Reasons to Document Your Business

Dennis: Tell me about your “why” and why the concept of having a WHY is so important.

Edwina: If we aren’t careful, we can go through life ticking boxes that are not necessarily right for us! Following the norm, you leave school and go on to higher education. Choosing a career path at 17 or 18, based on your marks and what you think you want to be. Then, get a job, get married, buy a house, etc.—getting lost in a life dictated by a “shoulds list” that you didn’t even write.

Add to that the trap of living reactively rather than proactively, and we potentially have a recipe for a frustrating and hollow existence. Then one day, we find the time and energy to stick our head up above the noise and clamor of the world around us and realize that we don’t even know who we are anymore, let alone what we want.

If we don’t take the time to stop and think about why we’re doing something, it’s easy to get lost on a hamster wheel of reactionary living, dictated by the word “should.” Should be richer, thinner, fitter, prettier. Should do this, that, and the other. Should have a bigger house, better car, fancier clothes.

The solution is to get crystal clear why you are doing what you are doing. Whether that’s why you want to lose weight, or change careers, or borrow money to buy a fancier car, if you identify what’s driving you, you may see things very differently. Moving toward pleasure and away from pain is a compelling WHY—you just need to be clear on your definition of pain and pleasure in relation to your choices.

For the entrepreneurs in this space, I challenge you to articulate clearly why you are doing what you’re doing. For me, it’s about leaving a legacy for my kids, financial security for the coming generations, and living a life that feels purposeful and fills me with pride.

Dennis: What kind of advice do you have for entrepreneurs struggling to find their “why”? Do you have any quick tips that may help Edwina: I learned a little trick from Dan Graziosi about asking yourself why seven times. It seems to be a magic number for some reason, and it works best if you do it with somebody else.

So whether it’s “I want to lose weight” or “I want to start a business” or “I want to make a million dollars”—whatever the “why” is, ask somebody to work with you by asking, “Why do you want that?” seven times.

Dennis: Talk to me about the role of vulnerability and creating connections with your audience.

Edwina: Vulnerability is a topic that we get to thank Brené Brown for shining a spotlight on. We’ve moved away from the idea that the people that we’re learning from—our teachers, our mentors, our coaches, our guides—have to be perfect in all things, all the time. The very nature of staying connected to our humanity is understanding the role of vulnerability. To strive for perfection is not only paralyzing for the person who’s trying

to achieve it, but it’s inauthentic and creates a barrier between you and those with whom you want to connect. It’s that perfect Instagram wall that we look at and think, “Oh my gosh, her life looks amazing,” but it’s hard to relate. In contrast, those who share the “real” picture create deeper, more authentic connections.

Sharing the bumpy ride and the mistakes along the way is helpful to our audience. The shiny is great, but the not-soshiny moments that happen along the way are where the riches lie. When we can share what went wrong for us, how we dealt with it and what we learned from the experience, it inevitably makes others feel less alone and more supported on their journey.

One of the most vulnerable moments in my career happened during my very first interview series. It was in 2018, and my eldest sister, Phillipa, died very unexpectedly. I had about 2,500 women waiting on me every day to show up and deliver content, and I chose to be very real with them about what I was going through. The support I received from the women in my coaching group and the understanding and care from the women in my audience showed me what generosity truly is. So yes, it was a gift for me. However, it was also a valuable leadership experience for those around me. I role-modeled, albeit inadvertently, that when something turns your world upside down, which happens to all of us, it’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to show up when things aren’t perfect. It’s okay. The lesson: Humans want to connect with humans who are willing to be human. Dennis: How do you define feminine leadership? Edwina: It is about letting go of the idea of perfection. I think the old paradigm of leadership was, “I’m the authority, and you do what I say.” Now it’s: “Here’s my suggestion. I’ve got some ideas, I’ve got some experience, here’s what I bring to the table. What do you think? What do you feel? What do you need?” standing shoulder to shoulder with people to create a fault-, blame-, guilt-and shame-free environment. It is about being 100% responsible for your choices and for your way of being. It is about being willing to show up and speak up when you can’t control the outcome. And I believe it is about making hard decisions from a place of love, not fear.

Dennis: Tell me about your role as a wisdom curator. Edwina: I collect wisdom from people all over the globe via interviews and then exhibit it in one easyto-access location. So, in essence, I curate wisdom. It is the first way that I serve my audience.

My intention is to plant the seeds of possibility into your heart and mind—the possibility that there is another way, another path, another version of you waiting to live a bigger, bolder, more beautiful life.

Step two of my work supports women to create a compelling and exciting vision for their own lives. Getting clear on who they want to be, what they want to do and what they

Step three is how to bring your vision to life. That’s where the coaching comes in. Most of us are not short on information and knowledge, but the gap between where we are and where we want to be is filled by having a clear vision and then the support and accountability to bring your vision to life.

To find out more about Edwina, visit edwinamd.com and check out her shows on MotivationandSuccess. tv. To get your copy of “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs,” visit any online bookseller, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Next is bestselling author Krista Mashore. Krista has been in the top 1% of Realtors nationwide for 20 years, and was named by Yahoo! Finance as the top digital marketer to look out for in 2021.

Dennis Postema: What was it like to be interviewed by Edwina for “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs”?

Krista Mashore: She’s great. It was so nice and she told the story so well. I felt like it was a blessing and honor. I love the female movement too. It’s great.

Dennis: How did you get your company’s revenue from $0 to almost $20 million in just four years?

Krista: It’s just not giving up, honestly. Hiring the right coaches and mentors is also a huge part of it. I would not be where I am had I not invested in myself over and over again. It’s funny, I just did a post in my inner circle adding up the cost of all the coaches that I had hired over about three years and nine months. It was about $460,000 just within my inner circle that I had invested. But we just hit the $20 million mark in our company and had our best month ever. We were just $2,000 shy of $20 million this month during a worldwide pandemic, and it is all due to just never giving up, continuing to move forward and hiring the right people to help get there.

Dennis: What would you say to people who are hesitant to get a coach? do what’s hard now, it’s going to be hard forever. Sometimes it’s difficult to pull out your pocketbook and pay tens of thousands of dollars. I just paid $50,000 and I might invest $150,000 in another program. It seems hard at first, but you learn so much when you hire someone who’s done what you’re trying to do. For example, if you want to learn how to make $1 million a month, you need to hire someone who’s making at least that, if not more. But you learn what they’ve done wrong—it’s like you collapse time frames because they teach you all the mistakes not to make and what does work.

If you’re coachable and you’re willing to actually

do the work, then you’re great. I think many people give up too soon. I noticed it’s like Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich.” You’re three feet from gold. So many people give up right before they’re going to get to that mark. Things take time, but it will work if you just don’t ever stop.

Dennis: What is your one key strategy for marketing to the digital masses? Krista: You need to date your community, date your clientele. You need to let them get to know you and like you and trust you.

My main strategy, both in real estate and in coaching, is utilizing the video strategy to put my content in front of people. Before I even launch any funnels, which is a website or landing page that you specifically drive traffic to, I spend part of my marketing budget on putting video content in front of my audience so that they can get to know me, they can start to like me, they can learn to trust me. It positions me as the authority, it starts to break down their barriers, and it literally develops a real relationship between me and them. That way, when I take them to the funnel, the conversions are much, much stronger.

There’s a term for this. It’s called a “parasocial relationship.” Our brains have been wired to see people on the other side of a screen and start to develop a relationship with them. We feel like we know them. We cheer for them, we cry for them and we start to trust them. Developing that parasocial relationship is what marketers or what any type of professional should be doing with their audience, so that when they do want to convert them to want to work with them, the conversions are much easier because the client on the other end feels like they know them.

Dennis: How did you discover this for yourself?

Krista: When I was just selling real estate, I was used to selling a lot of foreclosures. Then the market got better and I went from selling 169 homes in my best year to selling 12 the next year, because all my foreclosure accounts closed. So I went to a listing presentation to get a new client and when I called later to check in, they said, “Krista, we loved you, but the last guy called you the foreclosure queen.” And I thought, “Oh my gosh, I am a foreclosure queen. Nobody knows me in this market.”

So I started researching what the Fortune 500 companies were doing and realized they utilized something called content marketing. They would take material, add value and get material out there. They would market themselves to people, and that’s how they made it to where they were.

So I thought, “That’s what I need to start doing. I need to start getting my content in front of people. Serving, not just selling. Letting them get to know me, adding value, being prolific at times, questioning the norm, getting them to question what they’re doing.”

That’s why I did it. I focused on what other professionals, billiondollar companies, were doing. They used video content. If you think about the Kardashians, whether you like them or not, everyone knows the Kardashians. They are masters at creating content and getting it out

there, and now they’re billionaires. So I started creating content in my community, interviewing people, talking about real estate, talking about the community, talking about market-based seller tips and tricks. I also talked about things that were happening in the community and interviewed local professionals and interviewed local restaurants. And I took that content and created ads on Facebook, targeting and retargeting my local audience.

Then, when I launched my coaching company, I used the exact same strategy. I created a ton of video content, put ads behind it, started targeting and retargeting people and making sure that I put content in front of them that they were interested in, because research shows that the more your content speaks directly to somebody, the more likely they’re going to convert.

That’s why funnels work so well, because if I produce content and somebody’s watching, I can tell how much of the video they watched and that indicates whether they’re interested in my marketing. Then I send them more video content on marketing to nurture them, then I take them to my funnel. Now, when I ask them for their contact information or for them to pull out their credit card to get more information, they’re so much more likely to do it. It’s a strategy that completely fast-tracks the business.

Dennis: How does your mindset affect your business? Krista: Mindset has been a huge component of my success, and it’s been something I’ve really had to work hard at. I come from really, really humble beginnings. I haven’t lived at home since I was 13. There was some abuse happening in my home, so while I have an amazing relationship with my family now, when I was 13 I started running away from home and found myself in juvenile hall. Then I got sent to a group home for girls for a year and ended up going to a foster home my remaining high school years until I was 18. When you leave home that young, it kind of messes you up.

To maintain the right mindset, I read constantly about topics like the power of the subconscious mind and cybergenetics . There’s so much research about your brain and how your brain works and the neurotransmitters in our brain. It doesn’t know the difference between reality and what we visualize and what we think. So I’ve learned to just completely be a master of my mind.

Mindset is huge. I read books on it, I visualize my success, and I believe that I can do anything. One of the things I teach my students is to think about all the limiting beliefs they have. What are the things that you say to yourself that are holding you back from greatness? What we think about turns into our actions, our thoughts, our philosophies, our beliefs, our habits, our rituals, our routines and our actions. Those actions create our life, our success and the results. So we’ve got to be so conscious of what we’re saying and we have to believe that we can do anything.

Dennis: How do you manage to be so productive?

Krista: If you ask people what their biggest struggles in life are, they will tell you: being

more accountable and productive. If you’ve read books like “Atomic Habits” or “The Slight Edge,” they all talk about how big, huge, massive changes in your life are just the result of small actions. These big, huge, audacious goals are just an accumulation of small activities done over time to create really big things.

So last October I started doing something with my students called “skin in the game.” It’s a 15-minute daily accountability call. Students just jump on a call and state two things that they’re going to get done for the day—one for their business and one for their personal lives. One person’s goals might be like, “I commit to doing 10 video text messages, then I commit to working out for 30 minutes, and that’s my intention for the day.”

The next day you show up to the same call for 15 minutes at the same time with the same people, and you say whether you got those goals done. Then you explain what you let get in the way and how you’re going to overcome that today. So you might say something like, “I’m going to change my behavior by doing Y.” Then they restate what their commitment is for that day.

It doesn’t have to be the same commitment—it can be a totally different commitment—but the idea behind it is that no matter what, you do everything you can to make sure that those two commitments get done.

The reason this works so well is that call is your anchor. Having an anchor, something you do before the habit you’re trying to create, will help solidify that habit. That 15-minute call is your anchor to ensuring that you actually get that thing done.

The other helpful factor is the personal accountability and the accountability of the group. Nobody wants to go to the group and say, “I didn’t do my thing,” so the results have just been phenomenal.

