S7E6: Mary Henderson: On Building a 7+ figure Business and not Feeling Enough...

"Looking at my business card and I realize that my entire life is a series of labels on a piece of paper..."

Mary Henderson is a transformational Leader and an internationally recognized Personal Branding & Online Business Specialist. She has 20+ years of experience building 7 & 8 figure businesses & building high-performance sales teams and 15 years delivering online solutions for large and small businesses.

Mary dove deeply into her pain, her past, and her trauma to uncover who she truly was underneath everything and leveraged her unique skills and strengths to create a software system that helps define a person at their truest self then create a brand that perfectly reflects that across all touchpoints!

Amazing conversation!

Resources:
She has tons of free masterclasses on her website from creating your own personal brand to dominating on LinkedIn (she has over 83K followers on LI) and so much more!
Free Masterclasses | Mary Henderson | Personal Branding (maryhendersoncoaching.com)
You can also schedule a free 45-minute coaching call with her directly!

Transcript

Michael Bauman: 0:00

My business card falls on the bed, and I hold that business card and just this title, Mary Henderson, managing director, like the font size became so big. I realized, my whole life is a label. Like everything about me is a label. How do we truly feel like a success in every area of our lives? How do we feel enough and know that we are not alone? Join me as I interview some of the top leaders and experts in the world, from Broadway directors to multimillionaire, CEOs, neuroscientists, and more to look behind the curtain of success and examine not only the achievements, but also the fears. The. doubts The loneliness and how we can navigate through that to create the incredible life we actually want to live. Welcome to Success Engineering. Hello everybody. Welcome back to Success Engineering. I'm your host, Michael Bauman. So today I'm actually excited to announce the launch of my upcoming 12 week Lean Agile Life Mastermind for Entrepreneurs. So this helps you optimize your mindset, your emotions, your relationships. Your health, your habits, essentially a lot of the areas outside of the things you typically think about in your business. So this launches on March 13th. If you feel like the more you pour into your business, the less you feel like you're succeeding in the other areas of your life, then this is perfect for you. Like life can be. crazy. It can be chaotic. It can be difficult to navigate the constantly changing environment, oftentimes chaotic right now. So this is all about training your mind to be able to approach that with calm and confidence, knowing exactly what you need to be doing. The other thing too is it, it can be difficult even to find time as entrepreneurs. Exercise, or even for the relationships that are really important to us, whether that's, you know, our kids, whether that's our spouse, our partners, our friends, and even turning off, right, turning off after work. Or where does the work even end, for us online entrepreneurs? We'll talk about all of these kind of things in the mastermind. what you'll learn is the Lean Agile habit framework where basically you can implement any habit and make it stick. You'll learn how to understand and master your emotions so that you can stay positive, you can stay productive, you can stay present in any situation. You'll develop an agile mindset so that you can pivot, you can navigate the chaos and uncertainty. You can stay calm, you can stay focused even when you're tired, even when you're stressed, even when you're busy. and they'll also look about how we can regain, you know, connection with those relationships and even our health, and our happiness. So I have an early bird discount, of$250 off if you sign up before midnight on March 8th. And I don't just work with anybody. It's really important to me that I feel we are good fit for working together and that I can trust you to hold a safe place for other people in this Mastermind. So if this sounds like something that'd be beneficial for you, I'd love to talk to you. I'd love to hear you know where you're coming from, what your biggest challenges are. So you can go to success engineering.org. Just schedule a pre-call with me and we can talk. You know how my Mastermind might be able to help you achieve your goals in the life that you wanna live. So again, that's success engineering.org. Schedule a call with me. I'd love to talk with you. I'd love to have you as a part of the Mastermind. All right, let's get back to the show. I have Mary Henderson on. She's an amazing transformational leader. She's an internationally recognized personal branding and online business specialist. So 20 plus years of experience building seven, eight figure businesses. High performance sales teams, 15 years delivering online solutions for large and small, small businesses. Ton of publications she's been featured in. She's a digital sector thought leader. And then what really sets her apart, and this is gonna be super fascinating to get into, is she blends her personal branding methodology from her story with technology to just get a reproducible thing that can take somebody's brand essence and just put it out on all the touchpoints in every, every way you are aligned with who you want to be and how you wanna show up and how you want to appear as I love that. So welcome to the show. This is gonna be a lovely conversation. Hi, Michael. How you doing? I am doing really well. happy to be here talking to you. Me too. Can't wait. So on a, on a less happy note, but this, this kind of provides the juxtaposition for where you're at now and the incredible things that you're doing. And so we're gonna, we're gonna rewind and start with your, your background. And you literally in, in your own words, described it as the house of hell, unfortunately. So can you talk about that We'll start on the downer then we'll, we'll, we'll take, we'll, we'll Rocket take off from there. No, I, I think Michael, all of us have the hero's journey. Okay. And we choose whether we wanna go on that path or we don't wanna go on that path because the hero's journey really does start always