We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Babs Cheung a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Babs, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Prior to 2020 I had just quit my job to run my side hustle full time as an event producer for secret events around NYC. When the global shutdown made hosting and producing events illegal, I was in a panic trying to figure out what I was going to do for income. I got a direct hit from The Universe, my intuition, Gaia, or whatever higher calling it was which asked me to create a spreadsheet with three columns: Column A: What I was good at. Column B: What I loved doing. Column C: What I would do for free. When I asked The Universe about column C, the reply I got was, “It is unlikely that you’ll be making any actual profit until year 3, do something you’re willing to do for free.”
Astrology checked all the boxes. To understand the market and business better I took free online courses and searched the web for freebies from business coaches and enrolled in “YouTube university” as in using Youtube to help me search for business and marketing related content. I read countless business books and quickly learned that marketing and branding was what set most businesses and entrepreneurs up for success and apart from the competition.
During the building of my brand I was offering astrology readings on a donation base just to see what people were willing to pay. At the time a lot of my clients were frontline workers in the medical field who were worked ragged by the pandemic and they often wanted ways to navigate the crazy situation we were all in. As I listened to the questions and concerns of my first clients I was able to see how astrology that’s widely available to people wasn’t entirely helping them in an immediately applicable way; so I decided from there to launch a menu that addressed the crisis of the moment, no matter how big or small.
Thanks to those early clients, I was able to come up with my most popular reading, WTFIGO Plot Twist Reading which stands for “What the f*ck is going on?” This reading is designed specifically for people who are experiencing challenging situations and can’t seem to catch a break. I know from experience that once we can name the problem we are having, we are already halfway to the solution. And at the end of the day, becoming more self aware about the things that bother us is the only way we can really grow out of our conditioned patterns and become our best selves.
Babs, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m an astrologer, writer and keynote speaker and my mission is to encourage as many people as I can to learn and use the language of astrology for self awareness, personal growth and the casual dismantling of the patriarchy,
The services I provide as an astrologer are readings designed to address any challenges past or present and find a path to understanding its place in the path to growth. My most popular reading WTFIGO Plot Twist is a catch all general reading designed to get to the heart of any challenging situation a client could be experiencing.
My second most popular reading is called Main Character Energy.
This reading helps clients harness their “main character energy” which gives them greater self awareness and decision making abilities. Learning what is aligned for them using astrology helps my clients exercise their intuitive decision making. This kind of reading is also great for people who are just beginning to understand the basics of astrology.
While there are a bunch of other services on my menu (astrocartography, forecasting etc), one service that I’ve been actively developing helps clients’ plan their fiscal quarters according to their birth chart. This 1:1 service provides support to clients for three zodiacal seasons helping clients become aware of the cyclical nature of the cosmos, tracking opportunities for growth and accelerated achievements while also reconditioning them to get out of comparison traps and the destructive scarcity mindsets. This is done by showing clients their astrological timeline which is bespoke to their birth chart.
My job as an astrologer is not to tell clients what they should do in any given situation; my job is to give my clients options so that they know what they are capable of doing in situations.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
As a Capricorn Rising, my ruling planet is Saturn. And Saturn’s motto is, “Good. Better. Best. NEVER REST. Until your good is better than your best.” As you can imagine, not the most forgiving or lenient inner critic and coach to have on the team. But that said, my ambitious nature is supported by this Saturnian energy, that is until my body gives in, I teeter on the edge of depression, and I pretty much go through the downward spiral towards burn out where everything has to come to a screeching halt.
During my many burn out halts, I’d get three levels of Saturnian energy encompassing all my thoughts: The Coach, The Dictator, and The Dance Mom.
First my thoughts would start off as The Coach: “Rest up Babs, sometimes athletes have to take breaks too, we can’t afford an injury so rest for a day, but make sure your head is still in the game. Just because you can’t get out of bed, doesn’t mean you can’t watch or read business books or business podcasts to expand your business. Even if you’re resting, stay productive.”
And after several days of this, I’d quit and allow myself to watch a comedy or something not business related to try to get out of the funk. But this was when The Coach would turn into The Dictator, and would scream a bunch of hurtful things at me as a way to motivate me. often using reverse psychology to leverage the anger toward myself to get me to “get off my ass” and do the work. Sometimes, this was enough to actually snap me out of the rest period I’d take only to repeat the cycle, two weeks down the road. Clearly this wasn’t sustainable.
At some point after going through the needless self abuse from The Dictator, the approach becomes softer through The Dance Mom. The Dance Mom was a part of Saturn that used guilt and pride to reach a result. Often veiled with an enticing proposition paired together with a lofty, usually unproportionally skewed task, like the promise of rest if I sell four clients on a high ticket reading by tomorrow. The Dance Mom used negotiation and a bright tone to lead me to devalue my rest and to only value the part of me that could produce.
The lesson that took a long time for me to unlearn was exactly this, only valuing myself when I was productive and putting myself down, that I did “nothing” and feeling bad about it. I would catch myself in passing conversations with friends who’d ask, how was your day? And my response would be something like, “eh, I didn’t do anything so it was shit.” And this was something so deeply conditioned in my brain that it was my immediate response. But when being more thoughtful about the actual day, I’d realize that the day was actually not full of “nothing” ; it was a day in which I took the time I needed to process the week’s work. It was a chill day or maybe it was a day that I had to take care of personal matters. Whatever kind of day it was, it was in its own right, a productive day because at the end of it, my body was still intact, and I was still alive.
As I slowly unraveled this revelation, a breakthrough came while in meditation: taking a day off is actually me telling The Universe that I am worthy to just exist, calling in abundance because I chose myself and my rest. The ability to take time off and not have my whole world, business, day, or personhood fall apart is a tremendous abundance flex. And soon enough this abundance flex showed that my days off were intentional, built into productivity as a sustainable practice. This mindset shift empowered me to speak back to those three Saturnian voices to the point that those three voices disappeared. Now when I tap into Saturnian energy, the thoughts that used to be so quick to tear me down are even faster to lift me up and cheer me on.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
At the start of the pandemic, I had to make a decision which would define my career forever. And as I mentioned I approached this decision in a very logical way, making a spreadsheet with three columns and identifying my skills, my loves and hobbies, and services that I’d be willing to do for free. After deciding that astrology was the way to go, I signed up for a branding course instead of just setting up a webpage and immediately selling to clients (Pivot #1) In that branding course I met a thought leader who was a speaker in the tech field and invited me to go to a public speaking training where I fell in love with the medium and found myself light up when communicating my mission. (Pivot #2) While I was still in the infancy stages of building my business, I was training as a keynote speaker because it’s what excited me. And through that I gained new clients. But as my clientele changed so too did my menu offerings, brand messaging, and branding. (Pivot #3)
You could basically say that my whole career is full of several smooth pivots that always make their way back to home base, and if you were to choreograph my career into a dance, it would be one that contains a lot of jumps and leaps, movements flowing back and forth but not in a chaotic way. Every step and gesture is intentional and aligned to the telling of the overarching theme. And the theme here is that I enjoy pivoting in my business because it opens me up to a lot more opportunities than staying in one position does.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.babscheung.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/babs.cheung/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/babs-cheung/
- Other: Email: [email protected]
Image Credits
@Studio5800 @Seenbymarth