Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host Roberta.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast for you.

Today, I am joined by Melissa BauknightThe, who is a life alignment coach.

If that is intriguing to you, sit back and relax, because she will explain exactly what that means.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome Melissa.

Hello.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you for being here.

So before we get started on what a life alignment coach is, give us a little bit of your background.

Yeah.

So I like to say I'm a multi-passionate entrepreneur and a venture and I'm a mother of a son who is five years old.

And I've been married for almost seven years and live in Colorado.

So I'm very passionate about having to work life balance out here, especially in Colorado, when there's lots of nature to explore.

And I've had a long career in sales predominantly.

So I worked in corporate for about 15 years and I worked in a, I still do in a direct sales company.

So I've worked there for about seven years.

And that was the thing that allowed me to transition out of my corporate life.

I've since expanded to build a successful coaching business.

So I feel like I've had a lot of lives in my professional career, but it's all been in service of the life alignment, which is what I help women do through my coaching programs.

Your corporate life helped you transition to being a life alignment coach.

How exactly did that happen?

Actually, my side business that I had had at the time in a direct sales company helped me transition, but I will say my corporate life prepared me absolutely because I was managing multiple states at various times in my career.

I was responsible for developing my entire business development plan for my territories.

And so although it wasn't an entrepreneurial position, I had a lot of autonomy.

And so when I transitioned to being an entrepreneur, I had already been accustomed to working from home by myself, looking at all the opportunities that are available to me in a territory and really thoughtfully navigating that and building lots of strong relationships.

And so several skills that I developed in that time that really have helped me continue to be resilient and successful as an entrepreneur outside of that structure.

Right.

I've heard a lot of life coach as a career.

How is that different from what you do, which is life alignment coach?

I focus on their whole life, including business.

And when I first started out, I actually called myself a business coach, but it never felt right in my body.

I don't like the language of enough, but it wasn't enough.

It didn't really encompass what I was doing for women.

And so often people find me because they're seeking a meaningful transition in their career.

And before we go and make any changes in their external environment, what I do is I help them start by looking inward, because you're just going to take yourself somewhere else.

Right.

So something's not working in your career.

That's what we do.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

So if you move states or you change jobs, you're still taking yourself with you.

And so if nothing shifts on the inside, then those same patterns, the same thoughts, those same beliefs, those same actions are just going to repeat somewhere else.

So what I'm looking to do is really help them shift the inside landscape first and then make a meaningful change on the outside in their career, if that's what fits.

And so when you help women with this life alignment, what are some of the things, obviously I don't want you to share your entire business model here for free when you judge for it, but what are some of the key things that they start looking out for or start to notice within themselves?

One of the biggest things to look for is how does it feel?

How does it feel in your body?

So when you look at your life, and I have a pretty thorough process that we go through to assess this, if we were looking, let's say you are thinking about your career and when you think about your career, your chest tightens up, you feel anxious, when you look at who you're being at your job, you feel like you're not able to be your full self, you feel like you wake up with dread in the morning, and you just look forward to the weekends, then that job is not allowing you to show up as your full self.

There's something that's misaligned there, right?

And so when we pay attention to how things feel in our bodies, that's a really big indicator of alignment or misalignment.

I'm very intrigued.

And the reason is I had a job, I hate it.

I would literally have a stomach ache in the morning just thinking about going to work.

Because usually what they say is you need to be an adult.

Adults need to work and pay bills.

This job is giving you a lifestyle you never dreamed of.

Get on with it.

It's interesting that you say we must pay attention to how we focus.

Because sometimes that's the one thing we need to ignore in order to keep going, to achieve what we need to.

So how is it that you do that in reverse, so to speak?

I love that you just pointed that out because it is what we're taught and it's backwards.

It's like, don't feel, emotions are bad.

You just grind it out.

You stick with it.

You rise to the top.

You climb the ladder and then you retire and you live your life.

Right.

OK, great.

Well, what if I hate the entire process?

So we're all craving joy.

We're all craving sense of purpose in our lives.

And when we're void of that, it manifests in all different ways in our lives.

It doesn't actually work unless all you care about is money, which I really don't know that that's true for anybody.

I'm going to make a broad assumption.

When everything else falls apart.

Totally.

And so what I like to do is kind of reverse engineer your life.

