Are you feeling like you can’t transition your career without sacrificing something important like income, your family time or location?
Do you feel like you’re sacrificing your authenticity to achieve success in your business?
What if instead, you could align your work with your deepest soul calling and achieve both financial success and inner fulfillment?
It’s possible. And it's easier than you think!
If you're like most ambitious and sensitive entrepreneurs, you want your work to be deeply meaningful and financially successful.
In today’s episode, I share my personal journey of career pivots and business evolution over the past 25 years. I’ll guide you through the steps and lessons I learned to align my work with my true purpose.
Whether you're stuck in a niche that doesn't fulfill you or hesitant to make a career shift, you can align your work with your soul's calling and give yourself the inspiration to create a business that truly resonates with your values and desires.
Tune into this week’s episode of the Inner Purpose Podcast to discover exactly how I did it.
CONNECT WITH MICHELLE
FREE RESOURCE: Join Your Next Intuitive Business Breakthrough Free Series for full access to all trainings and bonus resources: https://wellbalance.ca/breakthrough
SELF-STUDY PROGRAM: Business Brilliance Blueprint will guide you how to infuse more of your magic into your business and create a more purposefully profound impact, aligned with your deepest self. Learn more here
WORK WITH MICHELLE:
Are you feeling like you can’t transition your career without sacrificing something important like income, your family time or location?
Do you feel like you’re sacrificing your authenticity to achieve success in your business?
What if instead, you could align your work with your deepest soul calling and achieve both financial success and inner fulfillment?
It’s possible. And it's easier than you think!
If you're like most ambitious and sensitive entrepreneurs, you want your work to be deeply meaningful and financially successful.
In today’s episode, I share my personal journey of career pivots and business evolution over the past 25 years. I’ll guide you through the steps and lessons I learned to align my work with my true purpose.
Whether you're stuck in a niche that doesn't fulfill you or hesitant to make a career shift, you can align your work with your soul's calling and give yourself the inspiration to create a business that truly resonates with your values and desires.
Tune into this week’s episode of the Inner Purpose Podcast to discover exactly how I did it.
CONNECT WITH MICHELLE
FREE RESOURCE: Join Your Next Intuitive Business Breakthrough Free Series for full access to all trainings and bonus resources: https://wellbalance.ca/breakthrough
SELF-STUDY PROGRAM: Business Brilliance Blueprint will guide you how to infuse more of your magic into your business and create a more purposefully profound impact, aligned with your deepest self. Learn more here
WORK WITH MICHELLE:
Today I'm going to talk about the story of the different pivots that I've made in my career in my business. Hopefully you're going to find some inspiration, some clarification for yourself and maybe a little bit of yourself in the stories that I'm going to share with you today. My career journey started when I finished my master's in human biology and nutritional sciences, after I had completed a Bachelor of Science in biomedical science. At that time I thought that I was going to be going down the road of a medical field, doing medical research and becoming a medical doctor. But the universe had different plans for me. If you want to call it the universe or whatever name or concept that you would like to put to it. When I was in university I got very sick. I didn't realize back then what was actually going on. I understand now that I have endometriosis and an autoimmune condition. Back then I did not understand any of this. During that time I was really struggling to get through finishing my master's. I think my illness really started in the last years of my Bachelor degree. But by the time I was doing my master's it was becoming unbearable the fatigue, the pain, the brain fog. I decided that I couldn't continue on with school and got a regular job. After doing a little bit of job hopping, while I was also struggling with chronic sinus infections and chronic migraines, I found a corporate job that worked for me. While I was working that corporate job, I was doing my own work to try to figure out what was going on with my health, because I was seeing doctor after doctor after doctor and no one could give me answers. I had tried every single medication that they threw at me and nothing helped. They told me over and over again, after trying everything that they could think of, that that's just the way you are. You're just going to have to live with it. I know that that is something that many of my patients and clients have heard from the medical system as well, but I was not willing to put up with that answer. I knew that I could not continue to live that way.
Speaker 1:While I was working this corporate job, in my off time I was doing research and trying to find answers. I started exploring health food stores which I had never heard of or visited before in my life. This is in the early 2000s, so this is 20 years ago now. I was speaking to somebody there who worked there and she referred me to a holistic nutritionist, which I had never heard of one before. I went to this holistic nutritionist and she suggested that I eliminate dairy and gluten from my diet. Of course, 20 years ago this was not something that was a popular practice. I told her she was crazy. She told me to do it.
Speaker 1:Within two weeks, sinus infections in migraine stopped and I didn't get them again. Of course, my question was what is this witchcraft? She just did. I mean, technically she didn't do anything. She just suggested some changes in what I was eating. This sparked many questions and many realizations, because I came to realize at that point that health was more than just taking medications.
