Women's Empowerment Podcast

In the first paragraph of his book The motivation manifesto Brendon Burchard asks a question - why having being endowed with the courageous heart of a lion do we live as mice? This is a very profound question to ask. One of the ways we can lean into this question and find out why we may be living like a mouse as opposed to like a lion is to find out which dial our mindset is set on is it set on a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. Because our actions are fueled by that that mindset. Some of those actions are conscious but most are unconscious. To be conscious is to be aware of what is motivating you to do what you do. To be unconscious is to not realise what is fuelling your actions. Most of what you do is fuelled from this unconscious place which is home to the habitual patterns you run on, I will speak to that more later. The unconscious is also where you store the parts of yourself that you disassociated from in order to fit in and feel like you belong.

As humans, we all strive for, a sense of belonging, a sense of belief in ourselves and others, a feeling of security and safety, and connection with others. When these needs are met we will then be able to develop personal skills like boundary building, becoming assertive, and be able to be emotionally aware, and not let stress overtake us. With these building blocks, we can then thrive in our leadership role

Our comfort zone is our safe place. It's fuelled by the things we do automatically that feel safe to us. If you have ever tried to do something outside of your comfort zone you might know that feeling you get when you think to yourself “ok that's me done, I need to stop here, it isn't feeling good or safe anymore”. Sometimes though we don't hear the self-talk, we just know unconsciously stop ourselves from going any further and this may be in relation to applying for a new job, looking for a different type of relationship or whatever. It's as if we go to the edge of the comfort zone and there's something there that stops us from going any further. But it is as we know and you have probably heard before that outside our comfort zone lies our potential. So let's explore this further.

On this episode of the podcast we are talking about beauty and the fact that ,,,, and I will quote our guest today Sharon D Founder of Irelands Got Curves who says Beauty isn't a size and size doesn't define you. Sharon you are welcome to the podcast. I want to talk to you about this topic of what defines us and how we can let that get a little ashew.

Nicola is a passionate advocate for empowering women to take proactive steps to optimise their physical and mental health during this stage of our lives. The more clarity we have the more we will be able to be actively involved in our own healthcare decisions armed with the correct information. A very informative chat with Nicola whose background is in nursing, education and mental health.

The tale of the Little Mermaid is a typical heroine's quest. Although Ariel, the Little Mermaid seems to have it all, she comes from a beautiful place, has the love of her father and sisters and grandmother she yearns for something more. Something outside of what she has. She is blessed with many things in her life; she has the most beautiful voice in her kingdom, she is the most beautiful dancer and her beauty is astounding. However, she doesn't feel whole. She desperately wants to grow a pair of legs like the humans she hears about and to have new experiences and to experience love. However, it is forbidden for her as a mermaid to interact with humans. Her yearning itches away at Ariel until, against the wishes of her family and friends she sets off on her quest. In order to do this, she has had to make a huge sacrifice. She goes to the dark witch who takes her voice from her in return for a potion that will change her mermaid tale into a pair of legs. The dark witch warns her that it won't be easy and that she will suffer excruciating pain in her legs when she walks. And true to what she has been told what follows for Ariel is a series of trials and challenges. Without her voice she cannot tell the handsome prince she has fallen in love with that it was she who in fact had saved him from drowning. Instead, she has to watch as he falls in love with a beautiful girl who was the first woman he saw when he was washed up on the beach where Ariel had left him. He in fact believes it was this girl who saved him. He does fall in love for Ariel but it is more of a sisterly nature and when he finally meets the girl he remembers seeing on the beach he marries her. Because Ariel has lost the challenge of making a human man fall in love and marry her she is destined to die on the prince's wedding day. Hearing about her demise her sisters visit the dark witch and ask for something to save her. The dark witch gives them a knife to give to Ariel. Ariel is faced with a choice; kill the prince and save herself or die (mermaids don't have immortal souls). She cannot bring herself to kill the prince and instead decides to forfeit her own life. On seeing her brave deeds of first saving the prince and not killing him to save herself she is taken by the elements of the air. There she gets her voice back and has the opportunity to become a immortal soul by doing good deeds for 300 years (with a few extra few deeds she can reduce the number of years!). What lessons can we learn from the Little Mermaid. She was courageous and in the end her quest brought her closer to what she wanted an immortal soul or the hope of it.

In this episode of the podcast, I discuss living in alignment with our core values with Business Owner and Coach Gill Caroll. Gill takes us on a journey of exploration around tuning into our values via our feelings. When we show up in our life coming from a place of being aligned with what brings us contentment and joy we will be more in flow with our life.

