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Episode 014: Leigh Daniel: Bringing Love to Law

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Dawn Gluskin: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Bare Naked Radio. I am your host, Dawn Gluskin, and today I’m excited to welcome a positive changemaker and lovely human being by the name of Leigh Daniel to the show.

Leigh Daniel: Hey there everybody and thank you, Dawn, so much for having me today.

Dawn Gluskin: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Leigh came highly recommended by a wonderful friend of mine, Debbie Sodergren, and we just talked a bit before the show. She’s lovely and I cannot wait to talk to her. She’s got a really interesting background and you guys are gonna love her. Leigh had been practicing as a family lawyer for almost 20 years when she realized the energy and stress was taking a toll on her. She had looked for another way and found Mike Dooley’s Infinite Possibilities. After becoming a certified as a trainer, she came home and transformed her law practice and her life. She’s gone on to create Project Positive Change, a global network of heart-centered entrepreneurs. I would just love to dive right into your story so the audience can get a feel of who you are and what you stand for. If you could just take us back a little bit – so you’re working as an attorney, which we all know can be a very stressful job, 80 hours a week. And something inside of you said, “You know, I need a way out.”

Leigh Daniel: I didn’t realize it at the time because I didn’t know that much about energy and things like that. Being a divorce lawyer, I would get really engrossed in what was going on with my cases. Being in that negative energy all day long, five days a week, I didn’t realize how it was affecting me. My health was taking a toll, I would eat a ton to processed cheese. Velveeta was like my food choice. A big block of Velveeta cheese. I know it sounds silly, but I was so unhappy. Even though it looked like on the outside that I had everything going for me – I had my practice, it was very successful, known as a very super mean lawyer.

Dawn Gluskin: Which I can’t believe. You seem so nice.

Leigh Daniel: Somebody said to me yesterday, “But she looks really nice.” They were, like, “Oh no, the courtroom.”

Dawn Gluskin: It’s game on in the courtroom.

Leigh Daniel: Yeah, it’s fortunate. I just knew that I was really unhappy. I had high blood pressure and my actual physician referred me to a spiritual counselor and she got me looking around at different things on the Internet and I happened to run across Mike Dooley on a Mindvalley newsletter. After I went to Mike’s event, everything changed for me from that point on.

Dawn Gluskin: What was it about his event or about his teachings that resonated with you? What was sort of your A-ha moment?

Leigh Daniel: Well, the biggest one was – well, if any of you that might be listening are not into this woo-woo – I mean, I showed up and was absolutely terrified, about all the happy people, I thought, “What? It’s not even 9:00 in the morning. ”

Dawn Gluskin: “Why are these people so happy?”

Leigh Daniel: “Why are they happy? Why are they all wearing so many bracelets.” I came to realize that the more spiritual you are, more bracelets you have.

Dawn Gluskin: I definitely fit that, though!

Leigh Daniel: I was feeling so out of sorts and so out of place. I kept running back to my room to hide between breaks. But on the second day, I wasn’t paying that much attention, but Mike said something like, “You can keep going to therapist or you keep taking medicine or maybe you could just decide to stand up and be happy.” And I thought, “Wow, I’ve wasted a lot of money, first of all.” I absolutely have nothing against therapists or drugs. But I just thought, “Is it really that simple?” I went back to my room and I just felt like shaken. “Is that true?” So when I came back, I brought my staff in and I said, “We are doing something differently. We’re going to be a law firm based on love. But we didn’t. We’ve managed to transform the way we practice law from that point onward.

Dawn Gluskin: What does that look like, bringing love to law? What did that look like for you guys?

Leigh Daniel: The very first step was really reframing everything that happened because there’s so much negativity here that I had to not only reframe for us – let’s just say there’s a hostile lawyer and I’ll say, “What can we say nice about them?” And it might be something like, “They dress really well. They’re very well spoken” instead of cursing them or thinking, “Oh, they ruined our day, what a horrible person they are.” Just a continual reframing from the negative to the positive. Then I had to do that with my clients as well because you can really, especially in the family situation, you can get so stuck on everything that’s going wrong.

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah. Attorneys are known for being cutthroat. The best ones are. The more cutthroat you are, the better your results are. It seems such a strange place to bring love. Bringing love into the battle field.

Leigh Daniel: I was very conflicted at times. I remember once I had a case with a cross-dresser. I was cross-examining him. He and his lawyer were just glaring at me and I didn’t care how many dresses he wore. I was doing my job to bring it up to the court. I really was thinking, “How can I attack this man? I feel like I’m judging him.” I felt so horrible. But then I learned that if I could just come from a place of intending just to show the truth rather than intending to attack – It’s really about intention, you know what I mean, Dawn? It’s the intention that I put behind what I’m doing. Do I have compassion? I am really showing the truth? Or am I really there trying to destroy somebody?

Dawn Gluskin: That’s a great reframe because as a lawyer, your job is to let the truth come to the table and then let the courtroom decide. It’s not personal and it’s not about attacking – acknowledging that there is a human being on that stand. Instead of making it personal. That probably is helpful to you too, I’m sure. A lot of those feelings of stress and happiness you had felt prior or because of the nature of that work.

Leigh Daniel: Yeah, for sure. You can’t be that miserable and stuck in that much negativity and not be affected.

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah. And then enters the Velveeta.

Leigh Daniel: The Velveeta, the bottle of wine. I also have a couple of pigs at home. It was a really difficult time. I think that this happens to a lot of people. I got to a point in my career that I thought, “Is this is really it? I make six figures or more, I can do anything I want, but why am I so unhappy?”

Dawn Gluskin: So many people can relate to that. The outside looking in, you have the perfect life, everything’s great. Then you’re like, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I not happy?” What was the answer that you came up with for yourself?

Leigh Daniel: I found that I could just create whatever I wanted. If I wanted to keep creating misery, I could keep creating it. If I wanted to create something different, I had to think about something different. And Mike’s Dooley’s thing that he says is “Thoughts become things.” I really started putting that into practice and thinking about what I’m thinking about. But I just looking at my thoughts and seeing how am I approaching things? I stopped calling a client, spouses – like they really want you to call other person a name. Like, “What about this person? They’re so so and so.” I had to just keep pointing them away rather than getting engaged in calling them names or say, “You know what, let’s look at this from a different perspective of…” or “Why don’t we look at what’s going to happen in the future that’s great rather than all the bad things that happened in the past.”

Dawn Gluskin: It sounds like your role almost evolved from not just being the attorney and trying to win the case, but also almost like a counselor and then helping them heal. Is that kind of how it occurred at times?And

Leigh Daniel: Sort of. Yeah. I also have a huge community of people that I do referrals, I send lots of people referrals for coaches and therapists and things like that. But really, just having them stop looking at all the bad and just focus on those little good things that they can find in their life. Maybe they are upset because, “I’m not going to see my kids every day” and I say, “Well, but what if you have more quality time with the kids when you see them?” I just kinda keep directing them back to that space.

Dawn Gluskin: I love it. I love it. For those who laughed at you and said, “We’re going to go out of business when you bring love to law.” You’re still thriving. How has it affected your bottom line?

Leigh Daniel: At one point – I think it was around maybe around six or seven months later – I definitely was at a crossroads where I could tell people would come in and they wouldn’t hire me. That had never happened before. I thought, “What’s happening?” This one really negative woman – the sky was falling. Literally she parked in front of the offices and a tree fell on her car. Everything that was bad would happen. She fired me and I thought, “Oh my gosh, it was a big money client.” And I won her first case, this was her second case. I thought, “But I didn’t want to represent her.” After that, I started really thinking about the person I wanted to attract into my practice. We’re far more successful now than we were then. So it hasn’t effected my bottom line at all.

Dawn Gluskin: It seems it’s affected it positively and you’re getting the clients that you want to work with. Which is beautiful. That’s just like doing the work that you love, working with people that you want to work with. I mean that sounds like a perfect ending.

Leigh Daniel: My website has positive change all over it and Buddhas all over the office. I think if they walk in or they looked me up online at all, they’re going to see that my platform is about being positive, bringing positive change into their lives. That’s all I talk about. That doesn’t make me any less of a competent or tough lawyer. It just means that I do my job and I do it from a place of respect for the other people.

Dawn Gluskin: That’s such a great point because you can still do your job effectively, like you said, uncover the truth, makes sure that justice prevails. But you don’t have to bring on the dark energy. You don’t have to attack people. It’s like you can do it in a way with integrity. We often talk on Bare Naked Radio about being the truth of who you are and how we’re so afraid to be who we really are because we’re going to be judged. Or in your case it’s like, “Well, you’re a lawyer, you’re supposed to show up a certain way. Not with Buddhas all over the office, not talking about positive change.” There’s a fear of like, “I’m going to lose clients”, but you’re going to lose the clients you don’t want, which is a good thing. You’re going to attract the ones that you do want and the people that you most want to work with.

Leigh Daniel: Also the people that come to me are satisfied because no matter how their case turns out, they know that I’m really giving them more than just legal advice. I’m giving them love. At this office, that’s what we do. Everybody that works for me, I indoctrinating them into the idea. I’ve looked for people to work for me that come from a space of compassion and really wanting to give back. That’s just become what we are here.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s beautiful. Often in the show we often talk about your biggest failures, quote unquote, because I don’t believe there’s any true failures. Just learning experiences or biggest fears. And talking about that, you had talked about when you first started speaking and doing workshops and then you were getting some negative feedback from other attorneys. They caused you to question yourself.

Leigh Daniel: I get negative feedback from other lawyers because they say that I’m too happy.

Dawn Gluskin: They need to go to Mike Dooley’s event. Right? Like you. To realize, “It’s okay to be happy.”

Leigh Daniel: It’s our natural state is to be happy. I can recall a trial where I had just gone to lunch with my client and I was feeling pretty good. It was just a case about money. There weren’t any children or any domestic abuse. There’s nothing heavy duty about the case. It was just a money case and they both had money. The other lawyer says, “Objection, Your Honor.” I’m like, “What is she objecting to?” And she said she was objecting because Miss Daniel is smiling.

Dawn Gluskin: There’s no smiling in the court room!

Leigh Daniel: No, evidently not. And I said, “What?” And she said, “She’s been smiling at the court reporter the entire time.” She’s sitting across from me! I had to go into the judge’s chambers. I had to go explain that I taught people happiness and then I was pretty good at it obviously.

Dawn Gluskin: Wow. I mean that really paints the picture of what the atmosphere is like in a court room. You’re smiling. Just being a happy, normal person smiling at another human being that you get called into the judge’s chamber to be reprimanded.

Leigh Daniel: The judge wasn’t mad at me, but it was just kind of – I think they all know now. One lawyer says a little song, “Happy, happy, happy.” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” But I think they are used to it now. There’s not a lot of smiling in court room.

Dawn Gluskin: You’re just going to show up as who you are and you’re probably way happier. Have way less stress levels. Living a richer life than the average attorney because of what you’ve gotten turned on to. Then tell us: you came home after your transformation, becoming one of the happy people. I do have to ask now: do you wear the bracelets?

Leigh Daniel: I have many more bracelets now. Many many more.

Dawn Gluskin: I love it. I love it. Then you went on to create Project Positive Change. Tell us about the project and how it took off and where you guys are right now.

