Story of Entrepreneur Katja Kempe

Meet our featured beauty with brains Katja Kempe, an entrepreneur based in Sydney, Australia. She is the CEO and Founder of Viveka (https://www.viveka.world) which is an online marketplace for coaches, mentors and speakers.

Viveka is a combination of Katja’s professional experience and personal passion. As a Strategy Manager and then COO of internationally leading law firms, Katja followed strategic, innovative and global industry trends whilst implementing new strategies to continuously up level efficiencies and processes. In addition, Katja always had a passion for personal growth and professional development and has been a coach and mentor for several years, parallel to her career in the legal industry.

Katja is internationally experienced, multilingual, inspired by innovation and a strong believer in creating positive and sustainable change.

Here is her story.

“The Catalyst.

‘The only constant in life is change.’- Heraclitus

Everything in life is in motion; we constantly evolve collectively and individually to form a new realm of consciousness. The notion to ‘arrive somewhere’ is an inaccurate belief and yet pursued by many in the hope of finding true fulfilment or happiness, once a particular milestone is achieved in life. Be it a promotion in your career, finding your life partner and getting married, reaching optimal fitness levels and participating in a competition or having a certain amount of money in your bank account, to name a few.

Yes, all these things satisfy us, give us a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of being ‘on track’, they may even ensure many thumbs up on your social media post. Reality is, these triumphs bring you happiness, but do these emotions last long-term?

How many times have you heard or even said to yourself ‘As soon as I DO X, I will HAVE Y and then I will BE happy, relaxed, able to enjoy life and be content with myself.’ We live in a ‘Do-Have-Be’ paradigm and have it all back to front.

You see, there is no single ‘summit’ when it comes to life. Life is an on-going personal growth voyage, so it’s best to experience this journey dancing to its rhythm or being ‘in flow’. Flow – the new buzzword featured in every modern development blog, magazine or professional development guide. But what exactly is ‘flow’ and how do we access it?

Generally speaking, there are three phases to personal change: the catalyst phase, the realization phase and the implementation phase. You are, consciously or not, in either one or multiple of these phases in every aspect of your life and every period of your lifespan. I would like to share a personal story with you. A story that had me question every aspect of my life. This story was my biggest catalyst in life and brought me on my path of purpose.

The difference between where you are and where you need to be is simple, yet it can be incredibly confronting. You need to fully surrender to your purpose, your passion, your magic in this world and step away from the status quo that sucks us into a place of complacency.

Just like you, I needed to surrender to something greater. You see, life was what I thought it was supposed to be. It was what the world had told me I was supposed to do and even though I wasn’t completely happy; I was ‘okay’.

My parents blessed me with an international upbringing and good education. In my mid-twenties, I graduated from a double master’s degree in business and then worked in the management of a big law firm. My career progressed quickly and after 8 years, I found myself in the C-Suite of one of the world’s largest legal firms.

I had a good salary, an amazing luxurious life, a beautiful view from my office over the Sydney harbour and the approval of all my family and friends. I thought I had ‘arrived’ and ‘made it’, yet I was living in a situation where intimidation, politics of the workplace and constant backstabbing was a day-to-day normality.

Some days, I could be oblivious to it and pretend to be completely happy and ‘in my element’, but even on those days when I told myself that it was alright, I knew deep down inside of my spirit, that something was profoundly misaligned within my being. More than anything, I wanted to get out. I bet you’ve been in that place.

You’re probably even there right now. But like you, I didn’t want to give up the luxurious life I had created for myself and take the bold step of surrender. And so, as Life, God, the Universe—or whatever you want to call it—often does, it stepped in and it forced me to make a choice. Was I going to choose to be the fullness of who I was?

Life offered me an opportunity. Most of the time, life’s gifts don’t always come as pretty bouquets, but blows. They come ‘wrapped in sandpaper’. I like to say, “life handed me a rose”. Sometimes you can see the rose for what it is, a beautifully created symbol of love and other times you are completely numbed by the pain of the thorns. And so, it was in my case.