with a story of, my life's not going where I wanted to go. Right? And so for me, you know, that story really started around just before year 2000 when I I got a divorce. I was married for literally five minutes to the absolute wrong person. But, you know, from that experience, what happened was, even though it was so destroying, not the divorce, just that the person that I believed was. What I deserved, right? Which was completely so far away from the truth. But I think we all, all of us have to go through this. I do believe this anyway, so we got the, I got divorce and then I was like, okay, my life is just, I can't get any lower than this. Like this is the lowest point in my life. I can't get any lower. The only next step for me is to go up. So I remember Michael, and this is really profound, that I was in my car and I had this like, Like a a very short term, like a little consulting type of job. It was just very low key. More on the admin side, and I'm driving to this job that I absolutely hated. I'm in my car. There's a red traffic light, and I remember just sit, sitting amongst the traffic in my car, like just hating everything about myself, my life, the way I look, everything, my whole reality. And I. In that moment had this switch that just, I just thought, no, you know what? I am never going to allow this to happen to myself again. I've got to change my life and it's up to me. It was just in that moment, it was like I had this massive, massive epiphany. I go to my job and in that, as I'm driving there, I'm thinking I've gotta change my life, like literally change my life. The very next day I got up and I, and I just started applying for jobs in the tech industry. That's where I wanted to be because I came from a media background. I, you know, that's where I started my, my career essentially in media. Media was not for me, but what I was very good at and recognized this as at, at a young, at at, at a young age is that I was just very numbers orientated. Like I just, anything to do with zeros and ones, you got my attention. I just knew how to I understood patterns, right? I didn't know that that was a gift back then. I just thought that, that everyone could do that. So I thought the tech industry at that time, think about this year 19 99, year 2000 tech industry was booming. Everyone wanted to be in the tech industry and the reason I think a lot of people wanted to be in the tech industry Michael, is because it was young, it was dynamic, it was vivacious. It was forever changing. It was just so dynamic. It was a perfect match made in heaven for my personality type. So, I applied for a hundred and fifty three fifty eight jobs. I got 48 face-to-face job interviews, and I got rejected from every single one of those. Every single one. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, so now think about this and, and I'm thinking. No way. I am, I, I don't care if I get another a hundred nos, but I will not stop until I get what I want. So I had this persistence, persisting, persistent, and then, you know, out of the blue, nine months later, 153. Job interview a job application, 48, job interview, face-to-face job interviews. I get this phone call out of the blue. And this amazing, beautiful, beautiful soul. She says, hi, my name's Priscilla. She said, our VP of sales wants to interview you. She actually just found your CV buried underneath a whole heap of PA papers as she was visiting you, the Melbourne office, because we, our sales manager is no longer here. So she went to Melbourne to clean out his office and found your cv. She wants to meet you on Friday and fly you to Sydney. So I fly to Sydney. I get the job on the spot, it was the right job. Mm-hmm. at the right time, at the right place because that job is why I do what I do today. Mm-hmm. a hundred percent. There's a massive interlink there. And so that's really where the origin of my story in terms of what, why I do what I do today is because of that entire experience of being fully rejected, you know, being at the lowest point in my life. But that one sliding door moment changes everything. Mm-hmm. can you, can you talk about I'm, I'm debating all whether to get into this now or, or, or later Cause you have a full system around it, but When, when people go through those really difficult times and you know, maybe in the, in the back, very deep within themselves, somewhere, they're like, I know there's, I'm made for more than this. I'm worth more than this. But everything like kind of doesn't seem to be, you know, externally showing that. What do people do to one, kind of like rebuild their identity when they go through places like that and two, Unwrap the layers of those like emotions and feelings and use those to actually point towards their values and the things that are really important to them. I love that question because that part of my journey has been so profound, so important till this very moment, and this is my understanding based on all of these years of experience n not to mention that I also was mentored by some incredible people in that process as well. This is what I've learned, Michael. Most of us are in denial. of the truth, okay? Most of us are in denial of the truth. That's just humanity. We haven't been taught that. The truth is where the freedom actually lies. And even though we feel like we've unpeeled the layers, and even in my situation getting that one job, it was like, oh my God, now I'm on my way to victory. I wasn't on my way to victory. I was on my way to redefining my personality. You are absolutely right and my identity, but in terms of the core emotions and feelings, they were still there. I had not resolved that, and I didn't know that they would come back at a later stage to play out in my life. But you know what we do is, and they do, by the way, keep playing out in your life. It's just that we deny them. We are like, oh, everything's fine. You know? How many times have people asked you, how are you doing? I'm fine. You're not fine. That's the truth. You're not fine. Right? So, so the thing is, for me that emotions and feelings play a significant role in how our, how we experience every aspect of our life. What I've come to understand, you know, there are three layers of us. You know, there's. The true