Speaker 1:At that point I decided I wanted to go back to school. I was feeling so much better and I had so much more energy Now that I was eating in a way that was no longer causing chronic inflammation in my body. I decided to go back to school and become a naturopathic doctor. This was something that I had looked at when I was doing my undergrad in biomedical science. I was living in a house with two roommates and one of those roommates was looking on her computer and came across the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine. She showed me the website and she said check this out, doesn't this look great? I remember looking at it and going wow, that looks exactly what I want to do. I remember in that moment catching myself and going, but my parents would never let me do that. I put that idea away and I went back to studying my molecular biology. That thought about naturopathic medicine was in the back of my mind until this point, maybe six years later. Where now? Wait a second, that Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine. I want to go look at that website again. This time, as I'm looking at this, I'm going. This is exactly what I want to do Instead of going, but my parents will never let me do that. This time I went and I'm doing it. My parents didn't want me to do it. That's a whole other story for another day.
Speaker 1:What I did know was that when I was in that role, working corporate in a cubicle with no windows, all lit up by fluorescent lights, I was not happy. I was not happy being a cog in the wheel where we were motivated by donuts and pizza, which I couldn't eat anyways, because by that point I wasn't eating any dairy or gluten. I didn't fit into that environment with my weird ways of eating. People were always questioning me why are you eating like that? Why won't you just eat the pizza and the donuts? What's wrong with you? This was happening a lot. I knew that there was something more for me than pushing paper.
Speaker 1:I decided to leave that corporate job and go back to school. That was huge because I had a guaranteed income, a salary, benefits, stock options, a retirement plan, and I gave all of that up to go back to school. To go $150,000 in debt. That's a big choice, but I knew there was some calling within me, within my soul, that was telling me that I needed to do this. I needed to study more about what this thing was. That helped me get back on my feet when I was struggling with my own health.
Speaker 1:I went back to school for another four years to become a naturopathic doctor and when I graduated, I ended up picking up and moving away from Toronto to British Columbia, canada. This is another story for another day. I moved from the largest city in Canada to one of the smallest island communities in Canada, on an island with 500 people. That in itself was a culture shock which taught me a lot, which I'm absolutely grateful for During that time I moved to a couple of different locations within British Columbia. All of them were small, remote areas in the province and started naturopathic clinics helping local people find better health through dietary adjustments, through lifestyle changes, through natural botanical medicine, homeopathy, through acupuncture.
Speaker 1:My favourite was helping people to discover that when they get better control over their stress and their inner emotional world, that their physical health improves. What I was discovering during that time when I was practicing as a naturopathic doctor in these small communities was the patients that were most receptive to looking at stress management and looking at learning emotional regulation were the ones that got the better results. They were the ones that I enjoyed working with the most, the ones that were showing up and they were just looking for a natural alternative to the pills that their doctor gave them to suppress their symptoms. I didn't enjoy working with them as much Now. I still made a difference in their lives with the work that I was doing and I'm forever grateful that I had that opportunity to help people find better health through the changes that I supported them through.
Speaker 1:But during that time, even though I was a doctor, I had the certifications, I had the busy clinic when I went through my old journals from that time period, I was still searching for purpose. I was asking what is my deeper purpose here? There's something deeper that I'm supposed to be. There's something more that I'm supposed to contribute. There is still something missing. It's a multi-faceted answer as to what was actually missing, which I will touch upon a little bit today and in future podcast episodes.
Speaker 1:One of the things that was missing was, first of all, finding my own purpose and value within myself and accepting who I am and owning my gifts. Because I wasn't at that time, I hadn't yet gone through a certain dark night of the soul that awakened within me this knowledge of who I am now and accepting who I am now. So I was seeking external validation through my title, through my work, through patient results, to help me feel better about myself. And here's the thing is whenever you seek external sources to try to fill something that's actually best done within yourself, you're always going to be chasing and it's never going to be enough. And I say that from personal experience, and I help my clients understand this as well. Most of them already know this and sometimes we all need a little bit of reminding.
Speaker 1:So here I was, working in local clinics in British Columbia and I was already starting to grow restless at this point because I knew that there was something more that I wanted to be doing and while there was a few people I was really enjoying working with, there were a lot of cases that weren't really lighting me up anymore. What I've come to realize? I enjoy depth. I enjoy going deep and really looking at the deeper impacts and the deeper roots of things, especially the deeper emotional roots. And some people just don't want to go there and that's okay. But what I was doing was hiding those parts of myself and adjusting myself and twisting myself around like a pretzel to try to be who.
