Stop Forcing—Start Resonating: A New Approach to Finishing Q4 Strong
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:00:01 Welcome to Heart Glow CEO®, where high achievers evolve into purpose-driven powerhouses. I'm Kc Rossi, your Integrative Leadership Coach. Join us to break free from people pleasing and burnout. Exploring mindset, embodiment, and soul alignment. Discover expert insights, success stories, and actionable tips for wholistic wealth on your terms. This is where transformation meets the modern, mission-driven leader. Let's go!
Today I want to talk about preparing the instrument, your instrument, your mind, your body, your voice, your business. It's a theme that's been echoing in my life over the last two weeks, like a quiet but persistent refrain trying to get my attention. And if a theme keeps circling back, I've learned to treat it as a messenger. So let's explore it together.
A couple of weeks ago, I restarted voice lessons after a long break, and the part that surprised me on our last lesson wasn't the singing. It was the not singing. My new teacher spent nearly half the session having me feel into the micro tensions, the tightness around my jaw, which I knew was there.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:01:27 But I really have become accustomed to it. I think we just hold these patterns of tension, and it becomes our new normal.
And so she had me tuning in. She had me just listening to background music and feeling where tension arose in my body. How the subtle bracing at the base of my tongue was kind of holding on. And then we also use these cool little melt balls, and we rolled them around on our palms and kind of flushed out some of the lymph drainage just by rolling the ball in one direction to towards the heart. And for a moment, I caught myself clock watching, and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, we haven't even sung a single note. Half of our lesson has blown by. Am I behind? I mean, like, shouldn't we be further along by now?
And then it hit me. And part of it is really sinking into the process and also trusting your mentor. And I really thought for a minute, and more so after I reflected — the preparation is the singing, and the tending is the breakthrough, and the presence is the progress.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:02:52 You don't blast into resonance. Okay. And I see this so often, and I feel that impetus in myself. I have always been someone that has wanted to race to the finish line. Leapfrog where I am. Even way back when I was a kid, when I was in grammar school, I had friends in high school. When I was in high school, I had friends in college. I always wanted to leapfrog. I always wanted to graduate early.
And so this aspect of resonance, you soften into it. You don't demand clarity. You create the conditions where you can just have it find you. Isn't that an interesting reverse? And I know that if you're a long-time listener, you've heard me talk about power versus force, and there is so much of that even resonating for me as I'm sharing about this topic - this aspect that you don't blast into resonance, you soften into it. You don't demand clarity. You create the conditions in your system where the clarity can find you.
And then another wave came, this time from an unexpected place.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:04:16 My teacher actually said, do you have anything other than your voice that you can follow along with and know the tuning? And so I was like, oh my gosh, I have this old upright piano, but it hasn't been tuned in years. And so I've sourced out a technician. They came a couple of days ago, and he really just kind of looked at the piano and said, after his initial diagnosis, we can only balance her today. She's too fragile to force into perfect tune in one sitting. If we try to tighten everything at once, it could damage her.
And again, just immediately, I stopped in my tracks and I said to him, isn't that true for us too? And we had a really sweet conversation about it.
We go years without tending to certain emotional strings. I know that I have. And it's something now that's really it's the chapter that keeps coming up for me - of how to tune in and how to continue attunement and pay attention and listen and not only listen, because I find often, especially with high achievers, we're great at learning.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:05:40 We have amazing emotional intelligence. We are so great at reflecting and journaling. Our situational awareness is off the chart, but there is a disconnect when it comes to aligned action. And that's the part that I'm so very interested in right now.
We can ignore internal dissonance because we're busy. We push through Q4 or any “Q” for that matter, because the world tells us to finish strong, grind it out, to go out with a bang. And you may be seeing that now as I record this in November 2025. There's so much of that and so much of this old paradigm that I've personally been trying to unsubscribe from. The old paradigm that you can sleep when you're dead, and now is the time to get all the experiences and to make, hay, when the sun shines. I don't know how many times I heard my father tell me that as a child, “Make hay when the sun shines.”
