From Linear to Quantum: The Systems That Create a Leap with Kalyca Zarek | Part 2 of 3

Summary: In Part 2, Kalyca and Katie pick up from her story of catastrophic system failure at a hundred-mile race and go deeper into the pattern that keeps high performers stuck: the belief that hard work is how results are created, and the identity that gets built around that belief.

They explore how fear shows up in disguise as busyness, why outsourcing your power never works long-term, and how doing the internal work first is what actually creates the container for the external systems to take you somewhere extraordinary.

Key Takeaways
→ When did you decide what earning looks like? Most of us inherited our beliefs about hard work from our parents without ever consciously agreeing to them.

→ Fear shows up as busyness. When you keep reorganizing your kitchen instead of doing the one thing that will move the needle, that is fear in disguise.

→ Outsourcing your power never creates lasting results. Programs that do it for you will always flatline. The answer is already inside you. Find the support that helps you access it.

→ People are wormholes. The right coach, the right hire, the right supporter collapses the time between linear and exponential. Asking for help is not weakness. It is strategy.

→ Fear is the chain tied to the linear trajectory. Every time you try to shift, it pulls you back. Nervous system work does not eliminate fear. It removes the stopping power of it.

→ What is at risk if you fully show up as yourself? That question reveals the real block. Fear of being seen, fear of success, fear of losing connection. These are what keep us small.

→ Your nervous system patterns lower your capacity without you realizing it. Suppressing old stories can take 10, 40, even 80% of the energy you have available to grow.

Where to find Kalyca
LinkedIn
Instagram
The Systems Clarity Scorecard
HighMpact Website

Transcript

Katie Wrigley (00:00)
because like you said, we're the bottleneck. And so what happens if you go on vacation? Your business is not doing anything in your absence. So you have to make more money ahead of time to be able to give yourself that space to be out of the business for a couple of weeks. And that is not going to scale over time, especially if you haven't grown enough.

And you're just making enough to be able to go month to month, you literally can't take a two-week vacation because you don't have anything coming in and you can't afford to take that time out. So that's the big thing. I'm starting to lose my train of thought on that one. That was there was another piece there. Where did it go? I'm gonna pause there and see what you want to say to add to that, Calica, before we move on.

Kalyca Zarich (00:34)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know what's coming up is going back to what we talked about in the beginning, where if we have clarity on what your true unique gifts are, that gives us this like blueprint to work from where now we can see, okay, if you are living in your zone of genius as the entrepreneur, and this could even apply to your corporate life or whatever, right?

But if you're living in your zone of genius, inevitably there are going to be other things that if you don't do them, they're going to fall through the cracks. Right. And that's where we can start to leverage and optimize the system design. And as we start to do that, people is one of the things you brought up, asking for help, getting support. That's true in our lives for our internal operating system for sure.

But it's also true in our businesses, right? And I almost look at it as if we're talking about the linear trajectory, right? And then we have this quantum trajectory. Well, everyone wants to get to the quantum trajectory. How do you get there? There are wormholes. There are, this is how you collapse time. This is how you collapse the space between linear and quantum is number one, the right person.

The right supporter, the right coach, the right hire. Those are all pathways that take you from the linear to the quantum. And then that list goes on, right? There are other things that you can incorporate that are on that like system map where that creates a wormhole for you to go from linear to quantum. And people is a huge one that I see all the time. Like if if you are operating in your zone of genius and you have the awareness to know, like,

Katie Wrigley (02:14)
Mm-hmm.

Kalyca Zarich (02:28)
Okay, maybe it's sales, for example. Maybe sales is not your cup of tea, or maybe it's admin. Maybe you're just like not organized and you hate doing admin and it draws and sucks the life out of you. That's great information. Guess what? That doesn't mean that you're a failure. That means that you've now just created a doorway for you to go from linear to quantum. Because if you find someone who is an expert, a genius at sales or admin or whatever it is.

Katie Wrigley (02:48)
I love that.

Kalyca Zarich (02:56)
That is your path from again, just like optimizing all of this. It almost becomes like a game when you can take your identity out of the results and the effort.