Our belief system defines how we see the world and gives us the ability to process what happens around us. If we didn’t have a belief system, we wouldn’t know how to process our reactions to all the things that happen to us on a daily basis. Our belief system is like the cookies in our browser enabling us to sort through things faster and based on our past behaviours. Our beliefs start to form from a young and are based on the way we perceive our life and its surroundings. We form beliefs about everything; how safe we feel; how loved we feel; how emotional we feel; how supported we feel etc. We can hold either good or bad beliefs about ourselves, when they stop us reaching our full potential we call them limiting beliefs. This limiting beliefs stack on top of each other and form our inner glass ceiling that keep us well and truly stuck where we are until we decide to change them.

I speak with Mel Murphy, Separation and Divorce Coach about the importance of support during these stressful times. Mel gives us some practical advice and NLP techniques for managing our lives during these times.

On this episode I speak with Kerri Hummingbird, No. 1 Best Selling Author of "The Second Wave: Transcending the Human Drama" and the award-winning best-selling book "Awakening To Me: One Woman’s Journey To Self Love." I speak with Kerri about the mother's wound and how it affects us on so many levels. Oftentimes it is when parenting our own children that our mother wounds get triggered and come up for healing.

One definition of the saying “you can’t fit a square peg into a round hole” says that it describes the unusual individualist who could not fit into a niche of their society. Now here my friends in my opinion is where the problem lies. It is the use of the word “unusual” which when we are talking about a person could be better described as “unique” individual. At the end of the day we are all unique and we are all individual. So here’s my journey through this exact problem.

A journey to living a fulfilled life happens when you honour your own values and you live by them. When you are incongruent with your values you may be living someone else’s life and you may form bad habits or become lost in trying to find yourself. Understanding what you value is less about looking outside and wondering what you should value, or what society says you should value, looking at what everyone else is doing and thinking this is what therefore you should do. Understanding your value system is an inside, personal job that is best done on your own or with the help of a professional who has no agenda, instead someone who holds space for you to help you tease out the information for yourself.

The definition of resolution is the act of solving a conflict. However, we often focus on what we cannot change and stick to that story. In this podcast, I look at some common themes or conflicts that keep you stuck in a rut or feeling overwhelmed and give you ways of looking at the conflict differently.

Instead of finding a way to quieten or banish the inner critic I want to show you four ways to embrace it. Why? Because your inner critic is a part of you. It’s the part of you that developed beliefs from your perceptions of your life’s challenges. And although challenges cause tension, without tension there is no growth. Your inner critic points you to your soul growth, to your inner north star, your full potential. When you lean into the inner critic you find it’s wisdom and you uncover your power.

I want to share something tangible with you now, something that you can do in the present moment that will bring you from where you are now, to where you want to be. This step is vital. It takes courage to visit something that may be painful for you, and you may struggle with admitting your vulnerabilities even to yourself. It is not a blaming or shaming yourself exercise. What it is, is an exercise to take the first step, even if it is only a baby step, it is a step all the same.

There are times when not taking it personally is the best advice we can take. But there are also times when it's essential to see what is being triggered in you that is causing you to take something personally in the first place. If you neglect to take this step, then what is being triggered is being kept in the shadow, so to speak, you are brushing it under the carpet. But things that are kept in the shadow or brushed under the carpet and still there.

I was asked a question by another coach recently about my opinion around whether we are controlled by fate, destiny or other external events as opposed to feeling like our own behaviours or actions determine our results. It got me thinking and I decided to share my views on the topic here at my podcast. I believe in both. I think there are definitely things in our life that are destined for us, and on the other hand we have a choice of what actions we can take. I believe we are born with strengths in some areas of our life which, if we follow them we will excel at.

The main protagonist in my yet unpublished novel is an example of how we can become empowered by healing the wounded and dissociated parts of ourselves. It’s also a good insight into how we can be leading our life feeling like we have it all under control until we realise we are in fact the one that is being controlled and have no control at al. Something happens that rocks our life and the very foundation on which our beliefs are based upon. We find out if those foundations are solid enough to support the stories we tell ourselves about our life. If they are not solid, no matter how many excuses we make or give to ourselves or the world they will crumble and fall. Mary, she is called, for now, used control and power as her default. She is fiercely independent and a perfectionist.

At times, our perception of an event may be totally untrue, but our mind distorts the truth to match our beliefs. It is only when we have an AHA moment or a moment of revelation that we realise the real truth, the truth that has been hidden from our consciousness For example you may attend a conference and hear something and have one of these AHA or revelation moments. This is when you see something from a different perspective. It is one thing of course to have a revelation but it’s another thing to allow it seep into our psyche and change our perception forever, if that change is better for us. Otherwise we will slip back into our old ways and become closed minded. When we are closed minded, we limit ourselves.