self, the soul. There's the subconscious, which is our spirit, if you will, and then we've got the physical self, which is our physical body. Now, the thing that we have to understand from my experience is that my brain cannot give me any more. Than what I've put into it. It's like an AI machine. Whatever you put in is all it can give you out. So my brain is, has very linear, but it's also extremely limited. Yes. One might say, but Mary, I could learn. I could go to webinars, I can read books, I can, I can, you are absolutely right. But if it, if that knowledge has never been experienced, it's just input. We're looking for output and we are looking for a feedback loop. So the feedback loop. Painful experiences, painful emotions, painful situations, painful events, anything that's not loving in our life. Anything that we don't love in our life that we're experiencing is connected to an emotion and a feeling that is buried. So until we actually sh show up and confront the truth. For example, if somebody is listening to this and they're an entrepreneur and they're frustrated because no matter how hard they try it, they just can't seem to get clients, something is wrong. So the truth is, the absolute truth is. That I can't get clients because I feel like I'm a loser. That's the truth. The truth is I have no money, and that's the truth. So we have to own up to that. Not say, Hey, I'm fine, or put out all these posts on social media. Hey, look at my laptop lifestyle, when your whole life is in ruins. That's not the truth. That's a del that's, that's just an illusion. So we have to go to the. And confront that ourselves. It doesn't involve anybody else because once we confront the truth, then we can get to the emotion. And that's, that's the connection. Once we understand where the emotions and feelings are and how we can transcend them into loving feelings, that's the, that's the pathway to freedom. The process of the hero's journey, if you will, is not for the faint of heart. Put it that way. It's those people that really want to experience and self-actualize their true potential to come back and to tell the story through experience, not just learned knowledge. Mm-hmm. Because once you go through this experience, then the emotions and the feelings are our feedback loop, and we become highly conscious of that and we can confront those emotions and feelings with such ease and grace and in. they're invitations for us because we welcome them because we know the positive impact that it will make, not just in my life, but my children, my clients, the world at large. So that's, that's the kind of the angle that I would give when it comes to emotions and feelings. Yeah, I, I have a very similar, similar thing, you know, like when I look at success, you know, we talk about success engineering. The whole reason behind it is like, I, I really feel like we need to redefine what that is. And so people define it as that appearance of success. And I would say, you know, I have kind of a layer thing like you talk about as well. You have that appearance as success and there's no correlation between that and actually feeling. like a success. And I would say, you know, in my classifications, like that's kind of that second layer you're looking like, how can I actually feel like a success? And, and so often the feeling of not feeling enough. And I know this is a part of your story as well, we might get into it, but that feeling of not feeling enough, they're so interchangeable with success, especially for entrepreneurs. They can. use'em interchangeably. Like, how can I feel enough as an entrepreneur? How can I feel like I have enough money? How can I feel enough as a father? How could I feel like I got enough done or had enough impact? So that's that second layer. But like you talk about, you have to go deeper than that. You have to go to, yeah, the identities. The, the narratives, the stories that we tell around how we view the world. And then underneath that is what you talked about with that true self. And, you know, I talk about it in terms of like the presence and the awareness. Like actually going, can I be present here right now? And is it enough? You know, like, is that enough question? Like is it, yeah, is this moment enough? Is it enough for me to just be. And I feel like that's the biggest gift I could give to anybody. You know, my, my family, my kids, anybody that I'm interacting with is going when I'm here, like I'm here. And that's, that's kind of like what you're talking about. But I do wanna get into that aspect of, of validation. So you had another. You know, I'll classified as the the business card epiphany. But you had this other epiphany later on in kind of your, your career and you discovered that everything you were doing was about seeking validation from your parents. So can you talk about that story? Oh, yeah. And then we'll, we'll again, dive, dive into the deep, deep end. That was probably the second origin within my story that really where I did a serial U-turn, you know? So for me, my whole life about success was the label, you know, it, and the materialism, which was the outcome. Okay. So it was all about what I had, what I wore, how I looked, the, you know, all of the, I mean, even my business card, I mean, for God's sakes. I mean, this is just ridiculous, but, In 2011, September the 10th, 2011, my son was born at three 30 in the afternoon. Literally three hours after that, I'm sitting on my bed, I reach over to get my purse. Cause I wanted to put some lip balm on my lips. My business card falls on the bed, and I hold that business card, Michael. And it was like, I've never had a near death experience, but it was certainly kind of like that. It was almost like I, I held this business card and I could see. all of these snapshots of my life in just appearing in front of me. It was like a very fast PowerPoint presentation and I'm thinking, oh my God, like what's going on here? And I'm looking at this card and just this title, managing director, Mary Henderson, managing director, just kept on like the font size became so big. It was like right here in front of my eyes. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, what is going on? And then I just sat still for a moment. and I realized, oh my God. Oh my God. Wow. My whole life is a label. Like everything about me is a label, number one. Number two, this little card is validating my self-worth and who I am and how I show up in the world. Like this card, this piece of paper, this cardboard is validating my self worth. Like what the and and then something most importantly happened and that was that I recognized w with clarity and I had to face the truth now cause I couldn't deny it cuz the pain was so deep that I had to just sit there and admit that the truth. The reason why I've built this business that I had built from ground up for seven years, my own software company into multi seven figure business, is because I was looking for validation from my parents to tap me on the shoulder all of these years later to say, Hey, Mary, we're so proud of you, even though you didn't finish your degree. Like, I'm still waiting. And in my thirties for validation, like really. And so I knew when Ida was going to leave that hospital bed that I would resign from my own company because I also recognized that I was in the wrong job, doing the wrong thing, serving the wrong people. And even though I built it into a successful company, I was also. Killing myself, like just physically, emotionally, and mentally trying to maintain that business. So, And then two weeks after that I did resign. My accountant just told me that it was hormonal and I should just forget about it. And I just said, no way. This is like at a soul level, my friend. Trust me, And so, you know, so January we merged my business with another business, thankfully, and january 1st, 2012, I took a 12 month sabbatical. I had a professor in philosophy who'd mentored me. Amazing. I had another per, another expert in the emotional body who mentored me. I did a 12 month course on quantum medicine at at Quantum University in Hawaii, and I walked to my computer on January 1st, 2012, and I googled how do I change my life? That was the my memory. 1st of January, 2012, and through that process, especially with my mentor, the professor, he really, really showed me a way to unpack myself. And being a systems orientated person, I was able to see very clear patterns and realize. With such dignity and beauty and for the first time, deep self, self-love that hey, I actually can do some things really, really easily and really, really well. And therein lies my purpose. So I'm gonna package that and I'm gonna take it to the world, and that's where I am. Before we get into the wonderful package of what, what that is, can you talk about cuz he, you know, he had you get outta pencil and let's talk about that. The, the story and the narrative, you know, cuz you talk about that hero's journey. What will, how did he go about kind of unraveling that the philosophy fa professor for you? It was really interesting, and I'll tell you why I went down that path. I found him on a, on a TED talk, by the way. So it was just like if the, I mean, that's the divine talking to you. If that's not the divine talking to you, I don't know what he is. So I went down that path and, you know, He was not self-help. I didn't want self-help books. I was well and truly beyond self-help books, I've been down that path for 20 years. Nothing, you know, since my twenties. Self-help is about fixing the effect, not the cause. I was looking at a way to fix the cause, not the effect. And what he was able to do was twofold. He was able to, some very profound ancient wisdom that most of us would never be privy to. Cause they don't share that stuff in, you know, in mainstream media or in self-help. So I was able to have a completely different understanding of who am I first to start with. The second thing is that he asked me to do, the first thing he asked me to do was to write a story in first person. About the first 21 years of my life. I'm like, I dunno what happened to me at zero. And he said, oh no, don't worry. Your soul will know. You just have to allow for that to happen. I'm like, where is this guy taking me? I mean, you know, I considered myself a fairly open-minded, you know, if I was to put a label on it, a spiritual person. But this was a whole different. Level of spirituality because it wasn't about spirituality. It was actually about understanding what the true meaning of your true self is. Okay. So it was taking me down that path of truly understanding what that means and how that feels and how that manifests, et cetera. and he said, and you must write in a pencil. You cannot write in a pen. But it took me about two weeks to actually start writing. I was, because I was so linear and so. Caught up in my physical self that I didn't allow myself to open up. I didn't believe that there was anything else bigger than this brain and this body. And so I get the pencil. Michael and I, I was really struggling to write, and then just two weeks later it's I, maybe two, three o'clock in the morning. It was like I, I just came, it all just came and I sat down and I got opened up my jet. It just started writing, and it's called freehand writing. You just write, you're not thinking, you're just writing. You're the hands actually writing. But really it's the soul that's writing. And so I wrote about the 21 first. 21 years of my life. It took me maybe a week to write the whole thing, and it was just unbelievable because I took that information. And of course being a systems person, I opened up an Excel spreadsheet, you know, 0 1, 2, 3, 4, right up until 21. Actually I did it till I was 30. And then I started to look at things a, a about myself, you know, like patterns of behavior traits. When was I happy? When was I sad? Values, who was there, what was happening? Whatever I could, whatever my soul declared was enough for me to define O m G. These are my values, my core values, things that I truly believe in, because when I was in my truth in a, in other words, when I was appearing in the world doing what I. My core value is truth cuz that's the truth, right? So this is why I, I say to people, if you're going to deny the truth, it's going to cause a lot of pain in your life. You're, we are better off declaring the truth because it will actually open up the door. And really there is, there's just so much peace and joy and bliss when we step over that threshold. So having a look