Courage Is Calling with Mel Wiggins

Today I'm welcoming the wonderful Michelle Leeder to join me as we discuss more about Embodied Leadership and share about our upcoming work on this. We get into the weeds about how embodiment works, why it has been so hard for women to connect to this approach in a leadership context and the huge potential and benefits of this approach to change the game for women who lead.

Hello and welcome back to Courage Is Calling!

Over the summer I found myself beginning to switch gears a little bit in my work. After quite a long time of not feeling super inspired, I had some new downloads of some gentle (but also quite mighty) ideas.

One that has been formulating for quite some time is a new model of resourcing and support for female leaders and the idea of exploring what it means to lead from an embodied approach.

I'm sharing more about this idea and approach in this episode and inviting you to join myself and Michelle Leeder (psychotherapist & embodiment expert) to hear more about what we're working on around Embodied Leadership in a free online gathering/webinar next Monday (Sept 11th) at 7pm GMT.

In all the work I’ve done with women of all ages and backgrounds over the last decade, there have been some emerging themes of self-sabotage that I have seen with my own eyes; some particular ways that I see brilliant women like you and I tripping ourselves up repeatedly over and over again. These are what we're going to be looking at in this weeks episode.

If you're looking for some coaching support, here are three ways you can work with me right now:

I don't know how long you’ve been following along in terms of the work that I do or what I share, but if you were around pre-pandemic, you may have seen that I had a little bit of time where I was exploring the idea of influence. I went on a bit of a quest to explore what it means in culture today; to break open the word and dig out all the flesh that we have put around it and try to find out what is at its core – the real juicy stuff.

And I got somewhere with it. Somewhere surprising. It was exciting to lift the layers and see what’s underneath all the trappings of influence that we have created for ourselves. (sidenote: what we have created - not wonderful) I'm sharing it all in this episode and I think you're really going to love it.

If you're looking for some coaching support, here are three ways you can work with me right now:

I’ve been involved in the personal development industry for just about a decade - 6 of those years directly coaching and building a business. I’ve been around the block in terms of the kind of gurus there are in this industry and have experienced a lot of different schools of thought when it comes to the ways you can make your business successful, grow your income and your influence etc and in this episode I want to shed some light on some of the more formulaic things that are being peddled that I think that are ultimately huge distractions that especially for women, are keeping us from doing fulfilling work. .

It is more important than ever, in this noisy culture that wants to tell us the formula for ‘success’, that we sift through the nonsense and tune into our own intuition and desires.

If you're looking for some coaching support, here are three ways you can work with me right now:

In today's episode I'm going to break down the second tier in the resilience pyramid; the building block on developing internal safety: understanding regulation. 

Regulation is our ability to head back to practices that notify our body that we are safe when we feel stress or experience difficult moments or feelings. I'm going to get into some important regulation techniques and also take a minute and explain a bit about stress, stress cycles (a term coined by the Nagoski sisters who wrote the amazing book 'Burnout') and the nervous system. If you want to know how to manage stress and build resilience in your life and work, understanding regulation is going to be KEY.

It’s no surprise to me that I’m hearing more conversations about resilience lately, and having people come to me to support their work or their teams in understanding and building resilience. In times of rapid change and so much uncertainty, we need to get to grips with what it means to be resilient more than ever. We need to learn the tools and practices that can support us to manage ourselves through disappointment, tragedy, chaos and flux. 

In this episode I want to share about is what I’m calling The Pyramid of Resilience Building; the structure that needs to be in place for sustainable growth, development, fulfillment and capacity.

I recently asked this question of female business owners: “What is the biggest mind-trash thinking you come up against in your business that you’d love to work through?”

And the number one mindtrash thinking that came up was about other people. Answers were things like: "Other people are better than me" "What will other people think if I do x y and x?" "I don’t think what I have is of value compared to other people in my industry" Other people other people other people...

So In this episode I'm going to break down how this is both a) totally reasonable and b) something we can move through not let it rob us of time, energy or creativity and brave action.

I hope this episode brings you a bit of comfort for when other peoples opinions or the plague of self-consciousness arises within you on your creative or business building journey.

Today I want to talk about what it means to embrace the feminine energy in business building. I think it’s important before I start to let you know that we are talking about energy here and not gender so I want to clarify that the feminine and masculine principles I’m talking about are not defined by gender or sexual orientation. They are universal energies, principles, or capacities found in all people, systems, and cultures.

We all possess feminine and masculine energy within us and the balance of these energies is used in many different aspects of our lives. We rely on both of these areas to show up in different ways and for different means and in business especially it is important to consider when we need each of these energies. I'm going to share six key areas that I believe need a stronger dose of feminine energy when it comes to building a business - tune in!

