Stepping into your authority as a money maker with Hayley Lloyd

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio

CLARE: A big warm welcome to the Clare Wood podcast. Hayley, for those of the listeners who aren’t familiar with you, would you mind introducing yourself and what you do?

HAYLEY: My name is Hayley and I am an authority and business mentor. So I specifically help people to build inner and outer authority so that they can grow their businesses or, you know, just develop their own sense of self in the world and really go on to create something that they feel very proud of. I hope that they feel is really giving something to society and impacting the world. And I come from ex corporate. So I was previously working for four years at Canva. I’ve had a long history with marketing, brand… and so a lot of that influence comes into building a lot of outer authority things for people. And then I have a very long history with Mental health and overcoming anxiety, social anxiety myself. And so that really informs a lot of the inner authority work that I do, and the importance of both of them really comes together to create the topic that I teach and coach on.

CLARE: Oh, so much in there. Thank you for sharing that background.

So maybe if we can share a little bit about your journey, I know you kind of did a bit of a high overview, but you spoke about some of the mental health challenges that you’ve had. So let’s go back and find out a little bit more about that.

HAYLEY: Yeah, sure. So we’ve had some long conversations about this previously, but even just five years ago, I had severe social anxiety, severe generalized anxiety disorder loops of depression. I was also addicted to alcohol and I made the decision to get sober four and a half years ago now. And during that time, it really stuck with me, put into perspective all of the anxiety that I had just living in my body because you have nothing left to then numb yourself, you know, anxiety was such a numbing mechanism for me. And I’d spent many, many years abusing that, which is kind of like a whole different topic, which we won’t go into. Well, I won’t go into right now, just to kind of focus on the mental health aspect of it, but it really like detached me from who I was. I realized that I was very much going through life, just operating through the society standard of what people wanted me to do and it led me to become very disconnected from who I was. I didn’t have opinions on anything. I didn’t know what I wanted in this life. I was doing a career that other people said that I should be doing versus what I really wanted to be doing. And it led me just to become so fractured inside of myself that despite on the outside looking like an authority, on the inside I felt like I was crumbling inside out.

And yeah, that led to a lot of social anxiety. I had and was having panic attacks every single day in the toilet. I could not even do a podcast episode like this without having a full script. Public speaking became next to impossible. And I really I wore this identity of being a chameleon as a badge of honor and would be able to kind of hop between different friendship groups and make lots of different friends, drinking friends and everything. And when the alcohol subsided, I, I really started realizing like, Who I actually wanted to spend time with and that actually certain people gave me anxiety and certain people didn’t give me energy, but actually drained my energy. And so when I did quit alcohol, it just basically put all of my mental health issues on show.

I realized that I had some PTSD that started resurfacing that I had to deal with. And so in order for me to be able to function in society and want to kind of be on this earth, to be very kind of honest about it, I needed to heal those very root causes of the anxiety. I have tried different types of anxiety medication, I have ADHD as well, I’ve tried ADHD medication, but for me it always just felt like I didn’t want to become dependent on a substance or a pill to make me feel normal, I wanted to see whether I could do it myself, and so it kind of started this very long journey of me starting to Heal those root causes of anxiety and the things that were causing the social anxiety. So, some of those things were things like fear of being alone, fear of being judged, wanting to fit in desperately seeking approval from everyone. And I developed some really, really big fears around public speaking and just being seen in general. Because I, I wanted to, I wanted to curate this very perfect version of myself. I’d always been told that perfection was, you know, we always have to strive for perfect. You have to look perfect. You have to present perfect. You have to be perfect. And if I stepped outside of that, then I would be judged. I’d be criticized. And that was so painful for me that it meant I couldn’t really do anything.

And, I kind of got to a stage in my career where I was eventually given a coach at a full time job that I had because my social anxiety was getting so bad. I’d just been signed off work for a period of time and One of the questions when I first came into the coaching session and it was with this guy, his name was James. He was a brilliant coach and very polar opposite to kind of who I was. And I didn’t think that I was going to actually get that much from these sessions because I’ve done three years of therapy. And I was like, am I ever actually going to be able to move through this? Maybe it’s not possible. And he just sat there and he listened to me like talk about all of the things that I was going through, the things that caused the anxiety, the moments that were triggering for me. And he just asked me a question at the end, and he was just like, I have a hunch I’m going to follow it… And he was like, what is your favorite color? And I remember, it’s such a simple question, and it’s something that today I’d be able to answer, but back then, it, like, sent me into a full fight or flight response. My hands went numb, I started disassociating, my blood, like, drained from my face, I started getting really hot, my breathing got really shallow, and I was asking him, like, what’s your favorite color? What’s your, like, deflecting the question? And we went round this for about like five minutes until eventually he was like, okay, you don’t need to answer that. But what I’m realizing is you have outsourced your power to everyone else. You have become so dependent on other people to give you a voice that you have no idea who you are anymore. And it was just this moment where I realized like, holy s**t, I have. In the hopes of getting approval and the hopes of being validated in the hopes of succeeding, I have completely put who I am in the back burner that now I don’t even know what my favorite color is. And that’s where the anxiety was really coming from.

