e047 – Emotional Alchemy with Leisse Wilcox

This Episode is the first of a very special series of episodes featuring our wonderful panel of speakers at our upcoming Boss Mama Retreat. For more information about how to join us in person for a beautiful day filled with joy and inspiration, check us out here.   Leisse Wilcox is a professional human and real-life adult who helps women find clarity in what they want, confidence in who they are, and the courage to stay true to both. A passionate speaker, writer, coach, podcast host, taco enthusiast, and mom of three, her entire experience has been about coming home to her truest self, and to call herself “beloved.” Through lots of life lessons learned, Leisse taught herself to turn difficult and ugly into something purposeful and beautiful, using a process she calls “Emotional Alchemy.” Leisse genuinely believes that changing the world starts by making the changes we want to see within ourselves, first. When we find true clarity, confidence, and courage, we start a ripple effect that makes huge waves in the world around us. Leisse's work is centred on giving people permission to be their authentic selves. There are so many stories that are told about us that we internalize. There are so many things that can happen to a person that could tank their identity. We choose to carry the burdens of other experiences and transmuting them into something that is truly and uniquely our own. For Leisse, her battle with breast cancer and subsequent double mastectomy and chemo treatment was the spark that lit her drive to change the negative into the positive. Looking back at the trauma from her life, she took a simple mindset shift and made those ugly uncomfortable experiences have better meaning and purpose in her life. We need to take the negative experiences and turn them into the positive in our lives. We cannot control the experiences, but we can control how much power we give them in our lives. We can feel the ugly, hard feelings, but we don't have to live there. By naming your feelings you don't have to feel isolated and burdened by them. You are giving yourself permission to sit in the feelings, it shifts you back into the driver's seat and you can control the path the feelings take you. When you examine the triggers and your current state, you can direct where the feelings take you. We are constantly bombarded with messaging that we are not enough. We are marketed towards not being enough, not having enough. Our loved ones can reverberate the message that we are not doing enough. We are surrounded by negative. They have their own perception of us and we carry these heavy messages. When our brain identifies with truth, it clings to that truth and does what it can to remain in the known truth. We begin to attract the negative to keep us in the truth we believe when we believe in the negative. But when we choose to change our truth, we start to consciously attract the things we want to be surrounded with. As a parent, when we reflect on our own negative experiences we start to see the patterns of the issues we had in childhood. By identifying and being conscious of how we thought about growing up, we can reflect on the attitudes we want our children to reflect. When we support their voices and autonomy, we give them the identity they need to own their own truth, and strength and emotional maturity needed to protect their truth. Children want to be seen and heard, and they want permission to be themselves without the fear of rejection or isolation. These are universal traits of the human experience. Our children want the same thing we do as adults. It is important to slow down and let our children direct their own lives. Our kids don't have to be how we want them to be, as long as they can belong to the group in a compassionate, kind way. Our job is to teach them how to act in those ways.