On Episode 17, Heather Tydings of Own Your Evolution and I talked about being high functioning, anxious, and kind of running through life like a chicken with your head cut off. When we get overwhelmed and anxious, our energy depletes. How do you get that back?

Recognize and try to prevent it from being taken in the first place. Yes, things come up that are naturally going to to take your energy down, but on a day to day basis your energy should not be shifted and pulled from all different directions and circumstances. Someone else's mood, something going on with someone else, a meme that someone posted on Facebook - whatever you're all bent out of shape on - how many times a day are you giving your energy away each week? I want you to take your power back by protecting your energy.

Be aware of your emotions. Are you reacting to a scenario or are you responding to a scenario? The difference there is when you're reacting, you're not taking time to think or feel. If someone says something that pisses you off and you just immediately react - you snap back at them, you're grumbling about something they did so now you're going to throw it back at them - that's reacting. Versus responding - taking a second, breathing, really thinking about the situation, and giving a positive, constructive response to it.

Be selective with who you share your time with. We all know people in our lives who just drain and deplete all of our energy. Then there are the people who fill our tank, help remind us of our higher selves, and create a space where we can literally just smile and have fun. You can protect your energy by creating boundaries and timelines for how long, if at all, you'll be spending time with those people who don't fill your tank.

Don't talk about your ideas too soon. So a lot of times when you have a brand new idea, your sparks go off. You're super excited, you're skipping around, you're like, oh my gosh, we're going to conquer the world. Which is an incredible feeling, right? And you're on this enormous high, you go run into a salon and you're like, oh my gosh, listen to this! If they're not the right person, they're not going to contribute to your energy. They're going to deplete it and aren't going to know what's going on. They may kind of knock you off your energy throne.

Share your ideas with the right people. Be really selective on who you turn to when brainstorming or going through things. Choose those who make you feel more excited and enlightened at the end of conversations.

Not absorbing other people's energy. This is particularly hard. I can speak from the heart from this. I am an empath inside and out, but just because someone else is having a bad day doesn't mean you have to absorb that and turn your good day into a bad day. You don't have to feel bad for feeling good when someone else's feeling bad. You can actually be an advocate to help that person through something or to maybe help them see something from a different perspective.

There are a thousand other ways that I could guide you in protecting your energy, but the most important thing to remember guys is you have to be aware of your energy to even know when and where you need to protect it, and almost always at the root or the people that you surround yourself with.

- - -

For more inspiration, follow

Support the show

Leave a Review!
We love, love, love to read your comments, feedback, and reviews. It also helps other women like you know they're in the right place to get support.
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-gutsy-podcast/id1445481970

So you are working hard day and night. You are pounding things out like they are your job because let's face it, it kind of is right? Yet on the inside, you feel like a complete train wreck. You are anxious, you are overwhelmed. You've got so many things going on that you feel like if you turn your head the wrong direction, all the sands gonna drop. So how do we set those boundaries? How do we endure just comfort to make changes that lead us to feel like we can live a large and fearless life? I mean, can we truly work smarter and not harder and also feel fulfilled?

Guys, I am so excited because today on The Gutsy Podcast we have our first ever guest, Heather Tydings, and she is going to dig into all these things. She is the owner of Own Your Evolution. She's a psychotherapist and certified Martha Beck Life Coach for women and teen girls who want to live a soulful, mindful, and potent life. She works with them to design a vibrant life by tuning into their internal wisdom using mindfulness practices and spirituality. She presents as an extrovert, but she is a true empath (which I can completely relate to) and has a deep abiding need for quietness and stillness. She's a mama bear to an adorable 11-year-old son, she's a writer, a pilates lover, and a lifetime vegetarian.

Heather, welcome to The Gutsy Podcast.

"Thank you, Laura. Thanks for having me."

Absolutely. This is a joy for me and I know for all of our guests. Now before we begin, icebreaker/fun fact - You met Oprah? So we need to talk about that.

"I totally did meet Oprah!"

How'd that happen?

"Oh, well I started getting into vision boarding, um, kind of as an experiment after I think I saw Martha Beck on Oprah. So I started to play with vision boards and I was going through a really big transitional period of my life. And, um, I created one and on the Vision Board, I put a picture of Mrs. Winfrey in a big purple, bold purple sweater. And I thought I'm going to meet her. I want to - she kind of grew me up. I learned so much about life and myself by watching her show in my teen years. And I wanted to meet my mother, though she didn't know she was my mother. 

