Work It Like A Mum
Work It Like A Mum
Why Slowing Down Is the Key to Achieving More Success
In this week's Work It Like a Mum episode, Camilia Berrada, an executive coach and transformational leader, joins us. Camilia shares her journey of slowing down to accelerate her career and life, helping individuals unlock their true potential. We discuss how understanding your zone of genius and aligning your choices with your values can propel you to the next level of personal and professional success.
About Our Guest:
Camilia Berrada is a seasoned executive coach with experience helping Big Four professionals tap into their true potential. From working at Deloitte to launching her entrepreneurial ventures, Camilia's career has been marked by a deep commitment to transformational change. She specialises in helping CEOs, C-level leaders, and entrepreneurs navigate personal and professional transitions, align their lives with purpose, and create lasting impact.
What You'll Learn in This Episode:
- The importance of slowing down to understand who you truly are.
- Identify your zone of genius and align it with your career and life choices.
- Camilia's entrepreneurial journey went from a successful corporate career to running her own business.
- How to navigate the fear and uncertainty of leaving a stable corporate job to pursue your dreams.
- Blending Western and Eastern practices in personal growth and leadership development is valuable.
- Why it's essential to evolve and redefine what success means to you continuously.
Key Quotes:
- "Slow down to speed up."
- "You need to go there – to tap into what's beyond your ability to perceive, to truly live a meaningful life."
- "Entrepreneurship forces you to face your limits and stretch beyond them."
Show Links:
Connect with Camilia on LinkedIn
Connect with Camilia on Instagram
Visit Camilia’s Website
Connect with our host Elizabeth Willets on LinkedIn
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Hey, I'm Elizabeth Willits and I'm obsessed with helping as many women as possible achieve their boldest dreams after kids and helping you to navigate this messy and magical season of life. I'm a working mum with over 17 years of recruitment experience and I'm the founder of the Investing in Women job board and community. In this show, I'm honoured to be chatting with remarkable women redefining our working world across all areas of business. They'll share their secrets on how they've achieved extraordinary success after children, set boundaries and balance, the challenges they've faced and how they've overcome them to define their own versions of success. Shy away from the real talk? No way. Money struggles, growth, loss, boundaries and balance we cover it all. Think of this as coffee with your mates, mixed with an inspiring TED Talk sprinkled with the career advice you wish you'd really had at school. So grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, make sure you're cosy and get ready to get inspired and chase your boldest dreams, or just survive Mondays. This is the Work it Like A Mum podcast. This episode is brought to you by Investing in Women. Investing in Women is a job board and recruitment agency helping you find your dream part-time or flexible job with the UK's most family-friendly and forward-thinking employers. Their site can help you find a professional and rewarding job that works for you. They're proud to partner with the UK's most family-friendly employers across a range of professional industries, ready to find your perfect job. Search their website at investinginwomencouk to find your next part-time or flexible job opportunity. Now back to the show.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Work it Like A Mum podcast. Today I am chatting with Camilia Barado and we're going to be talking all about how you can, in her words, slow down to speed up, find out who you really are and what your zone of genius is to ensure that you are aligned with your choices that you make in your career and your life. Camilia, she is an executive coach. She's helped people in the big four really tune into who they are and what's important to them, to help them make the next stage um in their career and help them move on to the leadership level. So thank you so much for joining me today. It's a real pleasure to chat with you. You've had such a varied career I know we we worked out, we worked for one of the big four at the same time but really interesting and to learn a little bit more about you and what's brought you here now, because I know you run your own company, so maybe what? What's been your career journey like so far?
Speaker 2:yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's so nice to speak to someone from our past life. Um, yeah, what brought me here? I've always been really, really obsessed with truth, the pursuit of what I perceive to be truth, and also the complexity of human nature and how to tap into human potential. It blows my mind how complex we are, how there's so many different aspects and facets that goes on inside ourselves, that's pretty invisible, and nobody ever focuses on or sees and yet determines so many of the decisions and the structures and the cities and the worlds and the nations and the leaders that we live in today that make up our lives. So really, it's been this underlying thread that's carved out my journey. I'm right now in Morocco.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah, I was going to say right now.
