Girl Gang Craft Podcast Episode #68 “Tough self-love: How to take radical responsibility
and own your business decisions with Angela Henderson”

Phoebe Sherman interview with Angela Henderson

INTRO
Phoebe Sherman:

Welcome to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast where we dive in deep to all things business, wellness, creativity, and activism for artists and entrepreneurs. We talk with impactful female driven companies and founders for an inside look at the entrepreneurial experience where you'll come away with tangible steps to elevate your business. Are you ready? I'm your host, Phoebe Sherman, founder of Girl Gang Craft artist and designer, and marketing obsessed. We're here to learn together how to expand our revenue, implement new organizational techniques, and cultivate best business practices as we work towards creating a life doing what we love. Let's get started.

Hello, creatives. Hello. Hello, Phoebe here, your host of the Girl Gang Craft podcast. If you are just tuning in this year and you didn't listen to last week's episode, go ahead and return to that episode and give it a listen. I have decided, and my teams decided, that we are now offering episodes every single week. So you can expect every other week episode to be an interview and then other episodes every other week are going to be a solo episode with me. This gives me an opportunity to hopefully connect with you a little bit more, share a little bit about the behind the scenes of running Girl Gang Craft, a little bit about my life, some entrepreneur journey stuff, some tips and tricks. We'll talk about the email marketing brand partnerships, time management. As you know, that's my jam. And of course, we are being kind to ourself this year and always as we work towards our goals, you know? Ask me anything. I'm really an open book. So if there's something that you want to hear on the podcast, like, please send me a message. You can send me an email if you're not on our email list, make sure you get on that right now. You can sign up right on our website or in our link in bio. on our Instagram @GirlGangCraft. And yeah, before we dive into this interview, some things I want to share. The dates are coming. I know you all are hounding us for those dates. They are coming. I promise. We are working on, you know, just tying up some lessons, figuring some stuff out. We're working on a new system over here so things can be a little bit seamless. You can see what events you applied for, if you payed your app fee, like what are your next steps. Working behind the scenes on that, which is really exciting. We love a system. We love a new system, and this episode is really great. It's fiery, it is like actionable. It is like, go, go, go. So be prepared tune in, get comfy, or maybe like power walk through this episode and that would be a good fit. What else do I have to say? Email. Let's talk about email really quickly before I go into this episode. If you are not sending emails to your list or you don't have a list, it's time to start. Take a breath. It's not too late to start your email list. So yeah, it's time to match that email list with your social content. Email is a really good opportunity to reach your customer in their inbox. These are folks who have already raised their hand and said, Yep, I want to know more. And as we know, the social media landscape can be a bit daunting and our content’s not getting seen by anyone or as many people as we want. Email rates actually are much higher than Instagram rates. Instagram rates engagement rates hang around 2 to 5%. A good open rate could be, you know, 20 to 30% of your list. So that's a huge difference. You want to start building your list. You want to start communicating to your list and maybe even build some lovely automations in there. We love automations because that means you're not physically doing the work. It means you set up a system that is delivering quality content, carrying your customer along a little journey and converting those audience members into paying customers. And we love that. We love that. And if you have no idea what any of that means, that's okay. That's great. If you have a small list and want to grow it or you don't have a list or you don't know exactly what to do with your email list, we've got a class for that. So our email marketing class is available now. Go to girlgangcraft.com/classes. It's right there. And I walk you through step by step how to grow your list, Why people should sign up for your list, how to nurture your list, how to talk to your people, and then like how to create up funnels or automations to again, nurture your audience along a path that gets them to convert into a paying customer. So go ahead and check that out. It's really affordable. Right now it's $57. I am changing that class shortly so this little chunk of time is going to be I'm not sure exactly when we're going to take it down, but it's almost the last opportunity to get that class at that price. I'm going to fluff it up, get a little bit more in depth. And so right now, if you've been eyeing that and just sort of want a quick and easy class that is affordable for you to start right now, now is the opportunity to join our email marketing class. Okay, I'm going to stop chatting, but again, events information's coming soon. Start your email list and podcasts every week. Oh yeah, if you like this podcast, can you share it with a friend, share in your stories, be sure you're following us on Spotify if you're a Spotify listener or subscribing to the episode on Apple Podcasts. And let's hop into this interview.

00:05:34:17 - 00:05:54:00
Phoebe Sherman
Hello Creatives, Welcome back to Girl Gang Craft, the podcast. Today we have Angela Henderson on the podcast. Welcome to the podcast Angela.

Angela Henderson
Oh my goodness. So excited to be here, Phoebe. So, so fun.

