's that element of like, okay, I see all of this. And I accept it, and that feels a bit more final, right? It's like I've gone through multiple layers of acceptance, but I still feel like I am much closer to a holistic acceptance of myself than I was, you know, even three years ago.

Absolutely.

Emily Peilan: And we all have, you know, light and shadow sides as well. And if you kind of just avoid and neglect and you know, the shadow side of you, well, it's still there. You know, you have to sort of, confront it, accept it. And only then do I feel like you can come to balance in your life as well.

Yeah. And also with this idea, like you mentioned, and this is so common but like when women are like striving for success, it's often the masculine model of success. Like push push your feelings don't matter. Hustle, grind it, dominance.

All the things, and it's like more why and I feel like this beautiful rise of like female entrepreneurs in the space is now balancing that as like success can also be being intuitive, being in your feeling in your feminine energy as well. Yeah, and I think that also comes into this balance and accepting some of the traits that.

We perhaps are told are not good in society. So for example if you want to be a successful ceo, it's like, don't feel that's bad. Or like resting is bad. That's for lazy people. And then it's like you're like, oh, I can't rest because then I'm lazy and then that's bad, and then you never rest and then you burn out and then you.

Well, your business dies or something, you know? Wow. So I feel like

Alexis Teichmiller: how did

Emily Peilan: you kind of confront or accept some of these like shadow sides of yourself? Like what were some of the things that you found or struggled to accept in yourself?

Alexis Teichmiller: Yeah. So Monument actually be anger. Oh, interesting. And I think that's something that I share it now with no hesitation, but I think as a woman it feels like anger.

We're not allowed to feel angry. Men are able to display anger, but women really aren't. And if they are, you know, they're crazy or they're a bitch, or Yeah, they're, yeah, they're psychotic. Like, you know, you automatically start to label a woman who displays anger. And back to my childhood, the shadow self there, the internal felt really angry because it couldn't match the external.

Like, I had these two sides of myself and I was angry about the dishonesty, I guess, of myself. And I didn't know that at the time, right? This is through years of therapy and they in books and self-discovery. But I just displayed a lot of anger in my teens. Like mean, just mean angry. And then how I dipped that in through college was through gossip.