Mhm mm hmm. Hello to all of you. Hearts rise up podcast listeners. Thank you for tuning your heart's in for another episode. I'm carol chapman, your host for today on this podcast, we share our own personal experiences, tips and strategies along with powerful stories and compelling insights from guests that we interview on the show. Our purpose is to inspire you to rise up to your best and highest self, tap into your own inner wisdom and elevate your state of being, your life and the world around you. It's that simple. So let's get right into today's episode. I'm delighted to have two fantastic women on our show, Dr Shelley gigolo and Linus Woods Mullins briefly let me introduce them and then we'll dive right into our discussion today. Both of you have some incredible backgrounds.

I'll start with Shelly Dr. Nagle O is the founder of power of women's seminars for over 30 years. She's been training women to create a life they love in her private practice, she mentors women in their personal and professional growth. She is an author speaker and business relationship consultant. Her book is entitled The Master in the Mirror, A woman's Guide to living a passionate and joyful life. And now for Lenny's Miss Woods Mullins is a certified holistic living and wellness expert and certified life coach. She's also the founder of Praise works, health and wellness for mind, body and spirit. And for the last 10 years, Lineas has been educating women over 40 through her coaching programs, e books. Dvds, she has radio programs, webinars, a digital magazine podcast programs, webcast series and wellness retreats, topics include holistic practices, fitness, nutrition, and spiritual renewal.

Lineas is the creator of the wellness Women 40 and beyond brand and the vibe living brand. She's also the co author of Power Up Superwoman. Together. Shelly and Lenny's are collaborating on a two part program called emergence of the Total Woman, which we'll talk about later on our program here. But first I want to introduce both of you to the show. Ladies welcome to the show. Thank you carol. It's wonderful to be here today. It's great to be with you carol. Thank you so much. Thank you. And as you know, our podcast is all about inspiring and empowering others to make the most of their life journey and rise up to their heart centered, higher self, much of which involves exploring and rising up to new ways of thinking, feeling and seeing and of course being in the world. So I'd love for each of you to elaborate a little bit more on my intro and your personal journey that led you to where you are today. And also we'll talk about more on your collaborative program.

How about we start with Shelly. Doctor Nikolas, Thank you and please call me Shelly. That's great, Thank you so much. Well, again, my name is dr Shelley Niccolo, I'm founder of Power of Women seminars And for over 30 years I've been training women to create a life they love. I have a seminar called power of women that I've trained women all over the United States and where this all came from is a very deep journey with my own life, looking for how to heal from a lot of childhood trauma and decided at a very young age when I was in my mid teens that I was somehow going to find a way to create a life that I really loved and that I wasn't going to drag the past into my family life whenever I decided to have a family one day and I was in my mid teens at the time, so that's what really drove me to continue to look for.

How do I heal my life from all that past hurts and traumas that I was holding onto, that was really influencing how I was operating in the world. So, I went on a pretty arduous journey and I'm really discovered a pathway to being, being able to heal myself permanently and for all time. And that led to the Power of Women seminars, Women began to notice that I had gone through great changes and started to ask me to teach them and I began with several women in the early days and then I finally had so much to say and that I had a profound experience of change from the inside out that I started to develop these incredible techniques and tools to be able to support other women in discovering how to make those changes for them for their own lives and have an experience of permanent change and being able to create extraordinary results in the world. So, was there a particular point in your earlier years that really was kind of that turning point for you, that shifted things in terms of your perspective and your commitment to yourself?

I think the turning point actually was in a conversation I had with a very close uncle who was telling me about his childhood, how he was raised, he and my mother were brother and sister and my uncle and I had very similar experiences in childhood, the kinds of trauma, the kinds of issues that we had in the family in general, that were again recreated in my, you know, in my family and my fears were that somehow I was going to recreate the same issues in a family when I had a family one day, and that was a pivotal point for me. And I had such strong determination because I was so deeply wounded with myself, but I wasn't willing to succumb to those old ways of operating. Yes, I still had them, of course, but I wasn't going to recreate that no matter what and my Children, we're going to be free from that past history.

