Episode 6 - Part 2: The Magic is YOU! | Michelle Rohr
May 18, 2021
Getting to the destination is more exciting to me than actually being at the destination.
- Michelle Rohr -
We’re beings who are constantly looking for new experiences, but we often forget to take the time to really enjoy the process of getting there.
So often we feel like we have to suffer in order to grow our businesses, enjoy our lives and take care of ourselves.
Ask yourself these questions: Are you happy with your current workspace? Did you choose to eat your favorite meal today? Did you finally buy that bag you’ve eyeing? If not, why not? What’s stopping you?
In part one, Michelle Rohr founder of Secret OWL Society shared with us what happened when she made the decision to take 100% responsibility of her life. By giving herself space to focus on herself, she was able to honor her deepest desires, concentrate on personal development and grow a business that runs on her terms.
This episode is a continuation of our conversation on trauma, why you need to say yes to yourself now, how to maximize our small pleasures, cultivating what you want, changing your mindset to believe you deserve, your desires and so much more.
Eleshia’s Essentials:
Michelle shared more gems in this second part of our conversation:
- Getting to the destination is more exciting to me than actually being at the destination.
- You can be happy because you are constantly cultivating the life you want.
- To be a good person, you have to be who you are.
- If we never face our fears, we're never embracing our desires.
- A lot of the time our desires are wrapped up in fear, so I help women change their relationship to fear.
About the Guest:
Michelle Rohr is the founder of Secret OWL Society. She helps women embrace their zone of genius through planners and personal development. A few years ago, Michelle realized that she had lived the same year twice and that day, she committed to taking 100% responsibility for her life. That decision led to a ton of personal growth, a multi 6 figure business, and a community of thousands of customers - all while following her intuition and staying true to cultivating her zone of genius. Check out her podcast here.
Want to join Michelle's group coaching? Click here to discover The Magic in You.
Connect with Michelle:
About the Show:
The Eleshia Show is a podcast to help female business owners feel empowered to put their well-being first whilst building their businesses. We’ll be bringing you conversations with guests and sometimes just solo episodes. We’ll be discussing strategies, sharing stories, experiences, expertise, insights, and everything in between to enhance your well-being and build your business while still trying to navigate real life. The host, Eleshia Harris, will share her decades of project management and wellness coaching experience to help you to start saying yes without procrastinating.
Show Transcript:
Eleshia Harris: Hi, I'm Eleshia Harris, and I am your host of The Eleshia Show. I am also the founder of eleshialifestyle.com, and I'm so excited that you're here with me and I am here with you. I'm also really appreciative. Each week I'll be sharing strategies and stories and insights to help you enhance your well-being and to build your business while still navigating life.
Because sometimes we often try and separate the two, and let's face it. If you are not well, you have no business. So let's try and work with these two things combined because we can to enhance your lifestyle. Again, I'm really excited to have you here. I have ,wanted to put together a podcast for over two years. And so here I am, ready to share. Let's get into this week's episode
Well, Michelle and I are back for the second part of our episode, and we went deep. If you haven't listened to the first part of our conversation, I would highly recommend that you go back and listen to episode five, titled The Magic is YOU!. And it definitely is. We went even deeper in this second part of the conversation.
When we spoke, we spoke for over an hour, and I didn't want to edit anything out because I know that it will help somebody. We talked about trauma. We talked about how to heal your trauma using your business. We talked about how you need to say yes to yourself now. You deserve what it is you want now. We talked about maximizing the small pleasures, and Michelle discussed how she envisions her business is looking in the next couple of years. This conversation is so rich that I just want you to go in this, and I know you're going to get insights from these. Enjoy.
I love watching your stories. You've got this mindset that you've already got it all. And you've got your coffee on order, and you're making sure that you're doing your exercises. And everything is just revolving. It revolves around Michelle first, and then the business. Because you're the most important thing in the business. So as you said, why struggle and then not be able to reap the benefits? Like I'd never understood that. I've never understood, "Oh, I'll do this when I retire or I've got to work really hard now, and then when I hit retirement, then I'll enjoy my life."
