Speakers Nichole Pitts (Host) and Gina Unterhalter (Guest and Leadership Coach)
Nichole Pitts
Welcome to The Ethintegrity Podcast, Gina. I’m so excited to have you here.
I am so excited to be here and do this podcast with you, Nichole. I’ve been looking so forward to it.
Oh, I’m so excited and glad to hear that. I really love your journey. I feel like in some ways we’ve got similar journeys since we have a bit of a similar background.
But I loved your career journey from employment lawyer into this personal coaching or business coaching career that you have. And I wanted to see if you could walk us through where you decided to take that pivot in your journey to go from lawyer/barrister to coaching and helping and empowering others to fulfill their greatest purpose.
Oh my goodness. I absolutely love that question. So right now I serve these incredible women in the role of a coach and a therapist. And I use my gifts and my skill to help women feel better about their lives and to really help them activate their inner power. I always had that gift and I always knew that I had it.
And I started off my studies actually studying experimental psychology because I was like fascinated by people and what made people pick and how they worked. And then transitioned into legal and became an employment lawyer because it took the fascination that I had with people. But then, coming into corporate, put it in more of a commercial framework.
And I also come with a long lineage of lawyers. And what I found is while I was showing up physically as a lawyer every day doing the work, learning so much as in legal as you do, and I was utilizing the gift that I have, but it wasn’t to full capacity, It wasn’t to full purpose. And there was like this niggling yearning within me to do something more, to go bigger, to help more people and I stayed in legal for such a long time. I stayed there for 10 years because you get caught up right in the salary, in the trajectory, and you tell yourself a story that you’re trapped and it’s so hard to leave. And actually, my hand was kind of forced because the firm which I worked for, and I’m not gonna drop names or anything, but it went bust and 3000 people across the EMEA region were made redundant.
And it was almost like divine intervention. And the divine intervention went Hey girl, this is your moment. This is your chance to really lean into your gift, lean into your path and your purpose, and to actually use those fields which have been yearning to birth through you, to help more women, to help more women really activate their power to step into their most authentic, truest versions of themselves.
And so I made a choice. I made a big brave bold choice and took that leap and I said goodbye to the six-figure salary and all of the kudos of being this employment lawyer and these big city firm, and I went, You know, what’s more important to me? What’s more important to me, is to follow what turns me on, follow what brings me joy in a challenging way because as we know, like the path of entrepreneurship is not an easy journey. It is not the easier path, right? But when you commit to that challenge and you grow and you learn and you fail, and you learn and you succeed, and you learn and you help and you activate that deep sense of service. That is what made me connect to the pivot.
That’s what made me jump. That’s what made me take my great leap into the world of coaching and personal development.
And what do you feel like has been your most fulfilling or rewarding part of coaching and personal development?
Oh, I am so privileged to work with such incredible women, and these women are so successful and so powerful but somewhere they have been conditioned still notwithstanding the fact that they have the success and on paper this power, and they assume these incredible leadership roles and these amazing businesses, they still for some reason don’t think that they’re enough.
They still for some reason, don’t connect in with that worth and that value. And for me, it’s when I see these women finally connect with that, and I don’t say that I do that for them. They don’t, I’m just there. I’m just the mirror. Like I’m just the coach. I just reflect back what I see. But when they really get it the pressure, the yoke of expectation, that judgment, that self-criticism kind of diminishes.
And they can breathe in their own glory and use that glory to amp up their lives. So what happens when women do that when they truly connect in with that and they’re not pretending, or people pleasing or perfecting, and all the rubbish, which we are so socialized as women to be even in these high and important roles, is that they fill their cups up and they amp up their lights.
And when they amp up their lights, they can hold more space for other people. It’s like this glorious ripple effect of lights. I’m gonna become the beacon. I’m gonna own my work, I’m gonna own my value. And what you do is you encourage people to meet you there. You encourage people to meet you at that energetic frequency.
They say, Hey, like, look at so and so. She’s doing so well. She’s so in her groove. I want that. And it happens on a subconscious, energetic level. It’s like the ripple effect of lights. And so this is what keeps me going. It’s like that is my gift. That is my service. That is my role to support, guide, help reflect more back to these women that they have all the power within to activate, to be free into the world. And in doing so, you become the light for other people.
You do such a great job of reframing and that’s one of the things that I really enjoyed with working with you and to the listeners, I first came across Gina in 2020. Yeah, a month after the pandemic started and you were doing a webinar for this personal club in London that we were both part of.
And I really connected with you and reached out for you to be my coach. I do give you a lot of credit for helping me work through my self-limiting beliefs, I still use those tools because you would reframe it and be like, But what if. Yes. And a lot of the pressure that I would put on myself and these high expectations were self-inflicted.
And it was understanding, It’s okay. Yeah. Not to meet those high expectations every day because most people don’t have that expectation. You set the expectation with people that you work with and that your hundred percent is way above and beyond. And if you show up at 50%, especially if you’re an overachiever you’re already exceeding expectations. And that’s one of the things that really, really helped.