Speaker 2:I've come home to visit family because I was in Latin America and the US most of this year, but I grew up here. I'm from Morocco and I moved to the UK in 2012. I was there. I was in London for eight years and the UK for about 11. And a large part of that was my big four experience. So that formed the first part of my career, and I think I would have been an entrepreneur sooner if I didn't need sponsorship from a big corporate company in order to stay and then visa sponsorship yeah yeah, I needed.
Speaker 2:I needed a British passport, basically to be able to live as a normal, free human in the world. But it ended up being such a blessing in disguise to know that I kind of had to be loyal and stay within one company because it made me completely create my role and lead a pretty unconventional path within and have a level of impact and meet opportunities that I don't know I would have come across had.
Speaker 2:I not started with a platform as global and as solid as Deloitte. So it was amazing and it was difficult too, because I refused to. You know a lot of consulting this isn't to put Deloitte under the bus at all, but a lot of consulting is socially useless and you know it's. It's created to provide transactional, marginal, political, incremental change, and I've always been very deeply passionate about transformational change with sustainable impact. So I've had to find the right people to be able to make sure that my energy was being deployed in the right way.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, that was a big part of my career and I, honestly, for a long time, I had a business partner in Deloitte and we thought we were going to make that our long-term vehicle. But it was clear that the level, the pace at which I was developing and my hunger for exploration and curiosity meant that I was breaking one glass ceiling after another and I couldn't have any limits or restrictions within the environment that I operated within. So I think the entrepreneurial path was pretty inevitable ultimately, and, yeah, it's definitely challenging at times, but it's completely changed my life and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I always find it so brave, though, because you chose to leave Deloitte, didn't you? You left obviously a well-paid job, and you took a leave for Fay. Talk us through that process. Were you frightened to do?
Speaker 2:that you know, I went through a phase because I think there was a part of me that was extremely assured and confident and playing at very high levels and just making the assumptions that it would be the same once I went on my own, because I was focused on the craft rather than the business building elements and it was just a vocation that I was pursuing, a bit like an obsessed artist, you know, and everything else felt like a distraction. And it was really easy to do that when I wasn't responsible for the business building elements protected by the firm. So I think I was a bit delusional, and when I was delusional I wasn't scared at all, I just thought that it was just going to make everything easier and better. And I remember, after a workshop that I led for an executive leasing team in the UK, I got very sick with COVID the day after and it was about the period where I was beginning to think of transitioning out and wondering whether I should completely leap and then figure it out or transition slower and, you know like, do it in a more gradual way.
Speaker 2:And I completely went through one of my biggest contractions actually even existentially, with this illness, because I ended up not being able to do anything or get out of bed.
Speaker 2:Like you know, I'm someone who's got a lot of energy and able to, just, you know, live multiple people's lives in one day and suddenly I couldn't even look after myself, like I couldn't even feed myself. Getting up was a lot of effort and yet you know, so aware those 10 days in bed, or 12 days or however long it was that I was safe because my setup right Like my bills, my apartment in London at the time, my, my work, my teams, right Like none of those things relied on my health or me bringing food on the table and I was going to get paid for that and I was going to get paid at the end of the month. And it made me freak out because I was like, oh my gosh, maybe, maybe I don't know what it takes to do this on my own. What if this happens and I'm running my own business? What happens then? It just has to finish.
Speaker 1:You know, stop and pause.
Speaker 2:Really well, you're pulling it, yeah and that really um humbled me moment and it kind of crushed my dreams of changing the world and my vision for what to do, because I was like, oh gosh, I'm not going to be able to do it in the way that I'd been imagining this entire time. And I, honestly, I went through my first depression which, honestly, up until that moment, felt completely unrelatable to me, and the way I perceive it now is really depression. Is your soul calling to come home? Right, it was like, oh, we've been patient, but now you're giving up on your dreams. No way, like we're taking all of your life force away. That's how it really felt, and as soon as I started connecting to possibilities again, I got all my energy back. So that was really interesting.