Gaslighting is another form of bullying and the gaslighter is likely trying to get one up on you from their own warped sense of their story. It can of course make you feel like you are losing your marbles and your self-worth will take a bashing and that is ultimately what the gaslighter wants, you to be perceived as weaker than them and to be weaker than them. You will see the pattern of power over emerging as you start to look at your individual relationship dynamic.

When you unravel the unconscious patterns that weave through all the stories you tell yourself you begin to see the circumstances you find yourself from a different perspective. And, of course we all have these stories, its part of our life to realise them and to have the opportunity to make better stories. This may require you to be confident enough to grow your courage muscle, to release shame and guilt that quite frankly may not even be yours to carry anyway.

In order for us to effect change and to create a secure foundation, it’s crucial for us to go through the process of accepting the stories that we hold. We need to acknowledge them, we need to be present to them, we need to mourn them and the loss that we feel around them. Ultimately for true healing we want to go forward with a different story around our foundational issues of trust, around safety and around our entitlement to be here in this world and to have what we need in order to survive. If you want more information about changing your life stories you can visit my corner of the web www.celticsoulessence.com.

Our relationships are what challenge us most in our lives and allow us real growth whether these relationships are with our parents, our siblings, our lovers or our children. It is said that we hurt the ones we love the most. And the reason we do this is because of the invisible “space” we know is there for us to be ourselves, to be vulnerable and to just be with those closest to us.

When it comes to looking out for others especially those closest to us caring comes naturally for most of us. So why doesn’t that follow on to how we care for ourselves? Are we hardwired with the missing link to that part of the brain? When I coach women one of the areas I cover are her values and time and time again I see how those value systems are totally cross wired. We are often plugged into someone else’s value system. Imagine how that sounds when we say it out loud, it almost seems impossible. Today I want to talk about self-talk as an element of self-care and invite you to challenge yourself. Here is how it could go.

For the most part vulnerability can get us breaking into a sweat and saying “Me, no I don’t do vulnerability”! Maybe that is because the first definition you get when you look it up says that “it is a fear of being attacked either physically or emotionally”. And of course, none of us want that as it taps into our basic fear around our survival. Feeling safe is a non-negotiable need. The kind of vulnerability I am speaking to is the one that makes us fear other people really seeing us, really knowing us, or really hearing us. We put on masks to hide our real selves in order to appear somehow different to who we really are. Often, we don’t realise we do it. But often times we do and choose to do it anyway. It comes down to how we value ourselves. We might not feel good enough, bright enough, thin enough, educated enough or whatever enough.

Becoming self-aware is a huge topic and there are many ways you can work on it. One I find extremely beneficial is to become emotionally aware. When you are emotionally aware you have a tool that allows you to figure out where you are holding onto limiting beliefs around something. You will be able to take lessons from life situations as they arise.

I speak with Bibi Baskin one of lreland’s most loved TV broadcasters. Bibi has gone from broadcasting to being a hotelier in India and is now back in Ireland working in the wellness space. She gives inspirational talks to people and inspires them to make the changes they long to make. She is also an author and is penning her second book at the moment which will be a weaving of Indian cookery recipes, lifestyle and inspiration.

The purpose of grounding our energy is to become present and connect to the very earth we stand on. We allow the earth to support us and rejuvenate us just like the feeling we get when we take a walk in nature.

I have spent many years on the journey of finding my voice both in my personal life and in my business. Along that journey there were many mindset issues to deal with and limiting beliefs to be transcended. A common way for me to deal with issues around my personal power in the past had been to get overwhelmed at a certain point and give up because of this overwhelm. This is quite a common dilemma faced by people when they are not standing in their own power and are stuck in a rut with a certain aspect of their lives. Overwhelm keeps us small and in our comfort zone, feeling like an outsider peering in a window where everyone else seems to have it all.

Who said dreams can’t come true? Each day when despair starts to take hold, reach into the light, find that spec of light and allow it keep you steady, allow it pull you up from the darkness of pain. It’s your light, it’s your despair, it’s your fear, it’s your choice. Grab your light and hold onto its promise of hope. Allow it be the light that guides you into a better place for you, because no matter what you belong and you belong in a place where you feel free.

To start with let’s look at both of these words anxiety and stress and dissect them a little and see what they mean. Anxiety is the fear of something that hasn’t yet happened. Stress can be triggered by number of reasons, one of these is of course fear again of what could happen to us should we do something. So what is fear. It is an instinctual emotion that alerts us to something that maybe dangerous it’s energy in motion e.g. a piece of energy we feel in our body

Interview with Lisa Regan on Galway Bay FM.

