Alexandra Covucci is an international coach helping visionaries, transformational leaders and coaches expand beyond their limitations and lead with mastery in their business and being. She works mainly with women to change their intellectual, emotional, and actionable strategies so they can begin self-actualizing instead of self-sabotaging, creating with confidence, and taking massive action towards their goals. She believes in an inside-out approach to success, with which mentors incredible leaders to activate the art of themselves. Alexandra has been studying personal development for almost a decade, and she’s been certified in neuro-transformation (NLP), holistic health, and coaching, with no plans ceasing. She deeply believes in the power of healing, shifting, and transforming, and she continues to build her life and business around those principles.

You can find her here:
Instagram: @alexandracovucci
Facebook: /acovucci
Email: alex@alexandracovucci.com

What is your story?

I assume everybody does this, but I’m not quite sure, but I look back at my life on checkpoints. Certain years or struggles or triumphs that really moved the needle for me, either just enough or massively, and there are a couple things that really moved the needle for me that really got me to where I am today. Number one, coming out of the closet was a practice in ownership and acceptance of self. Number two, I moved down to South America without a clue in the world about what I was doing. I bought a one way ticket on a random Wednesday night right before I graduated college at 21, because the idea of filling out a resume and getting into the corporate grind and into these boxes felt more terrifying to me. I didn’t understand at the time that terror of being conformed but I, I trusted it. That was one of the biggest times in my life that I ever trusted myself aside from coming out. And I remember I was on my way home to my apartment on my college campus and I looked up at the stars and and I recognized the power of decision in that moment. It was about a mile walk and I stopped in the middle in a parking lot that I’d walked 100 times and I looked up at the sky and everybody was frantically moving about “I have to fill out my resume, I have to do this, I do this, have you gone to the career center?”

And I looked up and I was so quiet and I just remember making the decision that I’m going to move and I’m going to go on an adventure and I have no idea how. I bought a one way ticket, showed up with two suitcases, no friends, no family. I lost all my money at the airport because I brought an apple in by accident and they fined me all the money I had. I had no job, no network. I had nothing except for myself. And I stayed there for a year and a half and I built everything. I left with friends, with a job, with travels under my belt, with an apartment times three because I’ve moved multiple times and, and I recognized my own power. So that was the second thing that kinda started bringing me to where I am.

Conversely, however, in that same situation I came back home powerless. I felt like I just grinded myself down to the bone. It was supposed to be this big adventure. But what I didn’t tell anyone was that I was miserable. That’s when I learned the concept “Wherever you go, there you are.” I didn’t quite have the language to articulate it nor had I read Pema Chodron, but I was experiencing it. “Wherever you go there you are.” Why am I still suffering? I tried to run away from this shit and because mixed with my power of decision and I’m going to do something different” was terror, I didn’t realize how much I was running away from. I thought I was only running towards. It wasn’t until my two aunts bought me a ticket to meet them in Peru and study with a Shaman for two weeks. I remember looking back and having these little peak moments of  “what is this? What is this? This is amazing. I feel like everything’s okay.” We meditated in these amazing places in Peru and Machu Picchu and these energy centers. I had no idea what we were doing and my aunt was way more intensely woven into the work than I was. When I came back home, I had ignited all of my power, but almost to the point of burnout, and I had nothing left. 

I was scared to make any more decisions because I had suffered so much in South America. I woke up with cockroaches in my shirt one night; I was stalked by my doorman and had to call the police; whatever could have gone wrong, did go wrong and I came back home and I almost went into hiding. I started trying to control everything because I was so afraid and I felt out of control. I lost myself by trying to find myself, which didn’t make sense to me, and I was so confused. I started binge eating kind of slowly at first, but I started using food as medicine: bingeing, bingeing, bingeing, controlling, controlling, controlling harder. I got to this point where over a couple of years in my early twenties was this vat of suffering. I did everything and anything I could to hide from myself, to hide from the world, to hide my pain for my friends, to hide everything. 