Dennis: What would you say to somebody who’s making excuses about why they can’t start a business? What advice would you give them?

Krista: There’s no better time than right now. We’ve crushed it during COVID. We’ve had our best years ever. There’s no better time than now. There’s so much opportunity and so much room for you to thrive, not just survive. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to keep getting the same results. You can either risk working for yourself, or you can continue to work for somebody else and make them rich because that’s what most people are doing. If you are not working for yourself as an entrepreneur and building your own business, you’re building somebody else’s dreams and life.

To find out more about Krista, visit kristamashore. com.

Coming to us live from Berlin, we now have certified high-performance coach Eva Medilek. Eva is a success coach and author whose book takes on the critical topic of allyship. Dennis Postema: What was your experience being interviewed by Edwina?

Eva Medilek: First of all, I love Edwina. Love, love, love her. She’s such a powerful human with so much love and tenderness in her. She’s got that

balance of love and tenderness with power as well, and I just find a lovely mix in Edwina. Because you can feel her power, but it’s not to the point where it knocks you off your center. It really brings you a grounded, lovely energy.

Dennis: Before you were a high-performance coach, you were a dental hygienist. How did that transformation come about?

Eva: Before I became a coach, I was happily working in the rat race, making good money and had been at my job for over thirty years. Then, in 2011 as the economy was still struggling and I was celebrating my 50th birthday, I was downsized. My salary was cut, my days were cut, and I found myself literally at the age of 50 interviewing to try to find work, which was very, very difficult. I was panicked. I’d been cleaning teeth literally since I was 16 years old, and so this was a whole new world for me. It was humiliating. Nobody wants to hear that you’re 50 years old and have over 30 years of experience.

But I needed to work because I wanted a certain lifestyle. I wanted to have a place in Berlin. I wanted to be able to take summers off and just go away and have a job that I could work anywhere in the world, and that meant I needed to get away from dental hygiene and look for work that didn’t require me to go back to school and get another degree. I came across Robert Kiyosaki, the author of the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad and read some of his books and thought, “Oh! Real estate. I could do that.” I went to one of his seminars and learned more about financial education and how to create passive streams of income, then I took a leap of faith. I bet on myself, even after being downsized, and I invested in coaches and mentors and training to become a real estate investor. Dennis: And then you went from real estate investor to highperformance coach?

Eva: In the beginning of my real estate investing career, I ended up burned out, stressed out and overwhelmed, all of which contributed to a breakdown in my marriage. I was frustrated and discouraged and started to think about giving up. One of my mentors taught me some things I could do to get over my pity party, so to speak. I also leaned heavily on books, hearing other people’s stories. Because your story can be someone else’s survival guide, and everybody has a story, so I found solace in learning how other people overcame those negative voices in their heads, the feeling of giving up. One of the biggest issues we all face is that we don’t get good financial education in school. So we really have to seek out how the rich become rich. At the age of 50, I didn’t have the luxury of 20 or 30 years to figure this out. When you think of having coaches and mentors, you want to collapse that timeline and really learn from their mistakes.

They’ve made them before you and so they’re not going to coach you or guide you into the same mistakes. They’re going to tell you, “This is what I’ve learned, this is where to go, and this is how to do it,” so it was really critical to me that I worked with coaches and mentors so that I had a five-year plan. By year four after implementing my plan, we had a place in Germany, and I was able to go there for months on end without having a J-O-B. At that point, I started becoming a mentor myself and found that there was so much fear for people to make a mistake that they didn’t really trust what the coaches and mentors were saying was true. They didn’t have the courage to make the phone calls and make the offers and find the deals and get capital and financing for the deals. Most people, especially ladies my age, were being held back by that fear. “What if people say no?” “How do I ask for money?” and I remember saying, “You don’t ask for money, you shop the deal. You find the deals and the money will come.” That’s hard to believe when you’re not in that world, because I’d had a problem myself until one of my coaches said, “Stop asking for money! No one’s going to give you money.” People want to invest in the deal—they want the ROI. And so I started coaching in that world, but I realized that people needed more than just to learn how to do it, they needed to get out of their own way so they could do it. Dennis: How do you define high performance? Eva: High performance really boils down to consistency. A lot of people, when they hear the word performance, they think, “Ugh! It sounds like hard work and drive, and I’m already exhausted by the word high performance,” but if we get to the bottom line of what high performance is, it really is succeeding consistently over the longterm while maintaining a healthy, happy life. It’s having success without sacrificing your health, your well-being or your relationships.

Dennis: How do you help someone get the courage to be high performance?

Eva: Before I even coach people to high performance, we talk about habits, patterns, beliefs and behaviors, from your early life experience and how it’s sabotaging your success and your relationships now. So I would say number one is to be aware of what you fear. You usually have fear, frustration and fatigue. You’ve got to know if it’s outcome fear, if it’s pain fear, if it’s “what if the grass isn’t greener on the other side?” fear. What exactly is the fear? There are so many fears that people are grappling with that were born out of their early life experiences that they’ve built to protect themselves. So we get to look at that carefully: where that came from, is it really true, and what’s the worst that can happen?

Our school system has set us up that if we get a bad grade, we feel like crap. We get punished. If we get a good grade, we get rewarded. If we don’t get a good grade, our parents want to know why we failed, and we feel like crap. Nobody wants to make a mistake because there’s that connotation of “I’m bad, I’ll be punished.” So we do everything we can to avoid that feeling. Instead, I want you to fail faster. Let’s make those

mistakes. Let’s get them out of the way. Let’s get those lessons and let’s do it—and you only can do that through action.

Dennis: Are you a visual person? What gets you from point A to B?

Eva: I use vision boards. I have mantras that I say and repeat every morning, and I have a morning routine. A morning routine will set you up to win the day. Part of the morning routine is getting my mind right for the day. Or I’ll hire a coach or a mentor to get me from A to B, because I know my limitations and where I need help. I very rarely go it alone, because that just causes a lot of stress and overwhelm and then other areas of my life end up falling apart. I’m a perfectionist and a do-it-all-myself type. I’m very visual and highly focused and have learned how to limit distractions. I have what I call my CPR method: Get clear on what I want, prioritize and be responsible. To get clarity, my husband and I always write down our goals for the business and for our personal life as well. I started visionboarding with another coach just to really get clear and focus because once you’re clear and focused on what you want to create for a certain time of life, it helps you minimize distractions. To prioritize all the goals that I have, I decide what order they need to happen in and what is the priority at the moment. To be responsible, I set and communicate my boundaries. If people don’t know what you’re creating and what your boundaries are, they can’t support you. That’s where a lot of frustration and miscommunication comes in relationships and with your team.

Dennis: What would you say determines performance outcome?

Eva: It really is that CPR and getting clear on what outcomes you want. It’s also acknowledging whether you’re letting your fears, your fatigue or your frustration get in the way. When we talk about performance outcomes, we really talk about your ambition. Your ambition is going to drive and change your behavior, and the habits and behaviors that you have in place have to be appropriate for the success that you want to create. If you’re really focused on writing a book, then focus on writing the book. Don’t get squirreled away by something else. Keep your focus clear.

Then we have to talk about your competency: Do you have the skill level? Do you need to hire coaches? Do you need to learn a new skill so that you can support what you’re trying to create as well? And what beliefs do you have? Do you believe that you can do it, or are you a Negative Nelly or Debbie Downer?

Dennis: What do you think causes underperformance for people in their lives?

Eva: Fears.

Fears, frustration, fatigue. A lot of it is the burnout and the overwhelm from not saying “no,” not being selfish. Your success depends on your ability to prioritize without regrets or guilt. When you’re saying “yes” to things that don’t support your priorities and focus at that time, it creates a level of fatigue that creates burnout and overwhelm, and that’s when you start to underperform.

Dennis: You just wrote your first book last January. Can we talk about that a bit?

Eva: The events of 2020 had an impact on the world globally, and I found myself, in reaction to George Floyd’s murder, really wondering: How can I have a bigger impact or influence? I noticed how people were getting criticized on social media, saying the wrong things, like, “All lives matter,” “I love everybody,” and “I don’t see color,” not realizing what that means to people of color when you don’t see color. But also knowing that it was coming from a place of good intention. I felt that I could support well-meaning people of privilege by creating a safe space to have these conversations and for them to listen and learn, so I put on a live forum called the Allyship Awareness Forum. It was six badass women of color, and we invited everybody who wanted to listen to our experiences and to learn about what we need. Out of that, I started a Facebook group called the Intimacy of Race, where I share resources so you can be more in tune with what’s going on, learn some of the history that never got taught in schools, and how that impacts how we show up. From that, I was inspired to write the book as well, called “The Intimacy of Race.” It really is how people of privilege can move past subconscious racism to active allyship. It’s very basic. You don’t have to protest and change laws; you start this transformation within. To learn more about Eva, visit her at talkwitheva. com and evamedilek.com. Dennis: Why did you originally start Kultured Wellness?

I’d like to introduce you now to Kirsty Wirth, an educator, integrative health coach and founder of the gut health company, Kultured Wellness.

Dennis Postema: What was it like being interviewed by Edwina and being part of the book “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs”?

Kirsty Wirth: It was wonderful. Edwina and I had already done a few interviews and formed a beautiful friendship, so we had so much fun doing the book interview. Kirsty: I have been unwell with gut issues for the majority of my life, so I normalized very quickly having diarrhea ten times a day and having stomach cramps and low energy and poor sleep. My grandma had it, my mum had it, I had it, my sister had issues, so it’s just like, this is what our family does: we have gut issues.

Never once did it enter our minds that we could get it tested or that this didn’t have to be our life. I just put up with it until my son became very unwell after going to Fiji. We were in Fiji and he contracted giardia, which, if anyone’s

had giardia, just the sound of it will make you freak out and be fearful. It’s horrible with cramps and pain … it’s debilitating. So he had giardia, and then he just kept getting it. He would have antibiotics and all of this medication, but his gut issues continued to get worse. Then we noticed at about 18 months a significant change in his learning and development. The trajectory completely changed. By the age of three and a half, he was completely nonverbal, had no communication skills, and wouldn’t look at anyone. He would just lie on the floor and scream all day and night. The classic diagnosis at that point was autism.

So we went from having this 12-month-old boy at a surf camp, thinking he’ll be a professional surfer like Kelly Slater, to being told that he will never communicate or go to school or play sports or have a girlfriend. Our whole life came crashing down.

I’m really stubborn and I love research, and I thought, “I’ve got these gut issues and I feel [like] crap. I can’t remember things, and I’m constantly fatigued and can’t sleep and have rashes all over my body. Is it actually possible that there’s something else?” My husband, who is an emergency nurse, said, “If someone turned up in the emergency room with this chronic yellow diarrhea, we’d go and get them tests. We wouldn’t just diagnose them with some random thing without investigation.”

After loads of investigation, we finally found the appropriate testing and the appropriate support and discovered my son had Clostridium difficile (C. diff), and so did I. My daughter had significant gut issues as well. The research was very clear: The toxins from the bacteria in your gut leak into your brain and stop brain function, cognition and development. So was our son really autistic, or was his brain on fire because his gut was on fire? We went on this grand adventure and connected with a research team in Canada who were doing fecal microbial transplants for C. diff. We sold our house, did a fundraiser, and gathered enough resources to fly to Canada and get on this research project. My son had this transplant and the next day, he started saying “Mum” and looking me in the eye and then would say, “Train.” I had the procedure done, too, and so suddenly, I’m like, “Wow, that’s how you go to the toilet in the morning!” When I reflect on it, Kultured Wellness is the business I never wanted to have. I was happy in my space in education. I come from a long background of education, teaching either outdoor education or in schools or university, and I was happy, cruising along, doing what I like to do. My parents owned a business when I was growing up, and I remember constantly saying, “I would never do that. Who would run a business?” Yet here I am, six years in, running a business, and I couldn’t love it more because it’s so purpose driven.

Dennis: What are some warning signs that indicate someone should get checked out for gut health?

