Navigating Mindfulness

In this episode, we welcome Belinda Clemmensen, B.Sc., M.Ed., PCC

Belinda is the Founder and CEO of Women’s Leadership Intensive.  She believes women are not only capable of changing the world, but that we will be a driving force in making it happen.  When we look out at the world, we see that change is needed and that we can help.

Many women feel that we don't fit the traditional leadership box. We sense there is a better way, and that we have more to contribute, but don’t always know how to reach that potential.  As a leader, it is essential to know who you are and lead as YOU.

With 25 years of experience, she understands how to help leaders uncover, and step into, their potential.  She helps leaders connect to that place of purpose where their unique strengths meet a need in the world and serve others.

This passionate belief is what drives her as a leadership development professional and what led her to build the Women's Leadership Intensive; our mission to inspire, empower, support, and equip women to lead the change the world needs.

Being a relentless champion of purpose-driven leaders is at her core. In addition to founding WLI, she is a proud co-founder of the Leader Coach Intensive, a unique program that builds world-class coaches – Tomorrow’s Leaders Today.

Some of the topics that we cover in this episode:

• Women in leadership.
• How living in alignment with our values and sense of purpose supports us to live with mindfulness and fulfilment.
• Values and purpose-driven leadership.
• Why it is more important than ever for women in particular to connect values and sense of purpose with leadership.
• How motherhood affects our leadership style.

Book Recommendation:

Dare to Lead by Brene Brown

Women’s Leadership Intensive has fantastic opportunities coming up:

Upcoming 6 Week Women's Leadership Online Course begins October 28, 2021:

Authentic: true to one’s own personality, spirit or character. (source: Merriamwebster.com)

Joined again by the “Magnet for magnificence” Lindsay Johnson, the topic of this episode is Authenticity.  Cheryl and Lindsay tackle the issue of being real about what we want and having the guts to go out and create it, ask for it, or do it.

Lindsay Johnson, aka The Radical Connector, is a 20-year entrepreneurship nerd and business strategist who's obsessed with teaching new entrepreneurs business skills and strategies for turning their brilliance into a profitable business by working less and playing more. Born into a family of entrepreneurs, Lindsay watched as her family struggled to balance working hard to succeed with burning out and sacrificing their quality of life. She was determined to crack the code to faster growth and more financial abundance with less work; more play and less struggle. Lindsay uses her online business school and private coaching to teach her clients how to use entrepreneurship as a tool to build the life of their dreams while also stepping into deeper radical self-acceptance as a business owner.

This episode is fun and informative with lots of insight:

• How the journey of self-acceptance affects your business.
• How to grow a business online.
• Knowing when unfollows/unsubscribes is an indication that you are doing something right.
• Understanding the need to test and experiment with social media.
• How to deliver information differently to avoid offending.
• The need to understand your customer’s journey.

All that and so much more!

Reading Recommendation:  The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

Looking to connect?

Cheryl Sutherland:

People-pleaser: a person who has an emotional need to please others often at the expense of his or her own needs or desires.  (source: merriam-webster.com)

According to psychologytoday.com, there are 10 signs that you might be a people-pleaser:

1. You pretend to agree with everyone.
2. You feel responsible for how other people feel.
3. You apologize often.
4. You feel burdened by the things you have to do.
5. You feel you can’t say no.
6. You feel uncomfortable if someone is angry at you.
7. You act like the people around you.
8. You need praise to feel good.
9. You go to great lengths to avoid conflict.
10. You don’t admit when your feelings are hurt.

You guessed it!  In this episode of Navigating Mindfulness, we are talking about ‘People-Pleasers’.  Cheryl has a guest co-host, Lindsay Johnson aka The Radical Connector. They are joined by special guest Elle Rosher.