But at the same time that spark in me that made that decision to go to Chile was like “I can save myself” so I studied, studied, studied and researched. I wanted to know what was going on with me, and I really started to understand and experiment on myself and my relationship to my body, my relationship to food, my relationship to letting go of control, surrender, alignment, identity, all of these things. And I was so in the middle of suffering, 24/7 all I would think about is food, “how do I get thinner so I can be loved because if I’m not loved, I’m not valid, and if I’m not valid, then I don’t exist. And I remember sitting down one day at my kitchen table and I was so tired emotionally because my mind just never stopped, and I said to myself “you know what? I’d rather be fucking fat as hell then suffer and try so hard.” And that’s when this question came out, I don’t know where it came from, but I asked myself “if I already had what I wanted would I be acting like this?” and that shifted me. 

These three monumental things: coming out, running away and running towards and moving to Chile and being on my own, and my deep struggles with health, body, emotion, all led me to where I am right now. And in terms of my coaching practice and human potential and personal development and personal growth, the thread that tied them all together was at every stage of the game there was some level of hiding: hiding from myself, hiding from other people, hiding my power from other people, adding my power from myself, hiding behind my power, all of it. And I got really fascinated with this idea of the way that we hide behind our limitations, behind our problems, behind our scarcity cycles, behind our ways of thinking, our stories, and we keep our power inaccessible. 

ME: I found it interesting that you said, it’s like I discovered this power and yet it exhausted me and depleted me. What do you think was the difference that caused that versus then when you really found it and grounded into it?

Disclaimer, I’m still finding everyday and grounding into it every day. One of the notions I’ve finally come to understand is that there is no arrival in terms of our power and who we are. There’s only an escalator and growth and mini mountains and major mountains. One thing that was a very big distinction was, in the most simplistic terms, the intention behind what was being created. Had I sat with my decision to go to Santiago a little bit more and I’m glad I didn’t, I maybe would have seen that I was trying to run away. I was going through a breakup at the time, she was staying at college and I was leaving and really didn’t know what I wanted to do. That was the crux of it: instead of sitting with “what are my possibilities?” I ran in the name of power and I think there’s a difference between rebellion power and creation power. I think I was in rebellion against myself, against the paradigms, against all of it. And I will say, I think that’s how a lot of people get here and so I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think rebellion power’s great, but I think until you learn where it’s coming from, you stay there a little longer than you may want to. 

What mission are you on?

In my mind my evolution is like the tree trunk and my mission is one of a million branches. What I really realize is that my mission and my impact come from the roots and the roots always lead back to this desire to help people remember how powerful they are and to create from that place of being who they want to be instead of trying to get away from who they don’t want to be. To create from that place of possibility instead of fear. A goal is not a place to get to, it’s a place to come from. There’s been this process of remembering how powerful you are, to go deeper in the roots and to recognize where and what you’re hiding from. What are you hiding from yourself? What are you hiding from other people? And that looks so different for everyone. 

I was hiding from the world and I was also hiding and withdrawing love for myself and that didn’t allow me to access my power to really live as who I am and who I wanted to be. I see all the time women and men hiding behind things that are limitations, their stories, this, that, and the other thing. Hiding behind so much to keep themselves safe without realizing this power inside them. But this decision and this cultivation inside IS the safety that we crave. When you work from that place everything changes. My mission is to help people stop hiding. 

How did you know what to focus on?

In order to come back to something, you have to know what’s there. And in order to know what’s there, you have to stop and slow down and be. It’s really interesting how many people are afraid of meditation or say they can’t do it. It’s literally just sitting down with yourself and I still do it every day and have for years yet my mind is still like, “don’t do it right now. Do it later.” In order to know what to come back to, you’ve got to cultivate the what you’re coming back to. For everybody it looks different, but for everybody it’s the same. It’s like coming back to the essence, the source, the beingness of who you are, separate from the thinkingness, right? Separate from the mind and everything that’s going on here because there’s something deeper. But we often operate from our head.