Kirsty: Your gut doesn’t lie. Every single day when you eliminate, you are getting the best barometer of what’s going on within your gut and with your

health. So you need to be checking your stools. If you’re not eliminating at least once a day, then there’s a problem. We need to be eliminating every day, and we want to have nicely formed stools. If that’s not happening, that’s your first warning sign. It’s as simple as that. People often wait until it’s extreme and they’re on the toilet constantly and they’ve got all these problems, but I would investigate if you’ve got three or four days of that happening. You also have overt symptoms: bloating, gas, rashes, constipation or extreme diarrhea.

What is now becoming very clear, and it’s not talked about enough, is if you have mental health issues, you’ve got a gut issue. All the neurotransmitters necessary for us to be buoyant, resilient, robust, including dopamine, serotonin, and GABA are all created in the lining of our gut. So if our gut is this big, red, inflamed mess, then our brain doesn’t get the appropriate neurotransmission and messages to feel joyful. Our brain gets the message, “Everything is bad! Be on high alert, be stressed, be scared, be fearful.” Gut issues can be more reflected in what’s going on in your mental health rather than in your gut. So you can have an extreme gut issue and not have any typical gut symptoms. That’s a really important piece of information that we need to get our heads around. Dennis: What types of mental health issues? Kirsty: There’s a study of about 40 women who were given a probiotic drink for six weeks and by the end, all their anxiety barometers in the test results had completely come down, whereas in the control group, they hadn’t changed at all. All that applied was one specific bacteria strain in that probiotic drink, which was the Lactobacillus rhamnosus. We have lots of information about OCD, autism, Asperger’s and global developmental delay being impacted by gut health. There’s some great research on bipolar and schizophrenia, depression—there’s research for pretty much all conditions relating to gut health. And you don’t have to have a diagnosed mental health condition— you can just feel low, as Dennis: What would you suggest to somebody who’s dealing with a lot of feelings of anxiety?

Kirsty: The first thing I would suggest is to take out what’s causing the inflammation. Your gut may be on fire and your brain may be on fire, so pull out what’s inflaming your body. If we’re all honest with ourselves, we know what it is: it’s the alcohol, it’s the doughnuts, it’s the sugar, it’s the grains, it’s the processed fast food. So the first thing is just pull back and calm everything down. Don’t go and find the latest product or supplement, just pull back on things and then get some sleep. That’s a really big one. Turn off the screens at night, go to bed early, and allow your body to recover and cool down the inflammation. After that, have some fermented foods, get into some bone broths, and replenish and look after your gut by eating a diverse amount of vegetables and fermented foods.

Dennis: What do you suggest nutrient-wise daily for everybody’s gut health?

Kirsty: Consistently having therapeutic probiotic foods is nonnegotiable. It creates such a wonderful environment in your gut to allow beneficial microbes to grow. It’s like when you have a house and you want your friends to come over, you want them to hang out and feel comfortable, stay for dinner and have a good time. So you set up a nice couch and you give them some water and you just make everything lovely for your crew to come over. It’s the same in your gut. You want those bacteria to be happy and multiply and support you, so you’ve got to create the environment so they stick around, not an environment for worms and parasites and so forth to come in. To do that, eat fermented foods. Put some in your breakfast, have some in your lunch, have some with your dinner. That is as simple as having a tablespoon of sauerkraut on the side of your dinner, having a bowl of yogurt for breakfast, so forth. When it comes to fermented foods, not all are created equal, so you need to choose fermented foods that have got a very high CFU count, or Colony-Forming Unit, which is the strength of the probiotics. And you want to choose ones that have got a robust amount of bacteria strains in them that support health—then you know you’re effecting change in the gut. That’s why I developed my Kultured Wellness products because there wasn’t anything available, so I had to create my own. In Australia, everyone’s chugging down kombuchas that are just full of sugar, and there’s no therapeutic benefit from them, and it makes me cross. To find out more about fixing your gut health, visit kulturedwellness.com. Dennis: What was your journey like, going from architect to a feminine leadership coach?

Ana: It was a big transition. It’s probably one of the bigger transitions I’ve experienced so far. I was in the architecture profession for about 10 years. I got to what I considered the top, working for famed architect Frank Gehry. That was my dream job, and I got there. But something in my heart was nudging me, telling me there’s

Please enjoy the talk I had with Ana Paula Munoz, a feminine leadership coach and cofounder of Inaura.com.

Dennis Postema: What was it like being a part of the book and being interviewed by Edwina?

Ana Paula Munoz: It was beautiful, and Edwina’s just a really amazing interviewer. We got to go really deep into feminine leadership, entrepreneurship and a lot of different subjects that are close to my heart. The topics we covered really speak to the women in my audience who want to create a life driven from vision more than anything.

something else. I had to sit down and think about whether architecture was truly aligned for me. I also needed to consider what it was I could create in this world with this life. At the end of the day, following my heart meant connecting with people more intimately in immersive experiences like retreats and workshops, and also supporting people on a deeper level. So instead of designing buildings externally for people, I chose to support others by helping them design their lives.

Dennis: That’s an awesome experience, but was it scary at the same time?

Ana: Oh yeah, it was scary. Imagine dedicating so much time and resources to reaching a level of experience, expertise and quality of work, and then suddenly feeling like it didn’t fulfill the illusion of what you thought you’d feel once you got there. I also knew in my heart that there was something else. There were moments of devastation, but it’s not like I was never connected to what I’m pursuing now. I’ve always dabbled in these pieces, and that’s always influenced my design as well, but it’s a totally different career.

It takes so much courage to be able to say, “It’s not about the time invested, it’s about your life.” It’s like being in a relationship. I’ve heard this so many times from different people, like, “I’ve already invested five years into this relationship. We can’t end it now. We have to fight,” but you don’t if it’s not working anymore.

It’s devastating, but at the same time, it’s opening up to a whole world of possibility that I couldn’t ignore. If I had, my existence would have become robotic and my life would lose color.

Dennis: Tell me about masculine and feminine energy and polarity in leadership and creating.

Ana: Coming into the body and feeling and allowing for that to happen is very feminine. When you’re in a very rigid structure, it’s more distorted masculine or hypermasculine. Societally, there is a hypermasculinization in the world. This includes ingrained beliefs in terms of hustle, production, super grind and kill yourself to make yourself, all these different things that are very intense. I understand the mindset and the benefits of endurance, and I feel like that is very valuable and it’s important to include that in leadership. But there’s a difference between that and ignoring that you have a body you need to take care of, and that it has functions. In architecture school, which is very masculine, it was encouraged to do allnighters, and we would. We’d stay for multiple days without much food and just keep on working, keep on drawing and designing. It was almost like a competition.

That’s not okay. That’s just leading to a more burned-out state. Then we go into the corporate world, and there’s still that expectation to just produce and produce and produce without acknowledging humanness and the heart—which is part of the feminine and is really important. That’s what we start bringing in as we create more balance between masculine and feminine in the workplace. It also shows up in all aspects in life. Healthy

feminine and healthy masculine create polarity. Men have feminine and masculine aspects as do the women. However you identify that you have both, within those two, you get to dance with it as your partner.

When I’m in action mode in my business and creating and setting goals, I am in my masculine. I also get to be in my feminine in certain ways, where my masculine holds the structure of my business, metrics and goals, and that creates a container. Then my feminine gets to come in as this beautiful creative flow, and it brings softness, feeling and intuition. It brings in all these different qualities that have been erased from the traditional workforce.

Dennis: Do you feel you’re better able to live a heart-led life since you left architecture?

Ana: Yes, it’s shifted. Our vision, our passion and our purpose continuously shift as we move through life. I feel like that’s something that sometimes holds people back from actually choosing a mission, a vision or a purpose, because it’s so solid. It’s like they think, “Now I have to be this thing,” and that’s not true. You get to continuously mold this vision, and I definitely have.

Right now, my vision in my personal coaching business is to support people, to design their lives, to truly tap into their hearts’ desires, see the patterns that are holding them back from getting there, and supporting them to get there. The reason I feel so passionate about this is because it opens up your heart to be the creative center of your life, and when you allow that to happen, and you truly allow yourself to listen to your truth coming from the core of your spirit, your essence has a different vibrational quality. There’s a spark that is ignited when you’re fully on purpose and you’re fully aligned. This alignment creates a transmission of your truth.

When I am aligned with my truth and I’m following my purpose and the things that light me up and fill my life with the experience that I’ve chosen, I am aligned and I am transmitting and radiating an essence of belief that people can truly design the life they want to live. It lights me up to see people doing that and taking action toward it, because it’s not just the visioning, and the hoping—it is becoming the leader of your life, and choosing and taking action.

This also involves the masculine components that we’ve been talking about, along with the feminine intuitive slowing down, listening, feeling your body and experiencing. Something that happens when we’re in a very masculine upbringing is we become numb to a lot of sensations. We become numb to feeling our feelings, much less expressing them, and it’s a whole experience to awaken and soften so many parts of us. It’s truly a different experience of life. It takes commitment, and it takes the embodiment of feeling like you’re in your heart and you can live from there. There’s softness and strength, and all these different qualities that you ignite within yourself, so that your vision can materialize. That’s what creativity is, and that’s what I’m most passionate about.

Dennis: Tell me about your website, Inaura.

Ana: Inaura.com is an online healing platform. We launched with a beautiful event last month, and we’re starting to open up different sections of the platform. It’s basically intuitive because it connects the seeker, which would be anyone who visits it, to a guide. Guides can be therapists, energy healers, NLP practitioners, movement somatic practitioners—all sorts of modalities. We have about 90 modalities and hundreds of practitioners that get linked with different seekers. There are also a bunch of different offerings like classes, and soon there’ll be workshops, group programs and courses to support you to find your path, because everyone’s path is different.

Inaura is based on the idea that everybody has their own path, and they get to find it through an educated experience. We provide free content, and there’s an intuitive questionnaire that supports you to match with different offerings, guides and so on. There’s a lot there. You have to visit to see more. To find out more about Ana, visit anapaulamunoz. com or check out her website, Inaura.com.

Let’s learn from Dr. Marcy Cole, a holistic psychotherapist, speaker, author, community mobilizer, humanitarian, visionary and wellness educator.

Dennis Postema: What was it like to be a part of “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs” and being interviewed by Edwina?

Marcy Cole: I was so honored to be asked because there’s so many magnificent women on this planet doing incredible things. So when someone plucks you out of the entire world of possibilities, it’s an honor.

Edwina herself is such a beautiful human. My first interaction with her was in my interview where, thank God for technology, we could actually see each other, giving it even more of a personal feel. I could feel her presence and wisdom and heart, and what an extraordinary, powerful visionary she is! difference between holistic psychotherapy and traditional psychotherapy?

Marcy: Traditional psychotherapy takes a psychodynamic approach, which looks back at your life story as if it’s a canvas. Who were your original love objects, caretakers, family, group of origin? What was your experience in your community, in your school, in your religious affiliation? Traditional psychotherapy posits that we track our selfexperience from some of the things that we picked up and learned and were told as we grew up.

Holistic psychotherapy integrates some traditional psychotherapy with the idea that we have multifaceted dimensions of our being. So I’m listening for physical

health. How do we take care of ourselves in terms of nutrition, exercise, stress management? What’s the quality of our sleep? What’s our sexuality and sensuality? Do we have access to that? Are we connected to our bodies?

Dennis: So holistic psychotherapy helps your clients connect all the different aspects of their life?

Marcy: That’s right. It’s about consciousness. If somebody is literally working around the clock without taking care of themselves, while they might be making money, they’re going to burn out if they’re not taking care of their mind, heart, body, and soul.

We don’t want to put all our attention in the money pot. If we’re not giving any mindful attention to our financial health, it’s going to stress us out. We’re going to end up depleted. We’re going to end up feeling emotionally scattered or mentally scattered, not grounded, not connected and focused. We’re going to feel emotionally probably very, very weighed down by fear, doubt, worry. So everything is connected. When I was getting my formal training in traditional psychotherapy, there was nothing in the curriculum that attended to the body and the soul. It was all heady stuff: How do you feel, and what do you think? But it didn’t attend to what’s happening in your body.