Leigh Daniel: After I found out that life could be different, I was really on fire to teach more people. I went and coached or taught hundred people out of Mike Dooley’s book and his workbook. That was first. Then I started doing retreats in Key West, Florida. I did nine successful retreats there and I met so many people. I started writing on a Facebook group, “We share infinite possibilities.” I met tons of people who wanted to make a difference in the world and we didn’t know how to do it. It was so expensive to get started doing online marketing. Lots of us had other jobs. So I said, “What if we just formed this community and started helping each other?” So that’s what I did. It’s been almost three years. April 1st was my very first webinar. The first people that joined, I thought, “I can’t believe you guys are joining. I just have an idea.” Soon, we set our goal for 111 people and that’s how many joined by mid-July. It was pretty incredible. All of us have a common goal to do business in a different way. That is to really put service to the world first and we want to make money and we will make money, but it’s not just about the bottom line. It’s about creating purpose in our lives and creating purpose in our business.

Dawn Gluskin: If you can create service to the world first and happiness inside a courtroom, which isn’t usually service to self and not happiness, but competition. If you can create that there, then yes, you can create that across any industry.

Leigh Daniel: I remember I used to read Marianne Williamson and she wrote in “A Return to Love” that when she used to work as a waitress in New York City that everybody else just thought she was a waitress. She knew she was a lightworker. I really think that’s all of our roles as light workers in whatever, wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, if we can just bring that higher consciousness and that higher vibration to wherever we are – we’re shifting things just a little bit,

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah, because our light and our consciousness – that’s the truth of who we are at the core of our being. And then we forget. Life happens and we start building up all these layers and all these beliefs and then we just forget who we are. Especially when you get sucked into some of the more corporate, cutthroat environments – like practicing law especially as a great example of that – then you lose sight of that so easily. But it’s not that hard to bring it back. Right? What would you recommend to people listening that are saying, “I want more light in my life?”

Leigh Daniel: I say start with the littlest step of reframing. Just catching what you say first because that’s pretty easy. What do you say about yourself? What do you say about your neighbors? When I first came back I had to kind of cut ties with lots of people that were negative in my life. While I thought, “Well shoot, I’m not going to have any friends.” Now, I had a community of hundreds of people who support and love me, but I didn’t want to be around people who are gossipy or who backbiting or competing. I just cut that out of my life.

Dawn Gluskin: That’s such a beautiful point for all of our listeners too. Sometimes we’re afraid just to be who we really are or to step into our light or step into our power because we’re afraid of losing people. But sometimes you do lose those clients that aren’t aligned or sometimes you do lose those friends that aren’t in alignment. It’s okay because when you lose the people that aren’t your people, that aren’t in alignment with you, the right people can come into your life. You’re creating actually creating space for more abundance, for more joy.

Leigh Daniel: I remember going to dinner with a group of women. They said, “We missed you, blah, blah, blah.” I sat there and listened to them all talk about other women and I thought, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to talk about people. I want to lift people up.” I know there’s some things you can’t avoid. I certainly can’t avoid going to court everyday and it sure as heck didn’t feel good all the time, most of the time. But if you can choose and you’re in a place that you don’t feel good, then don’t stay there. We have a choice to choose something that lifts us up and makes us feel great or something that makes us feel bad.

Dawn Gluskin: It is something that you have to do, like going to the court room. You can find a way to make it. How do you bring your light into that situation?

Leigh Daniel: Oh my goodness. I started wearing crystals in my bra. I did a little Reiki before going into the courtroom. I just say whatever it is I want to manifest that day. Recently at a trial and the whole way there, about an hour and a half. I just said, “I’m love and I am fairness and I am…” I just kept saying affirmations. I set my intention to do the best I could. It was the most incredible feeling of calm competency, skill – it’s just about setting intention.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s such a great role model for some people because a lot of times people will be maybe stuck in a job that they don’t love and there’s another calling for them. They’re like, “Well, how do I do both? I can’t quit my job because I still need the income. I’m not in a place to do that yet. Or maybe I don’t want to for other reasons. And I have this calling, this passion to do something else, like a soul calling.” It sounds like you’ve got the best of both worlds. You’re bringing love into the courtroom and you have your project, Project Positive Change. How do you manage it all? Do you just work constantly?

Leigh Daniel: I work a lot but I have a great team. I have a team of people with Project Positive Change. I have a team of people in my law office. I just surround myself with people that have the same vision that I have and know what the end result is which is to make, especially in my domestic practice, to make them leave in a better place than they were when they started. Just financially or not just with their children actually to have a piece of hope.

Dawn Gluskin: It sounds like you’re really invested in your team and helping them transform. If they come to work with you, they’re going to get uplifted and you guys are going to grow together.

Leigh Daniel: I’ve hired two lawyers since that happened and I fired one guy too because he was really angry and negative. I just said, “I can’t have you acting like that.” The people that I’ve hired are positive. They can see that silver lining, they really care about the people that come into the office. They’re not just a file. They’re not just money. It really means something.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s beautiful because in the business world, sometimes we can forget we’re working with humans. It’s not just a number on a spreadsheet. Those are real people with real feelings with real lives.

Leigh Daniel: Right. And I recently spoke at an event in the UK to about a hundred women. I had a very successful law practice and I was sharing that by even showing some vulnerability, showing your clients that you’re a real person, telling them anecdotes, connecting with them. That’s why I find that I’ve been so successful. Somebody wrote a comment that I had shown her a way to do business that she never thought of before.

Dawn Gluskin: That’s such a great point because a lot of people correlate vulnerability with weakness. It’s, like, “Being vulnerable, I’m opening up, you can hurt me now, I’m opening myself up to it.” But you actually find strength in vulnerability, which is how I view it too.

Leigh Daniel: And the other people that are around you – that enables them to show themselves as well. Right? My dog comes to work with me, that helps a lot.

Dawn Gluskin: Just the dog? Not the pig?

Leigh Daniel: No, the pigs are too big! One of my dogs comes here and I have lavender oil on. The people that especially stressed, I’ll get the lavender out. It just makes everybody feel like there’s a lot at the end of that tunnel.

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah. Well you sound like you’re doing it right. You’ve got lavender oil, you got the dog, you’ve got the Buddhas, we got the crystals and the Reiki. I’m like, “I want to go to your law office because that’s where it’s going on.”

Leigh Daniel: Well, you don’t! Dawn, you don’t want to come here. This is where people get divorced.

Dawn Gluskin: That is true. I just want to come hang out.

Leigh Daniel: I just bought a farm as well. I’m so excited about my new farm

Dawn Gluskin: Aw, I love it. So how did you end up with the pig and the farm?

Leigh Daniel: Well, the pig lives actually in the city. So hopefully nobody that works for the city is going to be listening today. I call him my “Hot Piggy In The City”. I had a picture of a pig over my bed like an artpiece, with a pig lounging on a couch for years. And then I had another picture in my kitchen of a pig. When I went to this flea market one day, I didn’t go with the idea about a pig, but I’m pretty sure that having those pigs in my house are exactly why I ended up with a pig. He’s a lovely guy.

Dawn Gluskin: Impulsively you’re like, “I’m buying a pig today.” It was meant to be.

Leigh Daniel: I’m like, “Let’s just take this hog home.”

Dawn Gluskin: Wow. I love it. Why not, right?

Leigh Daniel: Exactly.

Dawn Gluskin: Well, you have been such a joy to talk to you. Of course the show always goes by so fast, but we’re coming to that time in the show – our listeners who are loving you and your energy and they want to find out more about the Positive Change Project – how do they get in touch with you on social media, on the web. Where can they go next?

Leigh Daniel: Thank you, Dawn, for asking. We have a really great Facebook page called Project Positive Change. On the page I have 180 members from 25 countries and we have all kinds of videos helping people with so many different things, from their pets to their careers to Akashic Record readings, intuitive readings. You can check us out on Facebook, Project Positive Change. We have a website, projectpositivechange.com You can reach out to me on social media, Just send me a Facebook message or find me at my Facebook group: “We Share Infinite Possibilities.”

Dawn Gluskin: And all of those links will be up on barenakedradio.com in the show notes under Leigh Daniel’s podcast episode. If you can bring positive change and light and happiness to a courtroom, then you can bring it to anywhere in life. Thank you for demonstrating that and just showing people how it can be done. And I love your spirit and love you and thank you so much for being on the show today.

Leigh Daniel: Thank you so much for having me.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s my pleasure.

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Episode 015: Debbie Sodergren: Woo Out of the Closet

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Dawn Gluskin: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Bare Naked Radio. I am your host, Dawn Gluskin and today I’m here with a very special guest, a dear, dear friend of mine, amazing human being. I’m so excited to introduce to you Debbie Sodergren. Hello Debbie.

Debbie Sodergren: Hi everyone.

Dawn Gluskin: Debbie and I have known each other for, gosh, a couple years now and we just instantly connected. You know when you meet someone that’s, like, your person? That was kind of how it was with us. We’re in the same mastermind group together. We’ve got to travel to Hawaii and Puerto Rico and all these cool places together and she’s just amazing. I’m so happy I get to share her with you all today. If you don’t know Debbie yet, she is the CEO of Up Vibrations, LLC. Clients hire her to cultivate their mindsets, reduced stress, and raise their energy vibration to create the success they desire in their life. She does this through one-on-one coaching and group programs. I have worked with her before and she just really helps you clear out whatever you need to clear out and get connected to your higher self. She’s just amazing. So, hello Debbie. Welcome.

Debbie Sodergren: Hi Dawn. This is so wonderful being on Bare Naked Radio. I’m very excited to be here today with you.

Dawn Gluskin: Me, too. Me, Too. Oh my gosh. So much to talk about. Let’s just get right into it. Let’s talk about how you ended up where you are today. You have a really cool background. You’ve studied that metaphysics and you’re just so connected. How did you get where you are today and how did you become an energy vibration expert and what even is that for the people out there that are scratching their head?

Debbie Sodergren: It’s interesting because I’ve always been this and it’s always been difficult trying to find where in the world, in our society does what I am and how I’m put together, how do I fit in. It wasn’t until after I got married and, um, I used to work in the marketing world and left my job at the airlines working in marketing. I left my job working at Lego and marketing. I was going back to night school and taking some classes to – I’m a constant learner. One of my teachers – I was taking a psychology class. She, at the end of class, had said, “Hey, by the way, for those of you interested, I’m a medium and I offer classes in mediumship and paranormal and in metaphysics. If you are interested, come see me at the end of class.” Well, oh my gosh, my radar went up and I was just, like, “Thank you, Universe.” Like in my head, thank you universe, because I know how all this works. I just never really had a format around it. And so I went up and spoke with her and I ended up, Lo and behold, going to her school for six years called the New England School of Metaphysics. I graduated in 1998. I took everything they had to offer. At that point it was, like, “Okay, so I’m going to do this.” During that time, I’d had three children, so my dream job was being an at-home mom with my kids because my husband’s job had him traveling all the time. Our goal at that time – we had the same idea of values of what we wanted for our children – was that we were going to raise them, which meant one of us was going to stay home with the kids. When we first got married, I made the bigger paycheck. But over the long haul he had the buildout for having the bigger paycheck for the lifestyle. So, no problem. I would love to be an at-home mom. My parents both worked full time and I did not have an at-home mom. So that’s something that I craved to be for my children. While I was an at-home mom, I’d taken these classes. I graduated and I started doing classes in my home to different women’s groups that I was associated with through my children’s associations, whether it was a school group or a neighborhood group. And I was, like, “Yeah, I do this thing where I teach meditation classes and I teach you about your energy body.” And they’d be, like, well, “What’s your energy body?” I’d say, “Well, okay, so you have this physical body that you can see, but you also have these layers of energy that are outside of your body and inside of your body. Over in Indian ayurvedic training, they call them the 7 major chakras in your body and 21 minor chakras and hundreds of sub chakras. In the Chinese energy system, they call it the meridian system that’s inside the body. They’re pathways.” I explained it to people in this kind of language where they got it and they were, like, “Yeah, I would love to know more about how to integrate using that with my physical body and what’s going on around me.” A great pathway for me to do that with them was through meditation because meditation was just becoming mainstream and people were doing it. There were studies out in the early, the late nineties, early 2000s about the benefits of meditation. So that was a really safe way to introduce people to what my underlying purpose was, which was to get them to know about their energetic body vibration and by getting them to know, love, and trust me by taking four weeks of basic meditation and awareness with me, I was then able to answer their questions, build trust with them so that they were just salivating and satiated. That they wanted so much more. And then, we would continue onto this course that I put together. It’s a 12 week course called “The Journey Within.” It talks about a bunch of fun stuff. I try to keep it lighthearted and fun and I think that’s why I’ve had such great results with it is because I de-mystify it. I take away all of the stuff around it that makes it feel or sound like it’s something that would be hard to attribute yourself too. I try to make it so that it’s every day and you can actually do this, like in your home. You don’t have to go someplace special.