What I say a lot is let's say you're in a situation where you're wake up in your stomach is in knots and you're got to go to this job.

I like to say zoom out.

So I almost am taking you from this granular stuck in the mud place and pulling you out of it mentally to let's say a 10,000 foot view.

I always like to look at why are you doing it?

Why do you have this story that you have to keep going to this terrible job that is making you ill?

Why?

What is that core belief?

When did that core belief start?

Is it absolutely true?

Probably not.

And starting to believe that it's possible to have success in another way is critical to everything because unless you believe that it's possible, you're not going to try.

You're going to think this is the last, my last chance.

This is it.

This is how it is.

This is my life.

This is how it's going to be.

I'm just going to keep going.

And it's pulling you out of this almost robot way of being, stuck in this automatic cycle and bringing some awareness and intention to why am I doing this?

It reminds me of the late singer Whitney Houston.

There came a point where she said she doesn't want anything to do with the music industry.

All she wants is to take her daughter to the Caribbean and have a fruit stand.

All she wanted was to be in the Caribbean and have a cocktail stand by the beach.

Sounds lovely.

But we are always like to believe these are things we're supposed to chase, because they will lead to happiness eventually.

And then earlier we spoke about the masculine and the feminine principle, which you're going to touch on.

But my first question with that is, as women, we are supposed to dig deep into the masculine part of us in order to survive the corporate world, because, you know, it's a man's world.

We are the newbies there in the last few decades.

Isn't that what's required for us to not only survive, but to thrive when we enter the corporate world?

I think the survive part might be true, but I'm not sure the thrive part is true.

I have yet to meet a woman, and I know a lot of very powerful women in corporate that when they're trying to fit the mold of a man, that they're thriving.

Now, what I mean by this, masculine and feminine aren't gender specific, right?

They're energies that are in our body.

Yin and Yang, I mean, there's a lot of different ways to refer to them.

The masculine is kind of the doing parts of ourselves.

It's where we are, you know, we can be really focused, where we're very goal oriented.

It can lead to pushing and forcing and those things that help you survive, right?

Like, I just got to get this thing done.

I got to get to the next thing.

I just got to get this done.

So it can be very structured and linear and analytical and assertive.

So those are some of the qualities of the masculine.

Now, I'm not making the masculine bad or wrong.

It's absolutely necessary and incredible.

And when it's out of balance, when these parts of ourselves that are really critical to our thriving aren't being recognized, that are part of the feminine, that's when we tend to look at our lives somewhere between 30 and 50 and wonder, what in the hell am I doing?

So some of those are, you know, feeling connected to your intuition, kind of that inner wisdom, that body wisdom, feeling like you're able to be vulnerable, being empathetic, emotionally expressed, even just creativity in itself.

Because yes, especially with deadlines and everything in corporate, people say, I don't have time for the mushy stuff that get things done before the end of the day.

So you don't have time to check your feelings.

And like Dr.

Joe Dispenza says, feelings are the language of the body.

Check how you feel, be in the present moment.

And then when it comes to the masculine and the feminine, I've heard a lot of people who have discussions about personal relationships say, us women sometimes don't know how to take our masculine hats off when we get home.

It has also started to affect our personal relationships.

The masculine hat I had to wear at work in order to get things done.

We don't know how to rest when we get home and go back to, I'm feminine, my man is here.

I find it's true for myself.

I find it's true for my clients.

I actually always look at my life is the greatest practice field for my body of work that I teach other people.

I really believe that as a coach, we need to walk the talk every step of the way.

I have spent a lifetime in this very strong masculine energy.

I manage the households and the bills and all the logistics.

My husband's wonderful and really helpful and very successful as well.

And it's more of this need to control things versus a trust or a surrender in any aspect of your life.

You just feel like I've got to be the dominant one that has control over everything.

And if I don't, then the world's going to crumble and fall apart.

There are times when I think that too.

That's a tough one to untangle.

It's possible.

It really is.

So as a coach, how do you let coach a woman client to say this part you can let go?

There's a feeling of satisfaction that comes from if I get this done, it will be done.

And then I can rest.

I think that there's kind of a couple of things in what you just said of I have to do this first before I can take care of myself.