And funny, I found out that she opened the window on her website for one day a month and you had to go and put your information and you had a watch it every day and put your information in to get on her show. And so I did that for about a year and I was not giving up. Um, they did not call me. And finally..." (Continue Reading)

- - -

Mentions:
Heather Tydings
Own Your Evolution
Martha Beck
Slacker Magic, Abigail Steidley
Jill Bolte Taylor

For more inspiration, follow along with us at:

thegutsypodcast.com
f

Support the show

Leave a Review!
We love, love, love to read your comments, feedback, and reviews. It also helps other women like you know they're in the right place to get support.
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-gutsy-podcast/id1445481970

This week's #powerback is talking about the art of delegation. A lot of you have either been or currently are starting a business, which means you're wearing all 57,000 different hats that come along with that. So you become pretty accustomed to having to do it all. And that's really a struggle because when people try to help or you hire employees or you start to expand, people want to help you, but you're in such a normal routine and habit that it's really hard to let some of those things go.

Or another common thing, it takes time to train someone to be able to delegate it to them. Right? If this is a task they've never done before or a program they've never used or a certain part of your process you're doing, it's hard to duplicate your efforts if they've not been properly trained. So it was a knee jerk reaction. You say, "Well if I have time to train them, I might as well just do it myself."

Sometimes it's just a case of I don't know how to let people help me. I want them to, and it's not that I wouldn't be happy to delegate the 50 things that are on my plate, but I just simply don't know how to do that. And that brings me into the epic meltdown of 2019.

I have this really cool office. My one wall is completely glass and that happens to be the wall that faces my team - purposely designed so that yes, I could have an office space where I could conduct the things that I needed to do, but we also have this openness and transparency.

I had been feeling really overwhelmed by a lot of different things. I was doing way too many tasks. I got into that feeling where I felt like I was doing a ton of things, but they were only being done kind of okay. And I wasn't nailing anything. Like when I got to the completion of a portion of a project that I was working on, I wasn't feeling like, hell yes, I did that and I feel awesome. It was more just, okay, now I need to get onto the next thing and now this thing, etc. And I got a phone call with some information that I was not overly thrilled about and it was the straw that broke the camel's back and I had a freaking ugly ass meltdown. I'm talking ugly cry and swear words. It was just like the balloon had popped, all the emotions came out. And God bless my team. They just look back and they knew that there was some shit going down.

They always check on me, which is amazing, but it was kind of the turning point for me where I really needed to reevaluate me and my time. See, what had happened was I reabsorbed a lot of different roles and responsibilities, but I never really delegated those things out. So I made a list of all the things that I was doing. Then Amber and I went through the list and we crossed things off. She helped me really reelevate some of these items and it turns out it's really actually not that big of a deal. When you just ask for help, you would be surprised and amazed at how people want to help contribute to the overall success.

By delegating, you're not only helping them to grow and succeed, but you're also helping yourself to grow and succeed as well. So grab a piece of paper, sit down with yourself, make a list, and then grab a really amazing person that can help you go through your list and get you back to doing the things you're absolutely, incredibly, amazing at.

- - -

For more inspiration, follow along with us at:

thegutsypodcast.com

Support the show

Leave a Review!
We love, love, love to read your comments, feedback, and reviews. It also helps other women like you know they're in the right place to get support.
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-gutsy-podcast/id1445481970

Do you ever find yourself saying, "If I knew then what I know now, there is no way in HELL that I would be doing this"? You really start questioning, truly, if I knew all the things when I started that I know now, not only would it be debilitating, but it would most likely stop you from doing all the things that you're ultimately going to achieve.

This week on The Gutsy Podcast, we're going to dig into insights from some other rock-star entrepreneurs. A few months ago, I put out the question to my network and said, "What guidance do you wish that you had when you started a business?"

You know, ignorance is bliss, but there's also some things and guidance that if you can prevent certain things or go in with a little bit more mental ammo, you can make better decisions quicker and maybe even just have a broader perspective on the entire situation.

Here's the other thing about the perspective of time (which honestly blows my mind in all capacities), we are capable of a whole lot more than what we give ourselves credit for. And oftentimes the obstacles and even opportunities show up in our life when we are ready to embrace them.

So if you're, you know, one year into your business, three years into your business, 15 years into your business - if you were faced with all of the things that you have been through in the course of that time, if you were faced with those things when you started today, it would crumble, right? Because you wouldn't have the right time knowledge, know-how, real-world experience - whatever the case may be. You would not be mentally or physically prepared to handle those things because it's just simply not the time.

And every step of the way is a building block on the previous one. Right? So as I'm talking, I'm looking around in our office right now and I think about the challenges that came with that and building out the office and the timelines and the finances and all the things that came along with that.

