Episode 22 – Mastering Resilience featuring Jacqueline Nagle

Michelle: Welcome to the “InFLOW” Podcast. I am your host, Michelle Bosch. I see a gapping hole across society that focuses on the outer work and forgets about the inner work. And what we really need is to bridge the gap between prosperity and spirituality to live a life in flow, with inflows of light, inflows of cash, inflows of creativity, inflows of grace in our lives. Each week, join me for powerful messages and interviews that will leave you inspired and ready to step into flow in your higher work. So now, let’s go.

Welcome to the “InFLOW” Podcast. I am your host, Michelle Bosch. I have a brilliant woman today as my guest, and she is coming to you all the way from Australia. She is part of my entrepreneurial women-only mastermind. Her name is Jacqueline Nagle, and she is the creator of SpeakableYOU intensive training. I have, actually, just gone through this training myself a few weeks back. And Jacqueline is a recognized speaker and trainer in Australia. She is a Master Practitioner in NLP and hypnotherapy. She’s a certified peak performance coach with extensive business speaker and workshop training over the last 15 years. She has delivered a ton of keynotes, including one to “Marie Claire Australia” magazine event. She’s pursued and won more than $20 million in business throughout her career. She’s delivered more than 120 workshops, spanning 15 topic areas. She acts as a chair for the Queensland Women in Leadership in the Public Sector conference, and she is just freaking amazing.

And the reason why I have brought her on the show today is because I believe that she’s one of the most qualified speakers that I know on resilience, her entrepreneurial and personal journey. And when she speaks to her audiences on that particular topic transforms her audience at a cellular level, and I want more women to know about the lessons that she has learned along the way. I want more women to be able to speak up. I’m on a mission to get more women to lead in their financial lives. And so it’s an honor to have you today, Jacqueline, on our show. And without further ado, welcome, Jacqueline.

Jacqueline: Thank you so much for having me, Michelle. It’s such a pleasure to be here.

Michelle: Great. Wonderful. Looking forward to it for sure. So let me just jump right in because I know you probably have to keep on in your day. But tell us a little bit about your journey. I myself, I think I don’t know it all, but some of the setbacks that have made you a master on resilience. So how did you get started?

Jacqueline: Look, I actually got started very differently to a lot of people. So I was in Australia in year 11, which is our second last year of high school, and very, very clear about what I was going to do. So I wanted to become a lawyer, or a barrister, or a district attorney. I actually wanted to use those skills to come to New York, in the U.S. And six months after being crystal clear on that, I had events in my life, which meant that I dropped out of school and was homeless twice as a teenager, so that university career never quite landed in my lap. And I was very much, you know, off the rails girl until my early 20s. And then I fell into a job that I loved. I moved to Melbourne at one point when I was 23, and I fell into a job that I loved in recruitment. And that opened up the pathway, it reminded me that I was clever, if that makes sense. So it reminded me that I actually had a brain. So I spent sort of eight years in the Netherlands and off the rails, and that job reminded me that I was clever and I was fascinated with it. Because a great recruiter and a great consultant has the opportunity to understand how we operate as people, and sort of our clients are people and our products are those people. And when they all work together well, it’s fascinating and exhilarating. And when they don’t, it’s devastating.

So that was sort of my first career move that I ever made. And as a result of that, I actually ended up with my mother creating a family business after I left the corporate world with that. And as a business we took from $14 million to $22 million in over a period of years, so it sort of went from $0 to $4 million over about probably close to 10 years, and then we went from $4 million to $22 million, we sold to a stock exchange-listed company. I, actually, drove that growth in about 15 months. We transitioned that company…

Michelle: Impressive.

Jacqueline: Yeah. We did a lot of mistakes in that 15 months. We broke a lot of times in that 15 months, and then we sold to a stock exchange-listed company. I delivered their 3-year projected net profits within 10 months. Now, in that process, you know, when you grow that fast, there’s a lot of stresses, and you do break at a lot of different points. The other thing that happened along the way was we had a massive court judgment that was what they call out of jurisdiction. So we’d actually done everything right, but we were still found to be guilty, and that had a $700,000 penalty attached to it with 30 days to pay. So that was something that I got very good at negotiating. And we brought that back to a total impact of about half a million dollars and 15 months to pay. So that was my first experience of having to face something that actually wasn’t even your fault in the corporate world.

Michelle: That’s a major setback. Yeah.

Jacqueline: Yeah, it was a major setback. And we were very comfortable until that point. And then, along the way as well, one of the things that I do talk about in my keynote on resilience is I was about to buy the business off my mother with my 2YC. She had a bipolar breakdown, and over a period of time six months, took her own life. So as a team, that was extraordinarily hard to deal with. For me, it was actually like I was watching a mirror shatter in front of me. I had to keep together the business, I had to keep, you know, the team and I had three children under five or six at that stage. So it was a very tough process for us to get through and still keep the business afloat, let alone grow.