That is almost the like if I were to pinpoint a singular thing that makes the biggest difference when we're talking about untangling this, it's everything else first, then me.

That's the belief, right?

Whatever's left over in these tiny little crumbles that aren't actually there, that's where I actually fit.

Which all ties back into your question of this surviving versus thriving in corporate is, and it's a cliche thing, but it's 1 million percent true.

If you are not taking care of yourself and your needs, listening to your body, resting when it's asking for it, you will not thrive.

You will burn out.

You will get sick.

You will be accomplished, but you'll feel like garbage about it.

That thing that you said, once I get this done, then I'll rest.

That's a big thing to untangle because you will relinquish control once you start to take care of yourself.

Once you start to actually believe that you've got your own back, you can start to trust other people as well.

Whatever you're projecting outside of yourself is happening inside of you.

And how do you think that affects our mental health?

I think that's why we're anxious and depressed.

I think that's why people don't quite understand why their life doesn't feel good or why they're stressed out all the time.

Now, I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, right?

Yeah, none of us are.

Disclaimer.

Yeah, disclaimer.

And we get so disconnected from ourselves and our own joy.

We get so disconnected from what we actually desire from almost even too much for some women to ask them, well, what feels good for you?

What do you even want to do?

And they're like, I literally don't know.

Like, I've been so far gone from taking care of anything in myself.

I've been so worried about everyone else's needs for so long that I don't even know.

Is that the nurturing part of us that supposedly came with a woman DNA or is, like you said, not a little relation control?

I think it's both.

You know, there's always this nature versus nurture debate, right?

I think that we are innately very nurturing and it's not wrong to care about others and to take care of others.

But there's been like almost this trophy that's been placed upon this martyr.

Be a martyr.

Sacrifice yourself.

Be selfless.

It's like we've been trained to literally not care about ourselves throughout our lives.

I think this applies to people who aren't moms as well.

But especially if you're a mom, especially when you've got a family to take care of, in addition to if you're working, right, then you're taking care of your customers, you're taking care of your team, you're taking care of whatever that is in business and your family and your household.

And you're like, well, where's my trophy for taking care of everybody except for me?

I never I tried to be very delicate when it comes to mentioning moms.

I'm not a mom.

And since you are, I remember back in the 90s, I watched Oprah.

There was a woman who said she loves her husband more than she loves her kids.

And it was the world almost fall apart.

Everybody was going to not going to watch Oprah anymore.

And it was it wasn't called cancel culture back then.

I don't know what they said, but everybody was angry because you're supposed to love your kids first.

You're supposed to put your needs aside and put your kids' needs first.

And that's why even today you find women, they can't even take 30 minutes just to go to a spa and get their nails done.

The mom guilt of, you know, I'm not with my kid.

I'm going to look because there's a lot of shaming.

Yeah.

Yep.

Well, they're judging themselves first and then they're noticing that judgment in other people.

Right.

Because if you stop and this is complicated, but if you stop judging yourself for it, like, I'm not worried.

This is no, I'm not going to say I'm immune to other people's opinions.

Let's be clear.

But I'm not worried if I don't go to my son's gymnastics of what people will think of me because I'm like, I am taking this embodiment class.

I am healing my trauma through movement and I'm missing your class.

But I promise you, I'm going to be a really kick ass mom because when you get home, I am healing myself.

I get to be an exceptional mom because I am taking the time for myself.

It's like an and.

We don't live in an either or world.

We live in an and world.

You get to be a good mom and you get to take care of yourself.

And what I say, and this applies to what I teach actually is not specific to moms.

What I teach is start where you are.

So let's say you're in a demanding corporate job and you're working 80 hours a week.

You're not a mom, but you're still putting everyone else's needs in front of yours.

And you get home and you're totally drained.

You're in the same bucket as a mom that is giving away every part of herself.

So you start where you are.

So what that might look like is here's some real world examples.

If you never spend time to do anything, sometimes standing up at your desk to shake things out, bring some awareness into your body and sitting back down is where you start.

Right.

So you can get out of just being in this automatic way of taking action.

Sometimes it's putting your phone down at your desk, taking a 10-minute walk and coming back.

I first started to reconnect with myself when I was really depleted and felt pretty lost.

I had a newborn, I was working my corporate job, I was growing my side business and I had no idea where I fit anymore.