Speaker 2:But the way I navigated, that really was realizing that I had a lot of thoughts that weren't real, that were protecting me, and so it was really a gift because it helped me see things for what it was and I shifted from you know what, instead of like completely writing the systems and the broken systems of the world and raising the consciousness of all the leadership teams and being a case study for all the not-for-profits in the world, like these grand visions that I had. I was like you know what? I'm going to move to Costa Rica and I could teach yoga. And I was like I'm going to move to the surf shack and I'm going to be in nature. And I was like becoming a bit allergic to the city and consumption and just hustle and the pace. And I was like I I'm just going to find free myself and create the spaciousness there and create something, maybe smaller than I had, but even that, like that renunciation, brought me more freedom.
Speaker 2:So I was like let's park the change the world, let's just look after me right and give me what I need, and we can make that work, no matter what happens. You know, whether it's this big grand thing or this tiny thing, I'll be able to. I trusted myself that I could respond and was resourceful enough to create the life that I wanted to live. And that's what happened. And as soon as I went all in, um and I mean honestly, it was beyond my wildest dreams because within the first six months I had 3x my annual income um at Deloitte and I wasn't working that hard, I was actually traveling and you're probably I mean knowing you're probably.
Speaker 1:You know you weren't, you were definitely weren't on minimum wage at Deloitte, so you must have done really well yeah, which was so for me, for that version of me, that wasn't that bed sick with COVID.
Speaker 2:That was the most unbelievable outcome that we didn't even expect to get at that point and it was really beautiful because it's like, okay, this is my life now and you know, as an entrepreneur, I'm sure you know there is no certainty and even though you can create systematic processes and some sorts of predictability, things are always moving and changing. And to me that's a lot more real Because you're, you're confronted, you've got skin in the game, you're not. You're not like. I work with entrepreneurs and I work with corporate executives and I can tell you that the embodiment level of entrepreneurs are typically much greater than that of the corporate executives, because the executives will make decisions on war or peace and healthcare and lives and deaths, but at the end of the day, they're in the same situation I was when I was in corporate, which was their children and their families aren't risking anything their roles.
Speaker 2:Sometimes there might be some risks there, but they're pretty safe, even though they're making decisions that are affecting lots of people. But when you're an entrepreneur, the decision affects you all the time, you know. So you have to move at the pace that your nervous system can handle it, and that's been a total game changer. And so as soon as Camellia, the healer or coach, or the freedom box got ticked, I had the capacity to bring in the visionary CEO right Like revolutionary, visionary part of me back, and then we started to grow again and basically risked everything, but I had developed the tools and the confidence to know that, you know, if I lose it all again, I know how how to, I know how to start. So I I've almost kind of created the safety net within who I am instead of the external reality that matched and to me that's been really really priceless and and how I move, yeah, do you know that you I was listening to a podcast you might, you may or may not know.
Speaker 1:She's called Jenna Kuchta and she does the gold digger podcast, which is huge in America. It's a very good podcast and I remember she was saying that a lot of people are really frightened to take their foot off the gas because they're worried that once they lose that momentum in whatever they're doing, they'll never get it back. But actually it's having that confidence to know you know how to put your foot on the gas and how to get things going and therefore you can take it off when you need to take it off.
Speaker 2:and do you know I have so much admiration? Um, there's a lot of people I'm close to in the entrepreneurial world who they've built incredibly successful business. I mean, in fact, I've recently done this I'm just still processing that I've done this but I built a multi-six figure private practice right, and I could have just continued to do that. It was very high end, one-to-one, top 1% of society unlocking potential. I had all the spaciousness in the world. We had a sales engine that worked. I was attracting dream clients and I could have just done that for the world. We had a sales engine that worked. I was attracting dream clients and I could have just done that for the next 10 years.