Meditation is still something I learn how to do every day because I recognize the things that got me here won’t get me there. Ultimately it is my responsibility in all of this to decide to slow down and say “what is this? What’s going on?” To get curious. When looking back at everything that I did, one of the things that I’m most proud of in myself is that I’m eternally curious. I want to know  about myself. I want to know about business. I want to know about this. I want to know about life. I want to know what it’s like for my parents. I want to know. I’m insatiably curious sometimes to a fault, but I’m insatiably curious with no agenda and I think that was one thing that always got me back because curiosity served as the routes that I had to take to that place that we talk about coming back to. To answer your question a little bit more simplistically, curiosity is usually what brings me back. What am I going through right now? Why? What does it mean for me? What am I making it mean? What do I actually want? Why am I preventing myself from that? What am I not connecting to? What am I hiding from? Who am I hiding from? Am I hiding from myself? What am I hiding from myself? All of these things that start to spawn different worlds of answers when we ask certain kinds of questions.

Did you have a breakdown moment?

I wish. I always wanted one of those. Yes and no because I do remember sitting at my table that day, having that flash of insight and that was the day I stopped binge eating and lost a ton of weight all of a sudden and everything worked out with my body and my weight and my food. So,yes in that sense with little things. But no, in the sense that if I’m not careful I can still always feel like I’m in a breakdown. If I’m not aware and conscious and responsible, I have one of those really colorful egos that really loves to convince me that I’m not enough, I’m not doing enough, I’m not…. I could say my whole twenties were a fucking breakdown almost like I don’t even know breakdown from buildup, which goes along with the whole, wherever you go there you are idea.

The thing about breakdowns too, is the industry that we’re in. Everybody loves a rags to riches story. But one of the biggest cycles that I see people go through is that they think they haven’t hit rock bottom to change. It’s like the phoenix effect. There’s this addictive cycle to coming out of the ashes at this checkpoint. What I find is when I create those even in my own story and there are plenty, sometimes the slightest ones are I’m sitting in the car, nothing changed and I just had a quick shift in perspective and it felt massive. Like the butterfly effect or rather the domino effect. And sometimes the biggest, massive ones seemed big and massive but it took me a million little ones to get there. And so the reason I’m always a little hesitant about those moments is because I see a lot of people, and I went through this myself with this assumption that the only way to glory is through more pain, more suffering. So I deserve it. And that’s really dangerous. It’s a really dangerous paradox paradigm. That’s why I say yes and no. My whole life has a breakdown and a breakthrough and there have been hundreds of really pivotal moments and we’re all strung together by those pivotal moments. I think the most important part that I learned through some of these breakdowns is I’m responsible, I’m responsible, I’m responsible. Responsible for not having to go to rock bottom again, just to get back up. 

We also see this like alcoholism and drug addiction. Rock bottom breakdowns are really, really alluring because we get to be the hero and when we’re so hungry for own power sometimes, for lack of a better phrase, emotionally killing ourselves looks like the best way there. I don’t believe that. 

ME you’re right on so many things, especially that allure of the dark night of the soul, you know, it even sounds romantic, but it’s like, oh, when am I going to have become more? And I think the paradigm we’re shifting into, I see it in my kids, they take so many things in stride differently and they look at challenges differently and yes, part of that is nurture. I get that. But a lot of it is, is where humanity is because of all the work that you know, the previous generation has done. And, and so we’re, we’re entering a new paradigm of growth, I think very grassroots still. But um, but it’s, I think at some point humanity’s not going to need that dark night of the soul because of that. Duality won’t be necessary anymore.

When did you realize that it was worth it? 

One thing I can credit myself for never giving up on myself or on the people I choose to be in relationships with or on the things that I really love. When I really care about something, I’m loyal. I’m dedicated. That might just be in my DNA or my being. Because I think there’s something about the human being that’s always captured my attention and my soul. The way that some people are really captured by art, the way that some people are really captured by music. My mom says that I used to sit in the car with her when I was five years old maybe, and I would, I would touch her hand and say, “Mommy, you don’t look as happy anymore. What’s going on?” Even at that young age, I could pick up on what was going on around me in terms of the human and I would turn my dad’s face towards me if I was sitting on his lap at five or six years old and he wasn’t listening,I would turn his face towards me and really want to connect. And so my drive to always connect with others which is instilled in me created this innate drive to always connect with myself. I’m more intimate with myself but I’m no different than another person. I want to know what’s going on. 

