Mallory Erickson: Welcome Everyone! I’m so excited to be here today with Megan Seamans. Megan, welcome to What The Fundraising. 

Megan Seamans: Hello. I am so excited to be here. 

Mallory Erickson: So why don’t we just jump in with you telling everyone a little bit about yourself and what brings you to your work and to this conversation today?

Megan Seamans: Love it. Big question right off the bat. Nowadays I am a life and energy coach and I love to support people to reawaken their magic. And I do that through coaching and also human design. And what brought me here certainly was a life story and a life journey. But I think where it really started to click in and again, for me, it was as I was making my way through college trying to figure out my place, trying to figure out my spot, checking off all the right boxes and following all the things you’re supposed to do. I was just feeling so frustrated that it wasn’t working for me even though I was following the right steps that everyone was saying. I couldn’t find my place. And I changed my major seven times in university just stumbling around, maybe this is it, maybe this is it, maybe this is it. 

I’m looking back now. I can see there was so much not only in my confusion of trying to fit into a box that wasn’t quite working for me but there were also so many worthiness issues and things going on underneath the surface that I wasn’t addressing. Where I would be like, I’m going to do this thing and follow this path and then start to feel these feelings of I’m actually not good enough to do that.

And I couldn’t put words to that at the time but looking back now I can really see how that was building up excess anxiety and exhaustion, just all kinds of things underneath the surface. One day I was house sitting for my parents and I was sitting alone, which I probably hadn’t done my entire college career. I always had a roommate or someone around. And so I was sitting alone and I heard this voice that was like, what if you just said yes to you? What was that like, I didn’t know what to do with that. And I heard it again. I was like, all right, we’ll give it a try. And here’s that one moment for me that shifted everything. After that I went into my guidance counselor and I was like, what’s going to get me out the fastest? Can I just finish this chapter?

And so I finished a major and then when all of my friends were getting entry-level jobs I started from square zero. I got a nanny job which I did all through college and I just started finding my footing. And from there ended up building three businesses and started traveling the world and just igniting things that felt full for me. And it was all from one moment of saying yes. 

Mallory Erickson: Wow, that’s an amazing story. And it’s really interesting, I didn’t have sort of a voice necessarily come out of nowhere but a huge shift in my life was caused because of a recurring dream that I had. And then I woke up from having that dream for the third night in the road, the exact same dream. I asked myself, do you feel trapped? And every cell in my body screamed Yes. 

And then the implementation of that yes, I blew up my whole life essentially. I left basically an engagement, a whole house, a future all these things. I made a lot of people very angry and lost half my friends. But when people asked me why I did that, which it sounds like maybe this was what happened for you too. It was like I felt like I had two choices. I could keep going down this path that was clearly not working. Keeping everyone else happy, making everybody else very comfortable but knowing deep down that I knew that I was supposed to do something else. And I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. And I was like I could just follow that and I was sorta like, how am I going to do that? Like how am I just going to spend the rest of my life knowing that something else is true and not doing it. And it sounds like maybe your experience was similar to that. 

Megan Seamans: Oh yeah. A hundred percent. There was definitely a burn it all down and it makes no sense. And yet we’re moving anyway and I will never regret that. 

Mallory Erickson: Yeah. And in some ways, like it makes no sense to explain, it makes no sense to somebody else but it actually made perfect sense to me.

Megan Seamans: It makes no logical sense where you can’t put it into this formula, but there’s just something in you that knows. And I feel like where all of the best decisions in my life have come from. 

Mallory Erickson: And I love that you started even sharing that story by saying I was sitting in silence and I was alone because I think and I’d be curious about your work around this. I would say for me, I see a lot of people searching for maybe the wisdom or the answers to the experiences that you and I are talking about right now, but they don’t want to be alone. They want to keep themselves constantly busy. They want to be around people all the time. And it feels so impossible to access yourself a lot of the time when you’re surrounded by all these other stimuli. How do you help folks grapple with that piece?