at the first 30 years of my life in a book format, if you will. And then our Excel spreadsheet gave me a lot of clues to immediately self realize. Why have we been told to look for our purpose outside of ourselves when it's actually staring at me in my face? I had to go through all of this experience to get me to my purpose now, and that was the epiphany. That was the moment where my whole life just went o mg. it was, yeah, that it was very, very profound. And of course he, you know, when you work with people like that, you know, they have access to knowledge. I mean, he had access to the Vatican libraries and, I mean, know things that we could never have access to. Just speaking to somebody at that level of breadth and depth of knowledge and wisdom, it's captivating because you can see that what he had studied and knew, and. and how he was giving that information over to me. It was creating profound. It was like my brain was completely rewiring, you know, at a million miles per second, because suddenly I found myself so vulnerable and ignorant. Actually very ignorant because I thought that life was like this, when in actual fact it was completely so far away from that. and that's, that was kind of the beginning of, you know, that, that, that led that trajectory of truly, truly believing in this notion around your core values, honoring your gifts, honoring your talent, honoring your professional skillset, which is what I call wisdom and currency today. But that's where the start, that's where it all started. So I'm, I'm super curious. So you had this like, you know, and that, that sounds like, and you could, could correct me if, if I'm wrong, but it sounds like, more of a, a cognitive kind of approach, right? You're, you're writing something down, you're processing with your brain, you're putting it on a self spreadsheet, but parallel to that, you talked about that emotions. Kind of expert. I'm curious cuz you know, we can get the knowledge from the top and, and sometimes like you, you, you're talking about, it can get us down there. Right? You know, you have things like cognitive behavioral therapy, things like that, that can change from, from your thoughts to your emotions and then down, and then you have somatic experiencing therapy and stuff like that. That's all. Yeah. You know, your body, this stuff that's, that's, you know, trauma that's trapped in your body. So I'm curious, you have that parallel track, but what did it look like with the, the other person that you were working with on the emotional side? Well, it was a perfect marriage because the thing is that what happens is that you do advance your cognition levels when you're doing this level of work, because suddenly critical thinking starts to step in. You know, self realization starts to step in and you're trusting in that process, which is something that I, I thought I was doing, but I was not doing that on the emotional side. That was different because that was actually. allowing me to step into a place of being comfortable, being uncomfortable, and, and. that's profound because if we, because to to deal with emotions, it's not about dealing with my emotions of what I think is happening to me right now. It's dealing with my emotions that happen in that individuation phase of zero to seven. You know, and it's really going back to not the story or the narrative and the blame game, because you can't blame. and the reason you can't is because nobody can feel my feelings from my past. So my parents might, it doesn't matter who caused the, the trauma or the pain. No one can feel my feelings. Therefore, no one can remove it except myself. So I learned something profound about emotions, Michael, that emotions and feelings are two different things, because when you ask somebody, you know, how are you feeling? They'll say, I'm angry. But then if I say, how does angry make you feel? Then they'll give me a whole list of descriptions of what angry actually makes means. So there's lots of layers of emotions, right? Which are feelings associated to, to emotions. The thing about emotions and feelings is that they're mostly connected to a fear or unloving behavior. Okay. So they're the two core things that most of us, we don't get to that place cause it's uncomfortable. And what we do, instead of blaming, we've gotta feel it. And that's where the, the transcendence of the pull actually just snaps. And you, it's like a freedom. So when Peter was training me on the emotional body. It wasn't just about training me and saying, Hey, let's just get it rid of the emotion. It was actually understanding what does it mean to be, to have an emotional body. How I got onto Peter, by the way. Was I read Dr. Candace Pert book, Molecules of Emotion. That's when I recognize that I have emotions caught up at a cellular level at this is physical and, and I need to clear that because, because my body had become my mind, that was the reality. And so when you get help from somebody who's specialized in that work, it's not just about releasing the habit and the memory of those emotions and feelings at a physical level, at a cellular level, it's also releasing it at a subconscious level, but at a soul level. Okay? So at at the true self level, that's where the emotion actually is locked in. That's where the freedom needs to start in order for the domino effect to happen. the other way around. So we put all our effort into the physical, and what I learned is no, no, no. The, all the effort needs to go into the unseen, which is the soul, and that's the domino effect. It works from there all the way down. Here's the other thing that I, that I think is really profound and I wanna mention. Could you imagine if our school system, just think about this for a moment, taught us about feelings. Okay? But not just taught us, but actually feel the feeling. So we, as a human species, we don't even know what it feels like, for example, to be sad when you're angry, right? So we don't have a feelings dictionary, but yet Michael, the soul speaks in the language of feelings. So how do we ever clear what is actually holding us back when none of us are educated on the understanding of the core language of our true self. My soul doesn't speak in words. My soul speaks in feelings as yours does. That's why