Podcasts about natalie you

Natalie Franke, a dynamic entrepreneur, community builder, and the brilliant author behind the highly acclaimed book "Built to Belong," joins us today for an insightful conversation. Natalie's remarkable career has been a rollercoaster ride, featuring both incredible highs and profound challenges. As a teenager grappling with mental health issues, she discovered a transformative outlet through photography, which eventually paved the way for her remarkable journey to entrepreneurship and building a six-figure business. However, Natalie quickly recognized the isolating nature of running a business and set out on a mission to create a thriving community for fellow entrepreneurs. This audacious endeavor materialized into the awe-inspiring Rising Tide, a non-profit networking business that garnered an astonishing following around the nation.    In this discussion, Natalie fearlessly challenges the prevailing myths that hold countless people back from reaching their full potential in life, community, and business. With remarkable insights, she dares to rewrite the narrative, reminding us that it's never too late to embark on a new venture, asking for help is an act of strength rather than weakness, and ego has no place in the art of community building. Natalie's unwavering emphasis on shared values and the paramount importance of making a meaningful impact sets the stage for a paradigm shift in how we approach success.   Prepare to be enthralled as Natalie delves into the significance of play and offers an exciting glimpse into her forthcoming book, "Gutsy." Described as "a kick in the pants," this compelling work promises to ignite the spark of courage and resilience within its readers. This episode is an exceptional opportunity to gain priceless insights, challenge the status quo, and embrace the transformative power of community. Quotes “Play has a profound impact on the brain…when's the last time you played? With no one watching?” (9:16-9:49 | Lauren) “People always worry, ‘Can I start something new? Is it too late...You are never too old… You can go after it and reinvent yourself as many times as you want.” (14:08-14:41 | Natalie) “It's up to you and all of us are one decision away from an entirely different life, one choice away from a reality that doesn't exist for us today. We just have to take that step.” (14:42-14:53 | Natalie) “Even though my business was thriving…I felt deeply isolated.” (17:48-17:55 | Natalie) “Your community is only as good as its leaders, and its leaders are built by its members.” (23:02-23:09 | Natalie)   “You've got to rewrite so much of what you've been taught…the faster you fail, the quicker you succeed.” (35:03-35:18 | Natalie) “No company I've ever worked for talks about their community the way that HoneyBook employees do…as though they are the heroes the world needs.” (45:53-46:07 | Natalie) Links Connect with Natalie Franke: Website: https://nataliefranke.com/ The Book: https://nataliefranke.com/gutsy   Instagram: @forwardfemale @hernextbigmove Website: www.forwardfemale.com Join Community: https://theforwardfemale.mn.co/ Schedule Consultation: https://calendly.com/the-forward-female/discovery-call HoneyBook: http://share.honeybook.com/forwardfemale Email Us: hello@forwardfemale.com   Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Access the full transcript at HerCsuite.com/podcastAs leaders, we have to be ready for any situation. It can be difficult to know the best way to respond to unexpected situations. Discover the best ways to respond and be ready for the unexpected using Improv with host Natalie Benamou and Karen Hough, Founder and CEO of ImprovEdge. In this episode, Karen explains how we can leverage Improv to help respond to disruptions happening at the speed of change and why adaptability is essential for leaders in the workplace. Improv can be used in professional and personal settings to show resilience and empathy in any situation. Being an improviser has never been more important, take a listen as we discover all the ways to use these skills for the Future of Work. 5 Ways To Use Improv For the Future of Work1. Be ready to adapt to different meeting environments: Hybrid, Virtual and In-person.2. Apply flexibility to keep pace with change and demonstrate your resilience.3. It is better to slow down to go fast.4. Good meeting hygiene: set an agenda, assign topics to other people, and finish early.5. Ask open ended questions to stay on topic and in the moment.Learn how leaders across the globe use these principles to be more effective at what they do every day with Improv.Quotes from Karen Hough:"It is much more exhausting to be on camera than to be in-person, the brain has to work on over time." "We need to make clear decisions about who needs to be in a meeting" "If we empower ourselves as an improviser, we are never alone" "Be willing to be creative and ready to fail. It is how we experiment."“It is so important to our health and well being that we try to see silver lining even in difficult moments.”“As we think about the future, it's never been more important to be an Improviser.”Quote from Natalie"You have to listen attentively, so that you can follow up with the next question."Resources:Karen Hough LinkedInKaren Hough TwitterKaren Hough ImprovEdge websiteImprovEdge TwitterImprovEdge YouTubeNatalie Benamou LinkedInHerCsuite™ on LinkedInHerCsuite™ Thank you for spending your time with us today. This podcast is sponsored by HerCsuite™ Mentoring Made Easy Programs that combine speakers with executive coaches in every cohort. Gain a competitive advantage advancing more women at every level inside your own private network hub in HerCsuite™.Find out more at HerCsuite™ and Schedule a call to find the best program and share with us what success looks like for you.Thank you to Karen Hough for being a featured speaker for HerCsuite™ and guest on the show. To our listeners, we appreciate you. Keep shining your light bright out in the world. We would be honored if you hit the subscribe button and share the episode with a friend or colleague today.

Natalie Dunlap, a successful business woman and the Sr. vice president of Cloudmellow, shares her advice on how to be successful as a real estate agent in the 21st century. She discusses the importance of having a strong business proposition, engaging with your audience on a regular basis, and converting leads into sales. Natalie also provides helpful tips on how to maximize your social media presence and stay in touch with your clients. Natalie's goal is to help business owners learn how to use social media and digital marketing to their advantage, in order to stay top of mind and increase their profits. So whether you're looking for advice on buying a home or growing your business on social media, this episode is for you!   [00:00 - 12:46] Opening Segment I welcome Natalie to the show Natalie's transition to advertising   Insights on the migration from traditional to digital advertising   Marketing using Facebook and Instagram reels   [12:47 - 27:09] Staying Up to Date with the Current Trends Real estate in the context of digital marketing Own your media Creating a persona that people can connect with   [27:10 - 40:44] Maintaining Your Online Persona Having a diverse portfolio Avoiding oversharing information on social media Strong privacy settings Being up to date    [40:45 - 57:52] Cloudmellow Website design, mobile app development, social media management, and search engine optimization  Real estate agents should have a unified branding presence  Subcultures in Jacksonville   Having consistency and long-term play   Natalie talks about how digital marketers must be constantly evolving   [57:53 - 60:56] Closing Segment Final words See links below to connect with Natalie You can connect with Natalie through Facebook, or you can email her at Nataliedunlap@gmail.com.   SUBSCRIBE & LEAVE A 5-STAR REVIEW as we discuss real estate excellence with the best of the best!     Join our community at www.tracyhayespodcast.com   Email Tracy.Hayes@jethl.com to get in touch with me Connect with me on Facebook and LinkedIn. Check out Jet HomeLoans, LLC and get top-flight resources and first-class service in buying your house! Quote/s:   "You are what you sell…people do business with people they like."

In this episode, we cover: Introduction (00:00) “Embracing Change Fearlessly” (01:45) Fearless change enabling good work (04:00) The culture change that needs to happen (06:10) How to talk to your leaders (10:45) “The Adolescent Version” of engineering (14:40) How Natalie prioritizes time, speed, and efficiency (18:42) Natalie's keynote (26:48) Links Referenced: Gremlin: https://www.gremlin.com/ gremlin.com/podcast: https://gremlin.com/podcast loyaltyfreakmusic.com: https://loyaltyfreakmusic.com TranscriptNatalie: I like this—I call it the adolescent version of engineering. It's where, you know, we're through the baby part, we need to start to grow up a little bit, we need to go from getting stuff done in some way or another, to something that's repeatable and scalable. And so, it's like, that adolescent years, that's my fun. That's what I enjoy doing. I call it creating something out of chaos.Basically, taming the chaos is what it really looks like because it's very chaotic initially, and that's true of every, like, small organization; they always start like that. And as they start to grow, you know, you've got ten different engineers who have ten different opinions on how something should be done, and so they do it ten different ways. And that's fine when you're only ten, but then when you need to go from 10 to 20 to 30 to 100, it no longer works.Julie: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability, culture change, and learning from failure. In this episode, we talk with Natalie Conklin, head of engineering at Gremlin, about the importance of embracing change, and how we can all work through our fears and work together to build more reliable systems. Natalie, I'm so excited to have you here with us today. And today is actually a really big day because it is the fifth year of DevOpsDays Boise, which you are doing the closing keynote for. So, really excited to have you both on the podcast and at the conference today. And your talk is titled “Embrace Change Fearlessly.” So, do you want to kick off by telling our listeners a little bit about you and what you're going to be talking about?Natalie: Sure. Thanks for having me. I am excited about both, sort of, [laugh] which is exactly what the talk is about. [laugh]. The talk is really about being able to embrace change fearlessly, and that it's rarely ever fearlessly truly, but mostly around being able to do what makes you afraid anyway.I'm not a big public speaker, so that's something I've had to work hard at trying to be able to be more comfortable doing. And so, this is an exciting time for me. But background-wise, I am the head of engineering currently for Gremlin and had been leading engineering teams for growth companies for just over a decade. And a lot of what I end up doing centers around this: It's helping those engineering teams be willing to move forward in risky—because in growth companies, a lot of times you're building things that are brand new, this is not something that, you know, has been out there and done, so they typically have to do something new for the first time. And so, being able to take calculated risks is tough. It's hard stuff. And so, getting into the right mindset to be able to push through that, that's a lot of what I ended up doing.Julie: I love that. And that's actually a really good point that you're bringing up, you know, growth companies and being in the right mindset. So, one of the things you and I talked about when I was starting here at Gremlin and getting to know you a little bit about your background, which is really cool. You lived in India for a few years, correct?Natalie: I did. I lived there for two years. I was working for a company, we were doing big data analytics for telcos, building big, large platform that we would then do some custom development work off the top of for these various telco companies. And the team over there had experienced some turnover, and so there was a lot of quality issues and things of that nature starting to show up for the first time. This had been a very rock-solid team, honestly, and so the company asked if I would be willing to go to India to figure out what was going on. And so, that was what I did. It was a great opportunity; loved doing it.Julie: So now, as you work with teams to embrace change fearlessly, and we talk about you mentioned the ROI and doing things in new ways and building new things, do you have an example of maybe when you built something new or your team built something new, and it changed the way we work?Natalie: Well yes, an easy answer would just be to fall back on the India example for a second, right? So, a lot of what I did when I went there was they were a very waterfall shop, converted them over to Agile practices and DevOps. They had really none of that practice existing. So, when you ask the company—or the, I'll just say the team to go through that sort of transition, you're pretty much asking them to change everything about the way they work. And we focused a lot more —there was a lot of manual processes that they had been doing previously and we were automating all of those had to do the automations, but then also, you know, make sure that work fit into this new automated way of doing things.They also had, just, also the trepidation over am I going to still be needed, right? Those are all those things that come into your mind when you're basically changing from a manual process to an automated process, “Am I still going to be needed? Is my work going to still be important? What am I going to do in this new world, in this new environment?” There's a lot of that that pops up into people's heads.So, a lot of making the change successful, there's certainly the technical aspects of getting it automated and all those things, but to really make a change successful on that kind of scale, it requires getting people to think about it differently and to be okay, and to realize that they can learn new stuff and they'll come out of this better than how they went in. And a lot of that takes a lot of, just, communication and talking, being very personal with people, making sure that they personally understand how to do this, but then just also, things like training and coaching and making sure that there are people there to counter the negative energy that comes along with change. There's always negative energy that comes along with it, people are nervous, they're scared, and you have to be able to counter that in some way.Julie: You know, there was a talk I gave a while ago, and I'm trying to remember the name of it, but one of the things that I talked about was the Pareto Principle, which is, what, 20% of people are going to be amazing in an organization, 60% are going to be, you know, middle of the road, then you have that bottom 20% that are going to kind of fight that change. And you shouldn't really necessarily focus on that top 20%, but you should put a lot of the focus on bringing that bottom 20% along with you. And we talk a lot about just the cultural change that needs to happen when we talk about Chaos Engineering, for example. I mean, there's a huge cultural change that organizations need to switch that mindset into embracing failure. Which we talk a lot about, but it's hard for folks to embrace change fearlessly, embrace failure fearlessly.When you've been going through these experiences in the past—and you mentioned that you really need to think about the people—what's one of the common fears? You said, you know, people worry about their jobs and worry about being left behind. Work us through how do you help folks with that?Natalie: Yeah, I think that's actually one of the most interesting aspects of this. When you start looking at—when I [start talking about 00:07:18] about, you know, people don't change, when it's something that's personal like getting married or having kids or going off to college, you know, these are all huge life changes, and we celebrate those, we have parties, we're super happy, we think they're fantastic, right? And I mean, if I go back to India for a second, these are the same people that are struggling on, you know, the fact that I'm going to change from a manual testing to an automated testing, will actually go through an arranged marriage where they're marrying someone that they don't know super well, but they're very happy about it, right? So, that's one of the things that I like to point out and have a discussion with people about is that you're not afraid of change; you're afraid of change in your work life, right? And we have to be very specific about that because we start talking about humans are afraid of change, I actually don't agree. I think we're just afraid of changing what we do at work.And usually, that's because that's somehow tied to our needs pyramid, right? Like, that's how we get our needs met from food and shelter and all of these other kinds of things. And so, when we start to threaten that, it gets really, you know, sketchy for a minute, right? So, that's when we have to, like, take a minute and realize what we're doing and realize that we're being overly protective of a part of our world that, you know, we somehow feel like it's going to then have us begging on the street, is the example I give in my talk, right? That's not going to happen. Like, you know, that's just an irrational fear.And it's highly unlikely that that's your right answer. So, what I encourage people to do is to actually find a logical, kind of, sounding board, person, a mentor, a friend—and again, if you don't have this person in your life, then you know, find that person, but start talking to them about, like, what's most likely to happen in this scenario? Or, better yet, what can I get out of it? I think if you spent less time on that and spent, you know, more time on, like, what can I actually get out of this, how could this benefit me, and sort of flip that in your brain.Because what our brains are incredibly good at doing is going down that worst possible path. But the real truth is, we're just as capable of imagining the good. It's just a matter of focus. So, why don't we just focus on that instead? We can focus on what's the positive part of this, what could happen, and we're actually much more likely—there's a whole lot of studies around manifestation—and we can manifest that in our life if we want to, right? So, we just need to focus on the positive side of it.So, I—literally it's honestly a bunch of personal conversations, and getting people to just calm down and realize that the likelihood of their worst-case scenario is not really real. And then start to think through, okay, what can you actually learn from this? You know, is there something that you would like to get out of this? Would you like to try a new role? Would you like to try to lead an initiative? Would you like to be part of this in some way, right?So, those conversations—and again, it has to be personal. That's the thing that I think, you know, when you start doing widespread, full organizational changes, which I was doing over there and I had 120 engineers, it's hard to do it personally because you literally have to have one-on-one conversations with everybody and understand what they are going to get out of it. But that is what's required. I think, to really get people to a comfort zone, you've got to make sure that they understand how they fit in, and their why; why they're doing it.Julie: And that is all amazing. Now, as the leader, as the head of engineering and an organization, how do you recommend individual contributors talk to their leaders? Or how do they bring up concerns in a way that's productive in an organization? Because I know for me, sometimes—and you're right, I am excellent at going down that every possible negative outcome path; I've planned it out pretty well, to my peril, but that means that when I bring up concerns with leadership, I tend to do so in a heightened emotional state. So, what's your advice for folks?Natalie: Well, and it's just that. I think it's exactly where you're headed with that is that take the emotions out of it—or attempt to—and try to present your concerns logically. Because there's going to be situations where what you're bringing up is something they need to consider, and if you can present it in a logical way, chances are they will, and they'll take that into consideration. So, I would—like, even if they are going to still move forward with the plans that you've somehow don't agree with, like, let's assume that some portion of this change, you don't feel is correct, which is actually one of the most legitimate reasons to worry about this, then what you should do is say, “Okay, look, I have this concern, so here's the Plan B. But just in case, this doesn't work. But I think it might not, so here's a Plan B.”Like, that's a way of presenting that in a way that's not challenging to the situation. So, I'll give you an example. In the India conversations, one of the things was that I actually did create a Plan B around was the fact that the person was bringing up—I was attempting to have Agile teams where they needed to have very strong ownership, they also needed to be able to self-manage. We talked about self-managed teams in Agile. And India is a very hierarchical culture, and so the thing that they brought up with me is that this isn't going to work here; it culturally isn't a good fit.And frankly, I knew that I was going to—I had this issue it within the company, but was it so widespread within India that I couldn't possibly change it? I hadn't lived there my whole life, I couldn't say, right? So, I needed to actually answer that question. And I thought it was a legitimate question, right? And I thought—but it was presented in, you know, a very factual, logical way, and kind of without the emotions, and so it's like, “Okay, let me think through that.”And so, we did this as a—you know, we created an experimental team where we tried this out to see if it would work. And it actually did, ultimately, succeed with that team. And I love this team because —I mean, to be fair, I did handpick who went on this team. Like, I did, you know, try to pick people who I thought might be the most likely to succeed. I'm not crazy; I did want it to work, and so you know, I did sort of seed it a bit.But at the same time, when they came out of that—and they tend to be a little bit younger than I think some of the, you know—because I think their minds were a little bit more open as part of that, but they came out of that, and after about nine sprints, you started to see the junior engineers challenging the more senior engineers, which in India is not like something that you see all that often. They were also able to —the junior engineers were having opinions, they were contributing to the technical discussions. Like, it was actually a pretty radical shift. But they also kind of walked around with this, like, certain swagger that I cannot describe. But it was, like, super fun to watch.So, you know, you've got to see that this was actually going to work, and it could work. And then it became a really good example, for the rest. So, I think the main thing is to help mitigate risk. If you have a real concern over a change that's coming your way, and it's something you don't feel like the company should do, just understand that they may do it instead and that's not personal, but at the same time, you know, you can help by offering a Plan B or some risk mitigation to double-check that it is going to work or to help it work.Julie: Absolutely. It's kind of that whole testing hypothesis, right? We're going to see if this works; we're going to evaluate it. One of the things that you brought up that I love and it was something that when I was at PagerDuty, we used to talk about a lot with the postmortem process, which was to involve junior engineers because they tend to look at things differently with that fresh set of eyes.Natalie: Right.Julie: And they kind of get us a little bit—the people who've been doing it for a very long period of time—a little bit out of your comfort zone because all of a sudden, maybe you're having to explain something. Jason and I have talked about this a few more times probably than necessary, but just, “Well, we've always done it this way because…” and then having to explain that because. You know, one of the things that I find interesting just from your background is—you know, we've talked about this, where you scaled that engineering team from 0 to 100, to deliver on custom software engineering contracts, and you've done quite a few things over your career. I mean, even working at Oracle—which we were actually just talking about an Oracle outage this morning—but, driving technical programs. And that seems to be a lot of your background. I mean, even at Facet, that you introduced engineering best practices to standardize code reviews and improve test coverage. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?Natalie: Yeah, I think—I like this—I call it the adolescent version of engineering. It's where, you know, we're through the baby part, we need to start to grow up a little bit, we need to go from getting stuff done in some way or another, to something that's repeatable and scalable. And so, it's like, that adolescent years, that's my fun. That's what I enjoy doing. I call it creating something out of chaos.Basically, taming the chaos is what it really looks like because it's very chaotic initially, and that's true of every, like, small organization; they always start like that. And as they start to grow, you know, you've got ten different engineers who have ten different opinions on how something should be done, and so they do it ten different ways. And that's fine when you're only ten, but then when you need to go from 10 to 20 to 30 to 100, it no longer works. And you do have to create some standards and still leave enough leeway for people to be able to have their tool of choice based on, you know, what makes sense, right?So, there needs to be some pragmatism in there, you can't just, like, also go the [unintelligible 00:16:54] where it's just one thing. But at the same time, there is some standards and there is some consistency that needs to be created so that, like, when you're onboarding a new engineer, there's not 20 things to learn; you can reduce that down to something that's manageable and you can get somebody onboard and productive within a reasonable amount of time. Otherwise, that's difficult, even that becomes difficult. So, every part of it that needs to have some level of standards around it—I think the fun in it, too, is finding that balance between introducing enough process that you have some standardization, you have some consistency, but not so much that you slow it down to the point that it's no longer moving. Because you can; you can strangle a small organization with too much process.So, it's finding that middle ground. And yeah, that's what I've pretty much done, like, my whole career in some form or another; it's what I enjoy. And if it gets to the point where things become too standard, too stable, to done, then I'm probably… I'm going to need to move on to something different and new. You know, that's going to be where I go do this again, with somebody else.Julie: Hashtag #startuplife, right?Natalie: [laugh].Julie: [laugh]. That's interesting that you bring up, you know, going from ten people to more, right, where you can just buy any tool you want and reimburse it, and there might not even be a central repo of all the tools that the organization has, to whittling that down into processes that you own, that you control, versus processes that control you. And then bringing those ten people that were there at the beginning that could kind of do whatever they want because the whole goal is to bring this product to market, to refining that organization and helping build out features in service of the customer. So, when you're looking at the new things that you want to do or prioritizing your time or the engineering team's time, what are some of the things that you take into consideration?Natalie: It's kind of actually very similar to performance when you look at the performance of a system, right? The engineering organization is no different. You need to find your bottlenecks and then you work from there. And the bottlenecks are different depending on which team that you're looking at, right? So, I like to start to kind of get a feel for what's working, what's not working, and where things are slow, [unintelligible 00:19:15] oftentimes what I'm trying to do is to get some speed, to get some speed and consistency tend to be really big things without losing quality. You know, all of those kinds of—those are the always the buckets, right?And so, when you start looking at speed, it really starts to look very much like that performance bottleneck exercise where you just start hitting them one at a time until you, you know, you get through the easy ones and then you start tweaking from there. But for instance, I'll tell you when I first started with Gremlin, we had a very large team and because of that, stand-ups were very huge, there was too much conversation, they took too long, people —actually the odd thing is that you'll find people have less ownership when the team is too large because they don't feel like they're as part of something that they're making a huge —as much of an impact on; they don't feel their impact on a team that's too large, so when you're organized in such a way that the teams are very large, you tend to lose some of the qualities of Agile that you're trying to achieve when you're doing these little small Agile teams, or at least that's the thought. So, one of the things I did was split the team. And one of the first things that I did—and that automatically started to create a different dynamic within the teams, and we're starting to see the results of that. And so, I feel like those are the kinds of things that you do.Like, that was an easy one; we have to do this, like, that first. Now, like, what do we do next? It depends. It depends, like, where, like, in some cases—I'll take India, for example—there was a lot of tech debt. So, I had some tech debt that I had to contend with and deal with that was—the way it was built, it was built with this very huge monolithic-style service, and I needed to help them start breaking that into smaller services, mainly because—and they were such a large team, and it was still a monolithic sort of situation, the problem was actually more so than the performance because they had tuned the heck out of that, so that wasn't it.Like, the data was very large, so they had already dealt with performance. But the conflict within the engineering teams was a lot because there was so much coordination. And so, by being able to split this up into services that make sense, then the teams can start to own the services and be able to deliver on that with some speed without having to coordinate so much. And every moment of coordination costs you time, right? So, that's the type of things that you start to look at.And it could be a technical solution, like in this case, it was breaking the technology, from an architectural standpoint, down into something that make the teams operate differently, or it can be splitting the teams itself without changing the architecture. It can be any number of things. But really start to have to look at what's causing this to go slow.Julie: Now, I love that because when everybody owns everything, nobody owns anything, right? And you talked about breaking the teams down into service teams that makes sense. And so, it sounds like it was incredibly intentional; owning your services all the way through into production is really helpful with that speed and that quality. And you mentioned that briefly earlier, which is—what is that? The iron triangle, or whatever they call it, but speed, cost, quality. There's three things; you can only have two. Which two do you pick?Natalie: Right. [laugh]. Exactly.Julie: And I've seen that titled as a fallacy saying that you can really have all three, but I don't really know. What do you think? Speed, cost, quality, can you have all three?Natalie: Well, so you can maybe have speed, cost, and quality, but if you throw scope in there, [laugh] and you throw that into your [unintelligible 00:22:41], right? Like, because [unintelligible 00:22:42] where you have to start throwing that in. Like, if you look at—so, you know, the triangle that we tend to look at is the time that you're going to deliver it in, the scope, and the price. Those are the three that I think you can only hold two of. You can go—so by speed when you say speed, cost, and quality, if you go back to your you know, your original one, depends on what how you define speed on whether or not you get quality out of that, right? [laugh].And so, when you say—but when you start putting deadlines on things, then yeah, you can get quality so long as I can control the scope, right? Because then I can scope it down enough that I can deliver something within that timeline that is of high quality, right? So, those are the trade-offs that you have to make? And no I don't —I still feel like in that particular three-legged stool, you know, there's only two of those you get, that somebody else outside of your organization can handle. You do have to —otherwise, you know, you can't possibly deliver everything in the world within a really short timeframe and expect the quality to be high.Julie: Yeah, wouldn't that be nice if you could, right? But that's why we talk about learning from our failures. That's why we talked about Chaos Engineering and understanding our systems. Because in all reality, we do have timeframes that we need to get things out, and we have to make our systems as reliable as possible. But then where do we find the gaps that we may have missed because of speed, because of that timeliness?Natalie: Well, and when you start looking at things like, you know, quality, there's certainly things that you can do, but if you go back to Chaos Engineering—we talk about that for just a second, and we look at the changes that people are afraid of. What happens when you go in and you tell a place, “To improve your quality I'm going to actually start shutting down your host.” They're like, “I'm sorry, what?” [laugh].Julie: [laugh].Natalie: That's a very difficult conversation, right? So, I feel like it's one of those things where once you see that and why you would do it and then, like, you make the adjustments to that, and then it becomes a part of your—doing this sort of change is actually, you know, something that you just do on a continuous basis; it's no longer something that you're afraid of, right? And I think that's true of just [unintelligible 00:24:48] in general. Like, you know, once you start getting into the habit of it, whatever that habit might be—and automation, by the way, is one of those things—and whether it be automating regular tests, whether it be automating Chaos Engineering tests, like any of this automation, that's actually a key to speed with engineering. And the reason for that is because those are so closely linked.I go back and I talk about automation and confident mindset. This is really the two things that give you speed in engineering organization. And the reason is because if you can automate it enough, you can—you know, obviously there's just some speed that comes from automation, you know, that you're not doing things manually, that's great. But the thing that you miss in that, or that you don't necessarily think of, is the fact that there, like, an automated safety net under you, like, through testing, through, like, you know, the systems-level testing, Chaos Engineering, you know, the engineers now feel more free, they're more confident, they're able to make changes at a much more rapid pace. It feels less risky because they're able to make this change and then they know that the tests are going to catch them, right?So, if they've screwed something up, something else is going to stop it before it heads to production. So, they're just more—they're able to just move forward at a faster pace than they would otherwise, right? So, that automation, the speed that you get out of it goes far beyond just you taking the manual process down to an automated one; it's creating the safety net that gives them the confidence to just move without thinking. And that's huge. Like, that's a big deal.It's also—back to your thoughts on junior engineers—it's also why I think it's really important to make sure there's people in the engineering team who [unintelligible 00:26:26] three years, like, three years of experience. It's like you know enough that you can make really good progress and you can be useful, but you don't know so much that you're afraid. Like, there—laugh] because that confident mindset I'm back to, it really matters. Like, it makes such a big difference in the teams that will move quickly and teams that will not.Julie: I love everything that you just said. And I just saw a tweet from Kelsey Hightower that he tweeted just a couple of days ago; I saw it just before we recorded this. So, he said, “…as an industry we've been pushing… Automate. Automate. Automate. And we haven't been saying… Understand. Understand. Understand. Because if you understand what you're doing, you can automate it if you want to.”And I think you just touched on that. And I think you touched on a lot of the having confidence, that what you're doing—that there's safety and even if there are failures, that they're going to be caught. And I think that all ties together beautifully. Now, with that, because I do realize that we are running out of time, I just want to say, so for you, you are giving the closing keynote today at DevOpsDays Boise. And we've talked a lot about overcoming fear during this podcast, and I know that this was something that made you a little bit uncomfortable. Can you tell me why you chose to do this? Why did you choose to overcome this fear?Natalie: Because of my position and the fact that I'm female, I get offers. And I just made a deal with myself about, you know, a few months ago that said, you know, I wouldn't turn these down. And primarily it's because I feel like it's important that at least some women are out there and are serving as examples for others. Like, I'm not saying that I'm going to have, like, the best things to say all the time, and I think that's okay. I don't think every man that comes on a podcast has the best things to say either, right?So, I feel like it's just one of those situations where we need examples for ourselves, and I think it's important that, you know, we see ourselves in the—in what's—in what's, I guess, the speakers and the participants, right? And so, I want to make sure that I do my part in that, I guess.Julie: Well, thank you. And you heard it here first, folks. If you need Natalie to speak at your conference, she made a deal with herself [laugh] that she would not say no. We're really excited to have you both on the podcast and speaking at DevOpsDays Boise. So, thank you, Natalie, and thank you for joining us on Break Things on Purpose. And good luck on your talk today.Natalie: Thank you. Appreciate it. Enjoyed it. [laugh].Julie: Have a wonderful day.Natalie: You too.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