Yeah. A hundred percent. So there was so much in there that you just said, and I wanna start with how women approach life because I think it’s so important.
We are so conditioned to be perfect. To be the good girl. To people please. To have everything achieved and perfect right now, that we lose ourselves in the process. And if a, I’m gonna use the word patriarchal. I do not mean men. I mean an energy or belief system under which we have all been brought up in as what had predicated modern society today.
That we live in this patriarch of paradigm. Harder, better, faster, more, more, more. That we forget who we are and why we are here and what we are doing. And it all becomes achieving for the sake of achieving. Achieving for the sake of receiving the good girl pat on the back. And that external validation, and that sense of enoughness rather than realizing that we have that enoughness just from within, and so we lose sight of what we are doing, why we are here. And it’s also reactionary. It’s also dictated by the external rather than coming back into the internal and recognizing that we as women, we are one holistic being our work selves is our home selves and it’s our personal selves.
And so we have to be looking at our lives holistically and recognizing from, what energy and from what position we are operating from. I know for us, and I use the word us, is that we had a predisposition, or one does, um, particularly when you, if I use the example of that, the entrepreneurship journey is to model the corporate paradigm onto that.
And so we were talking about expectation and judgment. Well, you know, where did you learn that from? It’s from this very corporate patriarchal paradigm. And actually what we realize is that it gets results, but you’re gonna burn out and it’s exhausting and it’s not actually healthy or in alignment.
And so where the reframe comes from is really being brave enough to critically examine your modus operandi. Like, why am I operating like this? What am I trying to prove? And to whom and where did I learn all of this stuff? There must be a different way, right? Like what if there was a different way? What if there were the way of operating and being that achieved success while also achieving rest and balance?
What if there was a way of being that meant that I didn’t have to put all of the pressure and expectation and judgment on myself, but still got the result that I wanted? And what we learn when we go on these journeys is that there is, and it all starts with you getting super clear about what you really desire for your life.
And then when you get clear on that, the money, the results, the client, the status, whatever it is, it kind of flows. When I talk about the desire, I’m like, I’m talking about the feeling like how do you wanna feel joy, love, calm, balance? You start there and then from that point, then we can start working out strategic elements around that.
How do you create structure around that? How do you build a life for you that works around that? Because there are a thousand different ways of operating. We’ve just been so conditioned to operate within the go, go, go patriarchal paradigm, and that is one way of doing it.
Well, I think you made such a great point, especially about how the patriarchal paradigm and how we are conditioned from corporate. I’ve talked to so many other entrepreneurs, and basically, we did a lift and shift when we started our own business, and we’ve been so conditioned by corporate, which is really driven by profits. And of course, you know, as an entrepreneur you wanna make money because it’s all on you. And as I’ve said to you and others, many times, I didn’t wanna be riding the 38 bus selling mixed tapes in order to make rent. But looking at one of the things that you talked about today, but you’ve talked about with me several times, is being in service. And that really was changing the thought pattern from profits and how do I make this business to be successful in the terms of corporate, what I’ve always defined as success versus how do I empower and serve others? Mm-hmm. to be the best to give out that gift so that they can be better. How do they make lives better for the people that work in their organization? And that really was I think a critical shift in looking at business models. And as I’ve talked to other entrepreneurs, you can definitely see on the journey of people that decided I wanna be in service and how we approach business now, I think is a more creative way. Have you found that?
A hundred percent. This just deeply resonates for me, and we are all so guilty of doing this, so lift and shift. Why? Because that’s all we know. So we’ve gotta have a lot of love and compassion for how we started out, right? Because the whole process of entrepreneurship is a brutal journey, I think.
Cause you start for nothing and then you create something. But you’ve gotta have grace for it and you’ve gotta learn along the way. And so we come into this and we’re like, How am I gonna make money? How am I gonna find clients? How, how, how? I mean just the energy of that. I talk a lot about energy cause it’s so important.
It’s the key. And it’s scary and it feels like it can go away at any time. And it’s very disempowering because when we are in that frame of mind, what we’re saying is I need you to validate my life. And that’s a terrible place to be because you are rising and you’re falling by whether somebody pays you.
And what that does to your nervous system is horrific. Yeah. You can’t function and live like that. It’s this awful rollercoaster. You’re always high functioning. Your nervous system is in a constant state of activation. And again, we use the B word burnout, stressful. You burnout or you’re resentful, or you just won’t do this business or a business.
We have to come into the energy of service. One becomes an entrepreneur because they have a gift. Cause they have a vision of a gift. Cause they’ve got a sense of something within them that needs to be shared. The methodology for sharing that gift is service. It is about “we” not “me.” What is about me is me showing up, sharing what I have to share with the world, sharing my message, sharing my service, sharing how I can help, what I can do. And in doing so getting richly rewarded for it.