Phoebe Sherman
Yeah, so excited to have you. Can you tell folks listening a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Angela Henderson
Yeah, so my name is Ang obviously. Proud Canadian and I said, What's not to love about being Canadian? We've got Pamela Anderson, Bieber and Beer, so life is pretty good. However, I now live in beautiful Brisbane, Australia, and Australia's equally awesome with the beaches, the sun and just the beautiful nature that we have over here. But yeah, I'm an ex mental health clinician of 15 years where I used to diagnose people with schizophrenia, bipolar, autism, anxiety, etc. I then had my first child and we were playing toys around nine months old.
Everything was electronic that we had been given and I was like, There's got to be a better way to stimulate children. So I went on a mission to look for like fine motor skill toys, gross motor skills, anything to kind of spark imagination. And I started my first business, which is an e-comm business called Finlee and Me, where we focused on creating childhood memories through play, love and travel. We started like an E-Comm Business zero product, but when we wrapped up Finlee and Me, we had over 1400 different products. But the other cool thing I found Finlee and Me was about diversifying income. So though we had the 1400 products and we also had a relatively big audience, I had like 50,000 people on our email list. We had about 100,000 people in our social media community. I signed with companies like Netflix. similarly to your Whole Foods, Hiltons, Club Meds, etc. is one of Australia's leading parenting influencers. And that was great because you could charge those companies, do you know what I mean, for them to access your community. So that was my first business. And then people started picking my brain and I finally realized after 14 coffee dates where I don't even drink coffee, I was paying for my own things and driving there was like, if I charge these people for my time, I could have a secondary business. And that's how the consulting business came up. So now I help women around the world make more money. Through consulting masterminds and retreats.

Phoebe Sherman
Amazing. And so are you balancing both businesses currently?

Angela Henderson
No. That's a hard no. I did when I first started off the Finlee and Me business, I actually still worked full time for about three years and had one young child at that stage and then had my second. And so I do like talking about that because a lot of people, I think they go, I either have to quit my job, or I have to go all in. I'm a firm believer of you can still manage and be like to me, healthy, mentally, spiritually, you know, and all that - keep your job because you can leverage your time off your sick days, etc. to be able to grow your business. In Australia in some jobs, we also have this thing called like you can buy additional leave, and so what happens is I actually would have four weeks of regular leave, plus I would buy eight weeks purchase leave, and then I'd have two weeks off for sick leave and then like two weeks off with all that like calendar day. So I'd actually be at work for nine months and have three months off. So I leveraged that for my growth of the business while still getting paid full time, getting paid for my holidays, which then I could take that money to grow the business. So that worked for me. That might not work for everyone, but you need money to grow a business and you're either going to have money from inheritance, money through work, or you go in debt. So look at whatever is going to be the least stressful for you and your family.

Phoebe Sherman
When did you sort of switch fully over to coaching?

Angela Henderson
Yes, so back in 2017. So I've been now six years in the consulting side of things and we wrapped up Finlee and Me about six years from today. And people always ask, Did you sell the business? What did you do with the business? Because like I said, we had a pretty big asset pool. However, because Finlee is my son's name, a lot of what we did, especially with influencer marketing, was images of the kids. I'd talk about the kids, etc. So though people wanted to buy the business, I made the decision not to sell the business because it didn't feel right for me that I'd have to give them all my children's like, you mean I wouldn't be able to remove that information off of the sale? And so therefore I did not sell the business.

Phoebe Sherman
That's so fascinating. How do you make hard business decisions?

Angela Henderson
Yeah, sometimes. You know, I was just watching something the other day and someone said, like, put a helmet on and harden up. Do you know what I mean? And I giggled at that because I kind of feel like that’s just what I had to do sometimes was just like I also had the realization like nobody's coming to save us. If you're in a bad relationship, no one knocks at the door to come and save you. If you've got a hard decision to make in business, there's no fairy that comes down and tells you what to do. You really just have to like, lean into the intuition. I think women don't lean into our gut intuition. I think we are bred from a very masculine society. I'm very masculine myself, so I've had to learn to like when that gut instinct kind of hits you, gives you that nudge to really pay more attention to it. But I think we've also got to be okay that we can’t keep people pleasing. I think women especially, do you know what I mean, are very good at continuing the people pleasing and therefore we don't make hard decisions. And I just want to say the more you people please, it has a direct correlation with the amount of money you make, and it's a bit of a hard truth sometimes. But if you go and look at yourself and generally think my people pleasing, why does my back not like this? Because you're too worried about you don't actually want to write what you want to say on social media. You censor it to kind of down it. For me personally, I've got like 5000. My max is on my personal page for my Facebook page. You know, my personal, and I giggle like 5% of people would show up to my funeral. So let's be honest, they're not all my friends or acquaintances, but it's like I used to not share stuff about my business on my personal page because I was too worried about the ten family members because they can't handle me making more money. So there's 4990 people that I could be talking to and potentially making money. And I'm downplaying that because of the fact that I'm too worried and people pleasing.

Phoebe Sherman
Yes, we were just talking about this today on a different podcast interview, too. It's really top of mind, this idea of it's interesting that you're saying people pleasing because we were sort of talking about from the opposite perspective, too, like this idea of being in alignment and you're going to get pushback no matter what because people are, I mean, a million reasons, but like, how do you keep showing up and how do you keep going when you're getting that pushback, when that pushback is yourself, right, that people pleasing aspect.

Angela Henderson
And one of the things that I say about alignment, and I totally agree, it's one of the key things that I focus on within my business model with the women that I use is, well, one is if I ask you on a scale of 1 to 10 how burnt out you are, if you're five or above, that indicates to me that you're not in alignment. People think burnout means mental health problems. No, I disagree. It could lead to a mental health problem, but more than likely you're not in alignment. So then you have to go, “My framework is, well, where are you not in alignment?” Is it strategy? Health? Wealth?, Or relationships? And then we need to work backwards from there.

Phoebe Sherman
Yeah. So tell us a little bit about what that looks like when you're working with clients.

Angela Henderson
For me, like I said, as an ex mental health clinician, I couldn’t diagnose someone with autism unless I was impacting all areas of their life. I couldn't diagnose someone with depression unless it was all areas of their life. I do use the same type of model here is most people think business is just strategy, accountability and clarity, but it's so far from that. I also look at your health, your spiritual health, your physical health, your mental health, and I also look at your wealth in regards to your personal wealth, your generational wealth, your business wealth. And then I look at relationships, community relationships to self, and relationships with family. If one of those things is off, if you're in the middle of getting a divorce and I'm just focused on creating a strategy and keeping you accountable, we're going to have a problem. If you come to me and you're really suffering from stress and anxiety. Now, I'm never diagnosing my business clients, but if you're suffering from that, then we're going to run into a problem because your headspace isn't in the other spaces of those key areas. When I work with women on any given week, it's not just the next funnel, the next email, because when you look at those four components and you're in alignment with those components, you have more fun, make more money and have less stress.

Phoebe Sherman
Yes. And I'm thinking about my own practice and my own journey around spaciousness and building the life I want. I definitely have anxiety and dealing with some chronic pain, and the whole reason I've built my business is so I can have freedom in my day to day. And then, of course, if no one else is telling me what to do, you're that person telling me what to do and you're the one who is holding you back and not creating the life that you want. Obviously there are tons of other factors that come into play here, but often we cause our own stress within like how much we're taking on or that people pleasing or that like even just like ability to like, have patience or pace yourself, which I'm not very good at and it’s continuously my work to like, how do I find rest? How do I find joy within my day? And this idea of spaciousness. Spaciousness is something that really doesn't come easily to me. Anyways, I don't know, can you speak to like, how do you work on some of these things? How do you make sure that you start to be in alignment? Like how if we're anxious all the time, obviously again, other factors, there are other ways to help your anxiety, depression, etc. But yeah, how do you create this idea of alignment? How do you like pull it back in?

Angela Henderson
I think one of the first things is about it's not so much the how, but it's about the who, and I'll explain. So there's a really great book. It's actually on my desk. It's called Who Not How. Often, The first thing we think about is how am I going to get more spaciousness? How am I going to create the funnel? How am I going to build the team versus thinking about who is going to do this? So the first thing I think about is like, who could come into your world to help you get more spaciousness? Who do you need to hire to be able to get more spaciousness? Now the first objection that people are going to have is I don't have money to do that if I'm starting off from business, but I call bullshit. I'm like, if you drink coffee, if you drink alcohol, if you have tattoos, if you go shopping, you might have to make some sacrifices for a few months to be able to outsource something in order for the spaciousness to come in place. You really have to start choosing what's more important here? My mental health in spaciousness, or drinking a takeaway coffee every day that costs $5 or even $10 because a lot of people get two a day. But I can make it at home. And then I've got a savings of $8 a day, 30 days in a month. You just saved $240 and you could work with an amazing Filipino VA in the Philippines for like 15 or $20. So you might think, I'm not going to get that many hours. Work with me here, do you know what I mean? If you were to cut back the coffee and cut back your shopping, you double that, you could probably get about 8 hours a week with someone in the Philippines working with you. I think sometimes we're not prepared to make sacrifices because those are our comfort things. Those make us feel like, or sometimes it's entitlement. I'm entitled to get my coffee today. We don't want to make those hard decisions because we're in the zone of safety and you have to go back and think about it. 97% of the decisions that we make are because of our subconscious. Our subconscious is driven by three primary factors; safety, enough ness and belonging. So when we don't feel safe, we don't feel we belong, we don't feel enough. We go back to the 3%, which is our default, which is I’m just going to keep drinking the coffee versus going and getting the VA. Does that make sense? So yeah, So what I would say is it's about the who, not the how and the you might have to sacrifice something and get out of that kind of safety zone that you have. You might think that how do you do that in the well so you've got your subconscious around the safety and roughness in the belonging. But what I have found is there's actually seven major mindset blocks that I see that are holding women back from saying doing these things, growing, being able to shed what we call the 80% of their identity. And a lot of people don't want to do that. So again, they default in the safety zone. So the seven major mindset blocks that I see in the women that I work with is self trust, the belief in yourself, your growth and your integrity. The second mindset block that I often see is self-love. The sense of one owns value are worth as a person. The third one is worthiness, the quality of being good enough. The fourth one is around money stories and blocks. Again those negative subconscious beliefs about money that limit you from achieving more success. The next one I see is obsessive thinking that series of thoughts that typically keep reoccurring over and over and over are normally paired with negative judgments or thoughts. The six one I see is divine timing. So divine timing means the belief that everything in our life is happening exactly the right moment, but most often people will push divine timing away and try and manipulate that masculine energy. No, it's got to be this way they force things and that's where it becomes a block and the seventh thing I see is imposter syndrome refers to believing that you're not as confident as others perceive it to be. We all have a little bit or one of those are two of those actions the way we are. But that's because of our upbringing. And typically that stuff that these blocks that we're talking about comes from a T one or T two trauma. T one is something really big. I mean, like sexual abuse when you were a kid or divorce or someone dying, really big things, really bad car accident or something. But the T two trauma is little things. So you may have been a little four year old girl and you went up to your mom and you pulled on her dress or pants or whatever, and you said, Mommy, mommy, look at this painting. And she looks at the painting and she's like, yeah, honey, I'm just busy right now. Give me one second. And then your brain is a four year old because your brain can only cognitively comprehend certain things at that level because it's not fully developed, goes oh, Mom doesn’t have time for me. She's too busy. I'm not enough. And we already start to dedepositing these negative things in our brain. But what the little four year old girl doesn't remember was 10 minutes later, Mom scooped her up, put her in our lap and let her explain all the beautiful things that were in the painting. Another T two trauma could be like you were at Thanksgiving dinner and Uncle Johnny every year makes a little bit a comment about, oh you put on a little weight there Phoebe, do you know what I mean, and it's just like — or whatever, but again, deposits that in to that. So then what happens is as we start to think we're not enough, we don't belong or we feel unsafe, what I say to my clients is I can give you the best strategy in the world. You can go out and buy the best 2024 planner and be like, This is the year I'm going to be organized. I'm going to do this. But until you get to the root of the things that are going on from you having spaciousness or you wanting to make more money or you wanting to lose weight or whatever it is that you want to succeed, you will typically continue to siphon off self-sabotage behavior. In my opinion. You can go to talk therapy, and talk therapy does work for some people, and I used to do CBT, DVT therapy with my own clients, but you typically need like 50 or 100 sessions. Like it takes forever. And often you kind of feel like I think I talked about this last week because they're only getting like surface level. They're not getting to the root of what's going on. Then you've got something like NLP or neurologist X Reprograming I and that will work a little bit. You don't need as much, but in my experience with clients and with myself is hypnotherapy 45 minutes and you're at one, you're at the one root and you're going to fix everything. You still got to keep going back and doing more, but it is game changer. You've got to start thinking about again if these patterns continue to happen, are these things of presenting what's the root cause? Because everything else doing fine, more drinking, more coffee, doing these things. So you're just covering up what's actually going on. Does that make sense?

00:21:24:21 - 00:21:31:09
Phoebe Sherman
Yes. How do you see that all like manifesting in running the business?

Angela Henderson
There's so many things so it can manifest in health for example, I can see people they'll say, my goodness, I've had headaches for weeks now. And I'm like, okay, well, we want to make sure. Let's rule out nothing's going on. Have you talked to your doctor? Go see your doctor, get an MRI scan, whatever the doctor tells you to do.
Most of the times you don't have cancer or a tumor. Sometimes you do. You don't typically. Sometimes it will manifest in health problems. And that's, again, could be mental health, spiritual health, mental health. It can manifest in relationship breakdowns. So you start to take things out on your friends, on your family, on your partners, whatever. It can manifest in overspending or underspending. So you really make really bad decisions and just start like cash is going everywhere type scenario, but you don't actually know how hiring this person in this finance and buying this I e-comm stuff is actually going to help you. You just go in almost a reactive mode or you can stop spending even though you've got money to spend. So there's a variety of ways that this kind of self-sabotaging behaviors can start to manifest. But if you're not mindful of it, you're still going to be like, well, I went and bought the VA, but it didn't work. I went and saw my doctor, but that didn't solve anything. But it's because we're not getting to the root of what's going on and why we're doing this. And sometimes you might buy the VA for hire the VA, and it might work for a little while Phoebe, but more often than not, also now I get a call from a client and they'll be like, that VA didn't work out. So I just let her go. I'm like, Whoa, whoa, hold on a minute. What happened? All I'm saying is, is this like those of these patterns keep reoccurring. We've got to figure out why the patterns reoccurring, and then we've got to get to the root of what's going on. Because if not, regardless of you're in startup stage growth stage or scale stage, these patterns will just keep showing up, but in different ways.

Phoebe Sherman
So when you are working with clients in what formats are you working with them to get to the root of the problem?

Angela Henderson
The formats that I work with clients is first of all, everything is personalized. I don't do courses, so I've got workshops, we've got lots of material and workshops, but I do a lower end mastermind, a higher in Mastermind, one on one. I've got rev share clients now and I run retreats, but every single client that I work with that is in any of those main programs, they all get a one on one call with me when they are on board to be able to map out their next 90 to 12 month plan that allows me to know their business intimately.
And then when we are on the hot seat calls every single month, for example, we've got three hot seat calls a month for each of those programs. I'm giving personalized strategy to those people and those people only. Nothing's ever cookie cutter. You cannot do cookie cutter business. You can't. Because again, if you think about health, wealth, relationships and strategies like I talked to you about, if we don't do those things in isolation, which I don't do, we bring them all together.
No one's family unit is ever going to be the same. Someone's mental health is never going to be the same, someone's business models never going to be the same, and someone's wealth is never going to be the same. So I have to address those key areas with each of my clients individually by creating a personalized business strategy and giving them personalized feedback. And that's why I believe the women that I work with get the success that they do. I can start to see the patterns that are forming and then I'll say, Hey, have you thought about why this keeps presenting? And I might give them some prompting questions. I might give them some journaling questions. And I say, this has showed up now three times in the last three sessions, and you still haven't executed this task. Why is that? And I'll say, but I'm not a hypnotherapist also. I think it's time you go to a hypnotherapy session or I think it's time that you need to go and see the healer or I think it's time and they'll go and do it. And they're like, okay, we've had a breakthrough. One of my favorite books that I've been reading at the moment is a book called Ten X is Better thanTwo X.
It should actually be mandatory reading for actually everyone in business. And I've read a lot of books in my time and how I didn't never heard about this guy, I don't know. But it's an amazing book. But what they talk about is most business owners will continue just to stay at two X, They'll just keep going around and around.
If you want to stay at two X, you keep 80% of what you know of your life the same and you only have to change 20%. But if you want to ten x your business, you'd have to be willing to only keep 20% of what you know and get rid of the 80%. And that includes getting rid of potentially family members, friends that are toxic to you no longer serve you being ready to stop that people pleasing you might have to fire your whole team, for example.
But in the book they give so many crazy examples. When you ten X, things change dramatically and the majority of people don't want to ten X their business because they don't want to shed the identity that they currently know because that feels safe. So in order to be able to ten X, you've got to be able to step out of that safety zone and start shedding.
And it's not easy like you went into businesses like my best friend of 20 years who's now a douche bag, just talk shit every time I go and hang out with them, I’m gonnahave to start either putting boundaries in place or they no longer serve me. And then there's grief, because wherever there is losses, there is grief. And you got to grieve those friends that supported you and helped you. But they were a season of your life. And so it's like, who's waking up today as an entrepreneur going, Yay, I get to go shed all this. This is super fun. No one. But that's the thing. The majority of businesses just want to keep staying at the two X level and that's okay.
But then don't bitch and moan if you're only saying increasing your revenue by a couple thousand dollars a year or $10,000 a year, and you're like, Why am I not making a million? Because you're choosing to stay in the 80% that you know, and they're not prepared to do the opposite, which is letting 80% of what you know, to shed you for the next ten fold.

Phoebe Sherman
Yeah, and it's not comfy. I mean, this is why I think entrepreneurship is sort of like a mental health rocket also, because, like, you can't do much if you're not addressing all of the shit. You really have to like be clued in to your shit if you want to scale your business because you can't make more money If you're living in scarcity mindset, you can't help other people if you're living in scarcity mindset, you're not going to succeed for all these things that you can't organize your day if you can overcome whatever obstacles you have. And again, everyone has different obstacles. Everyone comes from different backgrounds, but you have to figure out how to deal with your own obstacles. And that's a continuous journey. If you want to continue to level up.

Angela Henderson
And I go back to what I said before, as no one's knocking at your door to save you Christmas Day two years ago, 11:00 was right on the money. I walked in. My husband of almost 19 years at that stage had pissed me off and I was like one final time. I remember walking into the bathroom and I looked at myself and I said, I'm not going in another year with this marriage.
He never cheated on me. There's no alcohol or drugs. We have just expired. And I walked out and I said, Dale, you've got till March to get out. Now, I hadn’t planned to say that on Christmas Day, but I was like, I'm not I'm not doing this again. I can't I was like, Life is too short. And one of the questions that I asked people think about is, if you were on your deathbed tomorrow, what would you regret?
And there are two stages there that are two things that I would regret not getting a British bulldog and having my ex-husband be the person at the end of my bed that I'm looking at That that might sound fucking horrible, but that was my reality. I was like, No, I would look at him going, God, what have I taught my kids?
Whatever. So Christmas Day, I made that hard decision. He moved out March 14th, end of March. We did our financials. It was my biggest revenue month ever. It's not by coincidence that you're shedding the old and making space for new. It is not a coincidence that I had my biggest revenue month, but when I shed that and backed myself because nobody was coming to save me, I took radical responsibility for my life.
I lost 30 pounds. I started to make more money. I found love again. I've got a better relationship with my kid again. Whatever. You are not changing. You are choosing severe, choosing to continue in this cycle. That's your problem. I hate when I'm online I see people bitching. Oh my husband didn't do this. Susie didn't do this. Dude, change it.
Nobody knocked on my door to say they were coming to help me with Dale. I had to do that. Really. And that's why I think, again, women need to take radical responsibility for their life. And I think that's hard with societal norms and historical norms. You know, I mean, women have been pushed in women down. I mean, I'm not here to bash men or anything, but it's like the way our society was. We still get paid less. There's all these other competing things that we're still dealing with. But are we going to let those stories continue to influence this or are we going to stop and make a decision about what we're no longer going to tolerate? And I encourage you, as you start looking at your 2024 goals, is what and who are you no longer available for?
I was no longer available for that marriage. Look, was it hard? Yeah. The hardest thing I ever had to do is tell my kids and see their little faces. It was devastating. But now that they've seen it, they're like, Mom, you and dad are happy. There's no more yelling. So it's like I'm happy they see me in love again with my partner Grant. Like life is good, but I had to take radical responsibility. And just remember that whatever choice you make, it's still a choice. It's tough love, but it's like, What are you going to change? What do you have to let go of? Because that 80% live letting go. And I had that next jump. I had to 80% let go of my identity of who I was, being a married woman and now being a single woman with two kids. What stigma was going to happen? What were people going to think? The marriage should have lasted. They'd been together for 20 years. Whatever it felt like. No, I couldn't people please. I had to do it for me. So what and who are you no longer available for in 2024? And what are you going to do to start taking responsibility for your life in your business?

00:31:24:28 - 00:31:37:09
Phoebe Sherman
What are some suggestions, making it a little bit smaller, to start creating change like how have you taught your community to just start creating change?

Angela Henderson
The one thing that I encourage everyone to do is daily gratitude, because when you focus on and there are some studies that have been done, when you focus on gratitude, the anxiety can't filter in, in that moment. I start my day. I mean, you can see here I have this book and I do it every day when I get here doing I mean three things.
I'm grateful for cuddles, sunshine, opportunities. Then I list my three desires. Create Australia's Leading healing center, ten X all areas of my life, and to love and ensure my kids are safe. And then at the end of my day, I write all my wins that I had for the day. Well, why do I do that? Well, gratitude again. Even in our darkest moments, there's always still something to be grateful for.
And there's so much research around. The more people that have gratitude within their day actually live longer than those who don't. So start small. That doesn't have to go look at any rooted problems. It's just simply looking at what's still present in your life that's good. And the other thing is we always say like, I'm such a failure.
I didn't get this done today. I didn't get this done today. I didn't get this done today. But look at actually what did you get done. If you can write three wins for the day then that means you got 99 wins or whatever in a month. So you start to go, okay actually, this is okay. I've got the momentum versus trying to eat an elephant whole and looking at like, I didn't get this whole funnel set up, but you got part of it done.
So that's what I practice every day. That's simple. But if I had to do anything with any of my clients, once I see something repeating itself after three weeks and change hasn't happened, I'm automatically like, go and pay the $100 and work with the hypnotherapist because I can keep reframing it a million times. I can give them a million different strategies, but we're still going to end up with them not completing the task.
And if you look at your own tasks right now, there's probably the same tasks that keep getting put to the bottom up like, well, I'm a writer, so I like writing out my to do list. Like for the next day and I'll start to see my own patterns. There'll be three or four things that continue to carry over every single day on that to do list.
And we know, though, if we do it, we'll have the biggest brick lifted off our shoulder. But we still keep avoiding. We still keep avoiding, we still keep avoiding. So if you're doing that, I encourage you to go and look at your to do list. And from there I want you to sit with like, why does that not get done?
So for example, I had a client who she had an email list of, I think it was like 20,000, something like that. And she hadn’t emailed her list in like six months. And I was like, I don't understand. You're sitting on a gold mine here, like, what is going on? And she finally said, Well, what we got to the root of it was, if I start to send more emails, I'll start to make more money.
If I start to make my money, I'm going to upset my husband because he sees his role as the breadwinner in our family. And if he sees that he's the breadwinner in the family, I'm going to have to like dim my light. And I said, okay, we're gonna have to work through this. Anyways, long story short, she sent the email and made 90 grand in 48 hours.
But do you see how it was like it was rooted because and then if you go further, when she did the hypnotherapy session, where a lot of that stemmed from was the grandmother's role was in the kitchen, the mother's role was to do the kids. Know what I mean, so it was rooted in generational observations about what the role of the woman was and she didn't feel safe.
Remember, safety was one of those three primary things that our subconscious does in order for her to feel safe she just stopped sending the emails. So do you see how we've got to like, keep digging to see like what it really was? And it was. She grew up in an environment where it wasn't safe for women to be out of their role, wasn't safe for women to make money, wasn't safe for women to kind of excel, even though she had the email list.
So we worked through that. That's just an example.

00:35:24:17 - 00:35:43:18
Phoebe Sherman
I guess sort of an aside like let's say you want to go to a hypnotherapist, but you don't know what the root of the problem is. You're not really sure what the problem is. You might have many problems or you just want to check it out. How do you go about that? Do you come into a session with something that you want to work on?

Angela Henderson
I always say never go in with anything. Okay. Whatever you need to talk about will present itself on that day. But again, our masculine energy is like, Fuck, I got to have this figured out. I better have my shit ready when I walk into that hypnotherapy session where I'm like, surrender and trust that it will come up. So I'm trying to think about one of those therapy sessions.
I had a money block. She's like, Why do you want to talk about this week? And I was like, I've hit a money block. My revenue has been the same for the last couple of months. And she was like, All right, let's see what happens. And all of a sudden she comes in. She said, Close your eyes.
She has a countdown. And then she said, All right, go ahead. And she said, What's in front of you? And I said the words like those cartoon characters. And it was like, I saw the speech bubbles. And it was like I said something about I needed to be able to receive more money. I needed to be willing to and open to accept that.
And then I couldn't remember the last one, but that out of nowhere, the speech bubbles were like, Enough, enough, enough, enough. I was like, What? She's like, she's like, Do you know where that might come from? And then all of a sudden there was like a visualization of me when I was in my twenties at my mom's house, and there was a computer like a laptop open. This is like, this is generally what happened. I remember walking past a laptop and on the laptop my mom was like messaging a guy she was dating, but I saw my brother's name, my name and my sister's name, and under my name it said Angela's got GPA 4.0. She's in medical school etc etc. Everything that my mom said was false.
I wasn't in medical school. I was barely passing. I didn't have a GPA. I was like, we're like 2.5. Then whatever she said about my brother, remember my sister. So the root of my cause was, how could I make more money in my brain? Did I mean, if I don't think I'm enough, where did it come from? All of my own mother doesn't even think I'm enough.
Then how can I be doing enough to be able to make more money? Does that make sense? So it's like I didn't know that that was the root of where it was. I just knew I had a money block. And then obviously they then say, okay, like, what would you say to your mom? But they go to like all this kind of stuff to kind of like if you can close a bow on it.
But that's what I'm saying. Like, no talking therapy would have gotten me to that scenario. All I'm saying is like, it's crazy what can come from these hypnotherapy sessions. And another time I had another client. She came to me and it was around enough nothingness too. But I didn't know this at the time.
A client came to me and said, Ang, I thought if I worked with you one on one, I'd get all these templates in my head of my debt. I've got hundreds of fucking templates, but I only give them the templates that they need so they don't become overwhelmed with everything. I went then she said, My therapist said, Anything you want to talk about is like, No man, life's good.
And I was like, Actually, this client fucking pissed me off this week. And she's like, okay, well, let's see where this takes you. And I knew that my client was just projecting her own things onto me, but I was still triggered. Be mindful of your triggers because wherever there is triggers, there should be curiosity, because whenever there is triggers, we still have rooted trauma.
Be mindful where those triggers are coming. Well, I went in there. Long story. She did the hypnotherapy thing and it came down to enoughness. Where did it come from again? Gaslight The good old Mother Wound. I wasn't enough for my mom. So because I wasn't enough for my mom, I felt that I wasn't doing enough for my clients. That was a trigger. Then she's like, Well, where is this enough? This also to me. And I said, I'm not doing enough for my boyfriend. I'm not doing enough for them so we unpacked this enough this again. But because I grew up in a home with you starting to see where obviously my mom didn't value us as kids. In a nutshell, I constantly grew up on eggshells and was never so I've really had to work on.
Do you mean through hypnotherapy in my Healers that I am enough? Does it still creep in? Absolutely. It doesn't ever go away completely. But now that I have the insight when I'm triggered. I'll give you another example. My boyfriend, Grant, when we started dating, he was late and I was like, hell no. It was like death stares when he walked into my house is like, Hey, babe, how are you?
He's like, I just stopped to watch the sunset. Any good human beings should be like, my God, how was the sunset? This is so amazing. But I was like, I was ready to kill this guy. I was like, hell no, not on my watch. So, Trigger, I've identified the two triggers. I'm very good at identifying triggers, but it caused friction that night.
There was like, this fight. I couldn't understand where the trigger came from. Where the trigger came from was when I went and did a hypnotherapy session is when I was a little girl. My dad used to work on the oil rigs and so did my brother when he left, and there would be days that I would just always constantly look at the window waiting for him to come home. And because of the snow back home in Canada. And so sometimes his mum would say, he's coming, but then he'd get stuck in bad weather and then he'd be a day late or whatever for me is then guess what, I didn't feel safe because I'm always waiting for when's Daddy coming home. Even though all he did, bless his soul, was stop and watch the sunset. It was enough for me to be triggered because I felt unsafe. So now he'll be like, Hey babe. FYI; stopping in to an actual loaf of bread or Hey, babe, I'm just taking the back route on the motorcycle and I'm totally fine. Does that make sense? But again, I was like, I'm in love with Grant. So I'm like, I've got to figure out what these triggers are. That's my responsibility because I don't want that to keep continuing and impacting our relationship. So I was like, No, I will go and pay the $100, go and see the hypnotherapist, go and work it out. And then I needed to go and tell Grant what happened. And he's like, totally get it, babe. He's like, I could totally see how that probably felt dismissive and how you were on edge wondering where I was. No worries. I can help you with that now. So those are some of the things. But again, remember, Phoebe, how I talked about you can't do things in isolation if my relationship is breaking down over here, how do then I go and do business. And so that's what I'm looking at. Like I've got to be constantly looking at this holistic model to help the women.

00:41:36:13 - 00:41:53:12
Phoebe Sherman
So how do you take this information that your clients have gone to see a hypnotherapist and they have a route and they want to make changes within their life and their relationship and their business? How do you work with them to create those changes?

Angela Henderson
Well, yes. So once they come back and we start looking at the root cause, we then start saying things like, okay, what are we going to be mindful of? Do you need to tell the team about this? Do you need to tell again, your partner about this? And it's just about checking in. That's all it is. But again, as an outside provider, as their coach, again, if I start to see things start to creep in and I guess that's the blessing of being a mental health commissioner, 15 years is I'm very quick at seeing patterns starting to form with my clients, then we address it.
So it's kind of like a rinse and repeat. Healing is never done. You are constantly going to be healing. So all I can say is like there's no specific thing other than when we're checking in our hot seat calls and we're doing our one on one calls. When we're at retreats, whatever. We're constantly having these conversations and also getting deeper with things like and our goal setting is like, I've got to constantly remind the women every single month, What is it that you truly want?
Are you ten xing your business so these conversations don't just happen once Phoebe? I'm constantly have them and reframe them depending on where the women are as they grow through their hypnotherapy sessions, as they grow through their businesses, everything's constantly changing. It's not like I can't give you a cookie cutter approach because I don't do cookie cutter. I believe you can't do cookie cutter everything is created based on what the women need and what I see that's being presented in front of me.

00:43:08:15 - 00:43:18:06
Phoebe Sherman
And once they start to work with you to see these patterns and to start to see the patterns themselves and make these changes, how does this manifest positively?

Angela Henderson
Oh goodness. That list could be forever. Like confidence increases, self-esteem increases, relationships are better, self-love and self-compassion are better. And obviously you then start to make more money. So many women think it's just the money that they want. I want more money. No, you don't. Money's just a tool. Money is just energy. What you want is freedom. You want your time back.
You want to create memories with the kids. And when we start working through that, that's exactly what starts to happen. As they start to get more time, they start to take more holidays. They start to get to sleep in their health starts to get better. Like it's such a knock on effect. I'll share it. Like I got lots of clients who make 7 million, but it's what my clients message me and they go, you know, Ang – like I just got a message the other night – I just wanted to say thanks for believing in me, but thanks for allowing me and giving me the tools to believe in myself. Now, she's not actually working with me. She worked with me for the first two years in business hasn't worked for me for the last two years. But she still was like, It's because of you and your belief in what you did that now I am where I am. Those are like the most magical messages. Or I have a client who? Her daughter, seven, and she'd never taken a family holiday because it was always work, work, work. And she's like, Ang I finally booked the holiday. She's like, I'm shitting myself. I could puke with anxiety. It's like, I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I did it.
And she came back and she said, What did you say to me? She goes, Thank you for giving me my children back. You can't put money, a dollar value on that. You truly can't. Those are the things that when women are prepared to do the work and look at where things are, so much spaciousness and so much goodness comes from it because no one wants to go to their grave with $10 million.
You can't do anything with that. But when you're on your deathbed, you can look at the joy you have gratitude to what the world presented. And if you're not making changes, like again, if you're really going, I don't have time. I read this statistic a couple of weeks ago where it was like, your children for the time they're 18 or have already spent 90% of their time with you.
And then I was like, Who made up this bullshit quote or whatever? And then I went to research and there's like quite a few that are around that. I also had a client. And the reason why she signed with me was she said, I want more time with my parents. She was in the Philippines, she lived in Australia, but her parents are in the Philippines.
And I said, How old's your mum and dad? And I think she said 80. And I said, okay. And I said, Most people will live to about 88, maybe if we're lucky. I said see eight years left with them. Yep. And I said, How often do you see them? And she said, One time a year. I said, You have eight dinners left with your parents.
And she was like, okay. She's like, Yep. And so I said, What do we have to do? And I was like, What do you want to do? And she's like, What would you do? And I said, If it was me, I said I'd be hiring team immediately and getting our systems in place to buy back your time. So then you can at least see them two or three times a year, which means now you've got 16 or 24 meals left with them. We think we want the money, but we don't really want the money. We want the time, we want the freedom, we want the memories. Money is just the tool. Does that makes sense?

00:46:27:20 - 00:46:35:19
Phoebe Sherman
Yes, very. Well, this has been so enlightening. Can you tell listeners where they can find you?

Angela Henderson
Yeah, I always say just go to my website. Angela Henderson.com.au and then from there it's kind of like an all you can eat buffet. You can choose to listen to the podcast, you can choose to look at working with me, whatever it is that you need. There's blog articles, there's so much over there. So yeah, feel free to go to Angela Henderson.com.au. One of our favorite tools over there is our business score growth card, whereas we look at the four main elements within your business, you take a three minute quiz with 20 questions and we'll give you an automated scorecard based on those four components that we look at and help you to identify the gaps within your business. So yes, you can also find that over at AngelaHenderson.com.au


Phoebe Sherman
That's awesome. Okay well thank you so much Angela This has been amazing.

Angela Henderson
Yes. Thank you so much, my friend. You have a beautiful day.

OUTRO

Phoebe Sherman
Thank you so much for listening to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast. Head to Girlgangcraft.com/podcast for shownotes and more. See you next time.