ReWild Your Business

On the ReWild Your Business podcast this week, I'm talking to Maria Cussell, an experienced leadership coach who helps high achieving leaders become even more effective by developing insight and understanding to move quickly to action, bringing them more success and fulfilment, both professionally and personally.

Maria spent over twenty five years at Barclays before building a practice of her own, and somewhere in the middle of her story she said something so simple I nearly missed it.

She said that when our real strengths come naturally to us, we assume everyone can do them. So we stop valuing them.

Ooof.

Maria spent years in corporate being told, in various polite and impolite ways, that what she was good at didn’t count. She could walk into a room and connect with anyone, any place, any time. A friend once told her that when everyone else in the business was drawing up strategies to get past people’s defences, Maria just walked straight through them. And yet that never showed up on a performance review, because what got measured was audit findings closed on time and synergies squeezed out of a merger. She was good at the thing nobody was counting.

Here’s what happened next, and I think it’s the part we all recognise even if the specifics differ. She started to doubt herself. Not because the feedback was accurate, but because it was relentless. A boss telling you you’re not hard-nosed enough. A 360 review suggesting the people who love your work simply don’t know what good looks like. Enough of that, over enough years, and you start doing the thing so many capable women do: talking yourself down before anyone else gets the chance. Maria caught herself mid-sentence doing exactly that in our conversation, thirty years on, and laughed about it. Old habits leave a long shadow.

Isn’t it crazy how easily we hand the job of valuing ourselves over to whoever happens to be scoring us at the time. And how rarely that scorer is measuring the thing that actually makes us extraordinary.

The thing you do without trying, the thing that feels too easy to count as a real skill, is very often the exact thing you should be building a life around. And the people who tell you otherwise, the ones measuring you against a scorecard that was never designed for what you’re actually good at, are not lying about the scorecard. They’re just measuring the wrong thing.

Worth asking yourself this week: what’s the thing you’ve quietly decided doesn’t count, simply because it never felt like effort?

There was a line Maria used… “When I coach, I fly”.

Underneath all the values language we throw around in this industry, I love this reframe - not “what do I believe in” but “what happens to my body when I’m doing the work.”

Finally, I ask everyone I speak to on this series the same question: what won’t you compromise on? Most people answer with a value. Growth. Honesty. Family. Maria’s answer was more specific and, I think, more useful. She said she can’t do work that isn’t fun for her. If it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a no.

Uncompromising in the BEST way!

Enjoy the conversation…

About Maria

“I act as a catalyst, enabling people to become ‘unstuck’ and move forward. My ability to hold multiple viewpoints enables me to empathise with the challenges faced by my clients, whilst also allowing me to challenge their assumptions.”

Connect with Maria on LinkedIn HERE.

THE COACHING BUSINESS ACADEMY

Enrolment is OPEN for the Summer 2026 cohort of The Coaching Business Academy...

The Academy is my 12 week immersive program for coaches who are ready to start consistently attracting and enrolling the right clients.

Check out the Academy HERE - if it feels like the right support for you then we’d love you to join us.

If you have any questions whatsoever, you can book a call with me HERE and we can chat it through.

Most money mindset advice sees revenue as a straight line, always climbing, every month meant to beat the last. But when you think about it, nothing alive, nothing that grows, ever grows that way, and I think that mismatch is where so much of our money shame comes from.

In this episode I walk through the four seasons of money: spring as planting and investment, summer as the unglamorous tending with no proof yet it's working, autumn as harvest, and winter as the fallow rest we tend to mistake for failure.

Which season are you actually in right now, and are you allowing yourself to be there?

This episode is brought to you by The Coaching Business Academy, which is starting its summer cohort on the 4th of August.

If you're sensing a planting season coming on, the details are at https://gillmoakes.com/academy, and there's a link there to book a call with me if you'd like to talk it through first.

If I had to start my coaching business again from nothing, right now, in the back half of 2026, I know exactly what I'd do, and it isn't what most newly qualified coaches are doing.

In this episode I talk through the four things I'd focus on before anything else: having real, one-to-one conversations instead of building an audience, getting actual proof from real clients before touching my branding, building one plainly worded offer instead of a whole suite, and thinking in terms of my first hundred days rather than my first year. I also talk about what I wouldn't waste time on, including platform-hopping, waiting to feel ready, and letting AI write content that sounds like everyone else's.

If you're newly qualified and still waiting for your first paying client, this episode, and the free workshop I mention at the end, are both for you.

Mentioned in this episode:

The Natural Order of Things (free book)

Your First Yes workbook

Free live workshop: How To Get Your First Paid Coaching Clients — 21st July, 1pm UK / 8am Eastern

The Coaching Business Academy, Summer 2026 cohort

If you can't describe what someone gets from working with you in one breath, this episode is for you. I'm talking about why coaches pad their offers with modules, bonuses and add-ons (and why it's usually a confidence problem, not a value problem). I walk you through the three things every simple offer needs: format, price and promise.

Have you signed up for my FREE workshop yet?

1pm on 21st July: How To Get Your First (Or Next) Paying Coaching Clients.

Register here: https://www.gillmoakes.com/first-paying-clients-workshop

This podcast is sponsored by The Coaching Business Academy. Summer cohort starts 4th August. https://gillmoakes.com/academy

Your business doesn't become real the day you qualify. It becomes real the day someone says yes, and pays you to coach them...

This episode is about that first yes, and why most newly qualified coaches are sitting further away from it than they need to be. Coach training teaches you to coach. It rarely teaches you to get paid. So you land in the gap between qualified and paid, and start believing the answer is a better website, a tidier Instagram grid, a cleverer funnel.

It isn't. Your first handful of paying clients won't come from your content marketing. They'll come from conversations. It's a proper rewilding move: stripping away everything that doesn't belong so the real work of these early days can actually happen.

If this is your sticking point, come to my free live workshop on the 21st of July, How To Get Your First (Or Next) Paying Coaching Clients. It's a hands-on 90-minute session where we sort your coaching edge, start your list, build a simple starter offer, and I coach you on the conversations that turn into clients. You'll leave knowing exactly what to do.

How To Get Your First (Or Next) Paying Coaching Clients...

21st July, 1pm UK / 8am EST. Free, live, limited places.

Register for the workshop: https://www.gillmoakes.com/first-paying-clients-workshop

Get the Your First Yes workbook: https://www.gillmoakes.com/your-first-yes

gillmoakes.com

Here we go... the seventh and final layer of The Natural Order of Things, the one that really decides everything: Deep Transformation.

Here's the reframe at the heart of this episode. Your job was never to teach, coach, or deliver content. Your job is to hold space while your client does the work only they can do. You can't transform anyone. You can build the container that lets them transform themselves.

The small things, done consistently. Timekeeping, boundaries, kept promises, full presence. The co-creation that turns a perfectly good client experience into one people can't stop talking about.

And because this is layer seven, it's also where the whole framework comes full circle. Exceptional delivery feeds back into every layer before it. It grows your confidence, fuels your courage, and hands you the best marketing you will ever have: other people, telling the truth about what changed for them.

Get the free book, The Natural Order of Things: https://gillmoakes.com/natural-order-book

Download the prompts for this layer: https://gillmoakes.com/217

Come and do this work in community inside The Wild Way: https://gillmoakes.com/wildway

There’s one word that can shift the energy in a room faster than almost any other. Say it to a circle of purpose-driven, creative, soul-led women and you’ll see a collective clenching…

The word, of course, is sales. And I understand the flinch completely, because most of what we’ve absorbed about selling, consciously, but mostly unconsciously, through the whole culture of online business and through the grim experience of being sold to badly, has taught us that it’s something to be endured at best and avoided when possible. Persuading. Scripts. Handling objections. Closing strategies. Getting someone from a no to a yes through sheer pressure and cleverness.

If that’s what sales is, then of course you don’t want to do it. It would be a breach of your values. It would feel like a betrayal of the entire reason you started this work in the first place.

Here’s a dollop of good news: that isn’t what sales is. Not here. Not in this framework. Not in the kind of business you and I are building.

In this episode I'll walk you through what feel good sales look like...

This is layer six of the Natural Order of Things - you can grab the free book, which walks through all seven layers along with the journaling prompts to self-audit what’s solid and what isn’t, HERE

There’s a companion worksheet for this one at gillmoakes.com/216.

If you’d like to do this work in community with other women building soul-led businesses, The Wild Way is open - we gather together next at the full moon on the 30th of June.

https://gillmoakes.com/wildway

So, our Natural Order Of Things mini series continues...

Almost everyone does this... they have an idea for a business on Monday and they're trying to market it by Tuesday, having sailed right past the four layers that would have made the marketing actually work. And then they wonder why nobody's listening.

This week we're on layer five: Speaking Up. The marketing layer. And I won't let you near it until the layers before it are solid, because marketing built on shaky foundations is basically just shouting.

Most marketing advice was never written for businesses like ours. It was written for the ones optimising for volume, virality and the algorithm, where the offer is interchangeable and the only goal is to be seen by more people than the competition. That isn't us. We're building something quieter and far more durable, and it's built on trust.

So this episode is about marketing the way it should actually feel for a soul-led business. Knowing your people so well you could finish their sentences. Choosing one or two platforms and showing up there fully, instead of repurposing yourself into the ground across six. And understanding the four phases every bit of marketing has to move through, whatever channel you happen to love: visibility, lead generation, nurture, and the honest invitation to work with you.

I also get into consistency, which is easily the most misunderstood word in marketing. It is not posting every day. It is not punishing yourself for sending the email on a Wednesday instead of a Tuesday. It's showing up reliably and recognisably as you, for long enough that people trust you're not about to vanish on them. I've been doing this podcast for four years. The first year brought me virtually no business at all. Marketing works, but it asks you to back yourself and then give it long enough to prove you right.

Next week, layer six: Honest Invitation. The sales layer. Because once the right people are raising their hands, the only question left is whether you can invite them in clearly and warmly, without it ever feeling like they're being sold at.

Mentioned in this episode

The Natural Order of Things, the book. My gift to you, free to download: https://gillmoakes.com/natural-order-book

Your Speaking Up companion worksheet, an editable PDF so you can type straight into it and keep it: https://gillmoakes.com/215

The Wild Way, my membership for soul-led women. £22 a month at the founding rate, locked in for as long as you stay.

We gather live on Zoom twice a month, at new moon to set intentions and at full moon to release and reflect, with hot seat coaching, a community hub, and a recorded class each month.

Our first new moon call is today, 15th June, 5pm UK time (12pm Eastern), our first full moon call is on 30th June 5pm UK time (12pm Eastern)

JOIN NOW - https://gillmoakes.com/wildway

I jumped on for a cheeky bonus episode this week because I genuinely could not sit on this a moment longer. The Wild Way is open, and I’m ready like a nervous, over-prepared host, to welcome you inside.

The Wild Way is the community I’ve wanted to belong to for years, so I’ve gone and built it, which feels like the only sensible response to wanting something that didn’t exist yet.

I’ve run memberships before. Two of them, in fact. Both were profitable on paper, both were perfectly lovely, and both left me feeling a bit meh, because I’d built the membership a business coach is supposed to build. Sensible. Logical. Ticks every box and warms exactly none of your bones.

The Wild Way is different.

This is for women building business doing the work that truly matters to them. Work that feels good AND makes bloody good money, because I will go to my grave making a stand for that and.

In this community, we don’t meet on the first or last particular day of the month. We follow the moon instead. A rhythm that has worked for me for a long while now. At new moon we set our intentions around where we’ll put our focus and energy for that lunar cycle. Two weeks later, at full moon we reflect on what’s working and release what isn’t. Two weeks, every time. The moon has been doing this reliably for a very long time, and it turns out she’s an excellent accountability partner.

That rhythm has moved my own business forward more than almost anything. Working on it, gently and on purpose, rather than always frantically in it.

Who this community is for

Come in if you’re already established but a bit lonely (entrepreneurial loneliness is real, and nobody warns you about it).

Come in if you’re right at the start of something and want to grow it without selling your soul… or your Sundays.

Come in if you’re having the slow but sure, unfurling realisation that you might have started the wrong business, and you want to start pivoting to something more soul-aligned.

All of you belong here.

And nothing about this is rushed, forced or frenetic. If you’re chasing the hustle, you have come spectacularly to the wrong place.

What’s inside the membership

A monthly class. June’s class is Trust the Timing, a topic I chose having decided that now is the right time to bring this to life - precisely when it finally felt right.

A guided meditation and a reflection workbook each month, stacking up into a proper library of soul-led business wisdom.

A community hub for connecting, asking the real questions and RSVPing to everything.

Live calls together on Zoom twice a month, an hour each, at new and full moon. We ground in, talk through the month’s theme, set or reflect on intentions together, then open up for sharing and you can ask for the specific advice / coaching you need from me.

The chance to book private 1:1 coaching with me at the lowest rate I ever offer it, members only.

A founding member price

It’s £22 a month as a founding member, and that price is yours for keeps. It will never be lower than this. I’ve made it gently, deliberately affordable, because this was never a numbers game for me. I would simply rather have the right women in the room than a spreadsheet that looks impressive.

Come and join us

Head to gillmoakes.com/wildway, have a good nose around, and come in if it feels like the right place for you.

Join today, on launch day and our very first call is TODAY (June 15th) at 5pm UK / 12pm US, setting our intentions together with the energy of the new moon. Miss this first call - no worries - you simply roll in on the next new or full moon call. The moon, as ever, will wait for you.

You know the feeling. You read something and stop dead. "Yes. Exactly that. I've never heard it put that way before." That flash of recognition is what a worldview does, and it's the difference between being remembered and being white noise.

This week we're into layer four of our 7 part mini series, The Natural Order Of Things: your worldview. Your thought leadership. Your distinctive, lived, hard-won take on your corner of the world. It's the opinions you'd defend in a room full of people who disagreed with you, and it's the reason the right people choose you and keep coming back.

If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right and somehow still disappearing, this is the one for you.

Next week, part five: the Speaking Up layer, where we take your worldview and make you properly visible to the people who need you.

Mentioned in this episode

The Natural Order of Things, the book. My gift to you, free to download: https://gillmoakes.com/natural-order-book

Your World View companion worksheet: https://gillmoakes.com/214

The bonus workbook for figuring out your worldview, borrowed from my Coaching Business Academy, because some things are too good to reinvent: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yf_E_Cq4h9uCOPjM7hfKDZX2x2S-_vfV/copy

The Wild Way, my community for soul-led women. £22 a month, live calls together at new moon and full moon, and our first gathering is at New Moon on 15th June: https://gillmoakes.com/wildway

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