when you and I connect, there was this instant like banter. It's the souls just dancing together going, yes, this energy is right. It feels good. It feels right. Mm-hmm. So it's the same thing in our life as adults, we have to go back to being a child. We have to express emotions like children, experience tantrums the same thing that is the right way to to eliminate emotions and feeling. So could you imagine as an adult now I'm getting, getting taught how to go back to my child's self in order to release all of these blocked emotions, but at a soul level, and then it works its way down. Very, very profound, but it was such a beautiful compliment to what I was learning from my mentor, the professor. So all of these learnings has become the core foundation of my entire philosophy today. and we're gonna get into that a little bit. I did want to talk about, you know, you mentioned not teaching the emotions and stuff in school. I actually had Jessica Joelle Alexander on, so she's the author of The Danish Way, way of Parenting and you know, a, you know, any of the Scandinavian countries have been RA ranked the highest in terms of happiness. Yeah. For decades. Right? And she talks about how they actually do that in schools. They have classes in schools, teaching kids how to comfort each other when they're, when they're hurting. Like the things that you're like, this is so important in life. and they actually have classes for it. Like everything that they do is based on empathy and cooperation as opposed to competition. It's, it's totally different than, than everything that we do. And that's, you know, kind of a little side note there, but Lovely. If, if, yeah, we were able to implement that more in, in different, different countries. So you talk about this, you had this incredible, you know, year long time where you're just unwrapping all these things, coming at it from all of these different perspectives. And then you started to marry that with your incredible technical skills. You know, like your zeros and ones, like all of the software, you know, building business brand stuff that you've done. So can you talk about, like, let's just kinda walk through the process. Like if you're working with entrepreneurs. Where do you start with them? How do you, you know, help them connect with that deep sense of who they are and then work out from that to represent that in the world. Let me start a little bit back to front from there so I can actually put myself into context and why I teach the way that I do. When I started to unpack that 21 years, I started to realize that I have unbelievable skill in sales. I have unbelievable skills in building digital solutions. I have unbelievable skills in personal branding, which that first job that I told you that break, that big break that I had, In year 2000 where I actually came face to face with the power of personal branding, and it was in that job where I actually started to play with. The idea and really start to solidify you know, the, the notion around personal branding versus job description. So that was a whole journey in itself. And then of course, you know, the embodiment work, which is also a part of my program as well. All and, and the system, the systemization actually converting. You know, data, moving parts into one solution. Everything that I teach is everything that I am, everything that I've experienced, whether it's in my or whether it's through mentorship, but every, all the knowledge that I have has all been experienced over and over again, and. is very important. So this is why when I work with people, the criteria is that you have to have a minimum of 10,000 hours in your area of specialization because that inventory is critical in order to create the outcome that we are looking for. And so what does that journey look like, Michael? Well, we have to start with a personal brand. And the reason I say this is because it's the foundation that we are building. Can I clarify? A personal brand is not about being famous in my world. A personal brand for me is understanding who you are in your natural state of being. This is why we've developed a software around that. It's called authority. My clients go in there, they complete the applications. What does that give me? It gives me. A hundred percent you, I get to see every aspect about you, your values, your gifts, your talents, your persona, every aspect about your skills, traits, genius, zone passions, you name it. I've got it captured in a document now. So when you come to me and you say, I wanna be Kim Kardashian, and that report doesn't match that, I'm gonna say, I think you wanna be famous. I don't think you really wanna serve people, right? Mm-hmm. it gives me an immediate, immediate truth card. It's the benchmark. So when I'm working with people, I'm working with, and what you bring to the table only. That's it. It's all I need. I don't need anything else. And so we've started to build that found. The foundation is the true is the essence of who you are. It's the essence of what you do. It's the essence of who you serve. It's the essence of what you promise. All of these aspects are formulated in your brand, which then also leads to the next layer, and that is understanding. who you serve at the different stages of their buying cycle. How do you start a conversation with them? You know, we need to understand what the brand story looks like. Is the brand story congruent with your solution? Because if there's a disconnect, you've got big problems. You know, and so, so all of these element become the branding foundation. Why do I spend so much time on making that foundation so beautiful and sublime? Your personal branding foundation is what makes you believable and trustable, period. In my world, people don't buy my program. My program has got every framework you can possibly imagine. Like literally somebody can log into my program, they don't even need me. They can go through the whole thing and they'll have an outcome. Do you think that people buy that? They buy my wisdom. They're just they, they want me. That's what they want because they've heard me, they've seen me, they've had a conversation with me, whatever. They just want my. Think people come to you, Michael, because they want your frameworks and blueprints and workbooks. Absolutely not. They want Michael, they wanna work with you. They've already decided you are the guy because soul to soul speaks much louder than mouth to mouth. So the foundation of the personal brand is critical. And also overlaying all of that is all of the messaging. Then we move to part two and that's the systemization of all of that inventory. So now we have to look at what does your solution actually look like? What is the problem that you can solve? How do we organize all of that information? 