Katie Wrigley (03:07)
Yes, and

taking that identity PS out is huge. I was remembering the other thing I wanted to talk about, but I think we already kind of beat the dead horse on that one. It's the learning that we have to trade time for dollars, that we need to work hard in order to succeed. And no one tells us that it's okay to only work 20 hours a week and be making six figures a month. And that's what happens when you make that quantum leap. And so that identity piece in there, that's huge. And that was something that came up.

this morning on that call, the the mindset call, how did she talk about that? It was something about let me see.

it's the working backwards. So that was one thing she said is that a lot of times we think that when we get XYZ, then we're gonna be okay. But we can't, we can't be okay. We can't be relaxed. We can't celebrate until we hit XYZ. But then we hit XYZ. XYZ isn't enough. And so it we we're a self-fulfilled prophecy where we have to keep going more and more and more because

That isn't actually the thing. The thing that we think we want isn't what we want. It's that we're actually looking for something. And this shifts right into the direct internal systems. What we're actually looking for is a feeling of peace, a feeling of feeling like the expert, of knowing that we're the expert, of embodying that we're the expert. We're not asking someone to prove it to us. We're not trying to prove to someone else that we're the expert. We just know. We just show up.

As that expert now, before we have external evidence that supports that. And that can be the tricky part with this identity shift. And you know, you had mentioned that working with me has really helped a lot. And thank you for bringing that up. And I love working with you. You're absolutely amazing to work with. And no part of you.

wants to be stuck in any of your old shit. I've seen that over and over again, which is one of the things that makes you so fun to work with is your nervous system's like, let's just go. Let's just get the shit out of me and let me go be the badass that I know I am. And like you embody that it's like so powerfully, Khalika. Like I love doing sessions with you because you show up and you are just fucking in it. And you get that shit gone. And I love it. And there's no other way for me to like properly

And power that like the power of you doing that without swear words. It's just not possible for me. So what have you noticed has become possible for you since you started to work on the internal systems in the way that you did? Like you mentioned, you had an amazing coach, you had an amazing therapist. But once you got into that nervous system work, what started to change for you as you started to work deeper on those internal sur systems?

Kalyca Zarich (05:56)
No, I mean, it's allowed me to show up as the expert more and more because the more that I shed the old patterns, which were like what you said about where did you first learn about this of what hard work looks like, right? We can all trace those things back, right? And if we trace them back, we look at the generation that raised us, and that very much was the case, right? Like.

There was so much more of that hustle grind energy, right? And so I learned it from my dad, right? Like my dad was the model of what how you earn money and how you how you relate to your job. And that's where that pattern was ingrained in me. So I think like when we are growing up, we are getting this information, right? It's coming in from all these different sources, and that's kind of like imprinted on us.

Right. So it gets imprinted. But then as we get older and we start to question some of it, and we're like, well, I don't think that's true. Right. Or, I tried it that way and it burned me. So I have to come up with a new way of doing it. Well, our system has been wired to do it the old way. And that's what feels safe and familiar to us.

Katie Wrigley (07:01)
Mm-hmm.

Kalyca Zarich (07:12)
So as soon as we want to start doing it a different way, our system goes, that's not safe. We can't do it a different way. And our bodies obviously don't know the difference between a real and a perceived threat, right? Like you could tell me tomorrow that, hey, I'm really mad at you and I'm gonna, I'm gonna write a for whatever, I'm gonna write a scathing Google review about you or something, right?

Katie Wrigley (07:23)
Nope. Nope.

Kalyca Zarich (07:35)
My body would interpret that as if there was a bear in my office, like trying to chase me, right? That's the same my body doesn't know that there's not a bear. It just feels like I'm being threatened because something I care about is at is in jeopardy, right? So what all the work that we've done has really helped me start like honestly removing those patterns, those stories, those things that like, you know, I learned from my dad, or it was like,

The societal messaging or wherever it doesn't even matter where these messages came from. They were embedded in my body, but now doing cogno movement, we've started to like pull the roots up and remove them. And I think the biggest thing that's happened is I don't have the same fears that I used to. And I think fear is the other huge limiter for us.

Like it's almost like fear is the chain that's connected to the linear trajectory and it's like chaining us to it. And every time we try to shift, it like pulls us back and it pulls us back and it pulls us back. But it's like, okay, through doing cogno movement, it's like, man, we took a we took a jackhammer to that chain. And now it's like, okay, the fear, the fear is still there, but it does not have a like stopping effect on me anymore.

Katie Wrigley (08:32)
Passive.

Yep. Yep.

Yep. It makes total sense. So when fear is too high, that's all we can feel. And it doesn't always look like fear. It looks like I'm busy all the time. How the hell have I not got more done? How did I not get this thing done? This thing I need to do, the number one thing I need to do to move the needle, why the hell am I not doing it? You're not doing it because you have fear attached to it. That's not at a level that you're registering it as fear.