In terms of career there are definitely times that I recognize that I thought “this is worth it. This is one of those times that I won’t give up on this mission.” I knew that I would never give up on myself and I knew I would never give up on people I’m in a relationship with sometimes to a fault? For those of us who are hungry and curious can sometimes get ourselves in real fucking trouble with other people. There was one moment with my coaching career; I became a health coach in my twenties and I coached some women through binge eating, emotional eating and it was just a little too close to me at the time. So I took a couple years off and I moved to Oklahoma with then girlfriend, who was in the military. I thought “what the fuck am I going to do?” We were not in a big city. I was not going to get another job. We were in a dinky little town that was mainly military and hadn’t grown past the eighties. The options were to work at the local bar and pool hall and there was no career growth. I had loved my time as a coach but I got scared away from it because it overwhelmed me and I was still dealing with my food stuff when I was a coach so it was a little too close. So I took some time off. The entrepreneur itch has always been there: I tried to start a software company through a group program because I was like, “ooh, passive income, I’m in Oklahoma. Yeah, this is great!” I don’t mix with software. It was a mistake. After the six month program they held an event for the whole group and for the longest time I was like, “I’m not going to go. I don’t even want to have a software program.” I ended up going to the event and the two guys who ran the program were super awake. They were really into the woo shit even though they talked business. 

My coach at the time was actually the mindset coach for this whole organization. At the event I got it. It was so fascinating to talk about lenses and stories and all that shit. We did this thing called circling where you sit in a circle and you have this really present conversation. It’s a bit like an experiment. You start with one person and they may say something like “I feel nervous.” And then you go to someone else and ask “how does it feel to hear that this person feels nervous?” And they might be like, “I think it’s kind of funny.” And then they’ll go back to the first person. “What does it feel like for you to hear that they think your nerves are funny?” And it goes back and forth and what it basically does is completely show you everything’s a story. It doesn’t matter what he thinks or what I feel, none of it matters. I remember sitting in a circle of all men and me and I was too scared to talk. All of it was because this was a predominantly male based software. 

They were present and awake and feeling with each other and they were hugging each other and I remember looking around and thinking that since the time I came out I didn’t even like finding my way. I am more connected with the gay community, the lesbian community. I never recognized my hunger for closeness. At the end of the whole circling experience they’re all getting up and I don’t know what came over me and I raised my hand and I thanked them for just showing up because what I noticed in that moment was they didn’t just show up for themselves. They showed up for each other and unknowingly showed up from me.

I spoke to my coach about this and I told him that it was a really transformative experience for me because this is worth it for people to like go to these places that are terrifying. My coach said to me “the way that you talk about coaching, the way that you talk about growth, why are you denying yourself this path? You’re just afraid.” And that was the day that I was like, come hell or high water, my coaching practice will be my life’s work, however it looks, courses, programs, retreats, whatever it will be my life’s work to be in this space. And that was when I decided and it took somebody to draw it out of me. 

What keys and principles have you built your foundation of success on?

Fun. That’s been one of my biggest struggles over the years. I think it’s one of the biggest energies that parallels with success. And not just success but fulfilled success because there are billionaires who are miserable and then there’s Richard Brandson and he’s playful. And one thing that I’ve noticed about a lot of the people that I really admire and one thing that I’ve noticed about when I infuse my business or my path with fun is it multiplies everything. It multiplies your fulfillment and multiplies the wealth in your life and multiplies relationships. Because when you don’t take everything seriously, you have more wiggle room. When you take the stories so seriously what you’ve essentially done is shoved yourself into the box that you’re trying to break out of. I would say in my experience, fun is a necessity for creating sustainable success in anything, relationship, business, whatever it is. Fun doesn’t have to be the reward. It gets to be the process.

Do you feel like you’re as fulfilled you inspire others to be? 