Welcome back to Courage Is Calling! Over the last few weeks I’ve been ruminating - allowing thoughts and ideas to come when they’re ready and I usually find when I have a bit more space or margin, I can sense certain things taking shape naturally. I notice that I keep coming back to certain themes within myself, in my processes and thoughts and I notice those things appearing or being talked about more frequently in my calls with groups and clients so I thought I’d share some of them with you today.

I’m calling them Mantras - 5 ideas or ways of being that I really want to hold onto as I run my business and do my work this year. Some of these have been brewing for a while and are finally landing in my head and my heart and I want to offer them to you so you can think on them as well.

So those are my five mantras:

1. Trust is paramount (in yourself and your clients)
2. Growth is not measured by numbers, but by depth of trust and impact in your work
3. Create a body of work rather than churning out content
4. Everything is an invitation, never an expectation
5. I don’t have to do this alone

I’ve been in a bit of a personal shift behind the scenes of my business, so this episode feels vulnerable and deeply personal to me because I want to take you there. I want to share with you how my business has shifted over the last few years and what I’m holding onto as things move forward.

I really wanted to share honestly because even though it’s vulnerable, I know there's connection to come from it and there are a lot more of us out there feeling the shift and wanting to take the leap to do things differently and bet on themselves in a deeper way. Please as always feel free to reach out for a chat, knowing that I’m cheering you on. You can reach me on IG @melwiggins or email me on hello@melwiggins.com

This is likely to be the last episode of Courage Is Calling before 2023, so in that case I want to wish you all the good things for the holiday season and I’ll be back in the new year with more. Thank you for listening to this episode and coming back to listen to Courage Is Calling throughout the last year.

In this episode I want to explore some of the reasons why your work might not be selling the way you want it to. And even though it might feel like this question – "why is my work not selling more?" -  has any number of possible answers to it – I want to focus down into three.

I’ve been working with hundreds of businesses over the last six years and I know how tricky selling is, especially for women, so I have witnessed first hand (and in my own business) the common stuff that gets in the way of seeing those sales come in. And so in this episode I want to offer the top three things that I see business owners often missing that are really worth a deeper consideration…

1)    Positioning

2)    Offering

3)    Visibility Vulnerability

Listen in for practical advice on how to shift your thinking and action around these things and let me know how you get on!

Welcome back to Courage Is Calling! I’m going to get stuck straight into the final part, Part 3 of the ‘What’s Your Method of Hiding’ series by talking about Paralysis. If you’ve missed Part 1 on Perfectionism and Part 2 on Procrastination, feel free to head back and listen to those.

But for now let’s talk about paralysis. Because it has a bit of a different edge to procrastination and perfectionism.

Paralysis may be showing up in your life as real avoidance of decision making and action. It may be showing up in your life as feeling overwhelmed and it may show up in your life by allowing other people to make decisions for you and give you direction.

If you're feeling stuck in inaction and overwhelm, let this episode give you what I believe is the path back to self-trust and growth.

Today I want to get stuck into part 2 of our series on 'What's Your Method of Hiding' and have a little look at procrastination.

Do you consider yourself a procrastinator? Do you always find something else to do instead of the thing you know you supposed to be doing? Do you find yourself faffing with peripheral stuff more than tackling the real needle-moving tasks? Are you currently procrastinating by listening to this podcast? If you are – I want you to stay here. Procrastinate a bit longer, because I want to offer an alternative way of thinking about how we see procrastination and why we do it.

It occurs to me that when it comes to berating ourselves for what we might be calling ‘procrastinating’ there are actually a few more intricate things to consider and be self-aware about:

1)    Are you actually procrastinating? Or are you overworking?

2)    Are you actually procrastinating? Or are you overwhelmed?

3)    Are you actually procrastinating? Or are you feeling vulnerable about doing the work that might actually be true to you because it feels exposing and requires you to be visible?

Let’s look at each of these more closely in this episode.

Feel free to get in touch if any of this connects and you want to chat more:

As I was preparing and planning for what I wanted to cover on the podcast in this next season, I started thinking about some of the common things that are keeping us from building courage and being brave and through my work coaching women running businesses I’ve had a pretty good front row seat to all of the sneaky ways that I see fear showing up and keeping us from sharing our work, our ideas and our thoughts. So I thought it would be a good time to dig into some of these common methods of hiding that maybe you can identify with. Some of them are pretty obvious, but today I want to start with one that I know all too well – it’s one of my most common methods of hiding that I use to protect me from vulnerability and it’s also a really sneaky one for women (I’ll explain in a bit) and that, my friends, is perfectionism.