Kalyca Zarich (09:00)
If that makes sense.

Katie Wrigley (09:27)
And so it looks like, let me go get my kitchen organized before I start my day. let me go take another walk. let me go grocery shopping. let me meal prep. Let me walk my dog. Let me do this. Let me do this. Shit, the day's gone. And I didn't do the thing. That is how fear shows up for an entrepreneur. We don't think it's fear. We think, but we've got all these other things to do. Right. And you just took the bottom of your priority list, put it at the top, because the thing at the top is scaring the shit out of you. And you don't want to say that.

Kalyca Zarich (09:53)
Mm. Amen.

Katie Wrigley (09:55)
And the other

thing that she mentioned on the call is like, what is at risk if you fully show up as yourself? And the thing that I saw in there is like, like if I have too much success, am I gonna be still be relatable? Like these are the things, these are the fears. Like, if I get really successful, like, are people still gonna wanna talk to me? Are they still gonna wanna be my friend? Are they still gonna wanna do this work with me?

Kalyca Zarich (10:17)
Mm.

Katie Wrigley (10:24)
If I hit a certain level of success, if I'm on a TEDx stage, if I'm getting interviewed in these magazines, are people still gonna want to come in to work with me? Cause now in this tiny little world where I feel invisible, this little world's safe. But if I make it bigger, am I still safe? And the body's like, no, you're not, because these are the threats that are out there. Like you said, like it's still the same reaction as a saber-toothed tiger on our butts.

But it is your device. It is something else out there. It is things that are made up in between our ears that we're feeling from the neck down. And it's that's part of the complexity is being able to pause and take these things out and look at them. And in society, we get so much programming that's coming in that disrupts this flow that we stop listening to ourselves.

And I was thinking of like a really funny example of programming when I went for a hike with Tanji. There's like trails right behind my house that like I can literally like walk out the back of my house less than a quarter mile hop on the trail. And I I don't know where it came from, but I'm like, this is such a great example of programming. But I'm like, if this was a horror movie, this would be the part where the bad guy's chasing me and I'm like getting away through the woods because I know the hiking trail and he doesn't. And like, that's a really warped.

way of like thinking. And it's like, but that's what I got programmed in from horror movies as a kid. Like we get programmed with this stuff and we stop listening to ourselves. And we have the answers. That's what cognizement is helping us access are the truths. You know, and you had mentioned something about these stories. Our stories are true until they're not.

Kalyca Zarich (11:57)
Yeah.

Katie Wrigley (12:12)
But the the scariness of the story we think is true, that's enough to stop us from going. Like your example of the ultra marathon, my God, I didn't get the results. I'm a failure. Am I still lovable? So scary to be in that moment. And it looks different for each person. I want to encourage the listeners hearing this, pause this right now and have a moment of truth with yourself.

Of what is this showing up as in your world right now with the systems, with the world that you're trying to build? How is this showing up for you? And I wanna pause there again and give Khalika give you a chance to chime in with your expertise on this as well.

Kalyca Zarich (12:54)
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. well, I think awareness is a huge, huge part. And we may not always recognize it as fear. Even I don't always recognize it as fear. Sometimes it shows up as a block. I'm like I'm on the effort line and I'm like putting in lots of effort, but I'm not getting the results. There's a block there. And what I've learned in working with you, so it's it's could be twofold, right? It could be an external system.

Katie Wrigley (13:06)
Mm, yes.

Kalyca Zarich (13:22)
Issue where there's something in your external system that needs to be further optimized, built a different way, or you know, etc. Or there's something in your internal system, or both, right? Could be both. but when you are working really hard at something and you're giving it all your effort and energy, and you are not getting the result you want, that is an inflection point for you to again seek some external, like objective. That's the other great part about.

Katie Wrigley (13:23)
Mm-hmm.

Kalyca Zarich (13:50)
working with people, bringing people in to help you, they're objective. You didn't know my parents. You don't know my story. You don't know any of these things that taught me the things that I know, right? Like, so you can show up to me and be completely objective. Same thing for me with my clients. And that objective eye looking at where you're stuck is also the wormhole that helps you go from being stuck in the linear to being on the exponential trajectory. And I think

You know, again, it could be an external systems issue or it could be an internal systems thing that is blocking you. But either way, the coolest part is that you have the power to move beyond the block. Right. And I think a lot of times, you know, the stats about, businesses don't make it past three years or whatever. 80% of businesses fail within three years, whatever that stat is. It's like

Katie Wrigley (14:36)
Yes.