Speaker 2:Right, I was doing what I loved, it was working, and instead I burned that to the ground, right, and took a huge amount of risk, and we've developed something completely different and to me, I don't see it as a completely different and to me, I don't see it as a pivot. I see it as an extension and a deepening. But I have other people in the space who they've built incredibly successful you know, structures and empires that don't even require them anymore in many ways, and yet they've also started over and burned those things because it was no longer aligned with how they wanted, or because getting to that place shifted their perceptions of who they were and they had different desires. And I think it's a radical act of self-care. Right to do that, because it's like it's a continuous risking of what's safe, because life is so fluid and moving and I think as an entrepreneur, I'm having to do that at a much greater frequency than I used to when I was employed, living in the city. Right, because you don't really take that much risk. In fact, everything is structured so that you just move within safe confines but you're not really alive, you're not really discovering who you are, you're not really playing at your edges, you're not really questioning, unless you're very, very deliberate about it, and that's. That's not how I want to live. Right, I know that I'm gonna have a million lives. I like, I know at this point in time that this is the best I got and the best hand I can play.
Speaker 2:And you need, you know, to when we go into trance and completely access these like states where we wake up our unconscious mind and we bliss out and it feels like we're on drugs, except that we're not, we're meditating and everything is open, right, it feels like, oh well, well, there's infinite possibilities. And how do you get anything done? So the idea isn't to just, you know, relax and open and not create. It's really knowing that everything is open and then choosing to fix some parameters that aren't fixed for a season in order to move, and then to be fluid with that, to hold it lightly, right, because it can. It's going to change. That's what's guaranteed is it's going to change again and again and again. So can you cope with that? You know?
Speaker 1:how do you work with clients, and so what sort of people do you work with and how do you support them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. I mostly work with CEOs, c-level executive leaders or entrepreneurs that want to create something really, really, really big reasons. The entrepreneurs typically come to me because they want to grow faster, but they want to do it in a way that doesn't involve so much suffering and so much sacrifice and that they know there's there's a more sustainable way to explode, um, that where that makes them feel better, that makes them makes things feel easy, that makes them happier, that makes them free. Right then the super masculine tide. There's one way, tunnel vision force, and that kind of disconnects you from your environment and it's pretty isolating.
Speaker 2:The executives come to me either because they want to really, um, bring a vision to life, um, through their organization and you know, at a cultural level, at a, at a legacy and societal level, um, or because they're in transition, so that can look like, oh, they're, their kids are leaving to college and they're, um, they have a last act. Or they're like a few years away from retirement and it's like, okay, well, now we identify. Or they hate what they do and they want to leave and they're looking to become entrepreneurs. So some kind of big external transition. And it's kind of necessary because, like, the entrepreneurs are transitioning in terms of an up level, the executives either a deepening, an expansion or a shift, but they all, they all are going through big things in their lives that require some kind of identity change and the level of work, even though there is some business strategy involved I'm not a business coach right, it's very, very deep identity work that we do using all sorts of tools from the Western world.
Speaker 2:You know from sciences and you know performance, economics and positive psych and all sorts of like hypnotherapy, really like a lot of um, the best of the fields that has to offer in terms of our understanding of our makeup and our brains and who we are and habits and performance, but more and more and more huge influence with eastern traditions and lineages from you you know lineage of sorcerers in Mexico and the whole Carlos Castaneda school to generative trance, where you know even Stephen Gilligan who's the founder of trance. He comes from the science world but if you go to any of his trainings, like it's all psychotherapists, you can tell that it's much more than that and it's it's really working with the spiritual or the invisible force that really goes beyond our ability to perceive and the short duration of our lives in order to tap into. You know, the scientists call it flow states, but there's just so much there um to explore and for people who want to live meaningful lives and do something with it, um it's it's necessary.
Speaker 1:You need to go there how did you get into this? Is this something you started doing then at Deloitte, or were you? Were you doing it after or were you doing like when you started? How did you get involved?
Speaker 2:with it? Great question. I used to be super secular, non-believer, biggest skeptic, partly because I grew up in Morocco and I felt there was a lot of hypocrisy in some of the Muslim practices and I didn't understand it very well. I'm actually reconnecting to my roots now, so I just rejected religion and I was like religion's a big human construct, not interested, not for me.
