176. Finding Fulfilment: One Woman's Journey to Inner Peace with Sloane

💭 What happens when a successful corporate lawyer decides to change gears and follow her true calling?

In this episode of The Leadership Project, we welcome Sloane, who shares her inspiring transition from a successful corporate career to creating transformative retreats for women leaders.

Sloane discusses her personal journey towards self-discovery, highlighting the importance of embracing true pleasure and aligning with one's authentic self. They explore the significance of female leadership, moving beyond societal expectations, and the profound impact of living in alignment with one's true feelings. Sloane also provides practical advice on how women can connect with their true selves and harness their unique strengths to create a fulfilling and impactful life.

🌐 Connect with Sloane:
• Website: https://www.therealsloane.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/therealsloane/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heartandsloane/

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Chapters

• 0:03 Female Leadership
• 8:09 [Ad] C-Suite Strategies
• 8:57 (Cont.) Female Leadership
• 13:16 Finding Alignment and Letting Go
• 21:51 Letting Go and Having Faith
• 37:04 Emotional Contagion and Peak Performance
• 50:00 Gratitude for Inspirational Storytelling

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

Are you living a life that is congruent with who you are meant to be in today's episode of The Leadership Project, I'm joined by Sloane, the real Sloane. Sloane shares with us her own inspirational story of how she was chasing a life of what she thought would make her happy, a life governed by societal expectations of what it meant to be successful and to be happy and how she managed to connect back to herself and find true fulfillment. Sloane now helps other women to achieve the same thing in their life. Sit back and enjoy the show. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Sloane, the real Sloane. Sloane has left a very successful corporate career to create a series of retreats for women leaders called beyond the edge. And today we're going to unpack this concept about female leadership, the female advantage, how women can step into being their true, authentic self and turn that into something very valuable in their own leadership, to embrace it and to see where that takes you as a leader. So I'm very curious about where today's conversation is going to go. I'll leave the intro short, and I'm going to hand over to Sloane. Sloane, what we'd love to hear from you. We'll have to know a little bit more about that very successful corporate career that you had and what inspired you to go I need to double down on this concept of female leaders. I need to help leaders to find their true self.

Sloane: 1:37

Well, in 2014 I decided to invest $100,000 with a mentor to help me grow my law firm. I was building a corporate law firm at the time, and I went to one of his conferences, and he says, envision the highest version of your life. So I thought, Okay, first, I'm recently divorced, and I want to have a really close relationship with my four year old daughter, Colette. Another thing I know is important is I live like the world is my playground, and I want to have a group of friends who do the same thing. And the last piece is I really want to have a partner where we're living and growing and traveling together. So four years after that conference, I'm at a private beach resort in Mexico with my new love. I met him in Zambia, and now we live together, and my daughter, Colette loves him, and I love him, and we're actually there with this group of friends who we've been traveling the world with. So there we are in this paradise, having dinner under a straw, thatched roof. When I start looking around and having this wild, out of body experience, I realize in this moment that I consciously created all of this, but I don't actually feel like I belong there. I'm not enjoying myself. Everybody's laughing and having the best time, and I'm not. I don't have the close relationship that I want with Colette, and when I go home from that experience, I'm hosting this policies and procedures retreat for attorneys that I know isn't the work that I'm here to do. So the next morning, my boyfriend and I, we get into this huge argument, and it's this argument we've been having over and over and over again. And in his frustration, he looks right at me and he says, Sloane, we can't keep going on like this. Why don't we just get married? When I heard that Mick, I just thought to myself, this is not the life that I want to be living. So when I went home, we ended our relationship. I asked all my friends for space. I canceled all my travel, and really, for the first time in my life, I was completely alone, focusing on building a relationship with myself and I I was working with mentors at the time, and I start asking myself questions, like, if you forget about what you think will make you happy, what will actually make you happy? What are you enjoying? I start taking myself on dates to the beach, focusing on my daughter, Colette, instead of going to Burning Man and traveling through Europe with my ex and all my friends. That summer, I take Colette to Malaysia, and we spend a couple weeks just floating the ocean and going down the slide. And there's this one night where I'm giving her a bath and I'm gently washing her hair, and I have this moment of like I am washing my daughter's hair, probably for the first time that I did that consciously me not a nanny. I'm like finally being the mom that I knew I could be. And when we go home from that trip, I take this big leap, and instead of the policies and procedures retreat for attorneys, I invite a bunch of women to. A retreat that's focused on aligning to their highest potential, and no one shows up. So three months later, I do it again. I read an estate I invite women, and this time, four women come. Today, as you mentioned, I host retreats around the world, guiding women and truly stepping into their highest potential in this life and from this experience, here's what I've come to understand, we as women are meant to be experiencing pleasure in our daily lives. And I'm not talking about the kind of pleasure that I was searching for in my life before orchestrating outside circumstances to feel good, having sex, eating chocolate, doing travel. Those things can be pleasurable, but they're secondary to the true pleasure. That's what I'm talking about here, this pleasure that we cultivate on the inside to be enjoying the passion and the creativity of our work daily, the connection of our relationships, this true pleasure that comes on the inside that then makes all the outside pleasures really enjoyable. Because it turns out that when you tap into this level of true pleasure as a woman, that's when everything in your life really flourishes. And that now is the focus of my work with women. There is, of course, the creating success, having the impact you know you're here to make, having the connections that you really want to experience in your life. And at the core of it all is the truth of how you're feeling. And so that's my inspiration, and working with women at the same time that I cultivate that in my own life.