I interviewed Jocelyn Cunningham for The Emotional and Mental Health Summit. She spoke to us about panic attacks and how they affected her life. Jocelyn explains "As it happens there are two types of panic attacks, expected and unexpected panic attacks. The unexpected is unfortunately what I suffered but I am still able to keep on top of it and that was 16 years ago. Unexpected ones can happen even when you are in your most relaxed and settled state, and again it is repressed energy. Nocturnal panic attacks happen when you are in your sleep state and you can even wake out of a deep REM sleep and develop this feeling of panic. Expected attacks are trigger based and have a lot to do with fear and phobias. Like when someone has a fear of flying and they can happen even if a person is prepared – triggered based ones are easier to handle than the unexpected ones".

I recently interviewed Mary Finn who is the Founder of Connect4Work an organisation who work with organisations to instill a culture of connection and integration for employees returning to the workplace. For details on The Emotional and Mental Health Summit visit my websitehttps://celticsoulessence.com/the-emotional-and-mental-health-summit-2019/

When two people with two different stories/energies are together there can be a clash sometimes if the two people are very different. If each are not standing in their own personal power, someone with people pleasing tendencies may become the dependent one, bending and trying to change themselves in order to fit in. I will take you through a story of how to weave your story, your way whilst standing in your personal power.

Our psychological reality changes as we go from being a child, into adolescence and beyond and our mind begins to fill with untruths about ourselves, or should I say truths that are not in alignment with our core beliefs and values. We may hide our passions and our dreams believing them to be silly or pie in the sky, perhaps because someone knocked them or laughed at them. We bury them and may choose a route that we feel will bring us more love and more acceptance and this can be for example at school, in our family or even our community. We conform to get on. Our reality no longer mirrors our core beliefs and values it becomes a reality crafted by outside influences.

Yes it's true there is pure magic to be found in the present moment because that is where all the magic happens. We cannot change the past and we can only change the future by the actions we take in the present moment. The other way we use the word present is when we exchange a gift ..another potentially magic moment when we have the ability to make someone’s day by giving them a gift of something they really want.

In a recent article I wrote I spoke about the story of Scrooge in a Christmas Carol which is a classic movie. This is a classical example of how an archetypal story can play out. Scrooge had a horrendously sad upbringing and I can only imagine put up a wall of defence around himself as a defence mechanism. However this wall was built so strong and so big that although it may have kept out what he considered negative, nothing good could come into his life either, or when something good did come in, he would inevitably loose it. As within so without playing out.

What could make a successful career woman not be able to find her voice within her own family? One would imagine if she had a strong enough voice at work and was confident using it she could also have a strong enough voice at home. This is not always the case though. The study of epigenetics, which is a fairly new in the science world brings us some interesting facts that prove that our environment affects not only our own life but the lives of the generations that went before us and those that will come after us. This was often dismissed in the past.

We hear a lot about the mother wound which we as adults can carry around with us. We are told that we can hold this wound if we perceive we didn’t get what we needed from the feminine, i.e. the soft nurturing feminine touch. I use the word perceive because with the best will in the world as a mother our children can perceive something so differently from the reality of the mother. The mother’s story is what she perceives is her reality based on her life’s circumstances. I often use the example and speak of the child who clings to his mothers leg when he starts school. Does he perceive mum is abandoning him when of course the reality is that mum is not abandoning him but merely sending him to school. But for this particular child they may perceive abandonment.

Our worthiness is closely woven with our ability to receive. We can go through life not realising we have self-worth issues as they can be buried so deep and for so long that we don’t realise they are sabotaging us. Our self worth is also closely woven with our money issues and whether or not we feel worthy enough to receive money. Thankfully the good news is that when we get to the root of our self worth issues we can untangle the stories and change them.

I would like to start this podcast with a question - Do you struggle with defining what the word feminine is? Do you get it confused with being a feminist perhaps because that is seems that’s what society does, bundles the words together. Perhaps you have a very clear understanding of what being feminine means to you and embrace your femininity in whatever way it means to you. . Perhaps you call yourself a feminist. There are so many connotations attached to these words and around what it means to be feminine it’s no wonder that we can be confused ourselves at times about it.

Each of us have our own stories that keep us where we are and if we feel that life is going well for us with these stories and we are happy with them then there is probably nothing coming up right now for us to look at. However if we feel stuck in a rut, if we have lost our mojo or if fear and anxiety holds us back, chances are some part of our story is not real. Perhaps the real us lies behind a mask, a mask we have put on to conform or to feel we belong. We may have started to don masks a long, long time ago so long ago we cannot even remember putting them on.