And that's deeply ingrained in my system. But sometimes your system says not all at once. You can tune me, but gently.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:06:58 Let me open slowly. Respect my pace.
And I have to say, when the piano technician shared that with me, I had so much respect for him because he could have pushed it. It was a two-hour round trip for him to even come to my little rural town and look at my piano, which I found was like from the 20s, which was really cool. I didn't even realize that I have an antique, and in that, I have to really understand the instrument to honor her.
The piano isn't being dramatic by not wanting to be forced into perfect tune. It's being wise, and so is your body, and so is your business.
I know many of you listening are heart-centered entrepreneurs, leaders, creators. You carry an enormous passion for your mission. You care deeply about the people that you serve. You want to see impact and metrics and revenue, but you want those things to come from alignment, not adrenaline. And gosh, do we even know the difference? I know for myself, I was so used to running on cortisol and running on adrenaline and using those hits to give me the motivation to keep pushing.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:08:27 That, if someone were to ask me, are you in alignment? I would be like, I don't even know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me get to my next thing.
I hope that you can take a breath here. I hope that you can let your shoulders relax. Maybe take a minute to have a sip of water or tea and really just let this wave and wash through. So it's not just another thing on your to-do list. So it's not just busy work or something that you do on the commute to take up dead air.
My invitation is to allow this to be an opening where strategy and soul meet, because this is where you have the opportunity to hold both data and the divine. Because here's the truth. Your business outcomes are a reflection of the condition of your instrument. When you're tense, rushed, disconnected, or forcing, your business echoes that. Think about that for a minute. Maybe you're in that condition right now. Maybe there's a deadline you're trying to push for.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:09:40 Maybe there is a proposal that you're in so much angst to actually deliver. Maybe there is an email or a new structure in your business that your heart is calling for, but all of the internal dialogue of what will they think? This is what they've always expected for me. They're going to think I'm greedy if I raise my prices. Whatever the old dialogue is going on, you get to just let it go. You get to acknowledge it and let it go.
Because when you're in attuned, intentional, and grounded, your business reflects that too.
And I've said multiple times to people that I have coached this week, you are the common denominator because right now there's a lot of swirls going on. I don't know, can you feel it? There's change, there's tension, there's mind swirls, there's second-guessing. And I think that it's very essential to step back. Because life, when I look at it, it's like, oh my gosh, it can be a blender. All you have to do is turn on any news channel.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:10:55 Scroll through any social for a period of time, and you will immediately feel swirled around in a blender. You can even feel this as budgets come out now - for a lot of my nonprofit execs, there's a lot of tension with funding being changed, with programs being discontinued, with titles that can't be used anymore. That's a blender, right?
There is this aspect of man, did I get where I wanted to get this year in 2025? When I start to look at my numbers, when I start to maybe even think about preparing my tax documents. That's a blender.
Client expectations that may be pushing you to go faster than your heart is saying, that's a blender. And so this invitation. This new paradigm shift is OK! I acknowledge my external circumstances politically, financially, whatever it is, and I can step out of that blender. I can witness it, but I can also come up and out of it and be like, I don't choose to be whipped around and swirled in that blender.
I hear the collective conversation right now: “Finish strong.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:12:17 Push for the final numbers, make you for your biggest quarter.” And yes, strategy matters. Your business deserves a steward who's thoughtful with planning and courageous with goals. Your clients deserve consistency, your nervous system deserves consistency and balance, and your bank account deserves leadership.
But finishing strong doesn't mean finishing strained. And I'm gonna say that again because I need to hear it.
Finishing strong doesn't mean finishing strained.
It's so interesting. I just even heard my voice crack when I said that. Because sometimes even just thinking of the connotation of strained, we can get strained. We can get tense. You know, you can. You just literally probably heard that in my voice when I said it doesn't mean finishing strained, because there is still some ingrained tension in there. Am I lazy if I don't push? You know, am I being weak? Am I focusing on the soft skills instead of my power skills that are going to make me worthy of that seat at the table?
I really want you to hear this and take what feels like it's resonating for you.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:13:48 It doesn't mean forcing yourself into tune in one session. If you try to tighten every string at once, the tension reverberates everywhere.