99.9% of people that come to me can't do that big. that's the part that's really, really hard. It's organizing all of that information so it spits out a solution that can genuinely solve a complex problem, which happens to be my genius. And this is the part in my program that I really do spend a lot of time with the client organizing all of that data, handing it back to them as a solid. Framework so they've got something solid to work from because it's, they take, it takes a month to try and figure it out. It takes me days. I can already see what the solution looks like just by spending the, you know, time with them. Then we move into, The digitalization and the digitization of assets. So we wanna automate the, a lot of the moving parts. We wanna create digital assets, whether it's your website, lead magnets, whatever. But the whole digitization and digitalization aspect of anyone's business for me has one outcome. And that is, Does it create an ecstatic brand experience? Because everyone that touches our brand, Michael, we need, we need them to leave and be wowed and in awe, okay? Because they will become our brand advocates. Even if they don't buy from us. Believe me, E, even if they don't buy from us, they will tell other people about what you provide as an experience. and then we move to the layered lead generation strategy. And I say with an emphasis on layered because too many people put their eggs in one basket. We need layers in our lead generation strategy. Why is that important? Because we need to understand where our target audience reside, and we need to show up in a way. And, and, and know how they want to consume content. So in their eyes, they see us as omnipresent, not the other way around. We're just showing up in front of the places where they hang out, giving them content in the way that they want to consume it, and in their eyes. You are everywhere. You are not really, but in their eyes you are. And then finally we do the embodiment work. Now you've gotta become all of that. All you've implemented, you've got this amazing business. You are out there, but now you've gotta become that. And this is where I do a lot of the energetics, the embodiment work, which is very, very much around emotions and feelings. Because what I find is, The transformation with my client is when I do that work, that's when the real transformation happens because they go to a place that they're really uncomfortable, you know, as you said, imposter syndrome, et cetera, all that stuff, you know, and so, but, but the actual implementation is what I call the masculine system, the embodiment is what I call the feminine system, and both of them are just a beautiful marriage together. There you have it Go and do. There you go. I've just given you the whole formula. No, but I mean, you're, you're absolutely right. Like it's. It's connecting with you as a person and the wisdom that you have and the unique abilities and the skills that you have to insert that, and even the frameworks by themselves are, are phenomenal, right? But you bring the, the power and the passion and the insight behind that to produce that ecstatic experience like you're, like you're talking about, which is, which is amazing. Yeah, phenomenal. If everybody, if any, you know, any of the listeners are looking at creating a brand around what they, you know, them being the, you being your full, authentic self, highly recommend checking out Mary Henderson, and we can put all the links and stuff into the show notes where, I mean, while we're on the topic, where can people, where can people go to look at your stuff. You have a ton of different master classes for free that they can do. I do. So the first place would be to go to my website, maryhendersoncoaching.com. The second place is, you know, if you want to have a conversation, I do offer free a free coaching call, which is still at my website, maryhendersoncoaching.com/apply And of course, just connect with me on social media on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. I'm at Mary Henderson. Super, super great. Because yeah, we could talk for forever on this, but you can tell from your story how much you've just integrated and done, done. The deep work, the, the tough work, the challenging work went through just rock bottom, really, really challenging times. You didn't allow, you know, to become a victim. You pulled out the wonderful gold, the strengths that you had in your per, you know, person, the resilience, you know, to get through that. You integrated these other skills and now you created an incredible thing that's helping so many people. So, if, if we haven't just kind of already talked about this in the, in the whole conversation, I do like asking as we kind of wrap up here. How would, how would you define success for. Oh, Michael. I absolutely do not define success with what I have. I define success on my ability to transcend those emotions that are actually blocking me from achieving my potential. So for me, success is really, really understanding and feeling and knowing my true self. That for me is a 100 success. and I know you have some kind of specific routines that you actually do to do that. Can you talk about what that looks like for you on a day-to-day basis? You know, the thing is that I was just saying this to somebody yesterday, I said, do you know that the most profound things in life are very simple and people don't, people want complex, right? Mm-hmm. So for me, when I'm actually feeling like something is not going my way, for example, or you know, there's a pain associated with something, I'm experiencing something today and it's creating pain. I'll actually sit with that. So instead of me just walking away and saying, you know, it'll be fine. It's just