Cause I know, like if I show up fully embodied as me and my gift of service, owning my stuff, owning my worth, owning the value of what I have, you can change your little slice of humanity. It’s about becoming brave enough to show up in service, but the more you do, the more it just becomes your way.
Yeah. I think you made such a great point about energy and tapping into that. Especially you were talking about validation and I feel like a lot of times in corporate we are seeking and rushing after that validation in order to get promoted, in order to get raises, those types of things.
And when you start your own business, then that validation turns into I have to get clients, I have to make X amount of profit every year. And one of the things I think that’s happened, at least for me and I know other entrepreneurs is that when you start your own journey as a business owner, you have to do a lot of self-work.
And I realized I was the martyr. If I just work all the time. I love being like I’m Type A and I work 16 hours a day and I’m working weekends and this is it. Because that was kind of a badge of honor, realizing it was actually not no. Which in taking that to the entrepreneur side, and you work even more because there really is no demarcation to your day than you do slide into burnout.
So it’s that, how do I change my energy? Yes. How do I really look at, how do I feel? How am I showing up? Especially with DEI work and talking to people and having so much coming at me, how do I protect myself from all the other energies so I can show up as my best self for them, but not take in all of other people’s trauma? Or beliefs and things like that.
Beautiful question. I love it. I love, I love it. Okay. You are in a very wounded masculine energy. Mm-hmm. So I’m gonna talk a little bit about energy here cause I think there’s some really good takeaway points here. We as beings have both. We operate from masculine energy, and we operate from a feminine energy. We are conditioned in patriarchal society to operate from what I call a wounded or a toxic masculine energy.
That’s push, push, push, push, push, push, push, you know, hierarchy, ego, power, grooving, and then from a toxic or wounded feminine energy, like the ‘woe is me’. The not taking radical responsibility, the feeling like, everything’s done to you, a real kind of wounded maiden.
Where we wanna get to operating is what I call the divine feminine and divine masculine energy. And it’s allowing based with those kinds of energies to really grow and for you to connect them with them. Cause we have them, right? So what do I mean by this? We have to create space to connect in with the feminine part of us.
The feminine part of us is the divine feminine part of us. It’s creativity, it’s deep introspection. It’s creating time and space for pleasure. It’s creating time and space for joy and rest. It’s creating time and space for love and compassion and self-love and self-nurturing. You know, think of like big mama vibes, right?
Like this, like real divine nurturing kind of energy. But we don’t give space to that, particularly at work or in our businesses because in patriarchy it’s seen less than. However, there is so much power in connecting in with what I call that divine feminine energy. Because in that divine feminine energy you find, you recharge, you connect in with what lights you up, you connect in with what turns you on.
You connect in with your creativity. You connect in with the joy of life. Because if we just stay here operating in the kind of toxic, high-functioning energy, well where’s the space for that? And then you can see how the balance shifts and we’re in burnout land and it’s stressful and this whole thing, which the reason why we left corporate and built these businesses in the first place, Look, I wanna go back into corporate. At least I’m getting paid, you know,
We’ve gotta bring the conscious awareness and asking ourselves, what’s the energy? The underlying energy that I’m constantly operating from? And where in my day can I just create a little bit more space to be in that feminine energy? It can be as simple as lighting a candle and having roses in your office.
Look at that just brings you back there. To running yourself a bubble bath, creating time of deep introspection, meditation and visualization, allowing yourself to connect with creativity on a more spiritual level. If you into it, like maybe connecting in with the seasonal cycles, you know, all an amazing time of change that’s very feminine.
Or if you’re into the moon cycle, connecting in with that, finding empowerment and wisdom through those channels. And then as women connecting with your internal cycles, whether or not you still menstruate, it doesn’t matter. We’re still cyclical beings. That’s very feminine. But we have to give it some containment. And so if we can find a way of being in that feminine and then doing in the masculine, so we’d be in the feminine, we find our creative juices connecting in with intuition and deep inner wisdom, all of that wonderful feminine juicy stuff.
And then let it be contained by what I call that divine masculine. Give it structure and form confidently and courageously in that divine masculine. And then when you start playing with that, you can start finding a little bit more balance when you do that. It also allowed time for the nervous system to regulate.
To become a less activated, become less high functioning course, the levels on your body, you’re gonna just have a moment to release, let you not always high functioning. Cause what often happens is when we just high function the whole time, then we stop, get sick. So it’s just creating that balance. To your other question when we are in a entrepreneurship or leadership or just a person in the world position, how do we deal with a lot of kind of negative stuff, which comes at us?
And this, I’m gonna use B word boundaries. We have to set our empowered boundaries and it starts with us choosing to set them. And it’s fricking hard for the conforming people, pleasing good girls. Perfection coach girls to set those boundaries. But if you were gonna survive in this world, the boundaries is imperative.
And actually I love the 1st of November. Cause November is “NO-vember” it is a time to say no to the people, places and things that drain your energy. So the question I’d like you and all the listeners to ask themselves is where can I challenge myself to set one empowered boundary?