I know there are women listening to this podcast who have important messages to share but whose self-doubt and fear is keeping them quiet or hidden. I know there are women listening to this podcast who think maybe think that perfectionism doesn’t relate to them or that their perfectionism is just "attention to detail".

I know that so many of us are caught up in the myth that we need to be more something – more qualified, more prepared, more expert, more influential, more polished – than we are in order to share our ideas or work or to try and develop something that we really want to.... this episode is for you.

Feel free to get in touch if any of this connects and you want to chat more:

I want to spend this episode sharing with you a tool that I’ve been developing over the last little while. It's one that I use with my clients in my group programmes, so I thought I’d share it here in part and link to the full tool so you can download it and use it for free!

I’m calling it the Business Evolution Tool. I wanted to create something that clearly helped female business owners identify where they were in their business evolution or development and maybe notice some of the common issues that come up in these stages and give you some relevant action to take to help move along, to deepen your work and see it develop.

I’ve grouped them into four stages of evolution: Infancy, Growing Pains, Adolescence and Maturing.

In this episode I want to talk about pricing.

It’s safe to say that so much of the struggle to price what we do or offer comes down to our feelings. OUR BIG BIG FEELINGS! The emotion that we are attaching to money and prices and other people's perception and our worthiness etc.

Our feelings tend to come first when we think about how to price: What does setting this price mean about me? Can I deliver on this price? Will I be good enough to live up to that price? Who am I to ask for this?

What I want to suggest is not that we leave our feelings at the door when it comes to pricing, because we know that a) it’s not possible and b) we want to include our humanity, our empathy and care in our business in lots of ways.

What I want to suggest is maybe that we need to tackle some of the particular mindset stuff that comes up that can sometimes be clouded by our feelings. So today I want to start with the idea of pricing to be affordable. Listen in for some advice on how not to get sucked in by the myth of affordability and how to factor yourself into your pricing.

We can expect that if we’re going to make some bold or brave moves in our lives or businesses or ideas, that we shouldn’t hold out for a sense of confidence. It’s likely not going to show up in the way you think it is. If you are waiting to feel confident about doing something brave before you do it – you might be waiting forever. Because the inner protector or inner guard is built within you to show up.

So we need to adopt some tools and skills to teach our brain that it is ready to evolve past the freeze, flight, flight and fawn responses that serve us well when it comes to certain types of threat or harm so that we can respond well to the fear that shows up when we move towards more aligned and exciting desires for ourselves.

The good news is that adopting some of these tools actually isn’t all that hard so I'm giving you a few key prompts that will help you keep going when you have brave moves to make!

The title of what I want to talk about today is ‘To Be A Woman Of Influence?’ - understanding what influence means at this time in our culture and see how we can understand it and harness it for good in our work, our businesses and lives.

I want to caveat this episode by letting you know that this is not a talk about the benefits or dangers of influencer marketing – this is so much bigger than that. There is no shame to be scattered here today. But influence as a concept has got me really curious because I feel like right now at this time in culture, it’s a word that’s skewed and it’s significant that we understand what it means and how we can harness it to do some good in the world. Some good that our world desperately needs.

I’m hoping that what I share here will give us all some insight into what it means to cultivate influence in a way that actually makes a difference - that shifts us away from the idea of influence being about consuming and see it more through the lens of contribution or contributing.

Today I want to get stuck in right away and talk a little bit about what it means to market your business, your products, under services in a way that doesn't give the 'ick'. The reason that I want to talk about this is because marketing your business especially if you're a woman is really tricky. I also want to make this episode a little bit more directed to the personal development industry. So anyone who is in the coaching, teaching, supporting, wellness and fitness space. I want to talk about this area in particular because it feels like it needs the most regulation in terms of how it is marketed. It is a largely unregulated field and so it’s always helpful to maybe shine a light on some things that might not be best practice and offer solutions to lift up the standards of the industry.

I really believe that when we are honest and true to ourselves our marketing can come from a place of integrity truth value and impact so today I want to gently uncover some of the ways that I see marketing happening in the personal development space that seems to me to be based in scarcity rather than being values-led.

In this episode today I want to give you a run down of my current business model, the one I am training my clients in and using as the basis of my brand builder programme. The next round of the Brand Builder Programme starts on Tuesday the 3rd of May and runs until August.

Welcome back to Season 2 of Courage Is Calling! In this pep-talk we are looking at comparison. This is the number one mindset issue that seems to be coming up for my clients and the women I connect with. This episode is all about looking beyond or underneath our comparison tendencies to what is leading us there. Comparison is usually symptomatic of some deeper stuff going on for us and I'm laying out three key things that it could be AND the important ways we can move through it.