EP158 You Are the Ceiling: Identity, Operations & Radical Alignment with Jodie Hayward

What happens when the business you've built looks successful from the outside... but feels completely wrong to live inside?

In this episode of The Reinvention Era, I'm joined by the fabulous Jodie Hayward for a conversation that sits right at the intersection of two things we so often treat as completely separate:

Who we are and how we operate.

Jodie works where identity meets operations, helping ambitious founders and business owners create both the structure to scale and the self-concept to match it.

And she knows what happens when those two things fall out of alignment.

After building a multi-six-figure business largely through referrals, Jodie realised she'd created what she describes as a “golden cage”. The business looked successful, but it couldn't operate without her, her life had to fit around it, and the freedom she'd originally gone into business to create had disappeared.

Eventually, she took the whole thing apart.

And what followed became the foundation of the work she now calls Radical Alignment.

We talk about what happens when your identity and your business are pulling in different directions, why better systems won't solve an identity problem, and why identity work without the operational structure to support it can simply create another route to burnout.

We also get into the ways your identity subtly shows up inside your business: delegation, people pleasing, overcomplication, procrastination, boundaries, visibility, the need for validation and that lovely little habit of convincing yourself you need another system, SOP or bit of preparation before you're finally allowed to bloody move!

Jodie talks brilliantly about the fear underneath so much of this, particularly the fear of being judged for succeeding differently, and shares one of my favourite lines from the whole conversation:

“Failure is foreplay for freedom.”

YES.

We also talk about why so many founders accidentally create a job rather than a business, why constant hustle can feel productive while getting us absolutely nowhere, and what freedom in business actually means when it's not simply about buggering off and doing whatever you want all day.

And, unsurprisingly, we end up somewhere I'm deeply passionate about too:

There comes a point where understanding why you are the way you are isn't enough.

At some point, you have to stop endlessly looking backwards, make a decision about who you're going to be and take the action that gives you evidence of that identity.

Which feels particularly appropriate because, as this episode lands, Jodie and I are together in London continuing this conversation live on stage at Be You Now.

In this episode, we talk about identity, operations, Radical Alignment, self-trust, fear of judgement, people pleasing, business structure, freedom, evidence, evolution and what it really takes to build a business that actually fits the person running it.

If you've ever looked at your business and thought, I've built this thing... but I'm not sure I actually want to live inside it, this conversation is for you.

Find Jodie

Jodie would genuinely love to hear from you, so please go and say hello on Instagram. As she says in the episode, she's a real human and she's the one who'll actually reply 😂

Instagram: https://instagram.com/the_jodiehayward/

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Transcript

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SPEAKERS

Sarah Elizabeth, Jodie Haywood

00:00

Hello and welcome to the Reinvention Era podcast. I'm Sarah Elizabeth, Queen of Reinvention, and I am super excited because today we have a wonderful guest in Jodie Haywood, and the best thing about this is that the day this episode comes out, Jodie is on the stage with me at Be You Now, the identity reinvention event for founders and business owners in London, no less. So I'm so excited that Jodie is going to have this conversation and then be our Fireside too. And this is such an exciting conversation because it sits right at the intersection of two things that we often treat as completely separate, who we are and how we operate. So Jodie works amazingly where identity meets operations, the structure to scale, and the self concept to match it. She works with ambitious founders and business owners to look beyond simply putting better systems into a business, and at the person who's actually operating those systems. Jodie talks about something she calls radical alignment, which we're going to go all in on, which is a gap between who a woman is and how she's actually operating. And her belief is that sometimes it's that gap rather than the systems themselves that's really putting a ceiling on the business, and obviously when someone starts talking to me about identity showing up in your business, I'm all in. So Jodie, as I said, is also my fireside partner at Be You Now, which is really exciting. So Jodie, welcome to the Reinvention Era podcast.

01:43

Hello, my lovely. I mean, this is exciting. What a wonderful intro! And yes, like today, when people are listening to this today, we will be doing like and and at Be You now, which is just going to be so phenomenal, and just everything that I, that everything that that not just I, but everyone needs. Do you know what I mean? No one talks about this enough.