Yes and no. I feel like it’s the game that we all play, right? And I feel like I feel like some days, yes, I’m on top of the world some days not. I think that that’s a result of the human condition setting out on your mission. When you know society hands you a nice little box you can go into for $40,000 a year.

I also don’t expect to inspire people to be inspired. I expect to inspire people to choose what they be. Oh yes. So if I can answer that way, I don’t want to be the place people are trying to get to. I want to inspire them to build their own roads, to choose from their own power, to ride the waves with fun. Every time I have a breakdown or cry, which will never go away because I plan to always grow, every time I go through that, a few minutes later I laugh at it. “Oh my God, here I go again.” So, I’m also careful to make sure that I don’t want to inspire people to be inspired because I want them to inspire themselves, um, but also recognize that it’s all okay. The downs, the ups, power, self love, compassion, ability don’t have to go away when you’re down. and being this and love self love and, and ability and, and compassion doesn’t have to go away, it’s all a place to explore. I’m not perfect by any means, nor do I want to ever be, but I will also never disavow my power again. And it’s not always roses and where you are is often your growth. You rise to meet something and then you want to go somewhere else and feel like a beginner again. If you’ve been single for years and you want an incredible relationship, you need to rise to meet it. And those things aren’t easy.

The personal development field has these checkpoints to reach like being rich and happy and we all want that feeling because it’s great. But something else that I think is equally important is staying in the room when it fucking sucks. That is when you begin to inspire yourself, because when you stop running from everything that fucking sucks and you just sit still for it, you realize “I can handle this.” That’s when you start to see “oh, my power’s underneath here. It never goes away. I’m just in a wave.”

What do you do when things feel hard? 

Number one, I stop, drop and sit. Self talk comes in after I stop fighting it. I’m all for the talking yourself into a higher frequency or a better feeling, but I think that comes after you take away the fear of the thing. Taking away the fear of the thing requires quite a bit of ownership of the things that you don’t want to experience, that you don’t like, that you don’t want to be in. So if I’m going through a breakdown or shitty moment, the first thing I always do is try to feel it in my body because it’s tangible. Our heads make it seem like my whole life is ruined! Our bodies really allow us to understand this actually as just a frequency moving around, this really is just an energy that feels weird in my stomach and my head is making a story out of it. And so I first always go to my body “where am I feeling the stress? Where am I feeling this anxiety, this fear, this whatever. What’s going on?” Because whether the story created the feeling or the feeling created the story, I want to know where it is. Next. I accepted it. I’ve start to really welcome it and ask some questions “what do I not want to be in right now? I really don’t want to be in my anxiety right now.” All right, I’m going to sit with my anxiety because the less afraid I am of myself, the less afraid I am of the world. I challenge and get curious. Sometimes I’ll talk out loud “what’s up, what is going on?” And I say to myself  “I feel like that..and I feel like this is never going to happen…” and on and on and I’ll challenge that, is that actually true? What’s going on? Do I really believe that? Am I afraid of that challenge? I get curious and that’s usually when I’ll change the story and where I’ll make a new choice. And after awhile you can do it pretty quickly:

Body.

Face what I’m afraid of.

Challenge and get curious.

One thing that is also incredibly important is surrounding myself with people who can help. And that’s not necessarily the highest ticket coach you can get. I love having coaches and plan to keep investing in myself. But I also developed my relationship around somebody who, sees that these are my patterns and holds me at my highest and sees this is where the challenge is or this is when I really just need to be yelled at. “Dammit, Alex, like you’re just being a fucking victim!” And I’m like, Oh yeah! 

One of the most important encompassing pieces of what I do when I’m in that moment is I’ve created support systems because I can’t do it alone and I don’t want to. But when I am alone in those moments, body face it, feel it, question it, challenge, it shifted. 

Do you feel like you have a biggest fear and how do you overcome it? 