Elle Rosher is a mindset coach for millennial women entrepreneurs who want to overcome people-pleasing and self-doubt to freely live their lives the way they want. Once a constant people-pleaser herself, she recognized the detrimental impact of living a life constantly striving to fulfill others' expectations. While completing her neuroscience degree at the University of Toronto, she gained valuable insight into the brain’s neurocircuitry and methods useful to alter unhelpful thoughts and prioritize our well-being. In her downtime, you can usually find Elle cuddled up on the couch reading a romance novel or dancing to her favourite tunes.

We’re so excited to present this episode to you!  Some of the topics include:

• Worth vs. self-worth
• Setting boundaries
• Codependency

And of course, we share lots of anecdotes and stories of our own as we have worked through many of these issues.

Join us for this relevant and important topic.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode!

Looking to connect?

Cheryl Sutherland:

How do you know it’s time to move on?

It’s important to take time to check in with yourself.  Not only on a personal level but also professionally. Ask yourself how you are feeling, acknowledge it and develop your course of action.

Some of the topics we cover in this episode:

• How the pandemic has forced some to reconsider their professional path.
  
• Pivot the business vs. moving on from it.
  
• How to know when to continue the evolution of yourself and your business.
  
• Recognizing when you continue doing something, or offering something out of obligation instead of what makes sense for the growth of your business.
  

Do you ever ask yourself, what would I do if I had to quit my company or sell my business?  If your answer is something along the lines of “exactly the same thing” then you know you’re on the right path.  If not, then you may need to take a look at what you would rather be doing.

Both Cheryl and Liza share their experiences with this topic.  Cheryl talks about how she has decided to stop consulting because it no longer brings satisfaction to her life and to focus more on her Affirmation products.  Liza has chosen to empower her team to lead the way in one of her businesses so she can focus her energies on other endeavours.

Please join us on this journey of building businesses while living a mindful life.

If you’d like to suggest a topic or join us for an episode, please contact us at:

In this week’s episode, we tackle the topic of Imposter Syndrome.

What is Imposter Syndrome?  According to verywellmind.com it “refers to an internal experience of believing that you are not as competent as others perceive you to be. While this definition is usually narrowly applied to intelligence and achievement, it has links to perfectionism and the social context”

Some common characteristics of Imposter Syndrome are:

• Self-doubt
  
• An inability to realistically assess your competence and skills
  
• Attributing your success to external factors
  
• Berating your performance
  
• Fear that you won't live up to expectations
  
• Overachieving
  
• Sabotaging your own success
  
• Setting very challenging goals and feeling disappointed when you fall short
  

If you have ever experienced any of these symptoms, then this is the episode for you!

Did you know that Imposter Syndrome (or Phenomenon) disproportionately affects high-achieving people and can affect a person at many points in life?

Cheryl shares her experiences with Imposter Syndrome and the steps she is taking to overcome it.

On this episode of Navigating Mindfulness, we welcome entrepreneur and business coach, Jessica Williamson.  She is joining us from Perth Australia to talk about her experiences as an entrepreneur and how she became a respected and sought-after business coach.  She explains her coaching philosophy and how she guides her clients in finding their true goals.

“If you want it, you’ll make it happen or you will find a way to make it happen” ~ Jessica Williamson

About Jessica:

An award-winning mindset & business coach and serial entrepreneur having run 4 businesses in the last 5 years… it’s safe to say, she loves to keep busy!

Hailing from a background in digital marketing and advertising, and with no formal training in fashion, she launched her first business Ete Swimwear at just 22 years of age in 2016. It was an almost instantaneous success, receiving an invitation to showcase at New York Fashion Week just one week after launching.  Ete Swimwear is now one of Australia’s most coveted swimwear brands with loyal customers worldwide.  Since then, Jessica has owned a wildly popular and successful event rental space, and a social media influencer travel agency and she continues to run a photography business.

In the last 2 years, she found her true passion in her work as a certified business coach. She loves helping other female entrepreneurs unleash their potential through her 1:1 coaching and believes that anything is truly possible! Jessica combines her experience in business with her innovative strategies for growth and passion for helping you reach your goals and live your dream life!