Dawn Gluskin: You have such a great story because I know that even from childhood you always have known that you are very connected to sort of the other dimensions and you’re really tuned in to the divine frequencies. Maybe as a child – and I know this because I know you – that that was something you kind of shut down a little bit because it was, like, “Well, this is kind of weird. Why doesn’t anyone else have this?” But you have such a great journey. You go into marketing and you decide that wasn’t your path. But then you go study metaphysics for six years, which is awesome because a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to have a formal education around these things. We’re all just kind of figuring it out. But then you bring it back to your mom groups and you’re teaching just moms, the regular people. Everyone has this capacity to tune in to their energetic body and I’m making a point of this because a lot of people hear about this stuff and they shut it down because, like, “Well I don’t understand that” or “I’m not special.” But we all have the ability and the capacity to tune in. Beautiful, magical things happen when you work with the laws of the universe. I just love how you’re bringing these concepts and you’re making them accessible to everyone. You started with moms and now I know you work with a lot of business leaders as well.

Debbie Sodergren: Yeah, I do. Thank you for that. Aw, that’s so sweet of you. Well, you know, back in the day when I was first starting to do this, I thought, “Who better than somebody like me, who is a mom, who’s taking care of the kids. Whenever I would file my taxes, they would say, “Oh, what are you, a housewife?” The one time that I answered it, that I was done with that word because I was, like, “I’m not a housewife. That’s not what I am. I’m not a wife to my house. That’s just not what I am.” And so I was sitting across from the account and my husband and I said, “Well no, actually I’m the manager of domestic affairs.” And there was silence in the room and he’s, like, “Excuse me?” And I said, “No, seriously. I thought about this, I manage everything that goes on. If I was in an office and if I was a secretary for a CEO, these are the things that I would be doing it.” I listed out everything and he just sat there and his jaw dropped open. He goes, “My wife’s going to love you.” So I’m just trying to bring some dignity to the whole idea of being an at-home mom. It’s a stressful thing and especially when you’re on your own for 24/7 for four or five days in a row, you can go crazy for a little bit and you don’t really have a place to vent. In our society, we have not been taught a proper way to unplug from all the external things that are calling our attention, to really get grounded, to go inward, to listen to that inner wisdom and tap into it. We’ve been so distracted by everything outside of us that we forgot how to listen to it. So what do I do really is I help people get reacquainted with that whole process of going inward and because it’s nothing that we’ve been taught in our regular school life or our whole lives. It’s by nobody’s fault, there’s no judgment here. It’s just looking at it as an awareness. It’s all about really teaching people to reconnect to that and you can’t do it in a weekend and you can’t do it in a night. It takes time.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s not a pill. You’re not going to swallow a pill and have this magic happen. It’s a practice.

Debbie Sodergren: Exactly. And our society has been sold on this idea of, “If something’s wrong, here’s a pill, let’s fix it.” Don’t get me wrong, I agree with allopathic medicine, but I think allopathic medicine is good for crisis mode. Then when you can get things under control and manageable, then you really need to start digging to look at what’s the underlying root factor of what this is so that you can then shift it so you don’t have to suffer with it any longer.

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah, and that’s such a great point because all the wisdom we need, all the healing we need, everything is available to us inside of us and our heart, in our gut. It’s available within. And meditation helps you connect with that. So when you say it’s an inside of you, a lot of people think, “Oh, inside my head, right?” And actually what’s going on inside of our heads, a lot of time is just fed by the outside world of wanting to fit in, of the beliefs we’ve created about ourselves. That’s another one of the beautiful benefits of having a regular meditation practice and a regular spiritual practice is connecting to that inner wisdom that comes from the heart, that comes from your intuition, to get rid of the stories in your head that are false and connect with your truth. It’s just so beautiful and I think everyone – gosh, why aren’t we teaching this in school to children? Everyone can benefit from knowing this, but we’re not really learning that. Especially here in this Western society.

Debbie Sodergren: Yeah. As far as your listeners go, if you take anything away from our call today, my purpose to being on this call is to help you understand that: give yourself permission when someone that you love comes to you with a different idea or a different mindset or a different way of being, instead of coming to them with judgment, come to them with compassion in your heart, so just drop from your head down into your heart. In fact, science has now proven that the electromagnetic field around the heart is four times larger than that. That’s around the brain. That’s huge. So if we could just drop down into our hearts and really have compassion for our differences and embrace the differences – because that’s what makes everything the spice of life – and stop passing judgment on it, I think that we will be co-creating the world that we really want to see moving forward.

Dawn Gluskin: I love that and of course you and I, we’ve been doing the work for many, many years so we know how to drop into our heart, but for someone that’s listening and they’re, like, “Well, how do I do that?” They spend so much time in their head. What would you say? Just like a to get started, like how do you visualize yourself doing that or what’s your sort of training if you can give like a quick little training here?

Debbie Sodergren: Absolutely. What I like to do when I’m doing an interview or if I’m doing a talk on a stage somewhere is just share with the audience. Remember the acronym FLY and it stands for First Love Yourself. When you are in stress mode of making dinner and the kids and the homework and you’ve got stuff on your plate that you didn’t finish at work or you need to get back into the office and it’s gonna be a late night. Whatever it is: if you have a significant other or not even that stressful, whatever those stressors are, what you can do is just take a couple moments to yourself, meaning stop whatever you’re doing, just kind of go into the bathroom, close the door, close the lid on the toilet and just sit on it and close your eyes and do three cleansing breaths. As you do them, breathe in through your nose, expanding your abdomen out, holding it at the top of the breath, and then exhaling through your mouth and pulling your belly button to your spine. After you do those three cleansing breaths, just kind of sit there, continue sitting there with your eyes closed, and just kind of go inward and see “How am I doing right now? What is it that my needs are? What is it that I need?” You might need to say to somebody, “Hey, can you stir this a few moments? I just need to sit and drink a cup of tea” or “can you just do your reading right now while I do…” Do whatever it is that you need to do. Maybe you need to stretch because you forgot about stretching. Maybe you forgot about drinking a glass of water and nourishing your body. It’s a really simple thing and it sounds simple and I can feel some of the eye rolling. Let me tell you.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s so powerful. Don’t dismiss what’s simple. It doesn’t have to be hard. We’re designed for it to be easy. Really. When you let go of all the story and just connect. There’s nothing more powerful than connecting with yourself, your truth, your divine self. It really is that. It can be that simple.

Debbie Sodergren: It sure can and I tell people, “If you are shrugging your shoulders, you’re not quite sure then why not try it? Nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah and our audience – we have some pretty openminded listeners too and they’re always willing to learn and that’s the feedback I’ve gotten from other episodes. I love that. Just take that on. And I love that you’re saying, you know, to go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet because if you’re a mom, you know that sometimes that’s just where you escape, a closet or the bathroom. “Can I just have a minute?”

Debbie Sodergren: Exactly. Exactly. And it only takes a couple minutes to do a couple cleansing breaths and then if you don’t want people to know what you’re doing when you’re in there, just flush it for the sake of flushing it and when you do imagine all your stress leaving, going down and leaving the house.

Dawn Gluskin: Then eventually gets to the point where you’ll just be wherever. Like, I’ll be on a bench at the park, I don’t care. Like, if I need a minute, I’m going to close my eyes and take it. It just gets to be like that because you know how good it is for yourself. And it’s, like, “I don’t need a high.” My kids know all the time. They’ll see me meditating and just know, like, “Leave Mommy alone. She’s having a moment.”

Debbie Sodergren: Yeah. And it’s really healthy. And as a matter of fact, when I see somebody in public do that for themselves, it triggers in me, Oh yeah, my own self care. Where am I going to take a moment? Maybe I’ll get in the car and get to the next location and I’ll turn the keys off. And I’ll sit in the car and I’ll just do it before I go into the next session, just so that I can get really get present around what it is that’s calling my attention next. Yeah. And the more you practice it, the easier it is to drop in, right? You can just a few seconds, not even with closing your eyes, you can just do it. I’m just walking, you know, walking through a crowded place or whatever it is. So it’s just setting the intention and you definitely can get there really quickly.

Dawn Gluskin: That’s why you want to practice. Awesome. I love everything you’ve talked about so far. On Bare Naked Radio, we always sort of touch a little bit on subjects of biggest “failures”. I always say “failure” in quotes because failure is just an opinion, but I think our biggest failures or our biggest heartaches really are what shape us into who we are. That’s where we get our super powers from. We talk about your mess becoming your message or transmitting your pain into your purpose. You have such a great story and I would love for you to share it with our audience today. Debbie is like “Little Debbie” and then how you’ve grown into who you are now and being so connected and what that journey looked like for you. So you want to share a little bit about that?

Debbie Sodergren: Yeah. Uh, how far back do you want me to go?

Dawn Gluskin: Well, let’s go back to like when you were sick. You were four or five?

Debbie Sodergren: Okay, sure. Yep. I just wanted to make sure I was going to go where you wanted me to go. So when I was four years old I went and had a kindergarten physical just like everybody else does. And during my physical, my doctor had noticed something strange with my heart. So they sent me to a cardiologist and they realized that I had a hole in my heart. Everyone’s born with a hole in their heart. Mine just didn’t close up, so they realized that I was going to need open heart surgery. After figuring out if they were gonna send me someplace to another state where there was a specialist or whatever, the cardiologist decided to come to where I live and do the surgery. After my first surgery, which was about eight hours, my parents came into my room to see me and my mom looked at me and she’s, like, “Something’s off. Her color doesn’t look good. Something’s not right.” They came in and they reassessed me and they realized that the procedure that they used didn’t work. So they needed to go in and do open heart surgery again. It was during the second open heart surgery that I feel I’ve had my out of body experience. I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember it through the lens of my four year old self. Once I came back, there was times when I was able to leave my body and I’d, like, travel across the street to see my grandparents. Or I’d go next door and see my best friend. I started saying stuff to them, like, “Oh, I saw you get up at such and such a time” or “Oh, I saw you had such on for your PJ’s.” An adult had sat me down and was, like, “You can’t talk like this. They’re going to take you away. Well, when you say that to a 4 and 5 year old… they don’t want to be taken away. So the next best thing I could do that was within my power was when I went to bed at night, I would just close my eyes really tight and I’d make this with my hands and I would just will myself to stay in my body. “Please stay in my body. Please stay my body.” And I did it, to the point where that’s what I mastered. So I didn’t have to do that willfully. I was able to do that naturally. That’s how my routine of practice became my habit so that it became just a natural thing for me. And growing up I was always kind of different. I hung out with the kids in the smoking area, but yet I was the track manager. And I was in plays. So I was kind of like the social butterfly just kind of fit in with everybody. I liked that about myself. There were times when I really felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere. Like I was this lone nut out there and “how come nobody else does what I do and how come nobody talks the way I do or nobody wants…” Anytime I tried to broach the subject of anything that was esoteric or metaphysical – friends who knew me and loved me – I would like bring up the subject and they’d be, like, “What are you doing? My God, you’re freaking me out. Stop talking like that.” So I kind of didn’t say anything. Throughout the years, I went to college, wasn’t really what I wanted in college, so I didn’t want to spend the money. So I left college after a year. I put myself through travel school because I thought, “Oh, I love to travel, I want to see the world, I’m all about that.” I became a travel agent and got a job at the airport working for a car rental, knowing that I wanted to get in to an airline. So what I did was every day on my lunch break, I’d go talk to the people at the airline. And sure enough, before you knew it, there was an opening. I interviewed and I got the job. That was one way of me knowing that if I just put my mind to something, if I just did some small action steps, I would create it. To me, I never second guessed that if I wanted something I could achieve it. It was just kind of something that I felt like I knew. From that point on, I kept trying to fit in in different jobs and, like I said, in marketing, through the airlines and through LEGO and stuff. I became a real estate agent because I thought, “Oh my God, I love homes and I would like to help people manage their dreams.”