Enjoy it now, because you may not get to that point.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah. And in fact that you enjoy it now you'll realise, "I didn't even need to wait." Like the feeling of being wealthy and all of that, you can have it now. You don't need to wait till you're wealthy. Because what it all comes down to is just the day-to-day pleasure of life. And we can create that just from honouring those little upgrades, those little experiences. It's little stuff. Being able to say yes to yourself when you decide to light a candle while you're taking a shower, being able to say yes to yourself when you decide, "You know what, I don't actually like this shampoo. I'm not going to keep using it until it's done. I'm just going to go ahead and get rid of it now and get what I want." These are the shifts that lead to you actually making more money, because then you become someone who believes, "She deserves better." And for women, it's like... The only way for me to explain it is to actually give real examples.
Like when you sit down to eat breakfast, what does that look like? Are you haphazardly throwing things in your face and maybe it's something off your kid's plate. Like we glorify what it looks like could be a busy mom. But it's like, "Are we really incapable of putting a placemat down, putting some fresh flowers in a vase, making a meal that has all of the components of a healthy meal, sitting down, having a cup, that is the real cup that we love, and we chose it from a store that we loved, not just some random thing to drink out of?"
Seeing how many layers there are to honouring and saying yes. And also, I think and in any circumstance, this is something I do with The Magic is YOU!, we do something called "petits plaisirs," and it stands for "little pleasures." What are the little pleasures? And so we take a category of life and we look at how we are maximizing on the little pleasures.
So the last one was making the most of mealtime. And so all the ladies would be posting how they were upgrading their mealtime, like the fresh flowers, getting nice dishware, taking that extra step to make your meals delicious. Maybe it was fresh herbs or you picked up some white truffle olive oil at the grocery store, and you use that on your toast. Like all of these little things that make you feel like you're a fricking millionaire. And it was just like picking up something else from the grocery store other than the default thing you usually get and be like, "You know what, I'll try this. You know what, I deserve the smoked salmon."
And being able to realise that you had the ability to have this life all along. You never needed to wait. You already deserved it. And like even right now the petits plaisirs that we're doing now is beautifying your workspace, because that's an area where we treat ourselves like robots. Like you treat yourself like a workhorse. And what I do is I look at all five senses, and what are you doing for each of your senses in this capacity.
So for your workspace, what are you looking at? Are you looking at clutter? Do you have something nice to look at? Are there plants? Do you have fresh flowers in your workspace? Taste. What are you drinking? What are you drinking out of? Can you upgrade your drink? Can you upgrade your cup? Smell. Do you have a nice candle? Do you have nice smells? Like I have this candle, it costs like 36 bucks, but it's worth it, because I'm worth it, and I love it. Every time I light it, I'm transported to the Italian coastline, and now I'm working because I want to go to the Italian coastline.
Eleshia Harris: Exactly.
Michelle Rohr: It's motivating. And then sight, smell, taste, touch. Touch. Like, are you comfortable? Do you need a new office chair? Even with this... My sister was like, "I realised that I was subjecting myself to a chair that was hurting my back and just acting like I didn't deserve better." Like, do you live with pain? Are you doing something to be more comfortable? And this is what I did with the petits plaisirs for the last one, which was mealtime. I realised, I hate this table. I hate these chairs. There is nothing wrong with them.
Eleshia Harris: They are just not what you want.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah. So I got new chairs. I'm completely changed. Like I went from thinking "I can only be comfortable on the couch and now I enjoy sitting at the table." But we don't give ourselves the space to look at these things.
Eleshia Harris: Yeah. I've just decorated my space. I love your wallpaper, but I'm not there yet. But I was the same. And I got rid of all of my clutter. I've got my Pilates equipment in the back, 'cause that's really important to me and my desk and just space that I can walk around. And as you said, the smells, it just makes such a difference than feeling like I was in this cluttered room that cluttered my brain.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah, like you just needed to suffer first and you didn't.