So we had some extraordinary achievements in that time as well. We became very adept at getting out-of-work women back into the workforce, which was one of our major drivers. So we were very good at taking women who couldn’t get a permanent job, putting them into temporary and contract jobs and ending up having them get the permanent job that they were placed into. So that was one of our big drivers, massive driver, actually. We were in regional Australia, so it was a massive achievement for us.

So that was that part of life. And then, I went into just doing some general consulting when I came out of that business because I wasn’t really quite sure what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I went into just doing some general consulting work. And I found that most small business owners, and even some medium business owners, were sort of being held captive by fear because of the Industrial Relations legislation, so employment legislation. And I found that I had a real flair for working out how to work with legislation, how to make it commercially viable for the business owner, and keep them protected and, actually, give them back some control so that they weren’t afraid of making the wrong move with their people anymore.

In that process, I became very good at doing enterprise bargaining agreements, so that’s an instrument in Australia where a company can have its own individual employment contract law, and I did 27 of those arrangements with 100% success rate, going up against the most militant unions in the country. And, I think, that’s where I honed my ability to communicate because I used to have to train the executive because if they walked out onto the workshop floor and said one wrong word, we would lose the deal. So that was sort of that..

Michelle: A lot at stake, yeah.

Jacqueline: Yeah, a lot at stake. So that was that part of life. My then husband and I took off for about six months traveling the country with our children in a caravan, which was divine. And when I came back into the real world, so to speak, when we got out of the bubble of travel and you know, being off road, I went into an executive role as Director of Client Services with a global recruitment company. So I put my feet back in it, and didn’t like it because the industry had become commoditized. So it had sort of become…and it wasn’t based on relationship anymore, and it wasn’t based on value, it was based on price and commodity.

So I stayed in that for 12 months. Then I became a general manager for a mining services company, so we were doing shut and works on coal mining sites. I was responsible for health safety contracts and quality for a $42 million business. When I exited that, I went back to consulting for a while, but then I ended up in a role… I moved cities, so I moved from regional Australia into a capital city in Brisbane, and I became CEO of a traffic control company. So the Stop/Go people in the big bump trucks on highways and motorways. And that was I was actually…it was a hostile placement, so the shareholding managing director was removed at 8:00 a.m., and I was placed in as the new CEO at 9:00 a.m.

Michelle: A lot of difficult, rapid growth, sticky situations, a lot of negotiation, I can see how your communication skills are getting honed throughout that journey, for sure.

Jacqueline: Yeah. So one of the things that was really interesting is that, along the way, and particularly when I got the CEO role in a traffic-control company, I had always been in labor/hire construction mining services. I would get asked to speak at events, and the men in the room would want to know what I was doing next, and what’s my next move and blah blah. And the women in the room would just say, “I don’t know how you knew you could do the job.” And that’s what started my change. So I’ve really shifted a lot. You’ve met me in my new sort of career, and I’ve really shifted a lot because that question just got me really curious. Because the way that I used to put it was I’d always been aware of the chatter that there was a gender inequality and gender imbalance and diversity was required. But because of everything I’d always done, it was just chatter to me. And it wasn’t until I walked into that role, and I was the first C-suite woman in the [inaudible 00:10:23] state that wasn’t the token HR or administrative-based role.

Michelle: Yeah. Yeah.

Jacqueline: And so it wasn’t until I walked into that role, and then when I got asked this question, I thought, “What do you mean how did I know I could do the job? I just knew.” You know, I just knew I could do it. There was something that needed fixing, I knew how to fix it. And I didn’t doubt my capacity or capability to do it. But it sounded lots of conversations for me, that I just started to realize that women just really have to have 120…feel like they have to have 120% of things in place to get moving. And even when they have the skills, they don’t know how to message it. They don’t know how to speak up about it. They don’t know how to capture it in a way that gets the attention of the men in the room. Because we can’t just say it’s all about women, we’ve actually got to get the attention and trust of the men. And it absolutely brought me down this whole path of doing a lot of empowerment programs for women and starting to really speak to what was actually missing as far as their communication skills go, and the confidence skills and things like that. So that’s sort of, in a nutshell, where the journey has taken me.

Michelle: Excuse me, yes. Wow, that’s an impressive story. I wanted to get back to a point where you said you had this lawsuit going and you’re able to negotiate from $700,000 to $500,000, and so on. And just, in general, I mean, that was a catastrophic event for the business. It’s overwhelming, devastating. And I know that, with resilience, it’s a recent area of study, and the idea that you can actually build the muscle on resilience is something new.