My biggest fear is being seen. My mission is built from my biggest fear. Absolutely. Unabashedly. I know it better than anyone. I explore it. I am in it. And I challenge myself through it all the time and some days it doesn’t exist and some days it’s there. It’s kind of like at the next level is a new devil and oftentimes that new devil is really the old story with bigger teeth. And so if somebody’s stuck in the story that like, success is unsafe, they’ll overcome that, hits this level of success, this level of success. All of a sudden it’s unsafe again. And now we have the tools and we can grow and we get the coaching, whatever. But I spent a lot of my life deliberately hiding. I remember in college I was dating my first girlfriend and nobody knew about my relationship to a woman for two and a half years; so a lot of hiding.

We would talk on messenger because she went to college an hour away. And everyone else’s computer was unlocked but mine was always locked because I had something to be found out. Every time someone sat at my computer I would panic because I was afraid somebody’s gonna find me out. And so I have very deeply ingrained from a very pivotal time in my life that the only way to stay safe was to hide. And that just became the lesson that I continually learn.

I became the mistress. I was my then fiance’s mistress because I wasn’t yet stepping into my worthiness of having an open relationship. So I went from being in a secret closet relationship to being the mistress. People knew I was gay but I was the mistress, I wasn’t the main or on the main stage and so I’ve learned over and over and over and over, self acceptance, coming out of hiding, stepping into your power, self to self acceptance, coming out of hiding, stepping into your power. My biggest fear is being seen. Will it always be? I don’t know, but it’s what makes me an expert.

One person I really admire is Rich Litvin. I remember him at some point in my business giving me the permission through him coming out and saying, “my biggest fear is my is my mission. I’m an introvert. I’m afraid a lot of the time I’m. I was never confident, so I went into business to understand confidence. I was never powerful, so I walked right through it and it’s become my business and it’s become my mission and my message.” And I realized it no longer had to be a source of shame. It was now my biggest source of strength and that in and of itself was another way to come out of hiding. 

Is there something that you do that doesn’t serve you and at the level of success that you’ve reached, why do you think you still do it? 

I do a lot of shit that doesn’t serve me; the case for being a human. I fight focus. Actually, I really adore it because it pops up when I need to look at something. So I think the reason I have a love hate relationship with focus is I’ve developed over the years this strange sense of Fomo, fear of missing out. And I think part of that is due to the Internet. I think part of that is we’re so quick in the personal development field to be like, what’s wrong with me? Why do I do this? What is it? I also think that it’s a symptom of having a business online. It’s a symptom of using text messaging to connect with our friends. I think it’s a symptom of a larger problem and that’s been a journey that I’ve been on is really addressing when I don’t want to focus, what is going on? Let’s sit with this. And also the process of letting go because I’m not missing anything. That is a scarcity cycle. I don’t have all of the everything right now. I think focus is a hard thing to maintain until you decide to master it. Jim Kwik, a brain expert who teaches people how to learn, says it’s a sign of the times. We never really learned how to learn. We never really took a course on sitting and being focused. We never really took a course on how to digest information and implement.  It is also a result of what’s going on outside of us. I straddled the line, I remember not having any cell phones in my childhood, I was 20 when iphones came out. I’m not in this younger generation, I can’t multitask as quick as they can, but I didn’t spend as much time in quiet solitude as the prior generation. And so I straddle the line and I see that in a lot of 30 year olds, we have crappy focus. I crave this deep focus, but I was also raised with the idea to keep up with the Joneses. So I think it’s also a result of the world.

What are your regular habits that you would say contribute to your success? 

I love meditation and I hate it.

Habitual willingness. I have habitual willingness to try. I have a willingness to pivot. I have a willingness to look at. I think willingness is a really under celebrated muscle. I think it’s an incredibly important habit and muscle to build the habit of willingness because stubbornness in a romantic relationship rarely works. Stubbornness in a relationship with yourself or your business rarely works. I’ve built the habitual muscle of willingness. Willingness to be called my shit. Willingness to look at things in your way. Willingness to try. Willingness to slow down. Willingness to teeter, as in what do I need? Okay, I’m going to go into it. 

The habit of choice. This needs to be cultivated because it is not easy. I heard someone say that if you’re in this area of indecision for a really long time, you’re actually making the choice to be stuck. So then, maybe flip a coin. Do something different. Don’t choose not making choices.