When she’s not busy supporting her incredible clients and getting them epic results in their businesses… or running her own empires… Jessica loves to explore and go on adventures or relax at the beach!

Looking to connect?

Cheryl Sutherland:

Customer Service: “Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during, and after a purchase.”

How do your customers feel about the service you provide?  In this episode of Navigating Mindfulness, we talk about why customer service is an important part of your business.

Liza can speak to the importance of great customer service as the owner of eLiaise, Inc.  It is a company that provides administrative services to companies such as managing emails and paperwork, answering phone calls, and calendar management.  She understands her clients’ needs and strives to provide best-in-class customer service.

As the owner of PleaseNotes, Cheryl knows the importance of providing a personal touch for her customers.  She recognizes the need to do market research to understand her customer base better and provide them the goods and services they expect.

We talk:

• Setting expectations - for you, your team, and your customers,
  
• Dealing with clients that have issues paying invoices.
  
• Knowing when the relationship isn’t working.
  

We know you will find this episode insightful as we share real-life experiences and tangible solutions.

If you have any feedback or ideas for future podcasts, please reach out!

Looking to connect?

Cheryl Sutherland:

Mindset: “the established set of attitudes held by someone.”

We are so excited to welcome this week’s guest, Bri Seeley as we discuss ‘Mindset’ as it pertains to building successful businesses.

Google’s #1 Entrepreneur Coach, Bri Seeley, helps entrepreneurs create long-term, sustainable and scalable success… on their terms! Bri distills her 14-years of real-world experience into digestible, tangible tools to help entrepreneurs thrive and profit. Bri is a 2020 Stevie Award winner for both Coach and Woman of the Year, a member of the Forbes Coaches Council, and author of the best-selling Permission to Leap. Her expertise has been featured in over 50 press outlets and hundreds of podcasts.

Cheryl and Liza chat with Bri about how she transitioned from a fashion designer to an entrepreneur coach. She describes how a mindset shift led her down a completely different path that has offered all sorts of surprising soul-satisfying results.

Don’t miss it - there’s an announcement of 2 free weeks on Bri’s membership program! Find out how in the podcast.

Book Recommendations:

1- Permission to Leap by Bri Seeley

2- The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed To Transform Your Life (Before 8am) by Hal Elrod

Looking to connect?

Cheryl Sutherland:

Money: “a current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes; coins and banknotes collectively.”

In this episode of Navigating Mindfulness, we talk about money. We discuss the importance of setting financial goals and opening ourselves up to receive.  We have to shift our outlook, take a macro look at the state of the business and make decisions. It can be difficult to see opportunities when we are continuously working on the daily needs of a business.  Recently, Cheryl decided to take a serious look at where she was spending time and has since started blocking time in her calendar dedicated to the items that she knew needed her attention.

We discuss the three ways to generate income:

1. Work for others.
   
2. Leverage income ie. Real estate, stocks, etc.
   
3. Generate income from a business.
   

Have you heard of a Mastermind group?  It’s a group of peers that meet regularly to give each other advice and support.  It can be extremely beneficial to share ideas, thoughts, wins, and challenges with people who are experiencing or have experienced the same things.  Cheryl and Liza are part of an amazing mastermind group of women who are each building their own businesses and finding success. Interested in joining a group or starting one of your own?

Check out the following website for a list of ideas on how to find your own mastermind group:

In this episode of Navigating Mindfulness, we talk ‘Intuition’. As successful business builders, Liza and Cheryl have had a fair amount of experience combining fact-based decision-making and intuitive decision-making.

Here’s a sprinkling of the topics in this episode:

• Learning to trust ourselves.
  
• Listening to ourselves.
  
• Building our intuitive cognition.
  
• Muscle testing
  
• Intuition is an inner GPS.
  
• The importance of meditation and journaling to developing our intuition
  
• Learning to label the feelings
  
• And more…
  

We would love to hear from you!  If you have any discussion ideas or feel that you would make a fantastic guest, please reach out!