Let’s take a breath. What do you notice? If you’re racing, if your body’s jittering, anxiety is just a feedback-loop sign that our body says, “Please take a moment. Take a pause. Take a breath. Pay attention to me. This isn’t feeling safe, or I’m not attending to myself.”

You have a lot of successful people out there with a business and a title and a bunch of letters behind their name with a whole boatload of cash in their bank account. But they are bereft of so much joy, and we don’t want that. We want it all. We want enough to say our money’s working for us to take care of responsibilities, but also to create balance, create exhalation, create beauty, create sacred space, create options and opportunities and possibilities. is your career today in holistic psychotherapy from your earlier career?

Marcy: In the early days of my career, I was in the corporate world, selling in the broadcasting business. When I decided to leave, people thought I was out of my mind, because I was being groomed for management and making a ton of money in my 20s. But I wanted to make a contribution that felt more palpably aligned with who I am. That’s when I went into clinical social work.

Today, the idea of a holistic, integrative model is so much more mainstream, visible, understood, accepted and sought out. Integrative medicine is available to us, and a holistic methodology of psychological well-being is also.

We need to really learn how to live more from the neck down. Today we have New York Timesbestselling authors talking about nondenominational spirituality principles. Neale Donald Walsch is one example. So these concepts are much more accessible to us. Think about our parents and our grandparents and great-

grandparents. They were generally in survival mode. They weren’t thinking about how they were doing and how they were feeling, and what does their heart desire. They didn’t consider what they thought might be possible for them or what they could contribute to the world. They didn’t have space for that in their lives, but we do.

Dennis: Tell me a bit about your Finding Love Again class.

Marcy: As a holistic psychotherapist, I’ve talked about relationships with lots of people through the years. It’s one dimension of our lives that’s so important and sacred. I’ve also had my own personal journey, which wasn’t very traditional. My parents had a 78-year epic love affair, and many of us grow up thinking that’s what we want. My journey took a different road. I had a series of beautiful relationships, but my first marriage wasn’t my forever. I have no unfinished business, and I’ve learned from each relationship, and it’s culminated in the most extraordinary love of my life now in midlife. I came up with this four-stage love formula, literally L-O-V-E. With that, I created the Finding Love Again class, which is a four-week virtual class with live access to me once a week. What’s been liberating and freeing is that I’m teaching it from the perspective of my own personal story as well. Many therapists keep themselves out of the experiential field of exploration with a client. While there is a time for boundaries, of course, in this class, I’m bringing in my own personal story with universal lessons for all of us.

Dennis: What is inspiring you right now in life?

Marcy: I just came back from a weekend with a nomination-based group called the Association for Transformational Leaders. I was nominated years ago, and I didn’t even know what I was getting into. It ended up being one of the biggest blessings of my life. It’s a group of people who are all doing something in self-development, selfimprovement and human potential, whether that’s health and wellness, music, business or science. This weekend there was a talk on transformation, and one of the presenters said, “What is transformation really?”

We talked about the chrysalis, the caterpillar, the butterfly, then explored how this happens with our own experiences. We talked a lot about transformation requiring acceptance and allowance for nothing staying the same. No emotion is ever final. The truth is, we live, and we’re going to transition one day. There is a finite amount of time we have. So it’s surrender, and then it’s about being open. And then it’s about rebirth.

So I’ve been thinking about this idea of transformation. It’s more poignant for me personally since I lost both my parents this year, and there were so many times in my life that I dreaded this. I was a relatively healthy human, but I would have this anticipatory grief that was actually really debilitating in a way, because I couldn’t imagine a time where I could be as joyful when they pass. I couldn’t imagine a time that their loss would not bring me to my knees.

different experience than what I thought grief was going to be. I realized that what’s most meaningful to me is the embodiment. When you embody an experience and you get through to the other side, you’re so inspired by your own experience that you want to just share it with others. Now I feel like I have a bigger space to share for someone going through similar feelings.

The combination of them living a long, blessed life, having an epic love affair, and the idea that I could not have been closer to them, there was nothing unsaid, nothing left undone or finished, and the fact that I am a person that believes in the unseen simply leaves me with gratitude. My grief is my gratitude. Honestly, I wouldn’t even call it grief.

That is what’s most inspiring me. This sense of awe. And of course, finding my love. Feeling like there were angelic forces before. It was time for my parents to go this way, and he entered my heart and my life, and it’s just been astounding. So I’m holding that space for everyone, that we can let go of things that either no longer serve us or that are inevitable, and we can still not only survive but thrive in spite of it and because of it.

To find out more about Marcy and her classes, visit drmarcycole.com.

Up next is a conversation I had with Jaimsyne Blakely. She is a motivational speaker, writer, and soulful life and business coach.

Dennis Postema: What was it like being a part of “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs” and to be interviewed by Edwina?

Jaimsyne Blakely: It was amazing. Part of that is because Edwina is one of my dearest friends. We talk almost daily and laugh about the silliest things. Her thoughtfulness about every single part of the book … it’s really a masterpiece. Edwina is providing a breath of fresh, even rare, air.

Dennis: How did you first meet Edwina?

Jaimsyne: I saw her speak in a group that we participated in. Then I ended up in a leadership program with her. I beelined for her when I saw her and said, “I just want to tell you that I think you’re spectacular and extraordinary, and here’s why.” I shared how I had been inspired and motivated by her vulnerability and honestly sharing from her heart and soul. She really stood out in a group of hundreds of women.

Dennis: Tell me a bit about yourself and what you do.

Jaimsyne: I am a soulful life and business coach. I’m a visionary, an outlier, an innovator, an inventor, a creator, an entrepreneur and a soul shifter. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t believe in God, but I was not raised religiously. This has always been something I’ve carried in me, and it has guided all my actions.

Death, too, has been something that has marked my life. For most people, it’s a dark,

forbidden subject, or they’ve gone through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book. It’s something I have experienced deeply and feel very connected to those who have passed. About seven or eight years ago, I lost 31 very dear, close friends and family members over a threeand-a-half-year period. My biological dad died when I was six months old. When I was four years old, my best friend passed away. Death has been in my face, and in my environment, and in my home throughout my life.

We all have intuitive gifts. Some of mine have been that I don’t feel the disconnection between the two worlds. I’m not a channeler, no, but I feel it, I hear it, I sense it. I feel the love. [The dead] dropped a body, but where did that energy go? That energy, I believe, if we, like the trees, if we shared that interconnectedness, then those people are there in energetic form, in spirit form watching over us. That knowing has carried me through my life. from expanding, which is awkward, uncomfortable, and requires risk. We have become so averse as a population to risk because we have heaters and airconditioners, all these things that send signals to our brains that we are not even aware of. It’s important to put yourself in situations where you don’t use your heater or air-conditioning. I’m not talking about suffering in 118 degree weather, but I am talking about not coddling yourself. Not condemning yourself to a life of comfort.

We live in a time when people would like very much to tell us who we are, what to do, how to do it under the guise of being helpful. It is essential that we, like every other thing on this planet, have to struggle. Approach it as the beautiful struggle, the struggle that a caterpillar goes through when it’s got many, many legs. It can travel anywhere. It’s like a massive bus, like an 18-wheeler, then it turns into that gelatinous mess. The thing is, and this was profound to me when I understood this, the mesothorax is the center of the butterfly. It never changes. If we find our true essential self, whether we are a gelatinous mess or we have 137 legs, or wings, it doesn’t matter because if we know ourselves, if we know our mesothorax, we will never be lost. We will always be in that state of emerging.

Dennis: How important is connectivity to our success? Jaimsyne: If all our selfdevelopment and selfgrowth is only about the individual and not how the individual interconnects with all, then we’re doing it wrong. I shouldn’t say we’re doing it wrong. That’s not true. For part of the hero’s— or SHEro’s—journey, we are going to be on our own, but if at the end of our lives, we never truly interconnected and our personal development never included the we, we never went beyond I, then you know what? For me, I would have to say I failed.

If we were meant to be alone and isolated, then we would have been born on different planets. We’re all together here. I think that our science is very young on the ways interconnectivity impacts a human’s body. We know

Dennis: How did you find the courage to pursue this path? Jaimsyne: We have become disassociated

that hugging can bring blood pressure down. It can heal the heart. Just like trees, and scientists have discovered so many things about trees even over just the last year. But this interconnectedness that trees have under the earth, we can’t see where their roots are connecting, even over very long spaces. And then the fact that trees have heartbeats—that’s something scientists have recently discovered. Those heartbeats change when there’s a perceived danger. These other trees feel that, and it ripples out.

Dennis: What do you say to your clients or people who are afraid to get out of their comfort zone? What do you say to encourage that?

Jaimsyne: I would never even say that, frankly. I work mostly with men, and I talk to them about risk and adventure. I talk to them about soul adventures. I teach them how to take an adventure with their soul, for the specific purpose of expanding their soul, and to do it every day. You cannot just sit at a desk. You have to have something to look forward to every day. In creating the time for your own soul adventure, you never know what’s going to happen. You just go where you’re guided to go. You might go on foot. You might go in a car, but you do something every day. Maybe you drive a different way to work, and you get out of the car because something’s calling you. You leave half an hour early, and you take a walk through a neighborhood you’ve never been to before. You take your camera, and you take some photos of things that you love. You have an artistic experience.

I get up at 4:00 a.m., which is my favorite time to get up. Yet it’s very challenging, because I also like to be out having dinners and enjoying evenings with my friends and family. Getting up at 4:00 a.m., I experience a very different person [that early], so that’s another thing I encourage them to do. I call it Camp Possible. When you wake up before your brain is on fire, and before it’s taken over, and you’re in your logical brain, you’re in this visionary brain, this creator brain.

It’s this way of living where we are in the flow of life … I like to call it the BuffettJobs-Oprah experience. I love Warren Buffett’s advice. He says that he spends a minimum of three hours every day in contemplation. Here’s a man who’s made billions of dollars, who’s one of the most successful investors in history, which is a game of roulette, of chance, of gut instincts, intuition, strategy. It’s a number of things—market watching, research—it requires a very interesting brain. What he’s saying as someone who has gone from essentially very little to a lot is spend time with your inner sanctum and the temple within. We can see the results of that.

Dennis: How do you suggest people get more connected with their creativity?

Jaimsyne: In order to tap into your creativity and intuition, you need to sit down. Warren Buffett values that so much that he does at least three hours a day. Oprah tells us the same thing. She meditates, and these things just come to her. When she did her show, when she created her network, she said she never had any plan for it or a vision board or anything. She just did it.

That’s what I feel the soul encompasses. It’s our real story, or original story, what we’re really here for. It’s written on our soul, and it’s our job to bring that forth. The way that we bring it forth is by connecting with ourselves deeply and being willing to listen to what our soul desires for our human self to put into action.

To find out more about Jaimsyne, visit jaimsyne. com. Chelsea Clarke: It was awesome. Edwina is fabulous. We had our interview while I was traveling. I was at a hotel, so I was concerned about the Wi-Fi, but it went really well. She’s just lovely, and it’s really cool to get to be a part of it alongside all of those wild women.

Dennis: You speak very passionately about entrepreneurship versus being an employee. Where did that passion come from?

Here’s an insightful conversation with Chelsea Clarke, a content monetization strategist, website investor and the founder of HerPaperRoute.co.

Dennis Postema: What was it like to be in “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs” and be interviewed by Edwina? Chelsea: Ever since I was a little, I wanted to make an income. My first job was selling pop on the beach. As soon as I was 12 years old, I had babysitting jobs. I went right into working at a restaurant as soon as I was 13. I was always working, and no matter what day job I had, I always had a side hustle.

What was more fun was the side hustle where I was in control of my income. After university, I was working in marketing, had an office job, and although I loved the work and the people that I worked with, I hated working on someone else’s terms. I hated even just the small commute I had to do. I wanted to stay home and focus on my business because I realized that you only get a little bit of time, and every moment I spent working for someone else and making someone else rich, I could be spending on my own business, helping my own family to grow and prosper.

When I finally decided to leave the job force and make it work and not give myself a fallback plan, everything fell into place.

Dennis: Talk to me about the importance of setting an example for your son to be a leader and an entrepreneur.

