November 12, 2025 • 37 mins
If your burnout, brain fog, or body has been trying to tell you something, you’re being invited to listen.
In this episode, Executive Life Strategist Jessica Cumming sits down with Anne Trager, executive coach, 5-time entrepreneur, and national martial arts champion at 50. Together, they explore how the body’s “symptoms” are really signals—data points calling you back to balance, energy, and self-understanding.
Anne’s story moves from early loss and reinvention to global entrepreneurship, biohacking, and becoming a French National Champion in martial arts at midlife. It’s proof that clarity doesn’t come from pushing harder, it comes from paying attention.
🎧 Listen now
🔹 Inside This Episode💫
How Anne rebuilt her energy and identity after burnout, menopause, and exhaustion
What becoming a national martial arts champion at 50 taught her about resilience
Why your body’s symptoms are signals, not setbacks—and how to interpret them
How to use biohacking and neuroscience to reclaim energy and focus
The simple practice of savoring that rewires presence, peace, and perspective
What it means to be “productively delusional” when chasing a dream
The mindset shift that helps high achievers act with courage—while feeling everything
“Symptoms are signals. Signals are data. It’s not about fixing yourself— it’s about understanding yourself.” — Anne Trager
About Anne Trager💬
Anne Trager is an executive coach, 5-time entrepreneur, and founder of Potentializer Academy, where she helps leaders unlock clarity, energy, and measurable impact. A certified black belt and former national martial arts champion, she blends the discipline of sport with neuroscience, biohacking, and evidence-based strategy to help clients transform complexity into clarity and potential into power.
She also co-hosts The Human Pulse Podcast, exploring how to live well with technology in an always-on world.
Connect with Anne
📍 Connect with Anne on LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/annetrager/
📍 Visit potentializer-academy.com
📍 Listen to The Human Pulse Podcast- https://www.youtube.com/@HumanPulsePodcast
Connect with Jessica
📍Jessica on LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicacumming04/
📥 Download your free Clarity in 10™ Reset — your 10-minute tool to reconnect with what matters- https://www.jcnewbeginnings.com/clarity-in-10
Download the Official Transcript
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to We Are Women Unapologetically, the podcast
that talks about the good, bad, ugly and awesome careers, life,
transitions, confidence, and everything in between.
Because shift happens, but you don't have to do it alone.
Hello and welcome to We Are Women Unapologetically.
(00:21):
My name is Jessica Cumming and today I am joined by Anne
Traeger. And as an executive coach and
founder of the Potentializer Academy, she specializes in
helping high performing leaders and teams unlock clarity, energy
and impact. With experience as a five time
entrepreneur, publisher and consultant across both North
(00:42):
America and Europe, she brings atruly global perspective.
A certified Black build in a former national Martial Arts
champion, she combines the discipline of sport with
neuroscience, biohacking, and evidence based strategies to her
work. Her clients value her ability to
transform complexity and clarity, overwhelm into focus
(01:04):
and raw potential into measurable, lasting impact.
And thank you so much for joining me today.
How are you? Oh, I am great.
It's great to be here. You have an amazing background
and even more interesting story.Why don't you tell me about how
you went from North America to France becoming an entrepreneur
(01:25):
in all of your travels and studies?
My story began with a lot of uncertainty.
When I was 7, I lost my mother. When I was 8, I lost my father.
So I was twice orphaned immediately.
I did find homes thereafter. In this early uncertainty, I had
to learn to adapt and survive the playbook for life.
(01:46):
I mean, at the beginning, it's your parents.
It just disappears suddenly. And for me, that was, yes, I was
lonely. Yes, I was frustrated.
Yes, there was a sense of being an outsider, of being different
from other people. However, that was my normality.
It wasn't strange, it just was the way it was.
(02:09):
It took me until my teenage years to realize that
resilience, which I had, was also a choice.
Absolutely nothing was the way everybody else's life was or the
way it was supposed to be. And what that did for me is it
opened up this whole space of dream.
I could dream, but dreaming wasn't enough.
(02:32):
You actually have to do something about it.
You had to make decisions. You had to make choices, and
then when you make a choice, youhave to have a whole lot of
determination to get something from that.
I decided in my mid teens that Iwas going to go to France.
I was living in a small town. There was no possible financial
way for me to go to France. So I figured it out and I
(02:55):
decided I was going to study French.
I got scholarships to study French.
I got on a program to go to France as part of my studies and
I decided to stay. I remember telling the librarian
at my university and he said, oh, you're going off on the
study abroad program? And I said, yeah, absolutely,
and I'm going to stay. And he said, oh, that's what
everybody says. And I said, no, I am going to
(03:18):
stay. It was so clear to me.
I didn't know how, but I knew that I was going to start this
new life abroad. And so I did and I went abroad
and I learned to be a chef. I thought, well, hey, I'm in
France. I can learn about all the good
food here. I learned to be a chef and I
worked as a private chef in a number of different places
across the world. It was very fun.
(03:39):
And I was like, I've done that, what else can I do?
And I had these language skills that I had picked up.
So I started translating. I had a catering business in
Paris and a translating business.
I was doing that. And then I was like, maybe I can
do something with more impact. So I started to do international
communications and working were these big companies, a lot more
money in that 6 figure business.So fast forwarding, I decided
(04:03):
after doing that for a while, I really got to do something else.
I remember it was such a powerful moment.
I had moved from Paris to southwestern France and I was
getting on a plane at 5:00 in the morning to go to a meeting
in Paris at which I knew we would get nothing done.
It was the time when everything was done in person and I had to
travel all day long, and then I had to travel all the way back.
(04:25):
And I was in the airport and I called my husband and I said,
listen, I'm going to take his sabbatical.
My husband is wonderful. And he said, OK, we'll figure it
out. By the evening flight home, I
figured out what I was going to do with that sabbatical, which
was to start a publishing company of all things.
I had not exactly thought it allthe way through because
(04:47):
publishing is a rather range business model.
Anyway, that was the next business.
And so I did my publishing thingand it was really fun for a
while and moved on. So you see, there's this
pattern. I'm just like, oh, what's the
next stream? And I think I'm going to do it.
And you do. There's a certain amount of
relentless Dr. I make a decisionand then I do it.
The dark side of the story is atthe end of this publishing
(05:09):
thing. I was in my mid 40s.
I had a young child. This new business, we had moved.
I was in this new place, and I really lost my edge.
I remember the day crumbling to the floor at 5:00 in the
afternoon. I used to call the witching
hour. I crumbled to the floor,
literally pulling my hair out. And my little girl, she was four
(05:31):
or five at the time, and she looked at me and she said,
you're such a witch. I mean, like, literally, it was
like, oh, my God, you know, who is this?
This is not me and that was the turning point.
This was not me. Oi had to then start climbing
(05:52):
back on my own terms. So I went to see the doctors to
see if there was something wrongwith me.
They all said, Oh my little lady, you're just going to have
to accept the fact that, you know, at your age was in my mid
40s, things start getting a little tough and you might want
to stop the sports and blah, blah, blah.
There is no destiny here that you're going to convince me of.
(06:13):
I am going to do something different.
So I dove really head first intoneuroscience and into biohacking
and into martial arts at full. On when you were going to these
doctors and they were telling you don't do some of the sports
you were doing or don't do some of these things.
Basically saying this is the reality of it.
(06:33):
You're in your 40s. Can you take me deeper into how
you were feeling at the time andhow you decided to pretty much
just say forget you? I'm not going to listen to you.
I'm going to thrive forward. Yeah, well, it was a tough time.
