Attuning to Emotional Intelligence in Entrepreneurship with Maggie Gentry

Reveal Radio is a podcast where we tackle the obstacles that make being a female entrepreneur harder than it has to be, and dig in to find creative ways to build a business that aligns with our values, supports our well-being and lets us make a positive impact without sacrificing ourselves in the process. Welcome to another episode of Reveal Radio. Get ready to meet the real, soulful Maggie Gentry, who brings heart and soul into her work and encourages others to do the same. Maggie's entrepreneurial journey started in a place where emotions and intuition were downplayed, but she knew there was more to it. Now, after six years of running her own business, she believes that business and love are intricately connected and an integrated way of living and working is the key.

I'm Maggie Gentry and I am a thought partner and mindful marketing strategist for high conscious entrepreneurs. What that really means is that I love working with folks who are building businesses with a mission, who are really here to use their business as a vehicle for change, and being that brainstorming buddy, accountability partner almost like a business coach, if you will, for them, and helping them make sense of the ideas that they have in their brain that they can't quite see, and being able to untangle that mess and create a really beautiful plan for them so that they know how to move forward in a way that makes sense for them.

I love that Very beautifully put. Thank you. You and I just did a project together. You helped me with some thought partnership and it was really helpful for me because I'm very big picture and not very detail oriented, and you were able to not only parse out those pieces and think through them in a way that I was struggling with, but you also pointed out a couple of things that might be more important to deal with. First, you had a really unique ability to do that big picture thinking but also take it down into that next level.

Thanks. I love that. That's truly something that I love being able to see the both and Really wanting to understand that bigger picture and then also really wanting to understand you and how you like to work and what your capacity is to create something that feels reasonable and attainable for you. I think that's the part that I struggle with a lot is we see all of these frameworks and guidelines that might have worked for somebody. I also think that a lot of them were likely created retroactively and they don't take into account happenstance and chance and luck and connections that allowed them to reach whatever goal it was that they met. I think that it's really hard to follow these formulaic processes that might have worked for one person, because they've never worked for me. I always want to buck the system in one way or the other. I'm always curious about how we can fit the strategy and fit the plan to the person.

You know I'm with you on bucking anything. That is what I'm supposed to do. It's just true, though, because we're not all the same and we're not all operating the same business in the same way, and personally, we're not the same. I know there are really organized and disciplined business owners who might not need your help in the same way that I did, but maybe they're not your clients, I don't know.

Well, I think it just goes to. This is like okay, I'm going to get on the soapbox real early, so here we go. I think that it's also a lot of how business is structured and a lot of business advice is. It comes from a really masculine point of view and a linear point of view, and also from an ableist point of view. There are a lot of folks who are differently abled and neurodivergent, and so being able to honor what makes you you, and realizing that, yeah, maybe my brain doesn't allow me to be on nine to five, monday through Friday, which I don't know, frankly, anyone who can that's been on my mind a lot, the nine to five thing lately.

Yeah, how do you structure your day? How do you feel about structuring your days as an entrepreneur? I'm just doing just a test.

No, it's perfect. Yeah, no, I'm an early bird, as I know you are too, but my mornings are also my precious time. I like to be up early. I have a whole morning routine where I do my meditation and my journaling, and that is just for me. But then I want my morning time to also be dedicated to what I think of as the deeper work. A lot of that for me is going to be more strategy, more writing, things that just use a different part of my brain that is more activated for me in the morning, and then I do the middle of my day, because that's when I feel most energized and that's when I'm doing more of my calls, and then the latter part of my day is more of the project management or details, and so, again, for me those things are easier at the end of my day.

Wow, that's kind of interesting because the details and the project management type activities are so much more difficult for me at the end of the day. I have to get those out of the way first thing in the morning, or I'm just sitting there banging my head against a wall at 4 pm.

And that's so funny. But for me if I go into the details immediately, then I'm gone, I've lost the thread and I'm into projects and I am just not at all. I think that's part of my ADDE where I just once I start following all the little loose threads and all the little details, then I'm just off. So I feel like for me the morning has to be the smaller, bigger, deeper projects. Yeah.

There's a thread You're so intentional about the way that you operate your business and the way you live your life and the clients that you work with and how you help them, and that conscious part is I don't see that a lot in all the areas that you are very conscious in. Did you kind of come to that down a rocky road or have you always been that way?