Eleshia Harris: Yeah, so I'm happy. And now I've got my Pinterest board of what accessories are going to go on the walls and bought my plant.
Michelle Rohr: And knowing that you're not waiting till this invisible deadline to be able to say yes to yourself. Like you're saying yes every day. No, you don't buy everything you need all in one day, but you can say yes somewhere every single day. And that's what makes it fun. It's not actually having everything exactly the way you like it that makes it fun. It's being in that journey of creating. And I was just telling Aimee yesterday, it's like, "I enjoy dreaming more than having."
Eleshia Harris: Okay.
Michelle Rohr: Getting to the destination is more exciting to me than actually being at the destination. I love to look at what else do I want? I'm not so tied up with, "Well, I'm not happy until I have what I want." I'm happy as I'm cultivating what I want, as I'm investigating, as I'm learning more about myself. Even knowing what I want. I love discovering new layers to that and getting to know myself more. So it's not, "You're not happy until you can make your life look XYZ." It's you can be happy because you are constantly cultivating the life you want now. And it's ongoing. It's never going to end.
Eleshia Harris: No, because you're always going to want to...
Michelle Rohr: You're always going to evolve.
Eleshia Harris: Evolve, yeah.
Michelle Rohr: You're going to change. You're going to move to a new country. It's going to be like, there's always going to be new experiences that require you to investigate, "What do I want?" and saying yes to yourself when you ask yourself, "What do I want?" It's not, "What do I want? Okay. Well, I guess when my business is bigger than I'll..." you know? Women do this all the time. Like "I'm not going to buy that laptop until I make at least, you know, more money in my business." It's like, "Get the laptop and make money."
Eleshia Harris: Yes, and the laptop will probably help you make more money.
Michelle Rohr: Exactly.
Eleshia Harris: Oh, wow. There is so much truth in everything that you just said, that my brain is doing this. Ooh. Even me from, my background is project management, and I always call myself the holistic PM because of the fact that I've got the well-being background as well. So I'm not.... I don't always stick to those deadlines of project management, because as you said, why? Blur the lines a little bit, enjoy what you're doing, and get the most out of life now and enjoy working on your desires and your goals.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah. You're not a machine. You're not a workhorse.
Eleshia Harris: Exactly. So, it's just, ah, yeah. As I said, this year of even just that self-discovery of learning to unwind myself.
Michelle Rohr: Unravel.
Eleshia Harris: Unravel myself, yeah. And just ask myself questions of actually why are you doing this? Is it benefitting you? Is it helping you? Was it because you think that's what you should be doing? Is it going to make you happy? Is it going to serve you? Is it going to serve your family? Is it going to take away from me spending time with my family? Because that's really important to me. Elessandra's, what, two and a half next month? And I love the fact that I can work around her. As, you know, as you do. That's really important to me. I couldn't do that if I was backed in the corporate world, working in investment banking and trying to make my business my hobby. Couldn't do that.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah. And we have to continuously step into higher and higher awareness of what it means to have a business as a woman. Because right now in the season, what works in your business for your family, for spending time with your child, it's going to be different next season. So if we are not constantly listening to our intuition, you could be just fine right now. Everything can be good. But if you just tried to maintain it instead of continuously trusting that your intuition is always going to be taking you to the next evolution of you and your business.
And then you'll get to a point where you realise, "You know what, I got joy out of this once upon a time, but that season ended and I didn't pay attention. I didn't pay attention to stepping into the next season." And that's why I'm at a point where I'm already looking at the season a year from now and knowing that's where this whole idea of my intuition is giving me these words, sabbatical- based business. Because I need to radically shift what it means to have a business as a woman. There's still nothing but masculine examples out there. And even with businesses that I really admire, I still see them get sucked back into the masculine way of doing things because the customers are trapped in that mindset. The customers have expectations that are based on the capitalist masculine, patriarchal way of doing things. And so to please your customers to do what your audience wants is to get sucked back into all of that crap. And you have to be brave enough to do what you really want, even if it means not making a lot of money. Because this is what happens. People want to make the money, so they give people what they want. But then that just makes you stay out of alignment with the truth. And I want to be a millionaire. I have nothing against making money.