I went into work one day and was retrenched. Sure, I knew there were expense issues and that politics had been at play and all the reasons why, but however you look at it, I was fired. My luxurious life had been yanked out from underneath me and all the blood, sweat and tears that I put in to my job didn’t matter at all. As if someone tore the carpet from underneath my feet. I fell, and I fell hard.

I was forced into that position and I chose to breathe through those endless moments of uncertainty and give myself the chance to unfold. I’m so blessed to say that I took time to travel, because it was in those travels, that I came to life.

When I did, I found my passion and my purpose. This was my realisation phase, my personal metamorphosis. Since then, I watched as one miracle unfolded after the next. The lessons I learned through my travels and of my new life journey, allowed me to see the tools which were placed into my life, to do that thing, that I was always called to do.

The intention of sharing this story with you, is to highlight the importance of a catalyst.

Now, let me share some of the best tools that my surrender taught me with you, so that you too, can take that leap of faith. Step out of the golden cage of safety and luxury and into the truly luxurious life that you’re really meant to live. I invite you to come with me as we both live a life of surrender. I did it, you can live through it, and I promise you, the other side is the place that you want to live.

Do you know someone, who suffered from a terrible illness and then once cured, completely reinvented their life? Or got retrenched from their job and then chose a completely different avenue, perhaps to contribute to the greater good and quite possibly even taking a pay cut into account.

Maybe you know someone who lost a loved one and as a result started to question their doing and value their time more. Perchance you can even recognise yourself in one of these people.

All these examples, whilst extreme, are catalysts. And if you give yourself the opportunity, you will start to see the blessings and collateral beauty of these perceived tragic, unfair and terrible challenges, that life throws at us. Catalysts are designed to shake you up, or better: wake you up!

All you need to do is persevere, open your heart and trust that the universe has your back.

Disrupt Yourself.

The beauty about a catalyst is that you needn’t wait until life seemingly conspires against you to put you on a different path. You can disrupt yourself to avoid the tragedy of severe events in your life, by being proactive. Believe it or not, the universe responds to change, it is a symbol of its abundance and ever flowing creativity. Change is the only language the universe understands.

The universal language of change is how the divine expresses its creative powers, its love for creation, its love for growth in possibilities and how It expands its own consciousness.

Ultimately, everything that happens to you in your life, happens for a reason.

Think Kodak, Borders, MSN Messenger, Pan American Airlines and General Motors, just to name a few. These once fortune powerhouses are no longer with us, with one common denominator cited by business experts as the reason: They did not change. They did not self-disrupt, and as a result, did not disrupt their respective markets with new innovations.

Yes, they relied on workmanship, competitive prices, PR, marketing and all the conventional ways associated with Big Business. Yet what was missing was self-disruption, to let go of the old and bring in the new, innovate existing trends, break the moulds and do things differently.

They stayed the same, and as a result, they were way-sided by inevitable progress.

So how do we self-disrupt? How do we merge with the universal language of ‘change’ to manifest greater success, greater love, greater wealth, greater health and happiness?

There are three key areas that need to be addressed, in order to shift the gears of their influence in your life.

Self-limiting patterns: This is perhaps the most important. Without this being shifted, nothing changes.

The human brain: This incredible organ is the determinant of our destiny, because we cannot coach ourselves based on what we want, but what we are.

Taking inspired action: Not all action-taking is created equal. Even some of what we think to be ‘inspired action’ can be counter-productive.

Undo self-limiting patterns and your destiny changes. Here’s how.

‘What are self-limiting patterns and why do they impact me in unforeseen ways?’

This is a question we get regularly at Viveka and rather than building self-trust through coaching or self-development and removing the weed of self-limiting patterns, an inordinate amount of trust is invested in forces outside ourselves, beyond our control. We blame and shame others or circumstances in our lives and even interpret life events as ‘a sign’ or karmic debt.