Megan Seamans: Yeah, a hundred percent. I fully attribute my moment of sitting alone and being in silence to letting that voice actually come through. We live in a world where there’s constant stimulus around us in general. And then, yeah, you’re so right we’ll put the things on top of that even. We’re already stimulated and we already have life to live and things to do, and to do that must get done, and errands that must get run. And I didn’t mean to make that rhyme, but it sounded nice. On top of that and then we’re like, I’m going to try and find this fix outside of myself. Someone else obviously has to know the answer for me, even more stimulus for ourselves. I always say, a plane can’t land if the runway is full. And I think it’s the same for our intuition, our inner voices. They’re not going to land if our entire mind and being is completely full. 

Mallory Erickson: So you had said that part of the coaching that you do is energy coaching. And my coach certification is in energy leadership coaching through an organization called APAC. So I was excited to talk to you about energy and what that word even means to you or why it feels like a really core component to be coaching around. So tell me a little bit about that. 

Megan Seamans: Oh, I love this, it is going to get juicy. Yeah, I mean everything’s energy, right? There’s energy all around us and we all express our energy in different ways and we all have different capacities for energy. So that’s what gets me excited about energy is that it’s everywhere. It’s all around us. And what gets me really excited about energy is I feel like people will constantly say things like I don’t have time to do this. And while we can’t create more time in a day, we’re all going to have 24 hours in a day. We can create more energy and we can create more optimal energy. And I think we don’t look at that and we don’t look at how we can optimize ourselves energetically from the internal to then optimize the life that we’re creating on the external.

Mallory Erickson: I totally agree. And I talk a lot about how it’s not time management is not really the challenge. It’s energy management, because we’ve all had times feel short and we’ve all had time to feel long. Like even to myself, I found myself the other day saying things like, time’s going so fast. I feel like my daughter’s growing up. And it’s giving me this sense of time slipping through my fingers a little bit, like that age they just grow so fast. I found myself getting into a thought cycle around that the other day. I was like, Mallory go do a headstand. I was like, if you need time to feel really slow, go hold yourself in a headstand for two minutes. You need some perspective shift here that time is yes, it’s fixed, but our experience of it actually can be drastically different. And my sense is that’s related in some way to that energy piece. What do you think about that?

Megan Seamans: Yes. A hundred percent. I love the headstand analogy. That’s so good. And it’s so true. We do, we have those experiences where we’re like, did an hour just happen? Are we sure? How did that even happen? And I agree. It’s the way our energy has moved in that hour, versus when an hour goes really slow it’s the way our energy has moved and we’ve like drug out something for some reason that’s underneath the surface. 

Mallory Erickson: I love that. I’m curious what your experience has been running a business with even the word energy as one of the core pillars of what you do. 

Megan Seamans: I think people are intrigued and a little yeah, I want more energy. I think that’s the first thing people come to, yeah, I want more energy. And do you want more energy or do you actually want aligned energy? Do you actually want energy that feels good? Because one of the things I feel like people get into, the pattern they get into and even a pattern I found myself in is I try to put someone else’s energy on me, like I tried to operate in a way that wasn’t sustainable for how my energy wants to show up. And this is one of the places that I really like to bring human design in, it’s a tool that can really help support understanding how our energy wants to show up. Instead of just like, how can I get more energy? What if instead of more energy you created sustainable energy, what would that feel like? 

Mallory Erickson: Oh, okay before I double click on this, can you just define for everyone what human design is for folks who are listening that might not know?

Megan Seamans: Yeah, definitely. So human design, it’s literally defined as the science of differentiation and it’s the study of how all human beings are different. So it brings in a few modalities that you’ve probably heard of before like Astrology, Ancient I Ching,  Kabbalah, and the Chakra system and it creates this beautiful blueprint of the way your energy wants to show up with the most amount of ease. To me human design is all about ease and there’s 2 billion different configurations of human design. I’ve yet to meet two people that have the same design, which is what I love about it. 

Mallory Erickson: So I love what you said about that alignment piece. And my sort of instinct here is that more piece, that like we want more energy that’s rooted in so much of the scarcity mindset, capitalism, the structural inputs on what we think optimization looks like, that optimization is more a thing. And I really appreciate what you said about putting someone else’s energy on you or trying to model someone else’s energy. I’ve never thought about that before. I think it is something I did too for a long time. And so I would often look like I had a lot of energy but I was very tired.