Now, what do you mean by empowered boundary? Yeah. Cause I love that phrase.
So an empowered boundary is if we think of ourselves like a vessel. And we are a vessel which is made up of a resource. And that resource is called your emotional energy. There’s only so much of it within you. Mm-hmm. . So we choose to give it over here. Maybe to that toxic person we choose to give it over there to that not nice thing that was said to us. We choose to maybe give it over there to something which we didn’t really wanna do, but we said yes to, but we didn’t really wanna do it because it’s draining or we say yes to that person, but we don’t really wanna hang out with them cuz they’re just completely negative. What’s happening to your energy?
Your emotional energy is going less and less and less. And let’s be like, look at it like a fuel tank, right? In a car setting an empowered boundary is empowered enough to go, Do you know what my energy is? My most precious resource, and so I’m gonna be brave enough and courageous enough to set boundaries on that and to say no when I need to say no to speak up. When I need to speak up, to push back. When I need to push back but we choose to set the boundary first. We go, I’m doing it, I’m gonna do it. And it’s scary because what happens is when we set a boundary and people have been so used to taking or slinging or whatever, they might throw a tantrum, but that’s their problem, right? Like that is their shtick not your problem to appease the tantrum, you’re just gonna come back and empower yourself to that boundary.
Nope. This is the level of respect I am demanding for myself and my lifeblood and my precious emotional energy. And that’s what I mean. And the more you do that, the more the negative stuff just kind of doesn’t land so hard because when you don’t set that boundary, cuz imagine like you had your car and you left the fuel tank leaking mm-hmm.
And so it depletes, it depletes and depletes. So when something not-so-nice comes your way, it hits you hard because your tank is low. And so it becomes very important to coming back into that empowered place of setting those boundaries. And as I said, it becomes easier to take the tough stuff. It doesn’t knock you so much. And I know we also have discussed during our sessions quite a strategic way of dealing with it or mindsets type way of dealing with it. But there’s a wonderful spiritual tool, which I love to do as well. It’s called bubbling. We’ve spoken about it, where you simply just visualize this glorious bubble encasing your whole body.
And you can imagine it growing from your heart center, and just grows and grows and grows and grows. And it just bubbles you and it protects you. And you can put that bubble around yourself every morning before you start your day and to be like in the bubble. And you can imagine, maybe it’s your aura, your shield, whatever it is, you, whatever color, but that’s your faith. And so if like you have a naggy whoever, or a toxic, whoever, a situation come away and they’re throwing their little arrows at you, you just imagine it sliding off your bubble and actually it provides the brain and anchor to go to so you can quickly pull yourself out of a tricky situation with something toxic or negative that has the propensity to drain your energy.
Yeah. And that’s one of the things I loved in using bubbling. I looked at it as that I have this bubble around me, and then anything that was toxic or negative or just not serving my highest good. It was kind of like, dirt that would attach to the bubble. And then at the end of the day, I would take a shower and do this visualization of scrubbing off all of that negativity from my whole energy. And it really lifted my spirits and it was a tool that I didn’t realize I needed, but it was a game changer.
Oh, it’s so powerful. That when you come to the end of the day or at the beginning of your day, start off in the shower water like cleansing. And you just wash all of that stuff off of you. And we use sit there managers in ways, it’s like clean myself of all that does not serve me. Mm-hmm. . And it is powerful. And these mantras and these affirmations are powerful because we are telling our subconscious mind a very, very important message. We are telling a subconscious mind, which is our operating system, really more so than the conscious mind where all of our thoughts and stuff reside.
We we’ll be feeding a message to subconscious mind that says, I’m better than this. I deserve better than this. I’m cleansing myself of this. I value myself. It’s empowering yourself to make your move and your decision and set your boundaries and the base-level treatment of yourself through that higher self version of you. So that’s the version of you who had made it right? Like, there, there she is. She is you now. Right? She is you now. And I think it’s important to say that, she resides within you and you just more and more activating her and becoming her every single day. But it’s talking about, well, how would she set a boundary?
What would she do if I made decisions through that future style version of me, that woman that I’m becoming, that I’m stepping into that I know is inside me, that I’m just unlocking the one that’s made it, that I happy, healthy, successful version one. Like where would she set that boundary? What are the move that she would make?
What’s the decisions she would make? And that’s a really powerful reframe as well to use that cause that’s gonna pull you forward. That’s going to get you making decisions through the filter of your future you rather than where you are now. So that’s gonna kind of blow you out of your comfort zone towards where you wanna be.
Yeah. And that was actually one of my favorite visualizations because sometimes if you can’t see it, it’s very hard to achieve it. Yes. And visualizing that successful, empowered you and the advice that she or he would give to the current you was really helpful in taking some of the emotion out of it.
One of the questions I do have for you is what are some tips and tools that people can use to really activate that inner power that you’ve been talking about? You’ve talked about, the empowered boundaries, the visualizations and meditations. What other tips do you have for people to really step into their highest self?