Speaker 1:Each one of these patients wanted me and needed me to be Right. So some people were just looking for an acupuncturist to help them manage their symptoms with acupuncture. Some people were brand new to making changes in lifestyle and had no clue what gluten is or that cheese is a dairy product, or they had no clue that stress could ever be contributing to their physical health and maybe they didn't even want to look at that aspect of themselves. But then they were asking but why am I not getting better? So there's many nuances to this, but what I've come to realize is that repeating the same basics over and over again were something that wasn't interesting me anymore teaching people how to eliminate gluten from their diet, for elimination tests, for example. What was starting to come up in my head was maybe these things that I'm repeating over and over I can create recordings video recordings for so that maybe I can have an online program, so that, instead of me repeating these things, I can give them access to this online program and then we can talk about the more interesting and deeper things in our one-on-one visit. So this was the beginnings of thinking about going digital and online with my work.
Speaker 1:However, when I was a naturopathic doctor, at that time I had a busy patient workload and by the time I would get home at the end of the day after seeing back-to-back-to-back patients, I had very little extra time for myself to do my own inner work, to do my own inner healing and inner learning work, and also I had very little time to do any of the ideas that were coming up to me in terms of going digital or online. That idea sat on the back burner. Now, during this time, I ended up meeting somebody when I was living in Kitimat, british Columbia, and this man I fell in love with and he was not from Kitimat, he was on a 12-month contract. He was actually from Quebec, and so we both knew that he was not going to be there forever because he had to go back to Quebec where he lived once his job contract was over.
Speaker 1:Now, a couple of things happened during that time. So in Kitimat there is a factory, an aluminum smelter, called Rio Tinto, and they were building a new factory. They had brought in people from all over the world to build this new plant and once the construction was over they sent everybody home. So this town, which is usually a population of about 5,000, almost doubled during that time, and I was very busy because a lot of these temporary construction workers and executives came to see me for things like acupuncture and pain relief and many other different reasons. But then they were all sent home and all of a sudden, almost overnight, my patient load went down by more than half. And then I got a phone call from my mother, who was French-Canadian and they lived out back east near Quebec, and she let me know that she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and that there wasn't much time left. As I got this news and my patient load went away and this person that I was dating his contract was almost up and he said why don't you come back east with me? So I packed up everything and moved back across the country back to Quebec, where my family's from, and now with my now life partner, my husband, and decided it's not going to be that big of a deal to restart a new clinic from scratch.
Speaker 1:I've done it before. I can do it again, not realizing the difference in provincial regulation between British Columbia and Quebec. As a naturopathic doctor, british Columbia is the most open and liberal in terms of a naturopathic doctor and what they're capable of doing under the regulations. Versus Quebec is an unregulated province when it comes to naturopathic medicine. Now, this does not mean that it's the Wild West and you can do anything. It actually means that you can do nothing, including doing things like saying the word health or using a tongue depressor to look in somebody's mouth. These are all regulated acts that a naturopathic doctor or naturopath in Quebec is not allowed to do. What I didn't realize was that the medical college in Quebec actually sends by patients to naturopathic clinics that pretend to be patients to make sure that you're not saying or doing anything. That's not acceptable.
Speaker 1:That was stress number one for me. Stress number two for me was the fact that this community that I moved to is a French-only community. People in this community do not speak English, and while I have a working knowledge of French I went to French immersion for all of high school my conversational French it doesn't come as easily to me as English does, which is my native language. On top of that, all of my naturopathic studies were in English. I didn't learn any of the terminology in French, so communicating a lot of the things was really quite difficult for me. Trying to find the words, I was doing a lot of extra studying, trying to look into vocabulary, looking at the French-English dictionary, trying to find the words that I needed to communicate with my patients. And then, on top of that, I've come to realize that the community here didn't seem to be as open to making lifestyle and dietary changes than the people in the communities that I was in in British Columbia, and I almost felt like I was a used car salesman, trying to convince people that what they were eating and how they were eating and how they were conducting their lifestyle was likely contributing to the symptoms that they were having.
Speaker 1:It was becoming more and more obvious that I didn't want to be working in a local practice anymore. And while this was all happening and I was trying to start this new practice and it was really challenging and I was coming up against all of these brick walls my mother's health was declining. So I left everything and I went to be with my mother and I'm so glad that I did for her final months of her life. Her passing was one of the most difficult experiences that I've had in my life. Once she passed away, I went back home to be with my husband, and the stress of everything of trying to start up this new clinic from scratch, being with my mom and caring for her in her last weeks of her life and putting my own self-care on the back burner through all of this finally paid the price.
