00:00 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
When you keep the focus on yourself, you're able to pour from the overflow, from the saucer rather than from an empty cup. But so many of us run ourselves ragged, especially women, and we try to pour from an empty cup, and so you want to pour from the overflow, and the only way to have an overflow, to have the saucer filled, is if you fill your cup first. So keep the focus on yourself.
00:35 - Wendy Battles (Host)
Welcome to ReInvention Rebels Stories of brave and unapologetic women, 50 to 90 years young, who have boldly reinvented life on their own terms to find new purpose and possibilities. I'm your host, wendy Battles. I need to kick your fears to the curb, do it scared and step into who you are meant to be in midlife and beyond. These amazing women, these ReInvention Rebels, can help light your ReInvention path. Come join us and let's get inspired together. Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of the ReInvention Rebels podcast. I am your host, wendy. I am so very excited that you are here, and I am especially excited because today is the launch of my four-part mini series. Where Are they Now? We are taking a trip down memory lane with four of my guests from season one of the podcast to find out where are they now, what are they doing, how have they grown and what has been most impactful. There is so much to unpack in this special series and I can't wait for you to listen with me. Over the next four weeks, you're going to get reacquainted with Barb Nangle, erica Bradley, wendy Knox and Couture Bryant, for dynamic Rebels that are up to amazing things, and it's going to be so fun to check in with them and see what they've learned.
02:23
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03:05
The cool thing is that there's a special discount for all my ReInvention Rebels listeners like you. You can enjoy 20% off on your first order. Go to magicmind.com, slash r-e-rebels, r-e-r-e-b-e-l-s and use discount code r-e-rebels-20, r-e-r-e-b-e-l-s-20. Details are in the show notes. Thank you, magic Mind. Alright, it is time for us to get started. Y I'm so excited because Barb Nangle, who was my very first guest back three years ago when I kicked off the podcast, is joining me as my first when Are they Now guest and you are going to love her story and what she's up to. Barb Nangle, welcome back to the ReInvention Rebels guest chair.
04:18 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
Thank you, I'm so glad you're here Me too, and not only was I your first guest, that was my first podcast guest appearance ever, and I've literally been on dozens since then. So we both cut our teeth together.
04:39 - Wendy Battles (Host)
I love that cutting our teeth together, doing this work, figuring it out and I will say I believe we both have grown so much since we got started all that time ago. Three years ago, you were just getting started in your podcast and you were thinking about other possibilities for reinventing yourself with this idea of self-awareness, so I would love for you to share a little bit about how your ReInvention Rebels journey has unfolded in the last three years.
05:10 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
Wonderful, thank you. So so much has changed. It'll be hard to we'll see whenever it comes up to the top of my brain, but my podcast fragmented to whole life lesson from 12-Step Recovery. I'm now four and a half years into it. I believe I just recorded episode 234. Wow. And the other thing that has happened and it literally happened right after I recorded with you is that I decided to hone in on being a boundaries coach. So I specialize in working with women who are always putting everyone else before them and or focused on what other people think and end up neglecting themselves. And I have developed a full-blown coaching program. So I have a private coaching program, I have a bird coaching program, I have a membership group and, as I said, I have guested on dozens of other podcasts since you and I were together actually three years ago this month.
06:12 - Wendy Battles (Host)
Three years ago this month, and what a trajectory you have been on. When you started out, did you have any idea? When you had this little bubble up of I should have a podcast to talk about my experiences and be of service to other people, did you have any idea what would lead to this?
06:31 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
No, I did not know what I was doing. I was not strategic in any way, shape or form. It just sort of fell into my lap the opportunity. And even when I started I was recording at a live downtown New Haven with Baobab Tree Studios, with Rev Kev, and I only did the first three episodes. I did every other week for two reasons One, he was doing it for free for me to begin with, so I didn't want to trouble them too much, and two, I thought I don't know if I'm going to have enough content, which is hilarious. That is so funny, isn't that hilarious? Yes, 234 episodes there. And also the list I made of topics at the very beginning. It still exists.
