The Goddess Gets Her Crown Back #2

Abundance and boundaries with Kelly Parker

If you’re on our TOTEM newsletter list, you should have seen a recent email titled, “The Goddess Gets Her Crown Back”. In this email, we outlined the key paradox around abundance. In our culture, success is synonymous with hard work: grit, suffering, effort, pushing through, accumulation, dominance, and aggression. But abundance is yin- not yang- requiring that we reframe our approach and mindset if we want to receive the things we’ve been working so hard to achieve.

The bottom line? Our addiction to doing is gumming up the works and fighting us in our push towards abundance. So, if we want to shift this dysfunctional dynamic, what do we do?

In short: we give the Goddess her crown back.

It’s an energetic metaphor for giving place of privilege to our divine yin energy and honoring the goddess- within and without.

In this series, I sit down with a variety of TOTEM collaborators, clients and thought leaders to get their take on how we can all “Re-crown the Goddess” and bring our lives back into balance. We continue this series with Kelly Parker- of Compass Real Estate- to dig into the tension between necessary boundaries, growing professional success, and quality of life.

About Kelly Parker

For 12 years Kelly has helped Chicagoland home buyers and sellers transition to a new home with grace, confidence, and ease. In 2014, Kelly fully embraced a new way of tackling the best of real estate (RE) with the launch of Chicago Home Collective. She now leads and mentors a team of female-only brokers who share a likeminded approach to helping clients while growing their business through authenticity and alignment.

But Kelly isn’t just a real estate broker or a “boss babe” (that cliché trope making the rounds on social media). As I quickly discovered in a 1:1 session with Kelly, she is all about vision and manifestation, and this approach has catapulted her referral-only business to the top one percent of real estate agents in Chicago.

Her 2022 focus is to help her team of agents- who she also sees as her clients- to lean into their authentic selves and align their professional efforts with their personal goals.

Here is Kelly’s website for your reference: https://chicagohomecollective.com

The Goddess and Kelly

To Kelly, Goddess energy means operating in alignment and honoring our inherent worth, which then leads to flow, receiving, and abundance. And this is exactly what she is living and teaching to other female brokers.

And, as Kelly points out, the real estate industry is the epitome of anti-goddess energy, presenting a unique challenge to navigate her professional landscape without losing her way.

“From day one in this career I realized I was ‘different’, and I had a choice: do the work in ways that felt right/aligned for me or how others told me to. Spoiler alert: I did it my way.”

Kelly embraced the concept of flow, refusing to force any aspect of her business: generating new business, selling properties, growing here team. Her business model is unique: she only engages with clients from referrals, and when there is a window of inactivity, she just goes on vacation instead of trying to kick up new business. According to Kelly, the RE industry should be about being- not about doing. Her “real work” became focusing on her state of being, which she viewed as her primary investment in her business.

On scarcity

Kelly will be the first to tell you that the real estate industry is propped up on a scarcity mindset, marked by zero boundaries and terrible work life balance, with people saying hilariously scarcity-minded shit, like:

·      “There is not enough innovatory right now- and ten years ago there were not enough buyers”

·      “You better answer every call/email/text asap, never turn off so you don’t lose the ‘limited’ opportunity”

·      “Don’t stop to celebrate, or else it might look like you have too much and you only have so much time to start generating next year’s business so get to work”

In the words of Kelly, “scarcity is a hamster wheel”. When you buy into this dynamic and internalize it, you can’t hold any boundaries of your own and you will be more likely to disrespect others. When you live in scarcity you will choose work over life because you think you can overcome it that way…and the hamster wheel just continues.

After all, in this crazy scarcity construct, it’s a famine out there….not a feast.

The road to an abundance mindset

Being self-employed and responsible for generating her own business, Kelly spent many years battling the different ways scarcity shows up. At one point, Kelly even hid the fact that she was pregnant for as long as she could. Then, after the birth of her daughter, she worked herself nearly to death fearing that people would choose not to work with her because she was a “mom”.  Kelly refers to this as trying to prove her worth instead of embracing her inherent worth.

“To me, balance is a practice of honoring your inherent worth. When you do you click into the energy of abundance. When you live in an abundant state you feel safe setting and honoring boundaries. In other words, it’s a cycle of what is good for me, is good for you and therefore good for us, and you arrive back and in balance.” – Kelly Parker

Kelly thinks that we get a lot wrong about Goddess energy. It doesn’t need to look a certain way- for Kelly, the Goddess energy can look masculine at times. It’s not meant to be a literal costume, character or affectation. Rather, it’s all about aligning with and honoring yourself.

Getting the Goddess online

For Kelly, a daily awareness to honor the Goddess is what works best. If something calls to her and seems interesting, she follows it. If she wants to spend time with her family, she does it…and she doesn’t hide it for fear it will erode some element of a workaholic brand. Kelly has become very vocal and assertive in her boundaries, even calling people out who disregard her clearly delineated expectations (which, I must admit, has led to more than one hilarious Instagram meme!).

Squaring the fear

Anytime we initiate something new, we are met with a lot of fear, particularly around scarcity, survival and position. Kelly treats fear as a signal- as spiritual data- and she pays very close attention to the situation, getting herself ready for the inevitable growth is on the other side.

It’s uncomfortable to stand in a place where, without all the answers, you choose yourself first-  especially in an industry in which boundaries are frequently met with confusion and, occasionally, outright hostility. For Kelly, the roadblocks are not just her own limiting beliefs. In real estate, other people get very comfortable projecting their fears, doubts, and societal conditioning on the agent. If someone is an empath or energetically sensitive- which Kelly is- there can be a danger of absorbing and becoming these distorted projections. This is why Kelly focuses so much on maintaining her center: because the barbarians are quite literally always at the gate.

The call to action

Kelly (rightfully IMHO) believes we are abundant beings, so abundance isn’t something you can receive because it is something you already HAVE. She recommends looking for the places where you are already recognize your abundance, such as:

·      A home you’re super proud of

·      The ability to travel

·      Running marathons or being active

·      Having a healthy marriage

·      Enjoying your children, friends, the people in your life

By tuning into the feeling of these examples (or their version in your life), you connect to and channel abundance energy, reminding your energy body of how to receive and be grateful. Think of these examples as a packet of tea that you can infuse yourself with (in this metaphor, you’re the hot tea water)- effectively infusing Goddess energy into your being.

For Kelly, real joy exists on the yin side of the street. To her, Goddess energy and growth go hand in hand- they’re not in mutual opposition to each other, as her industry (and our world, more broadly) would have you think.

What’s more: Goddess energy isn’t just tertiary self-care, it is critical to our overall growth, success and joy.

Thank you for sharing your secret to success, Kelly, and for showing people that it’s not all about grit and strife- rather, Goddess energy connects you to the abundance you always have.