Speaker 1:I ended up spiraling into the worst flare-up of my life. I didn't realize at the time that it was endometriosis and autoimmune. It wasn't until I started seeing doctor after doctor here where I live now, that I was diagnosed with these things and nothing that I knew to do as a naturopathic doctor was helping me. I was getting worse and worse and worse, to the point where I struggled just to get out of bed and take a shower, and anyone with chronic illness will understand what that experience feels like. As I was laying in my bed in pain, exhausted, I was watching my life slip away from me. I was watching all the potential that I had to do, all the things that I wanted to do, escape between my fingers. This is what sparked my third Dark Knight of the Soul. I'll talk about my other Dark Knights of the Soul in another episode.
Speaker 1:This Dark Knight of the Soul was likely the most significant. This Dark Knight of the Soul taught me about surrender, because I had no other choice, there was nothing else I could do. I could no longer push, force, hustle, try to force something to happen because I was not capable physically. And it was in the surrender that something changed. Through a series of events, I ended up finding something that actually got me out of this black hole where I was bedbound. It actually started when a doctor prescribed a colonoscopy for me, and the specific PrEP procedure for the colonoscopy is to eat a low residue diet for a few days before the colonoscopy. So low residue diet means no fiber, and so they suggested eating only meat and white bread. And I don't eat white bread, I don't eat bread, I don't eat gluten. So I said, okay, well, I guess I'm going to only eat meat for the next few days, and I thought that was weird. But something happened in those three days. It was like a dark cloud lifted and I felt better for the first time in months. And then I had the colonoscopy and I went back to eating my autoimmune protocol AIP diet. So it wasn't like I went back to eating junk food and all the things, but I was already eating a very specific and highly restricted therapeutic diet.
Speaker 1:At that point I decided to start to do some investigation about what happened here, that for three days when I only ate meat, I felt better. I discovered something called the carnivore diet and at this point it was quite new in the online communities and I started to do a little bit of research. I think it was Sean Baker. He's a medical doctor and he was kind of spearheading this carnivore community. It was really at its infancy at this point and he suggested for new years to do 30 days of carnivore for January and I thought, well, what do I have to lose? And I'm so lucky that my partner is finally supportive and luckily he's also a hunter, so we have a freezer full of moose and deer meat, which is wonderful to have access to this wild, free range, pure meat. This is something that I hold as such an important value, which I'll talk about in another podcast episode.
Speaker 1:So within a few days of starting this meat-only diet again, I started feeling like myself again, and my husband noticed the difference. He said what is happening here? You've been just eating only meat for three days and I can see how much better you look and feel right now, and that really opened my eyes to what's going on here, because this goes against everything that I learned to nutrition class as a naturopathic doctor. Why is this happening? So I started to dive into research and started to understand some things that say for example, potentially certain vegetables have what are called anti-nutrients, which, from what I understand. So these anti-nutrients are there to protect the plant from things like bacteria and bugs eating this plant, and for the general population, these anti-nutrients don't tend to cause too much of a problem. But my theory is, when your immune system is not working optimally, as was the case for me, then these anti-nutrients can become problematic, and that's part of the theory. There's some other pieces of the puzzle in terms of theory which I'm not going to get into right now.
Speaker 1:I might do a podcast episode specifically on carnivore and my experience with it, but this is not medical advice. This is just me talking about my own personal experience. And the thing with carnivore is that it got me back on my feet and gave me my life back when nothing else could, but it only got me so far. I found I was getting better and better and better to a point and then I kind of plateaued. Then I was starting to develop sensitivities to certain types of meat, certain cuts of meat. I was starting to see that I was getting backed into a corner and I was starting to question if I can eat less and less types of meat, is there going to be a point where I'm not going to be able to tolerate any food at all? This was a serious question and it was around that time when I started to now look at okay, so what else is going on here besides just the food? And I already knew that I had a lot of stress in my life. Especially I knew that I had a long history of my own personal trauma that I hadn't fully processed or healed from at that point.
Speaker 1:This is when I started to explore going deeper into my own emotional environment and doing some deeper work. It was about this time when I discovered a coaching program to become a certified coach. It was a nine month program where we had to journey through our own inner healing. First, because you can only take people as far as you've gone yourself, and I fully stand behind that, especially when it comes to inner healing. We journeyed through shadow integration and all sorts of different aspects of inner healing inner child healing, reparenting as well as learning a number of different modalities to add to my toolbox that I found really helpful for myself, especially things like essential oils in terms of psychoaromatherapy. I'll probably talk about that in another episode as well.
Speaker 1:At the tail end of this nine month program, I was connected to a medium. This medium connected me to my mother's spirit, so my mother, who had passed on. This was the start of yet another deeper level of healing for me. I ended up working for nine months with the psychic medium, with my mother's spirit, and the level of mother wound healing that I went through through that journey changed my life. There was a lot of mother wounds that I had.