Oh, yes. Juicy question and I love it. Okay. We as humans have this amazing superpower, I’m gonna drop it, drumroll, please. It’s called ‘your choice’. It’s called ‘your choice’, right? Yes. And we don’t use our choice properly, okay? So we have to choose to go first. We have to choose to believe in ourselves so freaking fiercely.
We have to choose to believe that we are on this planet, in this extraordinary wild time in our collective consciousness. For a damn reason, as I said, to share our gifts, to be of service, to make the world a better place. So it starts with you choosing to a) believe that you have this unbelievable power within you, that if you were just courageous enough and brave enough to move past the fear and the self-doubt and the imposter syndrome and all the negative stuff, which by the way isn’t even yours, right?
Like you learn that stuff from your ancestry, God bless them, from society like it’s learned. And when you are in a state of fear and self-doubt, imposter syndrome, all that like kind of negative stuff that kind of wraps it stuff around that inner a power high self you like all you’re doing is protesting other people’s BS as well-meaning as they were, right?
You just learn this stuff. Just learn this stuff because we do as kids, we do, we learn it. It’s all picked up from your early childhood. So if you were just brave enough, you look beyond that and realize with consciousness and awareness that this self-doubt isn’t who I am. This fear isn’t who I am.
This part isn’t who I am. It’s an emotion and a feeling I may have with me today. But at my core, what am I now? I like to think about it in a spiritual perspective because that gives me a lot of empowerment. Like I fundamentally believe that we are divine sparks and whether you believe in a God or the universe or the stars or fairy dust or whatever like we have an element of creative magic inside of us, and that’s your power.
Some people call it a soul, some people call it God, divine spark, universe, whatever. Don’tcare what you call it. I want you to connect with the feeling of it. And it’s that part of you which is like, hell yes, I can do this. It’s a reason why we got our big jobs in corporate. It’s a reason why we went on this entrepreneurial journey, or whatever it is that you listen to.
It’s that bit of you that’s like, I’m glad he can do this. And then what happens is as soon as you say that, then all the negative stuff comes. But you gotta choose to believe in that spark no matter what, and you got to choose to go first. What do I mean by that? Cannot wait for the client or the promotion or the pay rise or the partner or the friend to come along and say, Okay, now you’re good.
Now, you’re good. Now you’re validated. Off you go. Like you’ve gotta choose to just be like, Okay, well I’m gonna do it now. I’m gonna choose to go first. Yeah. I’m gonna go first with believing in myself. I’m gonna go first with recognizing that just within me today, I’ve got so much incredible skill and wisdom and resourcefulness and brilliant just wrapped up in a bit of me.
Just that I’ve learned from being a human for the last X year that you have lived on this planet that is of high service that I could share today that could change somebody’s world. It’s choosing to believe that you are enough. It’s choosing to believe that you are ‘a spiritual being having a human experience’. That was a French philosopher who said that it’s not me and I can’t quite remember his name. It means that even though we have that spark of greatness and power within us, we’re human.
And so all the humanness is gonna come along with us for the ride. And how much grace and compassion can we have for that humanness? Cause the humanness is the fear, The humanness is the doubt, The humanist is the belonging to belong. That’s a part of us, which craves the validation. But when we look at all the human of us, like what can we learn from that?
Why do these things keep on showing up for me? Because there’s great wisdom in what we have been taught are our limitations, but effectively they are simply just showing you the patterns of behavior that have been emerging for you their whole entire life that you need to work on and heal and integrate and shift in order to get to the next level.
So when I talk to activating your inner power, it’s like recognizing, like that’s all you, right? Mm-hmm. , that’s all you, that nobody is gonna give you that. And it all starts with your choice. And recognizing that fundamentally, that inner power, can never, ever, ever be taken away from you. You give that stuff away, right? You give it away unwittingly.
Yeah. I love ‘choosing to go first’. Just going ahead and doing it. And I feel like sometimes we are all so scared, but I love the quote ‘do it scared’. Yeah. I think also we think that people are looking at us and they aren’t, they’re not scrutinizing us as much as we scrutinize ourselves. Absolutely. One of the things you talked about was understanding your core and something that you and I did together was realizing and identifying my core values. And I’ve talked about this in other podcast episodes, is that we’re so conditioned to understand the company’s core values that sometimes we don’t know what our own core values are, which means that we are seeking this other validation, this external validation, and we haven’t rooted ourselves by understanding our own values.
So, can you talk about some ways in which to identify your core values and really get started on that road to see who you are and what you truly believe in?
Yeah, for sure. Before I actually do that, I just wanna pick up the one thing you said ‘do it scared’ and I absolutely love that. Because I think there is a huge misconception in life whether you are just a human or you are a career person or a business person, an entrepreneur, whatever you do is that when you reach a certain level, the fear in the self-doubt and the imposter syndrome goes away.