And so kind of from that moment is when I became obsessed with like coaching, evolving, trying to figure out what all of these moments were. And yeah, led me down this path of, expanding who I am and a very confronting healing journey, let’s say.

CLARE: Yeah, sounds huge. And so at this point in time, so you were still employed at Canva at that time?

HAYLEY: Yes.

CLARE: And you had started your sobriety journey or was this before any of that?

HAYLEY: Yeah, I’d started my sobriety journey. I, I tried a couple of times to get sober before but it was always one of those things where I was like, I can moderate, I can, you know, I’ll be able to kind of do what everyone else does and just have one, I’ll just have one and go out and it will be fine. It was never fine. It was never okay. You know, I’d always end up blackout. And so this was the time where me and my partner actually decided to quit together. And this was the one time that we both said, right, we either lose the relationship or we try to do this together. And it was just very serendipitous timing that at the same time you have to be on a wait list for one of these coaching schedules with my full time employment. And it just was around that time that the coaching journey started. And so then within about like a month of that is when I started the life coaching diploma. So it actually all started the year that COVID started. It was 2020, 1st of January that I decided to do that. And then the coaching journey started about two weeks afterwards.

CLARE: Wow. How serendipitous, hey, that it all sort of happened at the same time. So years on, just because I, the curiosity is killing me. What is your favorite color?

HAYLEY: Orange and purple. I now don’t have one, I have two and I’m okay with that.

CLARE: That really interests me actually, because a lot of your, branding and color is all dark. It’s all black. And I thought for sure her favorite color is black.

HAYLEY: Well, black’s not technically a color.

CLARE: It’s lack of color. That’s true.

HAYLEY: It’s like black and white are like, not really colors, but from like a brand perspective. You know, there’s a certain image that I want to give off. Like I wear a lot of black, like the colors that I look at that I like specifically are orange and purple. Like I bring like elements of like orange into my house and I bring elements of like purple into, you know, I love amethyst crystals for example. But I don’t typically wear them. They’re like accent colors that I like. So I like the colors, but like when it actually comes to like a, a brand perspective, the style that I typically, I want my brand to match my style, which is typically quite dark.

CLARE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Well, there you go. So it goes to show that you have gotten a lot clearer about who you are on this journey. And what other things have you discovered about yourself that have really surprised you when you’ve really said, who am I at my core?

HAYLEY: Oh my gosh. There’s so many, that’s such a big question, Clare.

How do we even, how do we even go into this? Let’s see. Well, I think one of the big things that really came out of, I’ll sort of link it back to like quitting alcohol and becoming sober. Was this desire to impact and this desire to actually be seen. And one of the things that I realized that I was very triggered by at the beginning of this whole healing journey was other people taking up space.

And I remember specifically, there was this one coach that I actually knew from like seven years prior. I tried to set up a coaching business seven years prior and I made all the things, created the photo shoot, created the… everything you’re meant to do, launched it, no one bought, and it like destroyed my mental health. So, you know, this is again, it’s that inner authority part, which I didn’t have any of it therefore, I couldn’t create something. I couldn’t sustain the rejection, the judgment that I thought other people would we’re doing it felt very personal to me to fail publicly. So I went back to corporate after that, but there was this one person that was in this mastermind that I was in and she ended up continuing to, you know, build her business to you know, heal herself to become very loud in her expression and when I was in a full time job, I would watch her and I would get so triggered and I would just like watch her being very expressed talking on her story. And I would just like be thumping my Some like on that next button, just being like, I don’t want to listen to this person anymore, you know, ended up like muting them for a while and everything. And when I really got honest of like, why was I being triggered by that person? It was because I wanted that too.

And that’s often, you know, the reason that we’re triggered by things is because there’s a part of ourselves that we see in this person that we’ve often rejected. And so I had rejected this part of me that wanted to be seen because, you know, growing up in a very typically English society, you know, where we’re told. Be small, you know, don’t stand out too much. It’s a very, even the way that we talk as Brits is much quieter. You know, Americans are much louder. You know, even if you go to the UK, everything is smaller. You know, the cars are smaller, the streets are smaller, the houses are smaller, everything is smaller. So our expression is naturally smaller. And so watching then someone be very large in their expression. I In myself wanted that, but had rejected it because it didn’t feel safe in my society in growing up, like it wasn’t safe for me to do those things. And so when I really started uncovering a lot of this stuff, I realized, oh, that’s actually something that I want to step into. I want to become the person that can speak on stages, that can speak on my stories, that can do podcasting, like I want to be heard. And I thought previously that I actually wanted to be invisible. I thought I didn’t want to be the center of attention. I thought I didn’t want to impact people. I thought I didn’t want to be in groups, but actually I did.

So that was a really big shift and it led me to then lots of other streams of healing, which was like, okay, how can I actually heal the parts of myself that have social anxiety? You know, I did improv classes. I did some very, very deep work around, you know bullying that I had when I was very young that caused me to very much like go insular inside of my shell. So that then I could speak on podcasts, so I can deliver a mission, so I could think for myself more creatively.