02:04

Absolutely, people don't talk about it enough. We get all the business stuff and all the strategy stuff and all the tools, but no one really talks about who needs to be to be behind all of that and run that business, right?

02:16

I do have a theory about that though, because everyone's trying to sell something, and it's the shiny stuff. It's like we're all magpies in some kind of way. We come into this online business and we're like, they must know more than me because they're doing X, Y, Z, and we give all our power away and we decide to take on other people's blueprints and stuff, you know. And then we just kind of lose ourselves in it. But you know, that's why we're talking today, anyway, absolutely,

02:42

absolutely. I couldn't agree more with you there, and I've done that. I've been the magpie more than a few many times, and that's how it's ended up here. But anyway, so tell me a little bit about you and how you ended up working in this kind of crazy mix between identity and operations.

02:59

Well, I mean, I've spent I've been online since 2016, and the reason I the reason I started online was I think probably similar to a lot of people is because I understood that at the time that it would give me freedom because all I actually wanted to be was mum, and just before that, my vocation, if you like, was I was a bodyguard. I was a close protection officer in London, protecting princesses that are over from Saudi Arabia. And obviously, you know, it's probably frowned upon doing that kind of thing while you're pregnant, right? I don't know. I had to give that up, and and I realised when I became a mum that that was always what I was meant to be because I'd had quite a difficult you know childhood questioning and and everything moved out of my family home when I was 13 and then when I became a mum I became you know the person who I thought I was meant to be I was always meant to be a mum so I didn't want to then have to go out to work nine. I wanted to spend time with them. You know, my friends used to call me Mother Earth because I like breastfed them until they were three, and

04:12

I love that.

04:14

You know, I was all into baby wearing and all the rest of it. You know, so I started in in online looking in online 2016, and really I came into the online business not really knowing what my qualifications were to be able to do that because of my previous work hadn't been anything to do with that, of course. So I I came in online. I was very lucky. I did all the shiny things, you know. I tried all the different things, training Facebook ads. You know, systems, social media. I think that's where we probably most of us start is social media. And then I found my quite quickly found what I was really good at because of my ADHD. My brain is already systems and process led. And I started quite early as almost like a manager, I suppose, for for a multi six figure business. And you know, the kind of traction grew from there. And I had referrals after referrals. I'd never marketed myself, and I grew a multi six figure business from that. And then I got pregnant with I got pregnant with a baby just before my third daughter, my third child, who is my only daughter, and I I miscarried that baby. And not my first, not my fifth, unfortunately. But something broke inside me when that happened, but not in a bad way. It broke something open. Now, ever since I can remember, I've had this fire inside my belly, and it almost felt like I've I've had chains around it all my life. And I've been trying different things to kind of unlock this thing, right? And I think what had happened is I'd got to a point in my business where I looked from the outside looking in, it looked amazing, like it was successful. You know, I had the the accolades and the multi six figures and everything from referral and everything, but I was literally dying inside of it. It was just a golden cage for me. It didn't give me freedom. It life, and I had to fit pieces of my life around my business, yeah, because it didn't run without me inside it, you know. And I was such a hypocrite because I was building completely the opposite for all my clients.

06:38

Oh wow! Yes, do as I say not as I do. done it for myself.

06:45

I was so caught up in being the people pleaser, being the one who's like boring into her clients. That was the story, you know. I'm just boring into my clients. I'm there when when they need me. That's why they hire me. That's why they stay with me. It's all bollocks, of course. We know that now. So anyway, I I let my team go. I let my clients go. I essentially took the business apart piece by piece, and I spent the next well up until now, sort of three years, three and a bit years now, recalibrating who I was and actually what I wanted to do, and the first kind of six to six months to a year of that was complete just mess. It's almost like I describe it as like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Yeah, I literally went to pulp. Like I literally went to