Jacqueline: Yeah.

Michelle: So how did in that moment, how in that time, how did you build that muscle of resilience? Like, how did you deal, like, in that recovery period? Yes, it was part of crisis management, but then how did you get yourself to step out of it?

Jacqueline: Yeah. So part of what I did a lot of the time was I just got…you get very laser focused. So I think what happens to most of us is we go, “I don’t know what to do now.” And instead of…our wiring seems to evolve to a place that as soon as we are emotionally or mentally saying to ourselves, “I don’t know what to do here,” it’s like we stop. It’s like we become, “I don’t know what to do here, so I’m not gonna do anything.”

Michelle: Yeah.

Jacqueline: Instead of…and of my mantras has become, “Just because I don’t know now, it doesn’t mean I won’t know next.” So I think our own chatter has a lot to do with it, but you become laser focused. So one of the things that we generally tend to not push through crisis or be…you know, move through things and become resilient is because we’re looking too far ahead. So we’re sort of like thinking, “What’s this gonna like in a year? What’s this gonna look like in two years time? I can’t even see six months.” And what we have to do is we have to get laser focused on, “What is the next best possible step that I can make in this moment?”

So one of the things that really happened from a financial perspective when we had that judgment was every single day, in the morning, actually, I used to do it at night so I could go home with a clear head and know what I had to do the next day, I would look at everything because there’s a lot of prioritizing going on, and I would look at everything. And if it was gonna make me money by immediately actioning it, then I did it or got my team to do it. If it was going to cost me money by not doing it immediately, then I did it, and everything else just got moved to review again in 24 hours. So everything is literally, “What is the next best step for what we need to achieve?” There was no big grand plan. There was no big, “What is this gonna look like in six months time?” You just have to, actually, look at what is the next best. And that’s where I find, even with my clients now, they send themselves into overwhelm even on the good stuff. Forget about in crisis, even on the good stuff.

Michelle: Even on opportunities, you start over analyzing and trying to figure out how it’s gonna look, and then you don’t act. Yeah, and then fear sets in. And yeah.

Jacqueline: And you just sit there. And so one of the things that, I think, was really…I think, because that was such a big thing, it was literally, I had no choice but to get through it because at that stage, we had about 85 to 90 staff. By the time we exited that business, or I exited that business, we were employing 220 to 230 people every day and across Australia. So at that stage, we had a lot of people depending on us. And it was a family-owned business, so if I didn’t pull this through, then my mother was gonna go down. That’s a big motivator. So I think, I sort of…I couldn’t…the reason why…I wasn’t a genius.

The reason why I couldn’t go to what this would look like in 6 months or 12 months in 2 years is because it was so incomprehensible where we were going. And I was like, “I can’t deal with that.” It was I couldn’t deal with… If I didn’t pull this off, people would lose their jobs and my mom would lose her business. I couldn’t deal with it. It was nothing genius. I just went, “Well, I can deal with this next step.” And in doing so, I actually started building a strategy around being resilient.

So I have actually built a strategy around how you build the muscle of being resilient, and then how you deal with those issues when you need to pull on that resilience muscle because everything is relative as well. Like, that is a major thing that people can get knocked sideways just by something they hear or see outside of their vision. So everything is relative. So building the muscle of resilience is not just with the big stuff. It can be the unexpected small things that just change your path.

Michelle: It isn’t the absence of stress or the suffering, you know, but how you adapt to that adversity that makes the difference in how you flow through life. Yeah. Going back now, thank you very much for revisiting that crazy probably period of time, you know, in your journey. Going back on the speaking, I know that you say that our fear of speaking and speaking up is not really about speaking, but it’s about an experience that has been either burned in our minds or a simple sentence from someone who thought that they were coming from love, but it didn’t land that way on your end, or an assessment from a teacher and environment where you, basically, were rewarded for being invisible. And so can you speak a little bit more about your personal experience with this? Like, was there one thing that happened in your childhood that you felt “Okay, this is it and this is how I overcame it,” or something like that?

Jacqueline: Yeah, so I don’t think that I overcame it in my childhood. There’s definitely some incidents in my childhood, and we’ve all bought back stories. We’ve all got things that define us. And mine was, as a six-year-old with parents separating, the focus was on my younger brother and how would he cope. And so I learned to be very quiet and subservient to make sure that my younger brother was coping, even though I was the one who actually knew my father beat her and things like that. So there’s all those sorts of stories. And I think nearly every one of us have something that we can relate to.

Michelle: Absolutely, yeah. Even as I was growing up, if you were nice and quiet and invisible, it meant that you were a good girl.