It does not ever go away. And I think that’s actually quite refreshing and empowering because you haven’t failed if it doesn’t. It’s just as we go up in levels that things change. It’s just which voice are you going to allow to be your guiding light? Are you gonna be guided by the fear or are you gonna be guided by the inner power?
And again, it’s the power of your choice. And to the point about being scrutinized, it’s like this, it, you know, like particularly in this day and age, people’s attention spans are short, right? And so one gives themselves such a hard time, like in your head all of the things, but actually everybody’s too busy focusing on their own business.
And again, like when you are in that kind of mindset of the scrutinizing that is the voice of fear, which is guiding and running the show. If you were in inner power it might be easier for you to let go of that yoke of self-criticism and judgment. So to the question about finding your core values. Fundamentally, what is the value? It is a principle or belief from which you live your life and from which you operate from.
If you are an entrepreneur, while your business is simply an extension of you. It’s like the roadmap from which your business operates from, and there’s so many cerebral ways that you can literally get yourself like muddled in a complete curfuffle about it. I trying to think it through and doing all these online tests and psychometric tests and all of those things. I think it’s very simple. Gotta drop out of your head. Just shut down those thoughts. What can happen is when you start to think things through or you’re too much in the cerebral, you go into comparisonitis, what’s that person doing? What’s that person doing? And should I be like that?
And then we’re like in a ‘should’ energy. Should energy is sticky because it’s not in alignment with you. And also we start to detract from inner power because when we are comparing, again, it comes from a place of self-doubt, of fear. We compare because we are doubtful of what we actually are. How do we find out what we actually are? Gotta feel it. Gotta feel it. Cannot think it. Gotta feel it. And the simplest way to do this is you can just come into a state of closing down your eyes and putting your hands over your heart center. Cause your soul energy, that divine spark lives here in your heart center.
And just starting down your eye and just breathing for a moment, coming into stillness, into being. And just allowing a bright orb just to kind of appear above your head when you’re in that moment of stillness with your eyes closed and just allowing that orb to drape down your head to dissipate all of that negative thinky, logicky sticky stuff.
And just allow it. Allow that light coming rest in your heart space and just truly feel it. And when you hear you just ask yourself some questions and go like, what lights me up? What brings me joy? What stretches me into the most exciting version of me? What stretches me into that higher self version? What feels good? You follow those feelings and then allow those kind of nudges to come through with like, ooh, like leadership, ooh, like freedom, Ooh, you know, all of that stuff, which you may or may not have gotten there if you were just trying to think it through.
Allow your values to come from the core of you. Allow your values to come from your heart and your soul. Allow your values to come from that inner power version of you, and you will get there through feeling it in your body, not thinking it in your mind.
Yeah. I think that is so true. And also being authentic. Yes. Because I feel like, Yeah, I mean, when you challenge those values, I think when we first do it, we do default to what we know. Yeah. And we have to continue to challenge that to say, Is this dovetailing back to my corporate roots, or is this who I am at my core?
Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, you like the A word. Best word ever. So I think that’s right. And like for me, authenticity means loving and accepting who you are right now and having the courage and conviction to show up as that loved and accepted version of you. And so when it comes to looking at your values, we see how it has to come from your gut, from your heart, because how else can you truly love and accept yourself? The true you. If you weren’t connecting in with that heart, that intuitive piece, that inner wisdom, that gut piece. Mm-hmm. . And again, people feel that. Yeah, they do. You can see a mile away through people’s branding or whatever how they talk.
It’s like if they create a set of values based on a modus operandi of how they think they should be, look, they may get results. I’m not saying they won’t, but it’s just inauthentic and pick and it becomes very difficult to be something that you’re not. And other people sense that.
I think it does a disservice to yourself as well. You try to show up so perfect. And I think that’s something you learn in corporate is that you have to be the best. You can’t show any weakness. There’s no room for error. Especially if you are from a marginalized community. Then you have to be twice as good, to get half as much. Mm-hmm. and I feel that by showing up perfect, it does a disservice to others that don’t understand the journey that you go through and really being imperfectly perfect so that people can connect to you.
Absolutely. Perfection will kill authenticity. Perfection is the polar opposite of authenticity. And you cannot be perfect and authentic because perfection is actually a wounded feminine energy. When you’re in the energy of perfection, you are in fear. We spoke about service and you cannot be perfect and in service, because what you do is you create, a separation between me and we. What you say to your audience or a client or whoever comes into your energetic field is that, Well, I’m perfect, so I’m up here.
And I’m better than you. You create hierarchy and you create a sense of division, and we don’t wanna do that because it’s toxic, it’s patriarchal, it’s not inclusive, and it’s not honest. And you cannot possibly be of service if you are being perfect. So to truly be in the energy of service, it’s having the courage and conviction to show the world who you are and what you’re made of, and that you’re human and that you have grown and learned and done and flipped up and had challenges because every single one of us does, and perfection has no place there. Cause it blows the hole right through the things that are going to allow a client, a person, another adult to truly connect in with you because you’re creating a hierarchical wall there.