Mick Spiers: 6:41

That's a really powerful story. Sloane, thank you for sharing. I'll tell you three things that I took away from that, and one is the picture that you illustrated at the start. A lot of people from the outside would say that that looks like a picture of success, and yet, on the inside, that was not being true for you. The second part is you said what I thought would make me happy, what I thought would make me happy, not what would really make me happy, but what I thought would make me happy. And if I put those two together, the things that I'm thinking of are around societal expectations, and I'm going to come back to that in a moment, and then when you get beyond that, what I'm hearing is about when you get true joy and fulfillment, instead of just the pursuit of pleasure, then those external pleasures, those extrinsic pleasures, become even more pleasurable when you're fulfilled on the inside, which I think is really powerful, what I want to come back to, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, I'm going to say that females may feel this more than men may around this societal expectation. So we have these Instagram pictures of what success looks like, but your story is not an uncommon one. Someone that, from the outside looks successful, but on the inside doesn't feel happy, doesn't feel successful.

Sloane: 8:49

Yeah. That's a really good point, and something that's so important to explore for each one of us, because in a lot of ways, our culture and society is set up around this idea that there's something or someone or some point outside of us that's going to make us feel a certain way on the inside. And I had the great privilege, I really consider it a privilege, to kind of go all the way in this big life and these big experiences to find my gosh, this is way beyond what I ever even imagined. And I'm miserable. I was so unhappy. So one of the places for men and women really to explore is where are there any places in life, even it can be really subtle, or it can be really overt and big, but whatever it is, any places in your world where you're thinking, when I get here, I'll finally feel better, more, good enough, happy, joyful, whatever it is, and consciously search that out in your life. Because if you do, you can uncover the simple truth that I think on some level we all know, but it's very challenging to live from the place of nothing outside of you is going to make you feel differently than you feel right now. And that's why it always feels like the goal post moves, because you reach the goal and then you still feel the same way you did. Oh, so it must be something else. It must be the next thing, and that's the illusion, and most people will spend their lives chasing after that. And it doesn't have to be that way.

Mick Spiers: 10:26

Yeah, I think you're 100% right. It's that pursuit is continuous, and you get there and you go, that wasn't it. What's next? It must be something else. And people keep on searching it also. So ends up being an element of almost addictive pursuit. I'm going to say where the pursuit itself is something that you have a badge of honor around, and is also making you feel in a certain way. It impacts the way you see yourself, the story you tell yourself about yourself, inside your head, etc. So Sloane, how do you've made your breakthrough? How do you help women at your retreats to do the same, to put aside some of those societal expectations or the story that they've told themselves in the head and start rewriting the story.