I felt like, who am I now?

I started by taking very short walks and it seemed so ridiculous to me because I was like, is this where I'm at?

It was like, this is where you're at.

You start where you are and it's bite size, very bite size changes.

And one of the things that has helped me meditating, I started very late after hearing of the practice because I used to associate it with religion, with a Buddhism religion, obviously is part of it, but it doesn't mean you have to be Buddhist to meditate.

Just even for 10 minutes, if I just let my brain not think, the only thing about your to-do list, your brain is always on overdrive.

Yeah.

Yes.

I like, and this is another start where you are, because sometimes if you have a really active, anxious brain, asking you to sit in silence is almost worse because then you're just accelerates the anxiety.

I've had anxiety for most of my life and I don't relate to it or it doesn't take over me anymore like it used to.

So I feel very sensitive to like an overly anxious mind.

And so sometimes silence is the enemy for that.

So I like if you're going to try to calm your mind, I like what you said, even having the waves, having a sound.

Maybe it's a moving meditation of walking and maybe you listen to a sound, a song that you really like.

So it's a way to try to drop into your body and quiet your mind, but it's not necessarily done in silence.

That is something I like to work up to.

And you might be there already.

You might be like, that sounds lovely to just sit in silence for 10 minutes.

You are right.

I don't do silence because I'm going to think.

I need somebody to say something on my headphones for me to let my brain know.

So what we're doing behind underneath all of this is you're rewiring your nervous system.

Our nervous system is essentially a bunch of patterns right from our past that's been formed.

And our brain pulls from the past to predict the future.

So we're kind of constantly always going to the past, predict the future.

And there's these patterns that are wired in our bodies, which is why we fall into the same habits over and over again and why these bite sized habit shifts work because you're literally forming new neural pathways.

And so when you think about, if I listen to this guided meditation for 10 minutes and I shut my mind off, or I choose to stand up and shake it out, or I take the walk.

Yeah, whatever that is, it's like all those bite sized things are literally rewiring you and you're interrupting that automatic habit.

And that done on repeat actually changes you.

Interrupting the habits, the old ways.

Melissa, you have shared so much with us today, going to take with me as well.

You have shared as the life alignment coach.

And before we go, what are one or two things that you want us to just remember?

I want you to remember that, and this is piggybacking off of what I just said, you always have a choice in who you get to be.

You get to choose that.

So you may have been dealt a deck of cards from your ancestors.

You may have been in a circumstance with your immediate family unit, something you've been born into.

The way the human body works is that you actually can rewire yourself, and you can break the cycle.

And so I want you to believe, even if just for a tiny little bit, that you get to change your circumstances by changing your insides, and that that is available to everyone.

And it takes repetition, it takes practice, and it takes support.

And so if you're feeling like you're stuck in a circumstance that doesn't fit you, that's misaligned, finding somebody to help you, whether it's a coach, a community, you can go on meetup.com, you can call me.

There's lots of people out there that want to help.

And getting in community about it is one of the best places to start, because we're stuck in our own minds, right?

All we know is what we've known.

And so sometimes it takes somebody, most of the time, it takes getting in community around it to really help you move forward.

So I just want you to believe that it's possible and to know that there's lots of support out there of people that want you to be able to show up as your highest self.

And that you are worth even just the 10 minutes to yourself.

Absolutely.

Oh my gosh.

If you have one mantra to say, I matter on repeat a thousand times every day, to begin to take that time, to begin to prioritize yourself, you must believe that you matter.

If you don't, it's okay.

It's really common, actually.

And starting to even just try that on, that you matter too.

And so you get to take the time, you get to get supported, you get to start to believe that something other than a circumstance that doesn't work for you right now is available and possible for you too, not just for other people in your world.

Melissa BauknightThe, The Life Alignment Coach.

Melissa, thank you so much.

And before you go, we can refine you so we can learn more.

My website is therippleconnection.com.

My Instagram handle is at therippleconnection.

And if you go on there, I created a really fun and insightful quick quiz that is called Unblock to Unleash.

So it helps you identify one of your main blocks and how to unblock that so that you can unleash yourself.

So that's a that's a fun place to start.

The Ripple Connection, the website and Instagram.

Yes.

Thank you so much, Melissa.

Thank you.