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What sets this podcast apart? We believe in the power of meaningful marketing—a holistic approach that prioritises authenticity, connection, and purpose, whilst still turning a profit.
Chantal Gerardy is an International Award Winning Marketing Strategist who empowers purpose-led businesses to revolutionise their online marketing approach and create a brand that resonates deeply with their online audience. If you're tired of cookie-cutter marketing advice, and seek strategies that truly make a difference, this podcast is for you.
If you are a business owner feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or struggling to cut through the noise online? We've got your back!
Our podcast is tailored for entrepreneurs hungry for clarity, confidence, and tangible results in their online marketing. Our podcast isn't just about boosting sales; it's about creating an efficient marketing machine that reflects your values, passion and purpose. Whether you're stuck or looking to maximise your marketing, we're here to guide you every step of the way.
Our episodes dive deep into practical skills, customer-generating strategies, and streamlined systems to help you thrive without relying on paid ads. From mastering social media, creating content that converts, ranking on google, getting your website to work, lead list building and email marketing, each episode is packed with tips and techniques to help you thrive online.
Join me each week as we explore management and monetisation online marketing strategies designed to reduce your time online while increasing your impact. With our guidance, you'll align your business and marketing team more closely, ensuring every effort moves you towards growth. From overcoming challenges to seizing opportunities, each episode is packed with actionable advice to help you thrive in the world of online marketing and effective management.
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Hey, this is Chantal Gerardy and welcome to another episode of the Meaningful Marketing Podcast. Today, I am super, super excited to be sharing with you something that I know is going to support and help business owners that are struggling managing their own marketing and managing their businesses. As a marketing coach, as a consultant, over the last 10 years, I often see the stress, the burnout, the fear, the anxiety, the overwhelm.
That business owners experience inside their businesses. And that's me too. Over the many years of me being a business owner, which is probably about 30 years, I've always had my own businesses. I have had ongoing issues with having to manage, you know, my mood, my stress. And I'm fortunate enough to have an holistic background.
So I always do focus on, you know, good eating, good sleep, exercise. These are things that I spend a lot of time with. And over the many years, I've also spent a lot of time doing personal development and I do consider myself to be spiritual as well. Having tried many, many, many modalities and, you know, exploring many different things and watching my clients go through a lot and experience different things in their lives and different therapies in their lives.
and me with my curious nature of looking at how it works and what's been working and not working and how people seem to be reacting to these things. I know that I am incredibly passionate about being able to learn more, so that I can better support my clients. So over the many years, obviously I invest in coaches myself and I invest in my own training and , I've done my NLP training, I've done my hypnosis training, I have, been to a lot of therapists in my life as well and experimented with a whole lot of different types of modalities to be able to curb and control this manic mind.
Over the last couple of years, of course, then it's this whole perimenopausal type thing, going into menopause and going, you know, is it perimenopause? Is it menopause? Is it just stress? Is it burnout? You know, what is this thing? To then looking at going, well, you know, how do you actually continue to curb the stress and how do you get in touch with your body and know what is actually going on?
So, you know, going to naturopaths and having a look at it, looking at alternative therapies, looking at ways to. To continually empower yourself and, and be the best business owner that you can be with a thriving, with a thriving attitude, and a healthy wellbeing. So, you know, again, in the last couple of years, probably in the last two years, I've probably spent a lot of time.
really, really, really dealing with, you know, what is this thing trauma? What is trauma? How trauma affects the body? And looking at, you know, how can I, for myself, deal with this thing? And it was the weirdest thing. But over Christmas eve, this thing popped up and it was trauma coaching course and I don't know why but I went you know what I'm just going to give this thing a crack and just add this to my repertoire because I want to know about this more for myself but I also want to be able to support the business owners that I work with as well because when I'm overwhelm and stress and fear and anxiety takes over you.
You cannot be clear on what you're doing. You cannot have clarity. You cannot be creative. You become reactive. You don't become, you know, you stop being proactive. So, so I signed up for this course and I can tell you now that, it's been one of the most exciting and revelating things for me. So I'm going to be talking a little bit about that today.
because I honestly feel that it is something business owners can do and it's an immediate fix. So it's one of those things that if you are feeling that you are riddled with stress, anxiety, fear, and overwhelm, and anger, and anxiety, and you're immediately feeling like that, and you feel like you're not coping, or your brain is, you know, running at a thousand miles an hour.
It's something that you can do. There's, there's 11 different things that I can, you know, that I can share with you today, which will show you that you can immediately do and it's immediately going to make you feel better. But not only that, it's going to help you tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day feel better.
So, complete disclaimer here, I have not completed my trauma coaching cert yet, and everything that I'm sharing with you right now is just my own personal experience, the own therapies and things that I've done over the years myself, and from various different modalities and things that I've tried out, and this is something that has been, straight away for me was a massive aha thing, and straight away for me, felt good, feels good.
and works instantly. And for me, it has absolutely helped me so much. Over the last years, as I said, with the perimenopause and then the menopause, and me always looking to, you know, natural ways to be able to deal with these things. Then the other thing that came up was, do I have, Undiagnosed ADHD or do I have adult onset of ADHD so I went down that whole road of exploring that as well Going you know is and I always think it's my superpower, right?
I've always said this and that's probably one of the reasons why I decided not to get a diagnosis is I went It is my superpower. I know who I am, but I also know the type of person. I want to be the type of communicator I want to be, the type of coach I want to be, and I want to have a level of control over my runaway brain.
I want to have a level of control over my stress and my anxiety, and when I get overwhelmed and my brain is just running away from me. So let me, let me get right into it. Let me get right into it. So if you're listening to this, you probably have experienced this and business owners do.
It's a completely normal thing. It's, it's not, there's nothing wrong with you. We all experience it at different times in our life. And as we get older, It compounds. It just compounds. It's like little things happen throughout your life, you know, obviously in your foundational years when you're growing up, right, and then as you grow and as you develop, more things happen and more triggers happen and more experiences in your life happen and all these little things kind of compound, and start to affect your neurosystem.
And then it can feel like you're not yourself anymore. And this is how I often felt. I was like, I don't understand. Like I'm doing my meditation. I'm doing my affirmations. You know, I'm doing, I'm listening to, you know, hypnosis recordings and, I'm seeing hypnotherapists and, but why is it sometimes that something happens and straight away, even though I know deep down, I know that I'm safe and everything's okay.
Why is my brain still Experiencing, stress, or threat, or goes into survival mode, or starts to react, and it starts to, you know, happen in your body as well, where you can't breathe, or you just want to cry, or, you know, and it affects you physically and mentally, and, and how, you know, why does this happen, when deep down I felt like, this is ridiculous, why am I even feeling like this, like I don't even really believe that or think that, but why is this happening inside of my body, and that is why I, Mhm.
Absolutely love what I'm going to share with you today. So, when stress, when overwhelm, fear, anxiety, anger, or burnout hits you, it can feel like your body and your brain has been hijacked. Your thoughts are kind of out of control and like I said, you can feel like you, know what is true and you know what you want to believe and you know how you want to think but all of a sudden the, you've just got a runaway brain.
That's the only way that I can kind of explain it. So again I'm just going to say to you I'm not a therapist, please speak to a professional, and get professional help if you're struggling with any of these things. This is all just my experience, and what I'm currently studying, and experiences that I've had with different therapies.
So for me it was just a horrible debilitating feeling. , and again, I can see this in my clients when they come to me and they're struggling with this. They want to work on their business, they're dedicated, they're committed, they're enthusiastic, and then all of a sudden, it's, it's, they have this runaway brain where, they're lacking clarity, lacking creativity, struggling to stay focused.
And again, it gets diagnosed as ADHD and, you know, menopausal or lack of sleep or whatever, so make sure that you are, you know, obviously taking care of all of those things and making sure that you are addressing any of those things should you had them. But when you're in that moment and it feels like, you know, your breath has been taken away, especially for me, it was always in my throat.
I felt like some, like I was being strangled. And it can manifest in different parts of your body. Obviously, it's unique for everyone. As I said, I'm not a specialist in, in this. But in the actual moment where you're experiencing this, and you're about to go and do a presentation, or you're about to, you know, work with your coach, or you're about to, do a podcast, And you're literally, your breath has been taken away and you're suddenly feeling overwhelmed and you've got feelings of grief or feelings of worthlessness or you're feeling helpless.
And your body is completely, you know, cramping up and, and you can't think. This, what I'm going to share with you today, this is going to help you to combat that feeling and give you a, and, and allow you to be more in control literally within minutes. of doing any one of these 11 things. And the bonus is, as I mentioned earlier, is that it's going to completely override your brain's thought tangents.
So your runaway brain, it's going to override it completely. So you can get back to feeling like the you, you, the you, you, because what is going on is just your nervous system that is It's going into survival mode and that isn't the you, you. It's the me versus the me, which is how I like to explain it.
So, you can literally do this. If you just trust me and do this stuff, you'll, you'll feel better. But as I said, speak to, speak to the professionals before you go ahead and, and try some of the stuff I'm sharing with you today. So if you want to feel like your true empowered self, I'm going to share with you some simple effective exercises that are going to help you to regulate the nervous system.
So it's immediately going to help you calm your mind immediately and then it's going to help you rewrite your brain's nervous response to stress. So it's going to these little wires that are kind of like wired the compounded wires over the course of the years that are going and are you know, runaway brain, thought tangents.
So when something happens you just go ar, this is going to straight away help you to settle that within minutes. And then on top of it, as every day goes by, if you continue to do these things, it will actually help you too. Feel more centered, feel more in control, and help you feel more calm and at ease.
And you'll have that clarity, you'll have that creativity, and you'll be, you'll be able to feel like yourself again. You will feel calm. You know, when someone cuts you off in traffic, you're, you're not going to get the shits. You know, if your kids go ballistic, you're gonna be so much more centred, it's, it's just gonna bounce off you, because those little wires, that nervous system now has been tamed.
So you've now improved your stress response to triggers. Okay, so let me get into it. These are the 11. As I said, please speak with a professional. I'm still in the middle of my course right now. So I'm not certified just yet.
But these are some of the things, that we've come up with. So number 1 is the 4 7 8 breathing method. So you inhale through your nose for 4 seconds. You hold your breath for seven seconds and then you exhale very slowly through your mouth for eight seconds like you're blowing through a straw. Now you can do this once, you can do it twice, you can do it ten times.
You could feel great just after doing this once, will immediately help you feel better. But if you do it a little bit more, it'll even make you feel even more better. So this technique activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is going to help you to calm your fight or flight response. So literally, if, you know, a dog comes out of the corner and, and barks and, and your nervous system goes up and reacts straight away, you can go into four, seven, eight breathing and.
One, two, three, four, five times, whatever. Straight away, even with one, you can straight away feel better. So number two is shaking it out. So just gently, so again, just gently being kind to your body. Stand there and gently shake your entire body. Your arms, your legs, your shoulders, and even your head. Just for one to three minutes.
You're literally going to shake, the stored, the stored tension inside your body and you're going to help to discharge the excess stress energy from your body. So just kind of like, you know, dance around a little bit, just kind of shake it out for one to three minutes, and, and shake it off. Number three is sighing or yawning or stretching.
So just take a deep inhale and release an audible sigh as you exhale. And then follow this with a nice big yawn, even if it's fake, because the feelings that you get will actually become real. You can stretch your arms overhead or out wide. And the reason we do this is that sighing and yawning will reset your nervous system, releasing the built up stress while stretching opens up any constricted areas inside your body.
So number four, and this is probably one of the easiest things that you can do, and I often find myself doing this in traffic or, You know, if somebody's kind of just tissed me off, I'll just walk away to the corner and I'll do this. And it literally is um ing, all right. So inhale deeply through your nose and as you exhale, chant along, um,
and let it vibrate inside your chest and hold it for as long as possible. So see how you can get that
for as long as possible so that it's the Excel that is so super, super important. And you can repeat this again, you can do it once, you can do it twice, up to five times. Every time you'll know straight away, you'll go, Oh my gosh, I suddenly feel amazing. It's like I can take on the world and people can come at me and I am going to be able to stand here and it's not going to impact me at all.
So why do we do this? Well, The vibrations of OM stimulate the vagus nervous system promoting relaxation and mental clarity. So again, this is a great thing to do just before you're about to go and get creative. So number five is tapping and clapping. So lightly tap and clap along your entire body. So if your hand is in a cup shape, you can start just gently Your head down, your shoulders, your arms, across your entire body, working yourself, working your way across your whole body, working down towards your feet.
So focus on any of the areas that feel tense. If you're feeling tense in your lower back, you know, just give it a little, a little, clapping sound. So I'll try and make the noise with my hands. Just gently capping with a, with a cupped hand all over the body. And the tapping helps to release the pent up energy and reconnects your body and your brain.
So, gently across your whole body including your head. So, number six is body awareness and breathing. So, just close your eyes and scan your body. Identify where you feel the stress or tension. So, example, oh, I've got a tightness in my chest or I've got a knot in my stomach. For me, it feels like someone's grabbing me in my throat.
Just acknowledge it, breathe into that area deeply, and then imagine the tension dissolving with every exhale. So again, try to inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth, keeping the exhale longer than the inhale. Now this increases mindfulness and emotional awareness, and it helps you process and release the stress.
This is a great activity to do first thing in the morning before you get up. So as you wake up in the morning, You literally check into the body, close your eyes, scan your body, and ask your body what's going on. What needs a little love today? So number seven is box breathing. So you can inhale through your nose for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, and hold for four seconds.
And I love to do four rounds of this. Literally, it just transforms how I'm feeling straight away. Now, box breathing helps regulate your breath and it calms your mind, creating an immediate sense of stability. Number eight is a butterfly hug. So cross your arms over your chest and gently tap your shoulders alternate, alternately left and right.
Breathe deeply as you tap. Why do we do this? Because the bilateral stimulation calms the nervous system and it's often used in trauma therapy when you cross the midline. So number nine is a grounding exercise which we call 5 4 3 2 1. So firstly, You're going to, for five, you're going to name five things that you can see.
For four, you're going to name four things you can touch. For three, you're going to name three things you can hear. For two, you're going to name two things that you can smell. And for one, you're going to name one thing that you can taste. Now why?
Because grounding helps pull you out of spiralling thoughts, and it brings you back into the present moment. So again, this is something you can do if you're at work, or if you're busy working. You can take yourself away to the bathroom, and you can simply do this 5 exercise to bring you back into the present moment.
It'll straight away Regulate your nervous system. Number 10 is gratitude listing. So you can just take some time to pause and list three to five things that you're grateful for right now. No matter how small they are. I'm grateful I have a roof over my head. I'm grateful the sun is shining. I'm grateful that I had a kind conversation with someone today.
The reason we do this is that gratitude shifts your mindset to focus on what's positive and it releases dopamine and improves your mood. Again, this is a fantastic exercise to do first thing in the morning. So first thing in the morning before you get out of bed, you can go scan your body. Send the body parts that need some love, some love, and then just start to list some of the things that you're grateful for before putting your feet onto the ground.
So number 11 is smile and laugh. This is something simply that you may have to fake initially to start with, but when you fake smile and you fake laugh, eventually, it'll start to become real. really tall and soften your shoulders and smile.
Again, even if it's fake, just fake a smile. Then try to laugh or even force a giggle. And maybe set a timer and try and do it for like a minute. Try and laugh for a minute and say, I'm really going to give this a crack for a minute. Because the more you try to do it, the more it'll start to naturally become a thing.
The other thing you could do is you could recall something that was funny or you can even go and watch a funny show. I always used to say, you know, put on some Netflix, watch a sad movie and cry. But I actually find that this works as well, is go watch a funny movie, just something stupid, funny, and just have a good laugh and a giggle because smiling and laughing, even artificially will release endorphins and oxytocin and it will help you improve your mood and reduce your stress.
Fake it until it becomes real, and it will. So once again, you know, these are general strategies to help you manage stress and regulate your nervous system. And, it is certainly not a substitution for professional medical or psychological advice. And if stress, anxiety, or overwhelm persists, please seek support from a qualified mental health professional.
Just remember, you are not your stress or your stress response. There is nothing wrong with you. It is compounded stress inside your body and your body is dealing with it. These tools are going to help you to shift from reactivity to intentionality. And it's going to give you the power to rewrite your brain's response and thrive.
And you can repeat these as often as needed. Even if you just hang on to one or two of them and give them a shot, whether or not you want to start from one and go down to 11, you want to mix them up. We'll just do one at a time. Just do something and immediately you're going to feel amazing. So challenges on the next time you're feeling stressed, overwhelmed, burnt out.
You find yourself angry and reactive and, moody. And you feel like. You're just not coping. Try one of these exercises and please send me a DM, send me a PM, send me an email, let me know which one you did, because obviously the feedback would be amazing for our audience. Let me know what works for you.
, if you tried it, how it worked, I cannot wait to hear how this is going to help support you. And once again, This is going to help you go from survival mode to thrive mode within minutes whilst cultivating your future coping skills. And I can tell you this, it will cultivate future coping skills.
You will eventually have to do this less and less and less. Because every time you do it, it will compound and it will help you override all that stress response that is, happening. So that runaway brain, those runaway thoughts, the runaway stress and tension inside your body, the pain that's manifesting through your body, it will start to dissipate.
So give it a crack, let me know, send me a PM and let me know how it works for you. This is Chantal Girardi from the Meaningful Marketing Podcast, sending you love and letting you know that you are not alone, and this is not you. This is just something that is happening to you right now, and you can have control over it.
Thanks for listening in. Meaningful Marketing is all about you making your marketing meaningful. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please hit that subscribe button. But subscribing means that you won't miss out on future episodes all about marketing and motivation. Stay inspired, stay focused, and make your marketing meaningful.