So, let's just take a deep breath together. Just allow yourself to receive yourself in this moment exactly as you are, with no need to push or force. But just listen. Just listen.
And from that receptive opening of listening, let me ask you, where have you been rushing the outcome? Where have you been clock-watching your own growth? Where have you tried to skip the warm-up and jump to the final chorus? Are you nodding in agreement? Do you have a couple of examples coming up? I trust that you do.
And this is what I want to share from my own lessons of the last couple of weeks:
Your voice knows when you're faking ease.
Your piano knows when you're forcing its resonance.
And your business knows when your energy doesn't match your intentions.
That's why this moment, this odd convergence of voice lessons and piano tuning, feels so important. It's a seasonal reminder that Q4 isn't just a time to push.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:15:40 It's a time to prepare the vessel for what's coming next.
Let's make this deeply practical.
Here are a few strategic questions to tune into.
Number one, your CAPACITY CHECK
Are you putting pressure on your business to deliver results that your energy can't currently hold? It's funny, my partner often will say, Oh, there's your word again, bandwidth. Because when he first heard me say that, he's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And so this capacity check I also think of as bandwidth. Do you have the bandwidth? Does your business have the bandwidth to deliver the results, to match the promises that you've put out there, that your energy can't currently hold?
Number two, PRIORITIZE FOCUS
What truly matters in these last six weeks, and what's just noise? One of the things I want to say here is that oftentimes I will look at emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence through the lens of business strategy. Don't mistake that I don't care about your bottom line and your ROI. We're in business. They are absolutely critical pieces for you to have sustainable profits.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:17:03 So this prioritized focus isn't me saying to you, slow down and go. “BE Zen” and meditate, okay? I mean, that may be what you need. That may be the Rx for you right now.
But I just want you because everybody's unique and multifaceted. I want you to just get honest with yourself. And when you think about prioritizing and focus, I want you to ask yourself what truly matters in these last six weeks of the year and what's just noise? Once you determine that for yourself, you get to schedule your yeses like a badass CEO. That's the point that I want to make here.
Number three., NERVOUS SYSTEM STRATEGY
Where do you need to soften to actually strengthen?
And lastly, number four, ALIGNMENT AUDIT
Which string in your business is slightly out of tune? Maybe it's your offer, clarity your messaging, your pricing. Or it could be your schedule. Give yourself time to think about that.
These are not soft questions. They're strategic diagnostics.
They're what allow your Q4 to be both productive and sustainable.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:18:31 And I know that that's why you're here. You are here for sustainable success. Your business is not separate from you. Your business is not separate from you. I say all the time. You bring you with you wherever you go.
You are the instrument through which your business is expressing. So instead of focusing yourself into tune, what if you allowed yourself to be guided into resonance? Instead of grinding out the last drop of Q4, What if you tuned your focus, tuned your body, tuned your intentions, and let your impact expand from there?
I get excited, like right now I have a big smile just even thinking about that, because hope is a core value for me. So if I can be a visionary leader and hope, then I have enough juice for the next day. Because the truth is, the best leaders aren't rushing to the finale; they're tending themselves so that when the moment to sing arrives, their voice is clear, strong, and unmistakably theirs. And that is what your clients respond to.
Kc Rossi, PCC 00:19:52 Not hustle, not urgency. Not end-of-the-year panic. They respond to resonance, presence, and attunement. And isn't that the same for you? Think about that when you're around someone that has this grounded, calm confidence, someone that when they speak, you listen, someone that when like their just mere presence without even opening their mouth, you feel something different in the room.
That, my friend, is resonance, presence, and attunement.
This is your invitation, your gentle tuning session, to honor your instrument. Honor your pace. Honor the wisdom that says balance first, then brilliance. Your business will thank you. Your body will thank you. Your future self will thank you.
And when you finally step up to sing, it won't be forced. It will be true.
Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for indulging me in this music metaphor. Share it with a biz bestie that you think could benefit from today's message, and you are always invited to leave a review at www.lovethepodcast.com/brilliance.
Until next week, my friend… Breathe joy.