(06:55):
My body hurt all over. My knees were shot, menopause.
That's why I was seeing doctors.Otherwise I wouldn't have seen
doctors. What happened is I just couldn't
compute that. Somebody said I could not define
my own life like that. There was some sort of like,
this was the way forward and I was like, well, there's nothing
I can do. There must be something I can
(07:15):
do. When they said, oh, my little
lady, I got a little angry. There was a little bit of anger
in that, but more in the condescending attitude that I
encountered. It was a condescension that got
me angry. And then there was this part of
me that just didn't understand what was being said to me.
I mean, like, I literally had not thought that it was not
(07:35):
possible to design my own future.
Call me naive or empowered. I don't care what you call me.
Call me crazy or delusional or anything you want.
I don't care because I'm going to drive forward and try to
figure it out. That's what I do.
That's what I had always done, was this kind of cognitive
dissonance that was really my savior.
(07:56):
I'd love to say that because most of the time when you see
cognitive dissonance, it's a symptom of something.
Well, maybe it's just a signal. I would say any symptom is maybe
just a signal. I was also very lucky.
I did meet some doctors who wereable to say, whoa, hey, let's
take a look at your nutrition and what's inflammatory here and
step back. I got really involved in the
(08:16):
whole biohacking movement. As a result, I found some people
who could guide me on a path forme to recuperate my health, my
foundational health, and then from there to fine tune my
personal energy systems because it's all about energy.
It's about how you wake up in the morning.
I had to recuperate my sleep. I had to find the right foods
(08:39):
for me. I had to find the pace and the
rhythm that worked for me. I had to figure all of that out
through experimentation. And then once you've got it, you
got it and you keep fine tuning it.
That's the game. It's never A1 and done.
It's that change, that constant change.
So you Fast forward again at 50,I got my black belt, I won the
(09:01):
French national championship andto this day I do squats every
day because I can. It was that moment of decision,
drive and determination, deciding that I was going to
have another story. Not the story people were
telling me I was going to have or the victim story that I could
have come up with, but somethingelse.
(09:22):
I'm going to do it. I love what you just said about
a symptom being a signal. Often times we have something
going on with our bodies and we ignore it.
We think it's just going to go away or get better.
You mentioned at this point in your life you were going through
early menopause. That's something that I've
(09:45):
noticed as I'm getting older. We didn't necessarily talk about
perimenopause, and now I feel like more women are talking
about that. All of these different symptoms.
And you also mentioned your diet.
These are all things that we don't want to talk about, we're
embarrassed or ashamed to talk about.
(10:06):
But in reality, it's our body that's giving us these signals,
giving us this data. There's something going on.
So thank you for sharing your entire story because I've talked
to so many women lately that aresaying something was just off.
And for the women out there and men too, there's something going
(10:29):
on with your body. Listen to it.
Don't ignore it because it is giving you a signal.
And it affects everything else. It's all one.
So if you're not sleeping, I getpeople come to me and say I'm so
on edge and I just can't understand how I can get my team
to do this and that and the other thing.
And I'm overwhelmed. How do you know how to sleep?
And they're like, oh, we're asleep.
(10:49):
And the less I sleep, the betterI am.
And it's like, no, not really. It all goes together.
And when you are able to fine tune it to you, then you really
do release those superpowers. How are you going to do that?
And then there are how are you going to keep it?
And then how are you going to reconnect that to the world
around you so that everybody gets to benefit from these cool
(11:12):
little ripples coming out from you, Jessica, or from you
listener? When you're talking about this,
it makes me think there was a time in my life where I
definitely relate to this. I wasn't sleeping.
I was not happy at work. Different things were happening.
I remember there was a time thatI woke up one morning and I was
(11:35):
peaceful. I had a great night's rest.
Quite honestly. This was just a few weeks after
my divorce with the corporate world.
How could I feel peaceful? You know, knowing.
That's amazing once you are ableto shut your brain off to get
the rest. And yes, that ripple effect is
amazing. The energy that you can exude
(11:56):
and the work that can get done and what you can think of and
accomplish, it truly is amazing.And the shift is not something
magical. It's this mix of necessity and
truly fierce decision making. There are times when it feels
really reckless. But I mean, is it reckless?
(12:17):
And that's the question I ask all of your listeners to ask
themselves. What are you really trading off
in your current situation? And are you willing to live that
compromise? Well, I wasn't willing.
That's a great point and that isexactly what we are talking
about in season 2 is what are women willing to trade off?
(12:40):
A lot of times the clarity perspective is so scary right
when they get clear and truly listen to what they've already
known. It's almost like people back
away because they don't want to move forward or hear the truth.
(13:01):
Have you found that in your own life?
I hear what you're saying. I see it too.
I see it in my clients. Sometimes the truth comes and
slaps you in the face and there are two things that happen.
I've had moments like that and there are ways where it's more
gradual. There are things that are more
gradual. Understanding who you are, where
(13:22):
you get stuck, and how you can change that.
I'm hesitant about that word change because I actually don't
believe that we need to fix ourselves.
I think what we need to do is understand deeply who we are.
I have some great tools for that, including a genetic
personality assessment, which isthe coolest thing because then
you can see hard science. Wow.
(13:43):
This is what my potential is. Am I living up to it or not?
It's amazing, but you have to figure out who you are and align
your biology. What was going on with me was
just pure fatigue. I had been stressed out beyond
myself during that period, and Iwas just exhausted.
So I had to figure out how to align my biology in a way that
(14:06):
worked for me, and then I had toset up these daily systems.
When you're doing all of that, you don't actually have time to
think of the fear. You just move into action.
Then there's this mindset thing.It's about how you treat that
adversity or how you treat the fear.
Courage is not about not having fear.
(14:26):
We have to learn to feel these feelings.
Just feel that feelings is part of life.
You get the fear and you get theexcitement.
Actually, they're kind of very similar, by the way.
Just depends on how you interpret it.
And courage is acting no matter what you're feeling.
But if you want to feel the joy,then you're going to feel the
sadness. And resilience is absorbing what
(14:48):
those emotions are, those less comfortable emotions, and
releasing the energy of them into action, into something
else. I mean, when was the last time
you turned a wall into a springboard?
We do it all the time and we don't think about it and we
don't acknowledge ourselves for doing it, but we do it all the
time. So I say lean into that, turn
those walls into springboards, have that intention in and own
(15:11):
who you are completely and fullyand absolutely.
And that's how you claim your agency.
I know there are so many women out there that are afraid of the
fear and they don't want to faceit.
And a lot of times they let thatparalyze them.
(15:32):
And actually, it's not just women, it's men too.
I truly believe that once peoplereally look deep into who they
are and own it. I love that you say that.
And the word that I would add tothe end of that is
unapologetically. Completely and totally.
Sometimes we will let other people's opinions or other
people's experiences or other people's fears dictate our own,
(15:56):
and by doing that, we're not being true to ourselves.
It's a great message. I believe that every person is
really truly unique and has thisvital power in them.
We don't need to constantly growand change or to constantly be
improving ourselves. We need to own those unique
innate strengths that we have. I'm not saying don't do self
(16:16):
development, I love constantly changing, but all of that is
icing on the cake. And what a cake it is.
It is a delicious, wonderful, extraordinary cake with some
bitter flavors, some sweet flavors, and some sour flavors.
If you don't have all of the flavors, then you don't get the
full mouth feel of existence. So my invitation to everybody is
(16:37):
to really embrace it. That full spectrum of feelings.