Because that was one of the things that started happening as well was like my creativity at the end was just sapped and I was, you know, doing a lot of design. So you need to be creative when you’re a designer. Like it’s, it’s literally part and parcel of your job. And towards the end, I was so fixated on what other people wanted that it completely sapped my ability to be creative. So. All of that started coming back online and I knew, like, where I wanted to take my life and how I wanted to express myself and be creative and what actually interested me as well.

And some of the other things that came up was around, my relationship with emotions. And previously I had always shamed myself for being quite, emotional. And growing up as well, this is potentially a British thing, but we’re, we’re very much told to have a stiff upper lip, you know, to not express your emotions, to not delve into a feeling to the anger is bad, that, you know, sadness is bad, that you should always just feel normal and happy all the time and display that.

And when I started going through this process, I realized that I actually have a lot of emotions. You know, I’m, I’m an emotional generator. Like I go through waves of emotion all the time. And when I was telling myself that that was wrong, I was basically repressing all of this anger, emotion, and it really started actually coming out physically. I started developing really painful periods. I had rosacea on my skin because often anger is heat and it will rise through your body. And so I just started developing all of this like acne, underskin acne, rosacea and a lot of these physical problems on top of the fact that I had this, like, I could get to rage very quickly. And that again, wasn’t being numbed by alcohol. So I was just more. I was able to witness the anger and the rage a lot more and be like, my God, I’m actually really angry. Like, why am I so angry? And when I started going through this process and I was working a long time with a womb healer, we started finding ways for me to express emotion in a healthy way.

And that’s been a really big part of my journey is like, giving myself space and permission to express those emotions. And to feel those emotions, because a lot of us feel like anger is just a bad emotion. So we have no way to express it. And the issue with that is then we repress it. And rage is a different emotion to anger, but when we repress anger, it becomes rage. And so I realized that all of that repressed rage was because I’ve repressed anger. I hadn’t given myself an outlet just to feel it. So just giving myself that permission to be emotional, to be an intense human, to experience the ups and downs and not always have to have a reason, but to give myself permission to like go into the feeling meant that then I wasn’t repressing anything.

So I’m, I now I’m very rarely angry and it’s such a stark contrast to what I used to feel like because I used to feel like a very angry person but just purely by being able to express myself, I’m able to first of all, follow that emotion to see where it leads me so like, you know, the reason that I coach on authority is actually very emotionally driven, because I followed my emotion, I followed my anger, I followed my rage, and it led me somewhere creative. Like, our emotions are always trying to show us something, but society tells us that we should push them down, that we should repress them, that we shouldn’t have them, and That is blocking a lot of people’s creativity because they, they teach us so much if we actually allow ourselves to feel them.

So, yeah, those are just a couple of things that come to mind, but there’s probably a grocery list that could last about five hours.

CLARE: There’s a book in there.

HAYLEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is.

CLARE: There’s a couple of like things that have really jumped out for me in that, which is firstly about being triggered by others and how often we see something it’s triggering us. And I know for me, in the online world, you know, you see someone doing something and if that’s triggering something inside of you, there’s something behind that. And it’s really interesting when you start to explore why is this getting under my skin and that’s the same for emotions. It’s all kind of connected. When you think about it, I spoke to my therapist the other day about something and I said, I shouldn’t feel angry about this. And she’s like, well, that’s a pretty crap thing. You should feel angry about that. I can see why you feel angry. Obviously how you respond or how you manage that anger is one, a different thing, but it’s okay to feel angry cause that’s a really crappy thing. And I love that you’ve, you’ve shared all of that.

So you’ve obviously been on this big healing journey. And then at what point, like, how did this sort of all start to tie together to become your path, your coaching journey, were you coaching you know, throughout these or when did you sort of start to realize this is actually what I meant to do is help people to unlock and establish their own authority as well?

HAYLEY: Yeah so pretty soon, cause I was doing this life coaching diploma. One of the things that you have to do is you have to work with people, like you have to demonstrate that you’re doing it in order to, it was a year long diploma, so it was a long time. And after about three months, they tell you that you should start getting like practice clients.

So just because I was in that program, I started doing it and very quickly realized that I was very good at it. And as I was going through a lot of it, I realized actually I could really help people with this. So I started taking like practice clients around then. And about a year later is when I started bringing in, you know, a lot of the marketing, the brand, the strategic side of things.

So I’ve always been in organic marketing teams when I’ve been in my corporate career. And so that lends itself to be able to create content that converts, for example, very easily because I’ve worked in a plethora of different companies and corporate companies of different sizes in organic marketing, organic branding, you know, brand positioning, authority building, essentially, to be able to speak to, different client bases, different target audiences, demographics, and things like that.

Like within Canva, you know, there were so many different like user segments that we had, but just for one page and one product, we have to, you know, find that, that specific way of positioning it for each different locale, for each different user segment, you know, you really quickly start to understand like how important the understanding of who you’re talking to is.