Eleshia Harris: Oh no. Yeah.
Michelle Rohr: But I, again, it's more important who I become. I'm becoming a millionaire for who I become in the process of becoming a millionaire, and I can see there's a millionaire I can become by making the money fast. And there's a millionaire I can become by making the money as a result of being true to myself. And that's a longer path, but if you believe that the journey should be as beautiful as the destination, you're okay with taking the longer path, that's the power in making the journey as beautiful as the destination. You stay true to yourself. You never feel like, "Oh, I'm just going to throw in the towel and just make easy money." So yeah, I'm exploring what does it look like to have a sabbatical-based business? It could be looking like, "What would it be to have a business where I set down my Facebook groups for six months out of the year?"
And if I'm honoring my desires, I know that will not just be good for me, that will be good for everybody. No one's going to die. Well, there'll be some people that'll feel like, "What? I have a right to this Facebook group. How dare you!?" It's like, "Oh, I have a right to my life."
Eleshia Harris: Yeah. When did you realise that you wanted just to follow your own intuition and just start to just work on your desires and your dreams and stop working for anybody else.
Michelle Rohr: Well, I'd been gradually doing it for the last 10 years since taking responsibility, but more so four years ago where I realised that the reason my life was so messed up growing up was because of narcissistic abuse. And when I decided to completely break free from that, that was when my intuition started really coming up. Because as long as you try to be in a relationship with someone who is not healthy, you are numbing yourself to your intuition. And again, even with that, there's messages that we think are good, but they're not serving us, which is family is everything.
And sometimes that makes women maintain relationships with people who don't actually care about you. But you think that if you don't care about them, you're a bad person.
Eleshia Harris: Yeah. That just hit me right in between my eyes, because you're right. You know, that's why my circle of family is so small because I'm not prepared. I am no longer prepared, I should say, to put you before me. You don't care. And that's been a hard pill to swallow for me and for the people around.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah, because you have all this programming that says, for you to be a good person, a good daughter, a good sister, a good friend, it looks like you're always there. You're always taking care of them. You're always forgiving. You're always dishing out second chances. And then to completely say, no, I put myself first. You will go through a death of identity. Like you have to literally step away from everything you thought it meant to be a good person and realise that to be a good person, you have to be who you are and trying to be someone who just fit into this paradigm of what it means to look like a good family, a good friend, a good daughter, blah, blah, blah, a good wife to like step away from all of that and redefine it for yourself. That is a hard process.
Eleshia Harris: Hard and heartbreaking at some point.
Michelle Rohr: And heartbreaking. But being on the other side of that heartbreak, your intuition starts to come out. I think that's the reason a lot of women can't hear their intuition because they are stuck in relationships because they think that to... They don't even see an option. Do you think this is just what you do? Family is everything. But I believe the family that is everything to me is the one I create, not the one I come from.
Eleshia Harris: Wow. Yeah.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah. That's my everything.
Eleshia Harris: That's a little mic drop. But, yeah. It is. But it is.
Michelle Rohr: Because you can't do both.
Eleshia Harris: I was just about to say that, you can't.
Michelle Rohr: You can't. Because if you're over here with the one you come from and trying to be the good daughter, the good sister, the good everything, then you take away from your husband. You take away from your children. You take away from your future generations. It's like you have to choose, because you can't satisfy both. So I choose the family I'm creating. And ever since I did that, all of the relationships that I've had with the family I come from have gotten healthier because now we're all free to step into our truths, but the relationships that were always toxic, because that's what they are at their core, you don't even care anymore. You're not trying to fix that. You are off living your own life and you just see what everyone else wants to go. You're not trying to control anyone.