Speaker 1:I'll explain in a podcast episode where I talk about astrology. There was sort of a sole contract that I had made even before I arrived here that I was going to experience deep levels of mother wounds. As a summary on that, I'll just mention that I have what's called a Hades moon, so my moon and Pluto are the same degree they're conjunct, the same degree. They're both eight degrees, libra, and my mother also had a Hades moon. So when Pluto is an aspect to your moon, so whether it is conjunct, which is the most significant, or square or opposite I'll explain what that means in another episode but when you have Pluto that is aspect to your moon, it sets you up for the most significant mother wound experience. That experience that I had with the medium changed my life. Through that work that I did, I put together a methodology that I led myself through, that I started to lead my clients through. This is where I'm going to go into talking about the career pivots that I made during that time, because there were several, as I was progressing through my own inner healing journey.
Speaker 1:So when I first started to come out of this health flare that I was having. Once I went carnivore and started to feel better and I was functional again. That's when I decided to start to go online with my work, instead of trying to force this local naturopathic clinic in French, which was obviously not working for me. I decided to go online and I decided to work with and coach people dealing with autoimmunity and endometriosis who are looking to make adjustments to their diet and heal their inner emotional world, to get better control over their symptoms. As I was guiding people through this, I was discovering that I was enjoying it more, and someone would come to me because they'd already tried carnivore and they realized that it helped them, but only to a point. And now they're ready to do the deeper inner emotional work, and so that was one of my first niche.
Speaker 1:Pivots was to shift from just working with people in general with autoimmunity and endometriosis, teaching them how to do carnivore as an elimination diet and then slowly, one by one, do food re-interactions again, or guiding them through the autoimmune protocol, because at this point I had become a certified autoimmune protocol coach. I enjoyed more when I didn't have to guide them through the step-by-step initial like okay, this is how you do it, and then guide them through those points of the initial elimination. But rather okay, you've already done the elimination, you already have all those factors figured out in terms of what taking all the inflammatory foods out. Now let's work on your deeper emotional terrain and once you do, that will help to ease some of the pressure on your nervous system. Because when your nervous system and your emotional, inner emotional terrain are dysregulated, that will cause what's called immune dysregulation and the immune dysregulation is what triggers worsening and the development of some of these immune dysfunction conditions like autoimmune and anemitriosis. Anemitriosis is not at this point defined as an autoimmune condition, but they are both conditions of immune dysfunction. That's for another episode. That was my first.
Speaker 1:Pivot was to move towards people who had already eliminated and now we're doing this deeper inner emotional work and they're getting better. They're feeling better, they're feeling stronger, they're feeling stronger from within themselves and now we can start doing a one by one food reintroduction again. Now, as I was doing this, I was doing my own inner emotional healing work, like I've just described to you earlier here, and as I was doing this, I was starting to practice some of the things that were working for me and I was offering them up as exercises and options and guiding my clients through the very things that I had guided myself through in terms of inner emotional healing. This is where my methodology came from, especially as I was working with my mother's spirit and I came up with what's called the inner liberation method, and what I was discovering is, as I was walking people through this methodology, the people that were responding the best were also people who identify themselves as highly sensitive people. They might also say that their empaths a large portion of them score INFJ on the Myers-Briggs or 16 Personalities test, and these are the people that got the most significant results in the shortest amount of time. And I recognize now that the people that get the best results are people who are like me and maybe a couple of steps behind me, and so that makes sense because I'm a highly sensitive person.
Speaker 1:So I started to shift my focus away from working with autoimmunity and endometriosis and working with people who identify themselves as highly sensitive people, whether or not they have a health condition, and I started to shift away from working with dietary and doing eliminations and reintroductions. There were still people that were showing up in my world who had been carnivore already, but that was not the prime focus anymore of what I wanted to be doing. I was recognizing that what I was enjoying more and more was to be doing the inner emotional work, regardless of what was going on with their diet. Now I definitely preferred to be working with someone who already had that foundational knowledge of if there were food sensitivities, of basic nutritional concepts, so that that was no longer the issue anymore for them. They already had that for the most part sorted out. There was always a little bit of troubleshooting that we would do, but I wanted to be doing the nutritional aspect of things less and less. So that was my next pivot.
Speaker 1:As you can see, it wasn't like, okay, here and now let's drop everything. And now it's here. It's more that it was this natural evolution. Some things were fading away as I was focusing more on other things. The things that I was focusing more and more about were related to the things that I was doing for myself and how I was evolving and growing and advancing, and those were the things that I was interested in and those were the things that I was passionate about and recognizing that my ideal client is me, a step behind me. So of course, they're going to really do well with this methodology that I put together and the focus that I was naturally pivoting away from and towards because of where I was coming from and where I am going in my own personal evolution.
