What has been your biggest achievement?
This is a surprisingly hard question – I’ve done so many things!
I passed my PhD without corrections (and while raising two very young kids). I also started a movement founded on the same principles of love and collaboration I spoke about above, which rapidly gained an audience across 39 countries and sold merchandise in 27. Finally, I’ve built a business I am truly passionate about. And, it doesn’t just allow me to make a difference in the lives of others – it also allowed me to retire my husband just nine months in, created its first £30k sales month at one year old, and meant I could extend a full time contract and income to my brother by the time it had hit 18 months.
But, personally, I think my biggest achievement was leaving academia and forging my own path. It was the ultimate act of embodying what I teach – an “opting out” of a toxic cultural paradigm. And, just keep in mind that it was over 18 months before I even had a business idea, and also that I had a history of trauma to battle, which in the past had kept me addicted to external validation. The whole process was a massive test in self-trust. But, I knew that if I stayed where I was, I could never be the person I had the potential to be.
Professionally, my biggest achievement would probably have to be distilling my many years of high level research and broad range of life experience into a single system that changes lives. Witnessing others as they do the work inside themselves to become the person they are meant to be is worth a million times more than the letters after my name.
What’s the biggest result you help your clients to achieve?
My clients make significantly more money and have huge transformations in their living situations (i.e. finding their dream home) after our business coaching sessions together. However, those are not what they or I would consider the biggest results. In fact, those are the byproducts of becoming more of who you really are. The real outcome is who you then get to be for the rest of your life.
Culture is calibrated to value certain ways of being and doing. Stripping that fakeness away in order to learn to value your own embodied experience promotes a deep sense of wholeness and self-love. From that place, you can then experience yourself as a source of safety, creativity, love, wisdom, joy, and abundance. Witnessing that shift happen in my clients really is magical.
With each person my team and I work with, we focus on integrity. We ask: what is the deepest, truest part of you? We encourage them not just to look at skills but at who they really are. In doing so, a client’s true self is allowed to emerge from a deep well inside. But, in order for that to happen, they have to be prepared to receive.
What we teach is a very different way of moving through the world, focused on being and co-creating. There’s no push. Most of my clients have experienced burnout before and they’re all done with the culture of pushing and manipulating. With us, they come to realize how important it is for them to honour their inner journey.
In the end, what they receive is not just a business transformation that they can feel truly positive about, but a coming home to their true self. And, along with that, they earn a family of amazing entrepreneurs. When people come into the community they find beautiful friends that they’ll have forever (and often clients, too).
What would be your biggest piece of advice for readers who want to achieve the same?
Whatever your business feels like now, those feelings will amplify. Remember that our choices always create more of our current reality – change has to start within. You have to learn to let go of control and to trust the process instead. It’s important to understand that we make our being in the things we are doing – not just in our businesses. They’re created in tandem, through everything we experience in body, mind, and soul.
To transform your life and business, focus on how you really want to feel. There’s a reason you’re in business (or want to be), right? Is it freedom? Creativity? Is it to do with love and family? Or, do you simply want to feel as though you’re not compromising your values?
Whatever the reasons might be, find ways to change from within and allow yourself to make those changes happen right now. Don’t wait until after the next money milestone, or any other milestone for that matter. There’s no milestone in the world big enough to compete with the overall impact of the thousand tiny steps it takes to get you to where you want to be. They are the steps that really “make” you and your business. So, do all you can to ensure they are joyful and free, and your business will develop in the same way.
What are the biggest mistakes you see people make and how can they be avoided?
In a lot of cases, when an entrepreneur doesn’t feel as though their business is totally aligned with their values and goals, they take the same approach as that old lady from the song, who swallowed a cat to catch the bird to catch the spider, and so on. In other words, they pop another strategy pill as a way of forcing everything into place.