Dawn Gluskin: You’re just like trying to find yourself and like, “How can I fit into the box?”

Debbie Sodergren: Exactly what it was like. And then finally, my kids were grown at this point. I was an at-home mom, my kids were grown. I had done a lot of work on myself and my own frustration and not fitting in and in my needs. I finally just had this download one night and I was meditating and Spirit came in and just said, “It’s time. It’s time to step into being you.” And I’m, like, “What are you talking about?” This is the conversation in my head. I was going, “What are you talking about? I am being me.”

Dawn Gluskin: You got so good at denying who you were that it was like, “What do you mean?”

Debbie Sodergren: Yeah. And then it was loud and clear. They said, “No, no. You have one foot in each world, we really need you to be the luminary that you said you were going to be while you were there. Let us support you. Let us worry about everything else. You just do what you said you were going to do when you came down.” So I was like, “Alright.” And I woke up and next day, I said to my husband, “I’m going to be giving up my real estate license. I’m just going to hang my shingle out there as an energy worker.” He was, like, “How are you going to do that?” I’m scratching my head, “I don’t know.” So I got on the phone and I made like 30 calls on the shoreline looking to rent space and I got two phone calls back. One of them was from a massage therapist practice and they said, “Yeah, we’d love to sublease to you. I ended up going there and I just trusted the process and it really worked out for me. I ended up running a Groupon of all things and I had, like, 300 people buy a Groupon for an energy session. That was the beginnings. I just did with whatever came to me naturally – like the idea of a Groupon. I don’t know. It came across my email once where there was a Groupon for something and I thought, “Huh, I wonder if I could do a Groupon for what I do.” I got in touch withGgroupon and they’re, like, “Yeah, you could do that.” They walked me through the process and I didn’t even think twice about it.

Dawn Gluskin: You were just being guided. That’s such an important point too because sometimes you just need to be in motion. You don’t have to have all the answers figured out or all the next steps or the big vision. You were literally being called by Spirit to get into motion and you just took the first step and the next step. It’s so beautiful. There are so many great things in what you shared, Debbie, because I know a lot of our listeners can relate. Certainly I can relate to a lot of your story with there’s something about us that we know is different or special or unique or it’s just a little other worldly, right? And then you’re told, like, “No, that’s too weird. People are gonna think you’re crazy.” And that usually happens at a young age and then you just learn to shut down. “That’s too out there. That’s weird.” All of these things and not everyone necessarily can leave their body, which is pretty cool. But everyone can kind of have their own version of that. That thing about themselves that they don’t want anyone to find out that they’re going to be judged about. People aren’t going to like them. So you just water yourself down. And that’s so much of what Bare Naked Radio is about, is peeling back the layers and being, like, “Hey, this is me. This is who I really am. I’m not hiding anymore. I’m not wearing the mask anymore. You’ve emulated that so beautifully when you got the call and it was. like, “No, Debbie, we need you. We need you to step up.” And you could have been, like, “No, no, I don’t. That’s scary. I don’t want to do it. But you took that step and even just sharing this today on the show, that’s huge. That takes something, right?

Debbie Sodergren: Yeah. It takes a lot because you know, there’s people that think that they know me and my community of where I live and they might listen to this show and they might not know some of this information that I’m sharing here because I’ve never been in a setting where I could share the context of my authentic self. I’m a Gemini. I’m a really good chameleon. I can fit into any environment. If you want me to put on the the at-home mom or you want me to put on the hat of being a member of the community or whatever it is. I’m comfortable doing it. To me it’s like the world is my stage and so I’m just playing these different parts in my stage and now the universe is really tapping me. My source is tapping me to step into being my authentic self and let the world see that and in my own beliefs of what was taught to me and ingrained in me when I was younger. That is my lens for thinking, “Oh, they’re not going to like me. Oh, they’re not going to accept me.” I’ve got the training now behind me and the wisdom and I’ve got the courage to just stand there and say, “It’s okay.”

Dawn Gluskin: It’s all perfect, too. I think it’s all perfect because at a young age, you had the near death experience which obviously opened some channels for you, but even being told to shut it down and living your life that way for so long. Now the time is right and the universe is ripe and there’s a lot of people coming out. We even talked about this. You talked about doing a show called Coming Out of the Woo-Woo Closet.

Debbie Sodergren: Yes, yes. I did a podcast show for a year with another co-host. We were before our time and we did this show. Now we just offer it on our website for people just to get to know, love, and trust us. You and I have been in some masterminds together. We’ve done some traveling together and we are likeminded and you are so in my corner and I love you for that. It’s exciting that one of the things to do is to get that podcast show going, “Woo Out of the Closet” kind of thing because everybody’s got their story of it.

Dawn Gluskin: There are so many. It’s even me. I can relate to that, too, because my way of connecting to sources is through channeling. I channel a lot of things in writing and I’m, like, “Oh my God, people are gonna think I’m crazy. ‘Oh, I’m talking to God. God’s talking to me.'” People are gonna be, like, “Okay, she’s crazy. They’re going to take me away.” And I was, like, “Can I say? People are gonna think I’m weird.” I had the exact same thing. I’ve shut a lot of it down, too. And the same thing, now more recently I’m being more open about it and just owning it and it’s who I am. How could you be too much love or too much light. It’s not possible. Anybody who judges you for that or has an issue with that’s just their own stuff that they’re working through and you can never take it personal.

Debbie Sodergren: Well yes, their own fears. It’s their own limitations. If they really stopped for a moment and they do those three centering breaths and get into their body, they realize, “This is it. This is me too. This is it, guys. This isn’t a dress rehearsal.” Knowing that information now going forward, what are your choices going to be? Because you always have a choice.

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah. It’s beautiful. I just love that you’re stepping up to the plate and answering the call and just sharing your brilliance with everyone and there’s a lot of people. You’d be surprised how many people are sort of “in the woo-woo closet” when you start talking to people. That happens a lot in my work. I’m the “Truth Digger.” I’m kinda like the “truth serum.” I get a lot of, “Oh, I’ve never told anyone this before, but…” I get a lot of that. Interestingly enough, I’ve worked with several clients who have had near death experiences. For whatever reason, my field, I attract those kind of people and it’s the same thing. Like I’ve never told this story before and so many people are coming out, so if you’re at home listening now and this is you, this is your permission to be who you are and it feels so good to not have to pretend anymore and not have to worry about what everyone’s going to think and just to be yourself. Who you were meant to be on this planet at this time and you even said it before, what you agreed to. We all have these soul contracts that we agreed to come here on earth at this time to cause something. So it’s time to step up, if you’re listening and that’s you and you’re hearing yourself in this story idea. I dare you! It’s not even a dare but it just feels so good. I heard you. Tell somebody. Tell people. Come out.

Debbie Sodergren: It’s time. If you’re listening to this podcast, that’s a sign that it’s time.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s so beautiful. Oh, I love it so much and I could literally talk to you for hours and I can’t believe our time is just about up already.

Debbie Sodergren: I know it goes by so fast, right?

Dawn Gluskin: I love you so much and everyone who’s listening now is falling in love with Debbie like I have and wants to get connected with you. Can you tell everyone where they can find you on social media, how they can connect with you?

Debbie Sodergren: Sure, absolutely. Thank you for that. I have a website, so if you go to my website, it’s www.upvibrations.com and I have a freebie on there. So if you’re interested in a little grounding, it’s less than five minutes. You can get it for free, you can put it on your phone, you can put it on your computer, whatever you need. I’d love to give that to your audience as a gift. I’m also on Instagram, @DebbieSodergren. I’m on Twitter and I’m on Facebook. On Facebook, it’s “Up Vibrations LLC.” So if you check that out you can join. It’s my company website. I’ve got different groups and things in there that you’re welcome to check out.

Dawn Gluskin: Awesome. Love it, love it. And as always, all of the links will be up on www.barenakedradio.com. You can just click on Debbie, her show, and her show notes and you can get easy access to all of that. Oh my gosh, Debbie, I just thank you so much for sharing and for coming out of the woo closet and inspiring many others to do the same. That’s what this show is all about, is being the truth of who we are so that we don’t go to our deathbed with that regret that so many people have of, “I wish I had lived a life true to myself.” Now is your time.

Debbie Sodergren: Absolutely. And I love what you do because sometimes when you’re first coming out like this and you’re saying this, it’s hard to find the language around it so that people can associate with you still and you’re not making yourself excluded. I love the work that you’re doing with just taking people’s stories of who they are and stepping into their authentic selves and making it in a way that shows them the love that they bring forward. And not the weirdness.

Dawn Gluskin: Oh yeah. Gosh, of course. Because that’s how we are. That’s the truth of who we are. It’s all love. We just need to honor that and be who we are. I’m talking to myself when I say this to like the reason this is my message – our pain becomes our purpose. This has been my life too. And as I come out and express myself, the more people that do it, that’s what this planet needs right now. So keep doing the work. Everybody connect with Debbie. She will help you connect to your energy, body, and love on yourself and FLY: First Love Yourself. It’s such a great acronym and so much good stuff. So thank you for being here, Debbie. Love you.

Debbie Sodergren: Alright, thanks for having me, Dawn. Thank you.

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Episode 012: Natalie Vartanian: When Everything Looks Perfect … But you Answer the Call of the Soul

Listen to the episode and access the show notes here.

Dawn Gluskin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Bare Naked Radio. I am your host, Dawn Gluskin. Today, I am so excited to welcome Natalie Vartanian to the show. A mutual friend of ours connected us and it feels already like we’re long lost soul sisters. So we’re going to have a great conversation today. We’re going to be talking about sex and mysticism and all kinds of good stuffs. Hello Natalie.

Natalie Vartanian: Hello everyone!