Right up until the consequences of these self-limiting patterns, from chronic procrastination to fear of starting new projects, rear their head and inevitably, ‘life happens’.

And some of the times when ‘life happens’, the universe itself feels like a hostile place, as though existence conspires to make one’s ability to move ahead in key life areas difficult. Yes, life can be a hard teacher. A lot of the hardest lessons we had to learn manifest not just once, but several times over an entire life-time.

Without eliminating limiting believes, you set yourself up for eroded courage. You set yourself up for diminishing hope, pave the way for self-doubt, self-sabotage and uncertainty in life. A pattern of ‘stumbling blocks’ that get in the way of obtaining your deepest wishes.

What’s tricky about these patterns is that, although they can often manifest externally in the form of ‘events’ that dishearten you or stall your progress, they actually start within us! Limiting beliefs manifest in your energetic frequency, as who you are; your buried traumas, your fears, your unsupportive behavioural patterns. They become the red lights along the road to your deepest fulfillments in life and some of these red lights feel like they take forever to change.

So how do you shift your Karma?

The human brain. Coach yourself out.

Fundamental to coaching is the ability to get deeply in touch with your emotions by creating a ‘structure’ that you are held accountable to, such as a time-table, a monthly ‘personal statement’ and so on. This then allows the negative behavioural patterns to be teased out from within the depths of your consciousness, brought up to the surface for examination and then let go of.

When you are no longer burdened by the negative emotions, something remarkable happens. The layers that obscured your authentic self; the real you that is naturally happy, carefree, heart-based and curious, will begin to replace any ‘pleasure’ you felt in the escapist activities and self-sabotage patterns of the outside world.

And this mode of being will feel so pleasurable –the changes that can manifest in your outside world, from more money to healed relationships, better networking gigs, more effortless learning and acquiring of hobbies and skills – so remarkable, that merely the very passing thought of even returning to your old patterns will bring about pain.

Before long, self-coaching will no longer be something you just do as a check-list. It will be something you will do as who you are.

Think of your brain’s cognitive capacity as you would of your laptop’s memory bank: It is a finite resource. When the laptop processes dozens upon dozens of operations at the same time, little processing power is left to tackle the important things, such as running programs smoothly.

In the same way, when the brain’s cognitive capacity is largely devoted to tackling the many stresses of everyday living, there is very little cognitive ‘bandwidth’ left to tackle the important, potentially life changing decision-making processes, such as those associated with setting and achieving new goals.

That is why, those who experience financial troubles instinctively resort to ‘comfort zone activities’ to stay ‘centred’ and grounded, to recoup and to survive. The only problem is, those ‘comfort zone’ activities often stifle one’s abilities to manifest a better life, as they keep one stuck in the old negative thought and behavioural patterns that manifested these financial problems to begin with and they enforce the brain’s old neural pathways and limit one’s potential.

You will notice that as you support yourself, no matter how great your problems, life will support you. Have faith, own your changes and recognize that staying the course of your new life literally changes your frequency from the inside-out.

Taking Inspired Action

Action-taking serves as an indicator, a self-diagnostic tool, that you accept the new limitation-eliminating, possibility-attracting frequencies inside you.

Your actions help anchor you in your new frequency and ground you. And by actions, I don’t mean actions on a checklist, but rather actions with self-awareness, where you embark on exactly why you are taking that action. Actions taken as a checklist can still have beneficial effects, but far less than when done ‘as who you are’.

Actions taken in combination with a structure such as a time-table, an ‘evidence board’ and introspective examinations of emotions that arise from within you, essentially communicate to the divine, to the universe, that you are sincere in your quest for fulfilment.

Taking action is crucial to self-disruption and is very powerful. With it, through the magic of neuroplasticity, the brain forms new neural pathways and with that, your self-identity changes. Your frequency changes.

What exactly is ‘inspired action’?

It is action that is based on an intuitive nudge.

