060 Stop Talking About the Life You Want, Start Living It with Rachael Hudson

What if the biggest barrier to your success as a leader isn’t your workload, your organisation, or even your strategy… but your mindset?

In this episode, Jacqueline Stockwell sits down with Rachel Hudson, an NLP coach, clinical hypnotherapist, and mindset specialist, to explore how leaders can break free from limiting beliefs and step into a more empowered way of thinking and leading.

Together, they unpack the concept of generative change — moving beyond quick fixes to creating deep, lasting transformation in how you think, feel, and act.

For information leaders and data professionals, this conversation is particularly powerful. Whether you're struggling with stakeholder buy-in, feeling overwhelmed by competing priorities, or questioning your impact, Rachel shares practical insights to help you regain control and confidence.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The difference between a victim mindset and an empowerment mindset
• How the stories you tell yourself shape your leadership outcomes
• A simple question that can instantly shift your perspective
• Practical tools like the Eisenhower Matrix to manage overwhelm
• Why resilience is built through challenge—and how to harness it

This is not about fixing problems temporarily…
 It’s about creating a new way of thinking that supports long-term success.

🎧 Tune in and start living the life you’ve been talking about.

🌱 Ready to take this further?

If something landed for you in this episode… don’t just leave it here.

You don’t need to figure it all out on your own — I’ve created a few simple ways to help you take your next step, at your pace.

🟢 — Start where you are

If you’re not quite sure how you’re showing up right now, start here:

👉 Thinking with Jaki Scorecard — your Influence Action Plan
Use this to get clarity on how you currently show up, where you might be getting stuck, and what your next influence move is. Thinking with Jaki

🟡 Build clarity and direction

Once you’ve got that awareness, let’s build a clearer picture of where you are overall:

👉 Leadership Through Data EMPOWER Scorecard
This will show you where you sit across the EMPOWER framework — your strengths, your gaps, and what to focus on next so you can move forward with confidence. The Leadership Through Data EMPOWER Scorecard

🔵 Grow with me

If you’re ready to go deeper and build real momentum:

👉 Join the free EMPOWER Masterclass | Leadership Through Data
I’ll walk you through the full roadmap and help you see exactly how to step into your influence and leadership — in a way that feels like you.  The EMPOWER Masterclass | Leadership Through Data 

🚀 Want to keep building?

If you’re ready to take action beyond this episode, here are a couple of ways we can work together:

👉 Book Jaki to speak at your next event
Bring these conversations into your organisation or community with practical, real-world learning. Public Speaker, Write & Podcaster - Jacqueline Stockwell

👉 Join the 21-Day EMPOWER Sprint
Build momentum, take action daily, and stop overthinking your next move.
https://leadershipthroughdata.com/empower-21/

💬 Final thought

You don’t need to do everything at once.
 Just take one next step.

And if this episode helped you, I’d love you to share it with someone who needs to hear it too 💛

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

Hello and welcome to today's show. I'm Jacqueline Stockwell, CEO and founder at Leadership Through Data. I inspire and motivate information leaders across the world. My guest today is Rachel Hudson, who is gonna unlock the master of that bottleneck for us. Rachel is a fully qualified NLP coach and trainer, an experienced clinical hypnotherapist, a stress reduction specialist, and a mindfulness practitioner. She's also a certified professional coach through the Institute of Professional Excellence in Coaching. She has dedicated her career to helping people break free from the invisible cages of limiting beliefs, stuck emotions and negative thinking patterns. By blending powerful techniques together like hypnotherapy, neuralistic programming, NLP, and conscious breath work, she does something truly remarkable. She helps her clients unravel and rewire lifelong unhelpful patterns in a matter of hours. But Rachel isn't just interested in talking about personal growth and she knows you aren't either. What she wants to achieve and what she maps out for every single client is a deep, permanent, genitive change. Her mission is to empower you so thoroughly that you stop dreaming about an enriched life and actually start living it across both your professional and personal world. Whether it's building bulletproof resilience, thriving as an introvert in an extrovert's market, or recovering from deep personal setbacks like trauma or divorce. Rachel is here to help you discover and harness your absolute best self. Now I love that, Rachel. We just did some breathing work just before this podcast today, and that was sensational. I'm feeling my best self already. So welcome to the show. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on today. Hi, it's brilliant to be here. Thank you for inviting me. You're welcome. Uh, you talk a lot about gender change rather than remedial change. For listeners, the information leaders that listen to the podcast, entrepreneurs or other other creators. How do you define that shift from fixing a problem to generating a completely new reality?

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Great question. And when we're fixing a problem, fixing a problem isn't just sticking a short-term solution to it. Fixing a problem that's been gathering momentum and deepening its structure requires changing everything about it. So I personally believe that, and the way that I work is that every single one of us has a thinking body, a feeling body, a believing body. And whatever we're thinking, feeling, and believing about ourselves, the world, and ourselves in the world impacts how we act in the world. And that kind of makes us a magnet to bringing either more of what we are creating ourselves or repelling more of what we want. And that occurs in teams and in organizations and in industries as well. So generative change is recognizing the thoughts that go with something and shifting those, recognizing the feelings that go with something and shifting those. So in the short term, fake it till you make it can be quite effective. Short-term bursts of energy, of kind of a false but necessary belief, not a complete buy-in belief, can affect great change. But in the short term, that's effective. Ultimately, in the long term, you need to truly build the foundations to support whatever that fake it till you make it energy did in the short term. And you can do the two along the same at the same time, simultaneously and concurrently, but they actually need to be used as a launch pad. The fixing points need to be used as a launch pad to percolate the deep change so that the next time it comes around, it's a different iteration. There's an evolution of it. So it's not as so reactionary and it's more responsive. So I love that.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

So a lot of information leaders struggles to get buy-in, to get people to listen to them within their organizations. What you're describing is their belief for themselves, right? In those five pillar things. What's one step that they could take today to make a shift towards that more positive self away from the fake it to you make it?

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Brilliant. And I'm really glad you asked that question because I work a lot in mindset. You know that I'm a mindset person. And we have the victim mindset and we have the empowerment mindset. Some people call it growth and fix fixed and growth mindset. Carol Dweck's, if you ever want to read about positive mindset or fixed and growth mindset, Carol Dweck has done a huge amount of work on that. In terms of one thing that we can fix is what story are we choosing? We bring it back to our self-responsibility. So there is amongst psychology and change work, there's what we call the victim triangle. Sometimes you'll hear it as the trauma triangle or the drama triangle. And in order for us to feel like the world is being done to us, then we have to be the victim. We have to have a persecutor, someone or something persecuting us that we are not able to change. Therefore, we must have a rescuer. So if you imagine it in a triangle on the top apex is the victim, one corner is the per persecutor, and the other corner is the rescuer. But in order to gain active agency and autonomy, we need to accept conscious responsibility for what is in our power to change at that time. And in order to do that, we have to take conscious responsibility for what we are doing in that moment that is playing a part in the continuance of whatever challenge we're facing. And we have to take radical responsibility and change that. And in order to do that, quite often we have to change the story. So if we are turning around and saying to ourselves, I have no control over this, to actually then say, okay, what do I have control of right now? And what can I do to change that? We often think in too big a scope. And actually, if you can break something down into each discrete step, it very quickly becomes doable rather than undoable or not changeable.

SPEAKER_02 6:24

Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. So they're kind of taking that wide view of themselves, really, isn't it? It's to the things that they can change, taking small steps. There's also a very good book, I think, is the Autonic Habits, those small steps. So doing something different every day or thinking about it, you know, you think go to the gym, you pack your bag, you go to the gym, you don't get to the gym, but the next day you're like, I'm definitely going to get to the gym. And then you kind of repeat those habits over and over again. And I think, you know, when it comes to mindset and certainly a positive mindset, and I'm very much of the something negative happens, or what's a positive outcome to that, or what can I shift, or what can I take from that? Like what learning opportunities. Some people though don't are as self-aware. What one thing that could they do to try and make themselves more self-aware so they can shift that, you know.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Yeah. Um thank you. I I also didn't mention the other side of the victim triangle, which is the empowerment dynamic. Imagine I get a triangle again, and you have at the side, instead of the perpetrator, that perpetrator becomes the challenger. Instead of the rescuer, the rescuer becomes the coach, and therefore at the apex of it, we become creator. So, in terms of accepting what we are doing, ask yourself, is this happening to me or for me? So, going back to your question, a very, very quick solution is if this were happening for me, for my benefit, what is the gift in this? What is the learning in this? What is the stretch in this for me that will bring me back to willingness? Yeah. And so there are gosh, there are so many instruments that I can use at any given time. And we've got the Eisenhower matrix as well. And then you've got the in you've got the leadership compass. And, you know, we often we all we all know what's going on for us. We all know the kind of things that we're competing with at any given time. But quite often when we we don't have control of what's being delivered to us from above, and sometimes we don't have control or or nor do we have the wherewithal to be able to look after some of the challenges that the people who are looking up to us need us to fulfill. And that's, I find, is quite a challenge at the moment because we live in a in a society currently where some leaders are being expected to look after the mental and emotional health of their team more than they themselves are looking after their emotional and mental health. And that's that's creating quite a few challenges, I think, in leadership and productivity and this kind of thing. So working with that is quite an interesting challenge when when we feel that we are out of control, bringing it back into control, our active agency and choice. First of all, we have to be willing to bring it back into control rather than to stay out of control. So whatever you can do to gain one iota of active agency and autonomy in something is great. And the Eisenhower Matrix is brilliant for that. The Eisenhower Matrix is um is a, you I'm sure you've come across it, but it's a productivity hack that basically has two um access, you have importance and urgency, you know. And if you have a team, it's about even if somebody else has given it to you and it's it's urgent to them and it goes along a hundred other things that have got immediate responsibility, it's about understanding in that moment and managing the communication for that. I don't want to speak, teach grandmother to suck eggs or anything like that, but who can, who does this belong to and when does it? We are often not, we often don't take responsibility for the way we use our time. So if it's high urgency for someone else, then that would come in, you would then assess it. Is this urgent and important? High importance, high urgency goes on your schedule in the next three hours where possible, or in the next half day wherever possible. High urgency, low importance, that's one of those things that you might delegate to somebody else. If it's high importance but low urgency, then I would diarize it so you know when you can take off of your conscious processing, put it in your diary or your calendar so that you know when you're going to work on that. And if it's low importance and low urgency, then you take it off your schedule entirely because when it becomes either important and or urgent, it will come back onto your calendar in that moment. And actually, I think many people underestimate the power of even if it's just a 10 or a 15-minute check-in with their team every day to ask them where they are on each of these tasks and where each of those tasks lie on this matrix, then that could that level of communication actually is invaluable. Some of the best teams that I've ever worked with have a really open policy on recognition of workflow and challenges on time and urgency.

SPEAKER_02 11:16

Amazing. Amazing. I think that's really important as well. Because if you prioritize your work, you actually know what you're doing, which helps your mindset and it helps you not feel that everything's coming up to you. So that kind of leaves me on.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Sorry, I can may I just add one of the things that you that you can do on that is I, for instance, am a real perfectionist, right? And that gets gets in the way a lot. So I find I set myself an hour's limit to do a particular task because otherwise I could be like the proverbial artist, never finishing a painting, you know, and I could spend a whole day doing one task, which is so not useful for me. So if I've only got 15 minutes in my calendar to work on a particular post for social media or to fill out a form, then I have to do it. And quite often the thing I have to take out is any emotional, any kind of, you know, I love a vocabulary. I love my vocabulary. But if I'm using flowery words to complete a form that doesn't need flowery words, it just needs the facts. Get the emotion out of it, deal with facts, do it in the 15-minute time scale that I've given myself, and then go on to the next thing. It's it's quite an exercise in stoicism, I think.

SPEAKER_02 12:25

Yeah, and I think time is really important because I think a lot of us in our industry are time poor. I get a lot of customers that say they're time poor. And sometimes I think it's actually flipping on the other end because we're spending more of our time doing other people's work or work that actually doesn't drive the organization forward, doesn't drive the strategy forward, you know, isn't really the stuff that we should be doing to get the better outcomes. And there's some really good tools around time audits that actually you audit your time, do a really nice, like a line down here and a line down here if you're watching the video, straight down line, two two columns, put 95% in one column, five percent in the other, and then in 95%, you basically write down everything that you do, so everything that you do, so spend some time doing that. And then once you've done that in the 5%, you actually write what drives the business forward or what drives the organization forward, what should I be doing in my job role? And it was so important. I I did this with my job, and there were so many jobs that I was doing that actually didn't drive the organisation or the business forward. And then I started to look at where actually I can push out some of the work that I'm doing that isn't really my job, doesn't drive the organisation forward, and started to then allocate it. So I did a time audit and then I actually got time back. And I'm bringing this point out because where you've said you've allocated certain points in your calendar. So what I find really interesting is your brain is not able to jump from, say, a podcast or a data protection impact assessment. I'm gonna use that as an example, straight into a one-to-one with a member of staff. So it will take your brain 10 minutes to move from one to the other. So if you want to be in a really sort of empathic one-to-one with a member of staff, you need to make sure you've got space for that. So this time audit then allows you to create on certain days, certain times that you have certain things to do. So like Thursdays would be a podcast recording day, client meetings Monday afternoon, LinkedIn Lives on Wednesdays. That's kind of how I've structured to set them up, social media planning. But then my team get a certain like two-hour allocation every day where they can book meetings with me. So I can be in there, I can show up, and I'm in the right frame of mind.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 14:47

And I tried to teach this to information leaders as well through the Empower Accelerator, because I think it's really important because we spend so much time doing things that don't help organ, don't help the organization, don't help you in your job role. And actually, if we sort of step back and think, well, you know, should I actually be doing that? You know, those types of things, and then you can get that time back. So I think it's really and I think it's really important for mental health and mindfulness as well to be able to have that consumption of time, effective time. And flow you're the right person.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

Yeah, absolutely. If you get that flow, then any team develops a rhythm. And if they and and and over time we anchor to that rhythm, which is brilliant. And you know the core things that are happening on most days, and then the the flow of the week will understand that, as you said, podcast days Thursdays. So you have a week from Thursday to the next Thursday to plan and create the questions, and everybody has that flow. And also, if you have that touch base at the beginning of the week to know that everybody is there, and it it I think it develops a much greater sense, in my experience with teams, it develops a much greater sense of collaborative nature, of collaboration, a much greater sense of trust as well, because it allows people to let go and of the things that they trust, they are giving others the opportunity to show up at their best doing what they are here to do without that micromanagement. Clearly, if it needs to be adjusted and approached at a time that's relevant for that shift. And it's so empowering for a whole team to understand what each person is is going through to have the it's it's like a global dynamic. Everybody's bought into the dynamic of the business and the flow and doing doing the relevant stuff rather than wasting time on short, short term, you know, everybody needs a win-win, you know, and it's I often invite my clients to look at, okay, this is what the dream is, this is what the best case scenario win is, what's the mid-case scenario win? What's the worst case scenario win? And what's the worst case scenario in the short, the mid, and the long term? And once once people have got a really clear idea of that, and they've and they then kind of use the matrix of how do I want to feel personally? How do those people who report to me, how do I want them to feel? What do I want them to think? So when we do it for ourselves in the the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, actions, and then we do it for our teams, and then how do I want the people I report to to think about me, to feel about me, to believe about me, to act towards me? You know, it really is. It sounds very complicated at the moment. I'm sorry about that. You know, but actually when you begin to look at it, then we begin to show up. That us shows up in the moment when we know what it is that we want to affect, the effect that we want to have on others, you know, and how we make people, how we influence how people perceive us and believe in us. You know, that's all in our power if we are willing to do that kind of foundational work to start off.

SPEAKER_02 18:03

Yeah, agreed, agreed. So, final question for me. I just want to talk about resilience. Tell me about resilience, Rachel.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

Oh, it's a superpower. Resilience is an absolute superpower if we are willing to recognize that we can only build resilience having forged ourselves through a moment of need, a moment of challenge, a moment of fire, a moment of trauma for some people. But, you know, we become resilient when we allow ourselves to discover resources we didn't know we had. So inner resources and resilience of bedfellows in my in my world, right? We very rarely develop resilience if life has been entirely smooth. However, when this system of ours has been challenged to think in new ways, to feel in new ways, and to and believe new things about ourselves. And that's often our future self that believes better for us than our current self. Put ourselves in stretch positions and challenges. Resilience comes through it. And uh one of the symbols I'm using at the moment is the phoenix. And I know the phoenix is out there all the time, but the phoenix is forced to burn, and the ashes create the most fertile soil upon which we then stand. So we are strengthened, and the foundations that we stand upon within ourselves are also strengthened. So resilience is a beautiful, beautiful strength. It's not forceful, it's a quiet certainty that is built by having gone through the fire, whatever that fire looks like. And for some it's much more challenging than for others. But even so, it's about knowing from where we stand now that we have been through things that have created a more evolved iteration of us, and that nobody can take that away from us. And then that's what we can apply to everything that comes forward, and that brings with it compassion and empathy and understanding and consideration and a greater sense of purpose. So, resilience, I think, is just the most beautiful thing because it's about integration of a previously weakened us into a much, much stronger version of us. Love that, I love that.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

Thank you so much for your time today, Rachel. How can listeners reach out to you if they want to know more?

SPEAKER_00 20:27

They can reach, I can give you my email address, they can reach out to me at rachelhudson.com, uh, which is A-E-L. Rachel is spelled specifically, but rachelhudson.com, um, Aki, if you're willing to publicize that. And I'm also really happy to provide a link so that people can get some meditations. I've got a meditation bundle that I'm really happy to give to your listeners. Three, 30-minute uh meditations for them. You can also reach Rachel on LinkedIn. But thank you so much for your time. It's been absolutely sensational, Rachel. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. You do brilliant things, Jackie.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Thank you for listening to the journals of the information entrepreneur with me, Jacqueline Stockwell. I hope you found this episode inspiring and helpful and have some takeaway tips that can be useful to you. If you liked this episode, please like, review, and share it with your friends. Your support helps us reach more information leaders to stay inspired and listen to great content. Want to test out your strengths and weaknesses and measure it against our empower framework? Please complete the scorecard. It's a great way to improve and evaluate your skills. You can find the scorecard at the end of the description of this podcast. Stay tuned for a new podcast every Thursday and remember to be bold, be brave, and be beautiful.