Sloane: 11:16

Well, the foundation has to be alignment with yourself. So in my story, the context was that I had gone so far out of alignment with myself, meaning what I knew was actually right for me in my heart, versus what I thought was going to make me happy or make me feel better in my head. And most of us are trained this way, you know, if you think about the professional path, for example, is like, Hey, you have to get good grades in school, and then you're gonna go to high school, and then you're gonna apply to college, and then you're gonna get the job, and then the house and the marriage. And, you know, it goes on and on, and at some point you have the opportunity to look at, wait a minute, is that what I'm really being called to do, or is that just the next step of what I thought I should be or do? And so for a lot of women, there is, I mean, actually, let's be honest, pretty much every human on the planet, there's a greater level of alignment with who you really are and what your heart or your soul or your inner guidance, however you like to refer to, it is calling you to and when you get into pristine alignment with yourself, you actually move into a life experience where two things happen. Number one, you don't really have problems anymore, and I'm not saying there are challenges. Life brings challenges or things that our personality side wouldn't choose or wouldn't want initially, but it doesn't have to be a problem. It doesn't have to be something wrong in your life because you're in alignment. This is this is your path. The other thing that happens is that life becomes a lot easier. Actually. It's very hard for us as humans to function being out of alignment with ourselves, but we're so conditioned about what we should do or have or be that it feels like we have to do that. So there's a simplicity and a balance and an ease that comes in life when you you get into alignment with yourself, and the further out of alignment with you that you are, the more jarring it can be to get into alignment. And my story is a perfectly extreme example that I do like to share with people. I share this story so that you don't have to go there. Most people do not need to completely cut off their life and their friends and who they were being to start over. But in my case, I did, and I chose to do that, and I was I had, I needed to. I felt at that time like that's what I had to do in order to get into alignment. And honestly, that was one of the hardest periods of my entire life. It really was.

Mick Spiers: 13:58

Yeah, yours was a very major reset, and I can see what you mean, that not everyone has to do that. There could be smaller pivots that they can make to get back into congruence. I want to come back to the awareness, though, in the first place, I'm going to hazard, I guess again here, I'm going to say there's a lot of people listening to the show that are going about their life. They're following the mortgage trap. They are. By this age, I should be a VP of my company, and by this age I should have paid off my house, and you can hear Him. The word should keeps on coming up, because people have this expectation. And then they may notice that something's not right, that something feels incongruent, but they don't do anything about it. Whereas you listened to the call, you went, hang on a second. This is this is not right. I've got to do something about it. What can you say to people that might be listening to the show now, who might have been following the bouncing ball, they might be in their 50s, they might even be in their 60s, and go, Yeah, I've done that my whole life and I never reset and reconnected to my true self. How do people that have lived with it for a long time take the step of awareness to go hang on a second. This is not who I was supposed to be.

Sloane: 15:13

Well, it really depends on how big of a change you want, because usually that idea comes up when things feel like they're not working. I didn't get that promotion I should have gotten, or I can never pay the bills on time. It feels like there's never enough money, or my marriage isn't working, or whatever the context is, you can start with baby steps, honestly. Alignment can be as simple as it's. Starting to speak your truth. A lot of people, they have, let's say, a challenge with someone they love. And instead of saying, Hey, that was a really hard conversation for me, can we talk about it and clean it up, or I keep fixating on what you said. It felt really bad, you know. Can we talk about it? They just brush it under the rug that's being out of alignment with yourself, all the way to if you want to make a big leap in your life, and you really like are bumping up against things not working. Alignment is the fastest way to move things forward in your life. So if you're in a place where you feel like, wow, I'm not where I should be, or things feel really hard, or this isn't working in my world. I know it could be better, or it's too painful the way it is. If you experience those things, it's it's a really powerful place to look is, Where can I get into even more alignment with myself? And the speed with which you want to make a change is probably the level of alignment that you want to step into in your life.

Mick Spiers: 16:42

So, if someone is at that stage then let's say that they they want to make the first steps. How do they connect to themselves?

Sloane: 16:52

Hmm, that's a great question, because there are so many ways to do it. I think it begins with the desire of like a real, honest clarification from with inside of yourself. Am I ready to hear the truth of me? And if you are, the truth is going to come out so that can be through silence. I have a dear friend who does a program with people for 21 days where it literally is just a process of allowing yourself to sit in silence or to walk in nature without podcasts and headphones and everything, but just to be present, answers are going to come in. And here's the thing I've come to understand about people and alignment. We all actually know at least a handful of the areas where we're out of alignment. So here's a really powerful question you can ask yourself, if you want to reflect on it in a meditation or a journaling session, where am I out of alignment with myself, or where am I out of integrity with me? And when you ask yourself that honestly, answers will arise, because we're human, we're naturally, you know, depending on where your focus is in this area, but on and off the path of alignment and integrity with ourselves. And so really is just taking the space and the time to reflect on it, and then if you want to go even faster. And the way I did this when I was changing my life was I worked with mentors, people who could show me my blind spots and show me where I was out of alignment with me, support me in seeing that so that I could move more quickly into making a change.