If I had tried to process all of those details 11 years ago when I started the business, I would have freaked myself out because I'm like, I can't. At that point, I didn't even understand like fully how to create a functional website to promote myself. So how on earth was I going to mentally handle the weight of all the that came along with an office filled out? There was no perspective. (Continue Reading)

- - -

Mentions:
Karmen Spear
Matt The Lawyer
Beacon House
McIntire HVAC
Innovative Inc.
Sass Magazine
Mary Kate McKenna Photography
Score

For more inspiration, follow along with us at:

thegutsypodcast.com
facebook.com/thegutsypodcast
instagram.com/thegutsypodcast
instagram.com/thatlauraaura

Support the show

Leave a Review!
We love, love, love to read your comments, feedback, and reviews. It also helps other women like you know they're in the right place to get support.
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-gutsy-podcast/id1445481970

Have you ever been in a situation where you just feel like your gut is trying to say something to you, even though your mind may be telling you something completely different? For this week's #powerback, we're going to talk about using your gut as a tool while fact checking with your brain.

Your gut can really guide you when you're making decisions, feeling things out, or trying to understand a situation. Sometimes it comes up in the craziest scenarios and protects you. For instance, have you ever been going home, you have a standard route you always take, but all of a sudden you had this kind of weird gut feeling like you should go a different direction or pick something up on your way home? And then later you find out there was a terrible accident or there were deer in the road or something happened on that route? Or maybe you ended up running into someone at a store you hadn't seen in a long time that you really needed to reconnect with?

Your gut is this deep feeling of something needs to change or something isn't right. It's often associated with that little voice in the back of your head as well. So if you're feeling - like physically feeling - something in your stomach and all of a sudden get a thought in your mind, 9.5 times out of 10 that's your gut trying to tell you to pay attention to something.

In a business perspective, I had a potential client come in at one point and there were just a lot of signs and symptoms that uh, you know, we were just not really going to be the best fit for them. And the more they spoke, the more my gut spoke and the more I let it continue with the louder my gut got. And despite that feeling, I accepted them as a client anyway. Cash flow was tight, projects weren't as dense. It just felt like we needed to fill the void.

And guess what happened? It ended up being a miserable relationship for both of us. My gut was trying to tell me - I mean, it had its arms up in the air. It was throwing red flags. It was like, don't do it. Turn around and go the other direction. And instead of listening to it, I went against it and I paid the price.

Now, I'm no scientist or doctor or anything, so don't go quote me on research papers, but from what I have read and researched, we have more neurotransmitters in our gut than we do in our brain, which basically means we have a second brain that lives in the center of our bodies.

Our gut-brain actually serves a really amazing purpose because it cannot overthink. It can't overplay. It doesn't process any other information than yes, this is right or no, this is wrong. It's kind of like having a magic eight ball in your stomach. When you have this gut feeling, it releases Serotonin, which sends a signal to your brain. That's where you can feel like you're having a gut feeling, but then can also really process the information as well. I might have a gut feeling that I want to do something big and extravagant, but my brain is going to help me to really make an educated decision based off of the facts.

This week, I want you to take your #powerback by tuning into what your gut is saying to you. I want you to be just a little bit more receptive and aware of when you're making decisions or going about your daily life. If your core and your gut start to interact with you, notice how that feeling starts to make you feel. If you get a deep, heavy brick-like feeling, be open to evaluating that situation or scenario a bit more

Support the show

Leave a Review!
We love, love, love to read your comments, feedback, and reviews. It also helps other women like you know they're in the right place to get support.
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-gutsy-podcast/id1445481970

Do you ever watch a movie and find yourself feeling whatever the character has going on?

So maybe they’re walking around the corner and you know a killer is on the other side and you can just feel the fear in your body? Or you see that there’s heartbreak or someone has lost someone and you can feel it in your body and you’re just sad – like you can literally feel it down into your core?

If some of these things sound like you, then you’re probably an empathetic person. Sometimes it’s referred to as an empath, and this week on The Gutsy Podcast, we’re going to talk about how empathy and entrepreneurship work together.

If you’re familiar with the concept of empathy and you know me, you know that I fit the bill about 127,000%. But if you’re not overly familiar with the concept of empathy, it’s the ability to understand and feel other people’s feelings and emotions. It’s having the ability to connect with people on a human level and really truly understand how they’re feeling and what they’re saying and not just listening into the conversation.

Like I mentioned, if you’re watching a movie and you can literally feel the characters and the emotions that they’re having or if you’re witnessing, you know, an argument through people and you can really feel the pain that person is feeling. Or one of the top places my empathy loves to kick in is when I’m experiencing someone doing something that they absolutely love to do.