And some of it doesn't feel so good, but when you lean into it
and you relax a little bit, there are techniques you can use
so that you can really be here and now, fully relishing the
richness of being alive with confidence and with freedom and
with awe. From relaxing into the
(16:57):
experience, acknowledging it, accepting it, absorbing the
energy, letting it go. It's like this breathing
movement. What would you recommend for
someone that doesn't know where to start and trying to make the
change in truly owning who they are?
OK, I'm going to say my suggestion is to get a coach,
(17:18):
really work with somebody who can mirror and who can ask those
questions so that you can dig deep into who you are.
The tool that I'm using right now, which is called Meet
Yourself, is also a door in you look at your genes and your
thinking patterns and your behaviors and you see where you
are on that. I have a ton of breathing
(17:38):
techniques. I love them.
I do them all the time, but I'm not going to give you breathing
techniques. What I'm going to suggest is a
really simple technique, which is savoring.
That is stopping, finding something beautiful that you
enjoy, that you can feel some sort of gratitude for, and then
you prolong the moment. Savoring is all about prolonging
(18:00):
that moment of enjoyment a little beyond what it is meant
to be. I used to do this with my
daughter. I used to drive her to school
every morning. There would be this incredible
Gray and pink sky in the morningand I used to literally stop the
car and just say, wow, look at that sky.
Just look at it and she roll hereyes and she's like, come on,
(18:20):
let's just go. There was the time I was with my
second husband, the father of mydaughter.
We had just met and we were walking in this beautiful
Botanical Garden in April when the peonies were in bloom.
Literally first date I was so amazed by these peonies that I
started to cry. But like cry of complete awe and
(18:42):
joy and I'm like Oh my God I can't believe I did that.
He's never going to call me again.
Anyway, he did and we got married.
We're all on this drive looking for some kind of fulfillment,
chasing this elusive kind of external validation, perfection
or enlightenment. I had this dream when I was in
my 20s. My dreams are really crystal
(19:06):
clear. I had this dream that I was
having lunch with the director of the movie.
He offers me a choice of lunch menus. 1 was the no fat menu.
One was the tasting menu. The third option was immediate
enlightenment. So which one did I choose?
(19:26):
You know, honestly, I would, I think that you would go for
either the tasting or enlightenment, but I I'm going
to go with tasting. Yeah, tasting menu.
I chose the tasting menu completely.
Not a second of hesitation untilI woke up in the morning and I'm
like, why did you not choose immediate enlightenment?
(19:48):
I was kicking myself. And then I do what I do, which
is say, well, OK, if it's going to be tasting menu, but let's do
the tasting menu thing. I've been doing the tasting menu
thing for a really long time, and it wasn't until very
recently that I realized that itwasn't a choice.
That enlightenment, I already have it.
Like I thought I had missed it, but actually somebody said this
(20:09):
to me the other day and said, no, you know, you've totally
misunderstood that dream. It's not that you make the wrong
choices, that there was no otherchoice.
You are already enlightened. Whatever we're chasing is inside
us now. It's inside each and every one
of us. It's inside of you.
So all the chasing that we're doing outside to perfect
(20:29):
ourselves, to get better, we don't need to do that.
It's inside of us. I call it the already there.
Find the already there. And that's where the power is,
to be truly present and living in this extraordinarily vibrant
world that we can live in. I like that a lot.
How do you take all of these different moments and truly
(20:51):
savor them? I think that is something
everyone can learn from. It's something everyone should
try to practice. We are in a hustle culture and
when we truly take the time to be present, to see what's in
(21:11):
front of us and to appreciate not only the good but also the
bad. The good doesn't exist without
the bad. Exactly.
It goes together. If you don't have the sorrow,
you don't have the happiness because you have nothing to
compare it to. That's the way we function.
Flavor, really beautiful. Mouthfeel is complete.
(21:33):
That means you have all of the flavors, the bitter and the
salty and the sour and tiny little bit of the sweet.
OK, not too much of the sweet, because it like overpowers
everything. And I think that we have
something to learn from that in our day-to-day, that maybe we're
actually not savoring enough those down moments, accepting
(21:53):
them for being there and tastingthe bitter.
Well, what what does that bring to the meal?
What does that bring to the flavor?
And the word that comes to mind is balance.
You really, really have to have balance.
Whether to be a meal, your personal life versus
professional life and things that you don't want to do versus
things that you do want to do because both have to get done,
(22:15):
right, Kind of like cleaning thehouse versus going out to the
beach, yeah. I totally agree with you.
You have to have balance and youhave to have both.
You can't be on all the time. You need to be on and off, on
and off. If you want to enjoy happiness,
you need to be happy and then not happy.
It doesn't have to be this dramatic thing.
It's just not so happy. Sweeping the floor doesn't make
(22:37):
me happy, but it's something that still needs to be done.
Happiness. You have accomplished something.
You weren't happy doing it. You accomplished something, and
that's something to be grateful for.
So I found the trick for those kinds of tasks is to actually be
doing it for somebody else when I take out the garbage, rather
(22:58):
than grumbling. And why?
I take it out. I'm like, if I take it out, then
my husband or my daughter doesn't have to take it out.
We're all going to appreciate that new empty, clean space and
it changes everything for me. I don't manage to do that all
the time. Sometimes I grumble, but I do
manage that from time to time and it does make it quite nice.
Very curious to know more about this genetic based work.
(23:23):
It's a personality assessment which I've incorporated into my
work and for me it works really well as part of a pathway.
You know, my process. I call it reveal, reboot,
rebalance and reconnect. This is the reveal section.
We start there and it's personality test a little bit
different than other personalitytests because it has three
(23:44):
different levels. The first level is your thinking
motivators. It's how your genetics work
transformed over the 1st 25 years of your life.
When you're very influenced by your surroundings, your culture,
your schooling, your family and so forth, you develop certain
preferences. That's one level.
Then you have the genetic reading of what your innate
(24:06):
potential is on 54 personality traits.
Genetics is interesting because it can be expressed or not
expressed but doesn't say anything about how good you are
at anything. It just says that you could be
OK, this is something you could be really skilled at or this is
something that will take a little bit more energy.
(24:28):
And The thing is, is that we're extraordinarily plastic in our
minds. We can develop skills even when
they are not innate potential. And so that's the third level
are acquired competencies here and that.
And so you get this very textured, dynamic view of who
(24:48):
you were born to potentially be,how that nature was nurtured
during those first years and what came from that, and then
what you're doing with it now. It's an extraordinarily positive
personality assessment that I really like to use because from
there we can see what's drainingyou.
Where have you totally outdone yourself?
(25:09):
What could you lean into that you haven't discovered yet?
For example, I am completely tone deaf.
You do not want me to sing. My family does not want me to
sing. I do not listen to music.
Somebody in the family will put music on and I'll let it go for
about 15 minutes to pretend thatI'm enjoying it and then I'll
(25:30):
say, please can you turn it off?This is who I am.
Comes out on the music one. I am the only one who has high
potential talent for that in thefamily.
Completely, totally high potential, off the charts high
potential talent for that. I just laughed when I saw that
and I thought, well, that's something I could decide to lean
into and develop now. It makes total sense to me.
I remember when I stopped listening and when you stop
(25:54):
listening, music goes out the way and I know why I stopped
listening. It was a choice.
We do what we have to do to protect ourselves.
So I was able to very clearly see that choice that I made, see
that, wow, here I am 60 now. Maybe I can do something with
that. And also to connect with the
fact that I'm pretty good at languages and I do live in a
(26:15):
foreign country and that maybe Idon't like to listen to music
because I'm so sensitive to it that it has to be in really
particular conditions. So I have a friend who's
promised to take me to a well known concert hall so that I
could, you know, have a different experience of music.
(26:36):
There's so much we can do with it and that's just one aspect.
It's not the personality aspect.It's a different part of the
test that you get all this cool information about yourself.
That's the reveal part of the ofthe program.
And then you know, it's not really enough to know it.
It's important then to like, OK,what are you going to do with
it? Where are you now?
What do you want to do with it? How do you rebalance that with
what's in place right now? How do you reconnect that to who
(26:58):
you are and where you want to be?
So that's the program. I'd love that.
This program really digs into not necessarily who you are now,
but who you were meant to be. It just makes me think about
people out there in a job that they don't like, in a
relationship that they're not happy in, even living in a
(27:21):
country that they don't want to be in.
And they are sitting there thinking, I was meant for more
or there has to be more. Yeah.
Than this. Yeah.
I truly, and I'm a believer in that everything that happens, we
have two different ways we can look at it.
We can look at it as it's happening to us or it's
(27:44):
happening for us. Absolutely.
And I also believe that the energy you put out as the energy
you get back, if you focus on the positive, more positive
things start to happen. And don't get me wrong, you've
had some bad days too. It's what you learn from it.
It is how you decide to continueforward.
I would like to shift the conversation a little bit.
(28:06):
You mentioned that you had a catering business and studied
under a chef in France. Like how cool is that?
And how cool is that? I thought it was cool too.
And my poor husband, I think he thought he was signing on to get
some really cool meals. But I don't cook all that much
anymore. You.
Studied to become a chef, you became a chef, you started this
(28:28):
catering business and you've done 5 different businesses now.
For someone out there thinking Ihad this dream, I want to go
after it regardless of what typeof business it is.
What advice would you give to them?
I invite everybody to please take this in a positive way.
To start a business, you have tobe completely and absolutely
(28:50):
delusional. If you have any connection with
reality, the failure is harder to take and there will be
failure step by step. Having your own business and
building your own business is hard work.
The percentage of small businesses that fail it is
extraordinary. So if you start thinking about
that and you're definitely goingto fail.
(29:11):
So don't think about that. Be completely and totally
delusional. Believe in what you're doing so
much that you'll just do what ittakes and you do it.
And when it something doesn't work, you pick yourself up and
do something else. Now just the other day I had one
of those things that happens in business the last three months.
I was working on this really bigproject.
(29:31):
I found out a piece of legal information that was going to
make the project entirely impossible, totally outside of
my control and all that work that gone into it just no longer
they are poof, gone. I was surprisingly calm about it
when to see my husband. I said, you're not going to
believe it. Then I went into this moment of
(29:53):
crawling under my covers and saying carpet was pulled out
from under my feet again. And I watched a whole bunch of
series, like really dumb series,binging and binging.
I did that. And then I drank a little bit of
wine, you know, and I did my little wallowing thing.
And then a little bit later I went to see I'm in a mastermind
of other small business owners. And I said, OK, I'm ready to
(30:15):
share this with you now. And this is where I am right
now. And, and so there started to be
a little bit of opening to OK, what are the next steps?
And I said, no, no, no, let's stop.
I still want to wallow. I need to have my wallowing
time. I need to feel the pain.
It took me another few days of feeling the pain when feeling
the frustration. See, this is where we get to
(30:36):
what we were saying earlier. It's about actually feeling it.
Because if I deny it and. Go.
Immediately back into action, itdoesn't work.
OK, I needed to absorb it and then release it.
You absorb the energy for potential to be used.
You have to release it. OK, but if you don't absorb it
because you're so stiff and you're like no, no, no, then you
(30:56):
don't have any energy to releaseit.
Happens in business all the time.
It's like a daily kind of thing with more or less amplitude.
So expect that, but be delusional and just go for it
and be completely crazy in your dream.
That's my advice. You went through the wallowing
(31:17):
of what was happening in your situation.
What happened after? What's the outcome of this?
I have enough practice that the workarounds I got them in 24
hours, like overnight sleeping. Before I had finished my
wallowing, I knew exactly what the next steps were going to be.
And I also like, oh, yeah, therewe go again, the universe giving
(31:38):
me a kick in the butt so that I do what I was thinking about
doing about five years ago that I never really have done because
I'm like, oh, my God, that's such a big project.
So it was just, you know, but that's what it was.
It was like, oh, yeah. So I've been playing small
again. And that's just how I interpret
it. I have no idea if there's any
universe looking out for me, butI like to tell that story.
I like to say hey this happened to me, what meaning can I give
(32:02):
it that will serve me? The meaning I gave it is that
this was too small. What I need to be working on is
that bigger thing which includesmy work around.
So that was your springboard. Exactly.
And I needed to gather some energy before I could
springboard it. And that was the wallowing for
me. You know, you feel the fear.
(32:24):
OK, We'll feel the fear. There's so much energy and fear.
There's energy and anger. There's energy in all those
emotions. There's energy and sorrow.
There's energy in all of that. If you feel it, then you can
release it into something else, into movement.
I really like the fact that you're talking about not only
(32:45):
feeling it, that's it's criticalto go through all of the
different emotions, regardless of what they are, and then
releasing it. Acknowledge, I'd say, OK, this
happened. I know that I'm angry, but I'm
going to feel it and then release it.
Because the more that you just hold on to those pent up
(33:08):
emotions, the worse it becomes when you actually do have to
release. One last thing that I did want
to touch on that I meant to bring up earlier in the
conversation is tell me about this black belt.
That's pretty. That is another pretty cool
thing that you have accomplished.
(33:28):
You mentioned that you did that at you said you were 50 when
that happened. You said that your knees hurt
all the time and you still do squats today.
Like every day? Every day, yeah.
Because I think that this reallyties into accomplishing
something. So I'm going to ask a question.
(33:48):
Do you find joy in doing squats?You know, I do because I can.
How extraordinary that I can do these squats every day.
Sometimes it's harder than others and the muscles hurt, but
it's really cool. It gets the blood circulating,
works the biggest muscles in my body, which means those are
going to be healthy muscles and keep me stronger longer.
(34:10):
There are a whole bunch of health reasons to exercise in
general, and the squats are a pretty good exercise to do.
It amazes me because we're talking about 10 to 15 years ago
you said that your knees hurt then I'm just kind of curious to
go from knees hurting to being ablack boat to still doing
squats. How did that happen?
(34:32):
Well, first of all, I need to resolve the knee pain.
It was an inflammatory thing forme.
Really had to figure it out. There was just no way that was
going to go on forever. I realized that high levels of
consistent, constant stress are very negative for one's overall
health. I was training for the national
championship and for my black belt.
At the same time. I had stress of the business and
(34:54):
stress of that. So I hadn't figured that out
yet, but I had figured out my knees and that was pretty good,
so I could do it. And then I sprained my ankle
right before the big competition.
But I still beat the kids. I was competing against much of
35 year olds. I was so proud of myself.
I really wanted to do that, and I did.
It was kind of a fleeting thing because then afterwards I
started to feel like high level performance is not what I need
(35:17):
right now. What I needed was to figure out
how to find a balance, the movement that was so important
for me that I was doing out of spite.
Spite is a beautiful motivator, despite the doctors.
And no, there's no way that thisis going to end.
Stop me from doing it. I am going to do this.
So I did it. And then I was like, OK, now you
have to think about your future.And that was the second phase.