In this episde, Amie and Natalie talk about indoor beanie hat wearing. Also, listen to them discuss what they listen to while sewing and Amie's list of favorite podcasts. The last topic entails listing the steps of putting a quilt together and what the best part is, but don't even think about this being a straight-forward list of steps. It's riddled with tangents and sidenotes. SHOW NOTES: Perpetuity and perpetuality are discussed. The correct term is most likely perpetually, so they were both wrong. ------ Amie's Top 5 Podcasts: 1. Seams Funny - by Amie and Natalie You're already here! Go listen! 2. My Favorite Murder by Exactly Right Media 3. Smartless by Wondery 4. Heavyweight by Gimlet Media 5. Reply All by Gimlet Media 6. Dr. Death by Wondery 7. No Joke by Headgum ------ Sweet Treat Quilt (Ice Cream Truck or Taco Truck) Quilt Pattern by: Lindsey of Pen + Paper Patterns Plaid Stars Quilt Pattern by: Oon of Grape Soda Studio You Can't Catch Me Quilt Pattern (Gingerbread Man Quilt) by: Wendy Sheppard Treelotta Fabric + Craft Studio shop link ------ CCV stand for - Credit Card Verification or Card Code Verification ------ 'To thine own self be true' is a line from act 1 scene 3 of Shakespeare's play, Hamlet. It is spoken by King Claudius' chief minister, Polonius as part of a speech where he is giving his son, Laertes, his blessing and advice on how to behave whilst at university. - via nosweatshakespeare.com Matthew 22:36-40 King James Version via the biblegateway.com 36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law? 37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/seams-funny-podcast/message

It's Friday, my friends! And that means it's time for another fabulous Q+A! What came up this time? A lot of pragmatic topics that many of us can relate to, like protein, calorie ranges, caffeine consumption and more! Let's dig⛏️ in! Find the latest episode of Q+A Friday on SoundCloud, iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts! Q+A Friday, Ep. 069 The link to the video version is here. If you're not already a member of The Killer B Hive Facebook group, you'll need to request access first: https://www.facebook.com/pahla.bowers/videos/287522436710597 00:02:33 - Amy - What is the calorie range to be on target? Link: The 5-0 Method: Weight Loss for Women over 50 https://pahlabfitness.com/weight-loss-over-50/ 00:04:50 - Cindy - Have you thought about starting a group on Discord as an alternative to Facebook? 00:11:42 - Christina - I'm planning to pause my weight loss journey because I'm going to train for a 200-mile bike ride. Should I increase my calorie intake because of this increased activity? Link: Body Shaping for Women over 50 https://pahlabfitness.com/body-shaping-over-50/ 00:16:40 - Amy - How important is it to get a certain amount of protein in your diet if you're losing weight? 00:25:16 - Christine - Is there an alternative to triangles? I can't seem to do them properly. 00:26:16 - Tanya - Regarding labeling my feelings when I journal, I often get the thought that I'm not labeling the feeling correctly. Do you think it would be a good idea to journal about what my thoughts are when I have a certain feeling? Link: Ep. 039: FEELINGS (suggested by moderator) https://pahlabfitness.com/feelings/ 00:34:01 - Jacqui - What is a good way for me to discover and recognize why, even though I know I'll feel better if I eat healthy foods, I keep sabotaging myself by making bad food choices? 00:47:04 - Karen - How much pain is enough to take a break from your workouts? I understand that you can't speak to a specific person's “moderate.” 00:55:08 - Alison - Is there any reason why we shouldn't go over the recommended amount of water in the 5-0 Method? 00:57:36 - Natalie - You have mentioned in the past that you've done away with many things in your diet such as caffeine. What brought you to this decision, and what has it changed for you? I've noticed that I've slowly gained weight over the years after starting to drink coffee with cream. Thanks for listening to the Friday Q+A! If you're new around here (or even if you're “old,” LOL), these are some helpful resources to get you going: Join my FREE and PRIVATE Facebook group, The Killer B Hive: https://goo.gl/fqtMXU Watch FREE workouts and informational videos on the Pahla B, Fitness + Life Coach YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/PahlaBowers Check out videos, podcasts, coaching and more on my website: https://pahlabfitness.com/ Wanna lose weight? The 5-0 Method (my FREE eBook) is the best place to start: https://pahlabfitness.com/weight-loss-over-50/ For hands-on coaching in a supportive group environment, the Get Your GOAL Coaching + Accountability group is the place to be: https://pahlabfitness.com/get-your-goal/ Cheers to your good health and fitness.

About NatalieNatalie is the Director of Marketing at the Duckbill Group. Her background includes marketing roles in the localization and SaaS industries. In her free time, she teaches yoga, creates beadwork, and tries to keep up with her toddler. All of which impacts how she approaches growth and storytelling. Natalie resides in Missoula, Montana with her husband, daughter, and two wild corgisLinks:Twitter: https://twitter.com/natveiswilliams TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part my Cribl Logstream. Cirbl Logstream is an observability pipeline that lets you collect, reduce, transform, and route machine data from anywhere, to anywhere. Simple right? As a nice bonus it not only helps you improve visibility into what the hell is going on, but also helps you save money almost by accident. Kind of like not putting a whole bunch of vowels and other letters that would be easier to spell in a company name. To learn more visit: cribl.ioCorey: And now for something completely different!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Periodically, it seems that I've misunderstood the fundamental concept of marketing and interpret it through a lens of aggressively shitposting on Twitter and other places. I have since been informed that what I do is less about marketing and more about creative stunts in public, which are apparently close, but not exactly the same thing. This led to a natural evolution of the Duckbill Group's understanding of what marketing is, and effectively culminated in our hiring, earlier this year, of Natalie Williams, who joins me today to tell me what a Director of Snarketing might actually do that differs from my ridiculous nonsense. Natalie, thanks for joining me.Natalie: Thanks, Corey. It's great to be here.Corey: At a high level, something that is one of the most misunderstood concepts across the board is what marketing even is. So, before we proceed down the barrel of inevitable, ridiculous commentary I'm about to levy at you, what is marketing?Natalie: Marketing is a way to attract the audience that you're looking for and to frame your services, your content, whatever you're selling, to your audience in a way that makes sense to them. And I think that another piece of it that's important is, everybody has a pain point; you really have to be able to find the emotion behind what you're selling in order to attract your audiences.Corey: So, fundamentally an authenticity story more than anything else.Natalie: Yeah, it's finding that—yeah, the authenticity in what you're selling, and meeting your audience with their pain point.Corey: So, many times, it seems like the next follow-up question for most companies would be, “Great. So, what emotion is it exactly where people reflexively reach for their wallet and hand all the cash in it to our company?” It tries to be combined with aspects of sales; it tries to, on some level, wind up doing the entire job, in some cases of not even having a decent offering in the first place, but if the marketing story is strong enough, it'll sell. Is that overly cynical?Natalie: I don't think so. I think that marketing, it's challenging in this time, we have so many options, so many choices there, our attention spans are so short. And so I don't think it's cynical because there's a lot of noise to cut through, and I think what's important is to think of your audience as—or what you're selling to your audience in a way that, how can I make their lives easier? I think that's what's going to, like you said, get people to pull the money out of their pocket and give it to you. What can you do to make their life easier and how can you show them that what you're selling is going to make their life easier?Corey: There's a recurring trope that engineers, developers, whatever we're calling ourselves this week—anything except DevOps is fine—that we don't like marketing because no one likes being marketed to et cetera, et cetera. And I feel like that, in many cases, is because most marketing is terrible at its job. It comes across as smarmy: if I were to talk to people in person the way that marketing talks to people, I'd get punched in the mouth a lot. And I feel that is not an accurate view. It's almost like looking at salespeople through the lens of the worst experience you've ever had buying a used car. And I feel like by judging an entire field by some of its worst examples, people are prone to prematurely dismiss a very challenging field.Natalie: Absolutely, I think that it's very easy to pick out that dishonesty, like you said, the slimy marketing sales tactic that just feels, it feels like it's too much. I think people are very, very good at being able to see that. It's like the spam that you get in your email or your LinkedIn direct messages. It's just this constant barrage of tactics to try and tell you what you need without actually getting to know what you need, what you're looking for, and how it can help you. So, I think there are a lot of those tactics that really give marketing and sales I think, too, a bad name.An easy way to cut through that is just to be human about what you're doing. Think of your audience as human beings and not just a target or a persona that isn't a real person. And so I think, like you said earlier, the authenticity piece of it; it's not difficult to… well, I don't think it's difficult to be human. I think it's easier to take the emotion out of it and just try and put a sales pitch or a marketing pitch together that hits on all the points of the services you provide, and, you know, “I'm so great, and this is what we do,” without being able to talk to the people that you're marketing to as the humans that they are.Corey: It feels almost like I became a marketing person of sorts without ever intending to. When I started this company as an independent consultant, I was finding my initial source of clients to my personal network, as most small independent consultants do. And one thing that almost came by accidentally was that newsletter, Last Week in AWS, that took on an additional series of—it gets a different level of meaning to the ecosystem, and it turned out, sort of, growing like a weed. At which point, great, now it turns out that is marketing, although I didn't realize it at the time. And at least from my perspective, I didn't consider it marketing, which meant that I built it the way that I would want to receive things because, as it turned out, I was a relatively close match to the people that I was going to be emailing every week.And as a result, I didn't do a bunch of scammy nonsense that would alienate people; there's never any tracking put into it in the form of, “Oh, if you click on a link, that implies that you're going to be interested in what I'm selling. We're now going to fire off drip campaign number 17.” We stepped away from a lot of that because I've been on the receiving end of it, and it always rings hollow and strange. When we were interviewing to fill your role, we made it a point very early in the interview process to make clear that, yeah, this is not going to be one of those scenarios where you walk in and effectively get to instrument everything with all of the latest marketing technology and the rest. Okay, yeah, we have a list now of almost 27,000 subscribers.We don't mine that for leads. Now, should we? Maybe in an idealized sense, but it turns out that the reputational management of people trusting us not to do skeezy things far outweighs any temporary benefit we get from doing things like that. Now, that wound up driving an awful lot of people away, which is why we mentioned this in the early stages; it didn't drive you away. You decided to say yes; you actually showed up on Monday for your first day, and then continued to show up every day since. What was it about, I guess, that statement that would drive some folks that we spoke to away, but it wasn't a deal-breaker for you?Natalie: I remember clearly that part of the interview, and I remember it feeling like a bit of a breath of fresh air. I think that when you get into all the tech, all the marketing tools, there is that trade-off of losing a little bit of that human touch with your audience where all of a sudden they're not humans, they turn into data points, they turn into the demographics about themselves. And all of that stuff is important and has a role, but when you lose that personal connection of the storytelling piece of it and you're just driven on a lot of these metrics, which I think it's very easy to almost paralyze yourself by looking at too many metrics and getting all this set of data versus just what are the most important pieces? What does our audience need? And you know that by knowing your audience, and so I think that's why it was such a good point when you talked about, you know, you didn't really know you were doing marketing, but you were having success with it because you were doing it in a way that was genuine to your mission and to your audience, and you weren't doing it with the intent of how do I get X number of subscribers?You were doing it in a way of how do I provide something that I think is beneficial to people like me. You had that pain point and you filled that pain point, and it resonated with your audience. And so, yeah, in the interview, when we were talking about those things, I just—it excited me to be able to have that connection with my audience and not be so focused on the data and the intel. Which, I'm not the kind of person that wants everybody to know every single thing that I do online anyway. I think that some of those tactics are, quite frankly, a little bit terrifying. So, knowing that wasn't a push of knowing every single thing that you could possibly know about all of your audience was something that was very refreshing to me.Corey: One of the things I built fairly early on was my own custom click-tracker because sponsors demand this, on some level, but I also found it useful for my own purposes in the aggregate. Specifically what I built is something that shows me the number of people that click on a given link in a particular issue, but it doesn't tell me who any of those people were. It dedupes it, so it isn't one person clicking a link 500 times winds up inflating the count, but that was as far as I went. And I use that data to periodically put together a best-of issue when there's a slow week, when Amazon, I don't know, winds up in a super-contentious company-wide argument about what is the absolute worst name to give something, and then there's not a whole lot of releases that week.Great. I can go back and highlight things that people found interesting and useful in the past because no one reads everything, and even if I've talked about it before, it's new to someone. And that took a surprising amount of work because every time I would talk about what I was building with folks in the space it was, “But yeah, then don't you want to track the people who click it as they move through your website, and as they wind up moving across the internet so you can start putting them into cohorts and the rest?” And no. First, I don't have the patience to wind up doing that sort of tracking; I don't speak Excel that fluently.And also, it's somewhat marginal as far as the ability to improve any meaningful business outcome. We don't tend to manage by a whole bunch of iron metrics here around things like that. When I wind up doing ridiculous stunts, like a music video making fun of some Amazon exec or whatnot, I do it because I think it'd be funny and it will probably resonate, but there's no business case behind it. It's, “Ehh, why not? Worst case, we learn something.” And I get the sense, talking to folks, that is increasingly rare.Natalie: I think it is, too, but I like the approach. I think the click-through rate, what's important there is the success of your content. If people are clicking through it, your content is resonating. And I think that people really underestimate people's ability to decide if they want to move forward and reach out to become a customer or go further down in the funnel. I think people are pretty smart.Just because they clicked on a link, you don't need to berate them with 15 more touchpoints to say, “Hey, are you ready to make this purchase? Are you ready for this?” I mean, all of these things, people can get there, and if you frame your funnel in a way that makes it easy for them to get to point A and point B, really shouldn't have to have that much involvement in their journey. And some marketing people might not agree with me on that, but I think as long as you make it easy for them to get what they need, to find what they need, to learn as much as they can about your service before they purchase, you don't need to have all of those touchpoints, you don't need to know that they clicked on all of these things. And I think, too, as a user, if I know that if I click on a link, I'm going to get a barrage of emails selling a service if I'm not ready for it, it's going to make me hesitate to click a link.And so I think that that approach is just a more user-friendly approach, and it really just makes the experience of the user that much more smooth knowing that there's kind of a mutual trust there. I'll let you know when I'm ready and you can help me get there, but don't try and do it for me.Corey: The piece that I've always found surprising was that everyone talks in the ad tech space as if without this data, our businesses will wither and die on the vine. But the ability to track people as they move across the internet and go through their lives is a relatively recent horrible invention. Companies existed and sold goods and services phenomenally well for millennia before the advent of any of these things. And does it improve around margins? Of course, it does; I'm not saying the industry is built on fraud. I'm just saying that it winds up making a trade-off that I'm not comfortable making myself, and therefore I'm unwilling to ask my audience members to make similar trade-offs themselves.Natalie: Yeah. And it's like, at what point do you get to be too much, where you know too much about your audience? And like I said before, people are smart; we don't need constant advertisements across all of these platforms to remind us of something we thought about or we looked about. I mean, it's good; there's certainly a time and a place to have a reminder come through or be retargeted in a way that isn't creepy, but I mean, it's those things where I think about something and all of a sudden I see an ad, those still freak me out, so I think that people don't need this over-advertised approach to make a purchase. Like you said, people have been purchasing things for a very long time, and I think that people are capable, people are smart, people know where they're at in the journey better than, really, anybody else.And so there is a time and a place for it, but there is also—it seems to be moving in too much information, too much interruption in people's lives and it is certainly—yeah, if I don't want it, I'm certainly not going to—or if I don't want to be targeted that way, I'm not going to do it to anybody else either.Corey: Turns out there's an entire seedy underbelly to the web, and as soon as you have a website that has a little bit of traction, you wind up getting exposed to countless piles of spam about it. There's the standard SEO stuff of how to optimize your results in search engines. I have this ancient approach that seems to serve me pretty well, which is, I write fun, engaging original content and then put it on the website, and then it sort of takes over from there. I don't write with an eye towards, “Well, use the following phrase more than 20 times but less than 50 in the course of the next month.” It's, “no.”But then you wind up with folks guaranteeing, “Oh, use us for search engine optimization,” which I always think is the weirdest pitch because let's face it, if I want someone to do my search engine optimization work, wouldn't you think I would just type the word search engine optimization into Google and then click the number one result? Seems like they have the proof and no one else would. But there's also this sea of folks asking if they can pay me to put a guest blog post on the website. And the answer is no. When we have guest blog posts—usually on Fridays—that comes from people that we pay to write them.It's not some random thing that's only tangentially tied to what we do but includes a suspicious number of links to some other third-party website. It doesn't make sense for me to just start devaluing the experience of the reader like that. I try to be as respectful of people's time as I can be when it comes to content creation.Natalie: Right. And I think I'm becoming a broken record on this point, but I will say it again: people are smart; they can see through those tactics. And yes, there are certain things that will help your content rank better: where you put your keywords, having a title and a meta description, and all those things are important, but at the end of the day you need to write for your audience and not for the search engines. They're getting smarter, right, the search engines are getting smarter, but they are still not the humans and so if you overstuff your keywords, if you put in a bunch of links, it's going to look like you're doing it solely for the search engine and people will see that, they'll recognize that, and they won't value your content because they will feel like they're being sold to. And they won't get what they need out of it; they won't see it as a thought leader that's genuinely producing content in order to help inform them and it'll be devalued.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: It's disturbing in some ways to see the number of companies losing their collective minds [unintelligible 00:16:29] there's a Google algorithm change, and suddenly, as a web browser myself—as in the person, not the software—when suddenly I'm no longer seeing a bunch of eHow links or whatnot dominating search results, or the godawful Experts Exchange site for a while where they would pretend to have a paywall, but scroll down far enough and they have the full text of the thing to keep within Google's rules. And Google got better at these things with time. If a single change to a search engine algorithm can destroy your business, I wonder how sustainable business is in the long term.Natalie: Right. And I think that, like you said, it's—I mean, it's a game, right, and the game constantly changes, it constantly involves. The search engines are getting smarter, but if you just try and constantly keep up with the rules of the game in that way, you're going to lose because it's just going to be a constant change. I think the most important thing is to just show up consistently and write good content. I mean, when SEO became a thing, if you put in five million keywords, you're going to rank well, but it's not any value.And so if your intent is just to always produce good content, be aware of the rules of the game and apply them when it makes sense to, and figure out what the ones that are most important to you are, you will do well, but it's just that consistently showing up, producing good content, and having your readers in mind is what's going to help you go forward. If you're just focused on the algorithms and making it fit in that, it's going to look that way and you're never going to be able to catch up.Corey: For me, the big indicator that I'm doing something right is periodically, because it is a collection of links, I'll link to some site that has some sort of attack malware on it, usually from an ad network that was compromised somewhere—surprise; it's just a thing that happens—and as a result, some companies will start blocking it or will start putting it in the spam folder. And when you wind up with larger outside spam folks reaching out to you because of the number of complaints they're getting from their customers about it being blocked, that's my indication that we're probably doing something kind of right, as opposed to it being incumbent on us to track that down from our side.Natalie: Yeah. And like I said before, I mean, the users know what—they also know the rules of the game, too, right? Or they're at least aware of it, and so they can recognize that. But like I said, it's just having the goal of informing your audience and producing good content that you know is going to resonate with your audience. It's just a smart way to go. I mean, having the user in mind always, and not it as a way to see them as just a dollar sign or a number, but knowing how can I really help them learn about this topic or share what I know, is going to always benefit.Corey: The piece that I think resonates in some respects as well is what I'll periodically do even on this podcast, where it's, I will ask people about what they're good at and listen to the answer, and then ask follow-up questions. It's not exactly a pioneering technique; it's just storytelling. And for whatever reason, it seems that marketing—the way I view it—is always tied back to storytelling. It's about understanding who your audience is for anything that you're working on, understand what action you want them to take. Maybe it is to fix their S3 bucket permissions.Maybe it's to reach out and ask me about AWS bill consulting. Whatever it is, understand who the audience is and what the expected outcome is, and then just tell a story around that. It's not that compellingly difficult, but for some reason, it seems like it's the most novel thing in the world to some companies. I always equated marketing with storytelling. Is that rare? Am I wrong on something?Natalie: Not in my book. I mean, that's how I think about it as well, too. I think that some companies get so focused on talking about themselves, and this is what we do and this is why we're the best. But they miss that storytelling piece of it of why it matters to the audience. You can talk about your company until you're blue in the face, but if you don't connect it to your audience, they aren't going to know how it helps them.And maybe you have a service that they don't know that they need yet, but by producing content and telling them a story of how what you're doing is going to make their lives easier, you're going to resonate with them. I mean, that's why people look for services: because they have a problem. And maybe it's not identified, or they don't know how to fix it, but if you frame your content in a way that takes them through a journey of, this is where you're at, this is how we can help you and then—or this can ask, how can you make your life better, and this is where you'll be at the end of it, it's going to resonate with your audience. And so yeah, I think that if you're focused on shouting the benefits without connecting it to the emotion of why it matters, it's going to come across that way. And so I think, yeah, storytelling, having the audience, their perspective, who they are, what they need, and telling the story in a way that is a good experience for them, is always the way to go.Corey: For whatever reason, it seems like the folks that are the worst offenders of that tend to be the big cloud companies themselves, where, “Okay, here's a service we built.” “Great, how am I going to use that to solve an actual business problem that I have?” “Next up, we have a guest speaker from Netflix to tell us what they did with it.” “Cool. Maybe I have problems that don't look like Netflix-scale problems, maybe I'm just trying to contextualize this thing that you've released with the 200 other things that you have, and figure out what component that will replace, or extend, or what feature it will grant inside of my existing environment. Or even if it's something new, it'll give me ideas for different directions to move things in.”And they never do that. They talk about features, they talk about capabilities, they talk about how innovative they are, and they just completely abdicate the entire role of telling a compelling story around this. I mean, Jeff Barr's blog posts are a terrific counterexample to this. I think it's the only time that AWS actually tells a story of, “I'm going to set out to build this thing to do this. Here's how I do it, and here's how it works.”And it's incredibly engaging, it has a distinct voice—because Jeff has a personality and can express that personality—and I get the sense, at times, he's the only person at Amazon allowed to do that. Everyone else just winds up falling into these same somewhat tired tropes of, “Here's a bunch of feature announcements.” The release feed doesn't even let you include images, so wind up—people trying to describe the layout of a new console page to you. And it just doesn't resonate or make sense. I mean, half the value of building the audience that I have is, whenever something comes out, people's immediate question for me is—they'll tell me that it's out by, “Can you explain this to me because Amazon, once again, has failed to do so.” I didn't show up here, due to the express purpose of being the de facto head of AWS marketing; it just kind of happened because functionally, it feels like it's a pretty empty seat.Natalie: Yeah, and I think that those are all really important points because they put out all this information about their services and their features, but they don't complete the cycle to say how it affects the user, how they would use it, and so it's like you're not finishing the race there. And so you also have to acknowledge that you might target a similar set of companies, so maybe you're targeting a bunch of companies in one space, but everybody's pain points are going to be a little bit different, so if your audience can't relate to how you're implement—or how you're telling them to implement a service or a feature, they're not going to feel that. And so you have to tell your audience how what you're doing is going to improve their life, but also doing it in a way that is going to apply to them. And so that's part of understanding your audience and understanding the different pain points associated with each of your target audiences. And so that's why it's important to have some of those intel on your audience, but finding out a way to resonate it across all of the companies that you target and make it relatable is what's going to be success.Corey: It's always strange to me that when we talk to sponsors who are—they want to wind up telling people about, great, I try to have conversations with them; imagine that? And understand, okay, how does this differentiate from, for example, an AWS service that does something very similar? And the answer is often, “Wait, that's a real thing that exists?” If people in that market aren't aware that there's an AWS release that does the thing that they do, what hope do customers have? None.Natalie: Right.Corey: It feels like it's not just a matter of will AWS launch a service that competes with you it's, will they do an even passable job of telling a story around it so people know it exists? They tend to do everything very frugally, which means that they can release things that are competing with, in some cases, many billion-dollar companies out there. And great, okay, so you've got a 60-person team or whatnot, trying to compete with a company with a $30 billion valuation. Yeah, my money is on not Amazon for stuff like this, until they start trying to do things that reek of anti-competitive acts. I'm not super worried about Amazon as a competitor for a lot of these upstart services.Natalie: Yeah. And I think another thing, too, that you touched on was having conversations with your audience and really understanding how they are perceiving what you're selling. I think if you get caught up in, “This is what we're going to push; this is how we're going to say it; this is what we're going to do,” but you don't have that touchpoint of how are they perceiving it, are they aware of this? There's a big missed opportunity there. Because if something's not working, there's a disconnect; there's a miscommunication. So, being able to have some kind of engagement with your audience, where you're surveying them, or whatever, to see how their perception of what you're selling is vital in shaping your marketing story.Corey: You really would think that this wouldn't be anywhere near as challenging as it has clearly become.Natalie: Mm-hm.Corey: But here we are.Natalie: And I think people, they try and make things more complicated, I think, from time to time. I think that just going back to the reason why you're selling things: the reason why you're providing a service is to help your audience fill a need, hit a pain point. And so I think that it can certainly get over complicated quickly and you can forget, really, the mission behind a lot of what you're doing.Corey: I wish more people shared your viewpoint. I guess, so far, all we can do is set a good example and hope the rest of the industry follows us wherever we're going.Natalie: Right. And I mean, you know, like I said, there's always kind of moving in that direction of a lot of tech, a lot of these big things that are supposed to make your life easier in marketing, but I think it'll always come back to the audience, it'll always come back to the storytelling, it'll always come back to the user experience. And so, it's just riding the waves, and seeing what's going to happen, and how things evolve. Because marketing and everything, it's just a constant keeping track of the trends and the evolution of it.Corey: And it never seems to hold still. If people want to hear more about what you're up to and how you think about these things, where can they find you?Natalie: You can find me on Twitter at @natveiswilliams.Corey: I will, of course, put a link to that in the [show notes 00:27:31]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.Natalie: Yep, Thanks, Corey. This was wonderful. I really enjoyed it.Corey: Natalie Williams, Director of Snarketing here at the Duckbill Group. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an insulting comment telling me exactly which features on the checklist this episode should have had instead, phrased in the worst way possible.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need the Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Todd: I'm here with Natalie and she is working in Bangkok. And how long have you been here?Natalie: I've been here about 10 months.Todd: It's interesting to hear your thoughts on Bangkok because I was an English teacher here over 20 years ago from 1994 to 1998. It was my first teaching job and Bangkok was very different then than it is now. Now I would say it's a pretty amazing cosmopolitan city. Could you agree?Natalie: Yeah, that's part of the reason why we chose it. My partner and I traveled for about a year and a half and we said, "Okay, now let's live somewhere." So we decided to move to Bangkok because it has this great balance of you're still in Southeast Asia, so it still feels like it's developing, it's on its way to something, perhaps what we see Japan or China as now, but it's not quite there yet. And also you can get all the modern conveniences that you could possibly need here in the city. It's really well connected, so it feels like a regular metropolitan city, but at the same time it still feels like you're living in Southeast Asia, which is really cool.Todd: It has done an amazing job of one becoming this just bustling, beautiful cosmopolitan paradise. I mean, the skyline was not here 25 years ago. So all the buildings that they've built or it's just amazing. So now it almost rivals Hong Kong or New York and years ago they didn't have that. So in terms of the city planning, it's just phenomenal what they've done. But also, like you said, they've kept the kind of original cultural vibe to the city-Natalie: Absolutely.Todd: Which is pretty amazing.Natalie: You have different neighborhoods that you can live in. So there is the, I guess a main arteryof Bangkok is the Skytrain. So we call it the BTS. And this a, I guess what they were considered to be high speed and transportation rail system that goes right through the heart of Bangkok. So a lot of the neighborhoods that I would talk about kind of populated around the Skytrain. So you will have pockets of Bangkok that will feel very Thai. So they will be further out on the BTS Skytrain. But you can still get to the heart of Bangkok where all the malls are, or perhaps where all the business areas are within, I don't know, 20 minutes. And obviously, with it being in Southeast Asia, it's still really cheap.Natalie: You can go way out into the areas that are super Thai. You get amazing street food, you'll see very few tourists and then you can, within 20 minutes you can be in, say the Japanese area, which is more expensive and it has a lot of Western restaurants and obviously Japanese restaurants. 20 minutes later you can be in the tourist center where you'll see all the malls and perhaps the more city side of Bangkok. So it's very accessible.Todd: Yeah, it's interesting. How have you been to Dubai?Natalie: I haven't, no.Todd: What's interesting is Dubai and Bangkok have almost the exact same developmental model. So what they did is they built a nice train line, an elevated train and then along the train they built a bunch of shopping malls and condos and they've built a world-class airport and made it a hub for travel to other areas. And even though Dubai and Bangkok they're so different culturally, it's quite interesting to see that economically they're kind of thriving onthe same model. They get lots of international travel, they have a lot of things for tourists to do when they go there. They get a lot of people now that want to retire or maybe live there.Natalie: Yeah. The people that I speak to you about that they're saying the same thing. Bangkok is almost the center of Southeast Asia. You can get pretty much anywhere in the world on a long-haul flight. So you can fly to the UK directly from Bangkok, which is insane. You don't have to stop anywhere. If you want to go to Vietnam from somewhere in the West, you have to stop in Bangkok for the most part. There are very few direct flights. And you can get to the likes of Japan and China within just five or six hours.