07:37

pulp. I feel you. Yeah,

07:39

I I didn't have I didn't have anyone there really to to walk me through that. I didn't know what to expect. I had to go through this process, and I've been doing identity and mindset work since 2017 on myself. I thought I did the mindset work, but it's completely different, you know. So radical alignment was born out of my own journey, my own travels on this path that never ends because right the journey is the destination, isn't it? I recalibrated to be able to help other women and to be that person that I needed back then to guide me through and to show me the light at the end of the tunnel and to hold me to you know a different standard, basically. So I kind I went through the the motions of letting go of the op side of things, but the truth is, really good at what I do. Like I'm really good at what I do, and when I looked at it, I was like, this is not a separate thing. These people I've seen I've built structures for people who haven't up levelled their identity and the business has gone nowhere. I've seen people doing the identity work without any structure and all they've done is burnt themselves out. You know, yeah. You and your business are not separate at all. Your ceiling is the business's ceiling. Yes. So that that

09:01

work that I do now, yeah, I absolutely love that, and it's so interesting, isn't it? Because all those stages that you've been through, that all those different identities that you've been through yourself, you know, you sort of say about Mother Earth because we were told that we can have it all, but what does having it all look like? So you kind of go and give everything to your children, and then you go and give everything to a business, and then you've still lost you. You still abandoned yourself within all of that, right? So this is kind of fighting that fire, unlocking that fire, but in a way that serves you as well as everyone else you're serving, right?

09:37

Absolutely, and and can I just say on that point that I had never lost myself because I didn't know who I was in the first place.

09:46

Yeah,

09:47

my childhood stuff. I was always the doormat, always the people pleaser. That was who I had claimed as my identity. I just didn't realise that I was the only one who had the power to change that.

10:00

Yeah, because

10:00

I was constantly looking outside of myself for validation of my own worth. You know,

10:06

100% 100% I feel it. I feel it. I know. Yeah, it's true, isn't it? It's what we got. I mean, I always say we don't find yourself; you design yourself, and you create the person that you want to become because we don't often know we don't. It's so long. I mean, I call it the sovereign self, that fire in your belly, and we're so conditioned out of it that it takes a long time to know. And there's there's not enough people out there helping us work through this as well. So um, so that's super like, how you've gone through all those different identities and worked your way back to what you love and what you're really good at. The whole Ikigai, isn't it? What you're good at, yeah. What you love, what you can be paid for, and how you can help people, what you can give, or something, isn't it? So, yeah. So that's amazing. So let's go a little bit deeper into the radical alignment. Then, what what do you mean when you talk about radical alignment?

11:08

So radical because absolutely no one outside of yourself is going to understand what you're going through,

11:20

Right,

11:21

radical because you have to be okay with that. Like you have to understand that and trust yourself enough to be like this is who I am. This is what I do. I trust myself implicitly to make these decisions that no one no one's going to understand from the outside looking in, you know. And that alignment piece is as true with identity as it is with business. It's essentially when you get to wherever you get to at the end of your life, right? If you let's say the gates of heaven or whatever it is that you believe in, um, you want to get there being the most full version of you. Do you know what I mean? Without those regrets and everything, you want to be the most full version of you. And when you create alignment, and I always describe alignment as the absence of misalignment, right? So when you get to that place and you're the most full version of you, it's because you've chosen to listen to your inner guidance, your inner compass, your inner tuition, despite what's going in on in the outside world. You've chosen to find your own alignment and and your own path to for what you were put here to do. You know, yes. And it's a shame in business because if you imagine, if you imagine a butterfly flying. I don't know if you've ever seen a butterfly flying. They're they're all over the place, right? They are. They're so random. They're just all over the place, and that's what we like in business. So many times, we're like, "Oh, I'll do this and I'll do that, and I'll go over here and I'll do and this.

13:00

Have you got a camera in my house, Jodie.

13:02

Yeah. If you ask the butterfly to go from A to B, it's gonna take 25 times longer. You know what I mean? Because they're all over. Absolutely

13:16

know what you mean. Yeah.

13:17

And and the alignment piece in business, you know, if you've got your ops, your marketing, your team, your direction, your your leadership-all pointing in the same direction. You are going to get there faster. Absolutely, that environment piece in business, you know.

13:29

Yeah. So, what does that look like when you bring that identity in operationally? How do you begin to break that down into what are the different areas that you would look at operationally and be able to go, yeah, that's your identity love. We need to do some work in that. Like, where where do you see it? Do you see like you know in delegating or whatever things like that?

13:53

There's so many different variations of it. Delegating is a massive one because there's there tends to be like a belief that only I can do this thing, or it's going to take me longer to get this thing out of my head, and then teach someone to do it. So I might as well just do it myself.

14:07

Yeah,

14:08

and there's like a vicious cycle as well because people will hire someone, not give them what they need to do their job. The job will then be shit, and then they'll go, "Well, look, this is why I didn't hire anyone in the first place. But it's just like a self-sabotaging

14:22

circle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

14:25

And there's like business is not hard. Business is quite simple. The people are hard. They make it difficult. They make it complicated. But business is quite simple in terms of what actually needs. Most of the time, people are overcomplicating things in the back end because they're procrastinating from getting out and doing the the bits they need to do in the back end, creating new stuff, and because they're actually doing things, it feels like they're being productive. It feels like they're moving forward, but they're not at all. You know,

14:58

yeah. So not. Going on underneath all of that, what have you found?

15:03

Well, the biggest one is fear. It's it's fear. There's fear of of being successful, you know, because the beliefs that they hold or whatever it is. There's fear of being seen, fear fear of being judged. I put a post out the other day. It's like most women are not, you know, they're not fearful of succeeding or something like that, they're fearful of being judged for succeeding differently, and we are because there's like a standard we've been taught, and and society and the online business in general has certain narratives.

15:34

Yeah, I

15:34

think the radical alignment piece is basically a great big fuck off, like.

15:43

I do it my way, thanks. No, I love that. But I said I did actually. Weirdly enough, I did a podcast on this a couple of weeks ago about the fear of failure. We frame everything as the fear of failure, but actually, more often than not, it's a fear of being seen to fail, and it's what other people think of us in that. Like, if we could try something, and no one would ever know if we tried to do it anonymously, is the fear is still the same? Because quite often it is what other people think, isn't it? Is that judgement, that fear of judgement, and we've created this whole judging panel in our heads of people that probably actually really don't give a shit, but we've made it out that they are the judge and jury of our fucking lives, and then we let them guide us without they don't even know that they're doing it, you know. And we're letting we're allowing this to dictate where we're going.

16:40

Yeah, and it's it's not even them because they're not actually doing it. It's all in your head in the first place.

16:45

Exactly on the

16:47

on the failure piece, like my I always say failure is is foreplay for freedom,

16:52

right? I love that. That's

16:54

it. There is no failure. There are always lessons. Everything is. I believe everything is always happening for me, and because I have that belief, and because I've ingrained that belief, if something is not going the way I would have had expected it to go, my overwhelming feeling that I have embedded and spent a long time embedding is curiosity with a little bit of excitement to see actually what's coming out the other side of this. Do you know what I mean?

17:20

Yeah, absolutely. It's data. Data. It's information guiding

17:25

us. Yeah, and that judge piece, like when I did my emotional intelligence training, the judge is so like your brain is so insidious with how it sounds like you. The stories it makes up are absolutely relevant to you and your circumstance. You know, is it's really insidious. When I sat with my judge, I actually realised it wasn't my voice at all.

17:48

Yeah,

17:49

and I think it's it's true of a lot of us. It comes from you know caregivers or parents or whatever it is. Beliefs are are caught and not taught, right? So yeah, it's that judge, and most often what we're judging other people on is also what we're judging ourselves on as well.

18:05

Yeah, definitely. I call it the shitty committee in the head. Being judge is I've called her Margot because she's like a judgmental old biddy. So I've depersonalised her so that it's not me, it's her. It's like oh, it's fucking Margot again. She's off. She's off.

18:23

I love that.

18:24

Although my friends called her baby then Margot, which was quite awkward, but you know, cute baby. So, do you find then that the identities you've talked there about how you've evolved in the work that you've done to be able to go. That's not failure. That's data. That's information. Let's get curious. Let's get excited. How often do you find that? Because that identity that builds that first version of our business, if we don't work on that, that is going to keep us there, right? Like you said, you're you know you you are your singling of your business.

19:04

Yes, yeah, and it's new level, new devil every single time, and sometimes it's new level, old devil because the same lessons are going to show up in different ways in your business, and until you resolve them, do you know what I mean? Yeah. So whether like being like one of my clients was, you know the typical in the background? I need to get all my SOPs in place, you know, before we do X, Y, Z. I need to get all these systems. I need blah blah blah blah blah blah. And she's she literally got everything in place, and then she found another thing that needed to go in place, and then there was another thing that needed to go in place. Like it just kept running the show until she came and and we started working together, and I was like, I'm not backwards about coming forward. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I'm quite down. We need

19:50

that. It's a loving bitch slap. I love a loving bitch slap.

19:54

Always said love, and it's you know absolutely that I'm. And I speak my truth to to my people because that's what I'd want, you know. And I said to her, like, you're creating your own chaos here. This is this is you. This is nothing that the business needs. The business is set. It's ready to go. We've got all the pieces in place. This is absolutely you doing this thing, because what had happened is she just kept burning out before she started working with me because she's doing the same thing over and over again. So when you come into business and you start, and I don't even think there's like levels of identity. I think it's just a constant evolution. The problem is, and I I'm very visual because I have ADHD. It's a bit like you say if you had a pond, right, and there was no running water going into that pond. What's going to happen is it's going to stagnate and it's going to die. Right, if you have water flowing into the pond, it's just consistent new life, and it's going to grow. You

20:53

know, if

20:55

you're not growing, you are dying.

20:57

Yes, yeah.

20:58

What people do is they get stuck in their business, and the reason that I believe they get stuck is because they are told what it needs to look like from so many different people, so many different angles. Do you know most of the things that people come to me and say is, "I just I don't know what I don't know.

21:18

Yes, yeah. So how do you begin to unravel that with your clients?

21:25

Well, the the very first piece that I do is the alignment piece. I'm like, do you actually do you love what you're doing? Do you actually want to do what you're doing? Are you serving people to your highest thing? And then we have to unlearn. Like, there's so much unlearning that needs to be done. I had to do it myself. I got to the point in my business, and I've seen it with my clients. I couldn't write a social media post because I would sit there for hours trying to work out the hook first, and then I had to have this thing after. And then, do you know what I mean? And then I had CTF, and like I was, I just like I can't do

22:00

it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

22:02

So we do a lot of letting go. We do a lot of releasing. We understand the true direction. We do a lot of nervous system work, you know, because you can't you can't unlock your vision and actually be grounded in yourself and in your body. And most people, again, when they come to me, they're cut off at the neck. Yeah, like everything's coming cognitively, nothing is from their body, and they're so ready. They are so ready to just find that little bit of release, you know. Even though, even though the world tells us that, you know, you have to work hard, which apparently means being chained to your desk 24/7, you know. So we work on those pieces first, and the grounding and everything, and then we look at the business model. Like, is this actually serving you? Where are you pouring into things that are just not working in a business? I have a very logical business brain as well. You know, so we're quite cutthroat with things, and it's never my decision; it's always their decision in the end, of course.

23:03

Of course, yeah.

23:04

Help move them pass, and then obviously I have my my scaled framework, which is my framework for building sustainable, scalable business that doesn't create a golden cage for the person running it. You know, so always start with the alignment piece. Though, do you love what you're doing? Is this? Could you see yourself doing this in 10 years? Because your body will tell you the answer instantly to that question.

23:29

Yeah, and it's having the awareness to know that and recognise that as well, isn't it? Because sometimes, like you say, you know, your business is never going to grow if your self-concept doesn't. Yeah, but sometimes it's also having someone outside of you to point something out. That's why I love coaching and mentoring so much because it is that you know. Just recently, I was having I had one to one with Matt Hall, and he pulled something out of me around my sense of achievement and how I link that to worth and what that means for my business-it's wild because I've done so much work on that area. But still, as you as you're growing, as I'm growing myself,

24:16

yeah, the

24:16

business is growing. So I'm having to grow with it and adapt and learn with it, and it's changing that self-concept as you go, isn't it?

