In this episode, Rachel Freemon Sowers, shares how changing your mindset is not enough you have to understand the mind-body connection in overcoming resistance in anything, but particularly in getting on camera and she shares tips on how to get more at ease on video! 

Resources mentioned

Contact Rachel:

@RachelFreemonSowers across social media

Website: RachelFreemonSowers.com

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3 Key Points

There’s more to moving forward than just mindset, you have to have the mind and body connected and working together.

Emotions can get stuck in the body and stop you from doing video or moving forward in anything you do.

Look for self-judgment and get help dealing with it.Everybody has to find their own path to their goal and it’s a balance between
listening to experts and listening to your gut.

Transcript

[00:51] Ellen: Hi, and welcome to Episode 91. Today, my guest is Rachel Freemon Sowers. Rachel is a psychotherapist from visibility and video strategist. She teaches female entrepreneurs how to align with themselves and their message to create videos with accelerated confidence to skyrocket audience engagement and amplify their message. She holds a Master’s in Counseling Psychology and specialized Ph.D. education in Mind-Body Medicine and Integrative Mental Health. So, I want to welcome you to the call, Rachel.

Rachel: Thank you so much. It’s such an honor to be here.

Ellen: Well, I’m always excited to meet new people and see what they’re up to, and how they approach entrepreneurship and help other people. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you got into this? I see you’ve been doing it for eighteen years or so. That’s cool.

[01:40] Rachel: So, yes, I’ve been a psychotherapist for eighteen years; worked with people between the ages of four years old to sixty-five, so I did that for a very long time. In the last five to six years, solely focused on female entrepreneurs and professionals, and now moving and pivoting the business to take everything that I know about mind-body medicine and emotions and all of those things to help women, female entrepreneurs to really be seen and heard so they can make that impact that they want to make.

Ellen: That is really important. I was talking to somebody yesterday and she’s a money coach. We were having the conversation about how women don’t ask for what they want, how women have a hard time charging what they’re worth. I’ve seen that, I’ve done several masterminds over the years, and the men never have a problem and a lot of the women do have a problem. So, I would love for you to speak to that.

Rachel: Well, I think, for me, in all of the time that I’ve been around and just doing this work around helping people, really, no matter what age they are, it’s different at each age, but specifically in the last five to six years, really allowing themselves to be seen and heard and the cultural influences that have often stopped us.

As far as we’ve come in equality, there’s still much further to go in my professional and in my personal opinion. When we are able to step into who we want to be, we really unleash this way of being that becomes just freaking fantastic. Like your life becomes something you never thought it would. Your business becomes something that you never thought it would. It boils down to feeling worthy and feeling like you’re enough, and some other things that we’ve been taught in the world that keep us small.

[03:46] Ellen: Yeah, I have a lot of the Louise Hay books and she says it always comes down to, “I’m not good enough.”

Rachel: There’s been so many times in the clients that I’ve worked with, and what makes my work a little bit different is that people, now, there’s a lot of mindset work. Just your mindset, and one of the things in the way that I approach things, that, if all of us all we had to do was change our mindset, we would all be making multi-millions of dollars and doing the exact thing we wanted, and saying the exact thing we wanted, and having the exact life we want.

So for me, in the work that I do, is it’s connecting the mind and the body and knowing that the emotions are underneath the mindset. So many women go down this rabbit hole of just saying, “I can’t do it. Why can’t I? I have confidence in this area. I can’t push the live button on the camera,” and it really has nothing to do … We have to move the emotions in order to shift the mindset. That’s my belief.

[04:50] Ellen: Can you go into that a little bit deeper because I’m not totally sure what that means?

Rachel So, it looks something like, I have women say, “I don’t know why I’m not confident on video. Like I can get in front of a room of people and I can speak, but when it comes to pushing that live button or it comes to pushing the record button, I can’t do it.” So they’re like, I should just change my mindset. I should just convince myself to do it. I should just do it. And yes, that’s part of it.

But what I find in my educational and in the work I’ve done with humans over the last eighteen years is that it is often a patterned way of being, a neurological wiring in the brain that is saying, “If you do this, you’re not going to be safe,” and therefore, we have to switch the wiring, disconnect it, and then put in a new wiring that says, “No matter where I am, I’m safe,” so I can push.

05.52 Ellen: Well, how do you do that?

Rachel: Well, we do it by looking at some of the emotions. Now, a lot of people say, “Oh, are you going to take me back to my childhood?” I’m not taking you back to your childhood. I’ve done this work for such a long time that I don’t need to do that. So, what we do is we use neuroscience to then say, “I see what that is. I am aware of that. This is what I’m choosing anyway, and then what are the things I need to do to make this choice?” –

[6:24] Ellen: This has come up several times in different interviews with people. One of my guests was saying, “Every time that happens, say change.” That was his thing. Another one is, I’ve read Eckhart Tolle, and he talks about just somehow distancing yourself from the thoughts that you think. I find that really hard to do, but I try.

Rachel: Well, it’s kind of like the Buddhist kind of thing of unattaching from an outcome, right? There’s lots of debate about whether the thought comes first. In my experience, it is the body that’s the primal response. So our somatic system…

[07:02] Ellen: But the body can have that response unless it somehow hears something or something imputes into the system first.

Rachel: Well, so if you talk about a gut instinct, the gut instinct is the vagal nerve that runs from the gut up into the brain. So, in essence, when you have a gut instinct, you have it in your gut, it shoots to your brain, then you have the thought. So, there’s lots of debate. It’s like the chicken and the egg thing. But what I know about experiences in the body is that no matter what happens, your body doesn’t forget because it’s here to keep us safe.

So, for instance, if someone has pushed the live button before and they totally bombed it, when they go to push it again, their body is saying, “Don’t do it. It’s not safe. You’re humiliated, rejected. I’m afraid no one’s going to want it, judgment,” blah, blah, blah, all of those things. The same hormones are released in that moment that you have that thought as it was the last time you did it.

[08:03] Ellen: Right, but also, something I saw on Twitter, which I think is really true also, is like you’re not afraid of the thing; you’re afraid that you’re going to be afraid of the thing, in a sense, right? Because I can be afraid of something that I’ve done before and done it fine. Like nothing terrible happened and yet I’m still afraid, because I’m afraid that what if it happens this time, right?

Rachel:  Right. So, I think, again, it’s really exploring what happens the mind-body connection, because we’re not just our minds. We’re not. Like our body is interacting with everything. We are a complete system in this.

Ellen: Well, when I started my business, I mean, I just took off really fast and I was really confident. I think I also … well, I know … I also had that mindset of “I had to be perfect.” The more successful I got, the more pressure I felt, the more it became difficult to do that, and then I was afraid though of letting people see the real me, in a senses. Finally, I think you just reached a point, or at least I did, where you just go, “Screw it. This is who I am. I am a mess, in some ways.” I mean, I had a lot of traumatic things happen in my childhood and that definitely affected me, but what I’ve learned is most people do. I mean-

Rachel: Absolutely.

Ellen: I think one of the reasons that people who rise to the top or are rare, in a sense, is because every time I interview one of those people or I hear them, people like Oprah, like that, they always say, “My parents or my grandma or my somebody told me I could do anything, I could be anything,” and the other ones didn’t get that. So, I’ve seen that as being having to work a lot harder if you didn’t get that, if it didn’t come naturally. That’s kind of what I’ve seen. I get the feeling you don’t agree.

[10:03] Rachel : No, it’s not that I don’t agree. I think there’s both sides. Like there are some of that, there’s people that get that and they don’t believe in themselves.

Ellen: Well, that too, yeah.

[10:12] Rachel : So, what is really the deeper thing that is there, maybe I’m … I, just this morning, was writing this commencement speech I’m going to do for a local community college and it really is what makes these less fortunate individuals succeed? Maybe it’s a determination that they don’t want to live the way that they’ve wanted to live.

 Ellen: Oh, definitely, yeah. Some are definitely propelled by that. I mean, when I got my Grammy nomination, the thing that really propelled me, as much as … I mean, I loved it and I was passionate, I wanted to be there, but as much as anything else, it was a teacher telling me I was never going to make it. I mean, I understood why he was saying that. He was saying that because I was writing music that was like Joni Mitchell, because that was somebody I loved listening to.

However, she was an artist and I wasn’t. So, if you want to be a songwriter who wants to sell your songs, they were saying, “Well, you can’t be writing like her. You have to write more generically,” in the sense that many people could cover the song, basically. But I took that as to say, “Well, if he thinks my lyrics are Joni Mitchell-ish,” which is what he said, to me, that means I got some talent, and now I just need to learn how to harness it to do it in the way that he thinks that will make it successful.

[11:34] Rachel: Well, don’t we experience that in the online world, right? We hire people or we buy courses, or we do all these things, who we think the experts are going to tell us what we need to do. Sometimes, we may either don’t finish the course, or we say like, “Hey, this isn’t fitting me. It doesn’t fit the way I want to interact in the world, the way I want to be and show up in the world.” I had a similar experience, I was just writing about it in community college, in that I needed to go back to work because I was in poverty and I was a single mom. He says, “If you quit now, you’re not going to ever go back.” In my mind, in that moment, I said, “You don’t know me and you don’t get to determine my future.”

I think it becomes this determination of not always thinking that everyone else knows what’s best for you. I mean, when you market in the online world, they’re like use money, sex, or relationship, or weight loss, like those are the things. Well, that isn’t always true to my style. So, I just have kind of grown-up bucking the system the whole time. Like, that’s why I do what I do the way I do It.

[12:52] Ellen: Yeah, I think you have to be somebody who bucks the system to be unique in a sense. But then the other side of it is I found, for me, I’ll usually find something, if I take a course and I can go, “This isn’t for me,” there’s usually something that I can get out of it anyway.

Rachel: Absolutely.

Ellen: Or, like I was listening to somebody, they were saying, “You have to do one-on-one first before you can do groups because groups are harder to fill.” Well, I did groups and one-on-one simultaneously right from the beginning. Yeah, I agree in a sense that it can be harder to fill, but there are easy ways to fill them, you just get joint venture partners.

Rachel: Well, Right. There’s always like you have to find a way that it fits you.

[13:38] Ellen: Right. You have to find the way, absolutely. You have to find the way that fits you and that you’re comfortable with. But what that makes for me, I’m a lifetime learner anyway, but sometimes, I have to like put a lid on it because I want to listen to everybody and hear, “Okay, what’s their way of doing it? What’s their take? How do they do this?” and then I can just go down the rabbit hole and not get any work done, so I have to …

Rachel: Well, I think, that’s the kind of like the, I don’t want to say danger, but that is a possibility because we believe that if we know one more thing or if we find out, and if you are an eternal learner, like you and like me, there comes a point and it’s the same thing with video. I mean, women fear the judgment of themselves and others. They fear rejection. They fear not being relevant. They fear all of those things, and what has to happen is you have to put your blinders on and trust yourself.

[14:34] Rachel: I think you also … once you do, at least, get the courage to do it a little bit, you’ll find that most people are much easier on you than you are on yourself.

Rachel: Right.

Ellen: Yeah. That’s amazing actually.

Rachel: I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some haters, for sure. But I mean like online, when I’m on live and they’re heckling me and all that, but it becomes less about them and more about why I’m here.

Ellen: Well, yeah, and when you realize that when people are like that, they’re hating themselves and they’re projecting and all that, it gets easier to just ignore them, I think.

[15:08] Rachel: Right, and some people would say like, “Oh, like just realize that and change your mindset,” but it doesn’t move that way through the body. So those are-

Ellen: Yeah, right. Well, the other thing for me is that I’ve just set up my Facebook where people are like that, I try very hard not to connect with them in the first place, but if I happen to connect with them, I just get rid of them really fast. I just won’t tolerate any of that. I just … yeah.

[15:31] Rachel: It’s the beauty of video, and one of the things is that you automatically attract or repel the people that really enjoy what you are doing, what you’re saying in your message. It’s almost immediate. Like, “She gets me. They understand,” whatever, or “No, she’s not for me, I’m gone,” and they just move on. So, that’s like one of the most efficient ways I found to gather my peeps and attract the people that want to be seen and heard.

Ellen: So, do you have any specific tips for people doing videos, since you’re a video strategist?

Rachel: Well, the number one tip is that it has to be in alignment with your strengths and how you want to interact in the world. Just like you’re giving the example of you have to do one-on-one first, then you do groups, you also hear the opposite: you have to do groups first and then, because then you make all the money doing groups.

But if you’re not aligned with the way you’re doing video, for instance, following a script, a lot of people get hung up on the script because they try and follow it versus a guide where you’re free forming a lot of it, but you have your points. Each one is different and to do things that are in alignment with your strengths and the way you want to interact.

[17:00] Ellen: I’m so glad and lucky that I started when it was teleseminars and not video, because I can remember in the beginning I did scripts. I mean, I would write out full scripts and I would read the scripts, and then as I got more and more confident, then it came down to more bullet points, and eventually just feeling like, “I know this inside and out.”

I remember, I mean, I don’t remember the exact day, but I remember there was a point at which I had created quite a following and, all of a sudden,  I did a webinar, I guess, an audio, webinar, and a whole bunch of people said, “Oh, God, you’ve gotten so much better at this.” It goes back to that thing of you have to be willing to do it badly before you can do it well, and the problem is that’s way harder to do in video. I mean, you feel much more vulnerable than I did in audio because it’s easier to hide.

[17:59] Rachel: Well, yeah, that’s exactly true. A lot of the clients, a lot of the women that I’m working with and that follow me, it is about allowing yourself to be seen in those vulnerable moments and upping your risk tolerance. How do we up the risk tolerance and unattached from the outcome that’s coming, but knowing that this is our place to be?

Ellen: Yeah, well, that’s what I just did … Well, by the time this one comes out, it’ll probably be like a month or two back, but while we’re recording this, I had just done a podcast on risk tolerance. Just looking back at my own journey and seeing the risks that we took, and some of them that were stupid and that we shouldn’t have ever taken and other ones that were the right ones to take and how you should be more discerning than we were. I was so naïve, I didn’t even know what I didn’t know, or I didn’t even know how to go about saying, “Well, is this a risk that’s worth taking, or is it too dangerous? That never occurred to me. I was one of those people who would just jump off the cliff and that was a really hard lesson because it took me about ten years to recover from jumping off the cliff one too many times.

[19:24] Ellen: It’s kind of like having that ability of knowing and it’s trusting yourself, like tapping into that wiser part of yourself and taking a moment to do that.

Yeah, and listening to it, I mean, we bought this house and to this day I go back and I go, “I don’t understand what the hell I was thinking.” I remember somebody wanted me to go in with them and buy this house and I said, “I’m not going to buy a house in this market for $700,000,” and then we turned around and we bought one for $625,000 and we put all of our life savings into it, right into the 2008 recession, and lost everything. It was like … it was just weird because I was like … and then we were thinking about backing out and my husband’s gut was, “Let’s just lose the $18,000,” and I let the realtor bully me.

She said, “I’ve never had anybody back out of a deal and you’re not going to be the first,” and I let her bully me into staying in the deal. Boy, that was a huge lesson for, especially, again, as a woman, feeling like you have to please everybody else instead of doing what’s right for you. I would never do that today. That was a hard lesson.

[20:38] Rachel: Yeah. Those are really hard lessons and it’s really about, again, coming back to you first. I’ve been bullied online for this kind and in my videos. In fact, one time, this guy said to me, “It’s all about you, you, you,” and exactly that’s right. It is about me. This is my life and when I am in caring for myself and allowing myself to interact, that’s the more I can do for other people. So, yes, that is right. This is my life and this is what I’m going to do to be able to live it in a way that I want to. So, it’s really being firm in yourself.

Ellen: Oh, a lot of people don’t even know what they want. For a long time, I didn’t really know what I wanted. Also, as you get older, sometimes doors close. It’s like, you can want something and it doesn’t always work out, and then what do you do?

[21:39] Rachel: Well, what I would do, let’s say, “Okay, well, is this door really closed and what do I want instead if it is? Like, what is my next move? Why is it closed? Did I see some …?” I mean, like I do that self-analysis. But sometimes, when we’re specifically talking as women and self-analysis, we can get into the detriment and go down this rabbit hole, and we need to shut the cover on the rabbit hole because sometimes it has absolutely nothing to do with us, like you’ve mentioned before, and yet sometimes it does.

So, it’s really how we … again, it goes back to me knowing how I want to interact in the world and being the woman I want to be at any given moment by removing external stimulants to have me feel the way that I want to feel. I don’t rely on my audience to make me feel good about what I do on video. So, those are kind of the things.

[22:43] Ellen: Well, then how do you balance between feeling good about things when you know you’re doing the right thing, but maybe you don’t enjoy doing the right thing?

Rachel: Well then, does it really feel good? That would be my question.

Ellen: Well, because a lot of times, what I’ll see is the idea that people have a certain goal, but they’re not enjoying their day-to-day while they’re trying to get to that goal. Does that make sense?

Rachel: Yeah. So, it’s looking back at the influences or the situations that have you believing that, that is the one way to get the goal. Like there’s multiple paths to the same fantastic outcome. Like there’s not just one path, but we get in our own way by thinking, “This is the path. This is how it has to be.” If we go back to your initial question about money, that’s because women believe this is what they’re worthy of. We have a limitation on ourselves and that can get blown out of the water if we entertain and play with the possibility of something different and allowing ourselves to feel into that something different.

[24:00] Ellen: Well, I think the other piece of it too, is there’s that fine line between listening to the experts and listening to yourself. It’s like they do have experience possibly that you don’t have, but at the same time you have to do what feels right for you. So, it’s kind of a…

Rachel: Right, so if you find that balance about how do I know something is a little bit off. “Okay, I have this feeling, it’s not feeling exactly right. Okay, what is that? How do I meld it because I know I need this information.” So, women know that they want to be on video. They know that it is the number-one way and the fastest way to grow the like, know, and trust factor in your audience. Yet things keep them from being on video. Oftentimes, “Well, I don’t know how the tech and I don’t know this,” and that’s usually not ever the real issue, because anyone can find out, I mean, look at YouTube. It’s like this plethora of nothing but tutorials. So, we can find that stuff out. It’s what’s underneath that then really stops us.

[25:07] Ellen: Well, I want to go back to the emotion thing for a minute. So, I had an experience last weekend … well, it wasn’t the weekend, but it was like a three-day event. In that three-day event … I had gone through a virtual event with this expert before and so I expected it to be similar. As I was going through it, a lot of the content was similar, but there were a few things that were different, and I guess I was different because I saw different things in myself that I hadn’t seen before.

When the whole thing was over, all of a sudden, I got this really stiff neck. I was like, I had a crying jag. I was like freaking out. I mean, it was … So, it was like on some level something was getting triggered. But at first, I mean, I didn’t really know exactly what it was or why it was becoming psychosomatic, so to speak. So, I’m curious for you to speak to that.

Rachel: So give me a little bit more. What about that?

Ellen: Well, sometimes I’ll get blindsided by something where I don’t realize that I’m reacting to something, and then all of a sudden my body freaks out.

[26:31] Rachel: Yeah. Because this is the primal body first kind of thing. You don’t know what it is, but your body is now communicating with you because the emotions are somehow stuck in your body, or you have a trigger that you may not remember the memory, but your body tells you, “I’m unsafe,” or “I don’t know how to process,” or, “This is something that’s disturbing to me..” So then we have an emotional response, and then after the emotional response, because when the body is in that state, you’re going into your brainstem in that flight, fight or freeze phase, and your prefrontal cortex can’t do the logical thinking. So, your body moves you through that so then your brain can say, “What is this about?”

Ellen: Oh, I see.

Rachel: But these are things that have just been covered up or have been shoved down so far, and because of maybe the work that you’ve done, they’re able to come up and the brain is saying, “I’m ready to process this.”

[27:36] Ellen: Ah, okay.

Rachel: So those are some of the things that can happen, and it happens on video, too. It’s the same situation that when these things happen, or you’re on video and you freeze, you go into the brainstem, because the body say, “Something is wrong. No one’s responding. No one’s logging on. I’m sitting here talking to myself for half an hour. What am I going to do? No one’s going to watch this.” You’d go down that rabbit hole and your body starts freezing up. So, then you get triggered and then you say, “Okay, I need to calm my body, calm my mind,” and then I can go into the prefrontal cortex and really see what’s happening here. But you have to have the two connected.

[28:18] Ellen: Okay, well, good stuff. So, any final tips?

Rachel: So, I would say if you are someone who is struggling to push that live button, it’s really finding out what is the self-judgment that maybe you’re doing and finding out who you can get support from, whether it’s free or paid, it doesn’t matter. Just find some of that, and then dare to play with the possibility that everything will be okay.

[28:54] Ellen: Everything will be okay. You know what? Even if it’s not okay, it’ll still be okay.

Rachel: Well, what’s okay is okay. You know what I mean? Like whatever happens, it’s Okay. It’s okay.

Ellen: Yeah. So, how can people reach you?

[29:08] Rachel: So, you can find me everywhere on social media, @RachelFreemonSowers, including on YouTube. You can go to my website, RachelFreemonSowers.com.

Ellen: This has been great, and for everyone listening, Rachel also has some informative videos to learn more that you can watch at the Rachel Freemon Sowers live show on YouTube, and we’ll put the information on the podcast page.

Before we go I have some exciting announcements!

First I’m going to be presenting at the Marketing to Boost Your Lead Generation and Sales Summit with over 28 top experts and influencers (myself included) who will share how to produce passive profits, attract new ideal clients, market smart online, and boost your sales and the link to register will be on the
podcast page.

Also, we had to change the dates for the next 5 Day Bestseller Breakthrough Challenge so it’s now July 26-30^th

In the challenge, I walk you through how to find the best topic for your book, how to pick the best market for you to write for, how to find out what your market wants to buy, how to position your book so your ideal clients scream, “I want this one,” and how to create your book outline in minutes. The information to register for that will also be on the podcast page, which is still booksbusinessabundance.com/podcast

But….We’re rebranding, this is going to become the Books Open Doors Podcast and we’ll be moving to Books Open Doors.com/podcast so be sure to make a note of that.
Right now you can get to the podcast at Books Business Abundance.com/podcast
or through the link at Books Open Doors.com/ podcast.as we work on it.

So, that’s it for today. Again, it’s https://booksopendoors.com/podcast. So, till next time, Bye-bye.

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