Todd: I'm here with Natalie and she is working in Bangkok. And how long have you been here?Natalie: I've been here about 10 months.Todd: It's interesting to hear your thoughts on Bangkok because I was an English teacher here over 20 years ago from 1994 to 1998. It was my first teaching job and Bangkok was very different then than it is now. Now I would say it's a pretty amazing cosmopolitan city. Could you agree?Natalie: Yeah, that's part of the reason why we chose it. My partner and I traveled for about a year and a half and we said, "Okay, now let's live somewhere." So we decided to move to Bangkok because it has this great balance of you're still in Southeast Asia, so it still feels like it's developing, it's on its way to something, perhaps what we see Japan or China as now, but it's not quite there yet. And also you can get all the modern conveniences that you could possibly need here in the city. It's really well connected, so it feels like a regular metropolitan city, but at the same time it still feels like you're living in Southeast Asia, which is really cool.Todd: It has done an amazing job of one becoming this just bustling, beautiful cosmopolitan paradise. I mean, the skyline was not here 25 years ago. So all the buildings that they've built or it's just amazing. So now it almost rivals Hong Kong or New York and years ago they didn't have that. So in terms of the city planning, it's just phenomenal what they've done. But also, like you said, they've kept the kind of original cultural vibe to the city-Natalie: Absolutely.Todd: Which is pretty amazing.Natalie: You have different neighborhoods that you can live in. So there is the, I guess a main arteryof Bangkok is the Skytrain. So we call it the BTS. And this a, I guess what they were considered to be high speed and transportation rail system that goes right through the heart of Bangkok. So a lot of the neighborhoods that I would talk about kind of populated around the Skytrain. So you will have pockets of Bangkok that will feel very Thai. So they will be further out on the BTS Skytrain. But you can still get to the heart of Bangkok where all the malls are, or perhaps where all the business areas are within, I don't know, 20 minutes. And obviously, with it being in Southeast Asia, it's still really cheap.Natalie: You can go way out into the areas that are super Thai. You get amazing street food, you'll see very few tourists and then you can, within 20 minutes you can be in, say the Japanese area, which is more expensive and it has a lot of Western restaurants and obviously Japanese restaurants. 20 minutes later you can be in the tourist center where you'll see all the malls and perhaps the more city side of Bangkok. So it's very accessible.Todd: Yeah, it's interesting. How have you been to Dubai?Natalie: I haven't, no.Todd: What's interesting is Dubai and Bangkok have almost the exact same developmental model. So what they did is they built a nice train line, an elevated train and then along the train they built a bunch of shopping malls and condos and they've built a world-class airport and made it a hub for travel to other areas. And even though Dubai and Bangkok they're so different culturally, it's quite interesting to see that economically they're kind of thriving onthe same model. They get lots of international travel, they have a lot of things for tourists to do when they go there. They get a lot of people now that want to retire or maybe live there.Natalie: Yeah. The people that I speak to you about that they're saying the same thing. Bangkok is almost the center of Southeast Asia. You can get pretty much anywhere in the world on a long-haul flight. So you can fly to the UK directly from Bangkok, which is insane. You don't have to stop anywhere. If you want to go to Vietnam from somewhere in the West, you have to stop in Bangkok for the most part. There are very few direct flights. And you can get to the likes of Japan and China within just five or six hours.

EP#031 - Hosts: Richard, Reno, Natalie - You already know that we're pros at fast food. We Love this topic so much, we ran it back for a round two. I Dunno Dude - Please listen, subscribe & share!!! 

In this episode of The Best Thing podcast, Antonio Neves talks to entrepreneur, writer, speaker, community builder, and neuroscience nerd, Natalie Franke. As one of the founders of the Rising Tide Society and the head of community at Honeybook, Natalie leads tens of thousands of creatives and small business owners while fostering a spirit of community over competition around the world. In a powerful and emotional conversation, Natalie shares how getting diagnosed with a brain tumor and undergoing neurosurgery changed her life. -- Quick Episode Summary: Meet Natalie Natalie's philosophy in a nutshell The narrative of insecurity How community has impacted Natalie How Natalie builds community When competition goes too far The best thing that has happened to Natalie You have a choice of how you want to use your time and talents When Natalie had to confront her diagnoses How Natalie's diagnoses affected her marriage Acknowledging the truth of your existence The benefits of gratitude   Quick Links: Natalie's website: nataliefranke.com Natalie's Instagram: www.instagram.com/nataliefranke Rising Tide https://bit.ly/2SUQXlG     Connect with Antonio Join The Best Thing Facebook Group: Click here Sign up for the Stop Living on Autopilot Mini-Course: theantonioneves.com/stop-living-on-autopilot-mini-course/ I'd love to hear from you! Text me: 310-564-7124   Pre-order Stop Living On Autopilot: Take Responsibility for Your Life and Rediscover a Bolder, Happier You: https://amzn.to/3mESHNB Join me on Instagram: www.instagram.com/theantonioneves Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/theantonioneves Join me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/theantonioneves Join me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/theantonioneves

We're back for episode thirty-eight! Natalie talk about one of her Pixar favorites, Rich introduces a new movie from Netflix, and does a little throw-back to an eighties classic! Plus, which kids' TV show characters are Rich and Natalie? You'll find out! Let's have some fun!

Did you know that you CAN get to the end of your Instagram feed? Darla and Natalie have never scrolled to the end of their 48-hour Insta-recaps, but if you do, something new awaits: suggested posts.  This new phenomenon replaces the notice that you’d normally get that says “You’re all caught up!” So why did Instagram give their feed an update? How does it impact YOU? Find out in this week’s Wingnut Social Monday Marketing Minisode. What You’ll Hear On This Episode of Wingnut Social [0:41] Hydrate hydrate hydrate [1:41] Instagram feed: suggested posts [3:23] The 48-hour marker [4:08] Suggesting new content [6:21] What posts will be suggested? [6:49] You cannot escape [7:32] Who will this impact? [8:42] Keep your content varied [10:58] Blooper Reel! Resources & People Mentioned TikTok Instagram Instagram’s before & after The reigning theory is that Instagram originally implemented the “end of the feed” messages to help users improve their digital well-being and limit screen time. But their newest biggest competitor—*cough* TikTok *cough*—already uses a continuous feed and it’s part of what’s made them SO successful. So Instagram is implementing this new strategy to compete. Instagram will now suggest new posts—based on what you already engage with—that will allow you to expand your horizons. They could be ads, photos, or videos—but they will NOT suggest IGTV teasers or Reels content.  How Instagram’s suggested posts feed feature can impact YOU What stands out to Natalie? You cannot hide these posts. You cannot escape. But you’ll only see suggested posts if you’ve exhausted the content posted by everyone you follow. So if you follow thousands of people, you’ll likely never see the end of that yellow-brick road.  However, this will impact new users with relatively small feeds. It’s a great way to increase your discoverability. This allows Instagram to increase its ad space as well. So the chances of your ad showing up in someone’s feed is pretty good. If you’re boosting a post and targeting people—here comes Darla Powell Interiors!  So what content should you post? Will it positively impact analytics and increase your followers? Listen to this minisode for all the deets! Connect With Darla & Wingnut Social www.WingnutSocial.com On Facebook On Twitter: @WingnutSocial On Instagram: @WingnutSocial Darla’s Interior Design Website Check out the Wingnut Social Media Lab Facebook Group! 1-877-WINGNUT (connect with us for your social media marketing needs)   Subscribe to The Wingnut Social Podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, or TuneIn Audio Production and Show notes byPODCAST FAST TRACKhttps://www.podcastfasttrack.com

On this week’s episode of the Single Mom Tribe, we take it back to where it all began, catching up with our Co-Founder, Natalie Wainwright, reminding ourselves what inspired us to start this project. Reflecting about how our lives have changed over the past year, especially during this Universal pause brought on by the global outbreak of COVID-19, forcing us all to slowdown and do some deep, personal introspection.Natalie is single-mother of two, a Tenant Representative in Commercial Real Estate within the Las Vegas Market, and she has been dominating each minute of every day for years. So this lapse in time and space has really allowed her life to slow down momentarily, and it has actually changed how she sees herself, in adapting to this “new normal” additional strengths she hadn’t previously acknowledged have emerged.Today she’s here to share with us some of her greatest advice on self-doubt, negative self-talk, fear-based beliefs, self-love, dating, a warning regarding jumping from one relationship to the next and introducing your child(ren) to your suitors too soon, loneliness, the pros and cons of social media, and the dangers of the comparison spiral.In her own search for solutions to sabotaging self-talk, her brother lovingly reminded her, that when you look for a solution, you’re going to find it, and on the flipside, when you’re looking for a problem, you’ll be sure to find that too, it’s all about your perspective. So it is important to choose the path that serves the best version of yourself. She reminds us that it’s ok to be ‘not ok,’ but it is even more important to love yourself (and your child(ren)) enough to do the work that it takes to get through the darkness and return to the light.Asking the hard questions that come in moments of self-doubt… Why me? Why this? Why now? Something has to give… Those questions don’t make you a victim, but they allow you the opportunity to sit with your emotions that surround certain circumstances in your life and give you the ability to work through them in healthy manners, so that they don’t show up in other negative ways in your life.Natalie gently reminds us that even when we do the work and get to a place where you love yourself despite your flaws, there will still be bad days, and moments when you just feel broken. We are human, but don’t be too hard on yourself, release the judgement, allow yourself to feel the frustrations, and as it passes, build yourself back up again; your child(ren) are learning by your direct example.Natalie continues to share her story because she doesn’t want other women to feel alone and unsupported on this journey, she prompts us to love ourselves even in the awareness of our drastic flaws, while allowing ourselves to step out from behind our shadows and shine, because we don’t have to be perfect to be seen!To connect with Natalie - You can find her on both Twitter and Instagram @Natalie_CRE310X

Why does Gina always clock in ten minutes late? How is the family affected with David's cell phone addiction? And who's eating all the peanuts in the breakroom? We all have employees, family members, and others in life we'll inevitably have to confront. The question is how? How do we have these difficult conversations? And are they really necessary? Sometimes it feels like we've gone to the dark side when we step into these moments of difficulty. We'd rather walk on eggshells than address the proverbial elephant in the breakroom. But is that really best? Join me as I talk with Business strategist Natalie Remund of Multi Business Solutions, and we explore how to overcome the challenges of confrontation. Want more from Natalie? You can gat in touch with her at any of the following: Natalie@multi-business-solutions.com or call @ (218)770-2691 or find her on FaceBook@ Multibusinesssolutionsmn.

  In episode 108, I'm chatting with Natalie Silverstein about her new book, Simple Acts: The Busy Family's Guide to Giving Back. We talk about the importance of instilling the value of service and acts of kindness. She shares how she created a resource of volunteer opportunities for parents and children in her community and what led to her writing this book for families. It is full of ways to make time in your family's busy life for service and suggestions for making service part of your family's culture. Big Ideas Doing service, acts of kindness, helping others is a wonderful way to grow empathy, compassion, and open-mindedness in young children. Studies show that people who volunteer with their families as children are more likely to do so as an adult. Studies also show that volunteering makes you happier and healthier. There are many ways to give back which don't require scheduling, spending a lot of money, or volunteering formally. It can be incorporated into the things families are already doing: playdates, holidays, vacations, etc. Involve your kids when deciding who to help, how to serve, and which charities to support. You can follow their lead and they will be more invested. When we make service a priority, we find the time to make it happen. There are people in need all year long, not just during the holidays. Social media can be a helpful tool for people to promote positive messages and acts of kindness. It can also be a way to get family and friends involved in service. Quotes Natalie: "All of these life skills that kids get a camp are values that parents want to demonstrate and model at home." Natalie: "I do believe that this work begins at home with very young children. Anything we can do to incorporate these acts of kindness into camp life, into extracurricular activities, and most importantly, into our weekends in our free time, is really so important." Natalie: "It creates a foundation, a moral base for kids, from which they grow." Natalie: "Everybody has a laundry list of extracurricular activities and tutoring and sports and ballet and instruments and all of these things. We don't necessarily prioritize taking time out to say 'no' to some of those things and 'yes' to service and acts of kindness and volunteering together." Audrey: "It's a partnership. It starts at home and then you try to find places like schools, religious organizations, and camps, that also support and reinforce those values that you're trying to teach your kids. Audrey: "We can't do it alone. If we're all trying together to promote these things, it works so much better and our kids turn out a lot better, too." Audrey: "As individuals, we all have different things that bring us flow. I think just like regular work, our volunteering should also be something that's in our wheelhouse, things we enjoy doing." Natalie: "We are all moving through our days, interacting with other human beings. Teach your child to make eye contact with the person behind the counter, hold the door, thank the postman. There are things you can be doing at every moment, almost every day." Natalie: "This is not rocket science. I think the theme of my book is you don't have to change the world to change the world. You don't have to fly to Africa and build a school to make an impact on someone else's life." Natalie: "Give (your children) the opportunity and don't make it negotiable. Say, 'This is what we do. This is how our family operates. Find the thing that really speaks to you and then let's find a way for you to give back in that realm.' It just builds on itself for kids." Natalie: "Instead of saying you don't have time for something, change it and say it's not a priority and then see how that feels." Natalie: "We want to model our values. We want to live our values, perform service and acts of kindness, and just treat people the right way out in the world." Natalie: "These are all things that people can be doing if they're mindful of it. It needs to be intentional. Just like everything in parenting. We need to be thinking about what it is that we can show our kids every day as we walk through our lives that this is how we care about others because we hope that they care about us in the same way." Audrey: "If you find something that you really enjoy doing, then you'll keep doing it and it will bring you a lot of joy, too." Natalie: "You're helping others in the community, doing something substantive. But you're also creating really nice warm family memories and I think those are the things that people remember as adults." Natalie: "There are so many little things that kids can be doing You just have to keep your mind open to it and your heart open to it." Natalie: "You don't have to go out and do this huge, enormous, time-consuming, expensive thing. It's just the little things and they're like drops in a bucket. They add up and they fill the cup of your child's emerging character. It makes a difference in who they are." Natalie: "It's about mindfulness and keeping an open heart and an open mind and really just reminding your children to think outside of themselves." Natalie: "If we can get young people on social media channels to turn the narrative around such that we are putting up instead of putting down--promote the good and spread the good--that can be very powerful." Natalie: "If I'm hosting a play date and these kids are already drawing or painting or making cookies, that can have a service or kindness element built into it. Then even better, go for a walk in the community and deliver those cookies to the local firehouse. This is all part of making it social, making it fun, doing it with other people." Audrey: "It's just so important. We need to counter the negative. Cyberbullying is at an all-time high. If we can just get our kids to flip this and be more focused on what good they can do, then that would make this a kinder world." Natalie: "All of these life skills we learn are tiny drops in the bucket of a child's developing character. If you're not modeling this behavior, if you are screaming at the person behind the counter or the other driver in the car, the way you show your child how you hold the door, how you greet the postal worker by name, it's really powerful. By showing kids 'how we do it in our house', it sticks. It just sticks." About Natalie Natalie Silverstein is an author, volunteer and passionate advocate for family service. After a 15-year career in hospital administration, managed care and healthcare consulting, she now works as a freelance writer and editor with a particular focus on the non-profit sector and community service. Her first book, Simple Acts: The Busy Family’s Guide to Giving Back, was published by Gryphon House on April 1, 2019. In September 2013, Natalie launched the first local affiliate of Doing Good Together (www.doinggoodtogether.org), a Minneapolis-based nonprofit with the mission of helping parents raise kids who care and contribute. As the New York area coordinator, she curates a free monthly e-mail listing of family-friendly service opportunities that are distributed to thousands of subscribers. Natalie is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on the topic of family and youth service, presenting to parents, educators, and children across New York City. She is also a contributor to parenting blogs, GrownandFlown.com, and Mommypoppins.com. Along with her husband, she is the co-founder of The Silverstein Foundation for Parkinson’s with GBA(www.silversteinfoundation.org),a nonprofit focused on finding a cure for Parkinson’s Disease in GBA mutation carriers, and serves as Executive Director and a member of the Board of Directors. Natalie earned an undergraduate degree in health policy and administration from Providence College and a master’s degree in public health from Yale University. Links Doing Good Together #CampKindnessDay Simple Acts Facebook Page Related Posts & Podcasts Ep. 46: #CampKindnessDay with Tom Rosenberg Why My Family is Celebrating World Kindness Day Focusing on Kindness  

Is Robert Wagner deceiving the public when he says Natalie Wood's death was an accident? Thirty-seven years after the Oscar winner’s inexplicable demise, the question lives on with the same vigor as when it was first asked—and the main person of interest continues his stonewalling. Now, we come as close to an answer as the world may ever come. In two explosive, face-to-face exchanges—one with a reporter from our investigative team and another with Natalie’s still-grieving sister, Lana—the Hollywood star is asked, point-blank, “Did you kill Natalie?” You’ll never believe his reply. Or the results of a lie detector test, performed by one of the world’s foremost experts. We also hear shocking final statements from those closest to the case who believe Natalie’s death was no accident and was, in fact, murder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Haha, what's up, guys? This is Steve Larsen.   This is Sales Funnel Radio, and before we cue the intro here, I want you to know, this episode for me was really special.   I interview an incredible entrepreneur. Her name is Natalie Hodson. She's fantastic. I love learning and studying from her.   She's gonna talk about some things that went on kinda crazy in her life, and how to leverage the crazy things inside of your life for your audience - particularly around the subject of vulnerability.   So this is how to be vulnerable without looking like you're weak, right? And for a lot of guys, that's super important.   For a lot of selling in general, that's super important - the purpose is not to look like you're weak.   So anyways, let's cue the intro here. I hope you guys enjoy it, and if you have liked this, please reach out to her and say thank you. She puts some really amazing things out.   Thanks, guys, so much, and see you on the episode.   I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today, and now I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million-dollar business.   The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer.   Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels.   My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. What's going on, everyone?   Hey, it's Steve Larsen, and I'm really excited to have you here today.   Stephen: I have someone that I've been trying to get on the podcast for a very long time - because I just think the world of her. It's been super amazing to get to know this person. Anyways, I'm excited about it.   The first time that I got to hear this story,  it was heart-wrenching for me to see, not just everything that had happened, but the inspiration that it's causing in other people's lives.   The way it's changing other people's lives is a huge deal.   It was fascinating for me to see that this is real, you know, this is a big deal.   I already knew that, but just to continue to watch it in application... I was like, "Gosh, the thousands and thousands and thousands of lives that it's changed."   It's my incredible honor and privilege to have you on the show. Guys, I wanna welcome Natalie Hodson. How are you doing?   Natalie - Hey, thank you so much, Stephen. That was an amazing intro.   Stephen - I mean it.   Natalie -  I'm so excited to be here too. I've watched your stuff, and I've binge listened to all your podcasts. Your advice has helped me so much, so it's like a win-win. I'm excited - you're excited. It's awesome.   Stephen - Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you very much.  I know a lot of people may not know about you yet, and frankly, it's just a matter of time... I think everyone's gonna know who you are.   Natalie - Aw, thank you.   Stephen - Could you tell us a little bit about your story, and kind of the background, 'cause it's inspiring, and...   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - There's obviously funnels in there, but that's a vehicle for this whole thing. You're changing people's lives, and I'd love you to grace my audience with that... that'd be great.   Natalie - Totally. Well, there's a long version and a short version. I'll try to keep it towards the short version, but I tend to be long-winded.   So at any point, if you're like, "Natalie, take it this direction," you know...   Stephen - We have happy ears.   Natalie - So I'm in the fitness space. But I always say that I accidentally fell into the fitness industry because I was a history major in school. I didn't know:   #1: That there even was a fitness industry   #2: That I ever wanted to be a part of it.   After I had my son, I gained 70 pounds when I was pregnant with him. I was like big, out here. He was a 10-pound baby.   Stephen - 70 pounds?   Natalie - Yeah, I was really big. And after I had him, I remember feeling lost. I remember looking in the mirror and feeling like, "I don't even recognize myself... I just wanted to feel like myself again," and it wasn't even so much about the weight. I just didn't feel like me.   So I started a blog, and honestly, it was like an online journal - just as a way to keep me accountable for my fitness stuff.   I didn't tell a single person that I knew in real life, because I was embarrassed.  I didn't want the people I knew to know what I was struggling.   This was when Pinterest very first got started, about eight years ago.  I just started sharing...   I like to cook, so I started sharing healthy recipes, and I started putting them on Pinterest.   And honestly, if you look at my first pins back then, they were taken with a flip phone, just awful photos, but luckily for me, now people are taking gorgeous pictures for me.   So I started to get a lot of traffic to my website.   Stephen - You were just kinda documenting what you were doing?   Natalie - I was just documenting what I was doing and sharing.   This was right when Facebook groups weren't even a thing, and I started a Facebook group with this training program I was doing. I started sharing my ups and my downs, just because I felt like it was a safe space.   I was really vulnerable and telling, you know, my struggles; like I got called out of the gym daycare again - just like real struggles, you know?   I was struggling with all this stuff. And so, I did that 12-week program, and had awesome results, and got some recognition from bodybuilding.com.   I was getting a lot of traffic to my site. So I was like, man, if I'm getting traffic, I might as well monetize it. So I got certified as a personal trainer and started writing - I wrote a couple of ebooks.  I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't how to write an ebook. I just kind of figured it out as I went.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - And then, I started recognizing, basically, like, long story short, what happened is one day...   I was at an event, and this girl came up to me. And she's like, "I love following your stuff! I could never do what you do, because I have stretched skin after I had my babies, and I could never look like you."   I got really confused in the moment, 'cause I was like, "What are you talking about? I have tons of stretched skin."   And then I started realizing that, I don't share that. I have all these beautiful professional photos where I stand up straight, and I angle myself just right so you can't see it, right?   Stephen - Right, yeah.   Natalie - Posture and perfect looking. I started realizing, like, "Holy crap," in my head, I look down, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I have stretched skin, whatever," but I wasn't like, showing that to anybody else.   And so, that night, I pulled out my camera, and I filmed this video,  just saying to people, "Look, I recognize that I've never shown you... this is what that looks like."   People talk about that a lot, but this was six years ago, and really, nobody was talking about it.   I remember the first time I posted that video, my hand was shaking. I thought I was gonna lose every follower I had. But I was like, "I know that if I'm struggling with this, other people are too."   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - And I posted it, and I shut my computer down. I wouldn't look at it, 'cause I was like, "everybody's gonna hate this."   When I opened it up an hour later, there were just thousands of comments, and that video went kind of viral.   Then I started realizing that the more I talked about things that felt scary or uncomfortable, it was actually more of like a magnet. People started to feel like, "Whoa, she gets me. Whoa, she's talking about things that I think in my head, but nobody's really talking about."   And then what happened is it started to  heal broken parts of me too - because I started to realize that those fears and insecurities weren't even real. It was just the story that I was telling myself.   So the more I talked about my story, the less power it had over me.   And so, total side note here, fast forward to right now... 'cause this was years ago... but I feel like I worked through all that body image stuff kind of on accident.   Stephen - Sure.   Natalie - I was being vulnerable, and it's crazy, 'cause right now, I'm going through a very similar process. I'm trying to do a lot of self-work. Learning to be perfectly imperfect with the body stuff - I feel like I did that, and I'm okay with it.   Stephen - “Perfectly imperfect” - that's cool.   Natalie - Yeah, and now it's like, "Okay, how can I...?" I've always struggled with this idea of perfection, and now with relationships, I'm trying to recognize that it's okay to not be perfect in relationships. That when you work through the hard stuff, when you talk about the hard stuff, it actually...   So anyways, I'll turn back now. I skipped a big chunk in there, but...   Stephen - No, that's fascinating what you just said... We will come back to that.   Natalie - Okay.   Stephen - Keep going, 'cause there's this whole spot... I'm like, "This is so cool."   Natalie -  I might not have the right words for it, because I'm just starting to figure it out. It's what I was talking to my friend Yara about last night.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - So, anyways, I built this big audience, all organically. I had about 400,000 followers, but I wasn't really monetizing it.   I was selling ebooks and making decent, good money, probably  around six figures as a stay at home mom - so it was good. Like, it was awesome, and I was enjoying it. I was writing.   And then I went through a divorce. And then it got really scary, because I was like, "All right, I don't have child support, I don't have alimony.  I have to figure this out."   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - And it just so happened... like, you know, I swear, a lot of times, things fall in place when they're supposed to, or you meet people when you're supposed to.   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - It just so happened that... I don't know actually what happened. I don't know if my name got thrown around in a mastermind or something, but all of a sudden, I got emails or phone calls from eight different people wanting to build a funnel for me in ClickFunnels, and all this stuff.   I was like, "What? what is a funnel? What is this?" And so, I started researching and googling, and I kept seeing this name, Russell Brunson.   It's so embarrassing now 'cause I know what a good, honest, genuine hard-working guy Russell is... but honestly, at first, I was like, "Is this a scam? Why are people promising me the world, and like telling me they can..."   Usually, if somebody tells you something that's too good to be true - it is, right?     ...And they're like, "With that audience, you can make all this money." And I was so skeptical.   But the embarrassing part is, Russell wrestled in college with my cousin, and we live like just right down the street from each other. So we had all these mutual friends.   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - I messaged him on Facebook, and basically just... I mean, I didn't say, "Is your company a scam?"... but that's basically... I mean it was rude!   And now that I know who Russell is, I'm like so embarrassed, and I'm so grateful he didn't just say, "See ya, I'm never talking to you again."   So I started finding out about ClickFunnels, and then I read his DotCom Secrets book, and I was like, "What?"   'Cause  I'd built this big audience, but never in my life had I even spent a dime on Facebook ads.   So, I started reading his book, and I was like, "What? These are real secrets. Why is he sharing this?"   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - Look, this is my original notepad.   Stephen - What?   Natalie - That's crazy. I was organizing my office, and it happened to be sitting here.   So what I did, this was cool. I pulled out this notepad, and as I went through the book, I started saying, "How can I apply that to my business?" Like, five variables of successful campaigns:   Step one, who are your competitors? And I started writing down who are my actual competitors? This is cool. Blast from the past.   Stephen - That's so cool. I just found mine the other day.   Natalie - No way!   Stephen - Yeah, it's just right over here - the exact same thing. I was just showing it to somebody else. But, yeah, I found mine. It's like going way back.  "I remember the first time I realized this!" This is a huge deal.   Natalie -  I was mind-blown, and I was like, "What?" And so, I started implementing it, and I was like, "This works!"   I brought somebody on to help me with building the funnel at the beginning. Now we've since split ways...   So we launched the funnel. So, okay,  this story's getting very long, so we'll wrap it up, but...   Stephen - No, it's awesome. Super valuable.   Natalie - Okay, so, basically, at that point, I was like, "Hey, my back's against the wall. I need to figure out, how am I gonna monetize what I have here?"   So what I did was, I looked at my Google Analytics on my website.  I was like, my audience is telling me what they're interested in through my analytics, right? So, I took my five most popular blog posts, and I said, okay, I'm gonna make an offer around each of these.   Stephen - Wow.   Natalie - So the first one was this weird word called Diastasis Recti. Which is basically ab separation.   When you're pregnant, your abs can separate to make room for the baby, and in about two-thirds of women, they don't always come back together the right way. So it can cause you to look pregnant, even if you're eating right or exercising. It can cause you to have like just core weakness.   The other post was this thing called Pelvic Floor Dysfunction, which in layman's terms means like, if you laugh, cough, sneeze, jump on a trampoline, exercise too hard, a lot of times, women, after they have babies, will pee their pants a little bit.   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - And so it just so happened that one of my good friends from college had just gotten her Ph.D. in this specific area.   So, I reached out to her, and I was like, "Hey, Monique, I am getting a massive amount of traffic to this blog post. Do you think we could do something together?"   And that's when she told me. She's like, "Oh my gosh, Natalie, the peeing your pants stuff doesn't have to happen! Just 'cause it's common, and happens to so many women it doesn't mean that it's normal or healthy. It can be improved."   And I was really skeptical again at first. I was like, "Yeah, right!" I was like, "Yeah, I've had two 10-pound babies." I got kind of defensive.   Stephen - Your kids were 10 pounds?   Natalie - Yeah, both of 'em. Isn't that crazy?   Stephen - Oh my gosh. Our first two were five and a half.   Natalie - Oh, wow.   Stephen - We have little kids.   Natalie - Yeah, and I had 'em at home too, with midwives, yeah.   Stephen - Oh my gosh.   Natalie - It was crazy. So crazy.   Stephen - Amazing.   Natalie - So, long story short, last year, it was November of last year,  I talked to her. It was that first conversation. And it's funny, 'cause we have the Facebook messages still with the date.   And I said, "Hey, do you think we can write a program helping women?"   Because she put me through a program, and it totally worked.  I knew that if I'm struggling with this, other women must be too.     We started talking about it on Thanksgiving. We began writing it at Christmas. We launched on January 31st.   It was like, a month, a month, a month.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - And we launched it through ClickFunnels, and within four months, we'd sold a million dollars of this $37 ebook.   Stephen - Do the math on that, people.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - How many people? That's crazy.   Natalie - Yeah, it was really crazy. We don't sell the physical version, but this is the physical version, and it's just an ebook. I mean, there's nothing super fancy about it. It's kind of text, parts of it are kind of textbooky.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - I partnered with the doctor to write that. I'm glad I did because she has the credibility, and I have the connection, so it's kind of like a one-two punch.   Stephen - I love that, yeah.   Natalie - I don't think I could have created that program 100% on my own, because when you're talking about the body and anatomy - there are so many things that I wasn't qualified to talk about, but anyways.   So then, it was this whirlwind of like, "Holy crap." Before this, it was just me in front of my computer answering emails.   Then all of a sudden, it's like, "whoa," we have this big company and this big machine, and I need to learn how to hire people and scale and be a CEO of a company instead of just like, a little solopreneur.   Last year was a real whirlwind of a year. I had to learn how to be tough with business. I had to learn the value and the importance of contracts and of not let people take advantage of you.   I had to grow and scale - and create value. I mean, just everything was...   Conceptually, I knew what I needed to do, but applying it was kind of a whirlwind.   I still feel like we're still... we'll always be working on our businesses, but...   So, that was the world's longest answer to "How you got started," but that's how I got involved in the ClickFunnels community.   The one thing I will say is; if anybody is watching this and is skeptical, "I understand," 'cause I felt the exact same way.   But if you just do what Stephen teaches, what Russell teaches it works. It really, really works! It's not scammy.   If you have a good product and a good message to give to the world, follow the system and don't try to change it, and it will work. That's all I did.   I didn't do anything fancy, other than I came up with the idea and the program...  I just did what you guys say to do, and it worked.   Stephen - That's so cool. That's so awesome.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - That's so awesome. Yeah, sometimes people look at it. I had a buddy who looked at it once, and he's like, "That looks like it's scammy," - you know, the same kind of thing. I'm like, "Ah, no, we actually end up delivering more value than if you don't do it this way."   Natalie - Yes, 100% agreed.   Stephen - Fascinating.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - You gave a speech at Funnel Hacking Live which was incredible.  I was so excited. I think we were sitting in the front row, or something like that, I was pumped.   I was like, "Yeah, Natalie's next!" You gave a speech about vulnerability. And you talked about some of the ways you build in vulnerability - and this isn't a weakness.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - Right, but how do you find the strength to be vulnerable?   I guess, first of all, can you tell us what it means to be vulnerable?   You're such an... I don't know if you wanna call it vulnerability secrets, vulnerability expert, or hacks? Whatever, like, but you're really good at doing this in a way that doesn't come across, you know...   It seems like most people are like, "I'm not gonna be vulnerable 'cause it means I'm weak."   Natalie - No, it's not.  I get that, 'cause I felt that way for a long, long time.   So first off, I think a lot of times, especially if you're talking to guys, they will hear the word vulnerable, and they'll be like, "I'm a man. I am not vulnerable," right? And I get that.   So, another way of saying "be vulnerable" is just "be real," right?   Look at Russell. He shares the ups and the downs, and because he shares the downs, you wanna champion and root for him on the ups.   If somebody only shares the good times, then you don't connect as much.   It's almost like we naturally, as humans, have a tendency to...   If you think somebody is only always doing good, it's harder to wanna cheer for them and root for them, you know?   Stephen - "Yeah, the cards are always in that guy's favor... are you kidding?"   Natalie - Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, when it comes to being vulnerable, it's not about crying all the time, and it's not even about being vulnerable all the time.   If you look at my content, 80 to 90% of it is just really good quality content, and then occasionally, I'll add some real honest truth or raw moments into what I share. And what it does is it brings, this isn't my phrase... it from an author named Brene Brown, her books changed my life.   *Natalie looks for books* I don't have them here, but "Daring Greatly" and "Rising Strong" literally, personally and professionally, changed my life.   Brenee is a shame and vulnerability researcher. She teaches that vulnerability is the ultimate human connector because vulnerability and shame cannot survive together.   And so the more vulnerable you are, the less shame can survive, and the less power that story has over you.   And so, you know, we all have moments that we feel embarrassed to talk about, or we think that people will judge us, or we feel ashamed, and what's crazy.   I've found that the more you talk about the hard stuff:   #1: The less shame you feel talking about it, and you start to feel more comfortable with it   #2: People start to open up to you and say, "oh my gosh, me too. I didn't think anybody experienced that."   And so what happens is it creates a different level of trust with your audience.   However, there's a fine line between being vulnerable to get sales and actually being vulnerable, right? That's kind of hard to teach. And so, you know, I didn't start this off saying, "I'm gonna be vulnerable so I can build a big audience and make all this money."   I genuinely have a heart to help people, and selfishly, it helped me along the way, too, because it made me feel less insecure about these things.   People always say, "Okay I get it in theory, it makes sense to be vulnerable, but how do you actually do that without coming across as that crazy person on Facebook that puts all their drama there?"   Stephen - Always crying, the person like, "Oh, crap, unfollow."   Natalie - Yeah, and you're just like, Where's the popcorn. Let's watch their drama unfold." And so I kind of have this four-step system that I didn't mean to create. It's just how I naturally write, but it works really well.   The first thing that I do is #1, remember that you don't always have to share your vulnerable moments in the moment.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - So, if you haven't worked through something and you're still feeling very fragile about it - it's okay to wait to share. Because, I've made that mistake before.   If you get criticism back and you haven't really worked through it yet, that criticism can be shattering to your confidence.   And so, one of the tricks that I have...   For a long time, I struggled, 'cause when you're going through the vulnerable stage when you're really sad or excited or happy or embarrassed or feeling ashamed when you're in the moment, the feelings feel very real...   But sometimes it's hard to sit in front of your computer later and remember the real emotion that you felt during that moment.   So one of the things that I do now, a trick that I have, is I'll pull out my phone and pull up the notes section when I'm in that moment feeling, you know, small or hurt or scared or whatever the feeling is, right? It can be good or bad.   And I'll just shorthand write out the raw feelings. Not like full paragraphs, but, now I have this big catalog of feelings, so if I want to tell a story that relates to this, that relates to body image, or that relates to whatever,  I have all these raw emotions to draw on.   I'm not faking vulnerability. It's my real stuff.  It's my real moments that I can draw from and turn into actual stories.   Another tip: A little family joke is that I'm really bad at analogies, and my family calls them "Natalogies" because a lot of times, like, you know...   The whole crux of expert secrets, is you have to be able to do epiphany bridges and analogies. And my analogies do not make sense half of the time.   I'll say them, and people are like, "that didn't make sense?" I'm just not good at them.   I hope someday, I can learn to be better at analogies. So what I try to do instead is just pull on these stories that I have - and kind of weave it together instead - 'cause my "it's kind of likes" never actually make sense.   So that's like my trick, you know how Russell talks about in the soap opera sequences, to start with the drama - to start with the most dramatic point, and then you tell the back story...   In my posts, a lot of times, I do that.   I start with like the hurt, the pain. Whatever you're feeling, the run moment, start with that, 'cause then people will automatically be like, "Whoa. She's talking about something nobody talks about."   And then what I do is I, and this is just my style. Everybody will find their own style.   But my step number two is to show myself some grace. Remind myself "perfectly imperfect, it's okay," or,  just show yourself some grace, and in some words, type that out.   Then the third step is to try to remind myself of a time when this has happened before and I worked through it -  or when somebody else has gone through something like this and worked through it.   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - And then the fourth step is; I always finish up on a positive note.   So like, either how I worked through it - if this is a past experience, or if I don't know how to work through it, I share what my plan is to try to work through it, even if you fail trying, right?   So what it does is it puts people, like, when you're, when you start with the raw stuff, it makes people feel like, “whoa, like, that could be me, because I've felt that exact same way.”   And then you're giving yourself grace, and you're teaching other people how to show, how to give themselves grace if they're in the same shoes, and then when you talk about how you work through it.   It's like, somebody else could look at you, look at your situation and say, “Whoa, I'm in that situation too, and if she can work through it, I probably can, too.”   And so, I think that's why a lot of my content has gone really viral, is because I make it relatable by sharing, it's not fake. I mean, they're the real moments, and then I come up with like a positive, and it's not.   Stephen - End with hope at the end.   Natalie - It ends with hope, yeah, but it's not like, talking down to somebody.   It's not like, you have to do x, y, and z, or I'm so perfect on my high horse here.   It's more like, we're in this together. We're all in the arena, and we've all fallen down. Let's dust off our knees, and this is how I'm gonna try to stand up. I might get knocked back again, but like, this is what I'm trying.   I don't know if that makes sense at all, but I think that's why... there's an underlying subtleness of talking down to somebody or being on the same playing field and championing everybody to come up together.   I don't know if I have the language to always describe how I do it, but that's kind of the feeling behind it.   I have written and deleted and written and deleted, 'cause I'm like,“This feels like I know everything,” or you know, I'm like talking down, and I never want that to come across that way.   Stephen - Right. Absolutely, and you know, you know what it reminded me of is so like, you know, we always tell people, like, start publishing before you have a big following.   Natalie - Mmhmm.   Stephen - So that you can bring them with you and you become the expert in front of them.   Natalie - Exactly.   Stephen - Rather than become an expert and then start publishing, 'cause it's so less believable.   You've done the same thing with the vulnerability, which is fascinating. Like, yes, start it. Don't be afraid to talk about the low moments, not that it always needs to be low, and it probably shouldn't always be, but you know...   Natalie - Totally.   Stephen - But being open about what's actually going on and doing it in front of 'em rises everyone together. That's fascinating.   Natalie - Well, and what's crazy is that it never gets... well, it's always a process, right?   So, what's weird is that eight years ago, for me to talk about the body image stuff, it was so hard for me, 'cause that's where I was. I was in that phase of my life where I was really struggling with that, right?   And so, I did the work, and I went through the process unintentionally.   I didn't know I was doing the work at the time. I was just being vulnerable. I was sharing.   So what's cool is that, fast forward to now, I don't really have all of those body image insecurities that I had then, and I think it's honestly because I was willing to talk about it in the moment.   Now, fast forward to today, and the issues that I'm struggling with are different.   I'm a different person than I was eight years ago, right?   So when I built my audience with talking about the body image stuff, now, it's like, "okay, I don't feel like I have to talk about that as much, 'cause I've not grown past it," - that's not the right word, but  it's not my main focus anymore. And now it's...   Like, okay, you know, I went through a divorce, and I haven't really talked about that very much publicly.   But now it's like, "Okay, now I'm sitting in this moment where  I'm at a crossroads." Am I gonna do what has worked for me in the past and be vulnerable and open up and share these things that feel uncomfortable to me again, right?   It's not the body image stuff anymore. Now it's personal development and relationships and the struggles that I've had with my business.   Like, it's always changing.   So vulnerability is never like, you just learn how to be vulnerable and you've got it. Like, it's always easy.   It is easier for me to be vulnerable on the body image stuff, but now it's shifted to "how can I grow?"   And the only hope I have is that I know that it worked with the body stuff. So  I'm hoping that five years down the road, I can look back and say, "Okay, I was scared to be vulnerable.  I was scared to talk about these things, but it got me into this confident, comfortable zone because I shared."   Stephen - No, totally, totally. Like, I went through a lot of the exact same, you know, it's funny because I feel like it's the emotion that binds people.   While I haven't gone through a divorce, there are other times where I felt really vulnerable as well. And so whilst that person may not have gone through a divorce, if we didn't have the same experiences, we did have the same emotions, and being able to expose the emotion, I feel like, is what binds people. I think it's interesting what you said.   Anyway, quirks, the little quirks that you have or the little vulnerabilities you have, that's your superpower. That's the reason people follow you. They don't follow you because of pure perfection 24/7. That actually annoys people after a while. But you actually get personal healing along the way. Like that's so, that's so amazing.   Could you tell us a little bit... I mean, this is Sales Funnel Radio, and you're talking about your sales funnel. Like, what does this have to do with sales funnels? Why does it matter? 'Cause it totally does, but just for everyone else, you know.   Natalie - Well, it 100% matters because the thing that I've learned is although I'm not the best trainer in the world. Like, I will be the first to admit that. Yes, I'm a personal trainer, but like, people don't buy my programs because....   I mean there are probably people that can talk science better than I can. I stumble over my words. I have mild dyslexia, and I mix up scientific terms all the time. But the reason people follow me and the reason people buy my programs, the reason we were able to sell so many of this book, is because of the connection.   I owned a company called Dollar Workout Club a couple of years ago, and we would film our workouts, and we never cut the cameras. And we would always be joking and be like, "guys, if you're at home you can relate to the doorbell ringing or whatever, right?" And it was very relatable.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - Well, in one of the workouts, I happened to be wearing gray shorts, and Drew, the only guy, the other trainer, wrote the workout, and it was all jumping exercises, right?   So, we're doing the jumping, and I'm like, "Oh, crap." I could tell I was like, peeing my pants a little bit, right?   It was so embarrassing.  I'm wearing gray shorts and you can see this little tiny spot, then by the end, my whole butt was just... it was so gross. It's just covered in pee. At the end, I'm trying to stretch and turn sideways so you can't see.   Anyways, I could have never shared that, and I didn't for a while. I was really embarrassed about it. But we have that footage. So then when I went to go create this program, I could take screenshots from that video. I could take the actual video and put it in my funnel.   So what happened is people were like, "Whoa, this woman actually peed her pants." Like, this is embarrassing. I mean, truth be told, this program almost didn't come out, 'cause I had to have a heart-to-heart with myself really, and say, "okay, Natalie, are you willing to tell the whole world that you used to pee your pants," you know?   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - But what happens is then you can put those real stories in your funnel. You can put the photos. And it's kind of like instead of social proof this is your real story and your real-life proof.   "Whoa, this woman understands me and this woman gets me." Because the truth is that real change, like, I can give you the best meal plan and the best workout program in the whole world, but it's not gonna have a lasting, long-term effect until you make that internal change and have that belief in yourself.   I feel like that is my gift, is helping people see their value and their power. And so, you know...   Stephen - People kind of have an identity shift with the vulnerability that you have, almost. That's fascinating.   Natalie - 100%. And so that's the psychology behind it.  I think that when you are willing to be real vulnerable, not fake vulnerable... If you're willing to be real vulnerable, people can relate to that. And once people relate to it, they begin to trust you, and then once they trust you, they'll buy from you.   My biggest fear is that when people listen to me talk about this, they're gonna be like, "Oh, I see dollar signs. I'm just gonna like, figure out how I can be vulnerable." But the truth is, people are smart. Your customers are smart, and they will smell out fake vulnerability.   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - And so.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - The biggest thing... If you're sitting there and you're thinking, "There's no way I could ever talk about this," then you're on the right path. That's how you know it's real vulnerability.   If you seriously feel nervous to share it and talk about it, and you think: “Everybody will think I'm a fraud. Everybody will think I'm a bad parent." Everybody will think I'm a bad husband or wife. Nobody's gonna find me attractive."   All of these things, these stories that we tell ourselves that you feel if you start talking about, people are gonna think you're terrible... Guess what? That's the real good stuff that you need to be talking about and sharing if you wanna create real connection and live a wholehearted life.   Stephen - Totally believe that yeah. 'Cause I struggled. Anyway, when you got up, and you were speaking about that on stage, I was like, "Man, I know, I feel ya, holy crap."   I had like, zero confidence. So rather than choose not to be active and do this game, I just called out my fear publicly, and that became a theme for a little bit.   It was like, "Look, guys, I don't really wanna be doing this, although I got something cool to show you, all right?"   And for a while, that was the theme of it. And then as I grew up and healed, (I like how you said that) I passed certain things in front of the audience.   Then it was like, "Whoa, I've gotta wait for this new episode," or "what's he doing now?" And it was crazy, crazy. That was worth more than me putting hundreds of episodes out of just the best content ever.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - It was crazy, crazy what that did.   So, what would you say is, like...   So you tell people, go ahead and start recording down things that are going on in the moment. Don't feel the pressure to go ahead and say it in the moment, which I totally agree with. I don't know if I can handle that.   Natalie - Well, and it can be whatever platform you like the most, right? Mine happened to be Facebook, but some people are better at YouTube, or some people are better at podcasting or Instagram.   There's not one that's better or worse. Just find what feels the easiest for you and start there.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - I will say too...   So, one of the downsides of being vulnerable is, and I don't let this scare you from being vulnerable, but it does happen. It still happens to me.   So when you're open and transparent about your life, for some reason, and I get it. We're that way with celebrities, right?   You're like, "I wanna know why they broke up." And both sides of the story; people feel like they know every aspect of your life. And I do share a lot, but I don't share everything.   And so what can happen is that you get harsh people on the internet. And we all get that anyways. Even just last night.   I get mean from people messages every day pretty much.   Luckily, I have my team now to kind of shield me from it, just 'cause it's like silly.   Stephen - I have to do the same, yeah.   Natalie - Yeah, just 'cause it's hard for me to continue to be vulnerable if I'm always reading the negative messages.   Stephen - Yeah, I'm the same.   Natalie - But one woman was like, "You are so different from how you used to be. You used to share your progress photos, and now you just talk about your life."   The truth is, we all change and grow as people, right? And so for me, posting an ab selfie now, I don't get validation or fulfillment. I don't need that like I did six years ago. So, yeah, if you look at my feed, I don't post as much like, like, body image stuff, because I'm kind of like in a different space.   And so what will happen is that as you're transparently sharing what you're focused on in your life, sometimes, you will get people that you don't attract anymore.   Like, they're still in a different area, and they want to follow people that are in that area, and that's okay.   What I've had to learn is that the number-one thing when you get mean people on the internet, and it took me a long time to figure this out, is that it's so much more about them and what they're personally struggling with than it is about you, you know?   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - Okay, so, for example, my peach tree. So we had a big wind storm. I'm sure you saw it 'cause we live in the same town.   So, this tree that I've nurtured for two years, finally had some fruit coming off of it, well the storm completely broke the tree, and I was really sad. I posted about it on my Insta Story, and she wrote back, and she was calling me all these mean names, and she's like, "To think that your biggest worry right now is that your peach tree died. My mom just died, and my brother is sick."     And I realize she's hurting because of that, and she's lashing out at me, right?   So it's a reflection of her. It's not a reflection of me. And so that was the hardest thing I had to learn, being open and vulnerable in the online space, is that you will get critics.   I always say it's like the people in the peanut gallery out there who aren't, like...   I'll listen to criticism from people who are in the arena with me, right, people who are battling and fighting and trying and working hard, but if it's just a critic out in the peanut gallery that isn't there fighting along with me, then their opinion doesn't matter.   It's probably more about them than me.   Stephen - You're better than I am, then. There are times I just, I don't know.   Natalie - Well, I did block her.   Stephen - I like to fight with 'em sometimes. And I shouldn't, and I'm growing past that, and there's me being vulnerable. I like to stir the pot sometimes when it's already brewing.   Natalie - You should talk about that, Stephen. So you should talk about it-  not just like the fun, "I said this, and he said that" but the real issues, "why did that trigger you?" And what's the story behind that insecurity?   Those are the things that people love. Not just the story, but going deeper into the feeling or the "why" behind it - you know?   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - I don't know.   Stephen - I told you, yeah, some of it's going on right now still with some other people. Like, it comes in waves. I don't know if that happens for you too.   Natalie - Yes.   Stephen - It's like the criticism goes down, whoa, and then it goes away, and you're like, everything rocks, and then you try something big again, and everyone's like, "whoa!" Not everyone, but there's like, anyway, the talking heads, as I call them, come on out. It's the armchair quarterbacks.   Natalie - Uh-huh, 100%.   Stephen - Yeah, I told you, and I've been planning on doing that. Funny you say that. I just haven't quite formulated how to do it yet, so.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - It's top of mind.   I wanna thank you for being on here with everyone, and guys, Sales Funnel Radio, we're talking about vulnerability.   This is everything, especially if you are the attractive character in your own business - which I hope that you are, and you choose to be.   This is not a tiny subject. It's something that you will not have the choice to go around. You will address it whether it's through haters or your own personal growth. You're gonna get it.   So, please, please go follow Natalie. Natalie, where should people go to follow you?   Natalie - My website is nataliehodson.com, or Facebook is Natalie Hodson Official. Instagram is nataliehodson1   Stephen - Cool.   Natalie - If anybody has any questions, you know, you can leave 'em, and I'll keep checking 'em. I'll answer them and stuff.   The books that I talked about are Brene Brown's Daring Greatly and Rising Strong.  I think they're books every single human being on this planet should listen to.   I call the books magic, 'cause I've listened to them probably six times now, and every time, I need to hear a different piece. I gain something different from them every time, you know? They're good books.   Stephen - I wrote it down. I'm excited. I'm gonna go get them right after this.   Natalie - Cool.   Stephen - That's awesome. Everyone, guys, thank you so much.   Please reach out to Natalie and say thank you and go follow her, and watch her practice what she preaches on this stuff. It's fantastic and amazing - and that lets her audience open up as well.   So Natalie, thank you so much for being on, and it's been a pleasure.   Natalie - Yeah, you're so welcome.   Stephen - Woohoo, hey, thanks for listening.   Hey, many don't know that I actually made my first money online as an affiliate marketer.   If you wanna know how I funded my entire company without using any of my own money ever, you can learn to do the same for free at affiliateoutrage.com.

There comes a time when you say, "Right. Out!" And that's what happened. I think we all have too much stuff these days." Those were wise words from my Mum, who I decided to bring on for Season 1 Episode 8 of Quest for Freedom. This topic and this podcast today is all about ... The art of minimalism and freeing yourself from stuff. If there's one person who knows how to do that, it's this girl. I think it's a really important topic because whenever I am offloading stuff out of my suitcase, in my life I feel so much freer. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Which brings me to Christmas time last year, when I gave my sister and my brother-in-law the Christmas present of my time. And what I said I'd do for them is help them clear out their garage. Now I have to say the garage was a complete and utter mess. There was so little room in there, there certainly were no cars, there was just all their stuff. Now my brother-in-law Zanda, has 3 kids from a previous marriage and now they have my lovely nephew, Morgan and so as a family you do absolutely need more stuff. I can't take that away from them. I know I see friends with babies and they are like, "Every time I go out I just have to bring all this extra stuff." So I feel for those people. I haven't yet experienced that and I get it. But this garage was a piece of art. There was every single thing in there that you could possibly imagine. So they were thrilled needless to say that this was my Christmas gift to them. So in January we set about decluttering the garage. Debbie, my sister, has been attempting to get Zanda to do this, as ultimately a lot of this was his stuff. I think it's one of those jobs that you can't take on by yourself. You've got to do it as a team. You've got to do it as a family. When we started, I knew that Debs would be okay with being a little bit ruthless with stuff but I wasn't sure about Zanda. And it happened pretty early on. I'm sure he is fine with me telling this story but I was starting to take stuff out of the garage to the car that we were going to put stuff in to get rid of. I checked with Debbie and Zanda if things are okay to move. And then I started moving bits of planks of wood and jib board and Zanda was like, "Hey! Where are you going with that?". And I was like, "I was going to put it in the back of the car to take to the tip." "Yeah but I am going to make something out of that" and I was like, "Oh okay. What were you going to make?" "I might be doing one of the cupboards for downstairs, like using it to make a perfect cupboard door piece." And I was like, "Okay. Well, let me just ask you a question. How long have you had this piece of wood? "Uh, about 4 years" says Zanda. "Okay and so when were you planning on doing this?" "Well, yeah.." And just in that moment there was this beautiful moment of realization or recognition in his eyes that he was in fact being a hoarder, and I wouldn't say the top definition of a hoarder, because even though I do not watch TV, I've seen the ads for the TV series on hoarders. You can't even get in the door of the house. They live on piles of junk and rubbish ...but that's definitely not where Debs and Zanda are at. Many of us have a hoarding mentality. It really comes from just not wanting to let go of things that could be precious, that could be valuable, that you might do something with in the future. But let me just push back at you, if you are one of those people going, "Yeah Natalie. Some things you just want to hold onto." Unless you are going to use that thing within the next 3-6 months, why on earth would you store it, keep it and have it cluttering up your personal space? Why on earth would you keep something that you are not going to use and serves no purpose other than creating clutter in your living space? So...back to that moment - a pretty great thing that happened, in that amazingly Zanda kind of turned completely around and started being really ruthless with stuff. So there was an initial push back and hesitation and a real desire not to let go, but once he realized what he'd been holding onto he actually got into it and as the day progressed, we spent a good couple of hours in this garage. He was throwing stuff in the back of the car and I was putting stuff off the side and he says, "Nope, that can go." And it was so liberating. We then went down to the tip and what was even more liberating. As you drive your car up and the trailer as well, then you get to chuck stuff off the side into this sort of pit thing, and then they either sort it, recycle it or take it away to go into the mound of dirt and create a big rubbish heap on some poor hill. But, still it was really liberating. We also took stuff down to be recycled and you get some money for that and it was crazy actually how good that felt. And we went back and we did another load and slowly but surely this garage started to emerge, corners of space started to emerge. Now here is the funny thing, that was one Sunday afternoon and then I believe I came back a couple of weekends later because, it's a bit hard to tie in with the family and things going on and it already had started accumulating stuff. But all of the stuff was things that they had now sorted out in the house that they were going to take to the Salvation Army or they were going to put on TradeMe, which is the New Zealand equivalent of Ebay or GumTree. And so the cool thing is that they kept at it. They didn't just stop there with the momentum and motivation I provided them with. They kept on going and they made several hundred dollars if not thousands of dollars selling on Trademe some of their stuff. A lot of that stuff was children's stuff that wasn't needed anymore or baby stuff that could go to another deserving family. And all it took was to start taking the photos, documenting and putting up the price and description on TradeMe. Turned out Zanda had a bit of a knack for selling things. So it was excellent. Now the cool thing was not only were they decluttering and getting a greater sense of freedom and space in the house, they were also making money. And let's face it, everybody likes to make money. So this was brilliant for them. Now right about the same time, and this is why I find the start of 2017 kind of fantastic and it's been one of the best years yet. But in terms of a time of change, it was for the entire Sisson family and the Rock-Evans family, which is now my sister's side - it was one of those times of just everybody kind of decluttering. So as my sister and Zanda were attempting to get things out of the garage and out of their house, Mum was attempting to downside the four bedroom family home that her and Dad had been in for fifteen years, because she was getting ready to sell. Dad passed away in December of 2015 and Mum just did not need to be living in a big house anymore. And Mum is not a hoarder, in fact, she's amazingly minimalist. She buys quality things and she's done an incredible job over the years for our family of doing up houses beautifully, but always with quality in mind. However, Dad was a bit of a hoarder. So the two rooms or the two spaces in our house that were the most cluttered were Dad's office and the garage. You know a man cave full of stuff! And Dad would, bless his soul, keep even rusty nails in jars. He had a place for everything but it wasn't super organized but he kept everything. And I used to remember as a kid growing up no matter where we lived, Mum would go down to our garage and say, "Oh Peter, could you try and clean up the garage a little bit." It was just incredible he just had so much stuff. I knew that would be hard for Mum to do, so I came over and helped out as much as I could to really go through a lot of stuff - letters, cards, boxes, files from years if not decades, photos, projector slides. All the stuff that you hang onto and you keep because you think one day you are going to pull out the projector and you are going to go through slides from like the 1970s and 80s. For those of you listening you do it, you know it! So I challenge you to get the projector out and have a projector movie night and then either get rid of them all, or get them put onto digital formats so you can have them on your laptop and eventually print them or do whatever you like. But basically out with the old, put it into a format that is accessible at anytime but doesn't take up space and move on. So back to Mum's house, so we have Mum downsizing and generously gifting to my sister and I, things that we would absolutely need such as linen, towels, kitchenware etc. And at this point as you probably know from my Changing Plans episode, Josh and I hadn't actually bought the house yet but we were looking really seriously. Mum was making decisions based on the fact that we might end up with the house rather than both be living in a suitcases. So to her credit she held onto things we may need and she sort of split up a lot of stuff between my sister and I. And what happened is all those stuff that Debbie and Zanda had been clearing out, was now getting filled up with trips from Mum and her house with stuff that she was giving them. Every time they got rid of something, more stuff was coming in. And I felt like it was the same for me. I don't own much stuff but even in my two bedroom apartment in Downtown Wellington, I'd accumulated a little bit of the stuff to have it fully furnished for myself when I rent it out. I also had about four boxes up at my parents. And all those boxes are my everything, my life packed up into four boxes. Or so I thought.... As it happens as Mum is going through more and more of the house and I was there with her, she was like, "Nat I found this box of your clothes or your school gear" and I was like, "Oh damn." "I found your bag of motocross gear" from when I used to race motocross. And I really never want to get rid of my helmet and my motocross pants and shin protectors. And I was like, "Oh damn!" So every time I go to help Mum declutter, I ended up coming home with more stuff, which I would then have to sort through, get rid off, give to the Salvation Army or downsize. I just felt like as a family we were doing this give stuff, receive stuff, get rid of the stuff, sort stuff, sell stuff. It was crazy. I was selling my stuff on TradeMe. I was listing some of Mum's stuff on TradeMe. Zanda was helping out and then there was a big garage sale where Mom made like $850 in half a day and huge. Also she had to downsize her house in three weeks or less once she actually got an offer on it. The power of downsizing and decluttering And here in her own words is kind of this whole process for Mum on really downsizing a lifetime: Natalie: Let's talk about how it felt to downsize and move out of a very large house - four bedrooms and all your and Dad's stuff for the past 13 years. Mom: For the past 47 years. Natalie: That's true because you've been in the house for thirteen years. Mom: Fifteen years actually. Natalie: Oh. I should get my facts right. Mom: Actually, I just felt sick. It's too much. I think the thing nowadays is less... definitely less. But you don't want to throw things away that your children have given you or presents, Christmas, birthday or whatever. But there comes a time when you think, "What am I going to do with this? Where can I put it all?" And I certainly have to downsize to a two bedroom apartment. And I feel I still have a lot but I am keeping the best, the very best... but even then I feel like I don't want it. Natalie: Do you feel lighter now that it's all done because it was quite a process, wasn't it? Mum: Yes. But I could still lose a bit. Natalie: Yes, you've held onto the lovely stuff as you said and a part of that is your identity and what you've had in houses for years. Mum: It's what you worked for. It's what you wanted but even that has changed these days. What we've enjoyed was antiques, crystal, lovely prints of the olden days - that's all gone. People don't even want it. Antique dealers don't even want it anymore. But I think it could all go around in circles again and one day it will. But who wants to keep it for that long? Natalie: Yes exactly. Do you want to talk about how you even started on the process? So obviously you put the house up for sale and then what? Mum: Oh I started way before. I went through wardrobes and drawers. I did a little bit everyday or every second day at least. A lot of it went to Salvation Army and Mary Potter Hospice. There comes a time where you just get rid of it. Natalie: And then when you got the offer on the house, we made it a pretty short turnaround time didn't we because you wanted to be in your new apartment. Mom: Because I was coming over to Bali for your birthday. Natalie: So it was three weeks and so you've done some of that sorting beforehand and then you started downsizing and taking things out of drawers. Mom: And going through linen covers and just knowing I won't need these, you might need it. The other part is that in our days we use to entertain at home. That has changed. We go out into a restaurant nowadays so you have all these lovely dishes that costs some money because you wanted to look good but you don't use either anymore. It just all changed. Natalie: Did you have a process that you were going through? Mom: The thing is we were brought up and we look after our things - clothes, anything. Every time we moved we would take it with us but you didn't wear it or you didn't use it. There comes a time when you say, "Right. Out." And that's what happened. I think we all have too much these days. Natalie: I agree. Mom: I use one dish, one plate, one cereal bowl, one mug at the moment because there's just one. But even if there's two you don't need much. Wise words from my Mum, Gina Sisson. I credit her so much in my life and that I really love being a minimalist. And you know my sister and I differ a little on that. My sister is super creative and so she loves a lot of artwork up on the wall. I think she's got tendencies to be a little bit of a hoarder and she's cool with that. But the point here I guess for every single one of us is every 3 months do a reconnaissance of everything that you own and ask yourself: Do I really need this? Is this better off in somebody else's home or hands? Could I sell this and give it to a more deserving person who needs this right now? One of my best tricks that I've learned is that if you've put something away in storage that you are just not prepared to give up, if you have not gone into that storage locker or that space or whoever you are storing it within 6 months time then you need to get rid of it. Because if you do not miss something and use it every single day it is very likely that you do not need it in your life and it is weighing you down as a sense of stuff. Now one of my good friends, Joshua Becker over at Becoming Minimalist talks a lot about this and here is a short excerpt from a Ted Talk that he did on this very topic as to the benefits of becoming minimalist. “Out of the corner of my eye I see my son swinging alone in the backyard. And suddenly I had this further realization that not only was everything I owned not making me happy, even worse everything I owned was actually taking me away from the very thing that did bring happiness into my life. But not just happiness but fulfillment and purpose and contentment. There's a very different realization and I think it is the very foundation of minimalism - the very foundational truth that would cause anyone to intentionally own less stuff. This reality is that not only are things not making us happy they've actually become such a burden on our lives that they are actually taking us away from the very things that we would prefer to be living our life for." If you'd like to learn more about minimalism, listen to this podcast interview with Joshua Becker about How to Own Less And Live More By Becoming A Minimalist. And the final thing that I am really really weary of is cluttering our new house. Josh and I both made a very conscious effort and packed with each other but we are not going to fill this house with unnecessary stuff. So first off Mum has kindly gifted us all these amazing things including a beautiful old vintage dining room table, a dining room cabinet, a cabinet for the lounge, a king size bed which will be now in our bedroom and some chest of drawers and lamps and some kitchen stuff. All of those things we actually need and that means we don't need to go and purchase them brand new. We can recycle, we can reuse and we can keep these beautiful pieces in the family that have been a part of my life for so long. The next part that we've been doing is I have become a bit of a TradeMe addict and we've set a budget and we've actually listed out on a spreadsheet, because we are geeky like that - all the stuff that we need versus what we'd like in the future. We've listed those out so it's by order of priority and then we've put next to it guesstimates on what we're sort of prepared to pay or budget. So we did a quick look online as to what things are going for and then we put in what we think we'd be prepared to pay. And now we are playing a little game, so I love bargains and I love getting a good deal and I love negotiating. I am setting out to become the TradeMe queen and I am finding incredible things because as you know the saying goes: One person's junk is another person's treasure. And just like we've been doing as a family for the last 2 or 3 months of this year, other people on TradeMe are getting rid of things that they've long held in their family or in their house and finally have just decided to release and let go of. And so I've picked up the best bargains. I got the piano! If you listened to Changing Plans and you heard me talk about the piano that I thought I'd missed out on, would you believe that lady had no luck with the person who bid and won on the auction and beat me in the auction? They flaked on her and so she actually texted me while I was in Bali saying, "I can't believe it's happened again. Is there any chance that you would still like to buy it?" and I said, "Yes!" Done. Put the money in her bank account and she sent me a text saying, "Thank you! You have restored my faith in humans." So I got the piano! And the piano stool and the sheet music for a $150. This beautiful, old, vintage piano which I am going to polish up. I bought an entire bedroom set of furniture granted a little bit retro, like a round mirror, a chest of drawers, another chest of drawers, two bedside table and a headboard for a $100 NZ. Even if it's not great, it's going to be a bargain and I can paint it and we can use it and then we can always resell it. And I'm just honestly having fun. I also bought two single beds including the mattresses, the frames and the bedside tables, pretty funky for like $400. And I just love this because why do we always buy new stuff? I mean granted sometimes you just want new things like you are not going to buy second hand underwear or laundry. I get that but why do we have this incessant need for new? I personally love reusing and recycling. You get some incredible, sturdy, quality crafted pieces of furniture, ornaments if you feel like ornaments, lamps, all sorts of things for so little. Because people don't see the value in them anymore and yet to me they are incredible. I bought a 5 lights with brass stands for $100. I am going to continue to find these amazing bargains and only put things in our house that Josh and I agree on and to add value to it and make it a really beautiful home that we love being in. As the Suitcase Entrepreneur and yes I am still Suitcase Entrepreneur even though I am moving into a house. The Art of Packing Light I just wanted to pass on some packing tips and once again I'd love to bring you back into a short conversation that I had with my lovely Mom who I have to say is an impeccable packer. And I definitely have witnessed her since being a kid packing for our entire family and we used to travel really light considering there were the four of us. She now packs even lighter just for herself. it's quite incredible. Between us, we often look like overachievers. If we ever go on our girls trip together to Melbourne at the start of each year to see the tennis, (it would have been 14 times together or something), we just pack so little. And it never ceases to amaze me at what people pack. Did they fit the kitchen sink inside the suitcase? And if so how do they fit their actual clothes and the things that they really need on the trip. It does really astound me. Here are some tips from the packing queen and her daughter. I credit her for everything that I do when it comes to being a Suitcase Entrepreneur. Natalie: Because I think since I was two years old, you and Dad took my sister and I on around the world tours and trips ,which is amazing, and we no doubt learned from you how to pack really well. And I think people still marvel now when they see how I live out of the suitcase. I know you used to pack for Dad as well. Mum: In one medium suitcase. Natalie: For the both of you? Mum: Yes. And half of that we wouldn't use. And yet even when we had bed and breakfast some people would come with these enormous cases. Each one would have a big case, plus overnight bags and God knows what. And I used to think, "My God. And they are only coming for 2 or 3 weeks, when we would be away for 8 weeks with less." Natalie: So what are your tips for the art of packing light? Mom: For underwear, one clean, one on, one used - that's only three of everything which is easy. Natalie: Really? I actually take 2 weeks worth of underwear because they are quite small and thin. And that means if I can't find a washing machine or do my washing for two weeks, I've always got underwear. Mom: Yes I take a few underpants but for Dad that worked for him. Shoes, a good pair of walking shoes. Something that is comfortable if you go out at night and maybe some sandals depending on the weather where you are going. And if you are travelling to lots of places it doesn't matter whether you wear the same thing every second or third day. People haven't seen it before. I always felt that you take with you your favorite things, that you feel comfortable in and just something good at night like trousers and a shirt but women always seem to have to have more. But even then, just a couple of tops and the rest is just casual. And things are very casual these days aren't day? Natalie: Well, that depends if you are going to a business event or something that's more fancy. Mom: Yes if you are just going on a holiday it is casual. Natalie: And what about toiletries? Mom: Sometimes I think that's all a bit too much but basically again I take what I wear everyday - sun tan lotion and shampoo. Natalie: Suntan lotion is expensive in a lot of countries. I do the same putting everything into small bottles because it can last for weeks. Mom: When I am in England, sometimes I buy the smaller bottles. You don't get it so much in New Zealand or wherever. Natalie: You do now. Anything else in terms of where you pack stuff, because we all have different ways, some people use packing squares. I have a two-sided suitcase so I put my better clothes on my left hand side and my sports care, flip flops and toiletries go on the other side. Mom: Yeah, you've got a good system but I sort of use my suitcase as a drawer. I fold things so neatly and pack it in a way that I remembered Aunty used to say, "Did you just iron that?", I said "No I got it out of my suitcase". Natalie: I definitely didn't pickup on that skill from you. Mom: Yes, actually they were always fascinated with that. It's just my way of packing. Natalie: You also iron your sheets at home. Mom: No I don't, only B&B. Gosh no. Natalie: Well, thank you. Those are the tips from the Suitcase Entrepreneur's mom. So I hope that those tips are helpful to you if you are really having trouble when you are travelling the world and you really just can't pack light. A couple of other tips I'd love to throw in there is put everything that you want to pack into your suitcase or your backpack on the bed before you go. Then once again do one more ruthless run through. So if you've ended up with four black t shirts and three pairs of brown shorts, can you just not take one of each? And if you put five beautiful dresses out and you are only going away for a week, could you not just take three and a shawl so that you can change your look? And then put them into your suitcase or bag and if you find it still too full, take it all out and do the same ruthless routine again. A couple of more tips: You can buy anything you need typically in the place that you are going to. So if you are going to go from a summer environment to a winter environment, I wouldn't necessarily pack all the things that you need for winter. I would buy them in the country that you are in before you go into the other country or have just enough warm layers and as you get there you can stock up on anything you need. The only caveat on that is sunscreen as I mentioned, when I was chatting to Mum, it can be really really expensive in other countries. And obviously alongside that are your pills or your tablets or your supplements, whatever you really truly can't do without that as specialists we need to get from your doctor or maybe a herbalist, I would definitely take those with you. But just take the quantity that you need. So for example, on this trip to Bali I took a couple of supplements and vitamins and I put them all in one supplement container so I don't need to take six or seven containers. And the final tip for me is layers. Layering of your clothes allows you to be warmer because you can just put more and more layers on but it doesn't add huge bulk to your suitcase. I particularly love Kathmandu and IceBreaker products. IceBreaker is Merino wool from New Zealand. It keeps you incredibly warm, wicks away any sweats, dries super quickly and you can wear it for an entire year without washing it and it still wont smell. If you don't believe me, Sir Peter Blake who is unfortunately no longer with us in this world who sailed around the world and set many world records and is q hero in New Zealand, wore his IceBreaker kit on the sailing yacht for a full year and it never smelt and he never had to wash it. If you are really going for a long time travelling or you want lightweight, yet warm and efficient and trendy, IceBreaker all the way. And finally, rolling. There are a lot of people who pack in squares and you can put clothes in them and you can seal them and you can press them down, and you can fit way more in your suitcase, which is great. I've never done it. I've never felt the need to take so many clothes that I have to compress them down. And then also I haven't really felt the desire to unpack and uncompress all these squares but it is handy if you want to maximize your space efficiently. But I love rolling clothes. One, it stops them from creasing and two, it actually does take up less space in your suitcase. So those are my final tips on packing light and the art of minimalism. I would love for you to share what tips you have below the comment section and tell me if you are you a hoarder or a minimalist? Stay tuned for Season 2 either in April or in May. It's not because I don't love you, it's because I am taking a business sabbatical for all of April. This episode is proudly brought to you by Freshbooks. So you’re racing against the clock to wrap up 3 projects, prepping for a meeting later in the afternoon all while trying to tackle a mountain of paperwork. Welcome to life as a freelancer. Challenging? Yes, but our friends at FreshBooks believe the rewards are so worth it. The working world has changed. 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I've only been in Bali five days and I already feel blissed out. I've had four massages, two meditation sessions, one surf lesson, two yoga lessons and a 4.5 hour pampering session! And I TOTALLY needed this, because the last month or two has been pretty cray-cray. As you may remember in my previous episode called Changing Plans, there's been quite a few plans that have been changed, including now owning a lifestyle property and getting a puppy for my birthday. Yes! My lovely man Josh has gone ahead and put a deposit on a white German Shepherd. So when I get back to New Zealand on April 5th, it's going to be all go - moving into the house, getting it furnished, setting up our new base and waiting on the puppy. I was content to go hard out on the organizing, planning, doing and making shit happen on all fronts, because I knew I'd be having this relax time in Bali, and of course my upcoming business sabbatical starting April 1st. If you've never been to Bali, let me just tell you this island has a very special energy to it. It's renowned for being a vortex of feminine energy. So for females in particular, when you're here you have this sense of being grounded, feeling strong, sensual and in your feminine power. Everywhere you look there are lush trees, green rice fields, beautiful flowers, street dogs, friendly Balinese people smiling, scooters whizzing by, yoga studios, cute cafes, healthy juices galore and many relaxed looking foreigners who are whiling their days away doing not a lot of anything much. Which is why Bali is the perfect island to come and unwind, de stress and lose yourself, or find yourself depending on what you're here to do. But obviously we don't all have the opportunity to buggar off to Bali when we feel like it do we? So it got me thinking: Why can't we have a mini vacation each and every day to get some of the same affects of a longer vacation? Why do we have to book in holidays months, and for some people, years in advance? Why all this waiting when we have the power and ability to take a break right now? In a Huffington Post article by Jill Ferguson she lists the benefits of vacations as: Reduces stress - as I can attest to, vacations help shrink stress and anxiety while boosting the mental and physical health of you and the entire family, if you happen to be vacationing with them. Helps your heart stay healthy - no really. In a 20-year study, researchers found that women who took a vacation once every six years or less were almost eight times more likely to develop coronary heart disease or have a heart attack than women who took at least two vacations per year. Improves your mental health (especially if it's longer than 2 weeks) because you're less tense, have higher energy levels and more positive emotions, fewer negative feelings and less depression. Improves your relationships because families or couples who vacation together undergo shared experiences, communication and togetherness, escape and relaxation and experiential learning, all of which contribute positively to well-being and to relationships. You may have heard me talk about taking a mid week weekend. I mean why wait for the weekend to experience one, but what about a daily vacation? That's a novel thought right? I dug into this idea with my dear friend Jaime Masters, of Eventual Millionaire fame, who's with me here in Bali. We planned this holiday in late 2016 when she found out she got asked to speak in the Philippines, just before my Freedom Mastermind Retreat I hold in Bali each year. So this was our window of time to fly into Bali at the same time and enjoy 9 days together. And we are doing that extremely well. Jaime is a single mother of two with an extremely successful and busy coaching and mastermind business. She's also a self prescribed geek when it comes to maximizing time efficiency and more recently bio hacking - do it yourself biology optimization, so to speak. Or as Jaime puts it - how to be a badass. So here's our jam session on how to optimize your day and also how to take mini vacations through a variety of suggested activities we do, and that we also think should be on your list. Natalie: So this is exciting! We are recording this in our lovely little room in Ketut's Place in Bali in Ubud and there's thunder and lightning happening and rain. This is cool. I am sitting on the bed as you do, with my girl, Jaime Masters and we've been talking a lot over the last couple of days about treating yourself because yesterday we had a four and a half hour pamper session! Thanks to Jaime, an early birthday present and it was amazing. And I was like, "Why don't we do this all the time?" and then I think actually if you did that all the time you'd just be in bliss zone and you wouldn't get anything done. Jaime: I think it can get boring after a little while. Natalie: Yeah, but it was pretty amazing. Like we had several massages, we had a facial; we had pedicures, manicures, head massage, hair treatment, body scrub. And I was in and out of states of bliss, in an out of state of sleeping, dreaming, imagining, ideating. It's beautiful. But what I want to just chat to you about, because I think you are really good at this with your full-time roster of amazing clients that you coach over at Eventual Millionaire and your business and your full time podcast where you are interviewing millionaires all the time. I mean you have one of the busiest schedules I know off plus you are a mom, full-time mom. So do you want to just share a couple of the ways you treat yourself throughout the day because I think you do this really well. Jaime: So first of all anybody that says that they don't have time, means that they don't want to. There is a great quote about that by Lao Tzu. "Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time,' is like saying, 'I don't want to." ? Lao Tzu So out of everybody I know, I am extremely busy. We need that time because we go crazy and nutso and when you get on that roll you are not efficient or effective in anything you do. So lessons learned from me sort of going a little insane, to children, and to my business and everything else has led me to actually taking the time in between. Even 15 minutes of going, "Ah! This is just for me and I don't have to do anything else." So we talked about meditation before and I definitely do meditate a lot. Sometimes in small spurts. Like I literally was just meditating for fifteen minutes while you were on the phone just now, because I feel like it gives me a deeper state of relaxation. I do that throughout the day quite often even at home in-between calls. But just trying to take that time where you can actually shut off whatever you're crazy entrepreneur brain is saying and go, "Okay this is time that I don't actually have to think about that", because otherwise we will. Our brain will just keep going forever and ever and ever. And so trying to pull those pieces out as best as you can, you know what I mean? Natalie: And I think we started discussing this from the minute I landed in Bali and I think you did too. We've both come off some pretty hectic schedules, me with house buying and packing up and book writing and helping my mom move and you with speaking in the Philippines, and having to do all the work around that as well. I think we both got to Bali and we are just like, 'ahhhhhhh' and I just noticed instantly how my mind just quietened and I've done more yoga and massage in the last two days than I had probably in the last months. So why don't we roll through, like kind of spit-fire out some of our favorite at home mini vacations we take during a pretty busy working day? Jaime: Okay so for me, I have a routine at the beginning. I literally wake up before my kids wake up now, 5:30am in the morning. I am not a morning person as much as Hal Elrod told me to wake up in the morning. I was like, "No I don't think so." It's literally only been the last four months or so. Beforehand I would meditate right after I brought them to school, but I realized that it wasn't quite enough for me and I kept feeling like I had too much to do throughout the day when the kids are at school so I moved it. And so far so good. I'm going strong but I am not a morning person! Natalie: Thunder. If you have any of this, this is real Bali in the background. Just making it real. Jaime: That was number one, so that was an evolution in my process. I have been meditating for a very long time and I was never like, "I have to meditate every day." It's just I wanted to, I wanted to. It is something that I pull out. I also do probably five to fifteen minutes in between whenever I am feeling overwhelmed or brain dead. So when I do a lot, I batch everything and so whenever I do client calls, sometimes I'm like, "How can my brain stop functioning like it should?" and being in states of flow are way more productive in general, so I try and figure out ways. There's a good book called Stealing Fire, it talks about hacking into the flow state that I was telling you a little bit about. What can we do that makes us feel so much better that we can come back and hit the ground running instead of just feeling horrid and crazy? Just what we were talking about this before too, like all day long nutso. And so I'll do that, I have a pool in the back sometimes when it's nice out, I'll go jump in the pool and reassess things, especially during the day when I'm actually working on stuff. At night time I'll definitely go, "This is my time! I am going to have a bubble bath. I am going to do whatever I can possibly do to turn that piece off". Because we don't make a conscious effort in general to turn it off. Natalie: A bubble bath is so good. I am looking forward to potentially buying a spa and having a spa pool for night time relaxation. I like the idea of a sauna, whether you go to one or have one at your place. Often gyms have a sauna so just even ten minutes sweating it out and just being present with your body is pretty amazing. Other things are just dropping into fifteen, twenty, or a thirty minute yoga session during the day, and I love starting with five minutes of downward dog because it ultimately ends up being a lot more, and just giving yourself that space. Also, when I have a dog which I am getting soon! I would just have cuddle time with my dog. I'd literally have a play time, go outside, throw the Frisbee, throw the ball, play. You've got kids around you, you'd grab them, play. Jaime: That's a funny thing. So sometimes I'm so back-to-back I like walking into the mailbox it's like my time. I literally go, "Okay I need some sun. I am going to go walk outside", because I literally only have like five minutes, like literally I am so scheduled. No matter what the time is, it doesn't matter I think it's the intention behind it that makes a huge difference. Because sometimes you can play with your dog and be like, "Oh that still didn't really help." But if you are really intentional about it, it makes-- Natalie: Throw the phone away for a minute. Jaime: As hard as it is. Natalie: Get back to nature. Sometimes just actually being outside and getting sun on your face is a really beautiful thing and just tune into the sounds around you. Jaime: I go and I lay in my backyard. I have the pool and I will go and lay on the bed and feel like, because we have an outdoor bed, just sit there for five minutes and not even have to do a meditation or anything like that, but just sort of soak in the sun. Natalie: The Vitamin D. Jaime: Sometimes I need that big time. And then being able to sort of go; "Now I reset. Now I can go back in". Very helpful. Natalie: We should caveat this with the fact that you are very efficient with your time. So it's not like you ever say, "I am really busy." You are fulfilled. You are busy but I as you said you batch things. Do you want to maybe talk people through kind of your working week so that... they do hear that you have time off, and time out and you are really good at, oh we didn't even mention it, you get regular massages? So do I but you get them every single week, yeah? Jaime: Oh yeah. Natalie: I think if you can you should even if it's half an hour. Jaime: Well this is the thing I kept going, "Oh I don't have the time because I have kids and I can't... when can I get a massage when I don't have them. We'll I have to work during the school hours". All that craziness goes on in your head. Let me just say, everybody can solve every problem pretty much. So my massage person comes in at their bed time, my kids go to bed, massage person comes in and I literally go to sleep right afterwards. Natalie: They come to your house? Jaime: They come to my house. It's not anymore expensive either. And they will do it like nine o'clock at night which is insane. Natalie: And then you just go to sleep? Jaime: I just go to sleep. It's like the best ever. It's amazing but it's because I am so scheduled and so intentional with my time. Because this is the thing too, it's not like I don't take a time off with the kids, it's that I have to be super effective whenever I am doing whatever I am doing. I have a lot of things going on so a typical schedule for me ,and I make my clients do all this too. I call it the master's schedule: Mondays are meeting days, back to back meetings like literally, with my masterminds, with my personal scrum from my team. Tuesdays are coaching days. Wednesdays, every other Wednesday is an interview so either back to back millionaire interviews or back to back me doing interviews on other people's podcast and then the rest of the week is free. So it's 'working free' so within the time my kids are in school which they get out at three thirty. Then I have open space that I can actually fill in advance because I am one of those people. But usually when I have the kiddos I'm done at three and then I don't work again unless it's like a crazy launch and I have to make an exception. It's me like going for a walk with the kids or I try and get some of the more special, relaxing kind of time with them. Not that I don't have to do homework, not that I don't have to do all the other stuff, but it's just trying to have that space within the confinement. How to take a quick daily vacation Alright hopefully you have some firm ideas on how to take a daily mini vacation. To recap: Short bursts of exercise - dance, walk to the mailbox, dip in the pool, play with your dog, drop down and do yoga. Treat yourself - have a massage or a sauna, at home or book it in at your local. Read a book - jump in a hammock, laze on your bed, lie on the floor, curl up in the couch, throw your phone away and disconnect the internet for 30 mins...then enjoy your fave book. Pleasure yourself - did I really just say that? Heck yeah I did. Have a quickie, grab your fave sex toy and take a moment to...you know...have some fun. Or grab your partner and kiss them passionately. It releases endorphins which are feel good hormones and everyone needs those - plus you do that stuff on vacation right? So this IS a mini vacation. Meditation - refer to episode 2 - Mind Your Mindfulness for a 1 minute one! They say meditation can be better than sleep and sometimes sex. So I think it's time to really take this one seriously. Before we bring back Jaime, as she's been delving into meditation for almost a decade but has upped her game in the last year with amazing results, let's say hello to Freshbooks The working world has changed. With the growth of the internet there's never been more opportunities for the self-employed. To meet this need, FreshBooks is excited to announce the launch of an all new version of their cloud accounting software! It's been redesigned from the ground up and custom built for exactly the way you work. Get ready for the simplest way to be more productive, organized, and most importantly get paid quickly. The all new FreshBooks is not only ridiculously easy to use, it's also packed full of powerful features. Here are just a few of the ones Jessica Broome, entrepreneur and Freshbooks customer loves: Go to freshbooks.com/quest and check out their full list of amazing features then sign up and save yourself time and money today. Just enter Quest For Freedom where it says 'How did you hear about us'. Ok, let's dive into meditation. So on a couple of the previous episodes I've been talking about meditation. And I have to say that I think we've only just scratched the surface on this and I am going to be doing a lot more work around this. But having chatted to Jaime over the last couple of days intensely around her her meditation practice, I've seen this different side to it so I think I've always sat on the surface going, "What if I could just get five or ten or fifteen minutes a day?". I know the benefits of meditation but I wanted to bring Jaime back because she's just sort of open my mind and blown my mind with the routine and the practice and the intention behind her meditation and how much is that impacting everything else. So I haven't seen Jaime for a year and a half and this time around seeing her I turned up and I was like, "Oh my gosh! You are just more like grounded." So here's a conversation we had about her meditation. Natalie: So who is this Joe Dispenza guy that you keep going on about? Jaime: Okay so I've been meditating for a really really long time and then I became a disciple. The reason why I found Joe is because I'd injured my foot and he wrote a book called "You Are the Placebo" and I didn't want to have foot surgery. That's the thing it was for the problem-solution piece of it. I'd always meditated. I didn't even know his whole thing was about meditation. Natalie: How did you find him? Jaime: My best friend gave me the book. Because she had been following him for awhile. But I was just trying to solve whatever the heck that thing was. I didn't know how deep he goes into meditation about how your body can change itself. And so it makes sense with, You Are the Placebo, but I never linked meditation and that before which was really awesome. Because before I thought it was, "I am a crazy, business entrepreneur that needs to get everything out of her head and feel okay" because otherwise I might have anxiety or whatever the pieces are. That's why I'd meditated before. And then I found this thing and I was like, "Oh there's so much more to it than that!" Natalie: And they are self-guided aren't they? Which I like because It's quite hard to just sit and not have thoughts. In fact, it's near impossible. Even the monks after many decades of practice don't' do it super well but they are far better than us. And I think I'd like to be like walking down the beach listening to meditation and then there you were, I was having a surf lesson and you were walking down the beach listening to a self-guided meditation. One where Joe got you to like ground your feet into the sand at one point, stop and just be. So I love the sound of that. Because I love walking and I like being active while meditating. What happens in that meditation? Jaime: So that one's really interesting. Joe has a bazillion different types of meditation. Some were shorter. This one's an hour and fifteen minutes. Some of our friends are like, "Oh surfing is so like that". It was funny when I was walking, thankfully eyes open for quite a bit, I was looking at some of the surfers and just thinking about how amazing that is too. There's a quite a few different pieces to his types of meditation. And so one is a big breathing aspect and then walking, where he doesn't have you do that because you look weird. But what he does as you start walking, he has you start envisioning your future and then walking as your future self. And imagining whatever happened that you want to have happened in the future as if it was a memory of the past. So you are walking and he is like talking about how to think of this and think of that, and as you are walking you feel amazing, on top of the world type of person. And then he has you stop and just close your eyes and imagine the feelings that you would feel: gratitude, joy - whatever those things are or affirmations are. And literally, because your body's been walking and energized, already like to me it goes like crazy. It makes you really feel the emotions. And then you walk again. And it levels up the emotional side of it. Levels up the feeling of, "Oh my gosh! This is what I'll feel like in the future." Right, that confidence, whatever those pieces are. And so you are sort of stepping into what that is and it makes a lot more believable. So as an entrepreneur I feel like, "Oh I want to speak on a stage at TEDx in front of a thousand people." I was chatting with somebody when I spoke in the Philippines, she's like, "I love crowds of 10,000 to 15,000 people." And I was like, "Hmmmm. I haven't done that before. 10,000 people that's a lot of people. Wow, Okay great!" She said, "The energy is just insane." And so then I started going, "Let's imagine what that would look like. I'm sure I can do it". And so in the walking meditation, I started bringing in some of those pieces. So when you start bringing in the pieces as if it already happened, especially the science behind meditation, it actually does. Have you heard the piano player thing? They had a study where: Some people actually play the piano in a certain number of hours per day for a specific song. Another one just did the finger exercises with no piano. And then the other ones meditated on it. So the people would actually meditate on it. They never touched the piano, and they actually were just as good as the other people. Natalie: When they finally went to play the piano? Jaime: Yes which is insane. Natalie: I've heard a few studies around stuff just re-visioning exercise on that. Jaime: Yes. It gets your body in certain state. It's really interesting to see the studies because we are placebos by the way, right? So we affect our thoughts and everything affects everything. And I think entrepreneurs need to get this better and better and better. It's not just clearing your brain it's all those thoughts that we think, that determine what we actually take action on, what we actually do. All those beliefs or whatever you want to say whether they are subconscious or not. When you start flushing those out, and you start imagining yourself..... I've had a friend who hated speaking and then he did like a hundred different speaking gigs all in a row just to get over the fear and to get really good at it. Well, you do a 100 of them and you'll get really good at it! Imagine meditating on it a hundred days in a row instead of actually having to go do it. And again there might be a little bit of twinge when you do the first one but it's going to feel so much more natural even just the visualization of it. And I've interviewed a ton of millionaires, 400 and something millionaires, so many of them bring up visioning, it's insane. I was not woo-woo at all and I started going down this road and interviewing millionaires and I'm like, "How come everybody keeps talking about this?". Because I really wanted to know and so then I started looking at the science behind it all. And then I'm like, "There's something to this", because I am a sciency kind of gal and then I've started implementing and doing it. It has literally changed so many things and what I can see is possible moving forward. Natalie: You mentioned that it's helped you, one being all grounded and not even noticed that visibly in you. You said your skin is glowing. You think you looked younger like not aging. What are some of the other benefits? Jaime: There's a whole thing on epigenetics which if you read any of Joe's books. Sleep Smarter by Shawn Stevenson talks about epigenetics - our bodies and what we feel basically. Because this is the thing, I don't think people really understand, and again the science is very very new behind all this. It hasn't really come out to the general population. If I say epigenetics, people are more like, "I don't have a clue what that is". But your DNA actually can turn on and off based on your environment. And so it's not all like you were born like this and now we are like that forever, it's what you ingest, what you are doing, what you are thinking that all affects your body, which makes logical sense when you think about it. We are not emotionless robots. All the pieces and parts really make a difference. You've seen the president go from looking really really young beforehand and how the heck did he age so much in such a short period of time? Like the stress and everything. And so it really affects your body. So you can do it in the opposite direction also. How can we change that? Natalie: I was telling you about Josh's friend Rohan, his father from England who's been doing transcendental meditation for something like forty five years or more. I haven't met him and I really want to meet him. I told you that right? Because he is late 70s and he looks like he is in his 40s. He gets up at five a.m every morning. He does one to two hours of transcendental meditation with the music and all the vibrations and everything. And he is apparently just super focused and onto it. He doesn't need much sleep. Just incredibly aware and has energy all day and that youth, that vitality and that absolute solidness around what he does and who he is. He's absolutely precise and clear on who he is and what energy he gives off. So that fascinates me. It does make me feel, yes you could change your state and you can change your entire DNA makeup. By the way, did you know that when you get sunburnt you are changing the DNA? There's a whole science behind it which you'd love. When you get sunburnt, your cells are exploding and we have billions of cells right, but they are exploding and each little explosion is shifting and changing your DNA. So overtime you can actually change your DNA of your body. Jaime: Good way or bad way? Natalie: I don't think sunburn is obviously good for you at all, but it's just more the point that scientists have seen that you are actually changing your DNA through that. So there must be other ways of changing your DNA. Jaime: When you look up epigenetics and you'll see some of those pieces because it's insane to read some of the studies on this. I didn't realize this. I'm like, "Man!". It is one of those things where it's such a new science so it seems a little woo-woo to people. It is with any sort of newer science. Natalie: I know scientists needs the data and the facts but also I just want to see it's working. Jaime: This is what I do, I'm like, "Well I'll test it and If I like it, I'll keep doing it and if I don't like it, then I won't." But there's a lot of Charletons that are like, "Oh you do this thing and it's amazing!". So that's what we have to be careful of, but to me I'll test anything and if I like it and I see results then I'll continue. I care about the smarts and logic. And so meditation has allowed me to tap in way more and not just be a 'running around like trying to do everything head wise', but actually tapping into all parts of your body. I never thought that your gut or intuition was a big deal until, again I heard so many millionaires going, "I went with my gut" and I'm like, "Wait! There's no real science behind that." I'll put a spreadsheet together so I can look at all the facts, this is why I am so science based because I need something to make a decision. I would almost never go with my gut. Natalie: Gut every time. Jaime: See... but to me I didn't get the point of gut. I thought that that wasn't logic. When you read like the book, Blank and we realize how amazing we are as human beings. We can make an assessment on something without even necessarily knowing the facts and data. Like that book was very eye opening to me because I was like, "Oh, maybe I do know more than logic will tell me and research and data." And so realizing that, along with everything else tapping into that. You can shut yourself off big time. Most people do. Most of the clients that I talk to I ask "What's your gut saying?" They are like "I don't know." Natalie: Oh really? I do it all the time. The only time that I haven't sometimes is travelling, because I listen to my gut and instinct all the time in travelling. "Don't go down there" or actually "Don't take that bus". Jaime: What does that feel like? Where? How do you do that? Natalie: Literally like a strong sensation to not go ahead and buy that ticket. Where? It's a good point. You do actually feel it in your stomach and then I feel like it just triggers straight away to your brain with a no. I have voice in my head going, "That's not a wise idea." It's really crazy and I just listen to it all the time. Jaime: I had heard this one place, and I have not verified sources but, what's interesting is they were saying that it's actually your heart that is making a lot of these decisions, and then going to either your stomach and then your brain and so it triggers all of them right? We sometimes think it's our brain first. Natalie: It's literally like a decision and sometimes your body will stop. Sometimes your body will stop walking like 'you are not going to go down there, Natalie'. It's the fight-or-flight response that I feel kicks in and that is triggered by your immune system and/or your nervous system, so I guess your heart is the thing that's beating. Jaime: We just don't know very much about our bodies though. Like it's kind of sad. I am trying to teach my children like, "Okay. Where do you feel that in your body?" so that they can become more in tune because I never was. I was like, what is that feeling? I would never go with my gut in general. So knowing and being able to say, "This actually works." I needed all the data from all the millionaires like, "Wait, you've went with your gut and that worked? Wow! Interesting." It would be really interesting to ask which ones typically go with their gut and which ones don't. Natalie: And where do you feel that in your body - that's an interesting question to ask anybody. Going on a bit of tangent here but asking 'how do you feel' and see what people's responses are, because if you ask a very pragmatic logic based person, they will go, "I am blah blah blah." Jaime: Okay so this is my best friend, she had to ask me every single day. She goes, "How do you feel?" and I'd say, "Good" and she'd go, "Good is not a feeling." "Great! I feel great!", she said, "That's not a feeling." I didn't have the words to express it. I literally had one of those little cards that said all the emotions on it. But I couldn't find the nuances between the emotions because I didn't think it was a big deal. Like what does it matter? Natalie: And it does matter. Jaime: It totally does now I know. I am teaching my children this. So tapping into