Chelsea: I grew up in a single-parent home, and I really looked up to my mom. She hustled so hard before the internet, so she couldn’t just make money online on a blog. So I was really inspired by her and how hard she worked, but I also realized that she was not in control of her income. We really scraped by, and that inspired me to not have to depend on just an employer.

Now that I have my own child, I just want him to know that anything that he wants to do, there’s a way to do it. You want to be a YouTube star? Okay.

Here’s a strategy for how we can actually grow a YouTube channel. I just want him to know that any sort of dream he might have really can be done. He’s into all these different creative things now, and it’s really cool to see what he might be able to turn into a business if that’s what he wants to do.

Dennis: What’s your process for goal setting?

Chelsea: I like to look at my year in quarterly blocks. I don’t like to think too far ahead. I’ll have an idea of what I want to be doing by next year, but I’m really just making the steps happen each quarter to get there.

I don’t like to take too big of a picture because I know that when you’re starting to plan goals, there’s a lot to do, and if you’re looking at the whole picture, it can feel really overwhelming. A lot of people get stuck and end up spinning their wheels and not getting anything done because they feel like it’s too much.

I use pen and paper, write out my goals or have an online spreadsheet. Each day I see what’s on my list and cross it off. One really handy little trick that I do is using Google Forms. I have a couple of questions that I ask myself each day. I call it an effort tracker, and it’s just a little checklist of things. If I did it, that gets checked off. I’ll also write a sentence about what didn’t work well or something I want to work on, and hit Submit. No one has to see that. I’m keeping a record of what I’m doing, and I can look back at it and see if I’m on track to reach my bigger goals. That’s my process. It’s really simple, and it doesn’t cost anything.

Dennis: Tell me a bit about website investing and how you got involved in that.

Chelsea: Website investing is my favorite thing ever. It’s buying websites, working on them for a little bit, and then flipping them by reselling them for more than you paid. Before I went out on my own, I worked at a business brokerage. I was really inspired by the business brokers there, but they were really focused on selling brick-andmortar businesses. No one was really thinking about the online space, digital products, ad revenue, online businesses, blogs, e-commerce sites, things like that, and that’s where my experience was— running online businesses.

I went through the International Business Brokers Association and started brokering websites for people. I flipped my own sites and it helped other people learn how to grow, scale and sell their own websites. I launched a marketplace where you can buy an online business or put yours up for sale. We have tons of investors and buyers who come through the site to see what we have in the marketplace.

Website investing, it’s cool because there’s something for every budget. I like to call it an option for microinvesting. You don’t have to put a ton of money up to buy a huge, established site. You can make a small investment of $1000 and buy a starter site that is undermonetized but still has great content. Then you can just add your touch to it and grow the traffic, get that revenue up and resell it.

It’s a really nice way to get into investing where you have more control. Unlike stocks, where you put your money in and hope for

the best, website investing gives you control of your investment because you and/or your team work on the site, make the content better, recommend products, grow the traffic, earn from digital products, and earn from ad revenue. Then you decide when you want to sell it.

Dennis: Do you just come up with a creative idea and start researching sites to buy?

Chelsea: That’s a great way to get started. Pick something you are interested in. Any niche can be made profitable, but whatever niche you want to work in, it should be something you feel connected to, one you either have experience in or you’re willing to research and learn more about. You can make it profitable based on your experience and how engaged you are with the actual content. Certain niches will probably always be technically profitable, like health, wealth and relationships, but you can do any niche that you’re interested in and monetize it with products you’re interested in because there’s an audience for everything. You can start a site from scratch, do keyword research and see what people are talking about, create content and recommend products that serve that audience. Or, you can buy a site that’s already established and build on it. The reason people do that is because an established site already has traffic. It already has products, revenue, an audience, social followers, all that stuff. So you’re not starting from scratch. Dennis: How important is it to have a digital product to offer? Chelsea: You can use a digital product like an e-book or an online course as a lead magnet to grow your list, and building up your email list is so important because your email list is one of the most important assets in your business. And it’s the only one that you really own because we don’t own our social media. Have a website [and] start collecting emails by offering some sort of free lead magnet, which is anything you’re giving someone in exchange for their email. Build up your list and your communities. Send a weekly email to let people know what you have going on. Over time that’s going to grow and you’re going to have people who become your superfans. When you have bigger products to offer, like a full online course, you’ll already have an audience who’s ready to buy from you. You can use free tools like Canva to create an e-book, PDF, a template, a workbook or something like that. You can offer that as a freebie for people who get on your email list. Starting with templates, e-books and workbooks is great. It’s a good way to test the waters.

Dennis: What should people keep in mind while they blog to build their website traffic and email list?

Chelsea: You want to make sure that all the blog posts are written with great search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. You can write about anything, and you can write however you want, but you should definitely be writing with SEO in mind.

The next step is making sure that you’re also always thinking about

monetization. So you’re recommending great products, including links to your digital products and letting people know how they can work with you or buy from you. That’s really important and brings it all together.

Dennis: How important is affiliate marketing?

Chelsea: Affiliate marketing is how I earn 80% of my income, and it’s all passive. I created a blog post a couple years ago recommending an affiliate product. I put the link in there and people are still buying years later from that one blog post, and that adds up over time.

Dennis: What kind of coaching and classes do you offer?

Chelsea: My big, signature offer is a coaching group, but I also have really great entry-level courses and e-books you can get into if you’re interested in affiliate marketing, blog flipping and scaling your business online. Dennis: What advice would you give to anybody trying to get into business right now? Chelsea: Go for it. It’s so easy to get in our own way and come up with a ton of reasons why we shouldn’t, or we can’t, or we’re not good enough or not qualified enough. You have to ignore that voice and focus on what you want to do and just do it anyway. Don’t let anything stop you. There are so many amazing resources online. You can find the answers you’re looking for, get support, and find an amazing coach that can help you and encourage you to stay on the right track. You don’t have to do it on your own. To sign up for Chelsea’s classes, receive an e-book or check out her free goodies, visit https:// herpaperroute.com.

Join me in welcoming Elizabeth de Moraes, a success and media presence coach and the creator of the Video Cam Glam Kit.

Dennis Postema: What was it like to be interviewed by Edwina and to be part of the “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs” book?

Elizabeth de Moraes: It was a fabulous experience. So exciting to interact with Edwina. She is such a powerhouse and has such a huge vision for this movement. I love to give to that, but also to receive from that. The community of women in this group are phenomenal, pun intended.

It also helped me reflect on what makes a person phenomenal, and to question where I am showing up in a way that is phenomenal.

Dennis: Tell me about the elements of your business. Elizabeth: There are three main elements in my business. One is that we really want to look at the vision that you have inside of you that you know needs to be brought out into the world. You might

have that feeling that you’re supposed to make a big impact in some form or fashion, and you know that you’ve been placed here to do something great. What I do with my clients is look at who they need to be. Who are they being called to become? Let’s visualize that and then look at ways we can bring that forward in a bold way.

The next step is to look at how you are showing up. Are you showing up in a magnetic way? I call this your magnetic personal presence, but executive presence resonates with a lot of people. It’s when you’re being seen as the authority. You bring the energy forward that really draws people in. They want to listen to you, and they just want to keep coming back for more. But they also see you as someone who’s trustworthy who they can follow. I help clients consider what the different elements are of that, how they need to show up, and then what energy they bring forward. What type of body language they need to be aware of to stand in that space, as the person they’re meant to be. The third step is the visibility strategy. How are you making yourself visible in a way that is aligned with how you want to communicate? Some people may want to be on camera, others may not. They might rather use their voice and go more toward podcasting. So we’ll look at the different ways that you can be visible—the media, your social media, other people’s social media, other people’s platforms, podcasts, writing your own book or creating your own product.

Dennis: What advice can you give for people to get past those inner demons and that selfdoubt we all face?

Elizabeth: I love to have my clients create a Badass List. Write down at least 50 elements that make you badass. Go through each decade of your life, so it’s not just all the big accolades and isn’t just about big awards and accomplishments but also about the smaller moments that show how tough you are. You can go from your first memories to the age of 10—what did I do during that time that made me awesome? Or reminded me of who I could become? Then 11–20, and so on.

Another thing you can do is find a picture of yourself from when you were a little kid that exhibits a spark of who you could become. Find that picture where you’re like, “Yeah, I’m awesome!” Maybe you’re in a superhero costume— whatever it is, find that picture, because that’s your essence. That energy and that person is still inside you, so when you have those inner demons, go back to that.

We’re always going to have those inner demons come up. It’s natural. It’s our subconscious trying to protect us from moving to greater things. It wants to keep us safe. When I start having those inner demons speak to me, I read my Badass List out loud. Then I look at this picture of this little kid, and if you don’t have one of yourself, go find one that reminds you of who you were. Or it could be your own kid or your friend’s kid. Then, physically, get into that little kid. Pose like the kid or the superhero. Get into that body, breathe, and then take action.

suggest for people when it comes to being on camera or going into a big meeting? Do you have some quick tips to help with confidence?

Elizabeth: One, read your Badass List. Next, I have one of the most beautiful letters that one of my coaches wrote to me that spoke of what she really sees in me, so before an interview or before getting on camera, I quickly read that. Another thing that you can do is prepare. Preparation is key. People say, “I won’t go do that until I have the confidence to go do it.” You develop confidence through doing.

You have to step out of your comfort zone for it to become your comfort zone. Preparation will also help you feel like you have some structure to rely on. Prepare certain talking points that you know you want to bring forward that you learned about the situation or the surroundings that you’re stepping into. For example, if you are going to speak to a board of directors, you’d better know about the company, who you’re speaking with, what their pain points are and how you can help with that. Don’t try to memorize a script. Know your points like the back of your hand so you can always go back to them, but also be very present. Allow yourself to just be. If you need to calm yourself down, if you make the exhale longer than the inhale, that will help you relax more. If you need to bring the energy up, then inhale longer and then also bounce. Do whatever you need to do to get into your body.

Dennis: Tell me about developing your product and any advice you have for others.

Elizabeth: Have you ever had an idea that comes to you in the middle of the night, and you figure out everything about how you can make it happen, then in the morning you wake up, and you’re like, “What the heck was I thinking?” Those are your milliondollar ideas.

Those ideas have come to you for a reason. You are meant to take that step, even if you have no idea how to make it happen. You’re meant to make it happen because that product, idea or service is meant to come out into the world. It also impacts who you become while making it happen, because you have to grow in the process. You have to learn new things, you have to show up as a different person than you were when you first got the idea, and then what you experience along the way that you wouldn’t have experienced had you not stepped forward into creating the product.

About four years ago, I was at a mastermind and our coach asked us if we’d ever thought about creating a product. We were all coaches, so we weren’t thinking about physical products, and I said, “I’ve dabbled with ideas, but never stepped forward into making it happen.” The coach said, “Go into meditation or prayer and figure it out. Just listen. See what might come to you.” So I closed my eyes, focused on my breathing, and prayed. I thought, “What are we making here? Who’s it for? What problem are we going to solve?” At that point, my main focus was video coaching and helping people with their camera confidence and how they were presenting. Now what I do is so much bigger, but that was the main thing at that point. And I was sending

people all over the place, wasting time and energy, for different lights and microphones and we still wouldn’t know if the client got the quality I would recommend, because they weren’t my products.

During this prayer, BOOM: the original Video Glam Cam Kit came to mind. The idea came to me and I thought, why not put everything together? Why not create a video media kit that has good lighting that I can literally put my name on—microphones, stability tripods, a selfie stick and a cool bag.

I really wanted to create an experience for the receiver of this kit. So it came in a dust bag, just like when you get a luxury bag or a pair of shoes, and then a beautiful box. I wanted this to be an exquisite experience of opening when one received it. And then, of course, empower them to have the right products. A product is a messenger rather than just something that’s going to make you rich. There’s a purpose to it and behind it. The big thing is, if you have that idea, follow through. Go make it happen. It will increase your visibility so that you can make the impact that you desire.

Learn more about Elizabeth and get tips for captivating a room at elizabethdemoraes.com.