Speaker 2:I'm a super cognitive person that thinks I didn't know how to feel when I started here, like I, I'm my biggest guinea pig by the way, um and as we were developing this work through Deloitte, um and creating I, there came a point where I realized there were a lot of things inside me that I was deeply uncomfortable about and scared of.
Speaker 2:And it wasn't huge big crazy things for me, like those came after I was on the path, but it was like, oh, I'm really insecure about my appearance, like I couldn't leave the house without makeup at the time and it's like that's so weird, you know, like I wouldn't want people to see me without having this like perfection mask or being put together, you know.
Speaker 2:Or it's like I had all these things with a family member and, you know, a parent of mine, and it's like they they were, they were mirroring, really, behaviors that were so triggering to me and I realized it's not them, it's because it's touching places in me that I haven't integrated, but I didn't like I didn't. There was so much resistance. It's like shadow work, right, but I was like I did not want to look at that and it's like this is like the truth seeker and the why child that's obsessed and been like peeling every layer of the onion and I was like, huh, that's really interesting, like lots of little things like that and I. A few things happened. I was going through a breakup and I started volunteering. I went to Buddhist center in Bethnal Green in London at the time and I signed up to one of their courses and I started meditating and the thing I loved about Buddhism that was my entry.
Speaker 1:Because you don't. So you entered back into religion, I guess Into spirituality.
Speaker 2:I would say, yeah, into spirituality. Because they, the Buddhists, say you don't have to believe anything other than your own experience. Versus here are 12 commandments and the law of you know, and it's like, okay, cool, so I can just experiment, right. So that worked with my scientific mind and as I grew that and I hired my first therapist at that point too so I started really consciously doing inner work and development work. You know, before I would call it personal development. Now it's like, okay, energy work ends, energy work begins where personal development ends. It's no longer about self-improvement, it's about tracking the energy and proper shamanism, like blow yourself open and heal. But that's how it started.
Speaker 2:And I, you know, when you experience certain things, like you know, sometimes you hear stories. They don't connect with you, but after a few unexplainable experiences, you, you get curious, you know, and that's that's the journey I'm still on and it's the most interesting, like consciousness and the experiment of our consciousness, like no one understands. It's the most interesting, like consciousness and the experiment of our consciousness, like no one understands it, you know, like no one can agree, and it's like we have it at our disposal. So it's, it's my greatest delight and vocation to kind of work with mine. You know and and see what the realms of possibilities are, and it's completely changed my life, this work. So, yeah, the entry was Buddhism, but it's taken a life of its own, really and it's having a huge impact on my business and the work that I do in ways that, honestly, I didn't sign up for. I've surrendered to.
Speaker 1:What did you want then when you first started the business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you a story. I don't think I've ever shared this publicly. I had a Swedish like, incredibly successful private client who, you know, I was helping him grow his businesses. He was the board on a number of companies and he was also going through a very challenging time in his marriage. He had two children and so 50% of our container ended up being around his personal life and his relationship and he ended up getting a divorce and, you know, beautiful co-parenting.
Speaker 2:It was a beautiful transition in the way that he navigated it, um, but there were all these um, emotional and spiritual and physiological blocks in his body where he hadn't had sex with his wife in a while and when he then started having sex again after he left her um wasn't able to ejaculate at all. Right, and like, he just assumed that it's because he was taking these meds or you know, whatever, whatever, and after one session together using some of these less conventional tools, right, realized the source of it was control, right? So, and it's like it's one thing to be in therapy and to know that you do something. You know, it's like I knew I was a perfectionist, I knew I was a control freak, but going to therapy didn't help me stop being those things right doing energy work, hiring a coach, like doing somatic work, joining containers, where people were using the body and energy to move things. That helped me change right. That helped me create new neural pathways, new patterns of behaviors. It extended my range in ways that just because I understand I'm doing something doesn't mean that it solves it. And so within one session I could feel we kind of coded type of release, release in his brain, like a type of surrender that was held by his nervous system, and it's like previously it's like we can't go there, it's not safe, you know, it's outside your range of operation.