Megan Seamans: Yes, 100% are you noticing what your foundations are doing as you’re like running or even I think the opposite can happen as well, we’re like I’m just gonna take a break, slow down, be in flow when actually you need to have that pace turned up a little bit. And yeah it’s, are you paying attention to those foundations and you don’t necessarily need more, we need more of you, not just more energy placed on top of you. 

Mallory Erickson: I have really struggled the last few years in particular with self-care marketing. Because I think a lot of the ways that we are taught to take care of ourselves, energetically have not felt right to me. And I don’t actually think I’ve known that until this moment. But I’ve said to my husband before, I feel like I’m trying to relax because I feel like I should relax because I’m operating at a high frequency and I need to turn off to rest, but it doesn’t feel good. And I literally texted a friend of mine the other day, how does one relax?

And I was like, I’m just curious, I need new things to play with because the things I’ve been trying don’t feel right for me. And I get it, everyone wants me to take more breaks, and work less, and all these things. Even though I don’t really feel like I work that much. I don’t work evenings. I don’t work weekends, but people are like, you’re always working so hard, but I like that. I feel aligned when I’m doing it. I’m not doing it for hustle culture. I’m not doing it for anyone’s approval. And so I think what you’re saying here is so important is that both from a rest perspective and from an engagement perspective, the way that you want to figure out how to show up is how you specifically need to show up to get whatever that energy is for you.

Megan Seamans:  Like sometimes hustle is the flow for you. I’m so curious what your energy type is. Do you by chance know? 

Mallory Erickson: I have no idea. 

Megan Seamans: Oh my goodness. We are definitely pulling that.

Mallory Erickson: I would love to know. Yeah. I’d be super curious. Okay so tell me a little bit more about that for folks who are listening and are maybe curious too, how do you pull someone’s like energetic makeup? How would we figure that out? 

Megan Seamans: Yeah. You pull your human design chart with your birthday, time, and location and that’s it. That’s all you need and you pop it into there’s several systems out there that are completely free for you to generate. I’m sure we can link one around here somewhere. And from there you get this chart that looks like a body and it has lines and colors and all these different things that are very exciting for me to look at. And when you look at it you might be like, I have no idea what I’m looking at. But there will be a few written things up above that say something like your type, your authority, and your profile.Those are really great places to start and you can find a lot of information very accessible on those kinds of top layer pieces of your human design chart. 

And so there’s five main energy types, and that’s the first layer of human design. And that’s where you can start to look at how your energy is designed to show up with the least amount of resistance. And there’s so many beautiful, subtle nuances in each of those energy types that just show different things where you’re like, it feels good to be in the creation, and me, I need 27 million breaks to feel really good. And you’re probably, what are you doing?

Mallory Erickson: I think it’s such an important point because and I’m curious how you balance this in your business even in the way you think about marketing, right? One of the things I feel I felt challenged with in marketing is that for me, coaching is all about the nuance of you. But marketing or even social media in so many ways is one perspective. Each post is one perspective, and helping people identify that is a piece of a very complicated puzzle that might apply to you, that might not apply to you, that might apply to someone else.

And I try to talk about the toolbox, like even when I’m coaching one-on-one we’re identifying a lot of different tools, a lot of different things to try. Some of them are going to work. Some of them are not going to work great. Some of them are going to work great in this very specific scenario. Others of them are going to work in this scenario. How do you encourage folks maybe in terms of how you talk about it more publicly, but even in your one-on-one to play and recognize that this is just not one size fits all. 

Megan Seamans: I think you landed on the exact word that I would use, which is play. Let yourself play. Let yourself explore. Let yourself try things on, see how they feel and let it go if it’s not for you. Because at the end of the day, especially when we’re looking at things like marketing, there are a million and one ways to get to success. There’s so many success stories out there and all of them have done it differently. All of them have followed a different path.

I truly believe there’s no one right way. There’s your way. And when you can try it on, play, stop taking it so seriously, even have some fun with it. If you’re building a business right now, you’re doing that out of a place of passion, out of a place of purpose. Why not have fun while you’re doing that and let yourself just experience the entire journey, experience it all the way through. And there’s certainly something to be said about consistency. I’m not saying try one thing today, and then completely switch it tomorrow, and then switch it again the next day, and then switch it again the day after that.