Jacqueline: Yeah, totally. Good girl. You know, I was extraordinary at math and sciences at high school. And you know, 30 years ago, that was unusual. And I had teachers who encouraged me to be visible and vocal about that. And that was really difficult because the minute you stepped outside of those classrooms, it was, “Who do you think you are?” So we’re really conditioned about it all the way through. But the moment in time when it really struck for me was I had one of the intensive workshops which you’ve done, and it was in Brisbane and I had a woman coming from Melbourne and a women coming from Cairns, which are opposite ends of the country in Australia. And they both had major issues with being able to speak up and being able to speak, and, “Am I worthy? And who would listen to me? And I don’t think I’ve got anything of value to say anyway.” Even though they were bursting inside to be able to express themselves.

And it turned out that both these women, because they walked into this room, I’d met them completely separately, they walked in the workshop and they were like, “Oh, my goodness.” And they’d gone through primary school together in a small town in regional Australia. And they both presented with very different fears, but the same core. Like, you know, “Who am I to speak up? I should be invisible. What right do I have to say anything?”

And it turned out that when we got on to the core and unlocked where the fear came from, they had both been scarred by the same year five teacher when they were at this school, right? And it was, literally, the way that this woman taught them and conditioned them, “And good girls don’t speak.” Right? “And if you don’t get it perfect, then you need to keep your mouth shut.”

And that was when I started looking at it and going, “Okay.” And so then what I started to do was to really work with a lot of the people coming through these workshops and think about the women that I had mentored and coached, and the men as well, right, because men also have some challenges around this space. And I thought, you know, even for myself, the times that you go to say something and you swallow it back is usually internal chatter of memory from when you’ve done this before and you’ve been hurt by it.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jacqueline: Right? So that’s why I talk…and, you know, I will say when I’m speaking at business groups, I’ll say, you know, “Put your hand up if you’re ever a toddler.” And everyone laughs, right? Because everyone’s been a toddler. And because my point is is that, as a toddler, when you first learn to speak, you don’t shut up. You know, you can’t get your words out fast enough. You will put anything in a sentence together. It’s like you’re tasting words and trying them on. And it’s not until we start getting told we need to be quiet, we need to shut up and, “Did you really need to say that?” That we start modifying our ability to speak. So everybody has the ability to speak, just all of us get conditioned in different ways to believe that we shouldn’t.

Michelle: I know that when you’re training others to speak, you have a philosophy that, “Speaker training is about everything but speaking.” What do you mean by that?

Jacqueline: I believe that speaking is just a confidence game. So all the techniques in the world and all the strategies and frameworks in the world will not give you the ability to speak if we don’t unpack a few things. There’s three key things that we have to unpack. One is, we, actually, have to unpack what confidence actually is. And confidence isn’t about the adrenaline pump, and confidence isn’t about the rah rah and the pump up. Confidence is about reducing the internal chatter that stops you from being as visible as you want to be. It’s an internal job. So it’s actually we actually unpack some very powerful exercises about how to actually regain control of your own internal chatter. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is, is that speaking is all about unpacking what you know to be true about the world. So what is your experience? What is your lens? What is your way of thinking? What is your deep field of expertise? Actually, I had this theory when I started putting the training together, because I was quite arrogant when I decided to put this together. I just thought I could do it better than what was out there. And one of the things that was really important to me was I looked at all the speaker training and they were getting people up and they’d say, “It’s 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, speaking without notes to prove that you could do it.” And then people walking out of this training and they still don’t know how to unpack their own knowledge into that.

So I had this theory that if you could show somebody how to unpack what they know to be true about the world and shape it into something that an audience wanted to listen to, you would eliminate 80% of confidence issues, and it’s proven to be true. And the way I put it is if you think about when you have a conversation with a girlfriend or a conversation with a friend full stop, you don’t second guess what you’re saying. You talk to what you know to be true about your world, your view, your experience, your day, whatever it is, and you don’t second guess it. And that was what I was relating it to. And that has also proven to be true.

So it’s about, actually, understanding that what you have and your experience has a value in the world. And once you know that, you don’t talk about it. You know, once you know that what you know, is great, like, you know, then you just trust, you just trust that there are people out there who need to know what you have to say.

Michelle: Absolutely. Yeah.

Jacqueline: Yeah? And then the third thing is, is actually creating evidence points of what you have is valuable. So we have a program here in Australia now that we just ran the pilot for called Hot Speaker Tracks. So it’s the first time you deliver a keynote. We do it in a room full of friendly people. We do all of your video and photography and all your collateral. But it’s the main thing that has happened out of it is we’ve created evidence points. So in the workshops themselves as you would have experienced, we create evidence points that what we have is valuable just from the response of the people around us.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Jacqueline: Fine. Then what we do…so what we have to do is we have to create evidence points. And evidence points are not about going straight from zero to hero. Evidence points are, again, what’s the best next step? Where should I start speaking about this? Where should I start the conversation about this? So you can get evidence points along the way. And it’s almost like you have to do an apprenticeship. So yes, we can take you from zero to hero as fast as you want, but you have to build evidence points to understand that you have the right to be heard.

Michelle: Absolutely. Yeah. And that is so important, because, like you said, it’s finding evidence that you’ve contributed in the past and whatever you’ve contributed has resulted in this, and just remembering those instances because we normally remember the times where we spoke and, you know, and we were speaking…

Jacqueline: And it didn’t go so well.

Michelle: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Now, shifting a little bit here the conversation in general, what are some practical things that you do to either get on creative mode when you’re either scripting out or clarifying a message or scripting out a keynote or about to go on a business meeting and you were gonna to have to speak up? What are some of the things that you do to, like, spark that creativity to, like, get into flow?

Jacqueline: Yeah, so to get into flow, for me, is, for one, it’s not being in the office. I have to be in a different place to my normal. So where I’m doing my delivery work, or where I’m doing my strategic work and things like that is not that space. So it’s any space but my office. The other thing is, is that one of the dangers that we run into with creativity is we actually still put create activity in a box. So when we talk about we’re gonna be creative, I’m gonna create something new, we do it inside a box of what we already know. So I go a little bit differently. I sort of go, first of all, to what is important about this for me. And you’ve done this exercise with me, Michelle.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely.

Jacqueline: What is important about this for me? First thing, is the topic, what am I going to speak on? The next thing is what is important about this for me? And that changes. So if I’m doing a keynote is, “What is the key takeaway I want for the audience? What is it the key message I want them to walk away with?” If I’m pitching for business, it is, “What is my bottom line here? What is important to me? Why do I need this piece of work?” And I’m very honest. Like, if it’s simply because it’s a project that I really want at the money that I deserve to be paid, then I own that. But if I need to win this piece of work to keep the doors open and the phones on, then I also own that. I’m very honest about that.

Michelle: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jacqueline: So why is this important to me? Or is it that I need to shift people’s thinking? Do I need to bring people together? What is it that is important for me?

Michelle: This is even not just with an audience This is with our teams, with our spouses.

Jacqueline: Totally.

Michelle: It’s even almost also how do you take the focus even in those one-on-one interactions from me and really put the focus on you, or whether it’s a one person or a big audience.

Jacqueline: So one of the things that is really important is I approach a conversation with one person, who might be on my team, who might be a client, exactly the same as I approach it from a major audience. My overriding mantra with speaking for everybody is it’s one conversation to one person at one point in time. Because that, A, it takes pressure off. B, it also puts you back into a conversational mode rather than a dictating or a speaking-at mode. And so what’s important. So even the reason I was so good at negotiating those enterprise bargaining agreements, was because I was really clear when I walked in the room what was important. So not, “We need to get X, Y, Z. And we need to get this amount of money on the board, and we need to get this sort of pay.” It was, “What’s important as an outcome here? What is gonna help the company? What is gonna help the employees? And what is the union gonna tolerate?”

So I was always really clear and I had this mantra that, “The deal is never won on the day.” And being in real estate, you will know that the deal is never won on the day, but we forget to prepare for it. We forget to go, “This is our ideal scenario. This is what our bottom line is. But in the middle of that is what are the outcomes we’re actually after?” So when I used to go after major contract works through a tender process, it was, “Yeah, you get the scope of works and the project deliverables, but what is it that they actually wanted?” Because what they’re actually buying from you when you go to speak or pitch or present is they’re buying surety.

Michelle: Yeah, yeah.

Jacqueline: They’re not buying commercial advantage. They’re not buying X, Y, Z price in commodity. They’re buying surety that you know what you’re doing and you’re gonna be there in the good times and the bad.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jacqueline: So if you look at it through that lens, it totally changes. And if you look at it through that lens as well, you’re now focused on this is our solution, right? When you’re an expert in what you do, you know the way to get somebody to an end game. But what you have to do is get creative. So if I had full control of this, and time, money and energy was no limitation, what would I do for this client? What would I do for this person? What would I do for this audience?

Michelle: Or in this situation? Yeah. Now, so much as it is a mental game and trying to, basically, understand outcomes and the other person that you’re communicating with, where does speaking from the heart fall into all of this?

Jacqueline: So speaking from the heart falls from…it’s actually…it’s one of those things that is very faith based, it’s very universal energy, it’s very-flow based. It’s speaking from the heart, the way that I would describe it, is you have to be able to recreate a picture in somebody’s mind of what is currently in your world. The only way you can do that is speaking from the heart. You have to be able to draw people into the emotion, and you have to speak from the heart. So when we’re speaking from the head, it’s tactics, it’s numbers, it’s data or it’s strategy, it’s tools. When we are speaking from the heart, it’s a story that’s so much there, and its connection. So even when we have to speak to data, and a Brené Brown’s quote that, “Maybe stories are just data with soul.”

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely.

Jacqueline: When we’re speaking to data, we still have to build a story around it, we still have to build context around it. You know, I love working with accountants and, actually, getting them to understand how to actually build a story out of something rather than just presenting numbers and graphs. So speaking from the heart, a heart-to-heart connection cannot come from speaking from the head. So as soon as you know that you’re speaking purely from tactics, purely from strategy, purely from numbers, and purely from KPIs and outcomes, you’re not speaking from the heart, you’re speaking from the head, so we may need to get that data across. But if you can’t build story and emotion and ignite a relatable character through that, then you won’t, actually, ever be able to speak from the heart.

Michelle: Yeah, and this is so important, like, on both the multifamily side and in the land side. When you’re talking to sellers, when you’re talking to buyers, usually the sellers of multifamily are much more sophisticated investors and there’s a lot of that initial data and tactical and very mental conversation. But in processes of negotiation, you’re sometimes even going through your attorneys. And at some point we’ve seen how valuable incredibly valuable it has been to basically, dash the attorney and actually talk buyer directly to seller, get on the phone and bring it down to, “Okay, this is this is what I’m struggling with.” You know, and have more of a heart-based conversation, and we have been able to save deals just by doing that. And on the selling side, really understanding my buyer as well, you know, on both the multifamily and the land side, “What is it that you envision doing with your piece of land?” And not just giving them the discount price that they’re getting, market values. You know, how does it compare to other similar properties? These are all facts and all data. But there’s other pieces, the heart-based part that is so important in real estate negotiations, absolutely.

Jacqueline: Yeah, well, and I don’t think I actually spoke about this before, but my once-was husband, and I owned real estate agencies in Australia, and we took an agency from number 27 to number 2 rank in our region. And the way that we did it was exactly that. So we always ignited what was important about them in this process. And we would sell based on that or, you know, direct purchasing based on that. And that was the real difference that we made to shift it up. And it was the same talking to landlords for properties under management because as you know, with a real estate brokerage, it’s the properties under management that gives you the value. So it’s always, actually, speaking to the landlords about what was important to them? What was their investment strategy? Who did they really want as tenants? Were they transactional or do they want someone to…? So all of those things, it was always a heart-centered conversation.

It’s also so important…you’ve just reminded me of something. I had a conversation this morning with a professional speaker in the U.S. who’s one of my clients, and he’s got a deal that’s going off-kilter. So, you know, in real estate, we have that all the time. And he’s got a deal that’s going off-kilter. And he said to me, you know, they’ve been going backwards and forth on email, and I said, “Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone.” I said, “You’re missing a piece of information here. You cannot communicate this via email or text or writing. You need to pick up the phone and you need to go in with a sense of insatiable curiosity.” So it’s not about this is wrong. This is what you agreed to do. You need to have insatiable curiosity because you have to now understand their map because their map has shifted. So the first thing you need to ask is, “What has shifted? We’ve been working together for years, what has changed that you haven’t actually been able to bring to the table, or you haven’t had time to bring awareness to?” Because something has changed. For this behavior to change, something has changed. You cannot have those conversations if you are not willing to speak.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. In part, there’s a…especially on the land side, there’s an element of scalability where we have the formidable situation where we don’t need to talk to many, many sellers. But we do need to talk to buyers, which is contrast to wholesaling and flipping houses where you actually wanna talk to the sellers and negotiate the price on the house. And you create a buyers’ list and it’s easy to wholesale. You know, we have kind of like the opposite situation where it’s easy to buy, you know, we’re very able to have tremendous scale on the buying side, but when you’re selling, you do want, you know, that conversation and you do wanna get on the phone for sure. And so yeah, it’s very valuable. You’re leaving a lot of money on the table, deals that are not being done when you’re not willing to pick up the phone, absolutely, and speak up.

Jacqueline: And you’ve got to invest in language, you’ve got to invest in knowing how to speak, you’ve got to invest in knowing how to negotiate.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Jacqueline: Because, you know, and this is, you know, when we talked about resilience, and then we talk about speaking, like, the number one thing I say to people is, “Resilience is also language.”

Michelle: Yeah.

Jacqueline: You know, building the muscle of language, it’s building muscle of resilience, it’s building the muscle of success, it’s building the muscle of selling, it’s building muscle of speaking. You know, the most valuable thing we can do is understand language and how to use it and how to negotiate and communicate well because the only thing that I’ve found in my life that unlocks opportunity is the ability to speak both externally and internally. The ability to language, to articulate where we are and where we want to go, to be real about the challenges that we’ve got, to be real about the outcomes that we want, and to be able to articulate the path forward.

You know, so my thing is, “Yes, speaking has become my vehicle and speaker training has become my vehicle. But what I’m actually creating in everybody is possibility and also building the muscle of resilience.” Because if you understand language, you can, actually, create whatever you want. And that’s the faith part.

Michelle: Mm-hmm, yeah. Would you attribute speaking to be the most important ingredient to your success?

Jacqueline: Totally.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jacqueline: And it’s not just about when things go good. I mean, I’ve had a number of challenging situations, you know, and some big hits, some very public hits, as well, because I’m a risk taker, so you’ve gotta take the up with the down. But, you know, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’ve done and I wouldn’t be able to recover if I didn’t have the ability to speak and to articulate. So, as an example, when I started this speaker training business, if you google me at that stage, I’d had a business deal go bad. And I had 73 pages on Google talking about that bad business deal. So I couldn’t use a digital footprint. I couldn’t use Facebook advertising, I couldn’t use email marketing. I had to go back to basics of how we built businesses 15 and 20 years ago, which was through speaking, presenting and connecting…

Michelle: With people, yeah.

Jacqueline: …to be able to build what is now heading towards a seven-figure business. So, I have so much belief in it. I also believe that when you build the muscle of language and the ability to speak and to communicate and to negotiate, I also believe that it’s, yes, it unlocks possibility and potential, but it also helps you mitigate the impact of when bad things happen to good people.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jacqueline: You know, it’s the ability to negotiate, to step forward, it’s the ability to articulate where you are and what that next step is and what you need to gather up to do it. It’s so vitally important, I believe it’s like breathing. I believe it’s like oxygen.

Michelle: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Now, you mentioned faith a little bit ago. How do you incorporate faith and spirituality into your life to create inflows of cash of ease and grace in your everyday life?

Jacqueline: So the way that I do that I have a very big belief in…so my faith is universal energy. Raised in religious faith, but my faith is universal energy. And I have a very big belief in reciprocity, and in doing the right thing. And, you know, I’ve had to do some very big turnarounds, where it would have been very easy to go after the people that did me wrong. And the way that I bring faith into my life is I just work out what is the right thing to do and continue doing that, and eventually moving through it. Because universally and energetically, it becomes recognized.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jacqueline: And it may seem like a longer way to go and it may seem like a tougher path to follow, but it’s the only path I know that works.

Michelle: Yeah, always keeping an open heart, for sure. You know, even though…

Jacqueline: Yeah. And, you know, when…and I’ll be honest, every time I take a big hit, I close that heart space off. Part of my resilience strategy is to close the door, to go to the floor, so I didn’t let myself break to find the thing, which is the one thing and then, to climb the stairs. So part of it is I do close down completely. And then, I come to a point every time between sort of five and seven months in where I go, “Wow, I can’t live like this. I can’t live so closed off and disconnected to the world. I would rather take the risk of being hurt, knowing that there’s going to be lessons that I can use later than to live an unexplored life, so to speak.”

Michelle: Absolutely.

Jacqueline: And I, actually, have to trust that everything that’s brought to me is, A, because I can handle it and, B, because it’s gonna be of greater purpose for what I learn out of it.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. That was beautiful. Now, to wrap things up, what are the top three things that you have for women either starting out or already successful in their careers?

Jacqueline: So the top three things. So one is stop asking for permission.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jacqueline: Like, you know, have…and we talked about faith and flow, which is, you know, the purpose of your podcast, believe in yourself. You know, stop asking for permission and stop asking for someone to show you the way, create the way. We’re so innately intelligent. And we bring such a different perspective to the world that the world needs. The more we ask for permission, the more the things that we say we don’t want are going to manifest. Because we’re not bringing that to the world. So the first thing is stop asking for permission no matter what level you are at your career, whether it’s getting started, starting a new business, starting new investments, whatever it is, stop asking for permission and waiting for a role model to show you how to do this thing.

Michelle; Create the path. I love that.

Jacqueline: Yeah, create the path.

Michelle: Be a creator, not a participant, not a spectator, but a creator. Absolutely.

Jacqueline: And particularly, not a spectator. So many times, and I’m gonna go here, the very women who are very vocal about what we should be getting as women are the ones who are, actually, in the boardrooms and not speaking out. The ones who are at the cocktail parties and being the token woman, they’re the ones who are drinking the guys under the table at the company conference. You know, so have faith that being innately intelligent and the lens that we bring with feminine energy, have faith that that is good enough, right, and create the path.

The second thing is, is do the work. So whenever I talk about resilience, I talk about you have to do the work. So I’m quite strong, I use stronger language, in general, in public. But you do have to do the work. So and by do the work, I don’t mean just the business work. I mean, you have to do the inner work because the devil doesn’t play in the daylight.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jacqueline: Whatever demons that you’ve got inside your mind, they’re only gonna come to play when the lights go off and you’re on your own, you’ve got no one to distract you. So if you don’t do the work, the personal work, the internal deep work, then you can never, and win is the wrong word, but you can never go to where you wanna go because you’re getting distracted by the demons and the devil. I’m a really big believer in that you must do the internal work. No matter how confrontational it is, you have to go there, and as a new layer comes up, you have to trust that the lessons that you’re gonna have in going deep and doing the work are gonna be what you need to go to the next step. So you must do the work.

And the third thing is you, actually, have to invest… Sorry. The other reason why you have to do the work is you have to build your own resilience strategy. So I can tell you what works for me, but you have to build your own resilience strategy based on what works for you.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Jacqueline: And the last thing, which we’ve already touched on is, you know, I believe in the power of language. I actually believe that language holds the key to everything we are and everything we want to be. And you have to invest in your ability to master the craft of language if you want to be able to do whatever it is you want to do. And it’s really interesting because the first time I, actually, realized this consciously, my eldest son, this is probably six or seven years ago, he’s a gifted child, was pulled aside by a family friend. Their children had grown up with our children, and Katie’s father had said to Aiden, my son, “Can you have a chat to Katie? She’s failing English.” And he was asking my, you know, 14-year-old son at the time to have a chat to Katie about doing better at English. I thought, “Well, this will be interesting.” And we were walking down the beach, and I heard him start the conversation. This is what he said. He said, “Katie, your dad tells me that you’re failing English.” She’s like, “Yeah, whatever.” She was 13. And he said, “Well, he said he wanted me to have a chat to you about doing better at English.” And she burst out laughing and I was actually thinking behind myself. I was, actually, laughing as well. You know, it sounds ludicrous when you hear it said out loud. “Okay, said it, or whatever, and what do you think you can do?” And he just said to her, he said, “Do you wanna grow up being able to get whatever you want?” And she said, “Well, yeah.” And he said, “Well, then you have to learn the words to use and how to use them. So you need to get better at English or else, you’re never gonna get what you want.”

Michelle: Yeah.

Jacqueline: And her English results went through the roof. And I thought, “Wow, that was the first time I was consciously aware of.” I’d always believed in the power of language, I believe in being well read, I believe in being well versed, I believe in being spatially curious and asking the right questions, but it’s true. Like if we, actually, want to be successful in something, we have to learn the language of it by invest in learning how to speak and how to use language to navigate what you want.

Michelle: Yeah. And the same…I mean, for anyone that is just starting out in real estate, that’s the same thing. If you want success, you need to understand what a cap rate is, what a deed is, what foreclosure means, what are disclosures. I mean, there’s all this language that comes with it. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, so that’s wonderful. Thank you so much for those tips. For sure I took notes. And I wanted to ask you, so if people wanted to know more about you, what would be the best way for anyone listening to this episode right now to find more about you and about what you do?

Jacqueline: So there’s two ways. So the main way is through our website, which is speakableyou.com. And it has all of our links and everything on there to find about everything we do and very easy to contact us through the website. And then also my LinkedIn profile is very strong on what it is that we do, so Jacqueline Nagle 1 on LinkedIn will find me, as well.

Michelle: And you need to follow her because this woman is brilliant and a master at crafting a message, whether it be for a one-on-one, for a small group of people, for a big audience, it’s definitely about speaking up and speaking up from, you know, from the heart in a way that it is authentic, whether you’re talking to a seller to a buyer to an attorney, to whoever it is. Thank you so much, Jacqueline. This was a wonderful and enlightening episode. And thank you for making the time all the way from the future in Australia because I know you are leaving in the morning of tomorrow.

Jacqueline: I am. I am. I’m already there.

Michelle: I can you are already there. Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure. And I look forward to being with you all in the next episode of the “InFLOW” Podcast. Thank you very much and goodbye. I hope this episode left you feeling inspired and ready to get inflows of cash, inflows of light, and inflows of faith in your life. I welcome your reviews on iTunes. Please leave me a review and help me create an amazing community of women in flow. Thank you, as always, for sharing your voice by going to michellebosch.com and joining the conversation about this show. And while you’re there, grab a copy of my “10 Commandments to Living a Life in Flow.” You can also follow me on Facebook @michellebosch, and on Instagram @michelleboschofficial. Thank you very much and until the next one.