So a lot of that, I was able to build a brand around like mindset and self doubt very, very easily because I had a lot of this experience. So it naturally then ended up being like, okay, well I’m going to start bringing in, you know, this nine years of corporate experience that I have into my brand. And when I started kind of reverse engineering, what really made authority and what really got some people’s content to convert and other people’s content not to convert, you know, applying both the mindset stuff and the strategy, I realized that there were certain themes that were coming up around why some people saw and deemed some people as an authority and why some people weren’t. And there are certain, like, blind spots that people would have. And there were certain things that increased authority, and there were certain things that would detract from authority. And I became really, really interested in this, and then I started researching it, and really going into, you know, having a whole funnel of my work, which was just researching authority, different types of authority and the effect that it can have on the wider population, on people that are, you know, taught or influenced or coached by a certain type of authority and what that would lead to them.

And I became really interested in that and it started to create this movement when I noticed all of these kind of patterns that were coming up where a certain type of authority always ended up having a really positive result.

And there are certain Authority that ended up putting people in a foreign response and started putting people into a response where It would actually take them away from who they really are and I became really interested in the type of authority where people were getting paid, people were able to describe what they were doing in a way that was convicted, not just confident, but convicted, and be able to be set apart and be seen as different by, creating something very unique.

And there’s a very certain I call it- integrated authority, where you know, your authority isn’t just I say that I’m an authority. It’s like, it’s an integrated authority. It’s a conscious authority. It’s a embodied authority that then, as we know with sales, it’s a lot of it is the inner world. And a lot of people create authority just with that outer world, this kind of film of like, Oh, I’m an authority because I have this, this, and this, but then they lack that inner authority behind. So it’s like combining that with then creating an outer authority that has different aspects.

So the four different aspects that you need to build authority, that outer authority is first of all, authority story.

So you need to have a specific origin story that led you to speak on this topic. And people often make this mistake where they’re trying to fit their entire story into talking about their topic. And it often dilutes the entire thing. Like you want to have very specific stories that tie to a specific topic. And we can have these for different programs, but overarching, like the thing that really creates a lot of authority is story.

If you think about, Brene Brown Joe Dispenza, Mel Robbins any of like the really big personal developments when you, you read any of their books, they all have very interesting origin stories. That’s a very important part of an authority identity.

The second part is topic mastery. So a lot of people are just drag and dropping what everyone else is doing. And they haven’t really mastered the topic. So it’s very like surface level to really build integrated authority. You want to have a much deeper understanding of your topic.

I really, then this goes into the next part, create your own unique perspectives around that topic. So it’s very easy for someone to create, to consume a program around how to build a program, but it’s very difficult, different to create your own methodologies, your own frameworks, your own understandings of how you build programs to then deliver it in a way that is faster.

And so the idea is always, you know, with topic mastering unique perspectives, that you’re trying to find a faster way for people to get a result. And that often looks like reverse engineering your own processes, which is really uncomfortable to do and actually brings up a load of shadow work in itself, which is where that inner authority piece is so interesting and necessary for this process. But this process is uncomfortable because it forces you to be like, okay, well, this is what I know, you know, this is what I know about. And it forces you to be like, but how can I break this and make a difference? We all want to… society makes us, you know, want to conform. And so we want to do the same thing that’s been done over and over again, and breaking that can be really hard.

Which then kind of leads me to the last part, which the fourth part, is every single authority identity needs a common enemy, something to stand against. If you don’t have a common enemy, it’s going to lack mission. It’s going to lack like a movement to stand behind. So when I talk about authority in this perspective, you know, I could say the common enemy is society’s idealism for us to all to conform.

You know, we’re told from a very young age, you want to be 30, married, buying a house with a white picket fence. You know, you want your job to look a certain way, being paid a certain amount. And you want to have the same opinions as the people in your society and in your family, so you don’t rock the boat. You know, that’s what we’re brought up being told. And it’s very hard to break that, which is why a lot of people don’t build true authority. People build replicated authority or borrowed authority, as I call it, but it’s not necessarily integrated authority.

CLARE: I love that. And it all kind of is actually part of your framework, is that people are using their own learned experiences to then become an authority in that field. It’s like, this has been my journey and this is how I empower other people to create the outcomes.

So is there a particular kind of client that you primarily work with?

HAYLEY: It kind of depends. Yes, in terms of the people that I work with authority wise, I work with people that are between six and seven figures that are wanting to really refine their authority and take it to another level.

Because, you know, as I said, like coming into the market, you’ll typically have like your authority. You know, it’s not as important. You’re really focusing on like content that converts, getting seen, getting your first few clients. When you get to a certain level, that’s where you really want to refine your authority. Because when you focus on that authority, that’s the thing that’s going to get you paid more. That’s the thing that’s going to get you put on stages. That’s the thing that’s going to get you invited onto podcasts and talking about different topics, you know, so that’s kind of like a higher demographic of people that I work with, like in my business containers that really want to refine and elevate that authority and create that like standout in demand factor so that they can get paid more.