Eleshia Harris: I literally did not know this is where our conversation was going to go. And I love it because you're so right. Again, I can only say from my perspective. Even just seeing how family had operated in the last six years, that my mum has not been here, and now seeing that they're no longer here either has been a big lesson to me. A huge lesson to me. Where I was putting my power, where I was giving away my power and my energy and so forth. As you said, to be that good...
Michelle Rohr: To be the glue.
Eleshia Harris: ...to everybody. To be the glue. If I was broken at one side, I wouldn't even see these people.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah. So when you said, when did you really start listening to your intuition? When did you really step into your power? Dah, dah, dah. I stepped into it the year I took off the Band-Aid, the year I stopped being the Band-Aid to everyone else's problems. And the scary thing is when you take off the Band-Aid, when you stop being the glue, it all falls apart, and everyone thinks it's your fault.
Eleshia Harris: Yes. Another therapeutic session for me right here. Wow. As I said, this is not where I thought we were going to go, Michelle. And we went there and...
Michelle Rohr: Let's dig up the trauma.
Eleshia Harris: Let's dig the trauma up and talk about it. But again, as you said, it's just all of these things are the things that we don't take into consideration when we say we are business owners. We are just out there, but we're not actually healing ourselves. We're not healing. We try and separate the two.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah. And I always feel like this is my superpower. And I just realised this recently, like I was able to put it to words, but I felt it for decades, like I can feel, it's not something like, "Okay, where is it? I'm like..." It's not like that. It's just like in the back of my head, like I can feel where a woman is wounded. Like I can sense the gaping hole. She doesn't even have to say anything to me. She doesn't even have to know me. I don't even need to know her. I can just like in passing on Instagram or something, like I can sense it. I can sense the trauma that's driving their actions. Even if on the outside it looks really shiny and pretty, I can see where it's coming from. I can see the brokenness behind what they're putting out. And so, this is why in my community, this is why I hate people making me the expert of whatever. Because then, people are like, "Okay, Michelle, let me tag you on Facebook and ask you my question about Pinterest or whatever." And they'll do that, and then I'll be like, "I can see. I can see you. This is not about Pinterest. I can give you the answer to your question, but this is not the real question." I can see that you have something that hurts, and you're trying to do distract yourself with this question about Pinterest and tagging me to answer it. Like this is a waste of our time. So that's why in my programs, I don't talk about all that technical stuff. The only as technical as I get in my programs, it's just, "Here's how to make a planner." That's the technical stuff. Beyond that, I'm talking about philosophy and life and healing and personal growth because that's where I want you to focus. That's where I want you to pull questions from. I don't care about Etsy.
Eleshia Harris: So tell us more about your coaching program. Tell us how we can get in.
Michelle Rohr: Well, if you go to secretowlsociety.org and you click on, I think it's programs or courses. I can't remember, but then you'll see everything I sell. And The Magic is YOU! is for women who want to let go of the BS, step into their power, honour their intuition, and embrace their desires. That's what it is really all about. And the way that we practice that is I have four different key practices that we go through every year. I don't do a new topic every month. When I was creating this program from a place of, I am enough, I realised there's only four things I want to talk about, and we focus on one thing per quarter.
So there's four quarters in a year. And at the end of the year, we just do it all over again. And even though the women do it all over again, it's a whole new experience because you go deeper. And it just gets more and more amazing to go deeper. We never give our chance to go deeper. "Okay, gotta learn about this. Gotta learn about that. Gotta learn about this." It's like you never go deeper and it's not business stuff. I don't want to teach you business stuff, because I know that whatever you do in business is whatever you want to do. Not what I say you should do. So what I do is help you remove what's not true.
So the first quarter is cultivate your brilliant mindset. And what we're really doing there is we're doing trauma-informed personal growth. We are healing trauma, and I'm not a therapist, so I don't go deep in it, but I point women toward this approach. And even with me just giving them that space, they have so many breakthroughs. So many of them will say, "I didn't think I had any trauma problems. I didn't think there was anything wrong with my childhood, but Oh my God. Let me tell you what I figured out."