It's so interesting because I think when you even ask to talk kind of very broadly about boundaries in business and how you saw that for me which to me that's like my forever life's work, like boundaries that has not come easy for me at all. It's definitely a battle that has been hard fought for myself to stand up for myself and speak up for myself and create that time. So I think how I came to it is just a lot. It was very clunky and also a lot of experimentation, a lot of me checking in and asking and honoring what felt good For you not what felt like it was part of the formula. Yeah, and a lot of this is inner child healing work that I was doing simultaneously when I started my business in 2016,. It was also the first time that I saw a therapist, because I knew that it was going to be a big leap, and so it's interesting how my entrepreneurial journey really mirrored my personal development, or like exploration yeah, like I think it's personal development, yeah, growth, personal growth Totally. But in that process it's like my work the entire time has really been about boundaries. And so, going back to the inner child, I used to be so high strung as a child and I had this entire sticker collection that I never would allow myself to use the stickers. I just counted them and collected them and it was just like wanting to know that they were there. And so I remember when I started this process of like trying to understand, like my energetic capacity and what I wanted to do, in a day I bought myself a thousand sticker pack of Lisa Frank stickers. If anyone remembers Lisa Frank who?

doesn't.

And so then, like how I marked the day, I'd like grade the day based on the like sparkliness or the like fantasticness of the Lisa Frank sticker. So it was like that was how I was healing my inner child by using stickers.

This was just a few years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, wow, yeah, I love that, and you used the stickers.

Oh yeah. So it was like that part was healing to my inner child and also it was allowing me to find a fun, playful way of like, oh, I can honor myself and it can be fun and it can be healing. It was all this like beautiful whirlwind all mixed up in one. But that that was how it started for me was just trying to find these patterns of, okay, big, flashy, three star Lisa Frank sticker days what is it about them that made them so great? And with, like, the little tiny one star sticker days like what is it about them that made it hard. And so then, finding those patterns really helped me create a structure that works for me, which it seems like we were just talking before that you know, we started recording about really blocking call days, and so I do I do that same thing or Tuesday, thursday, I try to do all my calls those days.

I might have stolen that from you.

And I don't think it's an original idea, so I'm not going to take credit for that.

I think that's where I got the idea that I just needed to like back off of all of the days and give myself, when you use the word spaciousness a lot, and I think of you when I hear that word and it makes me feel like that's something I need in my business, because that's something you've crafted for yourself and I like the intention that you've, you know, done that with.

Thank you. So a lot of work that I did with the Vada at Oshina, which I can share. Their name in the show notes, but their business is called be with, and they're an emotional wellness coach. Okay, and one thing that they taught me was this idea of how can we always work towards that feeling of relief, like what is that thing that will allow you to have that full body exhale? And so that's always what I'm seeking and that's what I think of when I think of spaciousness. So is it pushing a deadline a little bit further out? Is it canceling the call so I can go on a walk? Is it pushing through the thing so that I can make the meal and enjoy time with my family later? Like, so it can look a number of different ways, but I like using that as an everyday reminder. Like what is going to give me that full body sense of relief?

Like the way you put that, like that, I was thinking about how you describe that and I was thinking about like how that feels in my life, and sometimes it feels different, like you said, like sometimes I think of it as freedom to do what. I need for me, and so it's not feeling boxed in.

Yes, I think it looks different every day. You know like one day it might be that you know we need to do the work and other times it may be that we need to not do the work, whatever that might look like. But I think that just goes to like honoring us as human beings and as cyclical beings, and not every day is going to be the same.

Yeah, you're extremely self-aware and I think that your journey as an entrepreneur probably mimics a lot of people's experience in that it's very it can be confronting and, oh, 100%. If we don't prioritize our own personal development along with our entrepreneurial journey and our business development, I think it's a recipe for disaster and burnout.

Well, and I mean you're spot on, because I've seen it so often in the work that I do with my clients, who are predominantly service-based entrepreneurs. And so it's this weird mind fuck oh, can I curse on here you can say fuck Okay, okay, I was like uh-oh.

I don't like rules. You can say whatever you want.

But it is this proper like mind fuck sometimes of Okay, I'm selling these services which are my thoughts and ideas, or my IP. Where is that line between what I'm selling and who I am? Identity, uh-huh. And so I think that there is a huge amount of work that needs to be done for many new business owners, particularly those that are service-based entrepreneurs, about what is me and who am I and what is my work.

Well, and how does my business evolve as I evolve? Yes, we're supposed to be. There's this like I don't want to call it a lie because I know that it's good for some people but there's this idea that we have to be consistent, we have to start doing this one thing and we have to be consistent with it. Well, what if me being authentic to who I am is not being consistent? What if you can count on me to change my mind or I'm going to learn something new about myself? You were really great about this when we were doing that work together. You were helping me. You helped me kind of think through and launch this ambassador program for Ravel, so that I could empower some of our members and create more connections and all of this. And at one point we were voxering and I said, oh, maggie, I had this idea, I should do this, this and this, and I should plan this, this and this. And you came back and so kindly pointed out to me. I think you said like I just want to gently remind you that you don't like structure and being boxed into things, so that could present a problem if you did go down that path. Just food for thought, like you were so and I totally laughed when I listened to it and I was like, oh my God, you're right, I would hate that. Why did I even say that? Why don't you think? But you were such, it was such a good mirror to like you could see me more clearly. I forget that. I'm like that, right, I'm just. What do I need to do next? What's next, what am I doing here? And you were like but wait, that's not what's good for you and that's okay.

And I think it's so interesting too because it's we've been taught this idea that somehow consistency leads to trust. It's like that whole no, like trust factor and for whatever reason it's, we've been told that consistency is the way to get there where. But then for me, when I think about it, it's like but if we're, if if we take consistency a little bit too far along that thread, then to me we get stuck in a fixed mindset of, like this is the way we do it, it always has to be this way, and I don't want to be there. I want to be more on the growth mindset end of the spectrum and exploring what ways work for me now and being able to allow in iteration and nuance. And so you know, a way that I operate is I like to think about flexible consistency. So it's like, sure, let me allow that to come in like, let me experiment with a consistency that works for me, and also let me allow myself the time and the the permission to change it whenever it no longer feels right because of whatever reason I love that concept that you just said flexible consistency and it works for you as a purpose driven entrepreneur, because we still know what you're all about.

You might change your services or the way that you offer them, or stop offering services altogether, but you're still going to be about what you're all about and helping who you want to help.

And I think it goes back to us. We are human beings, we are not machines, and so it's just. You know that I think of, like I have a whole gripe against consistency, because I also think that creativity can't exist on a conveyor belt, and so it's like if we put ourselves like into this regimen where we feel like I don't know, whatever it is, like we've got a post on Instagram once a day, or we've got to send a newsletter every week, or as examples, you know, like sometimes that works and sometimes creativity loves a little bit of friction, and also sometimes creativity loves face and freedom.

So, yeah, I'm reading a really good book right now that one of our members recommended, and it's called 10x is easier than 2x, and the part that I'm at in the book right now is all about structuring your days so that you have these big chunks of time for doing a certain type of thing, and a lot of those days are supposed to be recovery days, where you're not thinking about work and you're going off and you're doing something like learning the guitar or taking a vacation to somewhere novel that you've never been before and having an experience that might trigger you to have like to nurture your creativity or help you solve a problem in another area, and just like getting away from the grind and just giving yourself that spaciousness. I think.

Here's another one oh goodness, I need to make sure that I've got the title correct which we can link to it for sure. I think it's board is brilliant, but it sounds familiar. It's a similar concept of how we are so connected that actually allowing ourselves time to let the mind wander is a way in which our brain can file ideas and that's how it makes connections, and so finding dedicated time to be bored is actually really fruitful, bored and brilliant.

Yes, how spacing out can unlock your most productive and creative self. That makes sense if you think about it, because if we I mean our society wants us to be robots and so if they keep us busy and plugged in and just pushing full throttle all the time, we are just going to fall into line and not have any brilliant ideas and not buck the status quo or do anything out of line and just be good little robots. Yeah, if we have time to think and relax, we might upset the cart. It's so true. It's so true. So what projects are you working on right now that you're excited about?

Oh goodness, I'm trying to just think really quickly about, I mean, some of the client work that I'm doing is really exciting. I just supported one client here in Austin with their pitch story and pitch deck and for a competition yesterday and they won, which is huge, oh, cool, yeah, so a cool 100K that they get.

That's a great client winning story.

Yeah, yeah. So it's massive. So we'll see how we can support their growth. I'm really excited about that. Otherwise, yeah, I mean for myself and my business I've been. The last thing that I created was about this idea of how to take a solo business retreat, which is interesting because it is about carving out this time to allow yourself to just dream and be. You do that, you do that, I do, yeah, yeah. So it's a business retreat and it looks different every time, like sometimes it's a two nights day somewhere that's not my home this past month. So I did it we're recording in May of 2023. I did it in April of 2023 and I just had two consecutive mornings that I had blocked, because that was really all that I had the capacity for at that point in time and it was just in my space, in my home. But I do make sure that I create some sort of container to allow myself to just like check back in on my mission, on my values, exploring how I want to fulfill those values and enact those values over the next three months. So that's been a super supportive structure for me, and so then the thing that I created was a whole notion dashboard with resources and tools to support people and working through their own solo business retreat. Oh, yeah, so.

So did you create kind of a process for moving, a process for moving through that and the journaling prompts and things like that?

Yeah, yeah, so it does have journal prompts or inquiry questions that you can use to meditate on or to journal on, if you'd like, before the retreat. But the big thing that I'm always thinking about, because we spent so much time working no-transcript, really like in the business, so that's the client work and the deadlines and everything that we have to do our own marketing, the bookkeeping, but having dedicated time to work on your business. So you know that's thinking further ahead, however long in the distance that might be working on a new offering, updating your systems or operations, whatever. So I think about those things as, like, the back burner projects, the things that were like oh yeah, I'll get to that one day and they start to stack up and so having these quarterly business retreats is a way for me to tackle some of those back burner projects. So it's the things that, those things that are important but not necessarily urgent yet Like what's an example of something you might tackle. So I the whole offering that I created and the outline for how to plan your solo business retreat like. I did that on my last retreat. So I wrote the blog post, I created the freebie content I could like, broke the welcome series for once you get the freebie and then also built the there's like a low cost up sale offer for like the full dashboard, so created that on my last retreat. I've done them before where it's when I wanted to update my full like lead magnet and so it was updating that process for myself. I've done it where it was creating my whole workflow for onboarding new clients. So I didn't really have a structure. You know, I was just every time I would send out a one-off proposal and then send out a one-off contract and so then working with my client management or my CRM to then build the templates and the workflow to ease that process for myself, gotcha. So it's a stuff that's like not always super sexy but can be really important and makes a difference once you dedicate the time to do it.

Yeah, just spacing out that runway so that you're not being interrupted and you don't feel like you have to be somewhere else or doing something else.

Yeah, and also I think it goes back to, you know, it's for me. It's really helpful to have just a couple of days every three months where I can say, hey, clients, I'm not available, and they don't necessarily know that I'm not, you know, I just say that I'm out of office, so they don't know if I'm on vacation or what, and I don't think that that they need to necessarily know. They probably don't care, right? Yeah, it's just that like I'm not available, and so I make sure that they have ample notice. But yeah, it's for me, again, I think it goes back to the boundaries of being very clear of, like I'm not available, like I have to let them know that I'm not available those days so that I feel like I have the self-permission to work on my business.

You're really good at that. Your email always says when you have future out of office days. Yeah, I wish I could remember what it is, but you would probably know. When you and I first connected, you were out of the office and it was around Christmas time not last year, but the year before and I emailed you and told you how much I loved this blog post that I found and I had run out of characters on LinkedIn when I connected with you. So I think I said something like hey, I just had to connect directly because LinkedIn doesn't give me enough characters to tell you what I think, and I needed to say this. But you've got an auto response that was like hey, friend, thank you for reaching out. I am out of the office until XYZ date. And you had this beautiful like description of how you handle email responses that very clearly spelled out what they could expect from you and what they should not be sitting around waiting for.

Yeah, I mean, it's the format that I follow a lot, where it's like if you're a current client, if you're a prospective, so it's like if you're a current client, I say something about when they can expect a response. It's like if you're wanting to work together, thanks so much. And also here's a link to book a call with me and yeah, but so in the retreat dashboard I have templates for auto responders for emails to your clients about letting them know that you're gonna be taking time off, and then also text templates just to like let friends or family members or housemates, you know, know that hey, I'm taking this dedicated time. So if you find it hard to state those boundaries and to claim that time for yourself.

It's like not something I've ever even thought. I mean, I think about it now because I've been in business long enough to have seen people like you doing this and to think, man, I should really. That's really helpful and it's funny because I always have had. I did not grow up with great boundaries. I didn't know. I was allowed to have boundaries for a long time. Oh yeah, same. And so as an adult I remember thinking like I have to figure out how to put boundaries in place, but I don't really even know who I am. So how do I know what boundaries I wanna put in place? And so there was this whole process of like having to understand that I needed to know myself before I knew what I needed and could teach people how to treat me. Yes, but when I see people like you do things like that, I'm like I'm so appreciative of the boundary that you put in place because I know where we're at. And it's like hard to think about that when you first start putting boundaries in place, because you feel like you're asking for something you maybe aren't allowed to ask for or something like that. But on the other side of that, I think people actually appreciate knowing where you stand.

Yeah, and I think, as a newer business owner, it feels hard because you feel like you want to say yes to every opportunity and you want to do all the things to. I think there's a lot of scarcity. I shouldn't. I'll speak to my experience. I think that's how I felt.

I think it's pretty safe to say. That's pretty consistent in what I've seen with newer entrepreneurs. Or even like when you pivot your business or you make a change and you're reeducating your network, it can be a little bit scary because nobody knows, you're not known for what you are known for anymore and there is a little gap there where you're having to reeducate and it can be tempting to take on things that are not a great fit. But that's one of my biggest pet peeves is what a nightmare that is for as a service entrepreneur, on both sides of that equation, because I've had clients that I should not have been doing work for, because I either wasn't the best I could have recommended somebody better, maybe in that specific niche or because the personality just wasn't a great fit and they were very, maybe structured and organized and I was more like free flowing.

So yeah, it's hard and also it's, I think, something to acknowledge that for now, we live in a capitalist society, which unfortunately requires that we have money to buy the things that we need to survive, and so I think there's also we've got to have a caveat to this conversation of like, yes, you want to be known for something and you want to make sure that you are staying true to your values, and also sometimes you have to find a way to do that that also supports what you need, which could be saying yes to maybe not the super, super, super ideal client, but allows you to pay your mortgage. So I think there's always a balance of maybe sometimes we say yes to the clients that help us provide that level of safety and that foundation while we build, and can slowly start to build the more ideal dreamy clients.

I think we learn who the dreamy clients are. That way too, we start out of the box knowing like when I quit my first job, my first big girl job, and was like I'm going to work for myself, you can't make me do anything I want to do I didn't know who was a great client and who was not. I had not worked with enough people, I had not had enough experience or enough. You know, I don't want to say failures, but I hadn't been knocked down enough times to know kind of what direction I really shouldn't be going. And maybe not everybody has to learn the hard way that I do, but there's a self-awareness factor that I think comes with just getting older.

And I think you know, sometimes we just don't know what we don't know, and so it is hard, but at least for me I know where my boundaries are once they've been crossed, which sucks.

That's actually a great way to figure out kind of, because it's really when I find when my boundaries are being crossed, it kind of usually touches on a core value that's being offended. And when I look back on my life I can see spaces where I felt resentful or compartmentalized or just like like livid about something right, and it tends to be connected to that for me.

And so.

I know where those boundaries need to be and it really connects to my core values a lot. I'm not going to let somebody schedule me whenever they want, because one of my core values is freedom and I have to know that I have the freedom to do what I need to do when I need to do it.

Yeah, and it's, you know, in that process of when you feel acutely that the boundaries have been crossed. I think it's an interesting point for self-reflection because sometimes it's like oh, that person is pointing me to something where I could do it differently, or I could say this in a different way, or there's something that I could clarify and that can be helpful. And also it seems like in my experience that a lot of people immediately go to like what did I do wrong, or what could I do differently, or what do I need to change? And so the other part of that of the self-reflection that's interesting to consider is well, what if your message is clear? What if everything was right and this person just wasn't for you? And so I think it's just honoring, like, yes, sometimes there are places where we can refine and iterate and improve. And then also sometimes it's just like can we graciously let that experience in that person go and maybe we're doing okay just as we are. But yeah, it does take some time, I think, in trial and error, to get to.

And a little bit of faith too, I think, oh yeah, In knowing that something will come in to fill that space. If that is a client that you have to let go, knowing that whatever needs to move into that space is not going to be able to move into that space until that space is made Exactly.

This is reminding me. I think this was like the first post in rabble where I, like, really got involved, because I had a really hard client experience and I was asking about red flag questions that people asked at the time.

You were kind of being quiet and you came in with this post and it said trigger warning, I think, and you were like I have you put a red flag emoji on there? You were like I need help and, yeah, what were you dealing with?

I don't remember exactly, but yeah, I'm trying to remember too. I know that it was a client who was upset and said some hard, pretty harsh things about me not delivering on what she thought the engagement was, which the disconnect was, because she was asking for a lot more than any of my clients who had previously had gone through this offering, and so it was already discordant. And I said something about she was like I think she wanted me. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I tried to also state a boundary of like yes, I want to get to this, but it was a big ask and I couldn't do it in the way, in the timeline that she wanted, because of other deadlines and big projects that I had at the time. So I tried to give her like yes, I can review it by state, and that did not go over well. And so then she wanted to like end our engagement immediately, and I gave her I think I gave her a refund, which I was happy to do, but it felt so odd because I felt like our initial discovery call felt really aligned, and so I came to the group just curious about what did I miss. Are there other questions that you ask either in the intake form or on the discovery call to really find those like right fit clients. But it just it really shook me. Yeah, it was really hard.

I had one like that too. It kind of broke me. Honestly, I didn't do SEO work for a really long time after this because I had kind of dropped the ball on. I had partnered with somebody and we were doing this project and she had not completed something, but I had not checked it either, so I didn't realize it wasn't even done. And then this guy came back and he just hit me out of nowhere with this email about how I was failing at everything and I was supposed to do this, this, and he listed off all these things. And it was like six o'clock in the morning and I was checking my email and I was just like this hurts, because I really liked him as a client too, and then I just was. I think that was like one of the moments where I was kind of like I should not be doing this work. I am horrible at this work. This is terrible, and I don't think I want to work with men in this industry anymore. No offense, I love men. Some of my favorite people are men. But how would I have known that that was not a good industry for me to be working with, or this or that, and it was the same thing. I was happy to give the refund and make everything right, but I don't know, it still didn't feel very good.

Yeah, it doesn't. And I mean it's hard because, again, going back to what we were talking about, it's like when somebody comes back with that harsh feedback, it's hard not to take it personally.

That's a good point too, because I do remember. I know at the time I read the email again and I actually went back through all of our old emails and there was only really one thing that he was correct about, and there were all those other things he had listed out that were not even correct, and but at the end he was like I don't have the bandwidth to argue about this, I don't need any rebuttals, blah, blah, blah. He was basically saying I couldn't argue back about anything like that. So it took me like three days to write him back, but I do remember that I think it wasn't even about me. He had a partner who was putting a lot of pressure on him, and so I think it had a lot more to do with what was going on with him, and I was a convenient person to blame. Be careful about it and have an effect, so you never know what's going on with other people.

Yeah, it's so true, yeah, but you know, it's these moments where, yeah, I mean we do the best we can, we respond in the most generous way that we're able, while also honoring ourselves in the mix.

And one of the things I love about what you're doing is that you're positioning as a thought partner and it feels a little bit less like the boss and the service provider, or like the client and the service provider. It feels less like you're. It feels more like you're in a position to say we're partners on this. Not, they're not going to be as likely, maybe, to come and say this is how I want this done and this is when I want this done, and you're so good with boundaries. I feel like that's a really great recipe for people enjoying the time with you and continuing to work with you afterward.

Thank you, I hope so. I mean I do. I do feel like I want to be that equal partner in the sense of just in the ways that I can. I mean, I know that you are always going to love your business more than I can, but it doesn't mean that I don't love it a whole lot with you.

I felt I got that sense 100% when you were working with me. I felt like you were very invested in the process and the outcome and that you were thinking about it even harder than I was.

Well, but I there's something that you said earlier too about how sometimes you can't even see yourself, and that's why I have people who I consider my thought partners, where it's like I come. I come to them so that they're able to reflect things back to me that I need to be reminded of or that I've forgotten. And you know, it always allows me to have this kind of litmus test in my body of okay, so when they say that to me, how do I feel? And that will usually point me towards my truth. If I feel lost, and if I can bring it to somebody and they can ask me some questions or they can reflect something back, and then I see what's happening, I will have some sort of somatic response that will. That will point me to my truth and it becomes very clear. So I think that's my hope with what I do with folks is being able to understand who they are and why they do what they do and where they want to go and how they want to do it in a way that feels supportive, and once I know that, then being able to ask those questions or kind of like the example that you shared about you know, wanting to have this like weekly call structure and I was, like you sure about that.

Yeah, there were a couple of things where I was like, ah, let's do this, and you're like, well, we could. But and let's just remember it's funny to me that you say you're so. You were high strung as a child because I think of you as this very calming, Like you bring my energy levels down to a human level, like if I get all wound up and like. When we got on our call to do the thought leadership onboarding thing I was, I was like I don't know who I had been on the phone with, but I tend to match people's energy and I was just way up here like all wound up. You were like let's take a minute and do some breathing. And I don't think I would have been a very fun person to be on the phone with for that whole time if you hadn't brought me back down and been like let's breathe, You're being insane.

No, I mean, that's that's how I start my cult, like that's just it wasn't. Oh, that wasn't just me. No, no, no, no. I mean because, but I think that there's something about breathing together that helps, like, create the containers, specifically when we're not I mean even more so in person, but it especially when we're not in person it helps to just sink breath across the screen.

It worked. I think there's some science around that too, but it totally worked, because I haven't. I cried a couple of times during that call in a good kind of cathartic way, when I was telling you about my mission with rabble and bringing women entrepreneurs together and why I'm doing what I'm doing, and I had never cried about that before. It's something I feel very strongly about and there's definitely some like feeling about what I do. I'm very purpose driven, but I had never cried about it before talking about it, and so there was some kind of alignment and there was an ability for me to open up in a way that I hadn't been able to before. So, whatever it was, it worked. It was very good, but I think of you as a calming, nurturing energy, so it's it's hard for me to believe you wouldn't give yourself the stickers.

Oh yeah, no, I mean I was like the anxiety ridden child to. I mean like this I still remember the night before kindergarten freaking out and not being able to sleep because I couldn't read yet and my mom like trying to reason with me of, like you go to kindergarten to learn how to read and I just couldn't.

So, yeah, that's like a little insight into it's funny because, like, I don't think of myself as having had anxiety as a child. That's more of like an adult characteristic that I picked up, I feel like. But you just reminded me of something that when I was a kid, the first day kindergarten, my mom, I refuse to leave the house until my mom cut the ruffles off my jumper. No way that could have been how my anxiety showed up. Yeah, and she talks about, she tells the story because I was, I was adamant like I would not leave the house. I was like hanging on to the leg of the table or something until she cut the the lace off the pockets of the jumper. Little Kara, but I've laughed my whole life like, oh, stubbornness, just how it don't like lace. But that was had to have been about more than just the pockets because I had to have known what I was wearing for school.

Yeah, oh, that's funny.

That's so funny, I'm hanging out with Maggie, it's going to start coming out. Oh, just imagine how much fun we're going to have in Mexico. I know I can't wait. I can't wait either. It's going to be amazing. It's going to be so good. I'm looking forward to lots and lots of good times like that. But now you have a heart. Stop here, and I'm going to respect your boundary, so let's let everybody know where they can connect with you.

Yeah, I'm not on social media these days, but you can find me on my website, which is Maggie Gentry dot com. If you're interested in the pre retreat checklist that I mentioned, then you can go to Maggie Gentry dot com slash checklist and you can download it there.

Yeah, that's that's where I'm at and I'll include links to all of that and thank you so, so much from the bottom of my heart for spending some time with me today and sharing your stories and your perspectives. I think they're really important and valid and I'm looking forward to sharing them with everyone.

Thank you so much, karen. I cherish you, so I cherish you too, it's been a delight.

Thank you same. And there you have it Another inspiring conversation with another amazing woman entrepreneur. Before you go, a heartfelt thank you for being part of the Ravel family. Your support means the world and if you like what you heard, please consider giving your fellow entrepreneur a virtual hug by sharing this episode on social or with a friend. See you next time.