For instance, we went to see it Frozen on Broadway and I’m telling you, I probably cried more than every collective little girl in that entire auditorium because there’s something about the magic of watching these performers on stage in their light doing what they absolutely love to do. And then experiencing the beauty and the craft that comes out of their voices. I mean, my empathy was like flying through the roof. At the very core, empathy is simply just the ability to understand and share feelings with another person, whether they’re in your presence or not.

Being an empath means that you feel everything. This is one of the greatest gifts that a person can have, but it can also be one of the most challenging emotions to overcome. My empathy is actually so strong that I can sense when someone is feeling something, even without them saying a word. I can walk into a room and sense the energy in the room. It’s almost like a sixth sense that allows me to pick up on things both good and bad.

And then let’s add being an entrepreneur on top of that. So how does empathy play into being an entrepreneur? (Continue Reading)

- - -

For more inspiration, follow along with us at:

thegutsypodcast.com
facebook.com/thegutsypodcast
instagram.com/thegutsypodcast
instagram.com/thatlauraaura

Support the show

Leave a Review!
We love, love, love to read your comments, feedback, and reviews. It also helps other women like you know they're in the right place to get support.
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-gutsy-podcast/id1445481970

Think of all the things you say yes to with hesitation in your voice, knowing that you don’t really want to commit but you do for the fear that you’ll let someone down. How many of these sound familiar?

• Joined a board or committee, knowing you don’t have enough time or energy
 • Agreed to go hang out with someone, even if you didn’t really want to
 • Chose an outfit because it fit in better, even though you didn’t like it
 • Offered to help someone, even though you can’t get through your own stuff
 • Took on a project, even when you knew it wasn’t a good fit

We agree to do a lot of things, even when we know we shouldn’t. We overwork ourselves to please other people. And while going the extra mile to lend someone a hand or make a difference has a positive ripple effect, they should be reserved for the things that matter most, not your daily decisions.

Think about all the things you’re doing – commitments, boards, routines, habits, etc. Ask yourself, when you say yes to these things, do you have a positive reaction? Do you think, “hell yes!” when you agree to do these things? My friends, if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no. You have limited time on this earth as it is. Why spend a large chunk of it doing things that drain you?

- - -

For more inspiration, follow along with us at:

thegutsypodcast.com
facebook.com/thegutsypodcast
instagram.com/thegutsypodcast
instagram.com/thatlauraaura

Support the show

Leave a Review!
We love, love, love to read your comments, feedback, and reviews. It also helps other women like you know they're in the right place to get support.
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-gutsy-podcast/id1445481970

We live in a timeframe where it has become a lot more simplistic for us to create brands, not just in person but online. Between Instagram and Facebook and Twitter – and all the other social media platforms that are available to us – often the first step in a lot of businesses is just opening up one of those accounts. This week on The Gutsy Podcast, we’re going to talk about the difference between branding yourself as a person versus branding as a business entity.

This is often times one of the biggest questions that we get when clients are talking to us and prospects are like, you know, I’m not really sure where to begin, whether I should brand myself and my name, or if I should create a fictitious name and create a business in that direction.

I want to preface this with there really is not a right or wrong answer to this. It’s really all about you and the business you want to create and the type of brand you want to build. So whether you do one direction or the other, neither are right or wrong.

The most important thing, regardless of which one you choose, is to create a cohesive brand experience. Back in Episode 4, we really dug down into the depths of creating a brand. So if you didn’t catch that episode, I definitely recommend to go back and listen to that because we talk a lot about the fundamentals and foundational aspects to creating a brand. So I’m not going to really get down into the weeds of what our brand is, but instead today I want to help you really understand the differences, the pros and cons, and some of the differentiating factors between the two. (Continue Reading)

- - -

Mentions:
Gary Vaynerchuck
Vayner Media
Brené Brown
Oprah
Jenna Kutcher
Marie Kondo
Nike
Verizon

For more inspiration, follow along with us at:

thegutsypodcast.com
facebook.com/thegutsypodcast
instagram.com/thegutsypodcast
instagram.com/thatlauraaura

Support the show

Leave a Review!
We love, love, love to read your comments, feedback, and reviews. It also helps other women like you know they're in the right place to get support.
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-gutsy-podcast/id1445481970

One of the coolest things that human beings are able to do is to come up with new ideas. But just as quickly as we can get inspired and want to go a hundred miles an hour - we can become overwhelmed by the details of this very idea.