Dawn Gluskin: So excited to have you here. We’re just having a really great conversation before the show. So really excited to share with you. For those of you that don’t know Natalie, she is a certified life coach, a relationship expert, business strategist, writer, teacher, and all around provocateur. Her biggest goal is for people to create life their way in whatever way turns them on. Natalie’s working on self-publishing her first book about her sexual escapades and revolutions. That’s going to be very interesting. I’m looking forward to reading. It will be out later this year at the end of 2018. So yay! That’s exciting! Let’s just get right into it. How we usually like to start this show is with a little bit of storytelling. For those who aren’t familiar with your work and who you are, if you could just give us a little bit of your background: how did you get into the world of healing and you do some tarot work and, of course sex is becoming a big part of your message and how that book chose you. If you could just talk a little bit about your journey.

Natalie Vartanian: Yeah, I definitely went the route of high school, immediately go to college, and start working during college. I had these like big plans for how I was going to make a lot of money and have a house. I like to say I was fully bought into the American Dream even though that wasn’t my soul. My soul was always kind of rebellious and I’m fascinated by mystical things and fairies and other worldly things, but very rooted in our reality, especially in the United States. I spent my twenties very much with the question of, “Why am I hear, what am I doing with my life?” Even though I had good jobs and I had great friends and, even at some point, I got the fiance and we bought a house together and I was an “Instamom”, because he had kids. On paper, everything looked perfect in some ways. Not that it didn’t have its struggles, but in a lot of ways, I was the epitome of success for a lot of people. I did. I loved my partner. There were things I enjoyed about my job and what I was doing. I went to Leadership Weekend and it just changed everything because it just had me clued into all these dreams that I had for myself. I’m, like, “I’m not doing any of them. We’re not traveling the way that I always thought I was going to travel. I’m not writing, I’m not…” My soul didn’t feel free.

Dawn Gluskin: I think so many people can relate to that because it’s on the outside in, everything looks picture perfect. On the inside, there there’s this longing, like, there’s something more. And then I don’t know if this was your experience, but with a lot of other people, it’s like they almost feel bad for wanting more, like, “Why can’t I just be happy? I have the perfect life. Other people would kill for this life.”

Natalie Vartanian: Totally. Yeah. “I should be counting my lucky stars, I should be on my knees every night, praying for this amazing life that I have.” And then there’s guilt with that. This guilty of, “Why can’t I just be happy with what I have?” Which is painful. It’s a very painful, lonely place, and shameful place to be. Talk about another taboo place of, like, “Everything is good. What are you complaining about? You shouldn’t be complaining about your life.” This Leadership Weekend just kind of blew everything open. Shortly after in my situation, I kinda had to blow up my life in order for it to change because it was so rooted and deep in everything that I didn’t want for myself. I moved and I separated from my partner at the time. I started working remote. Soon after I looked into coaching and, or even going back to school. I was just, like, “What do I want to do with my life that feels more “me” and more aligned in my purpose – that I have a reason to be here, that feels good for me?” That became my question. It was a quest at that point.

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah. Sometimes you have to kind of burn it all down to get to that fertile ground that you can re-create yourself from. To your point, a lot of people do feel that guilt when they have the outside looking in, it looks so perfect and then “Why can’t I just be happy?” But really, what you need to know about that, and for anyone that’s listening and going through that, is what’s happening as your soul is speaking to you and your soul knows that you’re here for a higher purpose and for another reason. It’s gently giving you that discomfort, giving you those feelings to lead you and to guide you, to have you get curious and say, “Okay, why am I not happy?” Just start asking those questions and guilt aside, “Why am I not happy?” and just start getting curious about that. Which it sounds like you did. You did burn it all down.

Natalie Vartanian: Yeah. And it took a while to realize that even that place is not a bad place because then I judged myself for being unhappy. I was just, like, “Ugh! What’s wrong with me? Why am I always so sad or unhappy happy or not fully happy?”

Dawn Gluskin: Our emotions really are just information.

Natalie Vartanian: Well yeah, they’re just pointers. They’re just, like, “Hello! Hi! Look at me.”

Dawn Gluskin: I’ve got something to tell you!

Natalie Vartanian: Exactly. “Be Curious about me.” They’re like little kids, pulling at your clothes until you just turn around and you’re, like, “Oh hey, hi, how’s it going?”

Dawn Gluskin: I love that metaphor. “Listen to me, Mom.”

Natalie Vartanian: Right. And they get louder and louder and louder. Sometimes it does and I think – we were talking about this earlier. “The call” “The voice”. Sometimes it is just the faintest of whispers.

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah, starts out that way.

Natalie Vartanian: It does, it starts out that way and when we become more tuned, we can hear them and act on them, but when we’re not, it’s like we have a bunch of heavy duty earplugs. It has to get louder and louder.

Dawn Gluskin: Then all hell breaks loose.

Natalie Vartanian: Yeah. Sometimes it does. It needs to, for us to pay attention and to wake up.

Dawn Gluskin: Your version of that was the feelings of “I’m not happy with this settled life.” Your pivotal moment was going to that leadership training and it woke something up in you, which is cool because a lot of people will stay asleep, even though they have those whispers and there’s things that are pointing. And then sometimes, we will do our whole life that way. If we don’t have the universal two by four over the head that wakes us up, we end up at our death bed saying, “You know, I wish I had lived a life true to myself, instead of one others had wished for me.” So we are the blessed, the lucky ones that have these sort of life-altering experiences that wake us up while we’re still here.

Natalie Vartanian: It had to be a life-altering one. Actually, something I realized as we were talking, Daw, was that – I mean I’m one of those people that was a reading self-help books from when I was 18. So it’s not like I wasn’t exposed to this stuff, but it’s kind of different. I was ingesting it and definitely was doing small things in my life and thinking these questions and being aware of, but I still found myself firmly in that groove of the kind of life that we’re conditioned to live and not ask about. So yeah, I did need the two by four. I did need to go to this leadership training, this transformational weekend and have it all in my face, so neon bright that I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

Dawn Gluskin: What was it like deciding to leave your relationship and your home, basically starting your whole life over. I’m sure it’s scary. How did you get through that?

Natalie Vartanian: It was super scary. Luckily at that time, I had started to collect people that were really for me and for my happiness and for my dreams.

Dawn Gluskin: I love that, “collect”. I’m an awesome person collector, too. It’s great.

Natalie Vartanian: Yeah. At that point, I had started doing that and even had that moment of having to do an evaluation and clean house with even the people in my life. “Are they for me? Are they for my dreams? Are they going to encourage me if I have a crazy thought, like, ‘I want to move to northern California.’ Are they going to say, ‘Yeah, fuck yeah. Follow your dreams and I’ll come visit you’ versus ‘Why are you leaving me?'” I still remember a conversation where I was talking with a friend about moving. I’m, like, “I don’t know anyone up there.” And she’s, like, “Natalie, you do not have a hard time meeting friends. Of course you’re going to find friends.” She was just so encouraging and loving with me.

Dawn Gluskin: That’s a keeper.

Natalie Vartanian: Yeah, she was, it was really sweet and I felt really blessed to have that. Once I decided each of the things – it was very fast when I decided about my relationship, it was probably like a week or two later when I decided about moving. I was from So Cal to Nor Cal in about a month, month and a half. It was very clear. The energy was very clear where I wanted me to go and I wasn’t fighting it anymore.

Dawn Gluskin: How that happens once you decide on something and the universe conspires. I think that was from The Alchemist. When you make a decision that whole universe conspires and works with you. It’s like, “Okay, she made the decision, she listened to the sign, she’s doing that. We’re going to help her and support her.” And then it all starts to come together. And the fear, the fog lifts.

Natalie Vartanian: Yeah, it does. It does. It is a very magical, mystical place. And I think this is the part where it is hard to believe that that’s true when you’ve never lived like that before. I remember feeling like, “Is it really going to show up if I jump? Everyone says this, but I mean it’s a lot of work to then have to pick up my life after falling flat on my face.” There were just so many things. I’m just such a planner and a logistical person and I want to make sure Plans B, C, and D are in place, before it happens and there’s some merit to that, right? Just think about all your options and do your homework and have some kind of contingency plans in place. But those then stop you a lot of times from even doing plan A because you’re so busy planning B, C, D, E, F, whatever.

Dawn Gluskin: From an energetic perspective, too, it sounds like a confused, mixed message out into the universe. It’s, like, “Okay, I’m all in, I’m going to do this, but in case it doesn’t work, I got all these backup plans.” It’s, like, “Well, do you want it to work or not? Because if you want it to work, put all of your energy into it working.” And then maybe have a little backup plan in the back of your head, but you’re right, if you’re so rigid and have all those plans of it not working, then it’s probably not gonna work because that’s what you created.

Natalie Vartanian: Yeah, because we’ve fragmented ourselves. We are splitting our energy in that way and it is hard to do a lot of things really well versus a couple of things or one thing really, really well. Just focusing that energy and in that way, I did have to burn that bridge. I was, like, “I’m moving. I’m not just separating and I’m not just leaving my job but I’m moving.” I have done a couple of times where I’ve moved and it’s failed and I’ve had to come back. That’s life. But I think with each time we do, that muscle gets stronger to make bold moves.

Dawn Gluskin: I think everything’s serving always. Even a “failure”. It could have felt like a failure in the moment, but I’m sure it taught you what you needed to know or unwrapped something for you or there’s something that happened with each of those moves even though it might have seemed like a failure on the surface. That’s also getting curious, getting curious about a fear of failure. So it’s, like, “Okay, failure, what are you trying to tell me?” Then you learn for the next time: what you do like, what you don’t like, what works, what doesn’t, and you adjust.

Natalie Vartanian: For me, I know that I value adventure and learning, in the sense that, at least I tried. At least I’m not gonna wonder later: “What if? What if I didn’t make that move to Austin for the boyfriend. What if I had actually gone after that career I dreamed about?” instead of sitting with those questions – Yeah, I did it and I tried and I gave it my everything and we decided to complete. And I don’t have to have that regret for the rest of my life.

Dawn Gluskin: At least, you know. At least you tried. At least you’re in action. That’s what I tell people. Just get into action. Don’t worry about if it’s right or wrong. Just do something. Don’t just stand there. Take some action. There is no right or wrong. Just know that if you’re moving – all roads lead home sort of thing. But you have to be in motion and you can’t just stand in one spot. So once you’re out there in action, things start happening. I also wanted to come back to something you said earlier, too, was that you had started reading the self-help books at age 18 and even though you had read them, you still went through the struggle. I felt like in you saying that, there were little seeds being planted and I’m pointing this out so people know that if you’re doing the work and it doesn’t feel like you’re progressing or transforming or are getting where you want to be, it’s working on some level, even at a subconscious level. Because reading all those books, starting at age 18, probably helped you build an awareness muscle that helped you say, “Okay, this is not the life I want. I need to take action and start it over.” Where most people would just keep going and be unhappy and that would turn into illness and that would turn into depression and anger. You know, all these things. But you had some level of subconscious awareness that you’re, like, “No, I need to do something drastic.”

Natalie Vartanian: Yeah, definitely. And I’m so grateful for that because you’re right, it becomes fertile ground to for the seeds that you then want to plant because you’ve just – We’re working on the environment so that when the seeds get planted, they have the best chance of blooming and thriving. Or even just even just coming out of the ground. Whereas they would probably would not have before if we didn’t have that awareness, if you didn’t have those mindsets, if we didn’t have that even belief that we could even try.

Dawn Gluskin: And that fear of failing or not, making the wrong decision or “I’m gonna regret this.” I think most people just regret not trying versus doing that crazy thing. The crazy thing always serves in the long run. If you had a client that you’re working with right now in a similar situation and they just come out and they’re, like, “Natalie, from the outside in everything looks amazing, but for some reason, there’s something inside of me that’s not happy. My whole life, I’m questioning everything.” What do you tell them? What do they do? What kind of advice would you give, for our listeners now?