Speaker 2:And it's like through that session we kind of anchored in his body that that was okay. And three hours later he messages me and he's like it's been 40 years, you're the best sex therapist ever. And I flipped. I was like I felt really mixed about that text. I was really happy for him and I kind of was like, wow, this stuff's really powerful, because one session's not much right to.
Speaker 2:On zoom, yeah, I was in California, he was in Sweden, um, but. But I was like damn, um, I'm not a sex therapist. This guy is insane, yeah, and it's like I'm not even a relationship coach, just helped him with his marriage because and it's like I had all these things in my head and these fears that I was turning into this weird, deep, unrelatable, right, like just human doing all sorts of unconventional things. And it's this is where the online brand came in, because I think what I was doing for all of last year was owning it to myself. Yeah, right, by being public with it, because I was not the most comfortable with all of that. And now, like you know, I'll I own my witch, I go on plant medicine retreats and it's, it's, it's, it's honestly the the greatest joy. So, yeah, it takes a while, you know, even as we go through these identity shifts, to to get comfortable with them.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of it sounds like you're helping people release things that they've held on to. You know pain and anxiety, or maybe that sense of who they should be and it's actually helping them. Do you feel like that it's helping people release or?
Speaker 2:definitely a part of it. Like we're we all. The one thing we have in common as human beings is we suffer. There's suffering in the condition of being human, so I use a lot of trauma informed tools, so there's a lot of healing that takes place in my containers, but it's. There's also a lot of growth. There's a lot of presence. There's a lot of growth, there's a lot of presence. There's a lot of creation, right, but not for the sake of just growing, right. It's like growth in a way that's going to contribute. It's really raising the collective consciousness of someone and of everyone they come in contact with as a result of that, which is why I love to work with leaders, because typically they're doers in the world and they're active, and they have teams and families and things that they want to birth. So it's helping them birth more and even bigger than they thought, but in a way that benefits everybody without you know a lot of the entrepreneurs I meet, for example, even the executives.
Speaker 2:They're, they're completely attached and their self worth is attached to who they are. That's how they define themselves, and so it's like they're moving from a place of lack. They're moving. Their engine is fear that they're gonna lose their sense of masculinity. Or you know femininity and they're gonna lose themselves if of masculinity. Or you know femininity and they're they're gonna lose themselves if they lose these things that they don't have and that might be like an attractive woman in their life, or that might be you know the ceo position, or that might be a bank account number you know wealth.
Speaker 2:Right, and I help, and they think that they need that to keep progressing. So what happens is they come in, we remove that and I should like in a safe way. We give them lots of ways that they can go from a place of desire and choice, because it's fun to want if you don't need to right. And so I help them. I support them in figuring out what they actually would create. Start to create that. I support them in figuring out what they actually would create, start to create that, and then we remove that unhealthy, unnecessary fuel that actually keeps them small and keeps them stuck and trapped. It's like you're. It doesn't matter how successful you are, you're kind of in a cage if you're governed by any kind of external outcome, and every time the external outcomes 10x. So it's like the biggest myth, I find, from a belief perspective, that you're gonna lose out if you let go of these things.
Speaker 1:You know it's like what got you here isn't gonna get you there, and I like the one of you always to put as well, I see, slow down to speed up. Yeah, what do you mean by that? And I love it.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's another one of these like myths to debunk, because we we're so convinced that the way forward is to do more and to do it faster, and it no, it's doing it better. You know, and I was talking to you before we started, recording about 10x is better than 2x. And you know, richard Branson did this when he had this revolutionary idea at the time that he wanted to put screens at the back of airplanes. Right, it's like, oh, entertainment, we should have TVs on planes, you know, and it's like, oh, cool, okay. And he applied for this loan in order to, you know, get 20 aircraft staffed with TVs. And it kept getting rejected. They wouldn't lend him the money. They're like, no, it's not going to work. Why would we make the service better? People just want to get from A to B. Go away, we're not giving you the money. And he persisted and no bank would give him the loan. And what he did instead is he applied for a loan 10 times more and he said I want to buy 20 planes for commercial venture. And he got the loan. And then they were his planes and he installed the TVs. And now we have TVs at the back of every plane. And that's, he would have never gotten there by doing more.