Mick Spiers: 18:35

Okay, so the two things I'm taking away they, Sloane. One is the giving yourself some space and time to get away from let's call it the daily rush. And there's always something that you can be doing. We know that. But if you just keep on chasing, chasing, chasing, and what's my to do list today, you're never taking the time to really listen to yourself. And then the second one is, if you are struggling to see the label on the jar from the inside, you might need someone from the outside to help you with the right questions, the right challenges. They might challenge you a little bit to almost force you to connect back to who you are. So if it's not coming naturally to yourself, This is where mentors and coaches can come in. How does that sit with you?

Sloane: 19:26

Yeah, absolutely. And one idea through that is the way I see what I do with clients is both because I have been through it in my own life and world, and looking deeply at this myself, and then also the misalignment is born out of the problem. So if we look deeper, or if you want to look deeper at what your struggle is, what's not working in your life, what feels bad, what you want to change, that's a great way in as where am I out of alignment? There's some misalignment there that you're experiencing the problem.

Mick Spiers: 20:06

I'm going to extrapolate here a little bit Sloane and just test something that's coming into my mind as you're talking when we do that, it's almost like a baselining activity, checking with ourselves what, what is out of alignment. What I'm extrapolating now is when we can then let go of the things that are out of alignment. We can allow the things that are aligned to come into our lives, whereas if we just, I'm going to use that cliche, the rat race, if we stay on the rat race the whole time the. No space for new existence to come into being, for new aligned activities to come in, because we're just too damn busy, right? So I'm hearing that when we do this, check in with ourselves, what is out of alignment? The next step, I feel, is we've got to let it go of those things, let it go to let it come.

Sloane: 21:00

Yes, it's such a beautiful point that you're bringing up, because I think one of the hardest things for us as human beings is letting go. And one of my spiritual guides says the new comes at the cost of the old. And for people who are always wanting to hang on to what the known and what is, and either the things that you have or the people in your life, or the way that things are, the way you see yourself as another big one. You know, I work with a lot of people who are ready for a big shift in their career, and it can be so hard to have achieved a huge amount of success, to have a great professional reputation, to be known as this certain type of person, and then to really go inside and say, Yeah, I have this level of mastery and accolades and everything in this area, but I am feeling like I'm ready to go in this other direction. That's a big letting go. It's a big letting go of how you see yourself, of how other people may perceive you, and that might be money included. I mean, there's a lot of factors. So this, this process of letting go, and as you're saying, to allow the new to come in, is huge. And if you think about it, all movement and growth and really upward evolution and elevation in life comes from first letting go. There's no way to add more into an already full life. Reputation, way of being, you've got to, on some level, act in faith. And I think this is another really important thing to bring up. And for a lot of people, the conversation about faith can be activating, because they may have certain ideas about it related to religion and other things. But I want to bring it in here, because this process and what you and I are talking about, about getting into alignment with yourself, about creating space and letting go of the old to bring in the new. About transforming your life and creating more of a life of what you really want inside, on some level, is an act of faith. There has to be something in a person where you can close your eyes and look within and say, I believe that more is possible for me, and I'm gonna go for it. Maybe I don't know the how, I don't see how it works out, whatever those things are, but I'm gonna go for it. That's real faith, that's trusting life, that's trusting yourself, and it's from that place that your highest potential and your deepest desires are fulfilled.

Mick Spiers: 23:36

Yeah, beautiful Sloane, so two chapters there I'm hearing is, what am I going to say no to? So I can say yes to the things that really matter to me, and then the leap of faith, the leap of faith that, yeah, there is something more for me, and I'm going to go and pursue it. Yeah, really powerful Sloane. Now I can see how all of this would make someone a better leader. We always talk about you've got to lead yourself before you can lead others, and the more connected you are to your true self, the better leader you're going to be. I want to get gender specific now though, you talk about the female advantage, what do you mean by the female advantage?

