Natalie: Hi, my name is Natalie Ledwell and this is the Inspiration Show. Today, we’re going to be talking about how women work in a man’s world, and how we can rise above that and step into our more authentic self and more of the femininity of who we really are. So today, I’d like you to welcome our special guest Fiona Fine. How are you Fiona?

Fiona: I am great. It’s a gorgeous day here in Toronto, Canada.

N: Wonderful. We were just talking a little earlier about your journey, about your story we will get into that in a minute but what we were also going to be talking about today is your book called, which is actually called Bitch: Babe In Total Control of Herself. (00:50) to get into the information of that but first let’s talk about your journey and how you got to writing the book and to what the mission of the book really is?

F: Interestingly enough I sort of laugh because for almost 30 years now I’ve had, until the last 5 or 6, I have totally played in a man’s world. I had a (1:10) childhood until the age of 17 when I went off to engineering school and pretty much in three weeks I had my first car accident and that sort of set it all up for a very different life that I had planned as a young woman. And so through a lot of learnings and through the engineering and ultimately in IT and corporate head-hunting, I played by guys’ rules totally. I became almost a man and I almost subjugated completely my femininity and therefore my personal relationships disappeared and were difficult and my health was really a big problem for me to have to manage. So it was only in the last 5 years, 7 years that I really started to claim, reclaim the sazzy, sexy self that I think of myself as now and started to really live a much more harmonized life and take all the new things I learned from that, in a guy’s world and really melt them together into what I think is truly a spectacular life now. So it’s been great.

N: It’s interesting that you say that you had this car accident and it kind of changed the course of your life, how did that do that?

F: First one, as you’ve said, I became a pit bull almost. I knew that I had always been thinking like a man. I have been driven by a goal, a goal where at the age of 17 I mapped my life – I was going to have a couple of kids, I was going to be married, I was going to be an engineer – I had it all kind of meticulously planned out just like other alpha women do and our life has a tendency to sort of change things when you get it to structure. So, the first car accident was in 1980, oh my goodness, 1980, 79 and the second one was in 1995 and third one was only 5, 6 years ago. By that time, I was getting the hang of it. We take things for granted that we believe we can control our lives and only when we start to let go and we (3:27) go looking for what we truly desire and we start to reframe our goals so that they become truly desires as opposed to these goals that we are driven to accomplish. That was a huge one for me.

N: Isn’t it interesting, I was actually interviewed yesterday, and we were talking about the movie, the secret, the guy who was doing the interview with me was like he was trying to (3:50) through the secret and I’m like, I’m not saying that I can do that because that movie and that book changed my life because it brought me to the conscious world of having to set a goal and do a plan and structure everything else to realizing that what you can visualize and see these end results, put the emotions on it, take action and then release and tell the universe and that anything outside of us to be able to give us what we need and we are leveraging something much bigger than us.

F: Yeah, because we really get it in our own way. Just before you and I started to talk, I mean I’m an engineer so I’ve got a lot of logical side to me and yet the law of attraction when I did my coaching, one of the pieces is that you have to believe that there is something like the law of attraction and that it is helping us to get results and we know that we truly want to create. So most people are surprised that I am a woowoo person but it was only through that type of learning that I started to create my best life. I couldn’t have done it from a logical, (4:59) mindset. It has to be from a bigger piece.

N: Yeah and that’s the thing, you know, what we’re talking about here is leveraging the universe to supply us with the things that we could have planned for a million years anyway.

F: And we get in our own ways, as they say, so yeah, it’s a big (5:16). I’m actually a huge fan and I use it again in the program. I’m a huge fan of the (5:22) Abraham thought process. I had a naturopath (5:28) who’s been healing the mind, body connection because I was really basically (5:32) my ego mind which I would say is the biggest muscle of my body. It gets exercised more than almost everything else in my body. So it was only through that starting to integrate that I really start to become a completely whole woman that could create something bigger than just myself.

N: Yeah, exactly. So tell me about the book, what was the motivation behind writing it? What’s the message that you wanted to get across?

F: Well, okay, so for 30 years I played in the man’s world, I played the card and fast and I knew how to make money. I can make money. I gave up on a relationships and the health side of things. Well, it was kind of like a three-legged stool as women or anybody but quite often we have one leg which is really dominant and the other two are very short wobbly and out of quilter. So for years I have been called in the IT world and head hunting referred to as a little bitch (spelled it). I was bitchy. I was miserable. I was in pain. The rest of the world was sort of getting in it as much as I was. As I started to come out of this, as I started to pick up the pieces and started to harmonize, to create, I was looking for something that gave me the magic chuckle so that I would start to go, yes, I am a bitch (spells it) capital Babe In Total Control of Herself. So it took it from the distant powering world which has so many of us hate to an empowering how do I stand in this? How do I inspire myself? How do I inspire other people? And so it came about this, believe it or not, I started working and playing with women. I sort of gave up my, semi-retirement and I started, created a company called goddess connections, we have a couple of different publications for women. But what I was finding was my personal voice was still going stronger and stronger and I realized I had to step into that babe in total control of herself, so a lot of the teachings that I can use from working with other clients, the trenches that’s where the book came from. It is a  very, people say they can hear my voice when they read it. I can hear you Natalie in my ear. (overlaps with Natalie) from my life and wanting to give women a bigger voice so we can step into our own power.

