Episode Summary
Finding our right work can be a journey. In our life, we may have had many jobs, explored many paths. What might it feel like to live your passion, to bring your full self to your work? If you listen very carefully, is your heart actually telling you which way to go?
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About the Show
Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.
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Full Transcript
Mandelberg: There's nothing about you that you've decided is true that you can't choose differently. If you're willing to get curious about all those decisions and conclusions you have about who you are or what you're capable of… curiosity is like the key to life.
Finding our right work can be a journey. In our life, we may have had many jobs, explored many paths. What might it feel like to live your passion, to bring your full self to your work? If you listen very carefully, is your heart actually telling you which way to go?
This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. There are so many rites of passage in our complex, multi-faceted lives. Birthdays, weddings, new jobs, relationships starting and ending. One rite of passage we haven’t spent much time on yet is finding our right work, starting a business venture that comes from the heart.
You might already have such a business venture,or perhaps it’s something that sounds good but it’s miles away. If the latter is you, then you’re in luck. Today’s guest Molly Mandelberg is going to walk us through her story of becoming a coach and ritualist practitioner. I have to warn you that Molly’s enthusiasm is infectious. She is a very talented coach by nature and she will open up your mind and your heart to possibilities you didn’t even know existed.
Thomas: I guess what I would ask you is… would you take me into your story?
Mandelberg: Yeah, so one of the biggest transformations that I've gone through in my life was actually starting my business and stepping into more of a leadership role, I think, in my life. And while that was directly related to my clients, it also has spilled over into my relationships with my friends, my family, my communities that I've decided to partake in or involve myself with. And yeah… I wrote a whole book about this story of, kind of what I had to go through are the big turning points and lessons that I've learned, but who I was 10 years ago before ever starting my business was sheltered, and hiding… somebody actually used the term “hunted” about my energy once and I was kind of a prickly person, I was easily triggerable, I was very unconvinced of my self worth. I was kind of angry and hurt and had lots of trauma that was still unprocessed.
And I think that we as humans often go through a transformational period around 29 to 32, during our Saturn Return anyway, but it happened that I started my business right before that Saturn Return. So there is this real big wave of personal development and personal growth and I've always been someone who is interested in the bigger picture of who I am in this body on this earth and what that really means. But it wasn't until my late 20’s when I started looking at, “Can I help people?”, and “Am I capable of doing that, of being a contribution in other people's lives? And do I want to make my life kinda about that by becoming a coach or holistic practitioner?” And there was a lot of stuff that came up to stop me. A lot of places where I thought, “I shouldn't. I can't. No one's gonna pay me for that,” or “I should just go back and get a j.o.b.”
And through investing in mentorship and through taking the journey of really looking at what is that limiting belief and do I want to allow that to continue stopping me or do I want to choose something different now? Studying a bunch of different modalities of healing practices and techniques, and also really kind of for the first time in my life immersing myself in larger community and actually surrounding myself with people who are doing work similar to that of looking at the shadow and looking at what we desire and what we think is limiting us from getting there, from reaching for it, from actualizing that in our lives. Yeah, I've had some close friends who are on similar sort of parallel paths to mine, that believed in me before I believed in myself. They saw who I was becoming before I had an awareness of what that was. And choosing to trust them and what they saw in me when I didn't have that yet, was like really the one of the things that kept me from giving up or quitting or going back to some other life.
And now I get to run a beautiful business that lights me up from the inside out, while traveling the world and knowing that, at least in some people's lives, I'm making a really big difference. And I can acknowledge that like, plainly and honestly, that there's no doubt in my mind that I'm doing something of value now. Because I was willing to go and look at that stuff and keep moving forward through it, I think.
Thomas: Can you take us into, like, a moment when you were facing something difficult? Like a specific moment or time that you remember when you were still working through that process? What did that look like?
Mandelberg: Yeah, absolutely. So I had a moment where I was ready to quit, I was ready to quit my business, I was ready to go back to… I… before my business, I was nomadic Vagabond hippie aimless and working kind of jobs that I hated so that I could just get enough money just to get back on the road and go on another adventure. And I was looking at, “Okay, I, I'm not making enough money in my business to support myself…” I was about a year and a year and a half in… and “I'm tired of trying, I'm tired of it not working. I'm tired of not having the magic recipe that makes this successful or makes my efforts worthwhile.” And I kind of had this beautiful sisterhood of a couple of friends who were in a business training program that I was in, and I told them, “Hey, like, I'm gonna get a job like, I can't do this anymore.” And they said, you know, “We get it. We've been there. We see you.” And their advice to me or their recommendation, their hope for me was to just wait a week, because a lot of times when we're in the emotional throes of something that we feel like we can't face, that's not the time to make big life changes are big choices that are going to change your path.