07:13
I've hardly ever tapped into any of them because stuff always comes up for me to talk about. And then I had my own quote studio that I had built into a closet in my basement at the time because I was narrating audio books, and so I just said to him wait a minute, I have a studio in my basement, can I just record it home and set it to you? And he was like absolutely, which saved us both time. And then I have since hired a professional podcast manager that has a whole firm and all that sort of thing, and I've gotten more and more strategic as time has gone on.
07:43
The other thing that never occurred to me was that the podcast would really have anything to do with my business, and it's the number one way that I get clients and it's because people know me. If they've been listening to even you know 10 or 15 episodes, nevermind 234 episodes they have a really good handle on who I am and they know whether I'm the right person for them. And I can't tell you how many times I get on a call with a prospective client and they go oh my God, I feel like I know you and I say do you listen to my podcast? And they say yes. If they say yes, I say well, then you do know me, because that is the raw me, that is.
08:20 - Wendy Battles (Host)
That is so you, you are such an authentic person, and how you talk to people on the podcast and really speak your truth about things is so how you show up in life too. So I can see that if someone says I want to coach with Barb, they're ready for this kind of direct feedback. Sometimes tough love to really ultimately to help them though, right to help them on their journey around boundaries yeah.
08:49 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
And I actually I have never used the word tough love, but I've had two different clients say to me thank you for calling me on my shit. Yeah, so I call people on their shit is how I've heard it said to me, but in a very loving, supportive way, like see what you're doing, let's figure out a way to change that. But you can't change your deeply entrenched patterns until you can see what they are. And I think that one of my gifts is that I can see people's patterns. And I was just talking about this with the client this morning and I said the reason I can see them is because I used to have them myself.
09:28
So the reason I became a boundaries coach I mean there's a few reasons. One is my core will and discos dependence. That's how I got into 12 step recovery and the antidote to co dependence is building healthy boundaries. Another reason is that you know every client I ever had needed help with boundaries. Another was that I needed a niche. You can't just be this like a generalized life coach, because when you market to everybody, you're marketing to nobody.
09:51
And then the other is I knew that I was really good at helping people build boundaries and I think it's because of my lived experience. I know what it feels like in my body to have really horrible boundaries and I know how freeing and peaceful it is in my body and in my life to have healthy boundaries. And I have the ability to articulate what that experience is like emotionally, psychologically, physiologically and to take people on the journey for how to get there. So I learned how to build boundaries in 12 step recovery. I don't even think I knew that well, that was what was happening.
10:32
And after a couple years, when I got a really good handle on boundaries, I went and started doing all this reading about boundaries and it helped me retroactively understand what it was that had happened to me and what I was doing. But all the books that I read were just words and I'm a very visual person. So I felt the need to sort of draw pictures to depict visually what this represented for me. And those drawings turned into handouts which turned into my workbook, which is the backbone of my boundaries coaching program. So I now have a process that I can accelerate the boundary building process for people in a matter of weeks rather than years.
11:12 - Wendy Battles (Host)
I think it's really fascinating hearing you talk about your own experience, your own evolution, how you figured things out. You didn't start out with, oh I'm going to become a coach. You just said I want to be of service to people and I want to have this podcast, and out of that grew these other things, and it feels to me like that is such a part of being on not just a one stop reinvention, but a reinvention journey when we let things unfold and sometimes we may go in directions we hadn't seen before, or we go on detours and we get back on track. What's the biggest and most impactful lesson that you've learned from this unfolding that you've done over the last several years?
12:03 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
I'm unstoppable. That's it, I am unstoppable. Do you know the song? Unstoppable, luicia, I do and I play it a lot.
12:11
So do I, and also I played it and had a little dance party. Literally. I got up, didn't even turn the light on, went to the bathroom and started playing. First I played Flowers by Miley Cyrus and then Unstoppable just came as the next one, because that's in my playlist and I danced to that and I'm like I tell myself that all the time.