a phase I'm going through. No, it's not. It's my soul giving me an indication that something's not right. I'm off track. I always sit with that emotion and I always ask myself, what am I feeling right now? Like, what am I really feeling? I might say I'm feeling frustrated, for example. Okay, why am I feeling frustrated? What's really, what is the truth of what is going on right now. Okay? And it could be, oh, you know, I just feel like I haven't got enough clients this month, for example. Okay? So that's the truth. The truth is I'm just, I'm, I'm, I want more clients. That is the absolute truth. Okay? So what is blocking me from actually getting that extra client this month? Like, what's, what is actually going on? And then I start to peel it just peel those layers down. But the key for me is feeling frustra. with the reason I'm frustrated. Okay. So, and it's just because that's the truth. That's the absolute truth. So you sit with that emotion. Or if my kids are not listening to me, for example, I do this all the time and I just sit on my bed and I'm like, oh, I feel broken. You know, they're not listening to me. I feel broken. You know, or something's dr. Something dramatic like that. But I'll sit on my bed and I'll just feel it, like really, really feel it. And sometimes I feel really upset cause I feel unheard, unseen, unheard. This is a big one for a lot of women especially. And so I'm like, Ooh, that's messy. That's huge. So that's connected to not my kids. Something else is going on, you know? So if I can feel that. and I can just step into that, the pain of it, then I can start unwrapping it and getting to the core of it. And once you get to the core of it, you do release it. And sometimes you have to do it maybe 10, 15, 20 times to actually fully release it. Because as I said before, the core emotion that holds us all back is either fear of something or being unloved or feeling unloved. They're the two causes. It always comes back to those two things. Sometimes, especially with fear, I find that I have to do the same thing and the same experience keeps appearing maybe 10 times until I fully release it. And then it just goes. And the, it really, really does create bliss in your life when you actually do this work. And by the way, it's not me sitting on my bed for four hours and, you know, doing some transcendental meditation thing. It's, it could be five minutes, literally. Mm-hmm. So it's just, Self-awareness, Michael. That's the key here. The key word is self-awareness. We have to be self-aware when this happens because if we're not self-aware, as I said before, the body becomes the mind. You go back into default mode and the same thing will keep on occurring over and over again. But when we become aware of it and we stop and we feel and we assess and we. we're going at, we're going back to the soul and saying, okay, I'm, I'm willing to go there. I'm willing to be uncomfortable because willingness and self-awareness are very key in this work. Mm-hmm. I, I'm curious, when you get down to that point where you've kind of unwrapped it to a deeper level of truth and you talk about releasing it, what does the releasing look like in terms of what you do? It's sobbing like a. That's the truth. You have to go back to. That's what I'm saying. Like if you have a look at a, you've got a toddler, have a look at the way your toddler reacts when they don't get their way, have a look at it because they, they, they go to a tantrum, right? And it's like, and they cry. And they cry and they're throwing things and, and then they start to just come down, come down, come down, and the sobbing in between all of that. Then they get to a point, that zero point where they've transcended that emotion. Okay. The toddler is showing. The way to do it. That's the stupid thing that toddler is showing us, the adult how to do it. So, and the reason why we sob Michael is because there's grief associated with those emotions that are captured at that level, like a lot of grief. And so in my story, I was raised with a serial narcissistic mother. I mean, on top of my story. Could you imagine, you know, living this life with. Woman who was just so incredibly self-centered and selfish. And I said to my husband the other day, I don't know how I turned out like this but in saying that, you know, She was also my teacher as well, so I can't go into blaming her and her story cuz she's got her stuff. What I can do is transcend the feelings or the way, the way she made me feel. She can't, she, I can't blame her for that. I can only transcend that. Nobody else can. There's no point in blaming anyone. You're wasting your time. what we have to do is transcend the feelings that, that those people or that environment created in us. The story's irrelevant. The feeling is the most powerful part of the story. Mm-hmm. Wow. Super. Yeah. Super, super powerful. And you know, if we look at, like you talked about the, the, your definition of success. Is that like, can you, yeah. Can you sit with that feeling? Okay. You be aware of it. Can you sit with. Can you release it and you know, go rise, rise above it regardless of the situation. And learning to do that in more complex, challenging situations that trigger us more and more so phenomenal. Yeah. Phenomenal conversation. I really, really appreciate it. I know, thank you. You know, my audience will get a tremendous amount from your story. I love what you do, the people that you're helping, so yeah. I, I, I really appreciate your time. Appreciate you sharing. Thank you, Michael. Thank you so much. I'm so happy that we connected. It's been a blessing to know you and also to also just have this conversation with somebody like yourself who also is on the same trajectory, so it's a match made in heaven. absolutely had a lot of fun. Thank you. You're welcome. Again, if you are interested in my 12 Week Lean Agile Life Mastermind for Entrepreneurs to engineer success in your mindset, relationships, emotions, habits, health and more go to successengineering.org and schedule a call with me so I can hear about your challenges and goals and we can see whether the mastermind would be a good fit for you. Remember if you sign up before midnight March 8th you'll recieve the early bird discount of$250 off. Talk to you soon!