So, that was my pivotal point. And then when I met my dear husband tom he and I I went on this journey together and in time I discovered that inner connection with myself that I was really missing from my life, I think that is so true for many people really. It is and it's not just people who have gone through traumatic experiences um in their earlier years or you know, throughout their life, but just the nature of our world today, everything is so externally focused that we don't take the time to focus on the inner or to just, you know, take an opportunity to just be and experience what is going on inside us. Exactly. That's so true carol. And yet it's the most important part. So we can be effective in the world and produce the results we really want to have. That's right. And is there a particular activity or practice that you have cultivated or evolved for yourself that keeps you balanced and keeps you moving forward and evolving as, as a person and as a human being, this is going to sound rather strange carol.

Nothing is strange these days. We've got, we've got a lot of stuff going on in the world. So bring it on. Well, you know, I've been doing this personal development work for my entire adult life. And at one point in this evolution with my husband and myself, my husband actually developed some very deep bodywork that clears the court things that we hold onto within ourselves whether it's dramatic or just life experiences that we've used to limit ourselves. And so I'm uh I was the original guinea pig and why I bring this up is because once the body is cleared it's cleared. And so I was the first person and when he was developing this particular cellular energy releasing it's called and again, once it's cleared, its cleared. So all I have to do is take a few breaths and I'm cleared out.

My body is trained in releasing and being open all the time. And this is something that tom learned along the way that he shared with you. And is this something that you've been using in the work that you do with clients? Yes, yes, we do you Well, he does have private clients. He actually developed it out of his own sensitivity. No one trained him. So, and I was the original guinea pig. So it was the foundation for the work that I teach the women today, and also in the relationship mastery seminars that he and I teach together, awesome. Well, that's just really, really fascinating and I'm hoping that we'll be able to dive into more of that as we talk about the program that you and Linus are collaborating on. So right now it might be good to shift to Lenny's Lenny's would love for you to just elaborate more on the intro and what's led you to where you're at today because the two of you have very complementary skills, different, different backgrounds, different things that you offer and you really have come together and collaborative way here and I think you've got some empowering tools that you're bringing together, but I would love to hear more about your journey.

Thank you Carol for giving me an opportunity to share and yes, you're right, we have some similar commonalities and I like to say it's one of the taglines from one of my friends, wellness woman, 40 and beyond that. We as women come from different backgrounds but we are all on the same journey and I think that the commonality that women have in their lives is one of the things that is so precious and that we should honor as women is that we are more the same than we are different and while we celebrate our differences, we also need to celebrate the fact that there is just an innate support that exists from the feminine energy that we all share. My story basically is that for 25 years I worked in corporate America, I was very successful as a human resources professional and then manager and an executive and about um almost 11 years ago, At the age of 51 I had an epiphany, I found out that I had an anxiety disorder from a series of events that happened and I decided to go to a respite for a week and to just totally disconnect and you know, I talked with counselors and therapy and all that to try to figure out what I wanted to do to address this anxiety disorder.

Initially they wanted to put me on medication. So I took the medication for a while, but I've never been a pill taker and I'm not anti am a you know, or anti prescription drugs, not necessarily, but I do feel that normally in most cases with things like this, with emotions and things like that we already have within us, everything, we need to be able to change that trajectory of emotions that aren't serving as well, but we very, very rarely have the skill set. We don't always know how to do it. And so we've kind of gotten used to popping a pill, but I decided I didn't want to do that. So I decided to start doing research and what I could do to get rid of this anxiety that I was filling in the borderline depression that I had. So I decided to take another eight months off And it was in that whole discovery that I found out about the wellness movement. And this was back in 2008, and I decided that after doing some research that I definitely wanted to do something in that I was a trained dancer.

Aside from my other career, I was a professional ballet dancer for about two years, I danced professionally and it was a dance minor in college, so I decided I would fall back on that and maybe open a dance studio And teach praise dance and other dance classes for women over 40 because at that time I was so I decided not to return to my job. I walked away from all of that And began to build the idea of a dance studio for women over 40. So I, you know, just rented a space and began teaching women. And that's when I found out that women needed so much more than just dance while dance could be or movement could be a great catalyst for healing. There were other things that I felt they needed. I had women in the class that had diabetes, another lady who had just gotten through having best cancer surgery, some women that had knee and joint problems as a result of obesity, others who had just retired and we're feeling depressed. And still another one who I was going through a divorce after 35 years in marriage and I mean we all, we all had these stories and I could see that the things that they were going through.