N: Right. So what do you think, let’s be honest, there’s been many reasons why women have had to step up in a masculine way, masculine world, but I feel and may be you feel the same is that we’re moving into this new feminine era of the planet. And so now it is thank goodness for the women that came before us and actually paved the way for us to be able to step into that but how do you feel that women can show up in a more feminine authentic way if they are actually in a man’s world?

F: You know one of the things that I had not really realized is that I really didn’t know what was going to make me happy. I felt money really could. I completely lost the ability to understand that without your health and without true love that can be the true love of anybody, everything gets shallow and hollow. So, I think for us as women, to not to try having it all at once, to give ourselves permission to really start to, I was talking, you’re going to laugh, the vagina chronicles broadcast just on Friday night and they were younger women and they were like, okay, I’m starting to find that I’m always got my boxing gloves on. I want to go right at it, the world, my partner, everything, and I said, when was the last time you took time just to find pleasure – I don’t mean sexually, but pleasure of what you really truly desire? And you can hear the airways type of thing. We don’t do that. So really, if we have, we’re (9:40) because I do a lot of date coaching, we are radio stats, we’re dials. We as women put our hands on our dial and stop feeling guilty that if a massage is what really want, give us that pleasure, give us that relief, bring it down a knot, then we give ourselves permission. We can’t keep looking for it from outside of society. Society hasn’t quite caught up. So we’re really still holding ourselves back and women have to be softer with other women and I’m learning that. We have to give each other permission to blow things up and to try things out without cutting each other up.

N: The other thing too I think and this is something that I am sort of championing right now reading recently (10:29) Brown – powerful (10:33). The gift of imperfection but as women, I think the more that we can share and be real and talk about a couple of things that may be we would see as vulnerable, like I know if I was ever shown that I came across as vulnerable to me that was weakness. I realized that really what it is is strength. We all have the same fears, the same doubts and have the same swords and the more that we share that, the more that we can expand all that.

F: (overlaps with Natalie) lives. I mean because, you know, if it was so bound up that we’re trying to be perfect, we can’t sustain it, that’s where our health gets us. That’s where disease dis-ease creeps into our lives. That’s when we take on so much as women and we are trying to hold it all together, we’re the biggest losers, and so yeah, living an open, vulnerable, I need help, this is not working for me what can we do, finding a new way to communicate with ourselves as well. I love the vulnerable piece and the authentic piece because we have tried to saw ourselves into little boxes for a long, long time.

N: Yeah and it’s hard. You’re a wife, you’re a mother, you’re working like you’ve got all these what you think others’ expectations of who you need to show up as. This weekend, just tap into that part of ourselves of who we really are underneath all of that because we are not our behavior. We are not our personality.

F: (overlaps with Natalie) we are not what we look like. I mean we’re also forcing everybody to be a perfect size whatever. It’s ridiculous.

N: I agree. You mentioned before that you have some publications that help and support women. So tell us a little bit about those.

F: When I started with what I have been doing, I have been creating my own spectacular love life and I had been coaching people. I come from 20+ years of coaching and so I was, the first publication that I started was how to put the fun back into dating. And it’s encouraging women to have fun in that process, to not just go out again with that goal of where is he? You know, prince charming, the one because quite often we’ll get somebody and boom, it’s like this isn’t showing up the way I wanted and need it to. So I started with how to put fun back into dating, then I wanted a broader voice for women. So I created the platform women who run it, it’s for women leaders of all walks of life and it is also a platform where women can speak to women and have a big voice around the world. So those two publications are part of the company, Goddess Connections, and I do my own speaking and write books and just really just sort of push that envelope and sort of (13:26) this bigger voice that we possibly can.

N: Yeah, perfect. So if people want to find out about the publications, about your book or anything to do with you where can we send them to find out more information?

F: The publications you can always go to the company (13:43) that’s the simplest. The company website has both publications on it. The company website is www.goddessconnections.com. They would see two links (gestures), they could go to either one and they would be sent over to them as individuals because you know it’s like vogue and national geographic to a certain degree. There is an overlap but they’re different. If you want to speak to me and get a copy of the Babe In Total Control of Herself, which we still have as a digital book for a limited time then they can go to fionafine.com. I’m on my own Twitter which is Fiona_fine, social media is one of the place I like to play. I like to push the envelopes (14:34).

N: We need more of you. So thank you so much for being on the show and thank you for the work that you’re doing because I think the more of us that can go out there and step into this light and create this space for women to feel like they can share and be supported and to get information that they need is really important. So thank you so much for everything that you do.

F: My pleasure. We are actually, the reason why I love the products that you have is because you give, I’m a very much visual person, and you give us an opportunity to create visually what we want to create in our lives and that’s huge. I love to play with that stuff so it’s fabulous the mind movies.

N: Thanks, Fiona. Now guys I encourage you to share this video. You can do that by clicking on the Facebook and the Twitter share buttons on this page. Also, make sure that you download the app if you haven’t done so already so you can watch the shows on the go. Click on the banner on the side there to go straight through Fiona’s website. And make sure that you leave your email on the box on this page, so I can send you the manifesting with the masters video e-course. It is actually valued at $87 and I would love to send it to you for free. So until next time, remember live large, choose courageously and love without limits. We’ll see you soon.