24:25

Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm not going to lie; I'm probably a little bit controversial when I say this. You may even disagree with me, but I think there's a point at which I think that, like in the online world, you've got kind of two camps: you've got the business. You got the mindset. Mindset is all about unlocking your beliefs and you know looking backwards effectively. But in my work, there is a point where where I start to go. Why why are we still looking backwards? Like we just we need to make the decision to move forwards and take some action that proves to yourself that you are. A different kind of person. Like that's no, I

25:03

completely, absolutely agree with you. That's what my all my framework, my queenology, as I call it. That's exactly what I do. We look at that inherited self and the survival self, but then it's about taking what we've got as our sovereign self and designing who we're going to be, and irrespective of that, taking the bits that we want, absolutely. But I always say, you know, like you say about the visuals. I always talk about like a car, like if you're looking out the rear windscreen, rear window constantly, wondering why the car broke down, then you're never going to get forward, are you? You've got to be driving forward, knowing where you're going. Have to take the wheel and actually take control in moving the car. You can't just keep going. Oh, why am I here again? But at the same time, it's like there is that new level, new devil, or new level, devil, new queen. You know, and and we, you know, it is. It's that constant involvement, and and I think that's probably a danger in business as well. Just from people that I've seen, is that they'll grow a business to a certain point and become so entangled in that business as saying something about them. They've attached a meaning about them that they've they don't look at whether they are actually aligned with it. They don't consider whether, and then they're wondering why it doesn't grow.

26:24

Yeah, but also let's just call, you know, an apple an apple. Most people don't create businesses; they create a job for themselves.

26:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think again, that comes from that employee mentality. I've struggled with that. Where I've left my job,

26:39

yeah,

26:39

in April. You know, there is that you still have that. I've got to log on, you know, nine to five. Like, I mean, I've can't remember the last time I did nine to five. I'm, I'm doing all bloody hours at the minute, like. But you know, there is that thought that you've got to log on. You've got to like do. You've got to work, and that employee mentality is really hard as well. That identity is hard to shift because otherwise you are, like you say, you just become you creating a job, aren't you?

27:08

Yeah, absolutely. And I I can't speak to the employee mindset side of things because I've never been one. But what I can speak to is the fact that also I think we do it because we're taught that if if we're hustling, that looks like working all the time. We're hustling. We're doing all the things we need to do. Then success and growth must be inevitable.

27:30

The problem

27:30

is, is the the actions that are being taken to do that hustle. I mean, how many times? Maybe it's the listener answering this. How many times can you tell me that you've finished at the end of the day and done a little debrief and gone right. What have I actually got done today? How many times have you finished at your computer and gone? Do you know what? I'll leave those 25 tabs open. I'm going to come back to them tomorrow because I haven't finished what I'm doing, and feel like you've got naff all done that day, and then those tabs that are open on your computer are just following you around like some insidious shadow because you know absolutely you've got to get back to them, so you can't release them. Do you know what I mean?

28:08

Again, you got a camera in my house. I'm feeling a bit seen here,

28:14

but it is. I think we're conditioned, and I'm not saying it's anyone's fault, you know. We've got this whole bro marketing club over here with business, but we've also feminine club over here, which is a lot of it just bro marketing with a dress on, you know. And the whole point of radical alignment is to find your own truth, because I absolutely know and believe with every piece, every cell in my body. That when you are authentic, when you are the person you're here to be, when you're doing the work you're here to do, the energy. I don't care whether you're writing a post or doing a reel or doing an email. That energy travels with you in your work, and that that magnetic. I'm getting goosebumps. That magnetic energy. That's how we attract people. That's how we attract wealth, you know, and that's how we create freedom. And my tagline is literally freedom, wealth, power, presence. I'm talking about freedom, not in the fact that you can just bugger off and do whatever you want all day because business takes hard work, right? But in the fact that freedom, I feel free every single day to talk about what I want to talk about because I love my work. I feel free to take myself out for a walk, you know, because I love what I do. Is that's that's the radical alignment piece?

29:35

It's that's the freedom. That's the part, isn't it? Yeah, and

29:38

the power part is your power because so we're just giving our our power all the time. Yeah, I need another coke. I need another mentor. I've got to do this course. I need a certification. Now we've got AI. Oh, it can help me be efficient, but all of a sudden it's doing absolutely everything for me, and now I'm really vanilla online. Like, do you know?

30:00

You're giving your brain away to AI, yeah. So with

30:03

reclaiming that power piece is reclaiming your own power. The wealth piece is all about yes, financials, but that's a byproduct. Yes, money is just energy. It's a byproduct. It's wealth of experience, wealth of opportunity, wealth of the space you need to be who you want to be and to breathe, you know, and presence is just literally being present in yourself. I think the biggest gift I could give anyone is the gift to be able to be present in the moment. Yeah, love that. You know, love that. Do you think as women though, generally we carry an awful lot of identity issues, boundaries, challenges that that we are kind of internal chains without necessarily realising that. Do you do you see that a lot? Particularly, you work with men and women, don't you? Yeah, I have. Well, I mean, all my outside marketing is women, but I do work with men as well. Yeah, moment, and I think that you can see the difference. See the difference. I think as women, we are expected to be a certain way at certain stages of our life, we go through these identity changes. You know, we're we're a girl, then we get our period. So we're a woman, then we're a girlfriend, and then we're a wife, and then we become a mother, and then we become an empty nester, and we completely lose who we actually were because we were a mum for all those years. You know, we go through so many identity,

31:42

and then become a nan, which is so much better, by the way.

31:46

Like you fold on all on top the societal beliefs that are that are given to us, the expectations, and can I just say what I see in business more often than not is a Expectations piece,

32:02

yeah.

32:02

Like, and also in identity, it's expectations of yourself, of other people, not communicating them, and then wondering why it goes wrong. You know, so we have all these expectations placed on us from very, very young, and I'm much more aware of it now that I have a little girl and how different she is from the boys, even though she rules the roost. But yeah, I'm very aware that actually I I don't want to pass on these things. So it's still a it's still a discovery process. I think the awareness is always the first step to everything, and we start learning at a very young age, who we're expected to be, get to a point in our lives where we're like, "Fuck that! Like, I just don't want to be that anymore. I don't want to be with the Joneses of what's expected of me. You know, I think we all go through some kind of journey. I just want people to be able to experience this this feeling of being so completely in love with yourself, whilst also knowing that you're evolving and changing, whilst also being excited for those things that are coming, whilst also being completely confident in who you are and what you do, and lit up every day. You know, I want to share that feeling with everyone. I love that. I love that. So, what what has your business and this evolution of your business taught you about your identity? That I'm stronger than I thought I was. I'm absolutely everything is possible. Like everything is possible, and I don't have any kind of resentment towards who I was. In fact, I have nothing but gratitude for what I went through, and I can see, you know, if I look at my timeline, and I often do this visualisation, you know, looking at my timeline, I can see why things had happened, but I also take 100% radical responsibility for everything that's happened, and and where I've got to right now. You know, I love that. But I can look back in the last three years and everything that I've done. I mean, God, I was the main breadwinner, and I just tore down my business. I had, you know, a new baby. Well, a one on the way, two kids, my behalf. I mean, chickens-they cost a lot. Chickens and the Great Danes, like everyone, was relying on me, and I just tore it down because I was so I had that much belief in myself, and I'm just yeah I'm I think that what it's taught me more than anything is the judgement piece. Don't judge yourself on who you are now. Look forward to who you are next.

35:00

You know, love that. I love that. So, are there still times where you find yourself out of radical alignment, and how how do you notice? What do you do?

35:11

Yeah, every every single like every single week, there's probably a time where um, and the main ones for me. I mean, in the last two years, I've let go of three clients because the misalignment was loud for me to ignore. One of them was, you know, worth 50 grand to me, and I was just like, I can't do it. I'm not willing to compromise myself again, and I've had to build that trust in myself, like by taking the over and over again. And it's not like I couldn't have done with the money. I put us in a hellhole by doing my business, you know. But when I'd, it's funny actually when I looked at when I tried to give myself the evidence because often we we only look for the evidence of what we believe, don't we? So when I looked in my first nine months in this new business, I'd already done six figures. I just hadn't seen it because obviously it had gone into filling up the hole that I'd created from beforehand. For me, it's a bodily response, and it comes in micro moments every single day. If it's a person, if it's a person that's you know making me feel like that, I'll sit with it. I'll make sure that I have like this rule of three. If I'm feeling it more than three times, then that's like that's my alignment. That is Paul. That's not just me, you know, making something out of it. It's the same with ideas and creative sparks. Three times it has to come while I'm away from my business before I'll dive into

36:38

it. Wow, that's so cool. That's

36:41

to stop the magpie, though.

36:43

That's true, and and the ADHD. I think you go bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, and then you just go, "Oh, let's go off on this tangent, and then you kind of yeah, yeah, like

36:52

I keep doing in this conversation. Have you met me? But for me, it's giving myself. I have to make sure I give myself enough space to drop into my body. So my nature is really important to me. I'm very lucky. I'm surrounded by it. Grounding with my feet in Mother Earth is really important to me. And if I can't do any of those things because it's peeing down like it is today, I have my Great Danes and my cats, and I will literally just sit with them and just be really present, and that allows me to drop into my body and be like, "What's coming up for me at the moment? You know,

37:30

presence piece, isn't it?

37:32

Yeah, but that that that is just the start of it, because you can feel misalignment all day long and not do anything about it. The hard part is choosing to uncover the misalignment and actually do something about it, and that is where you start building the trust with yourself. Because so often we are just breaking promises to ourselves over and over again and ignoring our internal intuition and alignment, you know, and then we wonder why we can't trust ourselves to run a business.

38:07

So if if someone's listening then and they're thinking, "Fuck, I can see this. I feel really out of alignment. This is not who I want to be, I might be that person once, but I don't want to be this person anymore. I want to be someone different. Where do they start?

38:28

Well, the first place you need to start is by fucking celebrating, because even that awareness of going, oh my god, like I'm getting goose pimples just thinking about someone having that moment, because that moment that is that is the starting point. You need to get excited because it it gets so much better from here. And I'm not saying it's an easy road because it's not. You will go down to the depths of your soul and wonder if you're going to come back out again. I remember those nights at 3 a.m. where I'm sitting and just crying myself in a corner, probably rocking, you know, wondering what the fuck am I doing. But just take a minute to celebrate yourself, and then start getting really curious. Just get really curious on what's coming up for you in the day to day, and the the the the how of getting curious is just to give yourself some space. Don't fill your calendar with so many things that you can't even breathe throughout throughout the day. Take yourself on a walk. You know, get really curious on like why are you here? What are you here to do? Who are you here to impact? I do believe that we are best placed to serve a previous version of ourselves.

39:44

Yeah, 100% 100% agree. Yeah.

39:47

So just get curious, get excited, and if you're not there already, get your ass to be you now.

39:55

I love that. Get excited and be you now in one one breath. I love. That and obviously we are going to carry on this conversation and be here now today, which will be today when it's released. It's wild. I've got to put it thumbs down. I can't wait to see where this goes. I'm so fascinated actually because there's so you know it's such an interesting conversation and there's so many different ways we can go, so I'm very excited. So, if people aren't lucky enough to be at be you now, I don't know what they've been doing with their lives, but right

40:28

now, what the hell, you

40:30

know, aren't as lucky as us. Where do listeners find you?

40:35

You can find me on Instagram at the underscore Jodie Heywood. Come and message me over there. I'd love to hear from you. I am a real person and always will be the one that responds to everyone.

40:48

Yeah,

40:49

and I love to hear from people as well. So you can find me over there ranting and raving, giving you virtual slaps with love on my.

40:56

I love loving the slaps. Amazing. I'll put all that in the show notes as well. So thank you so much, Jodie, for coming on. Yeah, I love these conversations. I could literally talk all day. I'm super excited for the fireside. Super excited. So thank you very much. And I will be back in your beauties, badass earbuds again next week with so much love. Bye.