It’s about finding what feels true for you. And if something doesn’t feel good when you’re doing it, other people can see that, other people can feel that. And I really believe when we’re doing the thing that feels good we become magnetic to what it is we desire. Not just sitting around here with your hands up doing nothing, but because we’re doing the thing we love doing and it feels really good.

Mallory Erickson: I could not agree more with what you just said. And I think for fundraisers who are listening to this, I want to double click on that from a fundraising perspective because I think sometimes we want to practice our meeting or pitch over and over. And we’re so focused on the words and we’re not focused on the energy we’re bringing to that interaction. And the words just don’t matter in comparison to the energy that you’re showing up to that meeting with.

Somebody recently asked me, how do you make reels or something on Instagram, like, how do you do so many reels? And I was like, I don’t know. I just click on my camera and I do them. And I was like, having you noticed I stumble over my words all the time. I don’t edit anything. I have no idea how to edit those things. But I show up when I have something I want to say that I think will be valuable to my audience and I just do it. And of course, just like you said, that’s not the one right way to make reels but for me having it not be an edited, not be a scripted process, even stumbling over my words is the most aligned version of that modality for me. And doing it that way then allows me to show up fully in my alignment as me. And so I think what you’re saying is just so important for folks to recognize that everyone can feel everything that is happening. 

Megan Seamans: Yeah, it’s so true. And I always like, whenever I’m talking about this idea of your energy speaking before you do. If that feels like too far out, they’re like, are you sure? Even just thinking about if you’ve ever had that feeling where someone walks into a room and you’re like, I don’t for some reason, I just feel like I don’t want to talk to that person, or the opposite, someone walks into a room and you’re like, wow, I need to meet that person. We’ve all experienced that feeling before. And that’s your energy speaking before you do? They’ve said absolutely nothing but there was something about their presence that said something to you in some way. 

Mallory Erickson: Yes. And I think there’s something about what you’re saying here that is also recognizing the wisdom in more than just our conscious brains. Your body sensed something, there was something that attracted you to that person. I feel like anyone who’s been physically attracted to someone that they didn’t want to be physically attracted to can also probably relate to this. They’re all these sensors that we have and we put a lot of pressure on our conscious cognitive brain when there’s a lot of wisdom in other places. And they lead us to things like that all the time. 

Megan Seamans: A hundred percent. One of my mentors says that the majority of us live neck up. We’re only trying to live from our headspace and brain and we actually have all these incredible cues neck down, they’re constantly speaking to us and if we can activate those, I think we truly open the door up for magic. 

Mallory Erickson: Okay. So let’s talk about some of the sematic pieces here because I think so much of what you’re talking about relates to listening to our bodies. And I feel like there’s a lot more conversation right now around embodiment work, which I really appreciate. I think 10 or 15 years ago, for me I would not have been able to access that conversation. I was still asking the question, what is intuition? And how do I tell the difference between intuition and fear? So what are some of your recommendations for folks who are starting to listen to themselves, meaning their whole selves, meaning their body too, for the first time? How do you walk folks through that? 

Megan Seamans: Yeah, starting to pay attention and starting to notice, if you’re here and you’re listening to this then you’re probably already more aware of the thoughts that are running through your mind and the story that you want to shift and what you want to change.

And so when those stories come up or when those thoughts come up, start to notice what in my body is activated. When I have this thought, am I getting this crunchy feeling in my belly? Or am I getting a heart flutter? When I think this thought and start to just notice as that awareness comes through, like, why am I thinking that way. Notice where that’s activated within your body.

And when you can allow yourself to slow down you can start to open up and activate some of those other areas so now you’re creating channels for that intuition that comes through and you start to notice like, oh, when I feel fear, I feel it in my stomach and it feels like a really heavy weight or a really heavy ball. When I feel excitement, I feel it in my heart center and it feels like this fluttering, I almost feel I can picture a butterfly. You start to notice these body cues as you just take that quick pause and just notice what’s going on, what’s going on with them, myself. 