Whereas exasperating uh some of the symptoms they were experiencing and when it came to chronic disease or obesity or even their emotional and wellness. So I thought, you know, what else could I do to help women besides just telling them to dance. And that's where praise works, which was the name of my dance studio became praise works, health and wellness. I went back to school and got certified in nutrition and Pilates and yoga and and as a holistic living and life coaching and from that put together several programs that address the needs of women when it comes to their mind, body and spirit and to help women to be proactively well or in some cases reactively well by using holistic practices, fitness, nutrition and spiritual renewal. So 10 years later, it's almost 11 years later here, I am doing my passion and I'm so glad to say that my anxiety disorder is just about gone. I would say, you know, 96% of the time I don't feel the anxiety, but when I do feel it because of all the studies that I've done all the research and work and all the hundreds of women that I've worked with when it comes to anxiety, I know what to do now and I haven't been on any pharmaceuticals in life like I don't know eight years or something like that, but it was an epiphany, you know, that caused me to trauma, that caused me to realize that I needed to get some help and many times um when we go through traumas, I want women to know that on the other side of that people in general, on the other side of trauma, usually there's a door that you need to walk through to get to the other side of that and on the other side there's not only healing but also a new way of being trauma can lead to many times, even a better life, you know, as you begin to heal and realize that there's some things you need to remove from your life for things that you need to add to your life, and that's what happened to me.

Well, it's interesting, I've had, you know, quite a few people on the podcast here and many powerful stories, the challenges and things that they have gone through, even though they went through tremendous adversity, there was always something positive that came out of it. And if you have that perspective, if you see that perspective, you can you can write that, you can take that and really run with it. And I think so often today some people just continued to just spiral and they're just stuck, sort of like the hamster on the wheel, they just can't get out of it and it just keeps spiraling them down. But if you can pull yourself out of it and see the opportunities as a result of adversity, that can make a huge difference in your whole state of being and how you approach life, by the way, I love the name of the company, praise works. That is such a affirming name. Yes, well, it's kind of a double n chandra for me because I was doing praise dance at that time, I've been praised dancing for about 10 years and basically praise dance is just dancing to music that is uplifting gospel music or other, you know, inspirational kind of music and praise really does work when you take yourself outside of yourself and begin to um you know, thank God for all that you have or if you if you don't, I don't know, you know people call it different things, whatever you call it, that supreme entity, but and also entering into gratitude because praise is just another form of gratitude and entering into gratitude really does work.

And I wanted to share with you what my, what happened, what my epiphany was and my my trauma about 30 years ago, 31 years ago now, um I had just had a baby girl and I had two other Children, uh so I had three Children under the age of five at that time and I was on maternity leave and I had gone by my mom's house in the morning because my mom didn't live too far for me to pick up some stuff from the dryer because I had put some clothes in the dryer and because my dryer was broken of course three kids in a broken dryer and um my mom was getting ready to work and as she had always done since I was a child, she had fixed breakfast and my dad was eating breakfast, his father was visiting from Atlanta and he was eating breakfast and so I sat down and I had breakfast and said mom, we're gonna sit down, she said no, I got a meeting, I got a board meeting and I said okay my mom was an administrator for the school district and I said okay well I'll talk to you later. So she ran out of the house and then I ate and then I you know took my five week old and we went to my office so I could show her off. You know she was almost six weeks and I wanted to take her off so I wouldn't you know showed her off.

And while I was there I got a call And it was from my dad. And this was before cell phones. This was the 1989 before cell phones. And uh my my dad said Malena's your mom's been in an accident and you need to go back to the family home because dad is there by himself, my grandfather. And so I said okay. So I immediately laughed and when I got there I said gee I probably should have somebody to come and stay with me. It's one of those situations where you can feel something, something's going on but you're not quite sure what. And I didn't want to be by myself. So I reached for my organizer, this is back in the Ben franklin days or you know those organizers? It wasn't there. I left it at work. So I said well let me call my mom's office because I know she has everybody's telephone number. So I couldn't think of anybody's number. Everybody's telephone number in her roller dex. So I called and I said, you know, I I know mom has all of my best friends numbers in her Rolodex, could you look up? So and so's number and she says to me, her secretary, she says, oh Linus, you know, we loved your mother, we are just so torn up.