Speaker 1:Here I am now in this other pivot where I'm now working with highly sensitive people, guiding them through this inner liberation method so that they could uncondition from all the social conditioning that was causing them internal pressure and judgment and stress and liberate themselves from the chains of limiting beliefs about themselves and the inner stress and pressure and judgments that they had about themselves, and awakening to the power that they truly have within themselves to be true to them and to let go of the survival behaviors, like the people, pleasing the perfectionism like I had, and heal the mother wounds and integrate the shadows so that you feel more whole, so that you come back home to yourself. And when you do, it changes everything. It truly transforms you from the inside out and it liberates you. And the reason why I called it the inner liberation method is because, over and over again, once people went through the method, they would come out the other side and they would tell me I feel free, I feel liberated, every single time. This, of course, was feeling extremely satisfying to me and fulfilling to me to help show other people this path that not everybody talks about. Especially when I was doing this, there weren't too many people out there that were talking about this particular type of inner transformation, and especially not towards highly sensitive people like me, and so to be able to give these people the gift of empowering themselves to regain control of their own lives and find their own inner freedom was so satisfying to me, way more satisfying than just trying to suppress symptoms with herbs, for example. I'm not knocking that, but I'm just saying for myself and my own personal experience. This is what felt like I was creating more and deeper and meaningful impact in the way that's important to me. I was helping guiding people through this inner awakening, so I was guiding them essentially from level two to level three consciousness, and I'm not going to go into the details of what the different levels of consciousness are in this particular episode, but just to mention that that's where I was guiding people through in terms of a scale of four levels of consciousness, and as I was helping them awaken to this level three consciousness and they were more connected with themselves than ever, they were realizing.
Speaker 1:So many of the people I was working with started to realize. You know what, now that I'm more connected to me, I realize that the work I'm doing is not aligned anymore. It doesn't feel fulfilling, it's not aligned with my values or who I am or where I'm at now in my life, now that I've evolved. There is a subset of that population that would tell me I want to work on that now. I want to make a shift so that I am now doing work that feels deeply meaningful and purposeful and aligned. It would be at that point where I would feel lit up and went let's go. That sounds exciting, the more and more that this was becoming obvious, that that moment in time lit me up.
Speaker 1:I had to now take a look at myself. I found it really meaningful to guide people through this inner awakening, but as I was deepening my own journey of inner evolution, it was no longer as fulfilling for me to guide people through the initial stages of awakening, but rather to be working with somebody who's already gone through some journey themselves of inner connection, inner awakening, moving up the ladder of inner consciousness, and now they're recognizing you know what just having a job for the sake of having a job is no longer interesting to me. I want deeper fulfillment. I want to be doing my work in a way that feels more meaningful, that's aligned with my values. I know I'm here to make a difference in this world. I know I'm here to make an impact for myself, for other people, for my lineage, for the collective. Whatever their motivation is. They knew that their work is something important to them and they know they're here for more, and they were ready to explore diving into that more, pivoting into that more, making the changes and following the call of their soul. That lit them up, and it was lighting me up to guide them to that. And so that was the moment for me where I had to go okay, if I'm going to be guiding people to their most aligned work, I've got to think about myself here and what I'm doing and who I'm focusing on, and my own business structure and my own niche.
Speaker 1:So that was when I decided to make the next pivot, and this time it was a significant pivot. Instead of just being like, these focuses are dropping away, like nutrition, and I'm just focusing more on the mental, emotional aspect of things. You could see how that was just sort of like a spectrum of like focusing more in this direction versus this direction. Now I'm kind of like making a clean cut and going in a completely different direction. Part of that direction is making a clean cut in terms of my identification with being a naturopathic doctor, and this was huge because it was my mother's desire for me to be a doctor. It was her deepest wish for me to be a doctor, because in her eyes, with her conditioning, that meant that I was important, and so you can imagine what that was like.