The habit of the inner work, the mindset work and that looks different for everyone. Over the years I’ve created my own flow that works and I change it every quarter. Sometimes I’m tapping like a motherfucker, and sometimes I just really want to write and hear what I have to say and challenge myself to write something new and create a new story. Actually sometimes I’m walking around my room like a crazy woman, hitting my chest, being like, yes, yes, yes. The tools aren’t so much the habits but I have a habit of using the tools. 

What is the best piece of advice that you’ve ever received that you always follow? 

Chill the fuck out now. Don’t always follow that…

When I was on this vacation with my aunts I was suffering so badly but nobody knew and I finally told them. I said “I hate living in Chile. Everyone thinks I’m on this adventure and I fucking hate it.” We’d been meditating and all these places and I didn’t want to say that I have this love/hate with meditation even though it’s so soothing.  And my aunt Patty, who’s a therapist, psychotherapist, and into all the woo, vibrations and the leader of this amazing meditation center; she does everything; she is everything. She’s amazing. And she very calmly met me as like, “oh yeah, that’s fine.” Almost like going through all this suffering is totally cool and will be over soon. She had her arm around me as we’re sitting on a boat on Lake Titicaca going to this village that you can only get to by boat, and she said “everything will figure itself out as long as you work on you.” Here I was worrying about I don’t know what I’m going to do in my life but I want to go home. The Mayans said the world’s going to end 2012 anyways. I don’t know if anything matters. My mind was going crazy and she calmly says that and it was this very quick silent, not monumental moment, but I remember the wind and I remember the smell of the lake and I remember our crazy shaman who was talking about something that no one was listening to, and I just remember sitting there being like, oh, and like his calm came over me and that was when I started working on myself. So I would say that that is probably one of the most subtle yet profound pieces of advice that I ever took from somebody.

What does success feel like to you? 

It feels expansive. I get this deep sense of being proud of myself because at the end of the day, if you strip away the results of everything: true love and money, bustling, coaching, business, whatever, I want to know that I got to those things or I received those things or I’m the doing things I’m proud of. Success to me is staying in the room, is learning a new way to communicate with my girlfriend, is signing that client that I know we’re going to make magic together doing all of this from a place of what I call inner wealth, fun, excitement, abundance, not worrying, not in scarcity, not in not enoughness. Success to me is the feeling of being proud of the way that I show up in the world because I think what I’m proud of and the way that I show up in the world, I get to magnetize what it is that I actually want. 

~~~

What’s inside a thought leader’s soul? I always wanted to know! 

About 4 years ago I received a Big Magic Idea about discovering the answer to this very question. Instead of just wishing I knew what made thought leaders tick, I got the brilliant idea to interview some thought leaders and then write a book about what I learned. 

That idea struck fear into the very heart of me and I shelved it. I didn’t actually need to know that badly what thought leaders thought or what success principles they lived by or what they did when things got hard. 

The thing with Big Magic Ideas is that they’re insistent and this one wasn’t leaving me alone. I rode the whole roller coaster of
Who am I do do this?
What if no thought leader wants to talk to me?
What if I fail?
…you know…that roller coaster?!

Then I turned 40 and I freaked out a little bit. The Midlife Funk came knocking to help me stop hiding behind fear. So, I made a list of women who I wanted to approach and interview. I reached out to my community to help me put together a list of questions. And I sent the first messages out. 

Many of the women said yes!!

I loved conducting the interviews and hearing their stories, their triumphs, struggles, and wisdom. I was elated. I now had 120 hours of conversation to work with. I got the interviews transcribed and ended up with a gazillion pages of gobbelty gook…the transcriptions were awful! OH NO!! Now what? I don’t have the budget to pay an editor at this point, so I took the next year and a half to fix the transcriptions. 

In the end, the book has turned into a series of blogs with the most important parts of the conversations highlighted. I want the world to know how these thought leaders think and what guides them. Their stories and wisdom are ready to go out into the world