And I was like, what you mean, she's gone. And that's how I first heard of my mother's death. She had been, she was downtown and on her way to the board meeting, she had the green and a fire truck that was responding to a smoke alarm ran through a red light and hit her and she basically died. And oh my goodness! And that's how I found out. And so I was like, oh my God. And I immediately I realized now after much therapy, therapy and introspection, I immediately went into a new way of living which was, there would never ever be any more surprises. I was going to control every single outcome. No matter what it took, I would control people in my job, people, my Children, my husband, my sisters, my dad, my friends, you know, no surprises. And what happened after living 25 years like that, I finally had that breakdown that epiphany and they, my family took me to emergency and I happened to have worked at the hospital where they took me and basically um the administrator and other people who cared about me.

They just had an intervention. They said Lenny's, you're exhausted and you need to go away for a while and get some rest. And it was when I went to the respite, when they told me I had the anxiety disorder And that's when my new journey began to try to get well. But for 25 years I thought that it was pretty normal to wake up every morning and feel like you're going straight downhill on a roller coaster with no restraint. Everybody felt that way that was normal for me until eventually my emotional closet got too full and I opened that door that morning, couldn't stop crying and everything fell out. And that's when I began my healing process. But I can't say in terms of the trauma and what I've been through on the other side of that was praise works. And in the 10 years that I've been doing this, I have helped hundreds of women deal with anxiety and stress and just getting well in their mind, body and spirit so that hopefully they don't deal with the same kinds of things that I went through in the same way.

Exactly. And, you know, it's pretty that's a that's obviously a very compelling and powerful experience that you went through and, you know, part about control. Um and wanting to control is all about resisting and the more we resist it really can take its toll on us. Hence the anxiety, the tremendous anxiety that you were experiencing, and I just want to applaud both of you for taking the time here today to share your personal experiences and what you've been through and the work that because of that, it's led you to the work that you're doing today. And this collaboration, which I'm just so excited to hear more about. And I would love for for you all to share a little bit more about this collaborative program that you're developing. Well, it's called emergence of the total woman a blueprint for living a life you love.

And isn't that a proposed for linens and me sharing with other women? Exactly, yeah, this program really is to support women not only with their wellness and their health and their well being, but also I personally will be training them with very specific tools or a step by step process to discover who they are, what they're passionate about. The things they want to create and to realize them or manifest them in the world, become really clear about what they're committed to. So they're not going back into their past ways of operating and learning to let go of the things that really hold them back and ultimately for each person who engages in the program with us to become unstoppable, because, you know, after all, if we hold ourselves back if we're living from our past ways of operating even the most successful women, just like Lynne is and I have been very successful in our past histories.

Well, that obviously is not just the whole picture, as we said earlier, you have to address the inner person and who they are, right? So we managed to put a program together that addresses the outer life and everything that they do in their day to day to handle their health and their well being, as well as their inner life, to feel good with who they are and to be able to soar in their lives and create extraordinary results in every area of their life. Would you say that one of the biggest challenges for most women are just maybe the self limiting beliefs that they have developed over time, or is it something else? Well, you know, you're right, there are self limiting beliefs, but also we hold on to that past history. We hold on to it physically mentally emotionally. It impacts our whole life and we develop these automatic filters or perceptions of our lives that keep us in old ways of operating.

So one of the things that we're going to be doing in emergence of the Total Woman is to release those perceptions and those old ways of operating now, are we going to be dredging stuff up? Actually, not, in fact, when I teach women in my power of women's seminars, we focus on what we're creating, but I also teach tools that when things do come up in life, you know, how to release them and get on with creating what you really want to create. So you're discovering how to create ongoing lee with great ease by the way, because that's very important because that old push that we all have to be the best that we can be in everything really doesn't help us create the quality of life and the satisfaction we're all looking for. Exactly, and we have to be committed to doing it and you know, it's creating those new thoughts and those new behaviors and those new actions and that new way of being while at the same time trying to mitigate the these old patterns and not spiraling down or you know, you know, succumbing to those old patterns.