Now I’d like to introduce you to Christa Nichols, a sales conversion copywriter, a messaging expert, and founder of the Written Results Academy and the Client Attraction Crash Course.

Dennis Postema: What was it like being a part of this book and being interviewed by Edwina? Christa: I graduated from college with a journalism degree, but I started out as a graphic designer for a small cattle organization. I live on a farm in the middle of Iowa, so I was able to be at home with my kids and just putz away at my projects. When I realized that was no longer going to be enough for our family, I knew I had to try something else. I learned as much as I could about making money from home and ended up in the digital marketing space.

I discovered that I had a knack for writing sales copy, and I started writing Facebook ads for an

Christa Nichols: I love Edwina. Who doesn’t love Edwina? It was such a privilege to be able to help serve her audience. She and I are a lot alike because we both started businesses as women who didn’t necessarily go into life thinking that they would be business owners. So it was a lot of fun to talk about our similar experiences and the unique ways women are able to leverage what they know to help offer training to someone else.

Dennis: Let me ask you this—how did you get into business even though you had no idea what your path was and what you wanted to do?

agency. Eventually, I was getting clients on the side for emails, sales funnels, webinar scripts and things like that. So even though I didn’t plan on becoming a sales copywriter or growing a six-figure agency as a copywriter, it was a really good fit for what I love to do and the talents that I have. Not to say it was easy—it was hard. But I love it, and it was worth taking that risk and finding out what I was capable of.

Dennis: What is direct response copywriting, for those who don’t know?

Christa: Direct response copywriting involves writing campaigns that ask the target audience to take an action. It’s not necessarily always about sales, although sales is always the end result.

You might be writing a lead generation campaign for a business, trying to get more leads in their funnel, or you might be writing a campaign to try to get people to sign up for a webinar, but the end goal is always to nurture target audiences toward the clients’ offers and get them to take some kind of an action that will ultimately Dennis: What are some of the unique challenges and mindset hurdles that you faced as a female entrepreneur?

Christa: There were a lot. Growing up, my dad farmed and my mom was always home with us kids, but she always had a side hustle going on. She’s a very creative person. She always had something going on where she was generating income on the side. I saw the way she did that but was still there every day when we got home from school, and she was still in the bleachers for all our activities. I thought, I really want that too. So I knew that idea of having my own business interested me, but I didn’t really think I was capable of it. I never took any business classes. I didn’t have any formal knowledge when it came to administration or the financial end of running a business. I just knew that I loved to write and be creative, and if I could make some money doing that, great.

When it reached a point where this business was the income for our whole family, I had to break down a lot of my own issues around that. Because I’d never seen myself in that role. I never saw myself as a business owner. I had to learn to not just accept it, but embrace it. I could accept it, but every time a challenge came up or things got hard, I would shrink back and think, “This isn’t for me. I can’t do it. I don’t know how to run a business.” Until I embraced it and learned to lean into the challenges as a sign of growth, I was my own worst enemy.

It really was a matter of changing my mindset around what it took to be a business owner. My business didn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It didn’t have to have whatever all the gurus had. I could design a business that worked for me and my family, and it didn’t have to be just like everybody else’s.

Dennis: What advice do you have for people who want to build their business within a niche? Christa: If you know you have expertise in an area, figure out what results you can get for someone else and talk about it everywhere you go. Show up online.

Show up on your social media platforms. Get on podcasts. Do guest blogs. Whatever you need to do to be loud about the result that you can get for someone else.

It’s not the service you provide that sells it, it’s the result—the outcome that you can get someone else. Results are where your revenue comes from, and if you can get a result for someone else with a service you provide, then you’ll never go hungry. For that matter, you’ve really got to get clear about who you serve. Who is the ultimate, ideal person that you can get that result for?

A message that goes out to everybody only lands on some people. But if it’s tailored to that specific person that you can get the best results for, it’s going to hit and be much more effective.

Dennis: How does one get to the point of being a messaging expert in any industry or in a specific industry? Christa: I always encourage people to not be a generalist. There are so many things that you can write for and about, that if you do everything, you’ll never have the time and the bandwidth to be able to really become an expert in anything.

I recommend either choosing a specific industry or type of client niche, or specializing in a specific type of copy. I do sales copy only, but I do it for a variety of industries. Not every single industry—I have my favorites. But I could niche down into financials or real estate. There are so many different ways that you can niche down. And that only helps you get better at the things you do and get better results for people.

Without a really good knowledge of the target audience and what they’re thinking, feeling and experiencing, you can’t meet them where they’re at and then bring them along with you to your clients’ offers. You can’t make those connections if you don’t know who the audience is and where they’re at right now.

That was a big surprise for me—the amount of research and studying how people act, how they make decisions, what they decide to do at certain points, and what they need to know and understand and believe in order to take the action that we want them to take. You’ve got to dial in on those things, or you’re just guessing.

Dennis: What do you think is behind a campaign that isn’t working?

Christa: When a campaign isn’t working, when your funnel is not converting, when your ads aren’t getting the click-throughs, probably 90% of the time it’s the copy.

Either the copy isn’t reaching the target audience or it’s too far ahead of them. When you are the person inside the offer all day long, every day, you’re so close to it that you forget to dial it back to where the audience is now. They don’t know and understand everything that you do right now.

One of the biggest mistakes I see entrepreneurs make is assuming that the audience understands more than they really do. Then their copy misses the audience because the entrepreneur is shooting too far out. They have to move the target closer

and hit those very basic problems during those first few cold contact-type reach outs. Dennis: One of the things that was most profound to me was realizing that sales funnels are not selling a product or offering a product, they’re leading a person to the next click-through or the next piece of material. Christa: It takes an average of seven exposures before somebody actually will take action on new information. We only get less than two seconds to catch someone’s attention. So it has to be just microbites of attention capture at first. You have to give them one thing you want them to do and just take them to the next step. The only goal of your ad is to get them to click. That’s it. Then on the page, you get them to give their email. It’s a progression. You don’t have to have them go from A to Z just in one piece of the campaign. That’s why it’s called a campaign, because it’s built to give them that blueprint to go from, “I have no idea who you are and what you can do for me,” to “I can’t live another minute without the result that this thing that you offer is going to provide for me.” Dennis: Tell me a bit about your courses. Christa: I train freelance writers to build a business and generate income as a sales copywriter. The client attraction crash course is my free five-day live workshop, where we break down my five secrets for standing out online and attracting your first or next paid writing project. I give them the foundational tools to be able to speak up about what they offer, set their rates, think about exactly who their ideal client is, and just those foundational things that really help you get your feet under you as you’re landing your first few clients. If you want to figure out whether freelance writing is for you, the five-day crash course is a great way to test the waters, land your first couple of clients, see what is out there for you. Written Results Academy is my online mastermind program. It’s a yearlong training program where you learn not only the foundations and the frameworks but you go deep into the different types of projects, like ad copy, funnels, video scripts, all those things, with all the business building and mindset and coaching support and accountability.

Dennis: What would you say to somebody who is on the fence about whether to keep working for somebody else or taking the plunge into copywriting for their own business?

Christa: As long as your insight is helping another person’s business grow, it’s stealing from the business that you could have yourself. The only way to truly have the freedom of your finances and your time is to have your own thing. That was something that was very clear to me. My income ceiling was only going to go so far when I worked inside someone else’s business because they were only going to be willing to pay me so much.

Whereas if I owned a business and the only thing that held me back was the result that I could get for a client, the potential was unlimited. It was basically just limited by the number of hours I had in a day and the amount I wanted to

To learn more about Christa and her courses, visit christanichols.com.

Join me as I visit with Sarah Louise, an author, life coach, speaker, healer and light worker.

Dennis Postema: What was it like being interviewed by Edwina and being part of “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs”?

Sarah Louise: It was such a beautiful experience. Edwina is this incredible soul who’s really open and super connected, so when she asked me to share my experience and be part of the project, it was a real privilege. I think we’re in the age of Aquarius, which is all about coming together, collaboration, and supporting one another. For me, that book was just completely in alignment with where we are.

Dennis: Can you explain how you got into doing weekly enlightenments?

Sarah: Living on planet Earth, we have weather around us, and that weather affects our physical body. So if we go outside and it’s raining and we don’t have an umbrella, we’re going to get wet. If it’s super sunny, we’re going to get sunburned. We also have what I call our cosmic environment, which I feel affects our inner body, so it affects our emotions and our energy. Every week, I sit down and I tune into the planetary energy and see what’s going on. I also have a look at where the planets are aligned and where the stars are aligned and how that’s going to affect our energy. Then, I take the spiritual aspect and that cosmic aspect, and I tune into my human, and I link the two to how we can work to our best ability as humans with whatever kind of cosmic energy is going to be around.

We live in a universal war of polarities, so there’s always a positive and a negative aspect of energy, and I want everybody to really start riding that kind of positive aspect so that we can be happy and evolve regardless of whatever’s happening.

Dennis: How did you learn all this and put it all together?

Sarah: I [was raised] in quite a bizarre environment. A lot of alcoholism and addiction, so I grew up quite quickly. I also [lived in] a really haunted house, so I was aware of energies. My mother was quite intuitive and psychic and she read cards, so it was the world I grew up in. I went first into massage and beauty, because I wanted to help people feel better, and I had this real desire to help people. After leaving college and doing that, I realized I could make people look really good. I trained as a physical therapist and studied exercise and nutrition, but some of these people, no matter what I did on the outside, weren’t feeling it.

So then I went into neurolinguistic programming (NLP), but it wasn’t everything, so I studied bits of astrology and went into healing and Reiki and crystal therapy. So this is the work I’ve always done, and over my lifetime, I’ve learned to blend it together so that I work with all of it in one particular way.

Dennis: How do you get clients to be open to the full program?

Sarah: I think one of my gifts is that I’m super authentic. I’m very direct and real. So I just say it how it is. If somebody’s coming in and they say, “I want to work on my business,” and I say, “Well, we need to be at our optimum health and our highest vibration, and right now, you’re not there …” Because I have a natural ability to tune into where I can see the weaknesses, I go straight there. At first, that can be a bit uncomfortable, but as we know, when we shift that, and we feel better, people keep coming back. As their life gets better, people are willing to do the work if they can see a change happening. suggestions would you have for somebody who really needs to work on that vibration?

Sarah: I talk to people a lot about how they’re feeling. It’s about feeling good. You can achieve all of this, but if you don’t feel good and your energies are not right inside, it’s irrelevant. You can do anything, but it’s never going to be enough. So really tune into how they’re actually feeling and get them really connected. I find we get so consumed with our external world that it’s never enough. If we come back to our internal world and we start connecting to our motivations, our values, our successes, and what that means to us and we start feeling good, we get it.

Dennis: What would you say to anybody who’s struggling with depression and loneliness? What kind of advice would you give to get them into a healing vibration and opening up to that?

Sarah: I’d say find your community. Because I think the separation that’s going on pushes us and isolates us. It doesn’t have to be like that. So find your community and connect. If you’re in lockdown and your community has an online group, join it and do it and show up. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when it was more important that we come together with likeminded people, that we support each other and that we’re there for each other. I run an online meditation session under the new moon and the full moon, and in the pandemic, we’ve grown exponentially, and I think that’s because we need it. We need connection, and it helps us to know that it’s okay, we can trust this process. So reach out wherever you can, find your community, and get involved.

Dennis: Can we talk a little about the cards that you have on your website and what those mean and how those work?

Sarah: They’re a tool that I came up with. I love my little tools. I love sprays and crystals. I think we need those sometimes, those little physical bits of guidance. I created those cards by tuning in and connecting and just thinking, “When we need that daily direction, when

we need that daily focus, what do people need?” I wrote them down over a period of time and put them together. Sometimes I look at them and think, “They’re a little bit basic, and they’ve not got these intricate pictures,” but they’re like me. They’re very clear, they’re very direct. If you have a question, you pick a card and you get the answer.

Dennis: How important have connections, networking and relationships become for business in the last two years?