Speaker 1:For me, this was not just about shifting my niche, but letting go of a piece of my own identity that my mother had yearned me to have. So there was a lot of processing that needed to happen for me in order to be able to let go of that as an identity, as a title of who I was, especially having put in all of those years of studying, all of that money that I spent, to now say, okay, I'm letting all of that go and I'm going in a different direction. But here's the thing is, I needed to have those previous experiences to be able to do what I'm doing now. I needed to make all of those pivots in my life in order to be able to have the experience and the knowledge and the wisdom to be able to guide others to do the same, because if you haven't made a pivot in your business, how are you going to guide other people to do that? That was a huge shift for me in terms of making a business pivot to where I am now as an intuitive business pivot mentor. As you can see from that title, which I don't identify with as an identity anymore, I don't identify my titles as an identity. I'm using that title now as a way to describe what I do, so people can understand and maybe relate, and I've gone through many iterations and maybe by the time you listen to this podcast, I might change my title and I'm okay with that. One of the pieces of that title is intuitive.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I've come to realize about myself is that I have a strong sense of intuition. Actually, we all do. This isn't some special gift that was only given to me and no one else has it. We all have that capability to be in touch with and in tune with our intuition. And what I came to realize through my own healing work was that the more I learned to accept who I am, accept the special features about myself, to trust myself instead of listening to other people and what they were telling me that I should believe about myself. The more and more connected to my intuition I became and the more I started to understand the language that my intuition uses to communicate to me. It's like my inner guidance system and you have one too and it was about calibrating that inner guidance system, understanding. Okay, so when I feel this or think this, or when this comes up, or when I see this, or when this happens, it means this.
Speaker 1:And it took a little bit of time to understand what that language actually is, to collect enough data to see what's actually happening and to trust it. There was a lot of paying attention to noticing that, okay, my intuition is telling me this, and then sometimes I wouldn't listen to it and X would happen. And then, if I did listen to it, y would happen. And it was in collecting previous data from what would or wouldn't happen when I did or didn't trust my intuitive nudges, that helped me to see the proof and go, oh, there's something, there's something to this.
Speaker 1:Then it took a long time for me to actually be able to openly admit all of this, that I am an intuitive, that I do pick up on intuitive nudges, that I do have this intuitive language where, when I am connected with a client on a one-on-one call, my intuition speaks to me through visions. So I'll actually see something over here, in the bottom right hand corner. I'll see things come up as we're talking and I know, when they come up over here and they look a certain way, in a certain color, as visions, that those are intuitive hits for me to share with my client. And when they come up, I'll say I've got this intuitive vision coming up, would you like me to share it? And they say yes, and I tell them what I see and they're like oh wow, that's exactly what I needed to hear when I share it with them and it's exactly what they needed to hear.
Speaker 1:These are the things that cause those instant moments of mind-blowing breakthroughs that light me up and they light my client up because now they finally see another piece of the puzzle come together and they see things completely differently once I share with them those intuitive hits and also when I share with them new perspectives that they haven't considered, especially when I can share with them the patterns that I'm picking up because that's one of the other talents that I have discovered through this inner work that I have about myself is that I pick up on patterns and this might be my neurodivergent mind and my highly sensitive nervous system and how I pick up on things. I pick up on patterns that a lot of people don't notice and I can see the pattern and then I can see what's underneath the pattern, what's driving that particular pattern, and so when I can see that in my client they're just saying, they're just talking, they're you know we're having a conversation but I can kind of pick up on like how they're saying things, what they're saying, the things that the words that show up over and over again. I can pick up on those patterns and it's like light as day for me. I can see it and they don't see it because it's just their normal conversation and I'll say I'm picking up on this. Would you like me to tell you what I'm picking up on? You know they'll say yes, and I'll tell them the pattern and then I'll tell them the typical roots underneath what's driving that pattern and they go oh my gosh, wow, that's it.
Speaker 1:I would have never considered that I can offer them new perspectives on that, because of what I understand that they hadn't considered, and they go oh my gosh, I never thought about it that way before. That makes so much sense and that changes everything. Because when you change the way you look at something, what you're looking at changes. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And this is the beauty of this work, because it's all about changing your perspective. And once you see it differently, you can't unsee that different, you cannot unsee it, and that's what creates the permanent change and transformation that happens with the clients that I'm working with now.
Speaker 1:And this is the difference between the work I was doing as a naturopathic doctor, or sure. Changing diet is important, having a lifestyle that supports your well-being is important, it helps, but there's always this underlying what is your perspective and mindset and what are your thoughts, what are your patterns and what's going on underneath the surface that's driving your inner emotional terrain, because that's the route that's going to impact your nervous system and it's your nervous system that's the bridge that impacts every single physiological system in your body. So can you see how the work I'm doing now is like that deeper route below, just trying to manage the physiological systems, the other thing that had to happen, through these pivots especially this most recent pivot and stepping away from my identity as a naturopathic doctor is that I had to own who I am. I had to own the things about myself that I had been hiding away and masking in order to quote unquote fit in to society, fit in with people who might not necessarily get me in who I am, with my sensitivity, with my deep nature, with my connection to my intuition, with the fact that, while science and research is super important to me and I have a passion for research I also have a passion for spiritual and energetic concepts. I love studying Buddhism.
