CLW vs. CEW

Several people have asked me to clarify the difference between our two upcoming October workshops: the Conscious Life Workshop (October 14-16) and the Conscious Entrepreneur Workshop (October 21-23). A number of people are still trying to decide whether to attend one or the other or both. So let me give you a better picture of what you can expect from each event.

Conscious Life Workshop (CLW)

CLW focuses on your overall lifestyle, especially the combo of identifying and following your path with a heart and creating income streams to fund it. This workshop is for people who want to upgrade their overall experience of life, so they can enjoy a more vibrant, heart-centered life with more energy flowing through it. If you feel that it’s time to take your life to the next level in multiple areas, this workshop is a good match for you.

CLW is a very holistic workshop because we have to address how all the pieces will fit together and how you’ll transition from where you are to where you want to be. What are the pieces of your desire lifestyle, and how will they affect each other? What will you do with your time? How will you fund this new lifestyle? What will your income sources be? How are you going to transition from where you are to where you want to be?

The main topics include discovering your desires, improving your relationship with life, lifestyle exploration, your relationship with money, generating income, strategies for earning $10K per month, passive income, finding work you enjoy, serving others, building key skills, and transitioning.

CLW is intended to be inspiring and motivating but also down to earth and practical. I’ll help you get specific about your desires, so you can get past fuzzy, non-actionable intentions like “make more money,” “travel more,” or “have a great relationship.” The intent of this workshop is to help you make real decisions and begin taking action to make your transition actually happen.

When people put forth the effort to upgrade their lifestyles, they generally succeed, especially when they have the opportunity to connect with others who are going through similar transitions.

One young man who attended CLW in 2014 now funds his lifestyle by selling ebooks for Amazon Kindle, and he doesn’t even write the ebooks. He earns more than enough to live on, and he can continue to increase his income by releasing more ebooks if he wants. He’s only is his early 20s, so he’s off to a great start with no need for a job. Now his biggest challenge now is figuring out what to do with all his free time, so he can keep learning and growing. He’s been helping and inspiring other people to create passive income streams too. He’s coming to both October workshops, so you’ll have a chance to meet him and hang out with him there.

For many people working on lifestyle transitions, the biggest hurdle is the income side. This is mostly a psychological challenge, especially if you’ve been brainwashed into thinking that you can’t make money without a job. Lots of people have already figured this out, and you don’t even have to be that creative these days to earn abundant passive income. It mostly just takes a different mindset and some new habits. It really, really helps to spend time with people who are already doing this, so you can absorb a new mindset and can-do attitude through osmosis until you finally internalize that this can be your reality too.

Some attendees already have the income side handled, and they want to have more of a life. For some it’s more adventure. For others it’s better friends and intimate relationships. And some people want to contribute more and do more heart-aligned work. What’s great about CLW is that there will be other people in the room who’ve already solved your particular challenge, and they’re working on other challenges now.

The big picture goal of CLW is to help you create a lifestyle that finally feels like you, where you can honestly say, “This is my life, and I really like it.” Put an end to those nagging feeling of dissatisfaction and disappointment, and replace them with appreciation and gratitude. This isn’t about tricks and shortcuts. It’s mainly about defining clear and specific goals, identifying the action steps, and then getting those actions done, one by one. The action side is fairly simple. But of course the more difficult challenge for most people is getting themselves into the right frame of mind where such actions become natural and automatic. The irony is that when you finally internalize this, conscious lifestyle design will become such a normal part of your reality that you may not even notice that you’re doing it. Whatever you used to consider extraordinary will simply be your everyday reality. You’ll enjoy and appreciate your new lifestyle, but you won’t make such a big deal out of it anymore. Making a big deal out of it only pushes it away.

Is it a big deal to travel for a month or longer at a stretch? To conduct immersive personal growth experiments? To earn abundant passive income without needing a job? To enjoy a relationship with someone who thinks this way? For the people who are doing these things, it’s not extraordinary at all. It’s just their normal life. The oddball freaks are the people who slave away at jobs they don’t like to fund lifestyles they don’t appreciate; how they’re able to tolerate such unhappiness for so many years without snapping is what’s truly extraordinary.

“More” isn’t a goal. This includes making more money, traveling more, growing more, and enjoying life more. These are the B.S. pseudo-goals that keep people stuck, and we’ll be dumping them on the first day of CLW and replacing them with real milestones you can actually achieve. For many people, specific goals are scary. It’s easy to be comfortable with vague nonsense like “travel more,” but as soon as you pick a city for your next destination and begin leaning into an actual trip there, you may start feeling pretty uncomfortable. Anyone who masters lifestyle design has to learn how to deal with that discomfort and to surf it. Once you learn how to handle such feelings without running back to your old comfort zone, you’ll have access to a special kind of motivational energy.

I had to go through multiple big transitions to bring all the pieces of my life into alignment, including changing my career, going through a divorce, and getting comfortable with extended travel in new locations. I’m really happy with my life these days, especially the experiential richness of it. Sometimes it’s a little crazy, but I love the craziness.

I know that lifestyle design sounds like fun, and it definitely can be. But it also takes a lot of work, especially in the beginning. There are decisions to make, challenges to face, problems to solve, and transitions to navigate. At CLW we will of course cover the fun side since people draw a lot of inspiration from it, but the real core of this workshop is to intelligently address the hard parts of lifestyle design. We need to ask the tough questions and solve the difficult problems, so we can gain access to all the heart-centered fulfillment that this path has to offer.