Looking to connect?

Cheryl Sutherland:

Empowerment: ”the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights.”

On this episode of Navigating Mindfulness, Cheryl and Liza are joined by Dr. Rosenna Bakari, a Philadelphia native and an empowerment expert psychologist. She helps people master the relationship with themselves to master their lives. She earned her  Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Northern Colorado, her Master's degree in Counseling from the State University of New York and her undergraduate degree in psychology from Cornell University. As a psychologist, writer, black belt, spoken-word artist, and a marathon finisher, she lives life to the fullest.

We eagerly await the arrival of Dr. Bakari’s radical new book on healing coming out September 3rd called 'The Healing Journey: Relationships and Wellness Daily Guide’.

She is the founder and executive director of Talking Trees, Inc., an empowerment organization for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

Join us for a powerful discussion about empowerment, the difference between ‘therapy’ and ‘healing’ and the idea of mastering your relationship with yourself.

Looking to connect?

Dr. Rosenna Bakari

Does the thought of delegating tasks make you slightly nauseated?  If so, then this is the episode of Navigating Mindfulness for you!

This week Cheryl shares her evolution from being unable to delegate tasks related to her business to reaping the rewards and sometimes experiencing the challenges of delegating.

Some key learnings:

• Set clear expectations.
  
• Open communication.
  
• Check in regularly.
  

Having the power to delegate certain tasks, means you have the opportunity to focus your energies on tasks requiring specific skills and tasks that you enjoy. In order to grow your business, it may be necessary to delegate because it can become overwhelming for one person to do it all.  If you’re always playing catch up, it’s impossible to get ahead.

Some of the tasks that Cheryl has recently found the courage to delegate:

• Social media management.
  
• Order fulfillment
  
• Channel research
  

It’s been a long bumpy road, however it is important to learn, regroup and move forward.

Looking to connect?

Cheryl Sutherland:

Costing - Pricing - Compensation

These are the topics on today’s episode of Navigating Mindfulness hosted by Cheryl Sutherland, owner of PleaseNotes and a noted public speaker and Liza Magcale owner of eLiaise and Delegate Wisely Consulting.   The two entrepreneurs share their own experiences with building successful businesses from small startups to the successful entities they are today.

We discuss:

• How to cost out a goods-based business vs a service-based business.
  
• What costs to include in the cost-of-goods.
  
• The reason why many entrepreneurs don’t pay themselves and why they should.
  
• How to price your goods.
  
• How to price your services as a freelancer.
  

Cheryl and Liza share some of their own experiences with these concepts and how they navigated through.  They have taken very different approaches to their businesses but have both achieved high levels of success demonstrating that there is more than one way to build a business.  The most important piece of advice is “Be clear about what you want and go for it.”

If you haven’t already, we suggest you familiarize yourself with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It is a motivational theory that suggests that in order for a human to move up the hierarchy, one must satisfy their most basic needs first.  We’ve included a link below if you’d like to learn more.

Affirmations: are positive statements that can help you to challenge and overcome self-sabotaging  and negative thoughts. When you repeat them often, and believe in them, you can start to make positive changes. (source: mindtools.com)

How do you integrate affirmations into building successful businesses?  It just takes practice.  If you already practice daily affirmations in your personal life, you know that ‘belief’ and repetition are the keys to success.

Some topics covered in this episode of Navigating Mindfulness are:

• The importance of setting intentions.
  
• How to read your body language and notice the voices in your head.
  
• Abraham Hicks’ Emotional Guidance Scale.
  
• Tangible methods for applying affirmations in your business building.
  

As well as being successful entrepreneurs, Cheryl and Liza have been practicing mindfulness techniques for many years.  They have become experts in integrating it not only in their personal lives but also in their professional careers.  They have juicy tips for integrating affirmations into all aspects of building businesses.