12:29
But I also know it, because, for those who don't know anything about 12-step recovery, step 12 is actually has three parts to it, one of which is we continue to carry the message of recovery to those who still suffer, and what that means is we, like what we say is I can't keep what I have if I don't give it away.
12:49
So I don't go shouting in the streets about my recovery, but when the opportunity presents itself for me to share with someone, like hey, this is what I did and it worked for me, perhaps it will work for you. Well, I take that very seriously and that is the purpose of my life, it's my calling and my soul mission, and I partly do that through the work that I do here, and I was talking to a young man who was becoming a coach and we were I did. It was essentially like a two hour coaching session with him. But we were just chatting at a co-working place and I said you know, nobody can stop me because literally, if I became deaf and mute, I could still pray for people Like you cannot stop me.
13:30 - Wendy Battles (Host)
That unstoppable, I think says it all. It's such a great way to encapsulate what you're doing.
13:36 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
I'm literally getting teary, I'm just thinking about this, I just, I'm just unstoppable, yeah.
13:43 - Wendy Battles (Host)
You can't stop me, and I love that, because I think that so much of reinventing ourselves is our mindset.
13:50 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
Absolutely Right and Absolutely.
13:55 - Wendy Battles (Host)
You were like a shiny example, barb, of one where we can start and where we can go, and what happens when we're open to possibilities, cause it's not like you said well, I think I'm gonna do X, y and Z. You just it just came to you and you married that with this mindset of I can do anything because I am living on purpose, which is what you talked about when we first met, about this idea of living on purpose and I, you know it resonates with me so deeply because I feel the same way about myself. I feel like I am living on purpose, I'm doing what I came here to do.
14:29 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
It took me 54 years to figure it out, but I'm doing right, right 55 for me, yeah, I'm with you and I think and I still I tell my boundaries clients. Building healthy boundaries is the process of learning to live on purpose. I didn't know that I wasn't living on purpose before I got into recovery, but now I live very purposefully and building healthy boundaries means you figure out what do I like and not like, and then you live that way and then you communicate those standards. That's what I think it was boundaries are. They're standards you have for your life that you live up to. Most people think about the part of boundaries where you're communicating them to other people. That's actually an incredibly minute portion of boundary building, because most boundaries you don't need to communicate to other people, they're for you. All boundaries are for you.
15:16 - Wendy Battles (Host)
Right, yeah, yeah, I can totally see that and I think that that really resonates with me because it feels like so much of reinvention is clearing a path to make this space to do that. And in order to do that, because so many women that listen to the podcast which is very similar, I think, to your audience that listens to the podcast in the sense that they've given so much to other people and not enough to themselves, right, and I find that in midlife women who are ready to reinvent, because the focus has been so much on their children or their spouse or their job or some aspect of their life where they've given it all, which in some ways may have been good because they were present and they were doing those things, but often at the detriment of question themselves. So now to be able to clear this space and set boundaries in which I can reinvent, in which I can. So it's almost like first we set some boundaries and then we can come and reinvent. And it's like a two-step process, right, because you have to make the space to reinvent.
16:21
You can't just keep doing often what you're doing and have no time for it and then get the result that you're looking for something different, something you want to create. So I'd like this idea of being able to do some of these things. You are continuing to reinvent yourself. You talk about how you've grown and how things have evolved in this very organic way to live even more on purpose, with this unstoppable mindset, if you had to do things differently the next time around because I know we always continue to reinvent ourselves what's one thing that you would do differently?
16:57 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
I would hire a coach sooner. So it's really funny. My account is like what's with all these coaching fees? And I go do you know how therapists need therapists? She's like, oh, do I? And I said, well, coaches need coaches, and I don't think it's just coaches that need coaches. I think anybody who's an entrepreneur needs a coach, but most people do.