Natalie Vartanian: I feel like that’s when so many of my clients. So much of my question at that point becomes: what part of you believes that you can’t have the kind of life that you truly want.

Dawn Gluskin: That’s a great question.

Natalie Vartanian: And what is that life that you truly want? If you didn’t have to worry about anybody else, if you didn’t have to worry about disciplining anyone, if you didn’t have to worry about hurting anyone or abandoning anyone or all of those places where we feel that our life is so tied to everybody else’s life. Just untangle for a moment and give yourself the space to just think: what would I want my life to look and feel like?

Dawn Gluskin: That’s a great question to start with. Yeah. ‘Cause then we release all of those limiting beliefs. You release all of those stories, those judgments. You are the creator of your reality, which by the way, you are, what would you create? Such a good question to ponder. On this show we always like to talk about heartaches and struggle. Something that goes on in the world is a lot of times people will put out their highlights reel. Because we just want people to like us and accept us. Don’t judge us. Just put your best face on and go out and face the world. But behind the scenes, we’re all human. We’ve all had our share of heartache, “failures”, all of that good stuff. But it’s so inspiring to hear what other people have been through and how they have coped with it. So what is something that’s coming to mind for you that you’ve struggled with in your life and then found a way to overcome it?

Natalie Vartanian: I feel like there’s several. For me, a lot of it has been around family. Again, my situation – my dad was in and out of our lives growing up and then he committed suicide when I was nine. So it’s been in this place of thinking – definitely has me wonder why are we here, why are we alive, what has us live lives that we feel are happy and fulfilled and purposeful. What separates some people from just living and kind of sleepwalking and suffering and others that choose, “I just don’t want to be here.” For whatever reason, some souls just don’t want to be here. Even to separate that from that a little bit. It’s been a long time for me to get to this place, I guess detached, where I can look at it from his perspective or someone’s perspective and not have it deeply impact me. I feel a lot. I’m sure a lot of your listeners are deeply empathic. We feel people. If someone’s around you that you can tell is sad or you can tell is having a rough time, we feel it. That’s been a big lesson for me. Even just this past weekend, I was at a workshop supporting men. I was, like, “I just want to practice what is it like for me to just be in my experience in my body? If I am happy and someone around me sad, can I maintain my happiness and still feel for their sadness? Can I do that?”

Dawn Gluskin: That’s really a superpower to be able to do that. To be able to just be with whatever feelings come up, whether it’s ours or other people and not becoming so attached to them. Not falling down the rabbit hole, so to speak, but just being in the moment. Obviously what you dealt with as a nine year old is so traumatic and then I’m sure it’s showed up in a lot of places in your life, but it sounds like you were able to turn that pain into power in a sense. Being able to connect with people deeply, being able to savor the moment, follow your passions. It’s all in the higher good sense of the experience. Do you see those as gifts that have come out of that?

Natalie Vartanian: Yeah, and this is why I’m so grateful for the kind of work that I do with people that I have done with me. I mean, I definitely attend workshops and I definitely go to therapy and I definitely have coaches and people to help me, guides to help me on this path and to help reframe a lot of this stuff. Because I mean, I could have been one of those people that became a drug addict and/or was heavily medicated or just was having a really, really robotic life. I could have been that. Given my circumstances, I definitely could’ve been that person. I’ve seen those people, who weren’t able to cope in some ways or learn or heal. I feel so grateful that I’ve been on that path and I have those guides and I can sit here now and feel into – wow, I’m so much more empathic of a person because of what happened growing up. I am much more of a cheerleader for people’s most turned on lives because of what happened. Because I saw what happened with my dad, who in a lot of ways I intuit that he was a tortured soul, that he was an artist that wasn’t able to express, that he had so many dreams that he probably wanted to live that he couldn’t.

Dawn Gluskin: Now that’s fuel for you as part of your life purpose, your mission, how you serve and help other people. To your point, too, it’s not easy to do the work. I mean, doing the work, looking at our achievements, peeling back the layers, getting to the root core of our trauma. That’s not easy. It’s so much easier just to go drink or do drugs or have sex with strangers or whatever it is. We all have our coping mechanisms and to just drown it out and to go numb and then there is no judgment because we’re just trying to deal the best we can. But to do the work, it’s not the easiest thing, but it’s so liberating and empowering on the other side. And then you can use to turn around and help other people do the same thing. It’s kind of like the self-fulfilling prophecy or the paradox of life – how we teach what we need to know and what we’ve mastered in own life and our mess becomes our message and that whole thing.

Natalie Vartanian: There was even a thing recently, too, where we were looking at some of our core wounds and how they are our greatest blessings. We were really talking about this thing of: your life is plan A. All the shitty things that happened to you wasn’t the thing that detracted you from having a life you’re supposed to have. That was the life you’re supposed to have. That is plan A and we’re just kind of sitting with this, like, “What? You’re telling me that my shitty experience of my dad committing suicide was the plan?”

Dawn Gluskin: Some people don’t get that. They’re, like, “What do you mean? This horrible thing was supposed to happen?” But if you take it from a higher-self level and if you believe that you were incarnated into this human body for a reason, for your own evolution, for your own growth on a higher level, everything that’s happening is teaching you, is helping you to ascend, to grow into who you are, to remember who you are. When you look at it from that level, it starts to make sense. And if that doesn’t make sense right now, just sit with it. And maybe it will. It’s crazy. It’s, again, the paradox of life. “Oh, I’m supposed to suffer so I can feel enlightenment? What?”

Natalie Vartanian: For me, growing up, I didn’t feel like people really paid attention to me or my family really saw me. There was so much chaos and trauma and drama in our household that in a lot of ways, I felt very invisible. I felt like no one was really paying attention or knew what was happening for me. You know? And tracking me and loving on me. So that has become my superpower. That is what I do with everyone. That’s the biggest feedback that I get from people, like, “Natalie, being around you, I feel like you so hear me and understand me.” I make them get the most important person in the world in that moment. I’m so present with them and it’s because I didn’t have that. So I want everyone around me to feel that. How would I know that that’s if I didn’t notice it from that “lack” place.

Dawn Gluskin: And everyone that’s listening: your details of your life are different. But if you could just take that on, that you’re suffering can now be how you serve. When you go through the healing process and you really come to terms with that – then it’s such a power. You come from a place of power and just helped so many other. But I wanted to talk about the book. It’s got such a good title. “Sexcapades.” We were talking about it a little earlier and you’re, like, “Well, it’s not like I chose to write this book.” It kinda chose you. Tell us a little bit about that and what’s it about and how did it choose you? Yeah, we want to know more.

Natalie Vartanian: The first iteration of the book was going to be the bigger memoir book and I had a friend point out that most people do it the opposite way. They have the smaller books and then they write a memoir book. In it was going to be the chapter on sex. There was going to be a chapter and everything: love and relationships and money and God and all of the different areas of my life that I’ve been with and transformed and the stories around them. But the more I whittled it down to what was doable for me to write, I also realized this is the one area that I do have a lot to say and a lot that I’ve learned and a lot that I’ve explored for myself and also in connections with other people. I have a podcast around sex. I was that person that everyone came to talk about sex because I was that safe place. I just realized I do have a lot to say here. I have done a lot of my work here. I do feel very different where I can say that I feel turned on around sex where I couldn’t say that before. I was so scared of it growing up. I was just, like, “What is this thing? And I don’t know what it is and I don’t know how to figure it out. And I’m scared of men and I’m scared of women.” All of it felt so far away from me.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s almost like part of your own healing is coming out with this book and also because you’re like one of the sacred rebels. I think that’s why we connected.

Natalie Vartanian: I like that. “Sacred rebels.”

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah. We know that what’s going on on the planet right now is not right. There’s this new paradigm coming through. One of the taboos and the paradigms that you know is sex. It’s such a taboo topic. You don’t talk about it. Even in school today they’re, like, “We don’t talk about that. We’re just going to sweep it under the rug. Kids are getting addicted to porn and they don’t know the sacred side of it.” There’s so much out there that it’s just a hot mess, right? Let’s just talk about it for what it is and when it’s supposed to be something pleasurable and it’s biological. Let’s just be open about it right then. Then we wouldn’t have all these deviant behavior that comes up in a bad way. I think it’s good. I think more people need to be talking about it. I grew up in a very Catholic household so I was one of those people that don’t talk about it. So I lived that life. I had all these questions. They even teach you it’s wrong to think about it.

Natalie Vartanian: Right, exactly. And then they wonder why we’re all just hot messes.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s the most natural thing.

Natalie Vartanian: You have us live in that vacuum, like in a black hole around it. But this is the funny thing. We actually interviewed a friend of ours who’s Mormon for my last podcast. We were talking about how crazy it is that it’s, like, “Sex is bad, sex is wrong, don’t have attraction, don’t have affection, don’t have desire.” It’s, like, “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t. Oh, but until you get married and then we get married that first night, you’re just going to have sex that’s going to blow your mind and fireworks and so much passionate desire.” That’s so traumatizing for people. You’re going to go from off to on in one night.

Dawn Gluskin: And it’s probably not going to live up to your expectations.

Natalie Vartanian: – have been traumatized because they got married, were virgins and then all of this expectation and pressure, in addition to how bad and evil sex has been made their whole lives and now you want us to just think that sex is the most holy beautiful thing because it’s with my husband or my wife?

Dawn Gluskin: When it’s been evil all along. Then kids are starting earlier and earlier these days. Which blows my mind as a parent, oh my gosh. It’s because no one talks about it to them in a healthy way. So they go out on the Internet and they find the dark hole, the darkest corners of the Internet. That’s where they’re getting their sex education from. And it’s, like, “Oh my gosh, no wonder they’re so messed up about it now.” That’s not the way to do it. I have conversations with my children about it. My oldest daughter who’s 10, my youngest, she’s five, so we haven’t really yet. I tell her the good and the bad and the ugly because I don’t want her to go to the Internet for her education.

Natalie Vartanian: Yeah, I hear that. And it’s true. It is this interesting place of – we are so concerned about the information that they’re going to get and how they’re going to be, that we don’t say anything. But that’s the thing: then they’re getting their information elsewhere.

Dawn Gluskin: And they’re forming these crazy beliefs.

Natalie Vartanian: We can have influence on that, if we are courageous enough to speak to it because it is such a taboo thing. We do have to overcome our own taboo around, “You don’t talk about sex.”

Dawn Gluskin: A hundred percent. I love that you are taking a stand on that and you’re putting all of your personal stuff out there. It takes something. My whole platform is about being vulnerable and telling your stories, but sometimes, it takes something to put yourself out there. You’re, like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe what I’m telling people this.” But it’s also empowering and it’s healing for yourself and for others. I, for one, definitely look forward to reading it.

Natalie Vartanian: Thanks!

Dawn Gluskin: I love talking to you. We could talk forever and the show always goes by so fast and I’m, like, “This is good”, but it’s that time of the show. We have to start winding down and this is where I give you a chance to let all of our listeners know where they can connect with you, get more from you, learn about your book when it gets published, all that good stuff.

Natalie Vartanian: The best place to goes to my website. You can access it via my name www.NatalieVartanian.com or www.ThisTurnedOnLife.com. Both will point you right to the website. From there, you can find out about the book. There’s a mailing list, if you want to get on the list to be the first to know when it comes out. You can do that. There’s also at the top an opt-in to get on the newsletter, just the general newsletter. I have a freebie opt-in gift for you around living a turned-on life and the steps to help accomplish that. And there’s more: there’s blogs, writings, different ways we can work together, tarot, coaching, etc. But yeah, I’d love to connect any that would serve.