Sometimes those are the times to just sit with it and feel the feelings and notice the emotions and maybe write down all the stories that are buzzing through your your head. But that's not the time to upend your whole life when you're in the midst of it. And so I did. I waited a week. And again, those were the people who saw something in me that I couldn't see yet. And so I was sort of looking at: What do they see? What is that that they're aware of that I haven't been willing to claim, own, or acknowledged yet? And it happens that in that week, a couple of people signed up for a session. A couple of those sessions turned into packages. My financial reality dramatically shifted in the span of a week or a week and a half. And I was doubling down on my business, I was like, “Okay, that's evidence to me that I'm moving in the right direction and I'm going to do with whatever the heck it takes to step into that, to step into whatever they're aware of, to step into my own discovery of what that is and what I can be.” But yeah, it was… it's emotionally challenging to run a business where you're basically selling yourself. You have to look at, “Do I believe in what I'm doing?” which is “Do I believe in me?” and we're not… most of us are not raised or programmed by the society to believe that we're worthwhile, or at least I wasn't. And so it took a lot of courage to start saying, “You know what I can, and I'm going to try and I'm going to unpack whatever story that is that says I shouldn't or I can't.”
Thomas: That's wonderful. I love that waiting a week. That's… I'm going to use that. That’s a huge bit of wisdom there. That's amazing.
Mandelberg: Yea, it sounds simple. But it does make a difference.
Thomas: Well, my second question is then, now that you're on the other side of the rite of passage, what is your life like? And what is your work like? And how do you show up in your work?
Mandelberg: Yeah, so I run a six figure business out of a sprinter van. I haven't given up the hippie Vagabond side of me, I just gave up the starving artists part of that. I make art. I write books. I have two podcasts. I have, I think, nine or ten different programs that I run. Usually, I'm only running about five or six in a year but I have a bunch of online courses and creations. I am on all different kinds of platforms and people thank me for my work. People show up to classes or workshops that I teach from all over the world. And I literally thrive on getting to do the work that I'm doing. I feel like I get paid to be myself more so than I get paid to do some service that I've come up with. And my brain works in kind of an interesting way. Because I have that heart-centered, spiritual emotional awareness of what I think how the universe works in my interesting point of view. And then I also have this kind of engineering brain of like tactics and strategy and pieces of the puzzle coming together and using automation and stuff like that. So I get to use both of those expertises, kind of, in my business where I'm helping people bridge that world of, you know, we're doing really deep, powerful work, but we have to use these really technological strategies to get the word out about them. And how do we do that without falling out of alignment with who we really are? So yeah, I get to live my passion which is creative. It's location independent. It's getting to see and be with the people that I love, no matter where they are in the world. Like, my mom was just going through a health kind of crisis issue the last few months and I got to just drive up to Oregon and spend that time with her and have her back while she was going through that, with absolutely no question in my mind that that's where I was going next. There was nothing else I had to move around to make that possible. And to get to live a life where that is something I can do with ease is, like, really extraordinary to me.
Thomas: Definitely. I'm curious how ritual played a part in your rite of passage. Was there a moment when you did a certain kind of ceremony or small ceremonies, or…
Mandelberg: Oh yeah. There's been lots of ways I've participated in… I mean, I've run my own women's circles and had… attended medicine ceremonies, and many gatherings that were deeply powerful for me. And also a big one for me is daily ritual and having sort of ceremony in my regular life. Every single day, I write before I get out of bed in the morning. I write before I go to bed at night and that is like, that's my spiritual practice, that's my mental health practice. That's where I connect to, you know, mantras and affirmations and gratitude and I'd say a gratitude practice is like the biggest tool that I've used over the years to keep my vibe where it needs to be, to keep… to pull me out of depression if that comes up. To raise, just raise me to the frequency I want to be living on. And then meditation has been a really like ongoing practice that sometimes I fall out of and then go back to and my goodness when I'm back on the wagon of meditating every day… And it is such a huge life hack, like the downloads and the insights and the information and the like peace and calm that's available with a meditation practice. I know I'm, like strumming a very old harp here, but it is so valuable and so life changing, in my opinion. So I think it's a combination of the daily rituals and practices that I have and then absolutely, I've had some, the, like, deep child stories of… I had sort of a evil stepfather when I was growing up and a lot of the work around that has been done in ceremony too and looking at my relationship patterns and who I be and in relation to other people and how I interact and how I'd like to be in those places. And sort of discovering what's the first step in changing that pattern? And finding that sort of throughline through ceremony and through sitting with healers. And I mean, shamanic journeying without medicine, and also with medicine, has been, yeah, a big catalyst in my growth. Absolutely.
Thomas: And is ritual something that you use with your clients at all?
Mandelberg: Definitely. Yeah. I mean, when I started my business, I was doing hypnotherapy. So I was using that as sort of a ritual and practice, also, but I bring in guided meditation and visualization. And we talk about the kinds of habits we're building and the ways that we're tending to our energy. A lot in my group programs, while we're talking about really strategic stuff, like hiring an assistant or, you know, using your email list well, or, you know, building out your next course or program, that is also happening simultaneously with the conversation about the energetics of who we're being and how that's magnetizing people to our businesses. So, yeah.
Thomas: As you're speaking, I'm getting a sense of so much intention, like intention with yourself in your heart, in your own practice in building your own life, your own work life and your life the way you want it to be, and then providing that to the people that you mentor and coach. It's really…. it's really inspiring.
Mandelberg: Yeah, I think intention is everything. Yeah, I think our reality is so much about the being and not as much as we think about the doing. And it's super important to pay attention to that I think…and and that, to recognize that we get to choose, we get to choose what we desire and focus our energy on that and that intentionality can change our entire life.
[MUSIC]
If you enjoy Shame Piñata, consider checking out our second show. It’s called Daily Magic for Peace and it’s a totally different kind of show. Each episode invites you to grab an item and do a simple ritual for peace in Ukraine. Episodes are less than 10 minutes long with a focus on calming the nervous system and keeping your heart open. You can find Daily Magic for Peace wherever you're listening to this podcast.
Thomas: One thing I wanted to ask you is that you spoke about broadening into community and trusting community more as you were growing. And I'm curious how your experience of community may be different now than it was before.
Mandelberg: Oh, yeah, totally. I had the story that I have to do it all myself, that no one is safe, and that I'm alone. And so I had this, I still have kind of this fierce independence to me. But it was a chip on my shoulder before and now it's a quality that I have access to more than anything. And, yeah, it took some trying, and it took some experimentation to find communities that I did feel safe and held in, to find a sense of belonging in those places. And that alone is a huge growth experience to go from. I know so many of us sort of far-out healers and holistic practitioners and like, just tuned-in people feel like we're alone in the world. And that, you know, if we get too visible, or get too loud about who we truly are, that we have that witch-wound that says, “Oh, no, you're going to be, you know, ostracized for this.” And finding places where you do feel safe to be all of you, where you feel safe to be in your bigness and your most magical and weird self and be accepted and adored and like high-fived and celebrated for that. That's a game changer, to not just be witnessed, but to be surrounded by people who get that side of you and maybe resonate to the same frequency is eye-opening, especially for me first as someone who…
I was raised in kind of a Christian community, not community, but the town I was in had a lot of Christian people growing up. And my mom raised us believing in like the Law of Attraction and the Akashic Record, and she used to channel and all this stuff. And so she kind of told me as a kid, you know, “We talked about this stuff at home, but we, it would probably be better if you don't talk about it with your friends.” And I carried that probably too far out into my adulthood of, “I have this weird, magical view on reality, but it's better if I just don't tell anyone about it, because people who disagree might, you know, shame me for it or make it wrong or not want to be around me because I have these weird views.” And so it took some time to deprogram that, but finally being in places where I feel that sense of belonging - and I know that that's possible for literally anyone out there. There is no kind of weird that's so weird, that it’s not shared by at least a few other people. Which is why things like Comic Con are so cool. It's like, in school you were probably a nerd and now you have all these people who think you're awesome for that thing. That's worth finding! There's websites like meetup dot com. There's all kinds of gatherings that exist in you know, the online space but also in person in different cities and communities that it's worth doing some research and going to show up to things like that, that maybe seem uncomfortable at first to see if you can find your your village, your sort of like-minded friends. Because it's easy to convince ourselves if those people haven't come across us in our lives, that we're the weirdo, that we're the odd man out. And the truth is, yeah, there's a lot of community available for any kind of person I think. And it takes courage to go and dig into that but it's so worth it. It's so worth it to not feel alone. We're not a kind of animal that's meant to be alone.
Thomas: No, it's like a matter of health and survival for us to actually…
Mandelberg: Hugely. Connection is vital to life.
Before we ended our conversation, I asked Molly if there was any last bit of wisdom she wanted to share with us.
Mandelberg: Question everything. “Is this true about me? You know, what would be the opposite of this? Is there evidence to show that that's also true?” You know, “What do I want to be right now? How would I like to be feeling? What would excite me? What can I add into my life right now that would just feel better or change to the game?” And then one of the things I say at the end of my podcast every time is, “Ask big questions!” …so that's a curiosity piece. And “Take bold actions!” So like show up. Try something new. Go exploring. Become the like, explore discovering your life every single day. And yeah… “You're here for a reason” is the last thing I say in my sort of sign off. Because I think it's true. I don't think people come into these bodies by accident. And it could be to change one life, and it could be to change a lot of lives, but it could just be to change your own life and learn, you know, what more you're capable of being and perceiving and actualizing for yourself. But that stuff is worth showing up for.
Molly’s story, Molly’s journey, and the passion she shows for her work are inspiring. I’m going to leave you with her wonderful list of questions. I encourage you, if you have a moment, now or later on today, maybe sit with them for a bit and see what downloads you get:
What do I want to be right now?
How would I like to be feeling?
What would excite me?
What more am I capable of?
Molly Mandelberg is the Founder of Wild Hearts Rise Up, Creator of “Magnetic Influencer Collective” and also the writer and illustrator of "The Wild Hearts Rise Up Oracle Deck". Molly works with coaches, healers, and conscious leaders to broadcast their messages with ease, so they can reach more people, and make more money with less time spent.
Our music is by Terry Hughes. Find us on IG and Twitter at shamepinata, reach us through our website, shamepinata.com and subscribe to the show on your favorite player. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.