Hello everybody! Welcome back to another week of Wealth Unplugged! This week I interviewed Alessia Marini on Feminine Wealth TV and this podcast presents my key takeaways from the interview, so that you have a resource available to grab quick nuggets of information, no matter where you are or what you are doing!
Alessia is such an inspiring woman! She runs 7 different companies on 5 continents – so she knows a lot about success in international business! It is exciting to meet someone who brings a feminine energy to business, and very successfully!
Takeaway #1 – Women often feel like we need to act like a man in business
In the corporate world women tend to take on very masculine personas to try and climb the ladder. Often in the entrepreneurial world, women are thinking smaller – seeing the idea of bigger business as masculine and wanting to do something true to themselves. Alessia is a good example of one who has found a way to step into who she truly is, yet run businesses on a global scale. Part of her success comes from the realisation that she could bring her passions into the business and have authentic business relationships that reflected her, rather than a masculine ideal of business. (She delves into this quite significantly so check out the interview on Feminine Wealth TV for more!).
Takeaway #2 – Your passion doesn’t need to be your business…
… but you must bring your passions into your business! Once you align your business with what your bigger vision or passions are, you will come alive in your current business. For example, I feel passionate about finding a way to curtail the practice of girls being sold into slavery around the world – a business is tool that can help provide the resources to fuel that bigger vision!
Takeaway #3 – The secret to true wealth lies in not giving up your feminine power
If you find yourself depleted at work or in business and feeling like you have to become a man of a woman to succeed, you have given up your feminine power. Being true to yourself is one of the secrets to building true wealth!
Transcriptions
Speaker 1: Want to know what successful people are doing with their money to create wealth and use it consciously for the greater good? Welcome back to Wealth Unplugged, the weekly podcast that gives you diamond tips on creating conscious wealth from change makers, world shakers, and wealth creators. Now here’s your host, Barbara Turley.
Barbara Turley: Hi there, and welcome to another week of Wealth Unplugged. Thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate your time every week, and I hope you’re starting to get some really good key takeouts from this Wealth Unplugged series and podcast that I’m doing. I got an email the other day from a woman, I hope you’re listening, Chrissy, and she said she’d been out walking her dog and she’d been listening to some of my podcasts. I think that’s a great one. I always say to people, “This is a short podcast, usually 10 to 15 minutes long, so you can get it in while you’re doing the shopping or feeding the baby or out for a walk with your dog. What a great idea.”
Basically, for any newbies out there, this is the show where I take my key takeouts that I pick up from the guests that I’m interviewing every week on my Feminine Wealth TV show, which is an online TV show that I also do every week, and I basically sit down and I take the key things that I learned in the week from my guests, and I talk about it here on the podcast. It’s a quick way for you to get some good strategies that you can implement really quickly in your life.
I had such a great week this week. I’ve been playing around with the show, the Feminine Wealth TV show, and I’ve been trying to interview more guests who are actually off shore. Who are not here in Australia, where I’m based. That presents its challenges. There’s obviously technology issues and all this sort of stuff to deal with, but I had my second show with a guest who is based in Rome, in Italy, and she is an amazing, gorgeous, inspiring Italian woman, and she’s as sexy and sassy and feminine as all Italian women are. It was great having her on the show because she basically runs seven different companies on five different continents, and she has driven all of them collectively to a $30 million in success, so I was just dying to get her on the show.
That lady is called Alessia Marini, and she’s a leadership coach and consultant now, and her company is called Women in Power. She teaches women how to step into their feminine power and really own it, which I just absolutely loved, because the whole word “power” and the concept of power, such a masculine thing. But Alessia brings this feminine, beautiful energy to it, and it’s exciting, electric to be around. I got her on the show, and of course I was dying to ask her, “What is the $30 million formula for success with all these companies? And how do you do it, but while still maintaining your sanity, your femininity, and your peace of mind and your calm, I guess, and staying close to core?”
