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Welcome to the Period Power podcast. I’m your host Maisie Hill menstrual health expert, acupuncturist, certified life coach and author of Period Power. I’m on a mission to help you get your cycle working for you so that you can use it to get what you want out of life. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Okay lovely ones, here we are with another listener Q&A episode, and I love doing these ones. It’s so fun to receive your questions and just to put them together in a bit of a mix and match episode. And I have to say, I’m really looking forward to this one because first of all, Nelson, my son has had chickenpox all week. So it’s good just to be in my studio focusing on this for a bit. And today’s questions have also come from inside The Flow Collective. They’re ones that our clients have all submitted on a dedicated thread. So thank you to all of you for doing that.

And these questions are a mix of personal ones about me, and some are about topics like boundaries, going big and bold and some nervous system regulation in the mix. So it’s going to be a fun one so let’s dive right in. So the first question made me giggle. Does thought work make me feel like a superhero? It really does and I think you’re all kind of feeling like superheroes as well as you get to know and go even deeper with your thought work too because for me knowing that I’m in charge of how I think and feel is amazing.

And at the same time, thought work makes me feel very human because it’s not about changing how you think. Yeah, that comes into it too, but the first step is always awareness of how you’re currently thinking and feeling. And processing those feelings and exploring those thoughts and seeing all the ways that that influences your life. So to notice those things, to name them, to feel them, that makes me feel very human. And I love having such a rich emotional life because I didn’t think that was available to me. I found emotions really fucking hard.

Hard to know that I was feeling an emotion, hard to name it. This has all been ongoing work for me, so I love being able to speed that process up for all of you. And then the second part to this question is, has your incredible inspiring master coach status achievement enabled you to believe anything is possible with thought work practice? And the answer to this is no, it hasn’t but only because I had that before I went through master coach certification. But doing it has had a huge impact on me and part of that is my self-coaching practice.

Because every month for six months we submitted our self-coaching, so that’s just the written coaching that we will do on ourselves every day. And the requirement was that it was daily so that was doing a thought download, just kind of dumping out our brains onto paper, writing our self-coaching models, which is the framework that I teach you how to do in The Flow Collective. And then further exploration of those models. So of course doing that every day, my brain changed. My whole business changed, how I showed up to my life and my relationships completely changed.

And it’s also made me super sharp at spotting things, like when I’m coaching on our calls, or when I read things in the community, or in Ask a Coach which is our personalised one-on-one written coaching service that you get as part of your membership. So sometimes I’ll just be reading through that, and I will just see a comment, or I’ll see something in the community. And I’m just like, okay, I can see the issue here, let’s coach on that, let’s spend some time on that, let’s do a workshop on that.

And I just kind of bring it in to what we’re doing in there. But it goes beyond what we do in the membership and it’s just there in my life where I can just spot other people’s thoughts in conversation. And I think I had this experience the other day where there was a service that I was strongly considering investing in. But as I was reading through the description of the service and all of that, what this person was offering, I could just see their thoughts in what they were describing, and it was just so off-putting to me.

And I think we all do this on a subconscious level. We make decisions based on the vibe we’re getting, even if we can’t name it, or be specific about what it is in the moment. But now I can actually really spot it and name it. And also generally speaking the rule as a coach is that you just don’t coach your friends and your family. But a lot of my friends are coaches, so sometimes we dip into coaching each other when we want to.

But there are also other times when my non-coach friends or people that I just encounter in life will say something and I just kind of want to offer them some coaching. And most of the time I can kind of sit on my hands and keep my mouth shut. But once in a while I’ll feel compelled to ask someone’s permission to offer them some coaching.

And I recently asked our babysitter if I could give her some coaching on how she talks about money and what she charges. And I was just basically thinking, oh my gosh, I don’t want her to go another 20 years before someone actually tells her this. I’m going to tell her it now if she’s up for hearing it. And she was, she was very receptive and grateful to it. And it was a great conversation, also got me all fired up about the money mindset coaching that we’re doing in The Flow Collective over the summer.

But sometimes other business owners that I know in other industries will also say things and I can just kind of spot something in what they’ve said. And I love, love, love business coaching. So I’m kind of always up for jumping in and offering something there with their permission. And by the way there’s going to be an opportunity to do business coaching with me later on this year. But all that to say is that I’ve just got really good at spotting what the issue is and seeing where someone’s brain is at and being able to get to that deeper level of things a lot quicker.

So master coach training was full on, but I got a lot out of it. And yeah, I do believe anything’s possible with thought work practice for sure, which is just a great way to be going through life, I have to say.

Alright, next question. I would love to have your thoughts on going big. I set an intention at the beginning of the year of going big and being bold. And now that things are going exactly in that direction, new exciting opportunities to step up and into I have been experiencing guilt for wanting more. Anxiety about not being good enough and imposter syndrome. And fear of people judging me for it. I’d love to borrow your thoughts on how we can grow forward while coaching our mind through such discomfort. This is such a great question. So are you ready for my answer? Here we go.