Eleshia Harris: It was burried. We bury it.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah. So just doing that, it's like, "Wow, no one gives people the chance to do that." And then after that, we do make fear your compass, because if we never face our fears, we're never embracing our desires. Just to run away from what frightens you is to run away from what you want. And for women, a lot of the times our desires are wrapped up in fear. So I help women change their relationship with fear. And then the next quarter after that is step into your highest self. And that's where we really go big on, "Okay, let's do it. Let's get the luxurious lotions. Let's upgrade our environment. Let's put up that wallpaper." Like celebrating doing that because if there's not a space for that, then women, again, they feel like, "I don't know. I don't want to be better than other people. I don't want to, you know, I don't deserve that, but I just like, let's do it. It might create that energy where it's celebrated. It's okay. You can do this. No one's going to judge you. And if they do, it's their problem. Just do it." And that really helps these women feel like, "I can have the life I want now." Because that's the other philosophy is to make the journey as beautiful as the destination.
And then the last one is decluttering. Decluttering is always a magical thing, and we do that with physical belongings, we do that with mental and emotional, and then we just do it all over again the next year. Actually, Aimee and I, because we've done this two years in a row, almost two years...
Eleshia Harris: You did two years already?
Michelle Rohr: ...with this program. Yeah. So we're getting to a point where having done it for two years, we're going to meet up in Paris at the end of this year and film the curriculum together in person. And then that becomes the new version of the program. And then off of that, because I'm thinking in terms of sabbatical-based business, I'm not going to be doing monthly coaching. I'll probably do either quarterly coaching or I'll do like once or twice a year, an intensive four weeks of coaching or something like that, but I'm going to completely change how I show up in the coaching. Right now, if you join, you're going to get coaching every month. But next year, the format of me showing up to do coaching is going to change.
Eleshia Harris: So I better get in now.
Michelle Rohr: Yeah, what are you waiting for?
Eleshia Harris: It's because I'm still working through all of my other programs that I've bought from you.
Michelle Rohr: Follow desires.
Eleshia Harris: I know, I know. That's what I was just about to say. I was going to say, but yeah, I need to follow my own desires because that sounds amazing. I also was going to say to you, when you said Portugal, I was going to say, I thought Paris was your place. So when you said, you do it in Paris, I was like, "Okay, she still loves Paris."
Michelle Rohr: Yes, come full circle to Paris. I might end up in Paris. I don't know. We're just going to start out in Portugal.
Eleshia Harris: I love that. Michelle, thank you so much for this open and honest conversation. I loved it. As I said, it was not the... We talked about trauma. We talked about it all, and now you've, as I said, I've got things going around in my own head that I need to go and start thinking about. So this was like my own little coaching session as well.
Michelle Rohr: It's exciting. I love it when things are like, "Ooh, change is happening. Something needs to shift." I love that.
Eleshia Harris: Yeah. Definitely needs to shift a few things right now. So tell the listeners where they can find you on Instagram. And just, as I said, like, I need a nap. I feel like I need a nap.
Michelle Rohr: Well, you can find me @michellerohr, M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E R-O-H-R, on Instagram. And even with that, re-imagining what would it look like to only use it six months out of the year? So if you want to get in while I'm still using it, follow me now. And then my website is secretowlsociety.org. You can find my podcast on there, my programs on there, and also you can just get a sense for what the Secret O.W.L. Society brand is all about and just say hi. You'll find me in a little chat bubble on the bottom right-hand of the screen. And you can send me a message that way if you need to.
Eleshia Harris: Okay. Brilliant. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here with me. Thank you.
Michelle Rohr: Thank you for having me.
Eleshia Harris: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of The Eleisha Show. If you know somebody who needs to hear the conversations that we are having, please share it, take a screenshot and send it to them. Also, I would really love for you to rate and review the podcast as this really helps, and I'd love to read your comments. Lastly, remember, you need to invest in yourself first because you aren't important and amazing. Take care. Until the next time. Bye-bye.