The first key takeout I really took from Alessia, and I have to say, I learned a lot on the show from Alessia, I loved having her on there. But the first one was this whole belief that we have in society, and I think all of us women have it, that even if we’re not conscious of it, we feel that you need to act like a man to succeed in business. What’s really starting to happen is that lots of us as women, we’re going into business, either in corporate or in our own businesses, and we’re feeling like we have to be a man of a woman in order to succeed.
I think two things are happening here. Number one in the corporate world: Women are becoming kind of very masculine to try and climb the corporate ladder. I was in the corporate world for a long time, so I know exactly what this type of persona is. You feel like you have to be strong and upstanding in very masculine ways to actually achieve and to be seen as a leader.
I think, similarly, something kind of the opposite’s happening in the entrepreneurial world, from what I’ve seen so far anyway. Women out there, all the girls are … Some people are leaving the corporate world to start their own businesses just because they don’t want to be in that rat race fight anymore. But we’re kind of going the other direction, in that we’re playing really, really small, and saying, “Well I just want to have a small business that allows me to be myself, allows me to be authentic and true to who I am.” Because again we equate big, global institutional-type businesses with very masculine energy.
Alessia’s story on this, and how she came to this conclusion herself, very, very interesting. She comes from a really entrepreneurial family. Her parents worked together, actually, and her mother and father ran a very, very successful travel company in Italy. Unfortunately, at one stage, probably 10 or so years ago, her father became quite sick, and she had to take over the running of the business all of a sudden out of nowhere. But she was kind of always involved in the conversation, so it wasn’t that big a jump. But she had to go in there and roll her sleeves up and start doing the work. What started to happen was, she started feeling really tired, overwhelmed, exhausted, kind of pissed off at the whole thing, really, because she wasn’t interested in the business. She wasn’t really … She just felt like she couldn’t be herself in there.
She said that it was interesting, she went into the business, and obviously her father was an amazing role model that she had, and she took the reigns from him and started basically having relationships with clients and staff in the same way that he did. She started looking to try and get solutions and drive results in the same way that he did, and the way that she had been taught how by him. Although there was nothing wrong with the way he was doing it, it didn’t really allow her to step into who she truly was.
After a while she decided … She hired a coach. It wasn’t a coach to help her to get the results in the business, it was actually a coach to help her to exit. She had decided she’d had enough. Thankfully she got this amazing coach, and this is the power of getting good coaching, right. The amazing coach she had asked her why she didn’t feel passionate about the business. She said, “Well I just can’t be myself here. I can’t … I want to escape. I feel trapped, I feel overwhelmed, I’m exhausted, I’m not interested,” all the rest. I think a lot of us women would feel that way. I know a lot of you out there are feeling the same way.
He asked her why she couldn’t bring her passions into the business, and why she had to do it the way that she was. To cut a long story short, and you should probably listen to the interview to get more of this, but he helped her to see that the things she was really passionate about were kids and animals, and he taught her how to see that by bringing her passions into the business she actually could realize more of her personal vision, and get more of her true self to come out.
How do you bring kids and animals into a travel business, right? Well she launched a side project, and she launched a charitable side to the business, and it wasn’t just a small thing. It was a small thing, but she engaged clients, colleagues, people in the industry. She rallied everyone around, and they were building schools in Brazil. This became the driving mission behind growing the business. She also started to have different relationships with the people that were working for her, and also her client base. She started to have more authentic relationships and true to who she really was.
This resonated a lot with me, because I have to admit, working in trading floors like I did for 10-odd years, you do kind of have to be a bit of a man of a woman. I can remember being told so many times, “You’re too emotional, you’re too female,” so you sort of shun that part of yourself. Then I went into an asset management sales role, and in that role there was a lot more client relationship management and that sort of thing, and I found myself totally changing.
It was an amazing experience for me because in order for me to … I was in a sales role, so in order to sell, and for me to sell authentically, I felt that I really needed to get to the heart of the client that I was dealing with, and get to the heart of the problem that they were facing, so that then I could authentically, and while being true to myself, sell them a solution that I knew was going to solve the problem that they had.
Rather than this hard selling thing, it actually resulted in me having very, very close, deep relationships with my clients, and it catapulted my career, to be totally honest. It changed everything. I had people who really trusted me. I had people who really confided in me. I found myself … I found it easy. I found winning deals a lot easier that way because I was more true, I was more open, I was more authentic.
Actually, what happened, and the same thing happened for Alessia … When we step into our feminine power like this, we actually get the results that we’re looking for. When we fight it, we actually lose our power. When we don’t step into our authenticity, our femininity. Alessia made the point that the world has enough men. We don’t need more men. Actually what we need is more women who are powerful in their own energy, and what men need is more women who are powerful in their own feminine energy too.
Interestingly, companies that do embrace both sides of this equation, the masculine and the feminine, studies have been shown that the results that they get are more sustainable, and the profits are higher, and then the giving back of the impact and the influence is higher, that these people have. What I would say, think about two things. If you’re in your own business, why are you playing small? Are you playing small because you’re afraid that playing larger means that you need to become a man of a woman?
Or if you’re not in your own business, or you’re just listening in in a corporate role, maybe think about bringing more of yourself to the table. Allow more of your feminine energy out. That’s not about being a flirt or being … We always think of these images of being somehow sexual or something, and it’s not about that at all. It’s about bringing the energies of intuition, trust, creation, connection, community, and all these really valuable, valuable traits of feminine energy to the table, and then watching things soar after you do.
I just loved that point from Alessia, and she’s a shining example. She went on from almost leaving that business to having a $30 million empire, and absolutely loving every minute of it. She has much deeper relationships with her staff, with her clients, and with herself, and she’s lit up inside. If you watch the interview, you’ll see what I mean. She’s gorgeous.
The next point she made, and I loved this as well, is your passion doesn’t need to be your business, but you must bring your passions into your business. What I love about that is, everyone is on this rollercoaster right now, running around, looking for their purpose, trying to find their passion, trying to launch a business. This whole concept of, “Do what you love and the money will come.” I just think that’s a flawed thing to believe, because it’s not quite as simple as that.
But I asked her the question … How this came up is I was interested to know, what happens if you’re running and industrial widget business? For example, here in Australia, there’s a big mining culture here. What about if you’re running a business where your client base are all miners out in the middle of nowhere, and you happen to sell a widget into them? If you’re not that passionate about it, how do you get around this problem? I just loved the solution she came up with, and it’s so aligned with my philosophy. She said, “You know, once you align your business with your bigger vision of what your passion is, it brings you alive, and then you know what the business is for.”
For example, let’s say that you’re very passionate about … Something I’m quite passionate about, and I would love to … This would be my bigger vision. The whole concept of getting girls who are being sold into sex slavery out of that hellish situation. How do we stop this problem globally? Or how do we curtail it? The only way that I can really get in there and roll my sleeves up and actually make a difference is if I have the resources to do it. Business is an amazing, amazing tool with which you can drive your bigger vision forward.
If you’re in an industrial widget business, or something that you’re not that passionate about, how do you bring your passion into the business? How do you align your business vision with your personal vision and what personally lights you up inside. This is something in my programs and I talk a lot about in my blog. I passionately believe you must start with your personal vision. Get clarity in what your personal vision for your life is. What your passions are, what lights you up inside, and then after that, develop … Whatever business your in, develop a business vision that will fuel that and that is designed to fuel that, rather than you just working for the man, or you just working to keep the business going.
I think what you’ll see then, when you grow your business by connecting to a bigger vision, you actually will grow a much larger business, and you won’t be so scared to step up and make a lot of money, because all of a sudden it’s not about the money, it’s about the bigger vision. It’s about the fulfillment. It’s about the pushing humanity forward. How beautiful is that? How would you love to feel that way? Just step up and don’t be afraid of larger businesses. You just got to be you, and then connect your big, big audacious vision with what your business … The business is the engine.
We talked a lot about her five steps. Alessia has this amazing five step formula for coaching women how to be a woman in power. I talked about this word “power” because I looked at her website and I thought, “Woman in Power.” I like it, but it’s a bit like the word “money” or “wealth.” These words, they kind of trigger interesting emotions in people. Power in particular has very, very masculine connotations. I asked her about this, and I said, “How do you be a woman in power, but still maintain your femininity when you have this kind of belief that power is connected to a man?” We shun power like we shun money or we shun wealth, because we think all these things are very masculine.
But what she said was a woman actually loses her power when she tries to act like a man. If you’re out there feeling like you’re trying to be a man of a woman to succeed, you’re driving yourself into the ground, you’re totally overwhelmed, and you’re just feeling not lit up at all inside, well then you’ve actually lost your power. You have actually given up your power for whatever it is you’re doing. From what Alessia said, and I totally agree with this, the more feminine that we are, the more powerful we are, because when we step into our feminine energy as women, when we step into what is true to us and what we know, intuitively know how to do and what we’re good at, that is when we step into our power, and that is when we become leaders.
I guess the pinnacle of what Alessia teaches and coaches women to do is to step into leadership, and what does leadership mean for them. I know that so many things resonated with me because it’s interesting, I really want to be a leader, obviously, for women in the wealth space, and to be a leader, it’s this whole thing of stepping into your feminine power. To be a leader in the wealth space is an interesting thing as a woman, because I had a look out there, and every wealth speaker and coach … There’s a lot of women out there, no offense to anyone listen, but it’s still a very masculine culture. It’s still a very masculine driven thing.
When it came to putting my website together, I wanted my website, which is energisewealth.com if you want to go and have a look at it. I wanted it to scream femininity. I wanted it to immediately appeal to women the minute they land on the site. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it’s sophisticated but pretty at the same time, and actually looks a bit like a Tiffany’s box, which is that whole sophistication I wanted to have in there. I guess that’s me bringing the true me and everything about me to the table. It’s putting myself out there and being raw, and stepping into my own feminine energy in this particular wealth space, which is still such a masculine place.
I feel more powerful. I have to say, the response I’ve gotten from people has been phenomenal. People love the site, they love what’s going on in there, they love that it’s like a magazine. It’s all about women, yet the messaging is so powerful in there. I have women who are beautiful, feminine, but powerful on my Feminine Wealth TV show. I’ve deliberately done that. I’ve deliberately skewed it towards this femininity angle because I really firmly believe, that as women, if we do want to step into leadership, if we do want to take a seat at the table to create massive impact and global change, if we want to create true, true wealth, our feminine power and our feminine energy is where the secret lies. The secret lies there.
I want to leave you on that point for this week. As always, if you enjoyed the show, please do leave a review and leave a comment wherever you are. You might be watching it on Stitcher, PodOmatic, we’re on Streaker as well, or iTunes, and if you could subscribe to the show and leave a review, it would be really awesome, because it helps me to get the show into the hands of more people if you do that. Also I started a Google Hangout every Friday. Friday morning Sydney time, 9 am, which is LA … I think it’s six o’clock in the evening in LA, and then a bit earlier in New York. I think in the UK it’s probably out for you guys, but there’s always a recording. On there I’ve been talking about the 10 wealth blocks for women, when it comes to wealth. It’s been a really interesting time. If you want to sign up for that and get the reminders about that, go to energisewealth.com/live.
Okay, so that’s it for this week. Come back and join me next week. Next week I’ve got a very … Again, another very inspiring girl on the show. Lisa Messenger from the Renegade Collective. How good a name is that? Renegade Collective is a magazine that has gone … It’s in 50 countries around the world now. It’s just right up there, right beside Vogue, Marie Claire, and it’s only 18 months old. Lisa Messenger is a great girl from Sydney who pulled it off. She understands the power of leverage, so be sure to tune in next week, and I’ll see you then.
Speaker 1: Thanks for tuning in. Come and join us on energisewealth.com to continue the conversation. Get your free video training, “Seven Steps to Energise Wealth,” and watch the video interviews that were the inspiration behind this episode.
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