Recommended Reading:

‘Your Word Is Your Wand’ by Florence Scovel Shinn

‘Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender’ by David R. Hawkins

Looking to connect?

Cheryl Sutherland is the founder of PleaseNotes.

“Vitality”

In both the physical and mental sense, vitality refers to a feeling of aliveness. The word itself is derived from vita or "life." In the physical sense, this vitality refers to feeling healthy and capable and energetic.

Are you in the Club?

Clubhouse:  is an audio-based social media app. The company describes itself as "a new type of social product based on voice [that] allows people everywhere to talk, tell stories, develop ideas, deepen friendships, and meet interesting new people around the world."

In short, Clubhouse is an invitation-only audio chat platform.  According to Backlinko.com there are 10 million weekly active users on the platform.  This is up 600,000 members from December of 2020.  Incredible growth in a short period of time!  It has gained immense popularity in part due to the exclusive nature of the platform. The platform also presents itself as a more relaxed forum that allows participants to simply listen to the speakers or to “get up on stage” and share the platform.  As a user you can select the types of rooms you are interested in and you receive notification when there is a room starting.  The user can quietly leave the room at any point.

How can Clubhouse become a tool for building businesses?  The platform presents an opportunity for business owners to connect with leaders of industry, specialists and experts in a variety of fields.  Occasionally there are opportunities for business pitches that generate real investment.

Cheryl and Liza are both early adopters of the platform.  As entrepreneurs, it is vital for them to stay on top of the latest networking tools.  Cheryl hosts her own room on Sunday evenings called ‘Create A Life You Love’ where attendees are encouraged to come onstage and be guided through a mindful conversation and set intentions for the week ahead.  It is on this platform that Liza has met some of her podcasts’ special guests.  It is a great way to network and meet people who share common values and interests.

In this episode of Navigating Mindfulness, Cheryl and Liza explore the Clubhouse platform as a networking tool, talk about the “whisper campaign'' nature of the marketing and discuss tips on using the platform effectively.

Looking to connect?

Cheryl Sutherland is the founder of PleaseNotes.

Today we chat about Personal Growth Principles with our special guest, Monica Villarreal. We focus on the journey from a “scarcity mindset” to an “abundance mindset” and how that change can affect your entire life.

Monica Villarreal is a Certified Health Coach located in California however she has a thriving online business and offers coaching to people located all over.  Ten years ago, Monica was not living her best life.  A lifetime of living with a scarcity mindset had left Monica overweight and unhappy.  After a disastrous meeting with someone who thought she would be unable to fulfill her professional obligations, Monica realized that something had to change.  She started working out at a small gym with the goal of losing 10lbs.  Realizing that goal, she decided to lose another 10lbs.  And so it went from there.  Monica made small lifestyle changes that added up to a bigger change.

Monica’s dedication to her healthy-self, has evolved into five years of success.  She has transformed not only her body but also her mindset, leading to a more confident version of herself.  Now she has transformed her personal passion into a coaching career to help others facing similar challenges to become their best self.

How to connect:

Monica Villarreal can be found at:

Facebook: @monicarosevillarreal

Instagram: @manifesting_monica

Cheryl Sutherland is the founder of PleaseNotes.

Today we chat about transitions as an opportunity for growth with our special guest Trista Devries.  

Trista Devries is a brand coach, web designer and self-professed marketing junkie.  She is super passionate about creating thriving brands for women-identified business owners.  After spending years working in large companies, Trista left that world to start her own company,  Trista Devries & Co recognizing it as a way to make a real, measurable positive impact on the world.  After working with more than 50 solopreneurs and building 3 thriving businesses of her own, Trista knows more than ever that women-identified people do business in their own way.  She understands the issues that women face and the obstacles that come up. Trista is masterful at helping women grow their businesses.  She believes in progress over perfection, showing up when you’re scared, and having a plan to get you where you want to go.  

How to connect:  

Trista Devries is the founder of Trista Devries & Co.