Sloane: 24:17

Well. The idea is that for us as women, there are different experiences and qualities and even practices that allow us to be the best leaders that we can. And this is what I consider like a pioneering exploration for us as women, because as you and I have talked about and you mentioned you've you've explored a lot in your show. The the current paradigm of creating success and of leadership is through a masculine paradigm. And I want to be clear when I talk about this, I love men. I actually have benefited greatly from the masculine paradigm. I built an entire law firm that I sold from that place. And then what I've come to discover through many years of study and working with women around the world and a certification in women's neuropsychophysiology, and then using my own life as an experiment in all this, is that there actually is a completely different path for us as women that not only allows us to create even more success, impact and connection, it also leaves us feeling nourished and uplifted, instead of what a lot of women leaders experience in the masculine paradigm is, yeah, they can create success, but it leaves them depleted, feeling like they. Want to have sex, pleasure is some secondary thing way down the line for when I have time and maybe feel good enough on vacation after a few drinks, and it's a way that leaves a woman kind of being a shell of who she actually is. So for us as women, the foundation of this new paradigm that I call peak performance, the feminine way, is beginning with pleasure. And the core belief is pleasure is my North Star. And it's this true pleasure that I was talking about in the beginning of our conversation. Who do I need to be to feel good? First on the inside as my top priority, and then from that place, I lead from that place, I create a business. From that place I serve my family and friends and team and the people that I love and care about in the world. And then there's a lot more to it that flows out of that. But at its core is the cultivation of true pleasure, and at its core is really having a different perspective about where self sacrifice fits in. And I'm going to propose it, it doesn't fit in in this new model. It doesn't fit in and it doesn't work. And that unfortunately is the place that most, most women are leading from, currently.

Mick Spiers: 26:54

There's multiple things I want to unpack there. Sloane, so bear with me for a moment. So, let's talk about the masculine paradigm. I do believe that this is getting better, slowly, very slowly, slower than it should, but we've had decades of alpha style leaders, and it didn't serve us well. Have a look at the engagement levels that we see in the workplace, depending on which research you read, whether it's ATD or Gallup, you know, the the engagement levels in the workplace can be as low as 16% one six, right? So one in one in five people in the workplace truly love their job and like their boss. So the masculine paradigm didn't serve us, well, any of us, not not just women, it didn't serve us that well, we've had decades where women leaders have felt like they had to mimic the behavior of the men in the room, otherwise they wouldn't get noticed and they wouldn't get on we do need to shift that. Then what I'm hearing is, and I'm going to say whether you're a woman or not, on this one, it's about that connection to fulfillment and having a true sense of self is where this will all come from. Instead of being the bravado act of today, I'm playing the role of leader. No, today, I'm playing the role of myself, and I'm going to show up as my authentic self is where some of this is going to come from. And that congruence and the alignment that you've been talking about, then I want to unpack the final word that you use that I thought was really interesting, and I think this is gender biased, and that's the word sacrifice. And what I see, particularly with working mums, it feels like working mums are the ones that feel the need to make more sacrifices than others, whether it's even going to use the word guilt. And I'll, I'll share a story with you, Sloane, and you might not agree with it, by the way, but the classic one of the school concert, where, if, if a woman is in the workplace and their children's school concert is that day, end of end of year, concert, whatever it is, if they're in the workplace, because there's something that must be finished, they'll feel guilty for missing the concert and a man, and forgive me for the gender bias. This is a complete stereotype that I'm talking about. The man goes to the concert and feels guilty that he's he's left the workplace, and I don't think either of those are healthy behaviors. Your thoughts?

Sloane: 29:24

Yeah, yeah. The self sacrifice is a really interesting one, and I agree that it's a big thing. With moms, there's a lot of mom guilt. There's a lot of like, I have to put myself way down on the list or last, and take care of everything and everyone first, and I'll just share that my experience with all kinds of women is that this is not limited to moms. This is a cultural norm that we have. Sometimes it's through religion. I had a client who shared recently she was raised with this idea of joy in a religious family that was you, you prioritize Jesus, others, and then yourself, deeply conditioned with this. And unfortunately, that is not atypical. That's actually quite normal, even if it's not in a religious context. It's very normal for women to have this idea that I show my love by sacrificing myself. And the reason that self sacrifice to create what you want, which would be love, connection, care, impact, success, the reason that self sacrifice can create those things, let me say that a different way, the reason that it's in a. Illusion that self sacrifice will create those things in your life, more care, more love, more nourishment, success, impact, whatever it is, is because you cannot sacrifice yourself to make others better off. And there is plenty of research that shows that people who are happy and feeling good and nourished, and I'm going to take it a level deeper and say for women who are experiencing true pleasure, because I think pleasure is a more holistic way to describe happiness for women, women who are experiencing that are going to be more successful and better off in every area of their lives. Sean Aker and The Happiness Advantage did this comprehensive look at every study he could find about happiness, and found that people are more wealthy, they're more connected, they're more successful, they're more fit, they're more everything when they're happy first, versus this idea that I could sacrifice my way to happiness or success or connection. So it's proven that what we're talking about is true. In addition to I just want to bring in this, this analogy of if you've had those moments in life where you're feeling really happy, think about how that permeates through every area of your life. You're singing in the kitchen, you're cooking. The kids are happier. Oh, mom's happy. Or your partner, you know, for a husband or a partner, is like they're feeling good when you're feeling good women set the mood in their relationships and in their world, and most women aren't realizing that's true in the first place, not to mention the power that they have through their moods. When you're feeling good, everything around you is better and everyone around you is better off.

Mick Spiers: 32:38

So, let me share what I'm taking away from that. And there's, it's an interesting dichotomy, I have to say Sloane, because we do know that leadership isn't is one of our roles of leaders, is to look after the welfare of others. It's to create an environment where they can do their very best work to in to empower them to look after their interests. And there is a school that would say, Yeah, you know, leaders eat last, they put other people first. But what I'm hearing from you is, if we have done the groundwork on ourselves first, and we've gotten ourselves to a place of happiness, then we're in the place where we can better serve others, not the other way around.

Sloane: 33:19

Yes, 100% even physiologically, that's it's pretty simple to see. So when we go into fear, and fear could be anything stress worry. You could be stressing and worrying about your team, or how are your kids doing, or your husband. When you go into any level of fear, basically, your body shuts down your higher critical thinking and creative capacities, because the body goes into a state of saying, Okay, there's fear. We got to protect the body, the body and the brain don't know the difference between. You're about to walk down a dark alley and there's someone down there with a knife, and I'm feeling stressed because my team might be overworking, or what do they think of me, or whatever, whatever ideas we get about things like that. So when you go into the fear, doubt, worry, stress, and you're literally shutting off your highest thinking and reasoning capabilities. So by definition, you have less creativity, less solutions, less options, versus when you're feeling good, when you're open, when you're set on your vision and what's possible and seeing the best in people, you have all of your body and your brain available to work for you. So even at a basic physiological level, it's clear that everyone is better off when you're in that state. Now, what does it take to be in that state? You could know intellectually what I'm saying. Probably most people listening already know that idea and what it actually takes to be in that state is first a decision that I don't sacrifice myself. I know I talk to women all the time who need to go to the bathroom for hours, and they sit there and work through it because they have a scheduled phone call, or they feel like they need to pack everybody in, or whatever the reason is that's a level of physical self sacrifice is not taking care of your body. You're not going to be in an open space seeing the highest perspective of that call you're on when you really need to go to the bathroom and you didn't go for the last hour, for example. So first is taking care of yourself, first on every level, physical, emotional, intellectual. Virtual, and then what's required for that is space. There's no way to create what we're talking about here, or to have pleasure, or to, you know, access all of who you are, where you are, packing everything in and saying, My centeredness isn't valuable. You've got to have space in your day and for yourself, no matter what. For me, I'll be late to a call if I need to use the restroom, I'll have someone wait instead of of not going. And that's such a crazy, silly little example, but it's an illustration of the way women are treating themselves that's causing this kind of problem.

Mick Spiers: 36:24

So the term space has come up again, and this is again, getting off the rat race and making time for ourselves. Then you mentioned the term peak performance earlier, and I'm hearing two things there actually. One is peak performance doesn't come through self sacrifice. It comes through looking after yourself. And have a look at Olympic athletes. Olympic athletes don't sacrifice their themselves. They look after themselves, and they use their body as the instrument that it is to achieve the goal that they're trying to pursue for themselves. Right? So peak performance comes from looking after yourself first, including your emotional state. So if you're going to be performing at your own peak performance and your own potential, you need to have done that work to look after yourself. Then the second thing I'm hearing, then Sloane, I'm going to call it emotional contagion. So once you've looked after yourself, it's then going to have an impact on others. And this can go in either way. Like you said before, if you're going around the office and you're in a bright, happy mood and all that kind of stuff, i Cheers everyone else up, and everyone else all of a sudden starts feeling, oh, the boss is in a great mood today. This is This is wonderful, and we all know the opposite is true, that if you're walking around stressed and completely out of yourself, etc, etc, the impact that that has on others. So peak performance starts with self it doesn't include self sacrifice. It includes looking after yourself. And then the knock on effect is that you're ready to serve others, but you're also having this emotional contagion effect on others. How does that sit with you?

Sloane: 38:04

Yes, yes. And I want to be really clear that the emotional contagion effect that you're talking about is not about positive thinking, and it's not about putting on a happy face or pretending to be happy and joyful. What we're talking about here is the truth of your state of being inside. And this idea of peak performance, the feminine way is, I have a whole framework around it, and I work with private clients for an extended period on mastery and living from this place. But I want to just say one thing about it that's really juicy, which is P performance, the feminine way is actually about, at its core, getting in touch with some of the gifts and the superpowers that we have as women, that for a lot of us, we've been taught our weaknesses or problems or shouldn't be part of corporate or are if we're trustworthy or professional, or any of that stuff is first of all discovering these gifts and then understanding how they're actually superpowers to be used in our businesses, in our relationships, in our everyday activities, and then when we are living from that place, we have this life experience of being fully expressed. Because one of the problems that women are experiencing. You know, women experience depression at a rate of at least double that of men. Autoimmune diseases double or triple depending on the disease. There are a lot of things that are showing us the way women are operating isn't working for us, and on the higher side of that, when you really are expressing all of who you are as a woman, a powerful woman. This isn't, you know, peak performance, the feminine way, isn't about becoming Meek or not creating success or any of that is actually a path of creating a lot more success and having a lot more power than we have understood that we have. And when I say power, I don't mean like power, you know, with your fist in the air, kind of old fashioned feminist, manly woman, or something like that. I'm actually talking about this power that emanates from us, from within, that when we learn what that is and how to express it, there's a level of power that most women, even very powerful women, have not yet understood, is available, and it's available to all of us.

Mick Spiers: 40:28

You've given us a lot there to think about Sloane, and you are right, some of those traits that should be superpowers, once again, societal expectation. It's not true. True, but the societal expectation, there's been a almost a training over years, that those things don't belong in the workplace, and that's that's just not true, and the world will be a better place when we can embrace that for sure.

Sloane: 40:51

Can I give an example of that one? One of them is emotions in business. So we as women have been taught that if you have big emotions in business, it can be crazy or bitchy or untrustworthy or out of control. And in truth, all that is is if you imagine, and I'm going to generalize here again, but if you imagine, as a general matter, men might have an emotional range that's like this, and I'm just holding up my hands in a certain distance apart, and women, as a general matter, have a much wider range of emotions. Well, if we're judging what a normal range of emotion is based on men, then anything outside of that that women have naturally is going to seem big and can seem out of control, especially if we have a culture that doesn't teach women how to express that in a healthy way. So if you can imagine, for us as women, it's actually a beautiful superpower that we have to feel differently than men do, and a lot of men actually really enjoy it to feel a woman in her pleasure and passion and the biggest feelings that she can have, for many men, that feels interesting and big and exciting. And when women are taught how to express their emotions in a healthy way in business and life, there's a lot of power in it. So a lot of us as women were taught, let's say, in corporate we shouldn't be angry, maybe that we shouldn't be angry, period. So that would be you swallow your anger, and maybe it's passive aggressive kind of complaining behind the scenes or gossiping and doing that. But there's a huge amount of power as a woman to be able to look at someone in business and say when you said that I was really angry, I felt so much anger inside, and I just wanted to let you know I did not enjoy the way that conversation went, or I did not like whatever happened. And when we learn to communicate the truth of our feelings, but in a healthy, contained way, there is a lot of power in both deepening relationship and having clear communication and elevating the whole context of our relationship. So that's just one little example, and there are so many more, but we have some very special ways of being as women, and as we learn how to use these and integrate them in business, which is the pioneering I was talking about before we have to kind of test and practice, but as we do, everyone is better off. Men are better off, women are better off. We're all rising together in this in this life experience.

Mick Spiers: 43:34

What you're talking about there is the root of emotional intelligence and being able to regulate our emotions and even use our emotions to full effect, like, to full, I'm going to say positive effect, like, get our emotions to work for us instead of against us, and bottling them up doesn't work for us, it works against us eventually. And it just made me think of one of my favorite quotes from Aristotle, and I'm probably going to butcher this, by the way, because it's quite complex, but it's something along the lines of, anyone can be angry that's easy, but to be angry with the right person for the right reason, in the right way and to the right degree, that is not easy, and that's what it should be about. And you can replace the word angry with any emotion, including positive emotions. Anyone can be happy, but to be happy with the right person for the right reason, in the right way, to the right degree, you can replace that with anything. And that's, that's what it's about. It's not about bottling and putting emotion aside, because emotions don't belong in the workplace. Like you're saying. It's, it's about, well, we're all human beings, and the sooner we realize that, the better we'll be as a as a race and as a collection of people and and, you know, a workplace, a society, a culture, or everything, will be better when we remember that we're human beings. Very good, Sloane. This It's been wonderful conversation, I'd like to take us now to our rapid round. These are the same four questions that we ask all of our guests. So Sloane, what? What is the one thing that you know now that you wish you knew when you were 20?

Sloane: 45:13

I know that the way I feel matters. I used to feel like maybe emotions were something to deal with, off to the side or by myself, or just something to understand and to manage where what I've come to realize is that it's safe for me to trust how I feel, and that's in my body, to how I feel about a situation in the story. I shared in the beginning, I didn't trust that what I felt along this path, I'm not actually enjoying these friends, this relationship that I'm in isn't feeling good. It's not feeling right. I was putting all that down for the sake of what I thought was what I should want or what I should create and what I should have, and that's how I got so far out of alignment, and so now I use my feelings as a guide, and not that my feelings are running my life. You know, I have a constant up and down of emotions that's always moving and at the same time, the way I feel matters I'm not enjoying these people. Is an opportunity for me to look more deeply at what's going on, instead of putting it aside and trying to ignore it for the sake of what I think I understand in my head.

Mick Spiers: 46:24

Yeah. Very good, Sloane. Thank you for sharing that. What's your favorite book?

Sloane: 46:30

That is a really hard question, but I'm gonna say I am the word by Paul Selig is a book that's revolutionized my life. He's the spiritual teacher who I referenced earlier about the new comes at the cost of the old, and I've been in a deep study with Paul and his work for many years. And the thing that's so profound and impactful for me about his work is while I'm doing all this growth and building businesses and relationships and everything. For me, one of the most important aspects of my life is cultivating the highest spiritual perspective that I can possibly have. And for me, at its core that is a practice and a path of living in love. How can I love humans more? How can I love me more? How can I be a presence of love and everything that I do and this work and that book, and many of his books actually have had a really big impact in supporting me and living from that place.

Mick Spiers: 47:29

Nice, Sloane. Thanks for sharing that as well. What's your favorite quote?

Sloane: 47:36

I love the quote by Helen Keller, and I actually don't know the exact quote in this moment, but you know, this, the thing that affects me so much about Helen Keller, and that I love about her, was she was what we would consider at such a disadvantage, and yet this woman says that if you don't go for it in your life and really, like, go all the way in for what you really want, like, what's the point of living? And to be able to have an idea like that from someone who you know is deaf and blind and would seemingly like, Oh my gosh. How's she even thinking about something like that, let alone communicating it to people, is really highly inspiring for me.

Mick Spiers: 48:19

Yeah, yeah nice. All right, thank you. And finally, there's going to be people listening to this, and they're probably going through their own journey at some point on that spectrum. Some of them might not have reached any awareness of their incongruence or misalignment. Others might be at that pivotal point where they've gone, yeah, this is not working for me, and they might be looking for support. How do people find you? If they'd like to know more about you and your work, Sloane?

Sloane: 48:47

Definitely connect with me on social. We'll post. You know my social media handles, I would love to connect with you. And if this conversation is inspiring you, if you're feeling like you want something more in your life, even if you don't know what that means or how to get there, reach out to me. We have a lot of opportunities on my website, which is the real sloane.com and I spelled my name with an e for us to connect. And that's to have a conversation where, at the minimum, I can support you in getting more clarity about your life and we can deepen our relationship. I love connecting with people who are dedicated to their growth and anyone who's listening to this conversation. I truly I would love to hear from you and connect.

Mick Spiers: 49:32

Wonderful, Sloane and thank you so much for your time today and for sharing your own story, as well as how you help other women today to find their own path. Thank you so much for sharing today.

Sloane: 49:44

Thank you so much for having me, Mick. Great to be here.

Mick Spiers: 49:47

You've been listening to The Leadership Project. If you want to take your leadership and personal performance to the next level, subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you live stream shows and new content every single week. In the next episode, I'll be joined by Gary Harpst, the founder and CEO of lead first, Gary and I tackle a really challenging topic. Can you integrate faith into a business without compromising inclusion? You don't want to miss this. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo And my amazing wife Sei Speirs, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel, where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care. Look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.