But this leads to a new question: How do we know, that what we call an ‘intuitive nudge’ is not actually our ego trying to self-sabotage the whole operation of manifesting a new reality for yourself, so as not to get vulnerable to its own destruction through ‘positive change’?

Note: The ego will do whatever it can to thwart change, even if it is change for the better. This is because the ego can anticipate old patterns, but not new ones. To the ego-mind, change is tantamount to its own death!

Action taken with self-awareness, taken as though change is inevitable and taken with full vulnerability to the unknown, is heart-guided or inspired action. That is the hallmark of the sort of action you must take for your life to change: Action that leads to new growth, opposed to enforcing old comfort zones.

In other words, action taken from the heart is the action that leads you to new discoveries about yourself, knowing yourself and your capabilities in ways you never knew or anticipated before.

This mode of action-taking is always ‘the harder way’. Essentially, you kick your own butt and propel yourself to positive new directions in your life. Now, understandably, because this way essentially ventures into the ‘unknown’ of life, there is one emotion that daunts most on this path.

The Emotion of Worry.

Replace worry with curiosity and witness your life change. Worrying is easily one of the most self-sabotaging habits and one of the most malicious stumbling blocks to manifesting the life of your dreams.

Worry literally behaves like an internal parasite. It feeds on the psychic cord between us and our higher self until the cord atrophies and we feel a profound disconnect with who we really are. What’s more, it steeps one deep into a behavioural pattern of shut-down and into confusion, victimhood and resistance to the natural flow of the divine.

Our faith erodes, both in the divine and in ourselves and that in turn affects our neural pathways and our frequency. As a result, we attract even more of the experiences which stem from our limiting behavioural and thought patterns and on goes the vicious cycle.

The good news: Worry is a very malleable pattern that can be unlearned. Statistics show that about 99% of our worries never manifest and that only 1% of them do. Worry is a learned behaviour that can be unlearned.

The bad news: When it does become a behavioural pattern, it becomes a very powerful one, as it is highly pervasive and even addictive. Worry does affect neural pathways when it becomes a behavioural pattern and due to its low vibrational frequency, we attract harsh lessons that aren’t specifically based on our initial ‘worry’, but that nonetheless make life very challenging and unsupportive.

Worry erodes faith and disconnects us from the divine. This can have consequences.

Therefore, so much emphasis was made on taking heart-based action. Worry naturally atrophies when you take action with the full self-awareness, that you are doing this to internally change. The awareness that you’re growing into the best version of yourself, irrespective of external ‘success’ or ‘failure’, becomes its own reward.

The next time you worry, make a conscious effort to catch yourself and immediately replace your worry with ‘curiosity’ and the question: ‘How good can this get?’

Worry is based on limited thinking; a natural result of abiding by ‘neocortex thinking’. It is an effect of not trusting our spiritual connection to the universe, based on the assumption that we are powerless, alone and bereft of the divine spark that is unquestionable and that exists within each and every one of us.

The diametrical opposite to worry is curiosity. Curiosity in life’s infinite possibilities, in the divine will, in a conscious search for the answer: ‘How good can it get?’

This shift in thinking is fuelled by one thing: gratitude. The presence of gratitude is the demarcation between worry and curiosity.

With worry, we are victims to life. With curiosity, we recognize life’s events, real and imagined, as gifts here to teach us things about ourselves that we would not face otherwise. Vehicles for knowing our truth and our capabilities. And for that, we become grateful and we embrace life with full trust and faith in the divine. We know that the universe has our best interest at heart.

At Viveka, we introduce ways to let go of internal blockages. Let go of precisely those behavioural patterns, that stem from limiting beliefs and get in the way of you embracing your life at the magnitude, that you were destined to. Ultimately, you know that you were always meant to live in this greatness. Let us lift you up and guide you there. Visit Viveka http://www.viveka.world and find a coach, mentor or speaker tailored to your specific needs. We update human thoughtware.

‘Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow know what you truly want to become.’ – Steve Jobs.”