“Michelle, even with her multi-millions, Oprah can’t even get results like your clients are getting…”
My online colleague and friend, Julie, passed away very suddenly a few months ago and I’d love to have had a chance to sit for an hour with her face-to-face and tell her what she meant to me.
We have these divinely-designed opportunities and it’s our job to say, “Yes” from a place of deep knowing that has very little to do with what our head says and everything to do with what our intuition says (link to blog on no no yes yes).
When we follow our intuition, we’re saying, “Yes” to the universe handing us exactly what we’re searching for on a silver platter, even if it doesn’t look the way we expected or come packaged as we imagined.
I had hired Julie to help me take my network marketing business to the top of the company… or so I thought…
I knew where I thought I wanted to go and I knew that I had no idea how to get there myself. That’s when I hired a coach.
I’ve hired many coaches in my life; I love being led to new discoveries and I love the insight I get when someone else points out the obvious: that truth that I’m too close to the situation and too “in my head” to see.
What I knew at the time was that what I had done to achieve the rank of one step from the top of the company was something I was no longer willing to do to get me to the top. I was destroying my sanity, my health, and my family in the process, and something had to change.
Julie was a business strategist and facebook ads expert, and I reached out to her because she was incredibly genuine in her marketing and I felt like we spoke the same language when I heard her talk.
Now I know that I was drawn to her because she was radiating empowered and balanced energy and I was radiating wounded energy. If you’d have told me that at the time, I would have thought you were cuckoo and I would have backed away slowly before running in the opposite direction.
At the time, all I knew was that she was an expert in something I knew nothing about (facebook marketing) and I was drawn to her energy. Maybe the Facebook algorithm actually is as intelligent as it is creepy. Or maybe she was as good at her trade as I had hopes of her being.
Either way, Facebook placed her ad in front of me. I watched her webinar and booked a call with her. I said, “Yes” when she offered me a chance to work directly with her, and then I promptly resisted most of what she was trying to teach me.
The reality was that my heart wasn’t in network marketing. I’d originally built my business to pay for two adoptions (a.k.a. I needed to come up with 60K fast) and once my family was complete, my motivation tanked. I started to feel like the business had destroyed the very thing that I had set out to build, which was my family.
I get now that my time in network marketing was preparing me for the amazing opportunity to help women overcome their limiting beliefs around health, but at the time, I was in emotional turmoil – which always means that something is trying to get my attention or come through. The more we resist being open to whatever is emerging, the more painful it feels. Can ya relate?
I became an accidental health coach when I lost an insane amount of weight really quickly. And I was fairly visible on account of my rank with this company.
When you see someone in the front of the room in December and they’re a size 16 (which should have been an 18 but I refused to buy more clothes) and then you see them in February and they’re a loose size 12, that really gets your attention.
I had so many people beg me for help in losing weight, that I opened up a little Facebook group and I taught them what I had learned about how to actually design a keto diet for women for weight loss (which is not remotely the way it’s taught all over the interwebs of recycled thought).
Little did I know that diet would be only part of the Total Weight Loss Equation™ but the diet part is what I knew at the time (plus I have a degree in exercise science), so that’s what I taught. And the weight peeled off. We’re talking 60lbs in 4 months. Diabetes disappearing. Women having hope for the first time in decades that they could reach their goal weight once and for all.
Julie was curious about what I was teaching so I added her to my little weight loss group.
Fast forward a few months and I was freaking out at the bottom of a bottle of wine at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday because Facebook had shut my ad account down.
I messaged Julie for moral support, and as she was known to do, she invited me to jump on a video call. I knew Julie well enough to know that she wouldn’t turn her camera on so it didn’t matter if I showed up in my husband’s old ratty t-shirt turned pajamas.
I really should have declined the call. I was in no shape to be having a business discussion at 11 p.m. after drinking too much wine. By the time I jumped on the computer to meet with her, I was certainly speaking in cursive.
Side note: It would take me another two years to kick the wine habit – I did it using the exact same Self-Sabotage Solution™ tools that I teach in my the Wild Woman program.
We jumped on Zoom and the conversation we had would change the trajectory of my entire life.
Rather than figuring out my ad account, Julie gently and kindly told me that I needed to stop being blind to that which was right in front of me, get over my own self and my own limiting beliefs, and share my message with the world.
She told me that I was being selfish by not sharing what I’d figured out, that millions of women are suffering in debilitating shame over their bodies, and I needed to help.
I protested, certain that I couldn’t possibly be called to do this as I didn’t remotely feel like I had my own shit together around body, weight, and diet. And to this she responded, “Michelle, even with her multi-millions Oprah can’t get results like your clients are getting. Who are you not to help?”
Gulp.
Then she went on to tell me that I had an obligation to charge big time for my program so that people would take it seriously, and so that I could help the kind of women who will go out and change the world when they quit letting weight hold them back.
Double gulp.
This was not what I expected when I jumped on Zoom that night with her.
Wine and stress are not helpful when you’re an emotional eater. True confession: I got off of that call and ate 4 slices of my kids’ gluten-free bread slathered with butter and honey.
And then I went to bed. It would take me another year to develop a craving technique that would have been helpful that night (before I opened the bottle of wine :).
The funny thing about a seed is that once it’s planted if it’s viable, it’s absolutely positively going to grow.
By the end of that year, it had become nearly impossible to even fake enthusiasm for my network marketing company. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s inauthenticity and that’s how I’d started to feel.
I’m a big believer in jumping and then building my wings on the way down, so although it was scary as hell, that’s what I did.
And then of course… I stalled. I worked on every single aspect of the business except the act of putting it out there for anyone to see. I brainstormed, I masterminded, I tossed, and I turned. And then little by little, I got out of my own way. I put one foot in front of the other, even with all of the unknowns, and the fear, and my desire to know the end before I begin.
My friend Julie died a few years later with so much inspiration still in her. Hardly a day passes that I’m not reminded of our conversation that night and my heart is filled with gratitude for the not-so-subtle urging she gave me to step into my greatness and share my message with the world.
If you’re needing a little love tap to step more fully into your essence and shine more brightly, I’d love to share my Wild Woman Weight Loss Roadmap with you. Hop on over here and get your bunz on the list for the next time the program opens.
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