Hopefully this gives you a clearer picture of what CLW is all about. Now let’s move on to CEW…

Conscious Entrepreneur Workshop (CEW)

CEW is geared for people who want to create and build a successful business. The topics include choosing a business, starting a business, growing a business, business models, business strategy, sales, marketing, legal issues (including contracts), government compliance, accounting, finding customers, serving customers, partnering, cash flow, passive income, and other business topics.

Some of this material applies to any type of business, but most of the examples I’ll use will involve online businesses because that’s where I have the most experience, and it’s also what most of my readers are interested in.

Some people who’ve signed up for CEW are interested in starting their first business, and they want to learn how to do it. Others are already experienced entrepreneurs, and they want to improve their businesses and its processes, or they’re considering starting a different type of business.

Since my readership is international and since we have attendees from outside the USA for every workshop, I’ve designed CEW with international business in mind. I’ll give specific examples from my own businesses with respect to location-specific details like legal issues and government compliance (my current business is a Nevada LLC), and I’ll also generalize the ideas and invite others to share their experiences in different regions, so this won’t be just for USA-based entrepreneurs.

There is some overlap between CEW and CLW because both workshops cover income generation, but each workshop approaches income generation differently. In the CLW context, we’ll cover strategies for generating income (especially passive income) that don’t require you to start a business. You can do contract work, earn affiliate income, or sell products through other company’s systems (like Amazon) to fund your lifestyle desires without starting a business. Some people also enjoy their jobs and don’t need or want to pursue an entrepreneurial path, so they’re fine with their employee income as-is.

CEW focuses on the business side, so this workshop is for people who want to create and grow a real business. To me this goes beyond creating passive income streams. You can create passive income streams by plugging into an existing system like using Amazon to sell ebooks or Apple’s App Store to sell apps or games, but some people want to build up their own operations too, so they can build their own customer base and have more control over their income streams.

In the CEW context, we’ll cover income generation in terms of designing and creating your own products and services to sell, not just leveraging other people’s systems. With your own business, you have a lot more control and flexibility. Your business can still use other people’s systems, but you can also design and create your own systems. So at CEW we’ll cover a much richer and more expansive set of income generation strategies.

Creating your own business also gives you more power and leverage to express your purpose. Your business is your baby, and you can sculpt it however you wish. There’s no substitute for holding the reins and being able to steer your own course.

I like leveraging other people’s systems to generate passive income, and I do that liberally, but I also like having my own business to express my purpose in ways that wouldn’t fit into someone’s pre-existing system. For example, through my business I can create and deliver live events such as these upcoming workshops, and I have a workshop coordinator to help me. This requires more work and a greater skill set than just setting up simple passive income streams. The upside is that I have full control over how to create, deliver, promote, and sell these events.

Another reason I like the entrepreneurial path is that it pushes me to grow in a variety of ways. I had to become a stronger, smarter, and more skillful person in order to succeed in business, and this aspect of self-development benefits me in my personal life as well. My business has provided me with some of the best personal growth training I could ask for. Business challenges can provide fast feedback cycles, and the practical side of business helps us develop mindsets and skills that produce real results, not just positive squishy feelings.

A working business has many different pieces, and keeping all these pieces working congruently and consistently isn’t easy. Your own business will provide you with a continuous flow of personal growth challenges. Some people don’t want to add such challenges to their plate, which is perfectly understandable. But other people are never be satisfied until they step up and tackle precisely this type of challenge – a holistic dragon that will sculpt them in so many ways.

A final benefit of the entrepreneurial path is that you can have a more direct connection to the people you serve. With some income streams, your link to the customer is indirect because someone else controls that aspect. This is especially true with affiliate programs. If you want to build a closer relationship to the people you serve, then creating your own business to serve those people is one powerful way to accomplish that. I really like that through my business, I’ve been able to contribute many more positive ripples than I otherwise would have.

CLW vs. CEW

So which workshop(s) should you attend?

If you want to upgrade your overall lifestyle, then of course CLW would be a good choice. For most of my readers, if I could only recommend one October workshop, it would be CLW. That’s going to be the bigger of the two events.

If income generation is important to you, but if you’d be fine using passive income strategies that don’t require you to start and build a true business of your own, then I’d say stick with CLW. If you mainly want income streams that you can create on the side to fund your lifestyle, CLW is sufficient for that.

If you feel the entrepreneurial bug and you like the idea of starting and growing a real business with its own products, services, customers, sales, and so on, then CEW is good fit for you. This is going to be the smaller of the two workshops, and you’ll be connecting with other entrepreneurially minded people there.

The two workshops are designed to complement each other, so if both topics matter to you, you’re welcome to attend both, and many people are signed up for both.

I can tell you that most of the people who signed up for CEW also signed up for CLW, but the reverse isn’t true. That doesn’t surprise me. People who are interested in entrepreneurship are often interested in lifestyle design as well. But many people who are pursuing lifestyle upgrades don’t necessarily want to become entrepreneurs, at least not right away.

I hope this clarifies what the Conscious Life Workshop and the Conscious Entrepreneur Workshop will cover. If you have further questions, feel free to send me a message. I hope you’ll come to at least one event this month since either one is sure to help speed you along towards a more fulfilling life. I constantly hear from past workshop attendees how the social connections they made at the workshops greatly strengthened the overall experience and led them into new actions and new results. It’s much easier to navigate a big transition when you’re going through it with like-minded friends.

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Steve Pavlina

Steve Pavlina is an American self-help author, motivational speaker and entrepreneur. He is the author of the web site stevepavlina.com and the book Personal Development for Smart People.

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