intuition or tapping into your gut is an example. I don't know what that felt like. I was like, "Huh! Nope. I got nothing." The little nuances in anxiety or the little nuances in joy, the little nuances in things that I just never paid attention to. And yet we can be so much more expressive as human beings if you actually know that. I had beforehand thought, "If I just negate all the bad emotions and only felt the good ones, I'll be happy in my world". I mean you know in entrepreneurship too, it doesn't work that way. Shit happens. Natalie: It's a rollercoaster. Jaime: Exactly. You have to mitigate all of it and sometimes the crappy stuff is teaching you the most and you have to be okay with those emotions because if you try and negate that you won't take the risks, even calculated risks. You just won't make the steps towards that because you are so scared of negative emotions. It's an interesting thing. Natalie: I think a lot of people live in the state of, "I'm okay. I'm okay. So I am not going to show any emotions." And you asking me the other day, "Do you feel that you tapped into that? Are you emotional?" I have my moments around my Dad because I was quite surprised that I wasn't more upset or just really in that state, but I do think it's because I focused on celebrating his life. It doesn't mean I think I shut down my feelings. Like I will have my moments where I'll just cry. As I told you I am big soak in movies. I'll just have waterworks in movies. I feel like a lot around animals and nature. I don't worry so much or sweat the small stuff but I often think about global issues or environment or inhumane treatment of animals or people. And that stuff gets me really emotional but I think there are so many people who are walking through life they are taking the drugs and numbing them. Jaime: But that's the point right? The placebo, the book is all about, you don't need to rely on what we think. One of the reasons why we take a placebo and think it will work is because people have told us that it will work. If a doctor someone of high authority goes, "This will work for you." Even if it numbs you like crazy, you are like, "Oh then half of it's probably the placebo effect and the pills don't even work." So it's one of those things where us knowing ourselves better. If you are the type, "I am emotional in these sort of ways and I don't need to like make myself be emotional in other ways either", but knowing yourself better makes a huge difference. So if you do get sick or whatever, trying to pay attention to what those emotions were within it and then solving that instead of going after like, "I just need more alcohol" or "I need more drugs". Like when I injured my neck they gave me Hydrocodone and I'm like, "That's a lot!". It's a narcotic. They gave me a lot of pills. I was kind of surprised. They gave me like three sets of pills. Natalie: The United States scares me with what they give out. It's such a pill based society. Jaime: And I was like, "So how do I fix it though?". It's one thing to numb the pain and I am okay with pain I can handle a lot of pain but how do I fix it? Nobody really went down that path which sucks. Natalie: It does. Western medicine is very much like immediate solution where as I love the Eastern philosophy around preventing it before it's even happened. Jaime: Yes but the thing is I agree a thousand percent but because we've already gone past the point. So again this is western world but we are sold that we can have everything right now and this is why meditation is so important too. Because we are moving at a constant pace especially entrepreneurs. We are problem solvers and we wanted the problem solved yesterday not today. And so a pill, sure! Faster, easier, more efficient. Natalie: The headache was just from the hours of pampering and all the detox. And when I was in that yoga class, that restorative yoga which I loved and I was having trouble with the hamstring pose and it was really like sinking in. Sinking into that pose and feeling the pain and I wanted to come out of it because we had to hold it for five minutes. And that's when she said, "If you are challenged by this pose, you probably have issues with control, because the control that you put into your everyday life will manifest itself into your basically your hamstring." So the tightening there is the constant control or tension. And I think in intrinsically you know that but whatever we are holding any source of tension or pain or even love manifests itself in your body. Jaime: So that's the whole point of Joe Dispenza, the whole point completely. He was a doctor and he actually cut his spinal cord. It was like crazy he couldn't walk and he didn't want to have surgery. And all the doctors are like, "So you kind to have surgery to fix this", and he was, "I am not going to do it." He meditated. And people were like, "Okay, you meditated your spinal healing. That's a little insane." Natalie: Have he done meditation before? Jaime: I don't remember. I think he must have done something. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't be like, "Oh I am going to try meditation and see if this works." He was a chiropractor so he knew the body really really well but what is interesting like you were saying is being able to have whatever is existing in our body usually is for a reason. And unfortunately because we are problem solvers and we want to fix this so fast we just take the pill and go, "That will be okay." But more and more instances of cancer, more and more instances of crazy stuff and we are going, "What's wrong?". Well yeah it's probably food and stuff like that too but there's so many things that we don't understand that us taking care of ourselves, like you said the eastern side of things could have probably prevented but now we are at this tipping point where we can't see the force for the trees anymore. And so that's why it's great that he wrote the book called, You Are the Placebo because there's literally everybody going, "I have a problem. I need a solution." And so being able to show people, "Oh by the way, this could help this." Natalie: I was going to say it sounds of ironic but I am about to say we have to take control or more importantly, we have to take responsibility because things are not going to get better. We are going to have more and more technology. We'd be more and more connected. We are going to have more and more devices. We are going to have more multi-tasking. We are going to have more and more things in our life that are causing us to live lives in totally different way where we don't have peace, quiet, nature, reflection, timeout, thinking time, quiet time. And so we just have to and that's why I am so proud of you because you are making time because you love it every morning to do your meditation. Jaime: One I didn't love it. I couldn't sit for five minutes. I used to lay down because I couldn't sit up. So I couldn't sit up for that long and I hated the five minutes every single time. It's just very much an evolutionary process. That being said I learned my own process. A lot of clients are resistant because they are entrepreneurs and logical and my brain is way too crazy, "I can't do it Jaime". I was like, "I have the same crazy brain you do. I have ADD literally". And so when we are looking at, "Okay what can you do as a first step?" We talked about five minutes of headspace. Headspace is great, Calm app is great, just to sort of slowly get into that and then I have people come back and they are like, "Oh that felt a little better." And then what is that next step and what is that next step, I did this as part of the evolutionary process it to try to make meditation efficient. I would get all the crap out of my head so that way I could feel like i could be more clear. David Allen's Getting Things Done, getting everything out of your head. So I would do that piece along with having this inspired thoughts of, "Oh you know what I should do and this". Natalie: You'd actually literally go sit down or lie down to meditate but then you'd have bing bing bing thoughts. So you'd actually then stop the meditation? Jaime: I wouldn't actually stop the meditation. It's really kind of funny I had a eye pillow on and I'd literally have a journal right next to me and I'd scribble. It's just like a twenty, thirty minute meditation, it wasn't a lot because I would only do the first piece like this. I would literally just go, "Oh!" and write those. Changes of launch plans or the ideas that I have. And then I would be able to clear and be a lot better. So it's still guided meditation but this is what I have my clients do because in general they are like," I can't make it stop." You know what makes it stop? Write all that crap down. And because David Allen talks about with getting things done, if it's still on your head it will keep reminding it. It will keep bringing it up. So there you have it. This topic of Personal Freedom here on the Quest for Freedom Podcast continues to come back to freedom of the mind in so many respects. I know I will continue to delve deeper into this. In the next episode I'll be discussing personal freedom from a place of less stuff weighing you down - as in decluttering. Tune in for that one. And read the full show notes for this episode at nataliesisson.com/7 You can also sign up to get fresh, hip and timely email updates when I release a new episode. Or you can simply subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud or Google Play and make my day - and hopefully make yours.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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“Let's make every birth the best possible version of that birth that it can be.”Dr. Natalie Elphinstone is a true trailblazer! When one of her patients asked about the possibility of a maternal-assisted Cesarean, she listened intently, took the idea to heart, and advocated for change by creating a new hospital policy to allow this beautiful procedure. Dr. Elphinstone is creating a whole new experience for Cesarean moms as they get to deliver their babies, hold them first, have uninterrupted skin-to-skin time, and feel like birthing women instead of patients on an operating table. Dr. Elphinstone shares how she was able to make this change, how we can implement this procedure in our areas, and even offers some VBAC tips as she is a big VBAC advocate as well! We are SO honored to have her with us today.Additional LinksDr. Elphinstone's InstagramDr. Elphinstone's Introduction PostHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode DetailsFull TranscriptMeagan: Welcome to The VBAC Link, you guys. This is Meagan, your host, and I am so excited to be here with you today. Today's guest is an amazing OBGYN in Australia. She has caught over 1500 babies and believes in supporting women and families to make individual choices that feel right for them. You guys, she is making such a big impact in Australia and I am just so excited to pick her brain and hear more of her journey about how she has been changing the norm in Australia. Review of the Week We have a Review of the Week so of course, I'm going to jump into that before we start with Dr. Natalie. Okay, so today's review is actually pretty short. It's from Dr. Steven Roushar who is amazing. We actually have him on a podcast probably back in the early one-hundreds. He is a chiropractor and his wife has also had a VBAC. He said, “The VBAC Link is phenomenal. Great podcast content and training for birth workers.” Thank you, Dr. Roushar. We are so happy that you love The VBAC Link. We love you and believe in chiropractic care so much. As usual, if you have not had an opportunity to leave The VBAC Link a review, we would love that. I love getting these reviews. It makes me smile and we love reading them on the podcast. So push pause right now, and head over to Apple on iTunes. You can leave us a review. A 5-star review would be awesome along with a written review. You can do it on Google. You can do it on Facebook or you can email us. Wherever it may be, we would love your reviews. Dr. Natalie ElphinstoneMeagan: Okay, Dr. Elphinstone, we are so excited to have you. We are so grateful for you. I know your time is precious in OB-land. You are obviously seeing a ton of births. So grateful to have you. Again, thank you so much for being here. In the birth world, we get these comments sometimes, “You're The VBAC Link, I have a girl crush on you.” I am girl-crushing on Dr. Natalie Elphinstone. She is the freaking coolest. You are so cool. I am so honored to have you on the show today and I'm so honored for her to share with you her knowledge because you guys, you are going to fall in love with her too. If you don't follow her Instagram, right now, press pause and go check her Instagram. Do you have a Facebook too? I think we just follow you on Instagram. Dr. Natalie: Yeah, sadly I just do the Instagram thing. Meagan: That is okay. You are @drnatalieelphinstone, right? Dr. Natalie: Yep, all one word. One really long word. Meagan: One really long word, but you guys, it's amazing. I want to do a little bit of a background. This is how I found her. I actually found her off a video. You may have seen these going around of a maternal-assisted Cesarean delivery. It brought me chills. It made me cry. I was just like, “Oh my gosh. I want to do this. I want to have this option here in the U.S.” She is in Australia too, so not here in the U.S. I don't even know. Your page just started blowing up and this video started going viral. I shared it and I think I wrote you. I think I just wrote you and was like, “Wow, this is amazing,” or something. Crazy enough, we had some crazy emails coming through like, “That's fake. That's not real. It's a simulation.” I was like, “What? No.” Anyway, so I wrote Dr. Elphinstone and I just said, “Hey, I would love to have you on the podcast.” She is so gracious and said yes, so we are going to dive right in. I always say “dive right in” but we are diving right in to learn more about what she does and how she is truly changing the birth world in Australia. Okay. Dr. Natalie: Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for even thinking of having me come and talk on a podcast that of course, tends to be concentrating on VBACs, yet yes. I am getting known for this maternal or parent-assisted Cesarean. And so to be honest, it took me a little bit by surprise that you thought maybe I would be somebody to talk to. I mean, the whole thing took me by surprise. When I started off just sharing some of the videos of my maternal-assisted Cesareans, it was not with any kind of intention of trying to be this game changer. I actually just wanted to show something that we did that was really, really awesome and maybe with it, that idea of, “Well, if we can do it here, then maybe it can inspire other people to open up their mind to this possibility as well.” And then, it kind of just blew up as you said. It started getting reshared. I started getting contacted by people all around the world asking for my help and my advice on how they could possibly do it in their country. I'm super, super honored to be able to share my journey and my knowledge. To date now, I can say that– I was just contacted today by another country over the weekend who contacted me to say, “Thank you very much for the information that you shared. It was able to allow me this opportunity to do a maternal-assisted Cesarean for possibly the first time in my country.”  This was Ireland, so I'm pleased to say that Ireland is the sixth country that I'm aware of that I've been able to help impact at least one individual person. This is just mind-blowing to me and I feel so privileged to be able to not do anything special. I don't think I'm doing anything special. I'm just open to changing my practice and then sharing it so that it is seen that it is something that is possible. When you then get people that say, “That's fake,” I mean, oh. That actually just makes me really sad. It makes me really sad that this idea of what I'm showing, a maternal-assisted Cesarean, is so far removed from what they believe to be reality and what they know in their world that they think it must be fake. That's actually sad to me. Meagan: I'm with you. Me too. It does. It breaks my heart that this world has come to the point where we are so blinded, we are so closed-minded, and just looking down this tunnel that we can't see the possibilities outside of the norm. Dr. Natalie: Yeah, yeah. That's what it is for me. This is just me thinking with an open mind, “Can we do something different?” If the answer is yes, then why don't we? Why can't we and how do we make that happen? So that's how I started. Meagan: Right, I know. That's what I love. It's going to take someone to get it started for it to happen. Here you are. You're doing it. You are doing it and you are changing it. It's hopefully just going to trickle on down and spread throughout the world to see that Cesarean birth can be different. It can be different. Each video, they are all different. Sometimes, I have seen that you've got videographers or someone in the OR even on the other side. You've got two different views of baby coming out. You have mom reaching down and pulling baby out, and then we have the other side where the amniotic fluid is pouring out. It's just so dang cool. It's so dang cool. I love it. For my second Cesarean, I watched it in a mirror. I wasn't able to be a part of my birth in the way that you are creating people to be a part of their birth, but I saw it in the mirror and it was really cool and really special. That right there, that and the skin-to-skin that I was able to get made the difference and created the healing for an undesired Cesarean birth that I had. It truly created that healing aspect. I'm just going to shoot it out there. How? You're seeing it in your head and you're like, “We're going to do this.” What kind of flack or backlash did you get or pushback did you get in your space there in Australia? What did you get there and how did you personally push back? Dr. Natalie: Yeah. It's a really good question because I think everybody who has wanted to pursue this journey comes back and says, “But I'm getting met with these challenges and I'm getting met with these accusations. I'm just getting shut down.” I think that probably everybody will meet some of those challenges. And yes, I've met those challenges too. My journey of how this happened to me, and I always tell this story because I think it's a really important part of this story. This wasn't on my radar. To be honest, I didn't think of it myself. I had a single patient come to me who I was looking after for her antenatal course. It was her first baby. She had decided for various reasons that a Cesarean birth was the way that she was going to go. She came to me and said, “I've seen on somebody else's social media this idea of a dad-assisted Cesarean, a partner-assisted Cesarean.” She said, “Can we do that?” I said, “Well, I've never seen that happen before in real life. It's definitely never been done at this hospital. I don't know that it's ever been done anywhere in my area before,” and so one easy spot to stop there would be for me to say, “So no, we can't do that,” and that would have been a really easy answer. But instead, I went, “Well, maybe. Why not? Why can't we do that? That does seem pretty cool. That does seem like it might be a really valuable thing if that's something that you want to do. So how do we make that happen?” So my point is, number one, this whole thing started with one person, one patient herself coming to me saying, “Can we do this?” It can start really, really small. I was in a privileged position where I had the opportunity to go basically straight to the top of the hospital. So I'm talking about working in a private hospital in Australia for this scenario, so I literally just went to the CEO of the hospital. I asked her, I said, “I don't know how to make a new procedure happen. Tell me what I need to do to be able to make this happen.” I mean, number one I asked her, “Are you on board? Can I make this happen?”To be fair, I was expecting to be shut down at that point, but my gosh, she said yes. She said, “That sounds like, yeah. Why not?” A very quick answer would be that when it always comes down to new procedures, is there a value in it? Is there an importance? Does it achieve something so to speak? And then the second thing, is it dangerous or are there risks or are there concerns about that? If you can tick off those two boxes, then yeah. We can do a new procedure. But there are some hoops to jump through. She told me what those hoops to jump through were. I had to write a policy. Hospitals always want to know this very streamlined checklist of how you do this new procedure. And then I had to get that policy approved by the various levels of boards if you like at the hospital, so I had to present this to a couple of different meetings. That's where things got really interesting. I can write a policy. I can write a protocol. That's just me sitting at the desk and talking stuff out, but then presenting this idea to boards of people to get a general consensus that this seems like a good thing to do, I guess I was really naive going into that. I guess I believed that this was a really important thing to do, so I probably expected that everybody else would as well, but clearly not. That was definitely my naivety at play there. I then got met with challenges from the people hearing it. Everything they just laughed off like, “That sounds like the most ridiculous thing in the world.” I guess when you are talking to surgeons for example, surgeons, yes. We operate. People are asleep and we cut them open and we do a procedure. There are a lot of these rules around that to keep it sterile and to keep it clean and to keep it safe. To be fair, here I am suggesting that this woman who is awake and having her operation is going to literally reach down into her own open wound and pull out her baby. So yeah, okay. I get why it might sound ridiculous if you don't have the understanding of the fact that this is birth rather than it being an operation. I think that's a really important part to remember. I hope that none of us ever forget when we are doing any kind of Cesarean or any kind of instrumental birth or whatever that this is not just a procedure that we are performing on somebody. This is their birth. This is the thing that they are going to remember forever. So even if this is the 5th Cesearean I've done this morning and I'm getting a bit hungry or I'm a bit bored or whatever, oh my gosh. That's not the point. The point is to remember that this is the most astounding thing that has ever happened in this woman's life and in this family's life so let's make it really, really special. Anyway, I digress. I digress. Meagan: Absolutely. You digress in a good direction though because it's so true. I'm sure. I'm not a provider. I don't know. I'm sure it just gets repetitive, right? Dr. Natalie: Yeah, it can. Meagan: Walk in. Catch a baby. Walk in. Have a Cesarean. But if you can, if you can walk in. If you are a birth worker and you are listening, and that goes for all birth workers, walk in and truly hold space for that person and be there for that person because it is something that they are going to remember forever. You probably aren't going to remember two months down the road, but they will. Dr. Natalie: I think that's something that hopefully every provider continues to keep in the forefront of their mind. I think I've certainly had the times where let's be honest, sometimes I haven't honored the birth experience, or perhaps it's a Cesarean and often we then think that the woman's really distracted now. The baby's out. She's focusing on the baby and we're just getting on with the rest of the operation and closing her up, and often, let's be fair, I am just having a conversation with my colleagues around me. I've had that not come back to bite me because I don't think I've ever said anything inappropriate in that situation, but the women and the partners have come back and said, “Oh yeah. We heard you chatting about other things.” Actually, a lot of the time when they are telling me that, they are telling me that they were kind of reassured by that because they knew that if I was just perhaps having this general chitchat then clearly I wasn't worried about anything in their operation. Meagan: Yeah, I can see that. It is interesting though because, with my first baby, that's what I remember. I don't remember my baby's cry. I don't remember seeing my baby. I remember the doctor and the assistant on the other side of the curtain talking about how terrible the storm was outside and how one just got back from Hawaii and was so depressed. That's what I remember about my birth. Dr. Natalie: Yeah, yeah. I don't quite know what the answer to that is because it is going to be this balance between definitely wanting to honor that birth space, but yes at the same time, we are humans too and it is our job. We love our job, but sometimes yes. Part of that job is bonding with our colleagues as well. Meagan: Talking on the job. Yeah, talking on the job. That's what you do. Dr. Natalie: That's always a wake-up call for us to always be really mindful of even just what that general chitchat might be that, okay yeah. Let's talk about our holidays. That's a good memory, but maybe let's not complain about something else like another colleague down the road. Let's keep that somewhere else. Meagan: Yes. Dr. Natalie: Oh gosh. So yeah, I did definitely meet with some criticisms as I said. Just that general not understanding of the importance of birth and this incredulity of the ridiculousness of the things that I was asking for. And then there was the stuff you would expect like the actual medical concerns that the other people might have like, is this a danger to the woman? Does it increase her infection rate? Is it a danger to the baby? The baby might get too cold and the pediatricians can't get access to the baby quickly. There were those sorts of concerns actually coming from a genuine place of still wanting to do the absolute very best for our families but of course, there is an answer to all of those questions. And then there were the people who I'm not sure what their motivation is. Maybe it was a threat to them. Perhaps other providers have always done things a certain way, so anytime you're wanting to change a procedure, number one you've got to realize why it's important to change the procedure. So with a Cesarean for example, we've been doing a fairly stock-standard way of doing this Cesarean for who knows how long. Certainly, for as long as I've been training, it's always been done a certain way and possibly I imagine, it's been done pretty much in the same way for many decades, so why would I change something that I can't see a problem with? In most providers' eyes, there's no problem with this. There's no danger in this. There's nothing going wrong apart from all of the things we know certainly can be a danger and can go wrong, but we accept those risks. But why would I change and certainly why would I change into a direction that might become more complicated, especially more complicated for me as the provider having to change the whole way I do things? Because let's be honest, we're people. We might not really like change especially if we've been doing something the same way for a really long period of time. So I definitely also got this pushback from maybe the people who felt challenged by that and who came back to me with even some threats. I don't even know. It was sort of ridiculous and if you weren't in a really serious board meeting, I would have laughed at these people who were coming to me claiming wildly with no evidence behind it things like, “You're going to kill women doing this.” What? What? Where is that coming from? And then the other really one that did actually make me laugh out loud, I certainly got one threat if you like or they thought it was a threat. They said, “But once you do it once, that woman is going to tell her friends and she's going to put it on her Facebook and you're going to get other people asking for this.” I went, “But that's the point.” That is why I want to do it. Meagan: You want to make this change. That is what we are doing. Dr. Natalie: So yeah, I thought that was funny, but that's definitely not where they were coming from with that. Anyway, that is what happened so they were right. Meagan: They were totally right. Here we are. All of us are totally in here loving it and wanting to talk to you about it because you are willing to. Like we were saying earlier, it's sad to know that so many people are so closed-minded. “Oh, well if you do this, then it's going to get it.” It's like, well yeah. We're not doing this as a secret. I'm not going through all of this to keep it a secret. We want to make this change. We want to make Cesarean birth better. My slogan is “Make Birth After Cesarean Better”, but to be really honest, sometimes our VBACs don't end up going exactly as planned, or maybe we decide in the end that we want a scheduled Cesarean, so let's have a healing experience, a beautiful experience