My experience when that happens is whoever then comes into your orbit, the whole relationship just doesn’t work cuz it’s built on such rocky, untruthful foundations.
Yeah, and it’s almost like the voices of the few outweigh the voices of the many. And I use the example of people that will point out where this wasn’t perfect. It’s to your point of setting that empowered boundary to say, I’m not going to take this in and I don’t need to really give a lot of credence to this. I always look at criticism as I wanna take the nuggets from it, but I don’t wanna take the trauma of it.
Yeah. And look the fundamental truth to receive any form of criticism is hard because we’re human. And that is a very normal human emotion. So you’re allowed to feel upset or shook or whatever. But as you rightly said, it’s like ok, now where are we gonna go with this? What’s the spiral?
Is it gonna go up? Is it going to spiral me down? Or am I gonna learn from it and allow it to make me use this as a springboard to my next level of growth? And again, I use the C word that is your really comes down to your choice. But I totally get and resonate how the voice of a few keyboard warriors or something maybe your colleague or a boss says to you can really shake you.
But if you can really empower yourself to say, Okay, what’s the learning here? Because I am human. What can I learn from this either about myself? Where can I improve? Because we’re allowed to improve. Improvement doesn’t fit alongside perfection because you can’t improve if you’re perfect. So the improvement is a really empowering place to be, and it is finding that activation of inner power to raise, Okay. Right. What am I gonna do with this? Spiral down or springboard forward? Because you have their choice and that power within you. To the point about activating your inner power, particularly if you are a content creator or have a social media presence, I think this might deeply resonate if you were of course in corporate too, but it’s like not everybody’s gonna like you.
But we wanna be liked. And that’s where, to your point, you said you can spiral down or springboard forward. Yeah. And I think that is such a key phrase. Cause you know, I normally spiral right on down, focus on it. And I’ll be like, Can you believe Billy said? And I focus on it and it’s really changing that narrative to springboard forward. But I think it’s that whole understanding, going back to what you’ve said of you have a choice. And sometimes we don’t look at it, we have a choice. We just default to what our patterns are, our learned behavior. Yes. And not trying to unlearn habits that don’t serve us.
Exactly. Exactly. Because at any given moment, you’re making a choice. That’s the truth. Subconsciously or not. [Inaudible name of author] said, until you make the subconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And where he was going was that is unless you get really clear about these subconscious choices that you’re kind of making all the time, you’re gonna land up over the position and you’ll say, Oh, well, you know, this was ordained for me. But that’s a whole other look as for another day.
I think the point is that we have to recognize the superpower of our choice. And more than that, the superpower that we have of then activating that choice truly. Cause that is how you activate your inner power. When we come back to talking about that not everybody’s gonna like you. It’s deeply triggering. I find it deeply triggering and I navigate that a lot. I think as an entre entrepreneur, you do. And again, it plays to the, we’re speaking about condition and learn patterns. Like the people pleasing, forming. A good girl is gonna freaking hate that because you were programmed to be likable and you have done everything in your power as a woman growing up in a patriarchal world to be liked.
And particularly you spoke about if you are in a minority group and in a corporate environment like you’re going to work even harder to be liked and to be validated. And then when you put yourself out there. Perhaps in the leadership position or as a content creator, as an entrepreneur, it’s very tough when not everybody likes you. And so when you get good with that and comfortable with that and recognize that it’s not about whether or not you are liked, but we’ve gotta fall back into the energy of service. I didn’t come here to be liked. I came here to serve and share my gifts. And in sharing my gifts and spreading my word, I may trigger some people. I don’t believe in utilizing triggers, but some people might get triggered by what you say.
In that delivering of a method, we can only hope that either the trigger for them is gonna awaken something in them. Because when somebody gets triggered, it’s scratching on a trauma, a belief, a limiting belief, something about themselves, which they need to look at and they need to work on, and they need help. It’s not about you. So your job is to come into the experience with consciousness and understand that. And again, you can really protect your precious energy because then you’re not gonna give all your power away to this one person who disagreed with you. Cause then you are being triggered because you are limiting belief about not being liked is being triggered now or we’re all in a trigger spiral.
And that ain’t helping anybody. So if we can see that and hold space for that person and hopefully they’ll either be enlightened and question the reaction or they won’t. But either way, that’s not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to keep on showing up in service, shining your light, and sharing your gifts with the world.
Yeah, I tell everybody that coaching is a game-changer. And I feel that historically it’s only been offered to executives and you really do need coaching earlier on in your career to help understand who you are and how you’re showing up. So how can we leverage coaching to be courageous and be our authentic selves?