Mallory Erickson: Okay. You said a word, you’ve said a word a few times I think, it’s really interesting in the context of this which is resistance. Because I feel like one of the things that happens in our body a lot of the time is that when we listen to it, we feel discomfort in some way. And I’m using that a little bit as an umbrella blanket term. But we feel something that we perceive as uncomfortable. And then we start to resist that feeling in certain ways. So talk to me a little bit about that. 

Megan Seamans: It’s going to be uncomfortable. I think, like we were talking about at the beginning when each of us had that moment where we decided to change at all, one of the things we had to do was burn things down that were working for years or months or whatever it is.

And that’s uncomfortable. And it’s learning the differences between the discomfort of being in your comfort zone versus the discomfort of shifting into a new chapter, because both are going to be uncomfortable and they’re going to be uncomfortable in different ways. And I truly believe a life inside of our comfort zone is actually the most uncomfortable one of them all. But it takes us stepping out and feeling the discomfort of burning some of the things away to realize how uncomfortable that actually was. 

Mallory Erickson: Yeah, it’s interesting. It relates so much to so many things. I was just thinking about how I had a coaching call recently, where I was coaching someone around an issue with their staff. And the thing that the person kept saying was, that would be a really uncomfortable thing to do. It would be so uncomfortable to have that conversation. And that they were also telling themselves a story that they didn’t have skills to manage that discomfort in the moment. But when we started to talk about the present moment, the person was managing a tremendous amount of discomfort in the present moment. They were very uncomfortable and they were doing a great job managing it actually. But they were telling a story about their inability to manage discomfort in the future that was keeping them stuck there. And so there’s this piece around how our brains predict discomfort versus how we actually can and know how to manage it in the moment. What are some of the things you think about that dynamic? 

Megan Seamans: This is reminding me of a really great book that I read called The Upside of Stress. And it’s all about the science of stress and how stress can actually be a good thing. And she talks about how humans are the only creatures that pre-create and recreate stress.

So we pre-create it before it’s even happened and we recreate it reliving the past again and again. Like a deer gets chased by a predator, they are in fear. And then once it’s done and they’re safe, it’s done and they let it go and they’re fully present. I learned a lot just from hearing that and playing with the idea to be fully present and to notice, like you said, how well you are managing things in the present moment and how the thing that is over here that hasn’t happened yet. It actually doesn’t have to be quite as big as you’re making it.

And so bringing yourself back to the present moment, I think is one of the most powerful things that you can do. I have an affirmation that I give my clients a lot. If you’re feeling like you’re really spinning, spinning, spinning into the future. And it’s creating a lot of built up resistance, anxiety, stress, pressure, whatever it is, I have them just put their hands on their heart. Take a breath and say the words I am safe in this moment, right here, right now and use that as many times as you need to anchor into right here in the present moment. What I’m spinning into, it’s not with me right now. And just bringing myself here into this space and creating that anchor point can really help to create grounding and then find the solution to move forward.

Mallory Erickson: Yeah. It’s such good advice and it’s so interesting to hear you talk about this and I love the sort of hearing how other animals process stress and I’ve been thinking a lot about the way animals process it out of their bodies. So it’s like the deer jumps away from the predator and it shakes, it messes out all of the stress, it actually processes it. And then it’s totally present in the moment. 

I love the affirmation that you gave and something that I sometimes say to clients is if you are having trouble taking that moment, create a transition ritual. For me, it’s washing my hands. If I need to transition my energy, I need to transition my thoughts, or I’m stressed. I need some way to close it out, say okay, like this moment is over and I’ll wash my hands. And as I’m washing my hands, I’m visualizing the whole situation running into the water, running down the drain. Because I think those things are so important to pull us back in.

Megan Seamans: There’s so many moments in the day we can create rituals like the hand-washing. I tell my clients all the time to have a mindfulness shower. Because how often are we in the shower and we’re like, what am I going to eat for lunch today? And, oh, what’s on my calendar again. And we’re a million other places other than the shower, where we actually are here in the present. And similar to what you’re saying with the hand-washing, which I absolutely love imagining that energy. Washing away cleansing and clearing not only your body but imagining even the water taking away any energy that’s not here to serve you that day or what you’re about to step into. And just feeling the shower, feeling the water on your body, feeling the soap on your skin and just letting yourself be fully present in moments like that. 