Well, I found carol that women as they are taking the steps to create what they really want to have when they start to focus on who they are and what they're really passionate about and use it as a foundation as the fuel for producing the results they really want to have, then life starts to unfold in a whole different way than most of us are generally used to. You know, we're not the sum total of the roles we take on were so much greater. Right? Exactly, and let us, what would you like to share about the program? Well, I know there's wonderful self development programs out there that women are taking and one of the things that I have always felt has been missing somewhat is addressing the wellness component, um you can be very successful but you can still be unwell and that really does block ultimately your ability to be even more successful if you are struggling with issues around your physical, mental and spiritual wellness.

So I wanted, I have been looking for a while for someone who does um and of course what dr Shelley Niccolo does is so much more than just personal development, but kind of like a life coaching, you know, encouraging women to go beyond where they're at. I wanted to be able to partner with someone that could see the value of having a wellness component in a program like that. And so um my part is basically addressing the needs of the mind body and spirit and talking about the needs of of certain kinds of holistic practices that we can do to stay. Well, I'm going to talk about the kind of food we need to be eating in terms of maintaining good brain health and increasing our energy because making a lifestyle change no matter how incremental it is, and leaving old ways of thinking behind and everything else, it can be very draining and it's such a great compliment or marriage to be able to also have some tools on how to proactively counteract that and to keep the change that you're experiencing from wearing you out because what happens is when people are making changes and under a little bit of stress or, or other things pop up as almost amazingly in our bodies and things like that.

And they're just little signals that maybe there's some extra little self care that you need to be doing and I'm going to be providing that. I'm going to be talking about increasing your energy, your brain health, the importance of movement. Talking about breath, which is so key and important when it comes to your overall wellness, the importance of meditation and how that works and getting quiet. And just some of the other tips that women need to have as they're going down this wonderful journey of emergence, I just think it's really a great compliment to not just having them to be well in terms of how their life is and as they go down that road and become even more successful, but to have a wellness component that supports that success. Exactly. What do you, what do you say to women who have, you know, such a hectic life? You know, they've got so much going on in their lives. What do you say to them in terms of how to approach this program so that it will instigate the positive changes that they want to see in their life Well, you know, it's interesting because I was that woman, I would come home from work and wouldn't take off my heels or even my jacket until everybody had been fed homework was done and bathtub and they were getting dressed for bed, then I would take off my shoes, maybe eat something.

I mean it was totally no self care, but I'm telling you, if you don't take the time for a little bit of self care, you burn out that much more quickly and no matter how successful you are, you're still not able to give the best and leverage that success. If you're not taking care of you. And the beauty of this program is that it's only for two days and a total of maybe about six hours and in those two days and six hours, which makes me sound like a lot, but it's, it's, it's just a drop in the bucket. It's a small drop in the bucket in terms of all the time we spend not taking care of ourselves. This is one of these kinds of programs where you invest that time and, and we'll end up gleaming much more than what you initially invested in terms of time. I think that women need to get rid of feeling guilty about spending that time for them. I think that it's not selfish at all. It's a form of self love to be able to spend the time that's necessary to pour back into you because we spend so much time pouring into everyone else.

It's really an opportunity to pour into you for a small incremental amount of time and to have such great benefits as a result. And that's the really the most important thing is to know that you can do it, and also you're going to be participating with other women as well, which makes a huge difference. Yes, when you're doing with others, because community and support and accountability can go a long ways. I think this is just fabulous Shelly, would you like to add anything else to our discussion here? Yeah, I was going to say a little bit more about what Lenny's was speaking about is that we women are so good at taking care of everybody else. And as Linhas was speaking about not even taking her heels off when she got home from work at the end of a long day and then taking care of everybody else. We're so good at supporting all the others. But one of the things that we forget is that we are actually the gift to the others.

We're the ones that are pouring our love into everyone else. So, in order for us to be as great as we can possibly be for the other people in our lives, we have to sustain and be all that we can be for ourselves and really include our own self love, that's essential because without it, we're giving, giving, giving, giving giving, and then one day we'll have a physical or an emotional or both collapse of some sort or other, and life will will get beyond ourselves. I too had a very similar kind of incident as Linus in my former career. Right. So that has absolutely been my experience as well, that you've got to include yourself most most important. And the emergence of the total woman gives women the foundation. They don't have to be looking at all these different things in order to try to figure out how to take the steps to really feel good with who they are and have really clear tools to to have the quality of life they really want to have and have true satisfaction.