Speaker 2:When we're moving so fast, even physiologically, these things happen in our body, where we're in a stress response, right, and so we miss out on opportunities. We're not as creative, we're not as resourced, we don't enjoy the process as much, we're not in an energy of fun and pleasure and what if, and even better and even more, and so we're kind of ending up like it's this rat race to the bottom of execution and it's exhausting, and then you hit burnout, and then you kind of take time off and you come back and excuse me, it's really overwhelming and it's so easy to fall into the trap of that because there's limited time and there's so much to do and it's busy people, and so what I'm finding in my own experience with all my clients is we are our best investment, right. We are the asset. We are the asset to protect. We're not something that we need to use. We're not loading ourselves up like we're sheep and mules and need to carry things Right.
Speaker 2:It's like how can I optimize my state? That's number one, Right, and so slowing down is one way to do that, but there's so many others. It's like you know, how do you eat, how do you make space for sleep? How, like the really getting the basics right. And then not just the physical and emotional basics, but the you know the, the deeper basics too, of you know.
Speaker 2:If you've got a relationship, that's like breaking down right. If you're like in conflict a lot of the time, if you're, if you got anger issues, if you're like purging your own trauma on your leaders, cause you're an asshole and you have no idea, cause you never learned, cause your parents treated you that way, right, like all those things are contaminating your energy and they're a huge bottleneck in your business. They're a huge bottleneck in your relationships. They're a huge bottleneck on your peace right and your ability to unlock and be the full avatar potential of what you want to do in your life. So people think that slowing down is gonna make them achieve the outcomes they want to achieve less fast. Um, but it's just not. It's, it's, it's, it's not true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. I don't even know that Rachel Branson story. I'm gonna be telling everybody that. What a great story. I've heard a lot of things that he said, but that was a really good one. And before we hit record, I wanted to talk to you about the zone of genius, because you mentioned that and I think a lot of people probably fall into a job. There's maybe parental expectations, there may be expectations at school, and are they working in their zone of genius and you know? If they're not, how do you find you know what? How do you identify what is your zone of genius?
Speaker 2:yeah, um, I mean, my zone of genius is when I'm helping, when I'm involved in human potential becoming more right, like it's like if I'm helping you be better, so obviously, like there's like layers removed, but I can see if I, for example, create a process like, say, sales process in my business, that doesn't work, I feel out of alignment because I feel like that's not contributed, whereas if I'm coaching somebody or if I'm hosting a retreat or if I'm designing a workshop, I don't care that it works or doesn't work, because it's getting in front of people and it's touching them, and so I feel like I'm in my purpose and this is what I'm here to do. This is why I was put on this earth, this is what I'm good at, this is what makes me feel like nothing else matters and there's nothing I'd rather do. So I think you know your your zone of genius is is almost like an extension of meaningful work, right, and it's like, okay, what's something that you're incredibly competent at right, something that you deeply enjoy and makes time stop and makes you come alive, and something that really like triggers you. You know it's like you can't stay away from it very long, or that you're very, very passionate about and if you can have something like that in your day to day and your work, it's going to be great. And I'm not saying you know like a lot of people are like, follow your passion. It's like you know like a lot of people are like follow your passion. It's like you know I'm so passionate about yoga.
Speaker 2:Yoga is one of the vehicles I use to explore consciousness. It's one of the vehicles that's helped me align my breath to my body, to my mind, and I used to have the craziest mind and I thought, you know, in that contraction period, maybe I should just become a yoga teacher, right? And I considered that for a little bit and I realized the way the economics of yoga were set up, the way my competence and how skilled I was. I love practicing yoga, I love receiving it, it's my hobby, I'll do it, I can teach it sometimes. But I could see that aligning my whole business to become a yoga teacher or create a yoga business was going to make me fall out of love with that. So I'm not saying just take something that you love and do that right, like business is required in business right, and you need to know that if you're following the entrepreneurial path in any way, but make sure that you're designing it in a way that you love. Like I could have created a coaching business where you know we had teams of coaches and I recruited other people. But the offers I have set up I do most of the delivery because I want to, because I love it, and I am actually streamlining the business part. I don't mind doing them, but I could not do them and it wouldn't affect me so much either, right? So I think it's really important to anything that you're not obsessed with and you're not extraordinary at and that you don't really love. You either work through so that you can then delegate, right. Or you ask yourself, you know, if you're out of.