and let's incorporate these moms as you are doing because it's truly going to make a difference. I don't know how many of these you have done, but I would be so curious to start learning what it does for the postpartum period, where it's taking us in postpartum, and how we are viewing these births. So many of these people that I talk to, and you can only imagine, have had very traumatic Cesareans, very terrible experiences, ones that they truly have to process and work through before they can even fall pregnant again. It makes me wonder with this even if it is a Cesarean and even if it wasn't desired, in what ways would it change our view? Have you had a lot of people talking about their experience of how they are viewing this? What are your patients saying?Dr. Natalie: I would really love to be able to do, if I had time in the world, to do an in-depth study basically of what the feedback was from all of the families that so far have had this procedure, this maternal or paternal or whatever you want to call it assisted Cesarean. Certainly, one thing I know for a fact is that I definitely have never had anybody come back to me after they have done this and complained or actually had any concerns. I have not had anybody ever come back saying, “Oh, yeah. Well, maybe next time I won't do that” or “I wish I hadn't done that.” Nobody has ever said that. It has definitely always been a really positive experience for them. Some families and mothers are only having their first baby and doing it this way, so perhaps they don't have anything to compare it to but that doesn't matter. What they know from this experience has been that it was really empowering for them and that it achieved a lot of the things that they would be imagining from a vaginal birth anyway. And then I've had all the way up to somebody having her fifth Cesarean and her four previous Cesareans had been with other providers and had not been any kind of maternal-assisted Cesarean. In particular, her fourth Cesarean before she came to me was a really difficult, traumatic experience for her because of things that happened at that time. This was an unplanned pregnancy, so this wasn't meant to happen in the first place, but happy about it and accepting it for sure. She was acknowledging that certainly she was going to have a fifth Cesarean. So she came to me and we performed this maternal-assisted Cesarean. We had spent an extensive period of time talking about what all of the very specific things that had been difficult for her in her previous Cesareans and how we could overcome that and what we could do differently this time around. She has this fifth Cesarean which she then says is so dramatically different from all of the other experiences that she had and so healing for her that she could now say in retrospect she hadn't even processed perhaps how difficult the other Cesareans had been until she had this experience where she could now see the difference. She's like, “Now, I can actually rest happy that this was my final baby now. The fifth one, we're done. We're taking permanent measures.” But this then was so healing for her that she can rest on the knowledge that this is her lasting impression of what birth is now, that it was this rather than the previous one in particular that had actually been really, really difficult. She had the insight to say that even the postpartum bonding period with her baby was so impacted by the difference in her Cesarean experiences that yes, she knew this baby from the very beginning. She got to be the first person to put hands on her baby. She got to have that immediate skin-to-skin with her baby and that uninterrupted bonding time. It often takes the women by surprise, perhaps they haven't thought about these details but they often will say things like, “Whoa. This baby's warm and slippery and wet.” I'm like, “Yes, of course, it is warm and slippery and wet. I don't know what you were imagining otherwise.” But that hadn't been their experience before because previously, the first way that they had experienced their baby was only after the providers had dried off the baby and wrapped it up in a blanket and maybe now given it to them, so they've only got the view of this little face and all they've gotten is “I can touch your cheek” kind of deal. So yeah, it has taken them by surprise that it turns out when you first lay hands on your baby, it's warm and wet and slippery. Meagan: It's kind of crazy though. I had the same thought. With my VBAC, I pulled him up from my vagina and pulled him onto my chest and he was. I was like, “Am I going to drop him because he's so slippery?” Before, I was strapped to the table and didn't really get that. So it is. It's such a different feeling and you wouldn't think about those little details being dramatic, but they are going to leave an impression. So how can we as listeners and people who are going for a VBAC, or maybe just a scheduled Cesarean, maybe going for a VBAC which ends in Cesarean, are there any tips you can give, or is there anything that we can start doing, especially if the hospital is not doing what yours is doing, to try and get this going like your patient did? If any providers are out there listening, do you have any tips for anybody?Dr. Natalie: I think it definitely can be achievable to make a change in the space of your own pregnancy, but perhaps start that early. So perhaps if you knew that a Cesarean was the way that you were going to go, start that conversation early with your care provider to say, “Okay, well if it's a Cesarean, can we make it look like this?” Perhaps it's not necessarily going to be to that extent of the maternal-assisted Cesarean because that does take all sorts of hoops to jump through and it will take time. I was incredibly– I don't know if luck is the right word, but in a privileged position to make those changes in the space of only a few months in my hospital to introduce this new policy and to be able to achieve it for that one woman who had asked for it. But I know that for a lot of hospital workers trying to change policy usually takes much, much, much longer than that. But it's got to start somewhere. So if you as a mother are wanting to make that change, it is possible, but if it's not going to work in your pregnancy journey, you could still be a voice for future mothers if you start the process at some point. It's got to start somewhere. The really easy first start is to start talking to your care provider. Just say, “This is what I want it to look like in whichever way it may be a maternal-assisted Cesarean, or let's lower the curtain down so I can see the baby emerging from my uterus.” Perhaps because I think a lot of care providers are going to take the easy way out and say, “No, you can't do that because we don't do that here.”The next step in that conversation to ask gently is, “Why can't we do that?” I say gently and I don't mean that you should be pleading or begging, but confrontation often doesn't achieve what you want it to achieve, so just have an actual, sensible conversation with your care provider. So if they come back and they say, “No, you can't do that,” then perhaps you can say, “Why can't we do that?” to actually find out what the legitimate reasons are if there is a legitimate reason because if the answer is, “Well, we don't have a policy for that,” then you can ask the next one.Meagan: How do we create one?Dr. Natalie: Exactly. How do we go about creating a policy? If the answer is something like, “My belief is that it's going to increase maternal infection,” then you can come back and say, “Is there evidence for that? Can you show me the evidence for that?” because I actually don't believe that there is any evidence for that. Whatsoever the answer might be, just keep the conversation rolling so that hopefully at some point, there might be this little click in the care provider's mind that says, “Oh, well maybe you're right. Maybe this is a legitimate question to ask and possibly I could maybe even be that change in this woman's life.” Maybe again, perhaps not. Maybe that care provider is still just not going to be open to change and not willing to make that personal effort that it takes, so if you're in the position of having different care providers or you have the ability to request a different care provider, then go to the next person and ask the same question. Maybe again, this is not perhaps going to achieve it in your pregnancy journey so to speak, but if then I as a care provider have multiple people coming to ask me the same thing, I would think that at some point, there's going to be a realization where I say, “Huh.”Meagan: This is desired. This is desired.Dr. Natalie: Exactly. Because if there is that desire, then maybe it is worthwhile actually making that effort to make a change. If I also believe this because I think it does take this understanding on the care provider's behalf to have that insight to say, “Actually, this is an important thing to do for our women and their families.” It takes an open mind for that, so maybe you're not going to get that with the first care provider, but ask for another one and just keep going. Meagan: And just keep going. Yeah, because the more that it is asked like you said, the more it's going to be in our heads as a provider and then maybe a provider one day is going to say, “Okay. Let's look into this.” Dr. Natalie: Yeah. You can always ask to go up that chain of command so to speak as well. If the obstetricians themselves are perhaps not able to change, then you can ask that question of, “Can I get the contact details of who the clinical director would be?” or perhaps what the titles are of the people in the hospital who are in charge of making that change. So just go up the pipeline. You can do that as a consumer. You can directly approach the director or in my case at the private hospital, the CEO. Just write them an email. Don't knock on their door, but gently ask in an email, “Perhaps is this something that we can work on?” And it is happening. All of those countries that I've said have come back to me and said, “We were able to achieve this for the first time in our country,” a lot of the time, that started with the patient herself asking her care provider and then hopefully meeting a care provider who is amendable to that challenge and who will take up with that in themselves. They're going to be more powerful going up that pipeline to make change happen. It's possible. It is possible. It is happening. Meagan: It is. It is happening. Your page has all of the proof. Dr. Natalie: Yeah. They're not fake videos. I don't have time for that. Meagan: Fake videos, I know. Like I said, it just makes me sad that people would even question that they are fake. Okay, we've talked about your journey of how this happened and now this is how we as consumers– I love how you said that we are consumers. We are really in a place where we can implement this. We can get things going and that's simply just by putting the idea in a provider's mind. I love that so much. You recently posted an introduction of yourself and something that stood out to me is in your post, you talked about, “What if we do nothing? What if we change the care and stop intervening and do nothing?” Then you prefaced it with, “I don't mean literally doing nothing, but I'm meaning continuously supporting, loving, educating, and empowering.” It really resonates with me. I love that so much. I love your words in that post. In fact, we will link it in the show notes so everyone can find it really easily. It's just beautiful and I love what you're doing. I really love it so much. I can't even tell you how grateful I am. Like you said, we are a VBAC podcast. I am doing these Cesarean episodes. Yes. I would like to see the Cesarean rates go down substantially. That is a huge goal of mine in my personal life. I would love to see Cesarean birth percentages going down, but at the same time, I do understand that they are needed. They are desired and there is that to be said. One of the questions I was going to ask you before I let you go is a lot of these videos look very calm and very planned. Sometimes Cesareans aren't calm or planned. Are there restrictions there, pre-restrictions that have to come into play before a maternal-assisted Cesarean delivery could happen? Dr. Natalie: Yeah. One thing I always definitely want to say because I've had this crisis myself as well going, “Am I getting known as a Cesarean doctor?” I don't want to. Meagan: I can see that. Dr. Natalie: I don't want to be that. I certainly don't want to become that person who then only does Cesareans and maternal-assisted Cesareans, but if a Cesarean is the right choice for the woman in her situation, then yes. Let's make it the best possible version of a Cesarean that it can be. That's the internal catchphrase that I say. Let's make every birth the best possible version of that birth that it can be. Whether or not that's a vaginal birth or whether or not that's a Cesarean or whether or not that's anything, a forceps, let's make it the best possible forceps that it can be. Okay, that's not on the top of the list of whatever you want to plan for, but if it's going to be that, then let's make it the best possible version of that that we can be. So yes. In a Cesarean situation, how can we make that calm– I mean not even calm, right? It's about that connection. It's about the instant connection of the mother and her baby, so how can we try to achieve that where she can be this integral part of her own birth rather than it being that she is a patient having an operation? It's about changing that viewpoint. I think that there are then so many little elements of that that we can achieve that even if it's not necessarily straight up to the maternal-assisted part, that there are so many other steps that can be important that we can do without necessarily having her scrubbed and putting gloves on and putting her hands in her belly. Let's lower the curtain. Let's do direct skin-to-skin. Let's do delayed cord clamping. Let's not take the baby away from the mother. All of those things can still be achieved as well perhaps even and mostly still very achievable in an emergency Cesarean situation. We use the word emergency Cesarean a little bit willy-nilly because it's not often an actual emergency. Meagan: Yes. I love that you pointed that out. But sometimes when we use that emergency word, it triggers people and they think that it was a life-saving thing, so I love that you said that. We have a lot of people say, “Oh, we had an emergency C-section.” I'm like, “Oh, what was the reason for your C-section?” “I didn't dilate past a 3 for a few hours, so we walked down to the OR.” That wasn't an emergency C-section. Dr. Natalie: I think in our hospital, and I know most other hospitals in Australia have a very similar classification system, but we either call it an elective Cesarean meaning that it's planned and booked well in advance, or if it's an unplanned Cesarean, it gets called an emergency Cesarean. But we have then six different categories of how we classify how urgent that emergency Cesarean is, but they all then come under the banner of an emergency Cesarean. A category 5 is that it just needs to be done within the next 24 hours. It's still called an emergency Cesarean, but clearly, if we're happy to wait 23 and a half hours, it's clearly not that urgent. But it still gets called an emergency C-section. Yeah. There's a very wide degree of how urgent an emergency Cesarean might be. So yes. At my hospital where I am able to do maternal-assisted Cesareans because I'm not at all of the hospitals that I work at, but at the one where I am able to do it at, at the moment, our policy is written in such a way that it is only for these planned, elective Cesareans. That's got to do with a whole range of factors. It's got to do with me being able to prepare the woman and her family ahead of time to know what this is going to look like. We go through all of those nuances of how she is, for example, going to become sterile because it is still an operation, so we do need to actually play by those rules to make sure that it is safe. I often get questions or comments on my maternal-assisted Cesarean videos saying, “Oh, isn't it a shame that she's got gloves on? If it was truly a bonding experience, she would touch her baby without gloves.” I go, “Yes, absolutely. That would be really, really nice.” Of course, it would be preferable to be able to grab her baby with her bare hands, but we have to keep in mind that this is still actually an operation, so from that perspective of we need to keep it safe for her, yes. She needs to have gloves on. I can't see a way around that at this point in time. Once the baby is out of her, once the baby is on her chest, once the baby is not in that sterile field so to speak, then of course, take the gloves off. She can touch her baby straightaway. That's what you'll see in those videos is that I often then lower her gown down so that she can put her baby directly onto her skin, onto her chest and then I'd be very happy for her to take her gloves off. They often just don't in that instant because they are holding their baby and they don't want to move from that moment. Part of the reason why it's currently only getting performed in an elective Cesarean situation is that pre-preparation where I've told her all of these rules of maintaining sterility so that she doesn't inadvertently break any of those rules. She has to follow the same rules that I as the operating surgeon have to. We go through the same handwashing process. There is a little technique to putting on the gowns and the gloves and whatnot. Meagan: Yep. I've seen it. Dr. Natalie: Yeah, you'll see it. Hands up in the air. Meagan: They get their hands up in the air and everything goes on. The gloves go on. Yeah. Dr. Natalie: Exactly. She can't then touch anything after that point that's not sterile. It's all of that pre-preparation and it's the pre-preparation of what it is going to look like and what it's going to feel like for her to put her hands on that wet, warm, slippery baby and to be able to lift it out of her. I get that if she starts to lift and she's like, “I can't do it. It's stuck.” You have to be reasonably firm because I try to make hopefully only a small enough hole that you can get the baby out, but it's not hip to hip so it's a little bit of a squeeze. But yep, pop it out. Meagan: That was a question I wanted to ask you. Since you've been doing this, have you seen any special scar situations with a mother assisting meaning any extensions, J's, or anything like that?Dr. Natalie: No, I haven't. I really haven't. Again, that's a question that we get. I get the question from people. I think this comes from their previous expectations of what they're being told perhaps in previous Cesareans that isn't it going to damage her abdominal muscles if she sits up like that? If she's reaching and grabbing? She's lifting her head up. People have told me before that in their previous Cesareans, they've been very much guided to not lift their heads up. In fact, I've had people tell me from other countries in particular that not only were their arms strapped down to the table but their head was strapped to the table as well. Meagan: I've heard that as well. Dr. Natalie: So they can't move their head and they have a system where they have to lie down flat for six hours after a Cesarean so that they still can't lift their head up or sit up for hours after the Cesarean because of this idea of things like a spinal puncture headache. I don't even know what those rules are because they don't make any sense to me. But if that's what people's experiences have been, then, of course, that's why they are questioning the validity or the safety when they see then what I'm doing that they themselves might think that this is dangerous. But no, there's no abdominal muscle trauma in excess of what a Cesarean does anyway. No, there's no risk to women of lifting their heads up off of the table. There's no risk to women of bending so to speak and lifting their baby up at the same time as a Cesarean. Yes, it can be a little bit more difficult because of course, they are anesthetized, but we are there still. She is not going to drop this baby. I'm still very much within catching range, supporting range and you might see on some of these that yes, I do still give her that helping hand to pop its bottom out, but once she's got that baby, you can just then watch their faces. You watch those videos and sometimes blur out the rest of the stuff that's going on, and just watch her face. It's really powerful to watch her have this, first of all, maybe this anxiety that's building. That would be an obvious response. Here she is lying down for this operation and then we lower those curtains and there's this wonderment of what this is going to be and then she touches her baby, and then she lifts it up. There's that moment of pure joy on her face every single time. Often, you'll see the tears that come with that too. It's just powerful. That's what birth should be like every single time. Just because it's now in an operating theater, that doesn't mean that we can't achieve all of those same things. Meagan: Right, yeah. Dr. Natalie: We might as well stop after that, right? Meagan: I love that. I love that. One day, I'm thinking, okay. I totally get that. You have to pre-prep and talk about this in a planned situation. I hope that maybe one day the conversation can be had in prenatal appointments where it's like, “Hey if you don't have a vaginal birth or if you don't have a VBAC or are a first-time mom, there are these options. Here, sign this form if you would like to be educated on this, and let's educate. Assuming it's all calm and it's not a true emergent baby out in seconds, but a very calm decision where everyone is making their way to the OR, maybe we can start implementing it there too because I do know for sure it would be so healing in so many ways for all of these moms that maybe wanted a VBAC and didn't have their VBAC.”Dr. Natalie: For sure. I think that's so true. I am definitely like that where I'm constantly pushing the boundaries at my hospital. That's where I next want to take it because as I said in my policy, it's written that this can only be performed on elective C-sections and I wrote that policy. That's a shame. If I could go back, I would take that out. I mean, it's got to be that way to start off with because we did want to do this in a really controlled way because we were introducing a new technique, but now that we've seen it and all of the reasons that we believed we would need all of this extra time to be able to plan for this, now that we've done enough of them that we're all practiced and experienced at them, it literally maybe takes an extra five minutes to the time of the operation just to get it ready.So there's no particular reason that I can see that we then couldn't achieve that same sort of thing for the vast majority of unplanned Cesareans as well. That would be a game changer because obviously, the unplanned Cesarean is in particular where the woman might come out traumatized at the other end if she's not getting what she was aiming for. Meagan: Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Natalie: Wouldn't that be powerful if we could still make it then the best possible version of the emergency Cesarean that we could do?Meagan: Absolutely. Well, I want to be conscious of your time. I know that you've been up all night for multiple nights on call doing the amazing things you do. I would love to leave with– since it is a VBAC podcast, is there anything that you would like to share about VBAC or anything cool that you've seen or anything that you've been implementing with VBAC or any tips or anything as a provider who is making a change in birth in general? I do want to focus on that. I don't personally see you as the Cesarean birth provider. Dr. Natalie: Great. Meagan: That's one of the reasons why I just think that you are amazing. I do think that is an amazing thing that you have done because you have started something that is really tricky. It's a really tricky thing and you've started it. That's where we start making changes just to start but I see all of your other posts too. I see all of your beautiful, amazing posts. I mean, I'm pretty sure you just shared a home birth after a Cesarean video. Dr. Natalie: The HBAC, right?Meagan: Yes, the HBAC. A lot of providers even in a hospital setting would be like, “Nope. Big no-no. That is terrible,” and you're still out there sharing it. You're still out there educating. Is there anything else you'd like to share for VBAC?Dr. Natalie: Yeah. I think that's right. I definitely am still very, very much in support of basically every woman being able to be empowered and informed to make the best possible choices for her in the situation that she's facing because whilst yes, aiming for a VBAC is a really lofty goal, sometimes that isn't going to be the best possible choice for her in whatever situation for whatever reason that might be. So yeah, number one is always having enough information being given to you or that you're finding out yourself that you are equipped to make a decision and probably multiple decisions that feel right for you. That's difficult sometimes, I think, to know where to go for that information, so thank goodness for places like The VBAC Link that can actually give you appropriate medical advice, research, and the studies and the actual, accurate information so that it's not just fear-based information that's getting thrown your way. Meagan: Yes. Dr. Natalie: And then it's about always advocating for yourself which is unfortunate that it has to become that way, but the hospital system, in particular, is a fear-driven,  litigation, consent place so you're often not necessarily going to get that unbiased opinion on what your choices are. You probably are going to have to go to external places to get that information, but then you just have to be really careful about where you're going for that information. Trust your sources. Also, my other tip is always going to be about looking at that whole birth mapping thing. So, okay yes. We are going to aim for a VBAC. For example, that might be your choice, but what if X happens? Then what's going to be my choice in that situation? If Y happens, then where am I going to diverge now and what's going to be my choice in that situation? We know that a lot of birth trauma comes from a situation that wasn't prepared for. The woman comes back at the other side and says, “Well, I just didn't consider that that could have happened to me,” so the unexpected or unplanned thing that happened is perhaps where a lot of birth trauma can come from. Having that fine line between considering all possibilities but not needing to dwell on those scary ones. There are fear-based ones, but knowing what if you then need a hospital transfer? What if you need a Cesarean? What are your choices going to be in that situation? So that you can continue to make it the best possible version of that now that you can possibly make it. Meagan: Yeah. I love that. It's something that a lot of our followers will say when they had their initial Cesarean. “It was traumatic because it wasn't even in my mind. It wasn't even a thought that that was a possibility” or “I was so focused on this birth plan, this one route that I wanted to go and then it did diverge and it diverged completely over here and it threw me for a loop and now I'm processing.” I love that just in general for anyone going in to have a baby. Even with a planned Cesarean, we want to have an open mind because birth takes weird turns sometimes. Having an open mind and having all of your ducks in a row and having the education because you may not ever get there, but if it's there, it's going to help you if it comes. So I love that. I love that tip. Thank you. Dr. Natalie: Yeah. Meagan: Okay, well thank you so much for sharing how you have got this implemented and how it started, and how we as people can try to implement it in our lives and in our cities, states, and countries because we have people listening from all over the world. I love hearing that it is slowly creeping out there and having it put in place. Thank you for all that you do, for your hard work, and for your support in all types of birth that you support. I really do. I just appreciate your time so much. Dr. Natalie: You are very, very welcome. I am always keen and passionate to of course continue to advocate for change wherever we can. I'll always give a little shoutout and say if you are a pregnant woman or a provider considering this as a change and you need a place to start, you can very much reach out to me via Instagram. You can send me a DM and I can email you information like the policy and some information that I've generated that may be able to help you along in your journey as well. I'm very open to that. Meagan: Awesome. Thank you so much. Dr. Natalie: You're welcome. Thanks, guys. ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan's bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.  Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands