Jen:
Hey team, welcome to the MumSafe Movement podcast. My name's Jen Dugard, and I'm very excited to be bringing you today my very first solo episode. So I feel like all eyes are on me, which of course they are. And today I wanna talk to you about understanding your whole life values.
So a little bit of a backstory before I jump in. I grew up in the UK. and I was a gymnast. I spent many many hours up until the age of about 14, 15 in the gym. I've been a long time goal setter and I can be really really really focused into what I want to do getting shit done. I also had for a really long time a very masculine yeah get shit done kind of older which I have done since then. I will push myself, I'll work till 11 o'clock at night, I'll fall asleep at my computer, I'll get up in the morning, I'll go train, I'll go train other people and I'll you know do whatever it takes in order to be whatever successful is or feels like within my business. So I really really for probably the first oh my goodness seven, eight years, even maybe more in my business, I was driven by what I thought success was supposed to look like.
So it was for me in a fitness business, it was stepping out of the business, working on the business, not in the business. It was financial success, so having all the financial goals. It was very, very ego-driven, and what does it look like from the outside? in order to, for other people to think that I'm successful, potentially even more than me feeling like I was successful on the inside. But things kind of change for me. I'm a big, I love the work of Brene Brown. So if you've not ever read any of her books, I would highly, highly recommend them. Start with Daring Greatly, which is not a business book. And then she also has a book. called Dare to Lead, which was an absolute game changer in the way that I do business and I do life now.
So I've moved very much from the space of get shit done at all costs, to understanding my whole life values, what that looks like and how that needs to frame and shape. who I am in business and what success looks like to me. So one of the first things that I did when I started to understand my life values was to not to stop segmenting my life. So I used to be really good at going to work, doing the work, coming home. Actually, I'm gonna say I was good at segmenting the life, but I think that work infiltrated everything that I did. What I was good at is focusing on work. a lot. I also, a few years ago, a good few years ago now, Ben and I, my husband and I separated and that actually enabled me to segment my life even more because what it meant was that when I was with my kids, I was with my kids and when my kids were with him, then I could work solely on the business and do even more than I would do normally. Now, when I wrote my book back in 2013, I got up at 3 a.m. every day for 30 days and wrote a thousand words a day. Now I joke around and say you can do anything for 30 days and I still kind of believe that. I can still push myself out of my comfort zone. But what I know is that kind of concentrating on work all the time is not completely sustainable.
Also as a personal trainer, I definitely went through, fitting my life into what my clients wanted. So if they wanted to train at 9am, I would train at 9am. If they wanted to train at 6 o'clock in the morning, they would train at 6 o'clock. I would train at 6 o'clock in the morning. If their schedule meant that it didn't fit my schedule, I would adapt my schedule based upon what I thought that I should be doing in order to be giving as much as possible to my clients and to be as busy and as full as possible. Little did I know that you don't have to do it that way. You can set boundaries and I've learned that a lot over the last few years. And I really do business and life in a very, very different way now. So when I start to think about values and when I talk my clients through understanding their whole life values, we talk about different life areas.
So I talk about family and relationships, not including your partner. So family and relationships, health and fitness, business. spirituality, leisure time, personal development, financial and love and romance. Now, I know for a lot of people that the love and romance, we just expect that shit to work. It doesn't if you don't put the effort in, but anyway, more on that another time. And when I look at those, how many life areas? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight different life areas, what I do is go through a process of understanding how they currently show up. in my life. So way back when the business component would have absolutely been number one. Probably number two was health and fitness because if I wasn't working, I was training. Maybe after that it would be family and relationships in terms of my children. There might have been some leisure time. Personal development was up there quite high. Love and romance was definitely at the bottom of the list, rightly or wrongly. But in order to start to understand how our business... can operate in service of our whole life values, we first need to understand how we're prioritising our life.
So now I would say business is still very, very high on my agenda, but so is family and relationships, love and romance, personal development. I feel like it's a lot more balanced now, and I actually don't believe in balance. I believe life comes in cycles, business comes in cycles. You're never gonna hit that perfect. you know, everything is working. We're gonna go through waves and seasons and through some waves. And like right now for me, we're in the launch of MumSafe. Business is quite high on the agenda, but what I've done is stripped out a lot of the other things. I actually, I was training for a marathon. I've pulled that back to a half marathon. I kind of understand how I need to balance things out and I'll take a holiday or spend some time with my family off the end of the launch period. So. We're going to come up and down in cycles. But what's really important to understand is, is one of our life values always, sorry, one of our life areas always being left behind? Or are we consistently out of balance, like I was a number of years ago in business, always being at the top? and love and romance being at the bottom. I wanted to think that financial was up there, but I really wasn't taking a whole lot of notice of my finances, so that definitely wasn't in alignment. So yeah, check in with those different life areas. You could even write them down, listen to it again, write them down and rank them from one to eight and see which of those life areas you feel like are in alignment or your priorities. prioritising at the moment and are there some of them that you would like to bring into alignment? Okay. Next up, we start to think about our actual life values. Now, your life values, I believe, are your true north. So you can go through a process of understanding your life values. In fact, what I might do is I have a worksheet called Heartfelt Goal Setting. I might put that into the show notes so you can actually download that sheet and you can go through a process. of understanding what your top life values are. So that process looks like, you know, there's a bunch of words on a page and you circle the words that really align with you. And then we take it down a little bit more and we draw some lines and we go, which words are like the other words and which are the overarching words. Anyway, through going through that process myself, my two overarching life values are courage and connection. And when I think about when I understood that they were my life values and what I chose to do next, it really, really shaped my path moving forward. So for example, connection and courage have to show up in every one of my life areas. Otherwise I start to feel what I call trigger feelings. So for me, my trigger feelings are things like resentment, yelling at my kids, I know that's not really a feeling, but that's an action. If I'm, if I'm completely out of alignment in my business space, I'm not able to connect with my kids properly. And I start yelling at them at the end of the day, and they don't even know what's going on. And it's all got to do with the fact that I've allowed business to get too much and too full on that's taken me out of alignment with my value of connection with my children. So then I have to have the courage. And that's where the other value comes in. I have to have the courage. to change something in my business space. And one of the things that I did for quite some time, it's kind of gone off the radar for a little while, is only having two meetings per week. So I had to have the courage in my business to go, oh no, sorry, I've got two meetings booked in this week, I'm not available, can we do that next week or the week after? Or hey, I'm not available for the next eight weeks, because what I needed to make sure was that I was in alignment. with my value of connection with my children on a daily basis. And if work was getting in the way because I've got too many meetings and then I've not got time to do the things that I wanna do or I need to do to keep moving me forward in my business, I had to change something. So other trigger feelings for me are anxiety. I can start to feel really anxious about what I'm, yeah, just anxious in general. I can't sleep. I can't, you know, I feel off for the day. Depression creeps in now and again, but not as much as it did when I was younger. So really resentment is a really, really, really big one for me. And if I'm so, if I'm feeling resentful towards something in work, then again, I need to change that as well. So to give you an example of how courage and connection really, really shaped the way that I moved forward in my business. So I was running group exercise sessions in Centennial Park. for 10 years. And I was also running early morning training sessions in a small studio and somebody else was taking my children to school. So at the time it worked for me because I was compartmental in my life, like I said before, and I felt like I needed to escape my kids because it was hard. And I figured that if I was going to work, that was a valid reason to not be there with them in the morning, somebody else can take them to school. And for a while that worked really well until I started to feel like I was really missing out on that time with my children, the time in the morning, the time taking them to school. I didn't want to look back and go, I just didn't ever, ever do that with my children. So what started to come into my awareness was that my value of connection with my children was out of alignment because I was starting to feel... resentment that somebody else was doing the part of their life that I now wanted to do. So I then had to draw on the courage component of my life values to go, what does that look like? How am I going to change things within my business in order to get back in alignment with connection with my children and still be fulfilled in my business? So what I did to begin with as I stopped doing all early morning training sessions. And that took a lot of courage, a lot of courage, because there was a lot of income that came from training clients early in the morning before going to the park. I would train clients from 5.30 till 8.30, I'd go have breakfast and I'd be in the park from 9.30 till lunchtime. And that was the core part of my, I guess, my day. So initially, I stopped training my clients first thing in the morning. Then what happened after that was we went through a few tricky bit of a tricky period with my daughter and I would be dropping her off at school so doing what I really wanted to do but she didn't want to go to school so I'd be trying to leave her push her through the gates of the school and she just did not want to leave so I was under pressure because I needed to leave the school gates by nine o'clock to be at the park by 9 15 to be then running my session by 9 30 and if we had a terrible morning where she didn't want to go to school. I was then pushing either pushing her to go or someday she would end up at the park with me. But what I didn't have was the time to truly connect with her and give her what she needed in order to get her into her school day in a more, a less stressful way. So I started to feel out of alignment again with that, um, the value of connection. And what I needed to do was figure out how I was going to be able to give my daughter more time. evolve into the next stage of my business. So I actually decided that I wanted to sell my group exercise sessions for mums. I think I had that in mind a while ago and I'd already started building Safe Return to Exercise, which is my pre and postnatal certification, but the certification definitely wasn't at the point where it was creating enough income in order for me to just simply stop working in Centennial Park with the mums that I absolutely loved. I had side note also started to think that I didn't want to stand outside in the park, you know, when I was 45, when I was 50. So in my brain, I had to start to think about where I was going to go next, what I was going to do and how I was going to evolve my business to the next stage of what it looked like in my fitness journey. So I started to concentrate on, so the courage piece there was, okay, I'm going to sell my business. I need to find the right person to sell it to. And I also need to start to raise the income in my certification. So do more certifications, run more courses so that I then over time had the option to stop running my training sessions in the park and step into being there more for my daughter in the morning and then into the next evolution of my fitness business. And that took a lot of courage. So I hope what you're getting from this is my values consistently. help me to see where I'm on course or where I'm off course and then help to guide me to the next stage. So that process actually took me quite a while. And both my kids, you know, there was times where I would, I wasn't available on a Saturday morning, the kids would say, you know, can you come do this thing? And I'd say, no, but I would also say to them, give me six months, give me 12 months. This is what I need to do right now. I understand that this isn't working for me and it's also not working for you. but I have a plan and they, the cool thing about this too, is they got to see me execute the plan that meant mom stopped doing that thing in her business and started doing a new thing, which I think is a really good learning lesson for our kids because they get to see that they can shape the future of their world as well as, yeah, as well as me doing what I needed to do for my family. So I spent the next 12 months searching for the right person. and also understanding my numbers within my fitness business. So I knew that Body Beyond Baby earned a certain amount of income. I knew that Safe Return to Exercise earned another amount of income and my job over the next six to 12 months while I was searching for that right person, it was to bring that financial income into not quite alignment, but to the point where I kind of went, if I have more time and I now strip my group training sessions away, I can now concentrate on growing. safe return to exercise and also what came to fruition around that time was what was known as the Body Beyond Baby affiliate team, which is now what's known as Mumsafe. So I was consistently thinking about what was happening in all my life areas, what was happening, especially with my family, how I was feeling and reflecting back on that and going, is what I'm doing now in alignment with my whole life values or is one part of my life superseding everything else to the point at which it's making me feel a way that I don't want to feel ongoing. And I say that with not hesitancy, but it's really important that we understand that once we recognize we're out of alignment with our values, that we go through a process of moving into the next stage. What I have seen is people before go, I'm out of alignment with my values. I'm just going to stop doing what I'm doing. Now that's all well and good. If you've got another income stream or you don't... You know, you don't rely on your income stream as a family, but for the majority of people, it's not so easy as to go, I'm out of alignment with my values. I'm just simply gonna stop doing that thing, unless it's a boundaries thing, maybe that's different. But if it's a business decision, there's gonna need to be a period of projection into the future, looking at what that next business or evolution of your business looks like, to then start that. that tipping, start the phasing in of one thing, phasing out of another to bring you into alignment with your values to then step fully into that thing that is going to move you to the next level and hopefully remove a lot of those trigger feelings. I hope that that creates some clarity for you guys around how I use my values to step out of that. part of my business and then into the next. I've also used it, it also became very apparent. So once I had sold Body Beyond Baby, I started running Safe Return to Exercise. We were delivering pre-COVID, we were delivering courses all around the country. And it meant that I was traveling for a weekend a month, pretty much. Now that was all well and good and it was fun in the early days. And then, and then this new part of my business that I created started to shift in the way that I was feeling. in terms of when I had to leave my kids every weekend. Now I love travel and I love presenting, but I wasn't feeling particularly great about leaving the kids on a Friday, getting back to them on a Sunday, going straight back into the week. So what I had started to think about after about a year, 18 months of traveling to do that every, or once one weekend a month, I'd started to go, okay, what does the evolution of safe return to exercise look like for me in terms of travel? And my plan was to slowly train up safe return to exercise master trainers and have a master trainer in every state across Australia and one in New Zealand, so that I could step out of doing safe return to exercise and they could present the course in their state. Now, of course, COVID came along. I thought I had another year of travel in me. COVID came along, we quickly switched to a virtual arrangement and that problem kind of went away. We still trained up a couple of master trainers so that I actually share the course. We split it between three of us and that works really well in terms of my energetic output and also bringing other people into the course so that it's not just me. So... making sure that it's scalable if it needs to be scalable, I can make decisions and again, I stay in alignment with my values. I think I said it at the beginning, but I'd like for you to think about your business and where you are right now, and to take some time to understand your whole life values. Because I think a lot of people are or can be, especially a lot of females in fitness, can be afraid of building a business that they feel trapped in. And they feel afraid of taking the next step into their, what may be the next evolution of their business because they're not sure if it's the right step. Now, when you have your values as your true North, you can never truly take the wrong step. You can take a step and the way that you feel when you take that step can give you some insight as to whether it was the right step for you or whether something's pulled you a little bit off track in your, I guess, in your mission to achieve the overarching thing that you want to achieve. And so every step of the way, when you're moving towards what it is that you wanna get done in the world, if you use your whole life values as your compass and as your guiding light, I believe you can never truly get off track because when you take that step back and you go, this just doesn't quite feel right. Something is not lighting me up. I'm feeling resentful. I'm feeling anxious. I'm feeling time poor. I'm feeling whatever the trigger feelings are for you. You then get to take a step back from the new thing that you've created in your business and look at how you've, how you're doing that thing and then choose if it was the right way. And if it's not, it's your fucking business and they're your rules. And you get to change whatever you want, any step of the way to then move towards the thing that you want to achieve in a slightly different way than you were doing it in the first place, or as you were doing it as you step forward. I spend a lot of time with fitness business owners, often again, female, so female fitness business owners that are looking after moms that really often happen to be moms and help them to undo the business that they've created that says serves everybody apart from themselves. And there's a lot of relief that comes when we do that. It takes a lot of courage and it takes understanding your values and having that deeper inner reason and knowledge of why you're dismantling something that you've created because everything that we create takes a lot of time and energy. But I really do find that for a lot of women, moms especially, it's a real big relief when they undo what they thought they should be doing and start to use their whole life values to truly create business that they have dreamed of and often support more moms in the process. And if you're listening to this episode and you're not a fitness business owner, but you are a human and maybe you're a mom and maybe things are pulling you in all sorts of different directions, using and understanding your whole life values can help absolutely anyone in any situation to start to make decisions that that come from the heart and come from. a deeper place than simply doing what you think you should be doing. I really hope that you've enjoyed my very first solo episode here on the MUM Safe Movement podcast. I'm gonna keep these episodes when it's just me chatting to about 20 to 30 minutes, which is what I've done today. I would absolutely love your feedback. If something that I've talked about today has resonated with you, please let me know. You can head over to Instagram, find me there, leave a review. rate the show, do all those things that you're supposed to do when you're a podcaster. I'm a podcaster now, how cool is that? And I very much look forward to bringing the next episode of the MomSaved Movement podcast to you. Have a beautiful day, understand your values, have the courage to get in alignment and create whatever it is that you truly want to create out in the world. Take care.