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah, definitely go check out all of her good stuff. She’s got a lot of great stuff on her website and you can always just go to www.BareNakedRadio.com and click on Natalie’s show and under her show notes, you’ll see all of her social media, her website links. Go there and definitely check her out.

Natalie Vartanian: Thank you so much, Dawn.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s such a joy talking with you. Like I said, I could talk forever, but you know, I know people have other stuff to do.

Natalie Vartanian: Go, people. Be free. Live your most turned-on life.

Dawn Gluskin: When you publish the book, we’ll have you back on and we can talk more about that. Thank you so much, Natalie.

Natalie Vartanian: Thanks, honey.

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Episode 010: Pattie Rydlun: How this Renegade’s One Brave Decision Altered the Course of her Life Forever

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Dawn Gluskin: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Bare Naked Radio. I am your host, Dawn Gluskin, and today you are in for a treat. She is feisty. She is funny. She is full of wisdom and amazing. She’s my friend and you would never believe that she is 72. Pattie Rydlun, welcome to the show. Say “Hello.”

Pattie Rydlun: Hi. Hi Dawn. Hi everybody. I’m so happy to be here today. Thank you.

Dawn Gluskin: So excited to have you. If you don’t know Pattie yet, she has an unmistakable message around work, business, retirement, and life in general. She believes that you can accomplish your goals with relish at any age. Pattie will tell you about the joys of getting older. It’s true. And she will make you laugh with her stories. She discounts, dismisses, and derides those traditional thoughts about being 70 and she does it all with a smile. She’s essentially a renegade who obliterates those age-old myths by living with zest, vibrancy, and the overwhelming desire to make a difference. And she does this through her coaching practice and she shares openly on her daily Facebook Lives called “Good Morning Renegades.” And I’m so excited to have you here! Yay, Pattie!

Pattie Rydlun: Yay Dawn! I’m happy, too.

Dawn Gluskin: We’ve known each other for a little while now. We’ve spent some time getting to know each other in a mastermind and a group coaching program and we’ve had some really interesting conversations.

Pattie Rydlun: Yes, we have.

Dawn Gluskin: We always kind of start out just getting to know you a little bit so our Naked listeners can kind of get an idea of what you’re about. I know that you are so passionate about women stepping into their power and aging powerfully. I know that you have so many stories, but give us a little bit of background, a little peek into your life, and how you got here today, and how this became your mission.

Pattie Rydlun: Okay. I, of course, being 72, have quite a bit experience. I was a teacher for 20 years and then got a freelance job – writing. And from there I went into corporate and was in corporate for 20 years. I left corporate after 20 years, so I was about 62? Maybe 10 years ago. Like so many people that are that age, I realized that it was such a missing not to have work, right? Because I ran a $20,000,000 company with seven direct reports and would get all the work out and with a smile and we had a great team wherever I worked. All of a sudden, there was nothing. I went from “woosh” to nothing.

Dawn Gluskin: “So now what?”

Pattie Rydlun: Exactly. And I floundered. I was, like, “Well, maybe I’ll freelance and maybe I’ll go back to teaching for awhile and maybe I’ll coach.” That was what it was. I did freelancing for a while, but I was so committed to helping women, as you said and I’ve said often, to stand in their power because not only did certain things happen to me, but also to women around me. That was my first thing. I started out with women’s life coaching, which evolved into career transition coaching, which evolved to where I am now. I want women to stand in their power and to age powerfully, so that we can do anything we want at any age, whether you’re in your twenties, thirties, seventies, eighties, even nineties. But it was probably one of the more difficult career things for me to stop working and to then find my way. I’m thrilled to be where I am today.

Dawn Gluskin: That’s awesome. And I know that because you are 72, you’ve lived through so much and you’ve seen so much in your lifetime. And of course now women really are stepping into their power like we’ve never seen before in our history. You can see women stepping up in the workplace. You can see women stepping up in politics. You can see women speaking out and not taking it any more with the women’s marches and the Me Too movement and Time’s Up. There’s all this stuff going on on the planet where women really are stepping up. As someone who is seeing the progression of time from how it used to be to how it is now and where we’re going in the future: what is your take on all that? Where we’ve come from, where we are now, where are we going? How do you see it?

Pattie Rydlun: Yeah. It’s so funny that you’re talking about that because I talked about that yesterday and today, stemming from Women’s International Day. This morning I just said that I want this to really take hold and make a difference because I’ve seen it almost happen too many times. All way back in the 60’s. I was in graduate school and it was this big women’s movement. I remember also another great movement against racism. One of my best friends in graduate school was a black young woman and I said, “Listen, you’re way ahead of the game. You are in the right place. All this is going to change and the world is yours.” But, you know what? It wasn’t. I’ve seen it too many times. When I went to high school, we couldn’t even play basketball. We could only bounce the ball twice and then we had to pass it.

Dawn Gluskin: Was that just for the women?

Pattie Rydlun: Just women. We were too fragile to play like the boys.

Dawn Gluskin: “Bounce the ball then pass it to a boy. He knows what to do with it.” Okay, got it.

Pattie Rydlun: You know, all these crazy things. And I want to say a couple of things about this movement that: please make it happen now! I want to be a part of it. I want to see it happen. What do I have, maybe I have 30 years left, but we have to make it happen. It’s interesting because I’ll go out and demonstrate, I want to help people get elected, whatever it takes. I want to see it happen because we’ve been on the brink and then we go back. We’ve been on the brink and then we go back. The second thing about this movement is whatever progress we make – I’m about to get a little teary because it’s so important to me. Whatever progress we make going forward now, we’re really standing on the shoulders of all the women before us.

Dawn Gluskin: Oh my gosh, yes. Because it’s just building and building. Progress is an interesting thing, to your point, because you’re right, we do make progress. We make these big leaps ahead and then – I don’t know what happens, if it’s complacency or maybe because it really needs to be a deeper healing as a collective consciousness; to really getting to heal the root of the problem. Women can vote and there’s been things in the workplace but we’re still not making the same amount of money and we’re still not represented in politics. The proportions are so disproportionate. There’s so much more progress that we can make and there’s still a lot of healing that needs to be done – the way it’s been, what women have roles we’ve been put in and what we put up with and the men, too. Not that they’re to blame because they’ve learned from society how to treat and how to show up. So much healing. It has to go really deep. You’re right, it’s happening and there’s still more work to do.

Pattie Rydlun: Yes. And it was so interesting because yesterday when I was at this networking meeting, I didn’t talk about my business or anything. I just talked about women standing in their power, doing what we can at whatever age. And I was so happy because the reaction from the men that were there was so phenomenally great and so supportive that I just had to go hug them all because we need to be unified on that point and not pulling each other apart. You know, it has to be a working together.

Dawn Gluskin: It’s not us against them. And it makes sense, from an evolutionary standpoint, that there needs to be an even ground like there wasn’t before. There are biological differences. Well, the obvious ones! Men tend to be stronger physically. If you go way back in history, the men had to go out and do the labor. And, of course, women bear the children. Again, biology. So we can’t ignore the biology. It makes sense that the woman has the children and stays home and takes care of them and all that. But nowadays in the digital world and where we regress to – those old paradigms don’t make any sense anymore. We have to catch up with the times and it’s time for equality and all of that stuff. But it’s still there. It’s present. The old ways of being.

Pattie Rydlun: Yes, yes. On that very point, it’s important also not to throw out the things that work with going forward. I can remember years ago, always telling women who would come back into the workforce, who would come to me to interview for a job, I would say, “Listen, be proud of all the skills you have running a household.” I heard a man the other day – and I’m going to forget. I’m so sorry. I can’t remember his name. He would be thrilled if I mentioned his name, but he made the point which was so great. He said, “When I cook dinner, I cook dinner. That’s it. I have everything in front of me. My wife cooks dinner. She makes sure the kids are doing their homework. She answers any phone calls.” He named, like, five or six things and I was like, “Yes, that’s what we do. We are such task-oriented people and so organized and so skilled.” I don’t want us to throw that out because we have that.

Dawn Gluskin: What I’m hearing in there is to still celebrate our differences and acknowledge our differences. Women are the nurturers and men are strong. And men can also nurture and women can be strong. It doesn’t have to be in a box. Still celebrate what you different and don’t let it put you in a box. It’s really what the conversation is.

Pattie Rydlun: Yes. And to remember how many skills that you actually have.

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah. And then you see a lot of men stepping up, too. Sometimes, the woman goes to work and runs a business or whatever and the man stays home and takes care of the house. It’s beautiful. They can do an incredible job and hurray for them for getting themselves out of that box.

Pattie Rydlun: I’ve seen that, more and more, I would say probably the last 20 years that I was in corporate and even now I hear it more and more: how often the woman is the person who goes to work. I remember one of my executive editors, we hired her and her husband was a Stay-At-Home Dad. She did all the work. It’s good to see because it’s a better sharing, I think. And not, like you say those boxes, those stereotypical roles that you’re supposed to take. I think they’re still around, but I think, like you’re saying, we’ve got to get out of those boxes.

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah. I agree completely. We also have to look at it from a place of encouragement and how can we grow in what’s the best for the planet, what’s the best for our family, and look at it from that lens. There’s a lot of anger out there, which I get. Sometimes it’s “feminists” get a bad name because “Why are you hating men and why are you so angry?” I’m not angry. I would say I’m a feminist because I think women should have equal rights. But I do get why there’s that anger out there. I’m not saying it’s healthy or it’s really helping, but I get it because women have been treated a certain way for such a long time – in the workplace and getting constantly harassed. It just becomes a way of being, you just kind of deal with it and accept it. And we’re kind of pissed off, like, “I’m tired of it. I’m not taking your shit anymore.” I think once we move past that is when the real progress will start to take place.

Pattie Rydlun: I agree. Part of me wonders whether it can really ever, ever be be done with. For now, I think they’re still be some vestiges of that hanging on. And what’s interesting for me is that I really left because of how women left corporate because they were stepped over for promotions. I can tell you a story about a man in this company. He came in every morning with his New York Times, closed his door, read the paper, and then he got promoted to an even higher position. It’s a little difficult and there was nothing that could be done about it. So, it’s those kinds of things, which I was, like, “That’s why I’m going to be a coach. I’m going to help women. I’m done with this.” I still am obviously passionate about that. All this other stuff with the Me Too movement. Some things were just – I was told and other women were told, “Well that’s how it is.”

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah. “Just deal with it. That’s how it is. They’re just boys being boys.”

Pattie Rydlun: It should not be.

Dawn Gluskin: That movement is so powerful. And of course that’s what, on Bare Naked, we’re all about: being raw and real and vulnerable. All these women that are stepping up and these wounds that they have been holding onto for lifetimes, for decades. All that pain. It’s very healing that it’s coming to the surface. And now, people get it. I think men are starting to get it because they didn’t understand before. Because they, too, have that underlying message. “That’s just how it is.” You get a pat on the back, as a man, when you act this way. I love that it’s all coming to the surface because you have to feel it to heal it. And it’s out there. It’s messy right now, but I do see progress. It’s beautiful and I love it. I love that you’re seeing it in your lifetime. Like you said, “I want to see this, I want to see it happening.” It’s going to be a continued evolution. We can go deeper. I’m really, really excited about our future. Our Millennials, our children. How they’re stepping up and showing up. I think the future is bright, I really do.

Pattie Rydlun: I was really confident in 1967. All these years, I was, “Okay, let’s see if it sticks.” And I do feel it’s different this time. I do feel that the openness and the younger generations, along with the old – this multi generational push to me is phenomenal – that we’re all working together and with men who get it. I had a really couple of good male friends in the business. I didn’t tell a lot of people but I was let go from one of my jobs and I was mortified. Of course, got another job right away. This was before I ran the $20,000,000 company and was the president and then before that, vice president and then president. But so I was talking to this friend of mine and I was telling him this story and I said, “Oh yeah, we had a meeting and this guy put his hands on my shoulders as we’re leaving. And I turned around and I said to him, ‘You put your hands on my shoulder again… My boyfriend’s a lawyer. I’ll be after you.'” So my friend, who’s a guy, he looks at me and he goes, “And you wondered why you were let go months later? And I was, like, “Oh, I never made the connection.” Those little, I don’t want to call them “little”, but those things happened. And like we were saying before, it’s almost like it was just accepted that that’s how it goes.

Dawn Gluskin: I’m assuming your reaction to that man wasn’t just about him. It was probably about all the other ones before. You were finally in a position of power where you can be like, “I’m not taking it anymore.”

Pattie Rydlun: What makes me think when all this news from women has come out – I think about myself and I’m certainly not on such a level where some women were so harassed and so assaulted. But I think that this behavior is still so pervasive. I think it’s changing, but, you know, much more than I think we could ever imagine.

Dawn Gluskin: And so much of it has been brought to the surface, which I know a lot of people are angry about. I look at it a little bit differently. Of course, we have our president, President Trump, love him or hate him. He’s here to cause a shift on this planet. I really do believe. That his way of being, while clearly I’m not a fan of his behavior, I’ll just put that out there was out there. Like, at all.

Pattie Rydlun: Ditto. Ditto.

Dawn Gluskin: Let’s just put that out there. However, the way he’s behaving is bringing the spotlight on this and people are standing up and saying, “This is not okay.” They’re shining the spotlight and you have to bring light to the darkness to heal it. I feel like he’s stepping up and playing a role. His role as the villain, depending on “what side you’re on”, but serving a role. I think as a on a planetary level, as a collective consciousness level. He’s drawing attention to the way things have always been. The people that have been in the closet about it or being more vocal and then the opposing side. Like, no, we’re not taking this crap anymore. And that’s why you see what’s happening. You got to kind of get people pissed off into action, I guess, because we become so complacent. To your point of why there was movement in the 60’s and it was probably like, “Okay, we made some progress. Let’s just chill now and hang out.” Now people are it feeling it again.

Pattie Rydlun: Yeah. Well, I believe that for change to happen – I make the analogy to a pendulum, where it’s swinging back and forth. That it’s got to go to the extreme and then it’ll come and settle in the middle. Do you know what I mean? When everything settles down. But I think we always need to go on that side of – whether it’s having anger about the situation or a fed-up-ness about the situation. Whatever it is, that pendulum swing all the way up and I just wanted to come back to the center. Everything has changed for the better.

Dawn Gluskin: I do see it. I see it and I feel it and I do see progress being made and we still have work to do. I have two young daughters, a 10 year old girl and 5 year old so for the future for them – I’m so hopeful and they don’t have to deal with a lot of stuff that I’ve had to and that you’ve had to and the generations before us. It’s already changed so much. If I think about my grandmother and great-grandmother and all the stuff they had to deal with – we have progressed and there’s work to do.

Pattie Rydlun: I don’t have any children but I have grand-stepdaughters and I’ve got grand-nieces. I worry about them. The oldest one is 15. I want everything to be solved for them before they step up and into the world. It is different already. So that’s a good thing. But I think it’s really important that the history of it all, that they remember. I tell them all the time, like, “Things were different. You’re very lucky about where you are. You can make even better changes for women.”

Dawn Gluskin: Yeah, absolutely. I know you’ve got an amazing book and we’ve talked about this before, just talking about all the stuff you’ve seen. I think whenever it gets published, it’s going to be a real gem just to see the world through your eyes and what the progress you’ve made as a woman that’s risen up the corporate ladder and has seen all the changes in the women’s movement. You’re still active in it now, like you said. It’s really interesting and fun perspective that you have. On Bare Naked Radio, we love to talk about fears and failures and heartache and all that stuff that sometimes people don’t like to talk about. We like to sweep it under the rug. But I think there’s also something beautiful about bringing it out into the open because people can hear your stories and you’re like, “Oh my god. You, too? it’s not just me. I’m not suffering alone?” Also to hear how we overcome our life obstacles. That’s something inspiring. You told me before the show, you don’t get to be 72 without heartache and failure. What is coming up for you? Something you’ve overcome, an obstacle, a failure, a fear, some heartache you’ve had in your life, and how you’ve transformed through it or survived and thrived afterwards.

Pattie Rydlun: There’s some things I have, to be honest, I’ve never even shared. Just getting to 70 or 75 or whatever it is, you accrue, whether you want to or not, so much experience and so much valuable information. It’s easier for me to even tell my nephew, who’s working 16 hours a day, which I did for a year and then I was physically ill, that you should not do that to yourself. But sometimes when you speak to younger people, they’re, “Oh, yeah, I can listen, but you know, this is different, this is different.”

Dawn Gluskin: We have to make our own mistakes.

Pattie Rydlun: So I’m, like, “Okay. Go for it.” I got married at a young age. That’s probably one of the most traumatic things that happened to me because it was not to a person who turned out not to be a good person. I’ve never spoken about it, but it was such a traumatic thing for me because it was abuse, physical and emotional. I’m one of the lucky ones because I had a family who was so supportive, who actually would say things like, “I’m praying for you to leave. We’re here for you.” I was steeped in my faith. I said, “How can I do this?” I was born and raised Catholic.

Dawn Gluskin: Yup, me too. I get it. “You’re married forever, it’s a sin.”

Pattie Rydlun: Yeah. But I had a very wise father who said to me, “I’m your father and I would never hurt you. Do you think God wants you to be in a situation where you’re hurt?” That was it for me. I got it. I help by giving donations of money because, after all these years, it’s still a difficult thing for me to hear about and see. I’m generous that way, but I think that the older I get – I don’t know how to change that situation as far as giving people the support that I had, having that loving family that’s like, “No, no, no. You don’t stand that. You get out.” And whereas I dated a man years ago after this happened and I knew him as a friend for about five years and then we started to date. We were talking about marriage and I had to say to him, “I have something to tell you.” Here’s what we don’t know about ourselves – some people will privately ask me to talk to some people they know. Here’s the thing, if you go through that, you can always survive and make yourself move on. And someone gave me really good advice. They said, “Embrace what happened to you.” And I use that in any and every aspect of my life, whether it’s embracing the business not going well, it’s embracing a career change. But I had to embrace that whole situation that happened to me. And then I could move on. And so when I was dating this fella, I told him I had to tell him something and I told him. And he said, “Oh my gosh, Pattie, this is what you went through.” Here’s the key operative sentence. I said, “Well, it wasn’t as bad as what other women go through.” And it took him saying to me, “Do you get that you really are an abused woman if you can say that sentence?” And that’s it. It’s that self-knowledge that’s so important. Because I was, like, “Oh, he’s right.” So I stopped saying that because it was just such an “A-ha” moment for me. In that respect, I’m embracing everything that happened to me. In life, you just have to be open to [the experience where] you never know where that one person is going to say the right thing to you to change your life for the better, to show you an insight, to say, “This is so.” You get that “A-ha” moment. You really have to be open to it.

Dawn Gluskin: People show up in our lives. In miracles, they call them spiritual relationships and that’s when people come up in your life to teach you something or reflect something to you. Yeah, if you’re open to it, we’d probably have those encounters every day or fairly often. There are so many gems in what you said. Pattie, the way I see you is, you’re just this woman of incredible strength and independence, just fun and feisty and you’re not taking anyone’s crap and I’m, like, “Yes! I love you.” And in your history, you were not that. You were someone who stayed in the relationship and didn’t know the way out and putting up with things no one should ever have to put up with it. For anyone else who is in some kind of struggle or in that kind of situation, you can get to the other side of it. Not only can you get to the other side of it, but you can find superpowers once healed from it
. Once you’re away from it, it really gives you your strength. We often talk about turning your “mess” into your message or transmuting your pain into your power and you’re such a beautiful example of that. Thank you for sharing and being so open with us today.

Pattie Rydlun: Yes, it’s interesting and it’s only taken me a few years. I want others, especially women, to know that you can always surmount all these things that happened to you. We all have that inner strength within us. When you need it, it’s always there. It’s always there.

Dawn Gluskin: I know when you’re in it, sometimes it doesn’t feel like that. “That’s easy for you to say but I’m in it and it’s so hard.”

Pattie Rydlun: Believe me, I was in it!

Dawn Gluskin: Our “it”s are all different but we’ve all been in. “Why does the universe hate me?? What did I do?”

Pattie Rydlun: I used to think I was living in a movie. Like, “this only happens in movies.”

Dawn Gluskin: But just take a step at a time – that was you reaching out to the family and then the next step and the next step. And then before you know it, just keep stepping and then you’re looking back in the rear view mirror and this all behind you. Just get into action and get moving.

Pattie Rydlun: Yes. And what I like to tell people, too, is whether it’s anything personal and emotional or career-wise or even age-wise or whatever, it’s not like you make this decision and then it’s, like, “I just feel so sunshine-y.”

Dawn Gluskin: It’s a process.

Pattie Rydlun: You take it day-to-day and all of a sudden you realize, “Wow, I didn’t think about that today.” It’s like this little butterfly on your shoulder, so gentle and you realize you’re at peace. And I think that’s the goal: peace in our hearts and our mind and our spirit.

Dawn Gluskin: I love that you say that because we all want that instant gratification.

Pattie Rydlun: That doesn’t happen!

Dawn Gluskin: But no, you have to get through it, you have to trudge your way through the mud.

Pattie Rydlun: But you know what? I like to tell people, “We’re like fine pieces of silver.” It gets nicked and then you polish it and it gets like black and you have to polish it. But all of those things contribute to this beautiful patina. That’s how I look at us. All the things that happened to us – we take them and they make us fuller and richer and deeper and more beautiful.

Dawn Gluskin: That is beautiful. Well, Pattie, I absolutely adore you and I can talk to you all day. The time always goes by so fast on this show. And I’m, like, “Oh, no!” But this is the time in the show where we get to promote you. If you are loving on Pattie, I’m going to let her tell you what she’s up to and where you can find her on social media and how you can connect with.

Pattie Rydlun: Okay, great. My website is pattierydlun.com. You can hop on there. I have some stuff about habits. You put your email in, but I hope you go there because I am writing “50 Ways to Age Like a Renegade” download that I’m gonna offer for free. And then, of course, I’ll keep you posted on my book which is going to be done by the end of the year and out there. Also, I would love it if you would join me on Facebook live because I talk about business, I talk about life, I talk about getting older and you know that you can be a renegade at any age. I’m on Facebook, Twitter. It’s all Pattie Rydlun. And Instagram. I’m on Instagram as well. Thank you so much, Dawn, for this opportunity to talk and to tell you about where I’m at. So, thank you.

Dawn Gluskin: Yes, yes, yes. And of course you can always go to barenakedradio.com and click Pattie’s show and then all her links and everything will be there. We make it nice and easy for you. Pattie, thank you so much. I adore you and your fun, feisty energy and I’m, like, “That’s me when I’m 70.”

Pattie Rydlun: That’s you now! You’re wonderful. Thank you so much. I love you, too.

Listen to the episode and access the show notes here.