17:19
And the thing that I've heard two different times in the last couple of weeks I've heard people say to me have you ever heard of an Olympic athlete that didn't have a coach? No, of course not, because if you want to get to the top level of anything you're doing, you need someone who has either been there or gotten themselves and knows how to get people there or has repeatedly shown that they get people there. So if you want to build healthy boundaries in your life, I'm the person to work with, because I personally have done it after, like in my 50s, and I've also coached you know scores of people in building healthy boundaries. So you know I would hire a coach sooner I work with. Actually, I was thinking I have two coaches. I really have three. I don't necessarily work with them Like one of them two of them I'm in their membership communities, but I have access to them all the time. And then, when I work with every single week actually no and then I have another person that's like my marketing and branding, so I have four approaches.
18:20 - Wendy Battles (Host)
You have a lot of people yeah.
18:22 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
I do, but because I don't know what I'm doing. Yes, as an entrepreneur, I'm making this stuff up as I go along, and the way that I get more and more strategic is to work with people that say, hey, you know, let's beer over here. And the idea, this reinvention that you're talking about, in the world of entrepreneurship we call that pivoting. People are so, in the world of business and entrepreneurship they're they're familiar with the concept of pivot. Like, if the market doesn't want what you're selling, then you pivot or you close or you fail. So the ability to pivot is really important. I'll give an example of mine. So, like, I was really excited to create a membership community because I knew, like, first of all, I'm a connector outside of being a coach, being a connector for other people especially entrepreneurs.
19:12
I cannot tell you how much it thrills me to do that. So creating a membership community was marrying my world of being a connector and my world of being a coach, and I really wanted to to do that. And so I built a community and I kept doing it and I, until I started working with one of the coaches I'm working with now I wasn't ever doing any math to see if it was worth my time and it so wasn't. So I ended up closing that community and I wanted it to work, but it wasn't working. I would have three, four, five people at a time and that's wonderful for me and those three, four, five people.
19:54
But if I'm trying to build a business and I want to serve as many people as I possibly can, I can't be spending so much of my time for so little money. And so now I'm creating new things that are going to be, I think, even better for the people that join and to me, and there are really good use of my time and I'm doing things that thrill me, whereas I didn't think it through enough. So I wasn't necessarily always doing things that thrilled me, and I'm a coach, it's my business, I should be doing things that thrilled me, Absolutely, Absolutely.
20:31 - Wendy Battles (Host)
And I heard you say that coaching was one of the key things. You wish you'd done that sooner. But I also heard you said and I completely agree, as someone who has hired different coaches that has made such a huge difference for me as well. I also heard you say something really important, which to me is about this idea of reimagining things, doing it differently, pivoting to your point that you could still get to that same point, but perhaps in a different way, that when we're open to things, sometimes it doesn't work out the first time, the second time, the tenth time, but the eleventh time could be it, and all we have to do is look at people that are authors, that are writers, that tried so many times to submit manuscripts and everybody said no to that one publisher, that one editor said yes. So this idea of resilience and persistence to me, is also such an important part of both of our stories?
21:26 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. And I think for me, I see a lot of overlap between the world of entrepreneurship and people in recovery, and it's that resilience that you're talking about. There's a proverb I can't remember what the origin is, but it's fall down seven times, get up eight. It might be a Japanese proverb fall down seven times, get up eight. And that you can't be a successful entrepreneur if you cannot recover very quickly from a quote failure.
21:54
And I like to think of them as detours. When you hit an obstacle, it's not actually blocking your way, it's detouring you into a different direction. And you can't make it in 12 step recovery if you're not willing to make a mistake and learn from it, and make a mistake and learn from it, and make a mistake and learn from it. And some people just want to never make mistakes and that's just not part of the human experience. Some people think that the people at the top like there's another saying I love like people don't fall to the top of a mountain, they don't just land there, they got there because they work there. And success leaves clues. There's another saying that I love.
22:34 - Wendy Battles (Host)
I'm right there with you.