Kalyca Zarich (14:45)
Yeah, because I think sometimes people just hit these blocks over and over and over. And it's like they're beating their head against the wall and they can't see their way out of it. And that's where people like me, people like you, there's many others, but like that's where you have the power to ascend beyond what's blocking you. It's just a matter of finding support, really, I think is what it comes back to.

Katie Wrigley (15:09)
Yes. And finding the right support. You know, that's something else that James Wedmore was saying on that that podcast. And I I like to give credit where credit's due, but and I really love the way that he put it of so many people want that end result, but they don't want to put the work in to get there.

You can hear that entrepreneurship's not for the faint of heart. You can hear that it is grueling. You can hear all these things. It is very different to hear about it than to be in the shit yourself. Like there's been moments where I'm like, the only thing that can come out of this is success because this is so fucking uncomfortable. Like that is literally the only thing that because I'm not allowing failure. That's not an option.

Like I've been at this for five years. Like I've already beaten the odds. So I may as well just go be as successful as I possibly can. Like I already got past that other shit. So may as well keep going, right? But like, but doing the work, it is so incredibly uncomfortable to be in it. And when you're getting all this messaging outside that, do this and get your six figure funnel up within 15 days and do that and do this and do that and outsource it here, outsource it there.

Kalyca Zarich (16:06)
Yeah.

Katie Wrigley (16:24)
All you're doing is outsourcing your power to other people. And I'm so guilty of this. Never works, by the way. You want to invest in programs and people that are going to help you access the answers inside of you. That's the program for you. That is the work to do, not the one that's going to keep letting you outsource it. And then you can find the right who's to help expand the network. But someone doing it for you, you can't grow that way. You have to be the one.

Kalyca Zarich (16:50)
Yeah.

Katie Wrigley (16:52)
that goes through it to get beyond it? And what have you noticed with that in your own experience, Coleca, plus with the hundreds of clients that you've worked with? Like has it ever worked to outsource your power?

Kalyca Zarich (17:04)
No, I mean occasionally you'll see it work in a very like short term, short-sighted, like, the initial result was great. But then again, you zoom out far enough on that trajectory and it flatlines. and so I love what you said about not outsourcing. Like I have another client who always says, like, you you there are certain things you can't outsource. One is your love making. You can't outsource your love making.

Katie Wrigley (17:27)
Ha

Very true. No one

would want to outsource that. Well

Kalyca Zarich (17:32)
But it's like if you draw

that if you draw that comparison to certain things in your business, same holds true, right? There are certain things in your business that cannot be outsourced. But I do think like that's where I'm such a I'm a passionate weirdo when it comes to systems design. Because a lot of times the design of your system is really where the the

Katie Wrigley (17:37)
Yeah.

Kalyca Zarich (17:57)
disconnect is right like sometimes even your business model is not necessarily designed in a way that is aligned to your gifts, strengths, et cetera. And like if you really get down into that, and that's why like a lot of what I do is working from the inside out on your business, right? Like, no, we want to optimize and design the system to support you and your dreams and visions and goals and where you're headed versus like,

Again, like you said, all these people looking externally, they're like looking outside themselves for the answer. But the answer is not outside of you. It's like, yes, there may be things you need to learn, build, design differently. But like I I agree with what you're saying. What I've seen time and time again is it's like you have to take that like inside out approach to all of this in order for it to be long-lasting, sustainable, aligned.

And something that's not just eventually gonna crash and burn or burn you out in the process.

Katie Wrigley (19:01)
Yeah, a hundred percent. I agree. And I want to just check in. Can you go a little bit longer, Khalika? I think we're gonna make this a three or four part episode, depending on how much longer we talk. But like this is too good and we're hitting the top of the hour. So I want to make sure you can still go. Okay, awesome. now where did I want to go with that? I wanna bring in an example of like exactly what you're talking about of hitting that block. And part of this is also not.

Kalyca Zarich (19:13)
Mm-hmm.