I think coaches come in many forms. A good coach is a mirror. A good coach is a mirror of your capability, of your potential, of your power, of your blocks, your blind-sightedness, and your triggers. So it could be anyone, if we are talking about it in more of a professional context and hire a coach or you get given a coach and how we can leverage that. I think it is really important because fundamentally no man or woman is an island, right? When we talk about how we are all pre-programmed and we are all conditioned, we develop our belief system and our modus operandi through, how we were brought up, societies we grew up in, the ancestral lineage. And it becomes hard for us to see ourselves but the yearning and the desire to see yourself is there. And so it stops with that element of awareness. And if you work with a really good coach, a good coach allows you to be yourself in all facets of you.
The good, the bad, and the ugly. No facet is better than the other because all of them make up you. And it’s about learning to work with all parts of your psyche, that inner power, soul, divine self, the egoic self that sits in fear and comparisonitis and all of that. The part of you that just wants joy and freeness. It’s understanding that you are one whole being and a good coach will guide you there. And in coming into that place of acceptance of yourself and of all the factors that of yourself, it becomes a very important tool to leverage because you are not just showing up as the perfect version of you.
You’ve come into a place of, I’ve accepted myself. All of me, I know how to operate and work with all of the parts of me because they all contribute to the tapestry of who I am and that tapestry of who I am. That collective experience accumulates in your knowledge and your wisdom and your gift to share.
And I truly believe that coaching can unlock their foreperson because it allows them to truly see themselves. It allows them in a very safe and loving, tough, loving environment to be challenged and to be stretched, and to have a safe space to show up in their career, in their business the most empowered, vibrant, authentic version of themself.
Yeah, I love that. So, rapid-fire questions.
Let’s go.
If you could be remembered for one thing, what would it be?
Oh, That I really helped people activate their inner power
And if you could give your 18-year-old self a piece of advice, what would that be?
Babe, you’re enough. I love that. You’re enough.
So what is the insult that you are most proud of?
Yes. Okay. I love this one. Um, “oh, so you just think you’re God’s gift, don’t you?” I’m like, yes I am. So are you. And this actually came off a post that I put out about self-promotion and talking about your brilliance and talking about your gift.
Because if you are not shouting about yourself, then who’s gonna shout about you? And this person got really triggered by it, and I’m really proud of it because I’m God’s gift. You are, You are you, We all are because we’ve got amazing gifts to share with the world.
Oh, I love that. What is the most important lesson you’ve learned over the course of your career so far?
Yes. That you don’t have to have achieved everything right now. Grace for the journey. Oh yeah. Grace for the journey. Cause it’s a journey and it’s developing and it’s growing and you’re a human who’s developing and growing. So have grace for the journey. You don’t have to have it all figured out right now.
I love that grace for the journey. What do DEI and ethics mean to you?
Yes. So it means creating safe bases or environments where all thoughts or walks of life and people from whatever background you can courageously and confidently share their voice. Our difference is collectively together is what makes the unity powerful. And if we look at how it can be used in businesses you get so many different ideas and creative approaches to how something can be done. And you’re only going to get that if you heard everybody’s voices. It also means being brave enough to look at yourself in the mirror, to look at where your unconscious biases have come from and to do better.
Yeah. I agree with that. So last question. Yes. What do you do for self-care to make sure that you are productive and happy?
Yes. So I am a big believer in self-care. Huge. And trust me, when I was working 19-hour days in corporate, I was not, I wore the badge of honor. I consciously create based in my day for exercise and to be. So, I will normally drop my kids at school nursery, and then I will either do a little bit of gym or I spend a lot of time in my yoga studio.
So I always got my day off with exercise because I’ve done something for me. And I know that I’ve gotta fill my cup up so that I can hold faith for all the incredible women and people that I serve. I also carve out time. It’s about creating balance as you go through your day.
Cuz what we often try to do is like we do our day and then we try to create balance at the end. And that like, it’s very hard to do that. It’s just block the time just to be. So put it in your work calendar, just a couple minutes, just to sit and breathe just for the sake of breathing, to just come into the present moment, to step away from the desk, and to just make sure that I’m checking in with how my nervous system is feeling.
Am I feeling anxious? Do I need to move my body? Do I need to take a moment to breathe? Do I need to take a moment to like tune in and come out of my head which is full of thoughts? So consciously creating time to be. I also love to have things around me which connect me into what we spoke about, the feminine energy.
I would use my candles and my flowers as an example because it’s just a little reminder. And although it makes you allowed to do things for you, which make you feel special. So the mindset around that is your self-care is proportionate to your level of success. But when you are taking your holidays, however much time you choose to give yourself off is to be on holiday, setting that out of office. Really just choosing to take a break. So when you are on that break, you take a break. Otherwise, you’ve never taken a break. And again, we land up in the B word territory can land up in burnout.
Yeah. Well, vacation is to vacate.
Exactly.
Yes. Well, thank you so much, Gina, for joining me on the podcast today. I felt like this was such a great conversation and you gave a lot of great information. So I truly, truly appreciate it.
I loved it. Thank you so much. I so enjoyed our discussion. It was wonderful.
Nichole
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End of episode.