22:35
That makes such a difference and I think, especially for women, because we often can get wrapped up in people pleasing and perfectionism and so much of our personal growth is in the experimentation, in trying things, in resilience and seeing the bigger picture that we're on this journey, and part of the journey is you're running to detours and then you get back on track and when you have that kind of resilient mindset, that's all about both the boundary setting and the reinvention and these processes.
23:07
They're so parallel that we're talking about I love it which back in, you know, three years ago, when we were both getting started and just figuring things out, you know we weren't having, obviously, this kind of conversation, but all of these experiences we've had have really enriched our perspective and this unstoppable mindset that we both have that we can do anything, which is what I hope that people listening will also begin to think about and try on for size, this unstoppable idea. So I want to ask you one last question, barb. I am getting ready, after our mini series, I'm getting ready for season six, and the theme of season six is own, your awesome, which I know resonates with you as an unstoppable person. My question for you is what's one thing that someone can do who's listening to begin to own their awesome or feel that unstoppable feeling that you have Something that someone could do to get started on that path.
24:10 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
Yeah, I'm going to say keep the focus on yourself. This is a really important thing that I really have to teach and like hammer into my clients, because they're so focused on other people. What does he want? What does she want? What do they want? What does the organization need? What does the situation require? And they pay no attention to what they want, need, like and prefer. They don't take good care of themselves. They're constantly giving unsolicited and licensed support to people that didn't necessarily ask for it. They're not necessarily thinking about what their contribution is when a difficult situation arises.
24:48
So learning to keep the focus on yourself is so important, because when you're focused on everything outside of you, that is an unending drain, an endless drain on your energy, because you cannot control any of that and you have nothing left for yourself. So even if you had the ability to focus on yourself, you would be completely drained. But when you focus on yourself, that is what you can actually control. And I you know like I use this all the time in the airplane, when they say, if the oxygen mass falls down, you put it on yourself first, because if you're passed out, you can't help the people around you. And so when you keep the focus on yourself. You're able to pour from the overflow, from the saucer rather than from an empty cup. But so many of us run ourselves ragged, especially women, and we try to pour from an empty cup, and so you want to pour from the overflow, and the only way to have an overflow, to have the saucer filled, is if you fill your cup first. So keep the focus on yourself.
25:51 - Wendy Battles (Host)
I love that pour from the overflow. Oh girl, that was like flossing and I have lost my. I was like, oh yeah, that's my nature.
26:00 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
I actually got the overflow thing from Ashley Kirkwood, who wrote the book Speak your Way to Cash. She is dynamite. And then I heard pour from the saucer, from Shannon, from the so victory, so it's, it's so victory fast. I can't remember what SOW stands for Strong, optimistic women. That's what it is. Shannon, Shannon Daniels, that's who it is. So I was like I, both of them. I'm like I'm stealing those concepts because I love pour from the overflow, but also from the saucer, Like it's so overflowing that the saucer's got stuff on it.
26:37 - Wendy Battles (Host)
I love that. And usually when I pour in, when something overflows and it's in the saucer, I'm like, ah, this is so annoying. It's dripping when I pick up my cup, but this, is a whole different idea of right. I love it. This overflow, that is great and I'm going to find those resources and link to them in the show notes, also for people to hear I can send them to you.
26:57 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
Sure, that'll be great. Oh my God, I can check this out. I can check this out.
27:02 - Wendy Battles (Host)
I want to. I know that people listening are saying where can I find Barb and I and I will also link to our initial episode way back when, but just as a refresher, where can people find you, barb Nangle?
27:15 - Barb Nangle (Guest)
Sure. So my favorite place to hang out on social media is on Instagram. I'm at higher power coaching. My podcast can be found on any podcast outlet or you can go to fragmentedtowhole.com and reach me there.
27:29 - Wendy Battles (Host)
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Barb. Thank you so very much for joining me today. It was a pleasure and a joy to reconnect and. Yes, absolutely. They reminded how we can all be reinvention rebels. So until next time, everyone, keep shining your light. The world needs you and all that you have to offer.