You can very quickly go from feeling on top of the world like you can tackle this - it's not an issue at all. Your mind is set on it and your going to do it - to being really overwhelmed by the 'I don't know how to do this' portion: I've never done this other part of the process before. This requires me to learn a new software and I don't know how I'm going to have time to do that or just something as simple as I've never done this before and I don't really know what I'm doing. Therefore, am I even qualified to dream about this idea?

Nothing will kill a dream faster than starting with the logistics. Now I know there are all different types of personalities and mindsets and I greatly appreciate logistical people, but just as there is a time to find out the details - there is also a time to just think BIG.

Think about this: If you could visualize and dream something as if nothing were an obstacle, what would you do? I've trained my creative team on this concept because every single day we are playing in the land of ideas and if we started off each conversation - each new brand story, each new idea - with how we were going to even make things happen, first I can promise you we would have missed out on a lot of really cool ideas that turned into very lucrative campaigns for our clients.

The most recent example of this, the team was working on event branding for an upcoming event we are hosting. And before getting started I reminded them, "play in the space of what if" and what that means is if you had no boundaries, what would you do? So they grabbed the floor plan and they grabbed the virtual tour and they started brainstorming together and very quickly one idea rolled into another one. They said, "Oh, what if we did this? Oh what if we did that?" And then they came to me and presented it.

Now yes, there were some really kind of crazy things in here, but, we played in the space of what if, and I absolutely adore that they didn't get locked down into the details of how things were going to be fixed to the wall, how many of each thing do we need, what's the cost for each piece going to be?

We're not in that stage yet. Right now we're just being creatives. And the more you allow yourself the freedom to come up with something new, it's often the big crazy ones that lead us to the right ideas.

So for this week's #powerback, I want you to stop "howing" your ideas to death and see what happens when you play in the space of what if. When you're headed into something that needs an idea, don't corner yourself or put a ceiling on your ideas simply because you're trying to figure out how to make them happen. Because the beautiful thing is when you don't cap yourself, you can come up with some pretty awesome ideas that may even be better than the ones that you were trying to already figure out.

- - -

For more inspiration, follow along with us at:

thegutsypodcast.com
facebook.com/thegutsypodcast
instagra

Support the show

Leave a Review!
We love, love, love to read your comments, feedback, and reviews. It also helps other women like you know they're in the right place to get support.
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-gutsy-podcast/id1445481970

How many times have you done something that seems pretty incredible to you? You have accomplished something new, you've overcome an obstacle, you've just really excelled in your business or an area of your life, and then within kind of the same breath, you think: Well, who am I even to do these things? I don't deserve them.

Today's episode on The Gutsy Podcast is talking about Imposter Syndrome: Something that more people than not suffer from, and how we can kind of start to overcome it.

Imposter Syndrome is really at the baseline all about feeling like you don't belong or don't deserve something. Like you're not cut out for the job that you have been given or any of your accomplishments aren't really real because you're a fake. Sometimes when people are experiencing this, they feel like everything that has happened to them is based out of luck and at any given moment it's all going to fall through and everyone's going to figure them out.

You'll notice this shows up a lot when someone achieves something and you hear people praise or really compliment this person and they immediately start to shut it down: Oh, well it's only because this person was there with me or it's only because I had this contact and they're the ones that really did it.

You know, there's a difference in wanting to share the limelight (which I think is really notable and just a really important thing to do), but you also don't want to discount the hard work and the knowledge you've actually put into something as well. When imposter syndrome is present, which it's in a lot more of us than we realize, that quick push-off is a quick way to turn all the heads and attention onto someone else. Because if people are not focusing on you and your accomplishments, then they can't quote-unquote figure you out.

In a lot of people's minds, if too much spotlight is put on them or too much acknowledgment is put on them - or even too much success comes into their life - they think all of a sudden they're going to be put on trial in front of a jury of people that are going to vote and say, You know what? The jury's out. You're fake. You faked it all along. We knew that you weren't true. All of your accomplishments are based on other people and you didn't actually achieve anything. 

Guys, I don't know about you, but that comment alone is scary and it sounds awful - but it's really the truth. Now, the actuality behind it is not true, but the feelings are very, very true. And when a feeling is present and not able to be worked through, it's our reality. (Continue Reading)

- - -

Mentions:
Imposter Syndrom Quiz

For more inspiration, follow along with us at:

thegutsypodcast.com
facebook.com/thegutsypodcast
instagram.com/thegutsypodcast
instagram.com/thatlauraaura

Support the show

Leave a Review!
We love, love, love to read your comments, feedback, and reviews. It also helps other women like you know they're in the right place to get support.
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/the-gutsy-podcast/id1445481970