Mallory Erickson: I love that. I feel that way about eating a lot. I’ll be like, I didn’t taste any food today. It’s if I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast or for lunch, I didn’t taste the food. Where was I? I was not eating that meal. I love that about the shower, I’m gonna try. My hack around the shower is that I take ice cold showers, nothing pulls you into the present moment like some ice cold water. 

Megan Seamans: Oh yes. You’re a brave soul.

Mallory Erickson: But it’s amazing. I discarded it for a long time. And then finally I read some new research around the ice bath thing, and I was like, I’m just going to try it for 30 seconds. And what’s so amazing about it and we can put resources below for folks who are interested, is the way that the cold pulls you into your body. There’s nowhere else you’re going. You are deep-breathing your way through that ice cold water. And for me, it’s to start my day fully, in myself that way, it’s crazy. I can’t even believe I’m recommending this right now but it has been game changing for me, energetically. 

Megan Seamans: Ah, I love that. Everyone’s homework is to go take an ice shower.

Mallory Erickson: Or do the shower the way you described it, or wash your hands, but to try to play. If people would take one thing away, it’s take one of the strategies that we’ve talked about and play with it. See what comes up, what you feel, what you think. I think the most important thing is when we try to over hustle or we stay disembodied in many ways while we’re doing these things and we’re like, did it work? We ask ourselves at the end of the day, was I more productive? Was I more optimized? And that’s not where the answer lies. The answer lies in you asking yourself right after you’ve done the thing, how did that feel? What was that like for you? 

Megan Seamans: I am so obsessed with that. I recently got rid of my morning routine because I found that I was doing that. Did I do all the things? And did I do all the things right? Did I do them well? And really almost like grading myself on this morning routine instead of being present with it. And getting out of my morning what I needed for my morning, not what works for other people, or like fit for other people setting their morning up. But what do I actually need in the morning? So I love that of just being present with what you’re doing and then asking yourself directly after how did it go? How did it feel?

Mallory Erickson: I feel like when I first started coaching and I would talk to people about the way they talk to themselves and they’d be like, you’re telling us to talk to ourselves. And I was like, honey, you are talking to yourself all day, every day. What we are talking about is you choosing how you talk to yourself, not whether or not you actually talk to yourself because that is happening. How do you help people build that relationship with themselves? If maybe that they haven’t had the best relationship or they haven’t even sort of recognized that it is a relationship to cultivate and build just like it is with anybody else. 

Megan Seamans: I think that’s step one is knowing that in recognizing and bringing the awareness you’re doing it, right. It’s thousands of thoughts a day, others constantly circulating. So it’s bringing that awareness, step one. One of my favorite tools to use if you are feeling that disconnect. If you feel like you can’t fully grasp it. One of my favorite tools to use is a journal because you can actually see in front of you what’s coming out. And really use that time to connect with what you are moving through. 

So I’m a big fan of free-write journaling where you just go in and you fill up the page, or fill up two pages, whatever feels good for you. And just letting it fly, like you can write about anything. It doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to go in order. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t have to be for anything. It doesn’t even have to have a purpose. To empty your mind and just start noticing what are the things that are going on. And I keep all my old journals and sometimes I’ll revisit them and notice hmm, that was the season I was in. And I see the piece of the art that was going on in the background there. Okay. Got it. And just as you’re implementing a journaling routine, if that’s something that feels good for you. Noticing how you’re shifting, how you’re growing, and noticing the way you’re speaking to yourself. I think that can be a really powerful way to do that. 

Mallory Erickson: I love that. And I’m curious and maybe this is related to that strategy you were talking before around that discomfort piece and how when folks are shifting a way that they operate in the world, they’re likely going to go through a fair amount of discomfort as they’re moving into more alignment with themselves because they’re going to maybe make other people uncomfortable. 

And when we make other people uncomfortable, we tend to hear about it. And if we have any sort of people pleasing or perfectionist tendencies, things I know a lot of my listeners and myself deal with, it means that there’s this I don’t know, crucible of discomfort that I feel like sometimes happens before. I’ll at least speak for myself, before I’ve maybe built my muscle around something, or which is some of my sort of resilience around a new way of operating. There is this sort of tension point that I have to overcome and keep walking through, even though it’s uncomfortable. Talk to me a little bit about how you think about that piece of the transformation process and how you support clients through that? 