(35:40):
It all comes back to balance, right?
Making sure that you're balancing, taking the good with
the bad, savoring all those different moments and truly
being present. And will you please tell our
listeners if they want to look at getting in contact with you
or learning more about you or the work that you do, what is
the best way for them to find you?
I am on LinkedIn, so you can go to my website
(36:05):
whichis@potentializerhyphenacademy.com.I also do have a podcast on an
entirely different topic, which is about living well with
technology. It's called the Human Pulse
Podcast and we talk about all this crazy technology and how we
can live well with it right hereand now your.
(36:25):
Podcast is one that you do with your husband, is that correct?
Absolutely. He's a tech consultant and I am
who I am. We bring all of that together.
Well, and I want to thank you somuch for being here with me
today. I truly believe that this was a
very timely conversation as the world we are living in and
(36:47):
people are hurrying, we just need to find the balance.
We need to slow down. We need to savor the moments.
If this resonated with you, share it with someone who needs
to hear this. And until next time, stay fears,
stay bold, but most importantly,stay unapologetically you.
Welcome to We Are Women Unapologetically, the podcast
that talks about the good, bad, ugly and awesome careers, life,
transitions, confidence, and everything in between.
Because shift happens, but you don't have to do it alone.
Hello and welcome to We Are Women Unapologetically.
(00:21):
My name is Jessica Cumming and today I am joined by Anne
Traeger. And as an executive coach and
founder of the Potentializer Academy, she specializes in
helping high performing leaders and teams unlock clarity, energy
and impact. With experience as a five time
entrepreneur, publisher and consultant across both North
(00:42):
America and Europe, she brings atruly global perspective.
A certified Black build in a former national Martial Arts
champion, she combines the discipline of sport with
neuroscience, biohacking, and evidence based strategies to her
work. Her clients value her ability to
transform complexity and clarity, overwhelm into focus
(01:04):
and raw potential into measurable, lasting impact.
And thank you so much for joining me today.
How are you? Oh, I am great.
It's great to be here. You have an amazing background
and even more interesting story.Why don't you tell me about how
you went from North America to France becoming an entrepreneur
(01:25):
in all of your travels and studies?
My story began with a lot of uncertainty.
When I was 7, I lost my mother. When I was 8, I lost my father.
So I was twice orphaned immediately.
I did find homes thereafter. In this early uncertainty, I had
to learn to adapt and survive the playbook for life.
(01:46):
I mean, at the beginning, it's your parents.
It just disappears suddenly. And for me, that was, yes, I was
lonely. Yes, I was frustrated.
Yes, there was a sense of being an outsider, of being different
from other people. However, that was my normality.
It wasn't strange, it just was the way it was.
(02:09):
It took me until my teenage years to realize that
resilience, which I had, was also a choice.
Absolutely nothing was the way everybody else's life was or the
way it was supposed to be. And what that did for me is it
opened up this whole space of dream.
I could dream, but dreaming wasn't enough.
(02:32):
You actually have to do something about it.
You had to make decisions. You had to make choices, and
then when you make a choice, youhave to have a whole lot of
determination to get something from that.
I decided in my mid teens that Iwas going to go to France.
I was living in a small town. There was no possible financial
way for me to go to France. So I figured it out and I
(02:55):
decided I was going to study French.
I got scholarships to study French.
I got on a program to go to France as part of my studies and
I decided to stay. I remember telling the librarian
at my university and he said, oh, you're going off on the
study abroad program? And I said, yeah, absolutely,
and I'm going to stay. And he said, oh, that's what
everybody says. And I said, no, I am going to
(03:18):
stay. It was so clear to me.
I didn't know how, but I knew that I was going to start this
new life abroad. And so I did and I went abroad
and I learned to be a chef. I thought, well, hey, I'm in
France. I can learn about all the good
food here. I learned to be a chef and I
worked as a private chef in a number of different places
across the world. It was very fun.
(03:39):
And I was like, I've done that, what else can I do?
And I had these language skills that I had picked up.
So I started translating. I had a catering business in
Paris and a translating business.
I was doing that. And then I was like, maybe I can
do something with more impact. So I started to do international
communications and working were these big companies, a lot more
money in that 6 figure business.So fast forwarding, I decided
(04:03):
after doing that for a while, I really got to do something else.
I remember it was such a powerful moment.
I had moved from Paris to southwestern France and I was
getting on a plane at 5:00 in the morning to go to a meeting
in Paris at which I knew we would get nothing done.
It was the time when everything was done in person and I had to
travel all day long, and then I had to travel all the way back.
(04:25):
And I was in the airport and I called my husband and I said,
listen, I'm going to take his sabbatical.
My husband is wonderful. And he said, OK, we'll figure it
out. By the evening flight home, I
figured out what I was going to do with that sabbatical, which
was to start a publishing company of all things.
I had not exactly thought it allthe way through because
(04:47):
publishing is a rather range business model.
Anyway, that was the next business.
And so I did my publishing thingand it was really fun for a
while and moved on. So you see, there's this
pattern. I'm just like, oh, what's the
next stream? And I think I'm going to do it.
And you do. There's a certain amount of
relentless Dr. I make a decisionand then I do it.
The dark side of the story is atthe end of this publishing
(05:09):
thing. I was in my mid 40s.
I had a young child. This new business, we had moved.
I was in this new place, and I really lost my edge.
I remember the day crumbling to the floor at 5:00 in the
afternoon. I used to call the witching
hour. I crumbled to the floor,
literally pulling my hair out. And my little girl, she was four
(05:31):
or five at the time, and she looked at me and she said,
you're such a witch. I mean, like, literally, it was
like, oh, my God, you know, who is this?
This is not me and that was the turning point.
This was not me. Oi had to then start climbing
(05:52):
back on my own terms. So I went to see the doctors to
see if there was something wrongwith me.
They all said, Oh my little lady, you're just going to have
to accept the fact that, you know, at your age was in my mid
40s, things start getting a little tough and you might want
to stop the sports and blah, blah, blah.
There is no destiny here that you're going to convince me of.
(06:13):
I am going to do something different.
So I dove really head first intoneuroscience and into biohacking
and into martial arts at full. On when you were going to these
doctors and they were telling you don't do some of the sports
you were doing or don't do some of these things.
Basically saying this is the reality of it.
(06:33):
You're in your 40s. Can you take me deeper into how
you were feeling at the time andhow you decided to pretty much
just say forget you? I'm not going to listen to you.
I'm going to thrive forward. Yeah, well, it was a tough time.
(06:55):
My body hurt all over. My knees were shot, menopause.
That's why I was seeing doctors.Otherwise I wouldn't have seen
doctors. What happened is I just couldn't
compute that. Somebody said I could not define
my own life like that. There was some sort of like,
this was the way forward and I was like, well, there's nothing
I can do. There must be something I can
(07:15):
do. When they said, oh, my little
lady, I got a little angry. There was a little bit of anger
in that, but more in the condescending attitude that I
encountered. It was a condescension that got
me angry. And then there was this part of
me that just didn't understand what was being said to me.
I mean, like, I literally had not thought that it was not
(07:35):
possible to design my own future.
Call me naive or empowered. I don't care what you call me.
Call me crazy or delusional or anything you want.
I don't care because I'm going to drive forward and try to
figure it out. That's what I do.
That's what I had always done, was this kind of cognitive
dissonance that was really my savior.
(07:56):
I'd love to say that because most of the time when you see
cognitive dissonance, it's a symptom of something.
Well, maybe it's just a signal. I would say any symptom is maybe
just a signal. I was also very lucky.
I did meet some doctors who wereable to say, whoa, hey, let's
take a look at your nutrition and what's inflammatory here and
step back. I got really involved in the
(08:16):
whole biohacking movement. As a result, I found some people
who could guide me on a path forme to recuperate my health, my
foundational health, and then from there to fine tune my
personal energy systems because it's all about energy.
It's about how you wake up in the morning.
I had to recuperate my sleep. I had to find the right foods
(08:39):
for me. I had to find the pace and the
rhythm that worked for me. I had to figure all of that out
through experimentation. And then once you've got it, you
got it and you keep fine tuning it.
That's the game. It's never A1 and done.
It's that change, that constant change.
So you Fast forward again at 50,I got my black belt, I won the
(09:01):
French national championship andto this day I do squats every
day because I can. It was that moment of decision,
drive and determination, deciding that I was going to
have another story. Not the story people were
telling me I was going to have or the victim story that I could
have come up with, but somethingelse.
(09:22):
I'm going to do it. I love what you just said about
a symptom being a signal. Often times we have something
going on with our bodies and we ignore it.
We think it's just going to go away or get better.
You mentioned at this point in your life you were going through
early menopause. That's something that I've
(09:45):
noticed as I'm getting older. We didn't necessarily talk about
perimenopause, and now I feel like more women are talking
about that. All of these different symptoms.
And you also mentioned your diet.
These are all things that we don't want to talk about, we're
embarrassed or ashamed to talk about.
(10:06):
But in reality, it's our body that's giving us these signals,
giving us this data. There's something going on.
So thank you for sharing your entire story because I've talked
to so many women lately that aresaying something was just off.
And for the women out there and men too, there's something going
(10:29):
on with your body. Listen to it.
Don't ignore it because it is giving you a signal.
And it affects everything else. It's all one.
So if you're not sleeping, I getpeople come to me and say I'm so
on edge and I just can't understand how I can get my team
to do this and that and the other thing.
And I'm overwhelmed. How do you know how to sleep?
And they're like, oh, we're asleep.
(10:49):
And the less I sleep, the betterI am.
And it's like, no, not really. It all goes together.
And when you are able to fine tune it to you, then you really
do release those superpowers. How are you going to do that?
And then there are how are you going to keep it?
And then how are you going to reconnect that to the world
around you so that everybody gets to benefit from these cool
(11:12):
little ripples coming out from you, Jessica, or from you
listener? When you're talking about this,
it makes me think there was a time in my life where I
definitely relate to this. I wasn't sleeping.
I was not happy at work. Different things were happening.
I remember there was a time thatI woke up one morning and I was
(11:35):
peaceful. I had a great night's rest.
Quite honestly. This was just a few weeks after
my divorce with the corporate world.
How could I feel peaceful? You know, knowing.
That's amazing once you are ableto shut your brain off to get
the rest. And yes, that ripple effect is
amazing. The energy that you can exude
(11:56):
and the work that can get done and what you can think of and
accomplish, it truly is amazing.And the shift is not something
magical. It's this mix of necessity and
truly fierce decision making. There are times when it feels
really reckless. But I mean, is it reckless?
(12:17):
And that's the question I ask all of your listeners to ask
themselves. What are you really trading off
in your current situation? And are you willing to live that
compromise? Well, I wasn't willing.
That's a great point and that isexactly what we are talking
about in season 2 is what are women willing to trade off?
(12:40):
A lot of times the clarity perspective is so scary right
when they get clear and truly listen to what they've already
known. It's almost like people back
away because they don't want to move forward or hear the truth.
(13:01):
Have you found that in your own life?
I hear what you're saying. I see it too.
I see it in my clients. Sometimes the truth comes and
slaps you in the face and there are two things that happen.
I've had moments like that and there are ways where it's more
gradual. There are things that are more
gradual. Understanding who you are, where
(13:22):
you get stuck, and how you can change that.
I'm hesitant about that word change because I actually don't
believe that we need to fix ourselves.
I think what we need to do is understand deeply who we are.
I have some great tools for that, including a genetic
personality assessment, which isthe coolest thing because then
you can see hard science. Wow.
(13:43):
This is what my potential is. Am I living up to it or not?
It's amazing, but you have to figure out who you are and align
your biology. What was going on with me was
just pure fatigue. I had been stressed out beyond
myself during that period, and Iwas just exhausted.
So I had to figure out how to align my biology in a way that
(14:06):
worked for me, and then I had toset up these daily systems.
When you're doing all of that, you don't actually have time to
think of the fear. You just move into action.
Then there's this mindset thing.It's about how you treat that
adversity or how you treat the fear.
Courage is not about not having fear.
(14:26):
We have to learn to feel these feelings.
Just feel that feelings is part of life.
You get the fear and you get theexcitement.
Actually, they're kind of very similar, by the way.
Just depends on how you interpret it.
And courage is acting no matter what you're feeling.
But if you want to feel the joy,then you're going to feel the
sadness. And resilience is absorbing what
(14:48):
those emotions are, those less comfortable emotions, and
releasing the energy of them into action, into something
else. I mean, when was the last time
you turned a wall into a springboard?
We do it all the time and we don't think about it and we
don't acknowledge ourselves for doing it, but we do it all the
time. So I say lean into that, turn
those walls into springboards, have that intention in and own
(15:11):
who you are completely and fullyand absolutely.
And that's how you claim your agency.
I know there are so many women out there that are afraid of the
fear and they don't want to faceit.
And a lot of times they let thatparalyze them.
(15:32):
And actually, it's not just women, it's men too.
I truly believe that once peoplereally look deep into who they
are and own it. I love that you say that.
And the word that I would add tothe end of that is
unapologetically. Completely and totally.
Sometimes we will let other people's opinions or other
people's experiences or other people's fears dictate our own,
(15:56):
and by doing that, we're not being true to ourselves.
It's a great message. I believe that every person is
really truly unique and has thisvital power in them.
We don't need to constantly growand change or to constantly be
improving ourselves. We need to own those unique
innate strengths that we have. I'm not saying don't do self
(16:16):
development, I love constantly changing, but all of that is
icing on the cake. And what a cake it is.
It is a delicious, wonderful, extraordinary cake with some
bitter flavors, some sweet flavors, and some sour flavors.
If you don't have all of the flavors, then you don't get the
full mouth feel of existence. So my invitation to everybody is
(16:37):
to really embrace it. That full spectrum of feelings.
And some of it doesn't feel so good, but when you lean into it
and you relax a little bit, there are techniques you can use
so that you can really be here and now, fully relishing the
richness of being alive with confidence and with freedom and
with awe. From relaxing into the
(16:57):
experience, acknowledging it, accepting it, absorbing the
energy, letting it go. It's like this breathing
movement. What would you recommend for
someone that doesn't know where to start and trying to make the
change in truly owning who they are?
OK, I'm going to say my suggestion is to get a coach,
(17:18):
really work with somebody who can mirror and who can ask those
questions so that you can dig deep into who you are.
The tool that I'm using right now, which is called Meet
Yourself, is also a door in you look at your genes and your
thinking patterns and your behaviors and you see where you
are on that. I have a ton of breathing
(17:38):
techniques. I love them.
I do them all the time, but I'm not going to give you breathing
techniques. What I'm going to suggest is a
really simple technique, which is savoring.
That is stopping, finding something beautiful that you
enjoy, that you can feel some sort of gratitude for, and then
you prolong the moment. Savoring is all about prolonging
(18:00):
that moment of enjoyment a little beyond what it is meant
to be. I used to do this with my
daughter. I used to drive her to school
every morning. There would be this incredible
Gray and pink sky in the morningand I used to literally stop the
car and just say, wow, look at that sky.
Just look at it and she roll hereyes and she's like, come on,
(18:20):
let's just go. There was the time I was with my
second husband, the father of mydaughter.
We had just met and we were walking in this beautiful
Botanical Garden in April when the peonies were in bloom.
Literally first date I was so amazed by these peonies that I
started to cry. But like cry of complete awe and
(18:42):
joy and I'm like Oh my God I can't believe I did that.
He's never going to call me again.
Anyway, he did and we got married.
We're all on this drive looking for some kind of fulfillment,
chasing this elusive kind of external validation, perfection
or enlightenment. I had this dream when I was in
my 20s. My dreams are really crystal
(19:06):
clear. I had this dream that I was
having lunch with the director of the movie.
He offers me a choice of lunch menus. 1 was the no fat menu.
One was the tasting menu. The third option was immediate
enlightenment. So which one did I choose?
(19:26):
You know, honestly, I would, I think that you would go for
either the tasting or enlightenment, but I I'm going
to go with tasting. Yeah, tasting menu.
I chose the tasting menu completely.
Not a second of hesitation untilI woke up in the morning and I'm
like, why did you not choose immediate enlightenment?
(19:48):
I was kicking myself. And then I do what I do, which
is say, well, OK, if it's going to be tasting menu, but let's do
the tasting menu thing. I've been doing the tasting menu
thing for a really long time, and it wasn't until very
recently that I realized that itwasn't a choice.
That enlightenment, I already have it.
Like I thought I had missed it, but actually somebody said this
(20:09):
to me the other day and said, no, you know, you've totally
misunderstood that dream. It's not that you make the wrong
choices, that there was no otherchoice.
You are already enlightened. Whatever we're chasing is inside
us now. It's inside each and every one
of us. It's inside of you.
So all the chasing that we're doing outside to perfect
(20:29):
ourselves, to get better, we don't need to do that.
It's inside of us. I call it the already there.
Find the already there. And that's where the power is,
to be truly present and living in this extraordinarily vibrant
world that we can live in. I like that a lot.
How do you take all of these different moments and truly
(20:51):
savor them? I think that is something
everyone can learn from. It's something everyone should
try to practice. We are in a hustle culture and
when we truly take the time to be present, to see what's in
(21:11):
front of us and to appreciate not only the good but also the
bad. The good doesn't exist without
the bad. Exactly.
It goes together. If you don't have the sorrow,
you don't have the happiness because you have nothing to
compare it to. That's the way we function.
Flavor, really beautiful. Mouthfeel is complete.
(21:33):
That means you have all of the flavors, the bitter and the
salty and the sour and tiny little bit of the sweet.
OK, not too much of the sweet, because it like overpowers
everything. And I think that we have
something to learn from that in our day-to-day, that maybe we're
actually not savoring enough those down moments, accepting
(21:53):
them for being there and tastingthe bitter.
Well, what what does that bring to the meal?
What does that bring to the flavor?
And the word that comes to mind is balance.
You really, really have to have balance.
Whether to be a meal, your personal life versus
professional life and things that you don't want to do versus
things that you do want to do because both have to get done,
(22:15):
right, Kind of like cleaning thehouse versus going out to the
beach, yeah. I totally agree with you.
You have to have balance and youhave to have both.
You can't be on all the time. You need to be on and off, on
and off. If you want to enjoy happiness,
you need to be happy and then not happy.
It doesn't have to be this dramatic thing.
It's just not so happy. Sweeping the floor doesn't make
(22:37):
me happy, but it's something that still needs to be done.
Happiness. You have accomplished something.
You weren't happy doing it. You accomplished something, and
that's something to be grateful for.
So I found the trick for those kinds of tasks is to actually be
doing it for somebody else when I take out the garbage, rather
(22:58):
than grumbling. And why?
I take it out. I'm like, if I take it out, then
my husband or my daughter doesn't have to take it out.
We're all going to appreciate that new empty, clean space and
it changes everything for me. I don't manage to do that all
the time. Sometimes I grumble, but I do
manage that from time to time and it does make it quite nice.
Very curious to know more about this genetic based work.
(23:23):
It's a personality assessment which I've incorporated into my
work and for me it works really well as part of a pathway.
You know, my process. I call it reveal, reboot,
rebalance and reconnect. This is the reveal section.
We start there and it's personality test a little bit
different than other personalitytests because it has three
(23:44):
different levels. The first level is your thinking
motivators. It's how your genetics work
transformed over the 1st 25 years of your life.
When you're very influenced by your surroundings, your culture,
your schooling, your family and so forth, you develop certain
preferences. That's one level.
Then you have the genetic reading of what your innate
(24:06):
potential is on 54 personality traits.
Genetics is interesting because it can be expressed or not
expressed but doesn't say anything about how good you are
at anything. It just says that you could be
OK, this is something you could be really skilled at or this is
something that will take a little bit more energy.
(24:28):
And The thing is, is that we're extraordinarily plastic in our
minds. We can develop skills even when
they are not innate potential. And so that's the third level
are acquired competencies here and that.
And so you get this very textured, dynamic view of who
(24:48):
you were born to potentially be,how that nature was nurtured
during those first years and what came from that, and then
what you're doing with it now. It's an extraordinarily positive
personality assessment that I really like to use because from
there we can see what's drainingyou.
Where have you totally outdone yourself?
(25:09):
What could you lean into that you haven't discovered yet?
For example, I am completely tone deaf.
You do not want me to sing. My family does not want me to
sing. I do not listen to music.
Somebody in the family will put music on and I'll let it go for
about 15 minutes to pretend thatI'm enjoying it and then I'll
(25:30):
say, please can you turn it off?This is who I am.
Comes out on the music one. I am the only one who has high
potential talent for that in thefamily.
Completely, totally high potential, off the charts high
potential talent for that. I just laughed when I saw that
and I thought, well, that's something I could decide to lean
into and develop now. It makes total sense to me.
I remember when I stopped listening and when you stop
(25:54):
listening, music goes out the way and I know why I stopped
listening. It was a choice.
We do what we have to do to protect ourselves.
So I was able to very clearly see that choice that I made, see
that, wow, here I am 60 now. Maybe I can do something with
that. And also to connect with the
fact that I'm pretty good at languages and I do live in a
(26:15):
foreign country and that maybe Idon't like to listen to music
because I'm so sensitive to it that it has to be in really
particular conditions. So I have a friend who's
promised to take me to a well known concert hall so that I
could, you know, have a different experience of music.
(26:36):
There's so much we can do with it and that's just one aspect.
It's not the personality aspect.It's a different part of the
test that you get all this cool information about yourself.
That's the reveal part of the ofthe program.
And then you know, it's not really enough to know it.
It's important then to like, OK,what are you going to do with
it? Where are you now?
What do you want to do with it? How do you rebalance that with
what's in place right now? How do you reconnect that to who
(26:58):
you are and where you want to be?
So that's the program. I'd love that.
This program really digs into not necessarily who you are now,
but who you were meant to be. It just makes me think about
people out there in a job that they don't like, in a
relationship that they're not happy in, even living in a
(27:21):
country that they don't want to be in.
And they are sitting there thinking, I was meant for more
or there has to be more. Yeah.
Than this. Yeah.
I truly, and I'm a believer in that everything that happens, we
have two different ways we can look at it.