But then there is the inner authority work and the inner authority work is kind of, honestly, anyone, and this is where it is a little bit broader. Because it’s, this is actually being taken into corporate a little bit more where I’m going to be speaking on the different ways that you can build inner authority to improve your leadership capabilities so that people can, you know, get a promotion more easily and, you know, Kind of find their own way of even showing up in the corporate space and communicate more clearly, develop better relationships with people, like the inner authority aspect of this, which affects all of our outer authority, whether you have a business, whether you’re in a corporate career, the inner authority is like, you know, if you imagine authority as an iceberg, you know, you’ve got the part at the top, The very tiny part that you see is your outer authority. And that is, you know, whether it’s corporate, whether it’s a business that you have, it’s a very small amount. So when you go on my profile, you will see maybe 10 percent of this massive iceberg that’s below. Everything below it is your inner authority. And the thing that will dictate whether someone is successful in business, in their career, is the amount of resilience that they have, the amount of neutrality they have, their amount of the capacity that they have to hold the success, because the success is potentially going to bring conflict, judgment, backlash, change, a lot of change.

And so, you know, we were talking about money before we came on this podcast, in order for people to make more money, whether it’s in the business or the corporate careers, they need to be able to hold that money. They need to be able to withstand often, you know, blocks around money have nothing to do with money. It has more to do with what money brings and it brings either pressure, responsibility, or change. And you need to develop this inner authority to be able to expand your ability to hold everything that’s success, different positions of power, different positions of authority, more visibility. You need to be able to hold all of that. And that’s a very insular journey that people go through, which is the inner authority side.

So that is much more geared towards kind of anyone that wants to develop more resilience whether it’s in a corporate career or just in their business so that they can hold more success, wealth, and visibility.

CLARE: Yeah, because it’s, it’s true. Like so much of it will be the, how does the saying go? You’re able to expand to the amount that you are able to hold.

HAYLEY: Yeah, exactly.

CLARE: We’re unable to sustain a new level because it comes with a new level of, of pressure of, you know, I was thinking about it today actually with the, the change in the US presidential candidacy, and I was thinking, I, I don’t, I couldn’t do that job. It’s too stressful, it’s too big. There’s so much pressure, there’s so much, there’s literally lives on the line. And I thought, wow, it takes a certain kind of person that can expand to that level of, of authority. Because I know in my heart, I’m not called for that, but then I know there’s a lot of people who aren’t called for the level of pressure and responsibilities and, yeah, all of the things that come along with the kind of work that I do now. And so you can expand into whatever it is that you are able to hold. But, you know, there’s that saying with great power comes great responsibility. And I love the way that you’ve articulated it. You know, you, you have to be able to, if you want the thing, you can’t have that without the other side of it. I can’t have the title of being the president of United States of America. I mean, I couldn’t anyway, because it was, but without all of the responsibility and everything that comes along with it, you, you have to, to your point, have that inner authority to be able to have the title and the things that come along with it. So that’s a really beautiful way of explaining it.

HAYLEY: And, and I think as well, like the biggest thing that I’ve had to change to scale to seven figures in my business has been my level of inner authority.

It’s, you know, the, the strategic things, the outer authority, they’re all things that you can learn. They’re all things that you can, it’s a skill. You learn the skill, you know, even leadership, it’s a skill. Communication is a skill, but the thing that allows you to use that skill and to appropriately use that outer authority, the content, whatever it is that you’re doing, is the amount of inner authority that you have. It’s a beingness. It’s who you are. The thing that I had to change the most to scale to seven figures was who I was. It had nothing to do with the skills that I had. I could learn those very easily. It was everything to do with how do I feel using this skill?

And, you know, to your point about, You know, the president, there was this brilliant podcast interview on a diary of a CEO with one of the past security guards of the president. And so she’s, like, top, like, secret spy. I don’t know what you call them, but she’s, like, top secret. at the top of her game, essentially secret service. There you go. And she talks about the fact that one of the biggest things that you have to have in order to make it all the way through the police force to the secret service is this inner resilience and an ability to be able to under very high amounts of pressure, not crack, but to remain calm.

And she was talking about, you know, there is, you know, in those rooms where they are having these huge conversations. And we’re not just talking about like, well, you know, someone’s not replying to my Instagram story. It’s like, literally this country is about to invade. What are we going to do with these hundreds of thousands of people? How are we going to make the decision for all of these people? She was like, the, underlying emotion and, and underlying vibe that there was always was calmness. She was like, no one had, Oh my God, what am I going to do? No one had that reaction because you can’t. And so she was like, the biggest thing that people need in this role is is that ability to have these hugely stressful situations and keep their s**t together. You need to be able to have that underlying resilience to hold whatever happens, because it’s always going to happen. And she was saying that she had a huge amount of admiration for some of the presidents who, would be sat there about to give a a speech to the entire world and the news channel would be on and they would be watching the news of people just tearing them apart, like talking about how backwards their campaigns were, like getting very personal about what they looked like, just really bitchy stuff. And they would just be sat there just nodding, breathing, and then without even faltering would get up on stage and give the speech without even hesitating. And it’s like, that takes a level of inner authority of inner resilience that is built. You know, you need to become someone who becomes unf**kable essentially. And that’s what these people in high positions of power do have. And if you want to, you know, build a seven figure business, if you want to be the person that has this power, huge corporate career, responsible for huge teams, you are going to have to, as you say, manage that level of responsibility and pressure without faltering, without feeling like your whole nervous system is going to crack.

