Align to your true self by listening to your inner guidance

Welcome Michelle, and thanks for being here with me today with this new Transformational Interviews series. For those who don’t know Michelle, she is a talented and heart-centered relationship coach on a mission to empower single moms to have it all.

How did you align to your true mission? Tell us a bit about the beginning of your journey.

In the beginning, I was following all the advice from experts and marketing gurus. I was telling myself, this is what I have to do. I need to follow these systems and do this and that.

It felt really hard. And a lot of it felt icky, sending all these, friend requests and things like that. Wasn’t aligned with my personal beliefs.

I believed life and business needed to follow different rules and this was just the reality, something I needed to be o.k. with. Things were moving slow and every step was a struggle.

What I’m learning right now is to lean into it. Taking what I’ve done in my personal life and what I teach in my practice and applying it to my business, I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before!

Now that I’m doing what feels good and aligned, things have completely turned around and things are starting to happen FAST. This is my second interview this week, those things never happened before.

This 100% resonates with my experience and my journey. Same as you, I believed business follows different rules and as a result, my message didn’t sound authentic. Magic started to happen when I found my true alignment.

Definitely, I connected with more people and got more results in the last few months since I’ve started leaning into this than I have in the last two years following social media guru’s advice.

Everything I knew back then was that I connect with people quickly and on a deep level when I meet with them one-on-one and that doesn’t happen very easily over social media.

So I just started listening to myself and said, you know what, I’m going to try something different. I started going to networking events and talking to people because that’s what feels more aligned. I started making all these connections with people at the networking events and got a referral client from the very first event.

I believe this mind switch sent some sort of signal to the universe that I am willing to do this, and this is what I’m ready to do. That’s when things started happening, all of this other energy in the form of people reaching out to me spontaneously. Become more magnetic.

What’s your relationship now with videos and social media?

 I have tried. I struggled with videos because of my perfectionism, and so every time I misspeak I start all over again, it takes me hours to record some 10-minute video. But, that’s how we learn. That’s how we get better. Nobody’s perfect in the beginning, and no one wants to go through messy beginnings, because we feel that we’re going to be judged.

But at the same time, I have to keep going and say to myself, it’s okay to be messy.

It’s embracing that growth process and accepting what is, and not judging. Especially in business when you’re facing the public. Realizing that it’s all part of the process and it is essential to your growth and your ultimate expression.

I’m still learning how to be myself and to be fully authentic on social media. I look at Facebook and it feels like the high school hallway. And that can be very intimidating.

It’s definitely a process but I clearly see the benefits of social media marketing for my business. It’s learning to notice all those things that come up and then learning to respond in a healthy way.

I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve shown a lot on social media and I bared my past and everything. What I found was instead of the judgment and the criticism, I got a lot of  “I feel I really know you now”. And it created a lot of connections, which was powerful for me. I assume in time, it will get easier. It’s like building that muscle.

How was your audience’s response in front of this new vulnerability? Positive or negative reactions?

I think there’s something in choosing not to engage in that kind of negativity. That’s setting a boundary for you and claiming this is what I believe in. I’m not here to convince you. I’m not gonna argue with you and you don’t need to resonate with my message. 

I’ve been applying these principles in my personal life for many years now. And I viewed business as something completely different. So, I’m learning to apply these principles to my business, and things are shifting. That’s what I am learning right now and trying to do.

My ultimate dream for my business is to be speaking on stages, delivering my message powerfully to groups, because you can only do so much one-on-one. So, I want to be speaking on stages, which is going to be a big thing for me, that visibility. 

Along with that, I’m about to launch a course in the next couple of months which I’m excited about but also terrified because of the way I have to promote it via social media. I’ve got to get out there and be bold and say, here’s what I have to offer, and hope that people will love it.

If you can bring the energy that you have right now, I’m sure people will love it. Just need to be comfortable with that. How is your public speaking? Because this is a nightmare for so many people.

No real experience with it. I just signed up for a public speaking class that I’m going to start. So, hopefully, I can get better because I need it. I think it’s required for my mission, and I am committed to my mission above all, except my family.

That’s a bold move, LOVE IT.

It’s like in my personal life where I was just stuck. I was grinding, and it wasn’t working. Finally, I surrendered and felt ready for a change. I think we all get to that point where we think enough of this it’s time for something different. And when we make that decision and we lean into listening to our heart and our calling, then everything becomes easier. But, I feel like stubborn people like me have to hit that.

I think that consistency is really important. Otherwise, it is confusing. It’s like you have to learn and build up that trust when you’re in the right.

Do you have a daily practice to support your vision?

It varies every day. It depends on how I feel that day, but I lean a lot into a quiet meditation, where I’m just listening to myself and my body.

When I’m feeling overwhelmed with all the outer noise, all the stuff that I’m flooded with I love to do body tapping. I stand up and start shaking to get out of my head and into my body. From there, I’ll start tapping all over my body to wake it, and to tune in, to see what’s going on. Then I would ask my body, what do you need right now?

Typically I will end up tapping in a particular spot, whether it be the heart chakra, which tells me I need to heal my heart. Or something is going on in my lower back, which tells me I’m needing support. It’s just tuning in to my body and following intuitively where the tapping takes me. It’s something that feels weird when you’re starting, it’s that we’re not taught this. But it’s really powerful.

So, it’s all about the body practice for me and the breath. And then, I can slow down and get into that breathwork and focus on the breath because my mind is quiet.

What got you started on your mission to support and empower single mums?

My personal journey of struggle led me to it, and helping other people with the same struggle. In a nutshell, I grew up very shy, I was reserved and quiet. Those characteristics played out in many ways in my life. I ended up losing, my second child to miscarriage, and then ended up in a divorce that led me to a downward spiral of depression. I hit rock bottom, again and again. At the time I didn’t even know what spirituality was. 

Then I met a life coach who taught me all these practices and guided me over a year and a half, and it changed my life.

Once I had that shift, I needed to share it with everybody. Everyone needs and deserves to feel this good. Nobody should be feeling how I was feeling ever.

Anyone has the power to make a shift within themselves. It’s all internal. And when I realized that, I had to share it. That’s why I became a relationship coach, helping people to rebuild their lives and turn them around after divorce.

And it’s been an amazing journey, a very fulfilling journey. To start my own business, helping people to do the same thing, I have become a more powerful and conscious parent. And I just got remarried three weeks ago. Now everything is complete, a total 180°  from where I was seven years ago.

And for me, everything started with the support of a business coach, a powerful human that made all this shift possible. I learned a lot from her and I’m still learning. Taking things to the next level, because coaches help you get there where you need to be. And watching my coach progress in her journey, keeps me motivated on my journey as well.

I told her a couple of months ago that I feel my life is too easy right now. I am so used to facing hard challenges.

Now I’m up against personal and spiritual challenges, growth challenges. But, that’s where I like to be, those are positive challenges in life and business. And I think that the key to life is balanced, it’s always a game of back and forth. I need to learn to embrace it though, we have our way of being and living, but sometimes we need to be more in harmony and flow.