And I think a lot of people can understand it intellectually, but until you actually make the commitment to actually doing it, doing something about it, nothing's going to change. It's always it's going to continue to be an intellectual exercise. And and I think a lot of people, there's a bit of a misnomer around self love. Some people think of self love as being self serving, but it really isn't. If you don't take the time to express gratitude to yourself. Think of the things that you do well and to love yourself and care for yourself and make sure you're getting the proper sleep, proper nutrition, the proper downtime. I mean, there's so much research out there that indicates and supports that these are the types of things that go a long ways in contributing to and increasing our overall state of being our overall health emotionally, physically, psychologically and mentally. And if we don't take the time and the energy and make the commitment to do it, we're going to continue to spiral in the same cycle that we're in, we're not going to get any further down the road.

Not really, not really. Of course we can produce results in spite of ourselves. But as Lenin said earlier, how much more can we create when we're really clear and focused and feel vibrant and alive? So much more is available to us to support others with and to be fully excited about ourselves as human beings. Yes, exactly. Well, this has been a fabulous discussion. I'm so excited for the two of you. Where can our listeners find out more about each of you? And we'll start with you Shelly and then let us and you can share and then where they can find out more information on this program, the emergence of the total woman. Well, for me, if women would go to facebook and Power of woman, that singular power of woman's seminars with Shelly. Niccolo Shelly is S H E L L E Y N as a nancy e G E L O W.

That is the best place to find out more information about Power of women's seminars. They also can go to Shelley gigolo dot com for more information on some of the private work that I do. And ultimately, if anyone wants to reach out to me and ask questions and to get more about my work directly, go to power of a woman seminars at gmail dot com. Perfect. And we'll be sure to make sure we get all of this in the show notes. So for our listeners, you don't have to write all of this down unless you're right at this very moment, wanting to jump on contacting Shelley and Lenny's Lenny's share with us how people can get a hold of you and reach out to you. Well, the best way to get a hold of me is to go to my website, Wellness woman 40 dot com Wellness woman 40 dot com. And that really is a portal to all my social media to my women's facebook group, my magazine, my books, my retreat to Costa rica, my spa days.

Everything was right there on that site. And for those of you who are on facebook, if you want to be able to reach out to me on a daily basis, I'm in my Facebook group at least 2-3 times a day. Just put in the search bar wellness woman, 40 and beyond Wellness woman, 40 and beyond as well as women 40 and beyond group. And it will pop up and you can also reach me. Um I have several email addresses, but I'll give you the wellness woman one, it's just wellness woman 40 at gmail dot com Wellness woman 40 at gmail dot com. Terrific. And we'll be sure to get all of that in our show notes. I just want to thank you both for being here today and I am so excited for you as you embark on this journey together with this collaborative program and I hope that's just wildly successful. And I look forward to hearing more about it once you get through it and you continue on the journey together. Well, thank you so much. And I also wanted to let the audience know that if they were interested in finding out more about the emergence of the total woman, they can go to our website which has the actual connection.

Yes. If you go right, if you go to the Wellness woman 40 dot com and click on the emergence of the Total woman banner, just click on that banner and it will take you directly to the jump page for that. If they want to find out more and go directly to the registration page, all they have to do is type in bitterly that's B I T L bi slash emergence blueprint. That's Bigly and it's B I T dot L Y slash emergence blueprint. Perfect. And we'll make sure all of that info is in our show notes. So people can go directly to that link. Perfect. Thank you so much. And I look forward to following back up with you all after the program. Okay, fantastic. Thank you carol so much. Wait, don't go yet stay with us just a bit longer before you go. We hope today's show helped to bring a bit more joy and happiness into your heart. We also hope that it inspired you to unleash your own inner power and to rise up to your best and loving heart centered, highest self.

Just a few things before we go and we'd love for you to subscribe to our podcast and share the show with others, particularly those episodes that are your favorite. You can reach out to us at www dot hearts rise up dot com. Or you can email us at hello at Hart's rise up dot com. Well, that's it for now. Until next time. Keep rising up and may love and happiness always be in your heart. Bye for now. Mm hmm, mm hmm.