We can look at it as it's happening to us or it's
(27:44):
happening for us. Absolutely.
And I also believe that the energy you put out as the energy
you get back, if you focus on the positive, more positive
things start to happen. And don't get me wrong, you've
had some bad days too. It's what you learn from it.
It is how you decide to continueforward.
I would like to shift the conversation a little bit.
(28:06):
You mentioned that you had a catering business and studied
under a chef in France. Like how cool is that?
And how cool is that? I thought it was cool too.
And my poor husband, I think he thought he was signing on to get
some really cool meals. But I don't cook all that much
anymore. You.
Studied to become a chef, you became a chef, you started this
(28:28):
catering business and you've done 5 different businesses now.
For someone out there thinking Ihad this dream, I want to go
after it regardless of what typeof business it is.
What advice would you give to them?
I invite everybody to please take this in a positive way.
To start a business, you have tobe completely and absolutely
(28:50):
delusional. If you have any connection with
reality, the failure is harder to take and there will be
failure step by step. Having your own business and
building your own business is hard work.
The percentage of small businesses that fail it is
extraordinary. So if you start thinking about
that and you're definitely goingto fail.
(29:11):
So don't think about that. Be completely and totally
delusional. Believe in what you're doing so
much that you'll just do what ittakes and you do it.
And when it something doesn't work, you pick yourself up and
do something else. Now just the other day I had one
of those things that happens in business the last three months.
I was working on this really bigproject.
(29:31):
I found out a piece of legal information that was going to
make the project entirely impossible, totally outside of
my control and all that work that gone into it just no longer
they are poof, gone. I was surprisingly calm about it
when to see my husband. I said, you're not going to
believe it. Then I went into this moment of
(29:53):
crawling under my covers and saying carpet was pulled out
from under my feet again. And I watched a whole bunch of
series, like really dumb series,binging and binging.
I did that. And then I drank a little bit of
wine, you know, and I did my little wallowing thing.
And then a little bit later I went to see I'm in a mastermind
of other small business owners. And I said, OK, I'm ready to
(30:15):
share this with you now. And this is where I am right
now. And, and so there started to be
a little bit of opening to OK, what are the next steps?
And I said, no, no, no, let's stop.
I still want to wallow. I need to have my wallowing
time. I need to feel the pain.
It took me another few days of feeling the pain when feeling
the frustration. See, this is where we get to
(30:36):
what we were saying earlier. It's about actually feeling it.
Because if I deny it and. Go.
Immediately back into action, itdoesn't work.
OK, I needed to absorb it and then release it.
You absorb the energy for potential to be used.
You have to release it. OK, but if you don't absorb it
because you're so stiff and you're like no, no, no, then you
(30:56):
don't have any energy to releaseit.
Happens in business all the time.
It's like a daily kind of thing with more or less amplitude.
So expect that, but be delusional and just go for it
and be completely crazy in your dream.
That's my advice. You went through the wallowing
(31:17):
of what was happening in your situation.
What happened after? What's the outcome of this?
I have enough practice that the workarounds I got them in 24
hours, like overnight sleeping. Before I had finished my
wallowing, I knew exactly what the next steps were going to be.
And I also like, oh, yeah, therewe go again, the universe giving
(31:38):
me a kick in the butt so that I do what I was thinking about
doing about five years ago that I never really have done because
I'm like, oh, my God, that's such a big project.
So it was just, you know, but that's what it was.
It was like, oh, yeah. So I've been playing small
again. And that's just how I interpret
it. I have no idea if there's any
universe looking out for me, butI like to tell that story.
I like to say hey this happened to me, what meaning can I give
(32:02):
it that will serve me? The meaning I gave it is that
this was too small. What I need to be working on is
that bigger thing which includesmy work around.
So that was your springboard. Exactly.
And I needed to gather some energy before I could
springboard it. And that was the wallowing for
me. You know, you feel the fear.
(32:24):
OK, We'll feel the fear. There's so much energy and fear.
There's energy and anger. There's energy in all those
emotions. There's energy and sorrow.
There's energy in all of that. If you feel it, then you can
release it into something else, into movement.
I really like the fact that you're talking about not only
(32:45):
feeling it, that's it's criticalto go through all of the
different emotions, regardless of what they are, and then
releasing it. Acknowledge, I'd say, OK, this
happened. I know that I'm angry, but I'm
going to feel it and then release it.
Because the more that you just hold on to those pent up
(33:08):
emotions, the worse it becomes when you actually do have to
release. One last thing that I did want
to touch on that I meant to bring up earlier in the
conversation is tell me about this black belt.
That's pretty. That is another pretty cool
thing that you have accomplished.
(33:28):
You mentioned that you did that at you said you were 50 when
that happened. You said that your knees hurt
all the time and you still do squats today.
Like every day? Every day, yeah.
Because I think that this reallyties into accomplishing
something. So I'm going to ask a question.
(33:48):
Do you find joy in doing squats?You know, I do because I can.
How extraordinary that I can do these squats every day.
Sometimes it's harder than others and the muscles hurt, but
it's really cool. It gets the blood circulating,
works the biggest muscles in my body, which means those are
going to be healthy muscles and keep me stronger longer.
(34:10):
There are a whole bunch of health reasons to exercise in
general, and the squats are a pretty good exercise to do.
It amazes me because we're talking about 10 to 15 years ago
you said that your knees hurt then I'm just kind of curious to
go from knees hurting to being ablack boat to still doing
squats. How did that happen?
(34:32):
Well, first of all, I need to resolve the knee pain.
It was an inflammatory thing forme.
Really had to figure it out. There was just no way that was
going to go on forever. I realized that high levels of
consistent, constant stress are very negative for one's overall
health. I was training for the national
championship and for my black belt.
At the same time. I had stress of the business and
(34:54):
stress of that. So I hadn't figured that out
yet, but I had figured out my knees and that was pretty good,
so I could do it. And then I sprained my ankle
right before the big competition.
But I still beat the kids. I was competing against much of
35 year olds. I was so proud of myself.
I really wanted to do that, and I did.
It was kind of a fleeting thing because then afterwards I
started to feel like high level performance is not what I need
(35:17):
right now. What I needed was to figure out
how to find a balance, the movement that was so important
for me that I was doing out of spite.
Spite is a beautiful motivator, despite the doctors.
And no, there's no way that thisis going to end.
Stop me from doing it. I am going to do this.
So I did it. And then I was like, OK, now you
have to think about your future.And that was the second phase.
(35:40):
It all comes back to balance, right?
Making sure that you're balancing, taking the good with
the bad, savoring all those different moments and truly
being present. And will you please tell our
listeners if they want to look at getting in contact with you
or learning more about you or the work that you do, what is
the best way for them to find you?
I am on LinkedIn, so you can go to my website
(36:05):
whichis@potentializerhyphenacademy.com.I also do have a podcast on an
entirely different topic, which is about living well with
technology. It's called the Human Pulse
Podcast and we talk about all this crazy technology and how we
can live well with it right hereand now your.
(36:25):
Podcast is one that you do with your husband, is that correct?
Absolutely. He's a tech consultant and I am
who I am. We bring all of that together.
Well, and I want to thank you somuch for being here with me
today. I truly believe that this was a
very timely conversation as the world we are living in and
(36:47):
people are hurrying, we just need to find the balance.
We need to slow down. We need to savor the moments.
If this resonated with you, share it with someone who needs
to hear this. And until next time, stay fears,
stay bold, but most importantly,stay unapologetically you.
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