Katie Wrigley (19:26)
Crediting ourselves, like creating a celebration system as we're talking about systems, like it's not just systems to get there. We want to make sure that we're acknowledging and celebrating what's happening. And I noticed like the last couple weekends, when Friday came around, I was having a tough time in my head. I'm just like, what the hell is going on? I just felt like I was hitting blocks. And

The ironic thing is, I've had more momentum in the last three weeks than I've had in the last six months. And I, even though I was, I was noticing it, I was celebrating it. I'm still like, it's not enough. It's not enough. And then I it clicked into place. And I realized I'm like, okay. So the work that I do right now, it's one on one one customized work, but it takes a while to get to know me and trust me.

To say, like, do I want to do this work or not? And so I've been putting out things so people have a better understanding of that. But I also I'm here to be of service to people. So how can I be of service without doing one-on-one work? What can I take from that and put into my work that I can give people in an easy to offer, an easy offer that's not expensive, that's not gonna be a blow to your bank account, that's gonna be less, way less than what you spend on a meal out.

It's gonna be very inexpensive. It's gonna had you add high value and suddenly it just all clicked into place. And I'm like, there we go. There's the block. There's the block. Okay. This is what I can change. This is what I can shift. And the thing was like the answer was in front of me the whole freaking time.

Like the program I'm taking that, and they don't tell you how to do anything. They teach you how to harness the messaging inside of you. Like everything is coming. And that is a really good coach. A really good coach is not supplying the answers for you. They're having you reflect back that you are finding the answers. That's what's making you empower yourself and gaining that trust in yourself. And I had to laugh that I'm just like, I'm in this program that's all about funnels, like.

How the hell did it not occur to me to create a bigger funnel? Like, duh. Like, this is so obvious. And so I'm gonna have a private podcast coming out later this week, just as a side note, because I'm like, that was the missing piece. Like giving people actionable things that they can do to help regulate their system and allowing people to see the stuff that I've been managing in my system since I left corporate. Like I've had a huge

load on my nervous system and I didn't really start talking about it until recently. But like I left corporate. That's a big identity shift after 24 plus years. Around the time my mom had a major cognitive decline and stopped being the mom I'd grown up with and became this different, wonderful, more childlike mom that I have now. Like I'm dealing with a mother with dementia as I'm growing a business and I'm also healing from a toxic relationship. Like

And I can show up authentically enjoy. And like I kept putting that quiet. I'm like, you know, people need to know what I'm dealing with, not because I want my shit all over the place, but for you to understand the power of doing this work. Like, if you want to show up as the powerful CEO that you are, you are going to want to find some tools to do the internal work so that you are handling life. And I love the way that you talk about this specifically, Kalika. It is creating margin in our bodies.

Kalyca Zarich (22:50)
Mm-hmm.

Katie Wrigley (22:52)
So that we have more space to work with. And we know we're out of margin when we're snapping out of partners, when we're considering outsourcing lovemaking to someone else, when we're angry all the time, when we can't sleep, when we can't eat, you are out of margin. And so you want to create more margin. And one of the ways you do that is with your systems, so that you aren't going to 10 million different systems to get something done. You're able to click one button.

Kalyca Zarich (23:01)
Yeah.

Katie Wrigley (23:20)
And off you go. Like, and that was the thing I realized. I'm like, all I have to do is stand up the private podcast. And then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all these other things that I already have on Coleca system high impact, they're already ready to go. I just pop that in there and it's done. Like there's so little work outside of creating the episodes. That was the only work.

Kalyca Zarich (23:41)
I love that. ⁓

Katie Wrigley (23:42)
And it's

like, okay, that's all I needed to do. And then if it doesn't get the results that I'm looking for, I go back, I tweak it, I refine it. But this is like clearly the thing that I was missing. And there's so much evidence to help me see that. My kitty's gonna join us again.

Kalyca Zarich (23:59)
Yeah. I love that you brought up margin because you know you've, you know, worked with me long enough to know that's something I harp on all the time because it's so important. Because if you think about it, the way that you show up to your life, let's just picture, like, okay, you got hit with a bunch of medical bills. And I'm gonna use financial margin as an example. You got hit with a bunch of medical bills, you have depleted your savings, your bank account is on empty, and

Katie Wrigley (24:06)
Yes.

Kalyca Zarich (24:26)
you know, you're going to have a conversation with your spouse about they have an idea of something that they want to purchase. Like, how differently are you going to show up to that conversation when you have zero margin versus you're operating from a place of margin, you have money in your savings account. You had some unexpected bills, but you were able to cover them just fine and you still have a surplus left over. Like

Just think about how differently you would show up to that conversation depending on your level of margin.