Speaker 2:I know so many people who their job's just a job, right, and it's like that's fine. Some people are genuinely fine with that, so they minimize the hours that they work, they use it to pay the bills and then they try and maximize their life outside that, but that's still a huge proportion of their lives and a lot of people I meet aren't actually happy about that. So they tell me they're looking for something else or they want, you know, and it's like really consciously exploring what you like consciously exploring what you're good at, surrounding yourself by people who you know are in that yourself, by people who you know are in that energy. Because I think when we're in the wrong environments we feel abnormal for wanting or desiring that and it's like our birthright to be alive and to play and to explore and to be curious. So, yeah, I think finding that alignment and there's going to be, you know, as we move through life, motherhood I know you work with a lot of mothers like motherhood is a huge identity shift.
Speaker 2:You know you're bringing life into the world. Everything changes postpartum. Like you have to understand that your zone of genius is going to evolve with you as you shift. So it's not like it's a're not constrained by it, but you want to have that fire in in your day-to-day. Otherwise what's the point of being?
Speaker 1:here, absolutely so. Have you got any tips, before we wrap this up, of how people can maybe just feel a little bit more aligned in you know who they are and the choices they make on a day-to-day basis?
Speaker 2:yeah, I would say get to know yourself. Like invest heavily in getting to know yourself. And that can look like sitting in silence for 10 minutes a day, right and and watching your thoughts and watching your responses and watching your triggers and watching what pops out and tracking your ideas. You know, like get curious about your energy, get curious about your potential. Like what would you do if you were living always aware with the fact that you're dying in every moment? You know this could be like we're, we're here for a very short blip, you know. And it's like what would you do if you weren't afraid? And how can you start? Tiny, tiny, tiny steps, right.
Speaker 2:Experiments, it's like no stakes, if they don't go well, that's fine, right, but beginning to implement things to show you there are different possibilities, like you could live your life so many different ways. So if you feel like you're stuck in one, how can you really use these tools that you have within you? And you know you can get support. There's so many podcasts. We talked about a few here. You know, joining a mastermind, going on a retreat, a yoga studio, hiring a coach all those things, like you know we can.
Speaker 2:Healing and community has been a big thing for me, and like having a support system and network of people who, because we're we, what I've learned is we will follow the path of least resistance, and so if the pain of change is greater than where we're at, we're not going to do anything. So sometimes you have to, you have to commit yourself to make sure that you move if that's what you want. So, yeah, be deliberate with your life, like you're not going to have another one like this one, you know, like, make the most of it well, I love that.
Speaker 1:I feel like that. I think I don't know if you felt like this. I think Covid definitely changed how I viewed life and you realize it is so fragile and it is short and you never know no one knows really what's around the corner. So actually you know you've got to make the most of every day. So thank you so much. I hope we've you know we've ended this episode on such a positive note. How can people find you and connect with you and maybe learn more about you and your services?
Speaker 2:yeah, um, follow me on linkedin um and if you dm me, the club. We've just launched a really accessible um membership and I'm giving everybody a free month in there. So if you guys want to experience some of these dates or some of the work, we'll be very happy to welcome you into that that sounds really good.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for all the links in the show notes. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening to another episode of the work it like a mom podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe, and don't forget to share the link with a friend. If you're on LinkedIn, please send me a connection request at Elizabeth Willett and let me know your thoughts on this week's episode. You can also follow my recruitment site Investing in Women on LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram. Until next time, keep on chasing your biggest dreams.