Guilt is optional, it’s your choice whether you indulge in feeling guilty or not. And every time you notice that you feel guilty you are then making a choice about whether to continue to feel guilty or not. And when I’m talking here about guilt, I’m talking about unproductive guilt because guilt is useful to us as humans it’s a prosocial emotion. But I know that most of you who are listening are feeling it far too often and for things that you really have no business feeling guilty about but it’s no wonder that you do, given how we’re socialized.

It’s just every time you have awareness that you’re experiencing feeling guilty, you get to decide what to do with that. I think I did a whole episode about feeling guilty. But you can think, is it appropriate given the situation to feel guilt or not. Why do you feel guilty? That’s the important question. You’ve got to ask yourself why it’s there. Okay, the next part of this was the anxiety about not being good enough and imposter syndrome. And these questions were submitted about six weeks ago.

And for this person and for all of you in the membership, I’m curious to know if that’s still there. But in case it is, here’s what I think. Anxiety being there isn’t a problem. We tend to judge ourselves for how we feel and particularly emotions like anxious, feeling anxiety, they tend to get a bad rap. But what if it’s just a sign that you care? What if it’s just a first step in the process? Because then you get to ask, “Okay, what’s next?”

And that’s how you keep going and you just accept the emotion, you process it, that you don’t let it be the end point, the bit that so many people just get trapped in this stage. So you can just decide to keep going, it’s just the first step, what next. That’s a West Wing reference for those of you who like The West Wing. Now, onto the judgement from other people. People will judge you for your success. They will also judge you for your failures. So you can just decide which one would you rather they judge you for.

Other people are always having thoughts about your level of success and those thoughts will go in all sorts of directions. Some people will have thoughts, actually people I know, people have thoughts about me, and my success, and my failures. And it’s probably 50/50, half of the time they’re thinking ‘positively’ about things and half the time they’re thinking other things. But really this is about your thoughts.

This is about your judgement of yourself. Because if you were to remove your own self-judgments, I bet you’d care a lot less about other people’s judgement. And it’s so freeing to get to that point, by the way. I mean they’re thinking about you way less than you think they are anyway. But we’re playing around with this, so let’s just keep the idea that they are thinking about you as much as you think they are, even if they are, who cares? That’s their choice. You can’t do anything about it.

So just let them have their thoughts because as I’ve said there are people out there who have a problem with women succeeding. But you know what? There’s also people for whom it’s inspiring and helpful for them to see you in your success. I’m here for those people. So focus on what you think of you and explore what do you think of yourself and your success, and then make a decision about how you want to show up from there. A few personal questions now.

Do you credit your mother as having modelled many of the behaviours that you want to live in as a woman? Yes and no. So my mum had a vivaciousness to her. She cackled a lot just like I do. She didn’t believe in staying trapped just for the sake of a commitment that had previously been made. And that was amazing, to have that modelled to me. She had a wicked sense of humour. She was very quick, highly intellectual, she could really hold her own. And at the same time I don’t think she was equipped through the upbringing that she had to process emotions.

And she would be the first to say that she had a lot of premenstrual irritability and struggled, I think now with the understanding that I have, with her stress responses etc, etc. She would lose it with people sometimes, including us as kids. I mean times when we were being little shits and times when we were just maybe wanting some love and affection of some kind. But she probably lost it like that because she was putting up with so much the rest of the time like we’ve all been socialized to do.

So I think some of that was modelled to me and I’ve taken on. And others I’ve been able to really understand now as an adult and have a lot of compassion, and love, and acceptance of my mum and how her life was and how she parented us. And it’s also really informed my work and the reasons why I want to do this. And there’s some of that that I’m unwinding in myself still, it’s ongoing work.

And then the next part of this question is, which women inspired me as a child? So I’ll be honest with you, I’m not really sure as a child if women were inspiring me. I’m sure they were but I don’t know, maybe if I thought about people I saw on TV and things like that, I’d be able to come up with some scenarios. But I’m thinking more about people I had personal relationships with. And I really struggled with being female until later in life. I really thought I got the short straw.

I mean talk about internalized patriarchy, isn’t that wild? I just thought that it was better to be male. I guess I must have been aware of the differences in how I as a girl was treated compared to the boys around me. And I just thought boys got to do what they wanted. So I thought it was pretty crap being a girl. So I’m not really sure that at that stage of my life I was feeling inspired by women around me. It wasn’t until later on in my teens that I started being inspired by amazing women. And I’ve been blessed to have contact with and relationships with so many incredible women.

But the biggest influence on me was my friend, Christine Hall. And Christine was my first acupuncturist, I went to her because of my period pain. And it was her that led me on this path in many ways. So at the time I started seeing her I was already working as a practitioner doing reflexology and aromatherapy and things like that. And I was also working as a doula. But Christine had been a birth worker and an antenatal teacher for, I don’t know, over 30 years at that point maybe.

So I learnt a lot from her in many ways, and including her philosophy was to always have a bottle of fizz in your fridge. She was great fun. And she died whilst I was in China doing my semester there as part of my acupuncture degree. But I made it home in time for her memorial celebration and got to hear all sorts of fun stories about her there. Period Power is actually dedicated to her, the acknowledgement in the beginning is to Christine.

The third part of this question is, what’s your heritage? A few of you ask this. So I’m Scottish all the way in terms of I always say Scottish blood because my brother and I are the black sheep of the family because we were born and raised south of the border in England. So my mum was from Saint Andrews and my granddad was a postman there, a big golfer. I think at one point he was the chairman of Saint Andrews Golf Club. And I didn’t know my mum’s mum because she died when I was very young.

But my dad and his side of the family, my dad’s from Girvan which is a small town in Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland, south of Glasgow, also close to another famous golf course called Turnberry. The golfing thing, it’s not for me.

Okay, let’s talk about boundaries. This next question, juicy one. So the question is, how do you move from hiding from unwelcome contact to having your boundaries respected? So I think this person is talking about having contact with someone and just hiding from it but wanting to move into having your boundaries respected. And I could do a whole episode about this. And for all of you listening, especially if you’re newer to the podcast or you haven’t listened to the existing episode about boundaries in a while then I recommend listening to that.

It’s all the way back on episode six, and in The Flow Collective there’s a whole webinar on boundaries and there’s also one on creating safety which is all about partnering with your nervous system and how you handle stress responses. And my opinion is that working on boundaries requires you to also work on your nervous system because when you feel like you need to defend your boundary, or when you just want to run away, or not do it at all and just kind of succumb in some way to what’s going on and you don’t say what you want to say or do the thing that you want to do.

And you just end up putting up with it. That’s your nervous system responding to the situation. It’s so crucial that you know this and that you understand this because if you don’t then what happens is you just blame yourself for not doing something and for not speaking up. So it’s so important to work with your nervous system throughout this. So with all that in mind I recommend just asking yourself what you are up for. And remembering that you have options.

Now, some of those options may not be ones that you want to entertain but it’s helpful to know that you have them because that’s one way that you can create safety for yourself and regulate your nervous system is to remember that you have options. So what are you up for and how can you honour that? Does this feel like a time where you’re up for a bit of a stretch and expanding into the capacity of your nervous system, kind of going up against the edges of it a little bit and doing something that’s a bit uncomfortable? Not stressing yourself out but just stretching it a little bit.

And that can go in either direction in terms of what you actually do. So for one person, avoiding contact with someone may be a real stretch, for someone else it’s confronting the issue in some way which may or may not involve actual confrontation. And with boundaries, someone can transgress your boundary and you can honour your boundary without them ever even knowing about it. So for example, when someone gets in my personal space most of the time I just move and give myself space.

I don’t stand there and go, “You’ve moved into my space. I need you to do this now.” There’s definitely times where I let someone know, and believe me, I can let someone know. But I do it from a very regulated place. Usually I can kind of make fun of it. It doesn’t mean that the boundary transgression doesn’t affect me. But they actually also rarely happen now because my mind has shifted, and my nervous system has also grown. So one option here is that you honour the boundary for you, no one else even needs to know.

And just letting your nervous system know that you don’t have to do anything, just reminding your inner children, hey, we don’t have to do this. We don’t have to force ourselves into something we’re not up for today. That can be such a reassurance, such a gift to yourself to do that. Or you can let this other person know, and you can just let them know, there doesn’t need to be anything behind it. But you might choose to share why. And that’s different to explaining, and defending, and apologising for it.

But this person said, “How do you move from hiding from unwelcome contact?” And I want to point out that you can decide not to be around certain people in your life, and it doesn’t mean you’re hiding. It can be a conscious purposeful and loving choice. It’s a decision but that’s all about regulating your nervous system so that it doesn’t feel like your only option is to hide. And then you can just decide what you want or need to do.

And the action remains the same, not seeing them, not seeing a family member for example but the energy behind it is very different. And because of that you’ll make it mean something different about you, something that’s powerful rather than something that’s quite disempowering. So having your boundaries respected is all about you respecting them, how do you want to respect them because we can’t force anyone else into doing something that they don’t want to do or for some reason they’re unable to do.

And so looking after yourself can also be about accepting that reality and deciding what you want that to look like for you. Okay, told you that was going to be a fun one. Thank you all for submitting those questions. I’ll be back next week.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of the Period Power podcast. If you enjoyed learning how to make your cycle work for you, head over to maisiehill.com for more.