Sarah: As we’ve stepped into the age of Aquarius, it’s all about collaboration and coming together, and it’s a completely new way of being. Before that, it was all about competition. You know, I want to be the best, I want to be a leader … there was a hierarchy in business, and that created a lot of separation and a lot of resistance in flow. We went into the new age in December of last year and moved into this new energy. It’s going to take time to really settle, but it’s all about collaboration, coming together and building relationships that aren’t “I’m this, you’re that, and I’m the boss.” It’s not about that anymore. It’s about how we can serve, how we can help each other. How we can grow together and support each other. That’s coming from a place of love. The vibrations are very different here. It’s not coming from fear. This creates so much flow, and in that flow is abundance. So I think that the way we’re creating relationships now in business is just going to take us all into some really beautiful places.

Dennis: How would you help a team to get over that competitive edge they have and try to work together to serve the greater good?

Sarah: I would talk a lot about the power of a group being so much greater than an individual. I would talk about how, when you come together, how you can see the value in how we’re all very different and how we work differently and how when we come together with all those differences, we create this incredible energy of flow. Helping people see the value of others, we’re so much more powerful because the power of the group creates so much more than individuals doing their thing. So I would talk a lot about the energy from coming together and different people’s values and gifts. And the benefits of having all those gifts put onto one table. We’ve all got different gifts, and none are better or worse—they’re just different. And together, all of the gifts—wow.

Dennis: You talk about flow—can you explain that? How do we know we’ve tapped into the flow?

Sarah: We know when we’re in flow because we feel like life is beautifully drifting down that stream, in comparison to rowing upstream. You know when you’re not in flow because life feels like it’s hard work. And it’s not supposed to. When you’re coming up against things, you’re not in flow, and it’s time to step back and see what’s going on. Some adjustments need to happen. If you’re in flow, life’s feeling good, good things are happening, things are coming to you, it’s easy. Life is supposed to be an incredible adventure, but when we’re not in flow, it feels really hard, and we’re miserable and we’re judgmental and

we’re not in love, we’re in fear. That’s when we’re not in flow.

Discover more about Sarah by visiting sarahlouise.live.

Here we have bestselling author Kim Morrison. Kim is a breakthrough coach, mentor, an NLP master practitioner, hypnotherapist and founder of Twenty8.

Dennis Postema: What was it like being a part of Edwina’s book, “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs”? What was it like being interviewed by Edwina?

Kim Morrison: Edwina is a super soul. She is a one-in-a-million type who just truly embraces and loves to make other people shine. Out of that, she shines even brighter. But to put your own ego aside, to actually do it for the greater good of entrepreneurs, feminine women, powerful women who are making a difference—that made me fall in love with her even more. And this isn’t her first rodeo. She’s done this a number of times.

She’s also a coach who understands how to bring out the best in you. So the questions she asked in the book were profound. They made me really think. And the fact that she called me a phenomenal feminine entrepreneur—I’m still blown away. To work with her on this project and see it come to fruition has really made me want to raise the bar, because she’s not only said she’d do the interviews, then she turned them into this book, these programs, and the ability for other people to be a part of it. She’s extraordinary. She is what you’d call a phenomenal feminine entrepreneur.

Dennis: I read the manifesto for living on your website. It focuses a lot on self-care and also mentioned essential oils, which is the cornerstone of your business. What would you tell a total beginner about aromatherapy?

Kim Morrison: Aromatherapy’s been around for thousands of years. It’s not new. This ancient modality is all about the potent extracts from different plant parts.

There are essentially two parts to aromatherapy: There’s the physical element, where you can place it on the body, it’s absorbed by the hair follicle and goes into the bloodstream, and within three to four hours, it does its magic and is excreted by urine, breath and sweat; and the other way is what we call psychoaromatherapy. This is the way the smell affects our emotions, and it is the one smell that is very closely linked to our emotional center.

When we inhale a beautiful smell, like an essential oil, all those chemical constituents travel up the olfactory pathway into the limbic part of the brain, and then via the hypothalamus, we have a biochemical

physiological reaction. Within seconds, you can feel quite different. You’ll have an instant physical biochemical, emotional response to that based on your memory and the odor association you had. There’s nothing else—apart, maybe, from music—that can move you in such a way as smell.

Dennis: How did you get into aromatherapy?

Kim: I was in Melbourne and I saw these two women speak onstage about their aromatherapy company. I sat there looking at them, going, “I want what they’ve got.” They were leaders in Australia at that point, and I went through their training, got my advanced diploma in aromatherapy, and then went on to become one of their international presenters. There’s something about aromatherapy … Not many people know all the magic. People think it’s a nice smelly thing, but when you understand the psychology and the language of plants and how they’re such an important part of our evolutionary processes and development, you can’t help but fall in love with these magical potent Dennis: How does aromatherapy factor into your coaching?

Kim: Essential oils become part of the self-care, selflove rituals of taking care of yourself. Using them daily to keep the focus off having to do something … it makes you feel like you’re doing something really nice to fill your emotional love tank, to honor your beautiful body, to respect where you are, right here, right now. It’s important to understand that we are all a work in progress. We are all amazing some days, and in some moments, we’re not so great. We’re all the best/ worst versions of ourselves at times, and we all make mistakes, but owning it, being responsible and accountable for those mistakes, is actually part of the work.

When you’re tired and emotional and you’re going through a tough time, of course, things are going to trigger you. I’m not about making us into these perfect humans, but more about honoring the imperfections and knowing that we’re all imperfectly perfect, or perfectly imperfect. I think that’s the beauty of loving oneself, knowing that we are all those things. All parts of ourselves make us so beautiful, so unique, and truly a lovable individual indeed.

Dennis: How did you help your clients create a positive space in the midst of a pandemic?

Kim: I stepped out of my comfort zone to create a space where people can come together. I think I’m just the conduit for all of their beauty and expressive selves, and I just show up. And I think part of doing that also keeps me accountable in the work. Every one of us has the potential to leave our story behind. To stop being pulled back into the drama and the negativity of those emotions, beliefs, and really focus on what we value, really focus on what is our motivation strategy. And then really work with the two of those to actually create the life that we desire. That’s not to say that you won’t have problems or triggers or people that annoy you in the future, or problems that the world’s facing right now. But it’s never about the event or the people; it’s about how we show up. So it’s

not about the coaching or the meditation or the self-love or the self-care rituals that I teach. It’s who we are when we’re not meditating, taking care of ourselves, or in a good space.

The other way to think about it is: If all the world’s television cameras were in your house 24/7, would you be proud of how you would be shown to the world? Because often when we’re around the people we love the most, we become our worst enemy. We think, “They love us, anyway, so I can throw a tantrum. I can spit out these words that are quite venomous, because I know that at the end of the day, they’re gonna love me and they’re not gonna leave.”

My question is always: If the world was beaming in on you right now, how would you show up? How would you be? Is that how you’d want the world to see you?

Ultimately, it’s not about other people; it’s about how you see yourself. I might screw up. I might tell my son something negative or I might yell and have a meltdown with my daughter. I might say something to my husband that’s inappropriate, but when I see myself doing these things, I ask, “Why did I behave like that? I’m tired. I’m being triggered. It’s not their fault.” Then I have the power to not only forgive myself but also the ability to apologize.

So I created forgiveness and apology rituals, because I think those may be two things that are part of being human. It’s very hard to forgive someone who’s hurt us and also to forgive ourselves when we haven’t shown up in the best light, but also to apologize to those people, or people you’ve hurt— but most importantly, to apologize to yourself.

Dennis: Were there any mentors or coaches that really inspired you to get to where you are?

Kim: Part of being in this work is you participate in that work. I’m constantly being coached. I’ve had mentors, therapists, I’ve spent lots of money on myself in this area. One of my greatest mentors when I was running was a gentleman by the name of Cliff Young, who was a 68-year-old potato farmer who won the Auckland City-to-Melbourne race back in the ’80s. He was the one who inspired me to run, because when I told him how boring it was to watch 40 athletes run around a 400 meter track, he said, “Well, put your money where your mouth is and run one.” I thought I’d much rather run one than watch one. His biggest message to me was, “You gotta remember, it’s 90% mental and 10% physical.” I’ve taken that analogy through the rest of my life—10% of how we behave is our conscious behaviors and actions and emotions, but what’s driving that is 90% of the unconscious mind.

We need coaches and mentors, or people that we look up to, sometimes. That’s why tribal philosophies are so powerful, because our elders have gone through these times. You may not have to pay physically for a coach, but you can certainly turn to people you admire. Who is it that you look up to? Could you spend some time with them and ask them questions? “How do you get through tough times? How do you keep showing up? What makes you tick? What have you done to get over your mistakes?

What do you do when you fail? How do you be a better version of you in a relationship?” There’s so much we can learn.

Then you can look at podcasts. They’re free, and there are millions of them now. I’ve been podcasting for eight or nine years, and there are so many amazing podcasts out there. You could just pick a topic and you’ll find some beautiful answers for free.

When my husband and I went through a really big marriage and financial crisis, we went to a psychologist who worked on spirituality, tapping an understanding that we are more than what we think we are. She was 90 and French, and I talk about her in my book, “The Art of Self-Love,” because she had such a profound impact on us. She once asked, “Danny, do you love this woman?” and he said, “Absolutely.” Then she said, “Kim, do you love this man?” and I said, “Yes.” And she said, “When there is love, there is no problem.”

I almost called my book that, because when you think about it, there’s only love or fear. Fear causes all the sabotaging behaviors, all the guilt, the tragedies, the emotions, the stories, the remorse, the anger— all those things come out of that place of fear. The only opposing, beautiful life force is love. When you understand the polarities and the importance of experiencing both, then you realize that it’s not about never having bad things happen or never feeling anger or going through tough times, it’s about how you show up. What tools and resources and inner self-belief do you have to get through that? And who do you turn to in those times? Because when emotions are high, intelligence is low. We do not do things well when we’re highly volatile and emotional.

Another coach I took on was a business coach. That is how I grew my business 400% in one year. The business coach showed me the things I didn’t know I didn’t know. I think that’s the beauty of mentors. It’s not what you know you know, it’s not what you know you don’t know, it’s what you don’t know that you don’t know? What is in that unconscious space, that part of you that is actually the hidden gem, but also may be the anchor that’s holding you back? And my husband’s my coach. My children are my coaches. Human beings are the biggest coaches. It’s amazing how much you can look at things and realize how much learning there is.

Find out more about Kim and get in touch with her through her website twenty8.com.

Our next phenomenal feminine entrepreneur is Dr. Izdihar Jamil, a business coach, media expert and a number one international bestselling author eight times over.

Dennis Postema: What drew you to the “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs” book project?

Izdihar Jamil: I think it’s just the fact that it involved women coming together. I know it’s kind of cliché, but I’ve always felt the best version that I can be when I’m surrounded by women, especially those who are sharing stories. We cry, we laugh, we just love sharing stories. That’s why we’re the number one people who go to the movies. In my heart, I think if one woman or girl can hear what I have to say and overcome obstacles as a result, it’s all worth it. I’m a hijab-wearing Muslim woman in America. It takes boldness to wear a hijab in America. Women who share stories help people push through the preconceived notions of society and be who they are. That’s the greatest gift.

Dennis: What was it like to be interviewed by Edwina?

Izdihar: What can I say? It was fun. It was exciting. It was also challenging. I’d just had a baby then. He was crying in the background during the interview, my husband was trying to comfort him, the connection dropped … This is the reality of it, right? I was up all night, and at one point, I just wanted to give up, because it’s so hard. But I thought, “No, I’m here for a purpose. I’m here for a reason. My husband is amazing. He’s taking care of the baby. He’s good. My two other kids are supporting him. I can do this.”

Edwina, bless her, was so patient. I gave her a heads-up that this was my reality. When I was done, I thought, “Oh my God, I did it. Hopefully someone’s going to hear it and take value from it or [I will] give them some hope and light.”

Dennis: We always hear the glamor of being an entrepreneur and all the good things that come with it, but we never hear about the hard work or the struggle and trying to juggle children and everything else. It’s not always a walk in the park, is it?

Izdihar: I think a lot of people have glamorized things so much, assuming entrepreneurs just make money while they sleep. The reality is, you don’t know what that person did for the last six months, for the last 12 months, for the last 10 years. It’s true they make money while they sleep, but the things that they have to do … the person who they have to be, the things they have to overcome.

I recently got accepted to be a talent speaker, something I’ve been praying to achieve for a year after multiple rejections. And then I got in, but people don’t know all that. It can be glamorous, but there is also reality behind it, and the reality behind it is what makes you the best entrepreneur or the best business coach or media expert that you’re willing to be. It takes a lot. It takes everything.

Even with this interview, Dennis, how many emails have we exchanged to just set up this recording? Ordinary people are going to give up because it’s just too much, but this is what it takes. Entrepreneurship takes particular characteristics. If you have these characteristics, you are going to make it. I remember Lady Gaga in her Oscar acceptance speech saying, “It isn’t about women. It’s about how many times you get up after you fail.” That’s exactly what entrepreneurship is about.

for you to make the shift from computer scientist to an entrepreneur?

Izdihar: My grandma always told me that she loved beautiful things. But she was a homemaker, and my grandpa gave her a certain salary or allowance. Anything more, she had to figure out herself, and she did. She cooked, she baked, she sewed, and she sold stuff. She traveled on her own money. She bought her own car. She bought nice furniture. She taught me, in a way, what entrepreneurship is like. She planted that seed and allowed me to see what a woman can be. My grandma never had a nine-to-five job, but she figured out how to push through her circumstances and get the things that she wanted.

So when I was pregnant with my first child and my husband said, “Let’s start a business,” the seed my grandma planted had taken root, and we started a business delivering organic food from the farm to the customer’s door. That’s how it started, and here I am.

Dennis: Did the seed planted by your grandmother’s money mindset inform how you coach your clients?

Izdihar: Absolutely. My grandma taught me a lot of things, and one is that if a woman wants something, there’s nothing that’s going to stop her. I learned about money management indirectly and also about relationships and everything from my grandma.

Dennis: How has your ethnic background impacted your work?

Izdihar: I moved from England to America during the transition after Trump’s election . I went to the grocery store and would get verbally harassed. I’d pick up my kids from school and would be called a vicious name. I literally had a sheet thr own at my doorstep for my three-year-old daughter. My house was vandalized, so there were a lot of scary things. But going on means doing business, and I needed to do so in an online world.

I remember when I first had my Facebook Live. I just cried and thought, “Oh, people are going to judge me. They’re going to think this and that.” Because that’s what happened to me when I moved to America.

But there was a moment when I was reading a storybook to my kids. My kids chose the story, I had nothing to do with it. There was a line in that story that felt like God was giving me a message. And I knew everything was going to be okay. That’s what made me move forward. Because who wants to put themselves in a scary, vulnerable, judgmental situation?

Dennis: What was the turning point that really helped you break, crush through those glass ceilings?

Izdihar: I think there are so many turning points or glass ceilings that struck me. One of the biggest ones was when I was working at Google, sitting in this little cubicle pigeonhole with pictures of my kids around me. I thought, “I just want to be at home with my kids, and I want to make money at my kitchen table.” This is my vision. This is my voice. I want women to be confident and strong in their own voice, and this is what it looks like for me. That is one of the turning

points. It was scary. And there are many other turning points. For example, I used to think that Forbes wouldn’t want to do a story on someone like me. It was a limiting belief. And then an amazing lady said, “What are you talking about, woman? You’re a hot property. Own it.” Within a few weeks of “owning it,” I had a full feature on Forbes. Because there aren’t many hijab-wearing Asian Muslim women out there doing it.

Dennis: What kind of advice would you give to somebody who is thinking about giving up on entrepreneurship because they just don’t want to fight it anymore?

Izdihar: I was reading “The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman, and he said, “Love is a choice.” It’s the same with entrepreneurship. It’s a choice. Every single day, you’ve got to choose it, or you’re going to let it go. The moment that you choose your commitment, your honor and your work, extraordinary things happen. Magic happens. Miracles happen. So many things happen because people are attracted to commitment. They’re not attracted to people who pussyfoot around things—they’re attracted to commitment and to people who have a big vision.

But maybe entrepreneurship is not for you, and that’s totally cool. The moment you honor yourself, the moment you start to give up playing small and go for big things, the moment that you start to honor yourself as the prize, as the queen or the king in your kingdom, magic, miracles, opportunities and excellence happen. If you don’t feel entrepreneurship is for you, that’s fantastic. Whatever you feel is, go big. Go be the best in what you do.

Dennis: What tips or ideas can you offer other entrepreneurs to help them hit their income goals while balancing family life?

Izdihar: It’s going to be messy, okay? It’s going to be messy. Every master was once a disaster, so don’t worry about being messy. Don’t worry about messing up. Be okay with messy stuff. And also most importantly as a mom, a woman, or as a father, it’s okay to ask for support. It’s okay to allow others to contribute to you.

I tell myself, “I’m an excellent receiver. I’m an excellent receiver.” I love receiving help and support. This morning I asked my husband to support me with my baby, and my kids to support me with particular chores. I think the biggest thing is to communicate what you want and allow others to help you and support you.

To discover more about Dr. Jamil, visit her website www.izdiharjamil.com.

And now, let’s talk to awardwinning public speaker Meredith Allan. If that name sounds familiar, it might be because Meredith also appeared in the very first issue of SHOTCALLERS! Meredith is a consultant who worked with Barbara Walters on “The View,” and also is the host of “The Meredith Show” on Motivation and Success TV.

Dennis Postema: What do you think it is that makes “Phenomenal Feminine Entrepreneurs” and these interviews so special?

Meredith Allan: I think the fact that the interviews go deep as well as the choice of really looking at what motivates people. It’s so beautiful because it is so different. So many of these ladies have been through so many different things—one woman talks about her big decision to let her hair go gray and what it feels like to just be authentic and not be covering up. There’s a lot of courage that you can muster through the pages that you don’t see everywhere. People who are showing up and saying, “I’m not interested in society’s norms. I define my joy. I define my beauty.” I find that very refreshing. I do believe that that’s the difference in this book. There’s no front. It’s a gorgeous window into amazing souls. Edwina didn’t just pick her friends. I believe she picked people who could change others’ lives with their stories.

Dennis: What was it like being interviewed by Edwina?

Meredith: It was really cool. Other people see things you don’t, and she cherished certain parts of the interview that I didn’t even appreciate. She’s a masterful interviewer, and we share a passion for going deep. I have no time for surface stuff like talking about the weather—I want to go deep. I want to know what makes you tick, and she really went there. I hope that people who see the series and buy the book or download the digital copy get a cup of coffee, put their feet up, and enjoy the windows into people’s souls. In all the interviews, I think she captured the core of what motivates people. She only tolerates working with people who are willing to go there. She wouldn’t put anyone on her show and her series and her book that hasn’t gone through some things but is willing to say, “This is what I used Dennis: How did you first connect with Edwina?

Meredith: A few years ago, I’d reached a point where I’d been coaching people for years, bringing out the best in them, motivating and inspiring them, and I wanted to get a coach for myself. I attended an event called “The Zone.” There were thousands of people there, but just a handful were onstage in what they called a “success panel.” At this same event was another woman who had come all the way from Australia. She saw that success panel, and she was going through massive challenges as a single mom of little ones at the time—that was Edwina.

The following year, she and I were both notified that we were the two people that went through and had smashing success that got to be onstage together. Edwina cracked me up when she said, “You know, this is a big moment, and why don’t we look into some professional makeup and hair?” and I’m like, “Edwina, I didn’t even think about that!” So she involved me in this hilarious adventure

searching among these thousands of women, looking for one with hair experience and one with makeup experience. At lunch, we found two lovely ladies to do our hair and makeup and ran back to the hotel room quickly. They didn’t even have the professional gear, but we were giggling like little girls, we were so excited, and we realized what a big moment it was, because if we could just be a tenth of the inspiration those ladies had been the previous year for others …

When we were onstage, she and I were the only two new people in the community who’d had the success we’d had. Yet also that year, we’d both had extraordinary adversity. She lost her beloved sister, I lost my father. But we both understood that when we show up raw and real, whether on a stage or on an online show, we have the power to change lives and connect with people and serve them in big ways, so that’s where the magic is. Today, Edwina and I are the best of friends. She’s very silly—I don’t know if she showed up that way for you, but she’s got a gorgeous sense of humor. Dennis: How did The Zone event change your career?

Meredith: I went to the event thinking I wanted to hire a coach for myself, and instead, I was completely fascinated by the stories of these women, each with very different experiences, on the success panel. They didn’t necessarily come from privilege, but one of them had an extraordinarily successful career she hated, and all of them pivoted and created online shows. And through the online show, they literally launched businesses, created raving fans who became buyers, and a light bulb went off for me, because none of them had a broadcasting background like mine. When I realized this, I thought, “I want to invest in the same program that taught them how to launch online shows,” and ironically, here we are. Today, I partner with and support people all over the world who launch online shows. And it’s a lot of work. I thought it would be easy with my background in television, but it’s a very different beast than just showing up on TV and having a huge team backing you, writing your words and fact-checking things. It’s totally different, and the trials and tribulations … it’s become some of the most rewarding and successful work of my life.

Dennis: Where do you think you got the inspiration to keep persevering?

Meredith: When I look back at my life, I realize that the first woman to inspire me was my mom. I don’t ever remember a time when my mom didn’t work, which was not the norm. By working, my mom showed me from a very young age what was possible. Really, both my parents were amazing. I’ve literally never met anybody who loved me as much as them, and I’ve never seen a bond between parent and child like I’ve been very honored to have throughout my life. The message they both gave me throughout my life was that I could do anything I wanted in life. My dad said to me, very seriously at a young age, “You could be president of the world if you want to.” And I believed him. I ran for student body president, which is where so many of my leadership skills began to kick in.

But they didn’t know that’s what they were doing. I want to say that because there might be a mom at home who’s like, “Really? I could have a full career and my child’s not going to resent me?” Yes. I admired my mother’s career, and when my father had to retire unexpectedly due to his health issues, my mother became the sole breadwinner for a decade, and I think she felt that was an honor.

But while I have these cherished memories of my mother, my sister is the total opposite of me. When my mother would wake us by saying, “Gooood moooorning, time for rise and shine!” I loved it, but my sister would curse and throw a shoe at her. My point is, my mother didn’t resent going to work. She woke up happy every day, and so I am thrilled in the same energy every day to get up and be alive and to be able to inspire and motivate people.

Dennis: I’m glad you mentioned authenticity and showing up vulnerable, because that’s a big thing for us and it’s even something you mentioned during our last interview. What do you think it is that gets you through when you hit your own periods of adversity?

Meredith: Giving myself permission to feel the feels. I’ve tried to power through. Initially when I lost my dad, I kept saying, “Why am I not crying? What’s wrong with me?” and someone really wise said, “There’s no perfect way to grieve.” Likewise, there’s no right way to motivate somebody. Everyone is very different. I respond well to lovely energy and clear communication. What motivates me is that there’s something bigger than me. So I know I have to get out of my own way and recognize I’m sad, I miss my dad, but I can’t ruin everybody’s day around me. I have clients to serve, family to be present for. It also helps to be grounded in my philosophy for life, which is pretty simple: You get to be the light.

I show up and I want to light up the room. I want to light up your life as your coach. I want to light the fire inside of you and go on a journey with you to figure out what motivates you. Because as I said, everybody’s very different. I have a client who owns a construction company. She’s in a maledominated industry, but her motivation and her disarming superpower is being a lovebug. She is the most loving, disarming person, so her superpowers are not just being loving but vulnerable, and that motivates me to crack open.

I feel like my life is an exploration of all the things that I don’t know. I’ll show up with what I do, but I’m humble enough to know there’s a lot to learn from others, and the greatest gift is just to be the light in somebody else’s darkness. But also, I’m willing to receive the light from others when I feel dim. Edwina and I have this pattern where we don’t hide when things aren’t going well. Because people love you and want to be there for you, and you’re actually being selfish when you hide and you’re not connected with others.

To find out more about Meredith, visit her website: themeredithshow.com.