Speaker 1:I have done that for 20 years and for most of those years I did that in hiding, because I didn't think that anybody would understand, and it didn't help that I was raised in an environment where I was told that I was too sensitive and I needed to grow a thicker skin and I needed to not be so sensitive. And this was something even that my mother told me in her last days of life. She said if there was one thing that I could change about myself to be a better person, I need to be less sensitive, and that stuck with me for a long time until I had this healing journey with the spirit, with the medium, and this is the other thing, the fact that I connected with the medium to connect with my mother's spirit. Now I have this understanding of connecting with spirit, connecting with energetic things that we don't necessarily see with our naked eye, and these are concepts that aren't always socially acceptable by everybody. There are some people who really connect with that and relate to that and are passionate about that and love these things, and there are some people who don't like that. And I was afraid to be public about these aspects of myself and what I was relating to and what I am doing and how I operate, because some people would get uncomfortable by that, some people wouldn't accept that, some people get upset by that. Before I did this inner healing work, I took that on as my responsibility, that I had to hide and manage myself in order to prevent other people from rejecting me, in order to avoid them getting upset with me, since, of course, come to this understanding that I'm not responsible for other people's reactions, I'm only responsible for my own, and that if somebody doesn't like who I am and what I'm about, if I'm being authentic and acting out of integrity, of course, and they don't like that. It simply just means that we're not a match and that's okay. And that took a long time for me to understand and accept that hiding and masking in order to prevent them from getting upset was actually holding me back from connecting to the people who actually would benefit from my work the most, and this is really important in terms of making the impact that you know that you are deep down in your soul here to make with your work especially, is to own who you are, especially the things that let you up the most and speak about them, show them, express them. And yeah, there are going to be some people who don't like it. They're not your people, the people who love it and get benefit from it and they see you expressing that. You act like a beacon of hope, you act like a lighthouse and you act like an exemplar that shows them the possibility and shows them that it's okay to be you. It acts as a magnet because that's what lights them up to and they love that about you, that they can relate with you.
Speaker 1:I often use the analogy of radio stations, so you have your own particular, unique radio station frequency. We all do. Say, for example, you are 104.5 and you're playing classical music and that's what you love, and there's someone who is prefers 97.7 and that's heavy metal music. This was something that I had to learn is I would have a tendency to try to change my radio station to align with them, but they weren't really enjoying that. They didn't really fully like that, because I could never be fully tuned into 97.7 when my authentic frequency is 104.5. So here I am trying to change myself to be like them and they're like hmm, something's not right, that's not clear. Versus when you are dialed into your frequency and you are expressing your truth, then the people who love that will be like wow, what amazing music. I love this, I want more. And that's how you can have the greatest impact for other people is by you being you I'm going to likely keep coming back to this over and over again in these podcast episodes is reminding you that your purpose is not necessarily about what you do, but who you're being and the more connected you are to you and expressing your truth, the way that works for you.
Speaker 1:That's how you create that impact. And right now, talking about my own business pivots, can you see how all of these pivots that I've made have been about me learning more about myself, evolving myself, growing myself and then guiding people that are a step behind me who also want to be doing the same type of growth and evolution that I'm doing, and that, as I'm growing and evolving, the person that I'm helping is also growing and evolving and changing and shifting, which has leads to these pivots that I've made in my own business. Now, if you resonate with this, your particular story is likely going to be different than mine. Your pivots might look different than mine and you might not be a coach or a practitioner. You might own a business in some other capacity. Changing or shifting might not necessarily look like you're changing your niche or changing the type of product that you're offering, but it might be that you're shifting who you're being when you're doing your work, and that's what changes everything.
Speaker 1:I think that's going to be enough for today. I think I've gone on long enough. I know there's so much more to share about my business pivot story and it is an ongoing process, so I will share more bits and pieces of the story with you and maybe choose bits and pieces of the story I shared today and go in a little bit deeper detail about one aspect of these stories. As I continue to record these podcast episodes, remember to hit subscribe if you like this, so that you don't miss an episode. Make sure to check out the show notes and, if you haven't already, download the free offering that I have called.
Speaker 1:Say yes to the career or business of your dreams. And when you subscribe for this free offer, what you'll be getting is a very short video recording where I will be guiding you through doing an exercise where you're going to get super clear on what I call your red flag and green flag feelings. I'm going to explain in the video and in the follow-up emails that you're going to get, exactly how to use this information to make the most aligned decisions for yourself in your business, in your career, in your work, and also you can use this in your relationships and every other aspect of your life. So make sure to download that wellbalanceca backslash. Yes, and you can access that in the show notes, and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.