An empowered woman looks just like you and me because, she is you and me. Each of us can step in to our own personal power because we were each born with the ability to do so, we may just have forgotten our way. An empowered woman stands in her own power and in so doing neither powers over anyone nor does she allow anyone to take her power from her. She has developed good boundaries for herself and knows who she is from her essence. She illuminates her way from within and so doesn’t need the limelight to make her feel good about herself. She can listen to others when they are talking and doesn’t feel the need to criticise them just because she may not agree with them. She doesn’t have to feel like she agrees with everyone either, but she doesn’t knock people down for the sake of it.

Having good emotional health or intelligence as it is often called, is our ability to deal appropriately with situations in life while allowing ourselves to feel each emotion that comes up in any given situation.  No emotion is negative, in fact what emotions are, are pieces of energy which have a message for us.  When we realise this, we can use this to our benefit. Antonio Damasio defines emotions as “Energy in motion, e-motion”. We are all made of energy and our emotions are pieces of energy that flow through us when we feel something.   Our words carry the energy of our feelings and influence the person they are directed at.

There is a deep embedded wound of silence in our psyche and in our culture. A wound of silence and powerlessness. These two words powerlessness and silence seem to go hand in hand in relation to victims of hideous crimes and the buried stories and secrets which are locked away tightly in closets. It is the polar opposite of what an empowered culture looks like. How can we help ourselves become empowered in a society that’s still holds on tight to these secrets. The wounds inflicted not only affect the victims but also those around them and our future generations.

The wound of not belonging is one of the biggest wounds carried by people and our feeling of self worth can be rattled to the core when this wound is triggered. For people who correlate their social post numbers and likes with their own personal popularity this truly is a sign of their self-worth being linked to a belief that “I am popular because I have a lot of followers on social media”. To the person who has low self-esteem this unfortunate belief can make them feel not good enough if they consider they don’t have a large enough following. They lose the ability to listen to their gut instinct and may do anything to satisfy their need for more and more followers.

Did you ever read a post on social media and feel that it really resonated with you and that it was the most perfect post you had ever read and perhaps it gave you clarity on a way to verbalise something you were feeling. You feel elated and over joyed that someone has put into print a feeling that you also carry around with you. And then you start to read the comments thinking that you will see that there are lots of other people who feel the same way as you and you know how over joyed they will be to read it too. After the first two or three comments you come to one which disagrees with the author and you think, “Wow that is harsh of them to disagree”. You feel wounded almost but read on and find more and more comments that disagree with the sentiment shared and some that see things in a completely different light. You may wonder are they really reading the same post as you?

If you feel resentment bubbling up inside you, anger at your partner and feeling it is their fault or feeling tired of life I would ask you to first give yourself a break. It is never too late to start again. No matter what you are doing right now confirm to yourself that you are doing a good job. OK so you might feel you could be doing so much better but realise you are doing the best you can in the circumstances you are in. It may feel you are on someone else’s life path and maybe you are. You may very well have ended up following someone else’s dream. The journey you are on may have been chosen for you by a well-meaning parent or teacher who helped you get on a career that she thought would suit you. However, deep down you may have known that it was not what your soul wanted or desired. Maybe you had no choice but to conform. Maybe you hadn’t yet found your voice.

If you don’t ask for what you want, you can’t complain when you don’t get it. What did that statement stir in you? Sometimes we think that people should know what we want, we all do it at times but to verbalise our needs is essential, most especially if you are wanting something from you other half and expect that he should know what it is you want. Well you know what ladies, we know at this stage that men and women think differently. We could break this down further and say the masculine and feminine energies are so different. It is the essence of the feminine to feel into a more knowing state, we have more of an ability to stop and be present with our knowing and feel into a situation. And men who are in tune with their feminine sides can access this too. But generally, men aren’t brought up in a society which values these more feminine values, so this chance is often snatched from them.

We as women are really at the cusp of major change in society and that change benefits us on so many levels, not just at a societal level. Psychologically, I believe these changes help us begin to unwind from the old stories, the old paradigm that has kept women, as a gender down over the years. From as far back as the story of the woman being at fault in the Garden of Eden, to the burning of so called witches in the 1500 and 1600s, where women who showed any type of power, amongst other crimes were punished. It seems a general distrust in women ensued where women were certainly not encouraged to step into their power. This lack of trust at a societal level can seep into our psyche and a fear of doing something in case of being punished can become the norm. And trust is a very foundational issue for us in life, if we cannot trust ourselves how can we possibility be open to trusting someone else? You can find me at my spot on the web www.celticsoulessence.com