Megan Seamans: Yeah. I think the most important thing you can do with that tension is to really honor it and feel it instead of trying to rush past it. Because that’s likely one of the patterns that kind of brought that stuckness on in the first place was rushing past, and pushing down, and repressing, and pushing it away.

We think if we can just do this thing over here, then all of this will go away over here, but it doesn’t actually go away. It’s just we’re pushing a beach ball under water and it’s like trying to pop back up. And so I think the most important thing we can do is we can give that intention voice, whether it is with a coach or a mentor or someone who can just offer that sounding board for you. Not necessarily giving you advice or telling you what to do with that, but giving that tension voice and just having that space where you can be like, Hey, here’s where I’m at right now. And it is uncomfortable and it feels like friction and it feels tense. And I don’t like it. And that’s where I am. 

Instead of just, I’m just going to shove that down and I’m just going to keep running towards the thing I want. And I’m just going to create even more attention on top of it and would really believe if we give it voice, we start to alchemize it into something new.

Mallory Erickson: I love that. And I think it made me think about how isolating sometimes this work can be. Particularly if it means shifting patterns that run contrary to the groups or the community that have been a huge part of your identity and like where you get that sense of belonging from and how important, there are so many reasons why I’m a big advocate for people having coaches. I always have a coach. I’m always being coached, and community. But I think something I’d never really thought about before that you’re opening up my eyes to is it also is just so important to have a place where you can say that thing, I’m really uncomfortable right now and be supported and heard. And not have any of those people want you to go back to that old way of being right? 

Because let’s say you’re trying to change being a workaholic it’s maybe not as supportive to share that you’re trying to overcome that tendency with your boss. Cause they have a stake in the game around how much you work, or same with maybe your partner, your siblings, or your parents when you’re trying to shift the way you are, because plenty of people have benefited from us showing up in ways that are out of alignment with who we want to be. And I really wanna double click on that piece for folks around this is why having a coach or a community who have folks who are trying to shed and evolve and transform in similar ways is so important. 

Megan Seamans: Oh, yes. I’m constantly going to my coach, I’m uncomfortable again. Is this ever going to end? And she’s no, but I’ve got you. It’s so just nourishing to have those people that have your back and also have an unbiased, bird’s eye view perspective and can just hold that space. Because the people that are in our circle, whether it’s for protection or for their own benefit, they might try and pull you back into that old story. And so to have someone that can hold you in the new story, balances it out a bit.

Mallory Erickson: Yeah, I love that. Okay. We could talk forever but tell everyone where they can find you, how they can work with you if they’re interested. And then I invite everyone to highlight a nonprofit that they love that we can do a little shout out for as well.

Megan Seamans: I love it. You can find me pretty much anywhere online with my name, Megan Seamans, my website is Meganseamans.com. There’s a free clarity journal gift there on the front page. If you do want to connect in and tap into that, that journaling routine that we were talking about earlier. And I also love hanging out on Instagram, which you can find me at Megan Seamans. I share lots of free tips and wisdom and dance parties. All in one platform. 

Mallory Erickson: You are always showing up with new tools and things for folks to try. So folks should definitely go and follow along there and connect with you. Is there a nonprofit you’d like to highlight? 

Megan Seamans: So you can correct me if this is not a nonprofit, but Omaze. They do charity giveaways and they always are supporting a different cause. And I really love the story and like just the experience they create with them. Because they’re always supporting a cause that is really meaningful, but they’re doing it in this fun way with like giveaways and bringing joy to someone’s life who when the giveaway as well as supporting different charities along the way.

Mallory Erickson: Oh, I love it. Yeah. I don’t care if they’re a nonprofit or not. That is a cool thing to shout out. And I think anything that inspires generosity or giving is super important. So I’m excited to share that with folks. So thank you for sharing that with us. 

Megan Seamans: You’re so welcome. I love the reciprocity of it, there’s like this full give and receive. That’s my jam.

Mallory Erickson: Thank you for this conversation today for sharing all of your wisdom with us. So thank you so much.

Megan Seamans:  Thank you, so grateful for this conversation.