And, you know, as we’ve spoken about with my own journey with mental health, I had none of that when I started. And that’s why it’s been such an important underlying factor for this success, is because that’s been the underlying thing that I’ve had to focus on, to allow me to remain calm when people didn’t like what I said, when there was pushback, when there was judgment, when there was, you know, something happening in a container, when I received client feedback, like these are all things that we have to expand ourselves in order to, receive more success.

CLARE: Yeah. That lead, that’s the leadership journey, isn’t it? Is it’s being able to navigate through those challenges and come out the other side without falling apart.

HAYLEY: Exactly. Because it’s, it’s very easy to fall apart. Like most people, if you put into a situation like that would probably have like a nervous system reaction.

Like I was watching this netflix show last night about these two people that they’re Russian and they basically built a career around free climbing these huge, huge, huge, towers, basically the tallest buildings in the world. Makes you feel sick to watch. But one of the big things that they kept on talking about was like, if their mindset wasn’t in the right place, it would cause them to freeze physically halfway up. And there was this one really scary moment where the girl, she recently broken her wrist and it was the first climb she was doing since she was back and she got halfway up this tower and she’s literally, it’s sickening to watch because you can see how far up they are. They’re climbing up these huge like pieces of scaffolding and everything and suddenly her body just shuts down. You know, it’s like, it’s like full freak out. She is in a fight or flight response. She can’t move. She can’t even take her hands off the railing. You know, she’s done something way more, extravagant than that in the past, but in that moment, her mindset wasn’t able to hold it and it caused a freakout, which if you’re in that situation, you don’t have someone around, that’s what leads to in that particular career, death, you know? And it’s like the importance of being able to remain calm in those high stress environments is literally life or death.

But when we bring them back to business, it’s like when you get like a negative response to someone that’s on a call with you, how you handle it in that moment will dictate whether someone remains a client that loves what you do or whether you burn a bridge, and it’s, it’s like that kind of level of being able to regulate our emotions and regulate our nervous systems so that we don’t fall apart. So we don’t go into a full flight or fight response and create that resilience.

And I think one of the things that I think a lot of people miss- understand when they come into building a business is that they want it to be easy. And I, I have a fundamental opinion on this, which is life isn’t meant to be easy. And i, I think this is actually part of the spiritual evolution, we were talking about spirituality just before this and you know, as a deeply spiritual person, I, I have my own opinions on what spirituality is and it’s not just talking to spirit guides and having these like magical journeys, it’s about transmuting pain, it’s about transmuting discomfort, so that you can become a fuller version of yourself, like that’s what true spirituality is, so yeah, I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent there but

CLARE: No, it’s a perfect segue actually into what was coming up next.

And it’s funny, actually you spoke about that reflecting on my own ability to hold discomfort. I used to same as you have a crippling phobia of public speaking and the particular way that mine would come out was in flight. So I would run out of the room and the other day I was in a situation and, and, you know, now I’m doing speaking, a lot of the times I kind of can, I don’t know if control’s the right word, but you know, I can say the time when I’m gonna start speaking or, whereas in this particular scenario, I was in a room full of people and then they said, we’re gonna go around the room and introduce yourself. And then suddenly my body went, this is a situation that used, that used to be terrifying for you. You need to get out of here. And I felt that feeling again. And I just sit here and, and then I sat in the room and I’m like, you’re not going anywhere. You’re fine. What you do now and then when the microphone to me, I heard my voice and I was like, you actually are calm and you’re confident and it was just such a reflection on how we can navigate through things that, you know, used to freak us the hell out. In a situation later, you go, wow, I’ve really come a very long way. And it has just been through moments of, of pushing through discomfort fear. It’s not like you don’t, I was still feeling the fear. It didn’t go away, but I was able to navigate my nervous system through it and say, we’re not going to run out of the room. We’re going to grab the mic and we’re going to talk like everyone else has done and you’ll be fine. And I was, and afterwards it’s such a liberating feeling to think, to observe I’ve been able to navigate again.

HAYLEY: Yeah. I mean, that’s the key word is observe, you know, when you don’t have awareness of what’s going on and you’re just in the fight or flight response, that’s when you don’t observe it. You just are it. But then, you know, that experience that you just shared, like it’s so, it’s so powerful because it’s like, you actually caught it. You know, you, you watched it, you didn’t engage with it. You didn’t become it. You didn’t let it win. You didn’t let it take over. You saw it coming and you know, I assume you sort of had some way to bring yourself back out of that moment so then you could continue doing it because whatever, whatever thing we have that’s important to us that we want to do in a career aspect or anything, there’s going to be an element of fear with it. And the fear doesn’t go away. You know, the fear doesn’t necessarily leave, you just get better at handling it, you know, so it’s like, sometimes I still get nervous before a podcast interview before, you know, whatever it is, it’s like, that doesn’t go, you just get better at managing it.

And I think that’s the thing is like, even in these situations, it’s not necessarily that when you’re going to become like completely immune ever to having, you know, those thoughts when you’re public speaking, but it’s like you have the tools to be able to manage those things. So it doesn’t stop you from doing the thing that’s impactful. That’s going to make you so proud of yourself on the other side, because nothing good comes for free. Nothing good comes without work. Every single thing that means something to us has been earned. And there’s a certain level of discomfort that comes with earning it. Whether that’s moving through a fight or flight response, moving through fear, moving through, you know, a long, a lot of work that we have to do and endurance that we have to go through.

Like the really great things come from when we can endure and go through that process and come out the other side.

CLARE: Yeah, totally. So let’s go back and talk a little bit about, cause you sort of touched on spirituality there. What does spirituality mean to you as a business owner?

HAYLEY: So my understanding of spirituality has massively evolved since I first found it.

And maybe I’ll just talk a little bit about how I first found it and how it sort of came into my life and how it’s kind of changed today. When I gave up alcohol, I, I’d always been interested in aliens, in, you know, the paranormal, but in my family, it was a very, repressed thing for us to talk about. My father is very atheist, and we, we just, If you were to talk about any of that stuff, it would be met with laughter and belittling, and so it was just something that we didn’t talk about.

So when I sort of started becoming very spiritually curious I found one of Gabrielle Bernstein’s meditations, where I’m connecting with spirit guides. And I remember, like, sitting on a beach and, like, closing my eyes and going through this meditation to meet my spirit guides, and it was a really beautiful, sunny day through this. And so, you know, sun on my skin. And I just remember this distinct moment of then feeling something come through and like sit opposite me. And I couldn’t describe it as almost like that feeling of someone watching you, but I just knew that something was in front of me. I couldn’t tell you anything about who they were or a name or anything. I didn’t get anything. I just knew that there was something there. And I just sat with this energy for a while. And I just asked, I was like, please, like, Somehow manifest physically, so I know I’m not crazy. Cause otherwise I would have just like parked this behind. I was like, I, I need some like proof here that I’m not just going crazy. And I just heard this distinct, make it rain. And I was like, I just knew I was like, Oh, it’s about to rain. And then I just started feeling droplets on my face. And it was so sunny when I started this. And I started feeling this like rain on my face. And What the hell and it kind of shocked me so much that I ended up opening my eyes and I opened my eyes and it was still sunny. And to this day, I have no idea where the water came from, there was no one around me. I have no explanation for it, but it was like the message that I needed of like, there is, even if there was something that came through to receive that message and then have that experience was too serendipitous for me to be like, okay, I’ll put this in a box. I was like, okay, I’m interested now and now I’m going to go full force into it.

So initially I was like, I want to connect with my spirit guides and I had a lot of, you know, Belongingness things, being in Australia away from my home. And so I did a lot of, you know, connecting with spirit guides, connecting with ancestors, connecting with past lives that actually really rooted me here.

So initially it was very much this kind of surface level of just connecting with the ethereal, with connecting with other aspects of the world that we can’t really see, which led me to channeling, which led me to really learn how to kind of start to with intention, pick up on these messages. Then over time, I started realizing that the more anxiety that I had, the less I could develop the connection and the more wavy the connection started feeling.

So, often one of the issues that people have when they’re developing this spiritual connection is they don’t know what is them thinking and what is them receiving something. And that’s probably one of the biggest issues people have. Well, maybe I’m just making this up. And that was my biggest thing. I don’t know whether I’m just making this up because it’s so loud up there. You know, it’s so loud. Like, how can I know whether I’m receiving something, whether it’s coming from somewhere else, or whether it’s in me? And as I started kind of realizing this, this is where the spiritual journey kind of linked into my healing journey because I need to quiet my mind, I need to release anxiety, I need to become silent up here and learn how to receive as opposed to thinking it’s too very different. Like thinking is more of like a pushing muscle tensing, receiving is like nothing, it just arrives and In order for you to become a channel, you need to clear as much debris and blockage as you can to allow, you know, the divine to kind of come in. Because otherwise we’re always going to be putting it through a filter. We’re always going to be putting it through our own preconceived notions of what we think something should be. And often it is then a lot of thinking, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it just means that You probably won’t have any, like, really profound experiences, you know, until you’re very relaxed and not expecting anything. And that’s why I had that experience the first time, because I didn’t have any expectation. But to remove that expectation, you kind of got to go on this healing journey. And I realized the more that I healed, the more neutral I became. The less reactive I became, the more I was expanding my capacity to manifest wealth, to build a business that impacted lots of people, to get paid for my services, the better my spiritual connection became. And it was like this understanding of like, oh, okay, spirituality is less about connecting. It’s more about clearing the vessel so that you can connect. And so it led me then to eventually do a shamanic practitioner training.

A shaman is essentially someone who can connect with the other world and does more somatic healing with people. And I felt very drawn in that connection. I don’t have any lineage there. It was just something that I was drawn to. So I went to stay for two weeks in the middle of a wood to start to learn to, you know, be a shamanic practitioner. I’m not a shaman. It’s just shamanic practitioner training. And in that, The whole first, like, ten days, essentially, is just you healing, is you clearing out stuff, and as I went through that process, my spiritual connection just cracked wide open.

Suddenly, I I had the Most distinct realization of what it felt like to receive because suddenly I didn’t have any of my blocks of like, am I thinking, am I making this up? I could immediately validate with someone else that was there, the messages that were coming through and they were very accurate, which again instilled this like confidence of, okay, maybe there’s something going on here.

And through that whole process, you know, what you’re really taught is like the spiritual connection doesn’t live in your mind. It doesn’t live up here. Because that’s what I always wanted to do. I wanted to connect upwards. I wanted to meet an alien. I wanted to, you know, get out of my body and into the sky. What I really learned by doing that is your spiritual connection lives in your relationship with your body.

And I had this one distinct experience when I was there that really cemented it for me. And we were connecting with the spirits of the land. And so you basically go out into land and you go into a meditative state and you set the intention. Well, you ask permission to connect with the spirits of the land and introduce yourself and then basically connect and receive a message. And I received, I went into the shamanic practitioner training with this desire to connect and get out of my body. And I had this very distinct ancestor of the land come through and He showed me this channel of light between the ethereal and the ground. And I was watching him basically show me, if you want to connect up there, you have to connect down here first. You’re, you’re too out of touch with your body. And your body is the vessel for spirituality. You can’t connect spiritually unless you’re in your body. Unless you remove the blockings from your body in, in so many words. And he was showing me this and then he started saying like he was started dancing and then being like wogga wogga wogga wogga wogga and I was like, okay, I don’t know what that means. Ended up coming out of the meditation and I was talking to the facilitator and I was just like, yeah, this, this is what was coming through. He was just like, oh, it sounds like you know, potentially like an Aboriginal phrase, like Google it. So there’s different like Aboriginal languages and in the Area that I was in, there’s a specific Aboriginal language and in that native tongue, Wagga Wagga meant dance. And so what it was showing, and what was really weird about that experience as well as like that journey, everyone had been saying to me, you look like a dancer, do you dance? Like, I bet you’re a really good dancer. And I was like, I stopped dancing when I was very young. Cause I used to do ballet and had kind of got like entrenched in me that ballet had to look a certain way. It was about discipline. It was never about expression. And so I’d stopped really dancing up until that moment. And so it felt like it was just showing me. Dancing, movement is going to bring you back into your body, which is why now you see a lot of dance on my feed is because of that invitation. It’s like, it’s a way to anchor into the body.

So after that experience, I really realized, okay, I’ve got to stop trying to get out of my body and get into my body. So that’s when I just really went very deep into the healing somatically because our whole nervous system is in our body. It’s not in our brain. And so a lot of people try to therapy and talk their way out of a trigger, but the triggers in your body. Okay. The trigger is living in a certain part of your body, it’s somatic in nature, it’s not just something you can just think away.

And so, for me, spirituality is a long winded way of, of talking about it, is a somatic experience of becoming whole again. Of removing the generational programming, the societal programming, so that you become a clearer vessel and channel through whatever it is that you’re meant to be doing in this life. Whether that’s a career, whether that’s a specific talk you’re meant to be doing, a specific book, a specific program.

For me, spirituality is all about transmuting pain. It’s about transmuting triggers. It’s about becoming a fuller version of yourself. It’s not about, as a lot of the spiritual community will lead us to believe, love and light. You know, when you feel a negative emotion, just let it go, pretend it’s not there, you know, get back to harmonious. That’s that’s bypassing, a spiritual bypassing. It’s not spirituality at neither spirituality, just connecting to spirit guides. I believe the spirituality is about becoming whole. It’s we have literally been born into these bodies today. Not just to live a really peaceful life, but we’ve come into a dense experience in the 3D human form to experience, to feel pain. We’ve come in with certain things that we’ve got to learn about, to transmute, to feel, and that’s the point of our life. Our point isn’t to just have an easy life, it’s to heal. And that’s what I think now, after many years, spirituality is.

CLARE: Wow. That is huge. So, so much in there. I feel like this is a whole other conversation, but we have got to the end of our time together for this episode.

I really love a couple of the things that you said in there about… a bit of a different perspective around spirituality around that. It’s not love and light, that it really is around becoming whole. I really liked about how you shared about having that connection and being able to really clear a way to allow yourself to receive rather than trying to reach out, actually saying, yes, I am receiving the message that’s coming through, that was so beautiful.

Hayley, as you know, I could listen and chat to you for ages, but we do need to wrap this episode up for now, I want to say a huge thank you for coming on the podcast. If people do want to learn more about working with you, about using their authority more to scale their business, what are the best ways for them to get in touch with you?

HAYLEY: Thank you so much for having me, Clare. It’s honestly been so great and I’m excited for us to continue our chats on a walk at some stage. But if people want to follow along to learn more about authority, whether it’s inner authority, outer authority, you can just find me on Instagram at HayleyJuneLloyd or on YouTube, I’m putting out, trying to put out new videos every week at the moment. That’s just at HayleyJuneLloyd as well. And yeah, if you go onto my Instagram, there’s a lot of links in my bio of different videos, trainings where you can learn more about authority there as well.

CLARE: Beautiful.

I’ll obviously pop all of those links in the show notes for today’s episode. A huge thank you for coming on and yeah, I’ll chat to you off air, I’m sure.

HAYLEY: That’s amazing. Thanks Clare.

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio