Transcript
Speaker: Hey moms, it's Laura Olinger.
Speaker: Welcome to the Positively Healthy Mom podcast.
Speaker: Because there's no manual for the hardest job in the world.
Speaker: Hello, everyone.
Speaker: Welcome to today's episode of the Positively Healthy Mom.
Speaker: Today, we have Dominice Clifton, who is a coach and somatic practitioner.
Speaker: I'm so excited to dive into this conversation, Dominice, because it sounds like you have some really cool stuff going on in your both personal life and your business life.
Speaker: So, you know, tell us a little bit about what it is that you do.
Speaker: Hi, Laura.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me today.
Speaker: I'm thrilled to be here.
Speaker: So as you stated, I'm Dominice Clifton and I wear many hats.
Speaker: I always have a hard time with saying like who I am when folks ask this question, because I think it depends on like the room and the conversation.
Speaker: But I would say for the sake of this moment in time, I'm an aunt.
Speaker: Well, I'm a mama.
Speaker: First, I'm a mama of two girls.
Speaker: They're five and eight.
Speaker: I am an entrepreneur, I'm a business coach, and I'm really passionate about helping people to build sustainable business or work professional careers while also prioritizing and maintaining their personal wellbeing.
Speaker: I think that oftentimes we think that it has to be an either or where I get to pick this one or that one.
Speaker: But again, my mission is to really let us know that we can do both and we can do both well.
Speaker: And when we do both well, we are able to show up with a greater capacity for all of the roles and the hats that we wear.
Speaker: So that's what I am.
Speaker: Yeah, I like that.
Speaker: And I like how kind of you're implying that these things kind of interlock or interlace, much connected.
Speaker: And it's not like we're two separate people by day and by night, you know, we're kind of all the same person.
Speaker: And so how those things to flow together, and I seem to become kind of the best version of ourselves, because I know you talk about being passionate and about showing up.
Speaker: And so tell us a little bit about, I know one of the things that you offer is this kind of soul, you call it your soul unique blueprint.
Speaker: Tell us about that.
Speaker: Yeah, so I, well, I'll split them up.
Speaker: So I believe that we are all spiritual beings having a human existence.
Speaker: And with that, we are not just these physical bodies that we're walking around holding, right?
Speaker: Our body, our souls are housed in these vessels.
Speaker: With that, I think that we all have to be really diligent about nurturing and nourishing all the parts of ourselves.
Speaker: And so when I talk about all the parts of ourselves, there's the physical body,
Speaker: There's the mental body and then there's the spiritual body.
Speaker: And so over the last four and a half years, I've been very diligent about really building a soul care practice.
Speaker: And I differentiate soul care versus self-care because oftentimes when we think about self-care, we think about very topical things.
Speaker: And so it's like,
Speaker: you know, brunch with the girls or taking a nice bubble bath at the end of a long day.
Speaker: And it's like, those things are really great, but we can often focus on some of those more like, again, topical external things, but we might not focus on our minds and what we've been nourishing our minds, or we might not focus on
Speaker: our spirits and the relationship that we have with our souls or the relationship that we have with the higher power.
Speaker: And so I really, really try to get folks to have a mindset shift around how they prioritize themselves and really focusing on nurturing and nourishing all those parts of ourselves.
Speaker: And I call that the trilogy.
Speaker: Like if you think about a triangle hitting on all three of those parts of ourselves consistently.
Speaker: And I have been doing that Laura for the last four and a half years.
Speaker: And it's made such a difference in my life to
Speaker: be very intentional every day about nourishing my body, to be very intentional every day about nourishing my mind, and to be very intentional every day about nourishing my spirit.
Speaker: And what I've seen over time is that, again, that has given me a greater capacity to show up as a mom.
Speaker: That's given me a greater capacity to show up as a business owner.
Speaker: And so that's a little bit about this soul care practice that I'm super passionate about sharing that folks need to be doing.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: That makes so much sense.
Speaker: And so what a woman who is in desperate need of your help, what are the problems that she's facing?
Speaker: What is she dealing with?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So she might be a mom.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because I think we attract a lot of what we are.
Speaker: I oftentimes work with women who are working nine to fives, but feeling called for more, called to do more.
Speaker: Sometimes you know what that more is, but a lot of times you don't necessarily know what that more is.
Speaker: There's a tug on your soul that, you know, there's more to life than this.
Speaker: You're living a life.
Speaker: You've checked all the boxes that society tells us to check, right, to be successful.
Speaker: And then you're looking around and you're like, I've done all the things, right?
Speaker: I've
Speaker: crossed all my T's and dotted all my I's, and I'm not feeling fulfilled in this work.
Speaker: And so oftentimes when my clients come to me, they're most likely, again, working a nine to five, but they're not feeling fulfilled.
Speaker: They want to have a greater impact, but they're not sure what that is.
Speaker: And I typically help two clients.
Speaker: I help the client that's an aspiring entrepreneur.
Speaker: And so perhaps she is a mom and she's balancing all these things and she wants to make an impact and do mission driven work.
Speaker: And so I guide that woman through a process of self-discovery to really figure out who she is first so that we can now build a business that is aligned to who she is.
Speaker: And that is what brings the fulfillment and the joy and the happiness, being able to show up every day in that business.
Speaker: The other woman that I typically see is a woman who might already be an entrepreneur.
Speaker: But she's more early stage.
Speaker: And so I consider that the first one to three years of business and perhaps is working in a business.
Speaker: But it doesn't feel good.
Speaker: It doesn't feel aligned.
Speaker: And that was my story for a long time.
Speaker: And I kept burning out because I was working so hard and exerting so much energy into something that didn't feel good.
Speaker: So if you can relate to any of those things, balancing a lot of roles, wanting to make a greater impact, wanting to launch a business, those are typically the type of clients that I support.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And what, can you share a story of maybe your greatest achievement for a client as for entire transformation?
Speaker: Kind of tell us a little bit more.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I always, I feel like whenever I get this question, I don't know if it answers the question in a way that the host would want, but I think that the small wins are really the big wins.
Speaker: And so I have a client right now who's a mom of three and she has a
Speaker: How old is her oldest?
Speaker: She has a seven-year-old.
Speaker: She has an almost three-year-old who'll be three in December.
Speaker: And then she has a one-year-old.
Speaker: And she's a full-time entrepreneur.
Speaker: Her and her husband actually work together in a photography business.
Speaker: And so they have a studio.
Speaker: And so they are
Speaker: co-founders of the studio, and she's balancing a lot of things.
Speaker: She's a mom of very young children, a wife, and obviously that pulls us in a lot of different directions.
Speaker: But when we started working together, she had been in business actually for seven years.
Speaker: So she's a little bit different from my typical client.
Speaker: But what she was finding was that the things that worked for this first seven years were not getting her to the next level that she desired to go.
Speaker: And so oftentimes she felt stuck in her business of like knowing that there was change that needed to be made, but she wasn't really sure of what that change can look like.
Speaker: When we don't, you know, when we aren't clear in our goals and we don't have clarity, that leads to feeling stuck.
Speaker: And so there was just a lot of inaction.
Speaker: There's kind of the throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying to figure out what to do, right?
Speaker: Like how do I move the needle?
Speaker: How do I generate, you know, more clients and bring more revenue in?
Speaker: And so one of the greatest things that we started doing in the beginning is helping her to get clarity.
Speaker: And so that is, you know, now that you've been in this business for seven years, what are the strategies that work for the first seven years?
Speaker: But what do we need to do now that's different?
Speaker: So she was spending a lot of time on social media as a photographer.
Speaker: Like that was her main means of marketing for those first seven years.
Speaker: But now we're actually shifting.
Speaker: She doesn't have an email list after seven years and we're working on building an email list and really starting to get clarity on her goals over the last couple of months of working together and setting goals and really checking in on those goals and having accountability.
Speaker: She goes into work every day and is in her business now in charge, right?
Speaker: Like being clear on what she needs to be doing.
Speaker: We've also focused on scheduling and time blocking so that she's able to prioritize her goals.
Speaker: And instead of going in and having a full day and being like, I don't know where to start because there's so many things to do.
Speaker: we focus on what are the top three priorities now that we've identified your goals and what do you need to do today to move the needle on those three priorities?
Speaker: And so it's really beautiful when she sends me messages and notes and she's just like, I feel like I'm getting the bliss back in my business after just kind of feeling, you know, for the last few years, like I just haven't been passionate about it.
Speaker: And so that to me is a really big win where someone who's been in business for a really long time is feeling excited as if it were the beginning again.
Speaker: Yeah, right, right.
Speaker: Well, that's great.
Speaker: I love what you described as far as getting really clear, getting really focused and kind of like feeling reinvigorated.
Speaker: And I have a feeling that that is maybe what's stopping a lot of moms out there from going into business on their own, because most of my audience is parents of teenagers.
Speaker: And what we're seeing is, you know,
Speaker: This can go in either way, but like the light of the end of the tunnel or Tuesday where our child or children leave the nest and launch.
Speaker: And then it's kind of like, now what?
Speaker: And we have a new version and we have to figure out what our new identity is when we're not.
Speaker: caring for children that live in the house.
Speaker: And so, you know, I can imagine that that's very overwhelming and daunting.
Speaker: And so part of getting over that, you know, overwhelm is to kind of come up with what you've described.
Speaker: And so what advice would you have for those moms who are kind of on the fence and they have this kind of big, you know, event coming up where their child is going to leave the home and they want to do something and they don't know what to do?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So love this question.
Speaker: So my mom is a teacher and she's been a teacher now for, gosh, almost 30 years.
Speaker: And she's at that point of like, I don't want to retire and do this, but I don't know what else I want to do.
Speaker: I have a young mom, so she's not ready yet for thinking about retirement.
Speaker: So for any moms, I have a younger brother.
Speaker: Also, I'm sharing this story to say, yes, I have these conversations quite often with women.
Speaker: We you know, you might be in a career that you've been in for a long time and maybe you you do well in that career.
Speaker: But again, you're not feeling fulfilled.
Speaker: It doesn't set your soul on fire.
Speaker: You know that there's more that you want to do when you're in a space of, you know, what is that more now?
Speaker: I actually a couple of months ago started giving this this down low for what has now become discovering your zone of bliss.
Speaker: So bliss is an acronym.
Speaker: And for anyone who was like, what do I do?
Speaker: Like, how do I figure this out?
Speaker: I love the idea of moving through this through discovering your zone of bliss.
Speaker: And so when you think about like doing something right, think about the word bliss.
Speaker: It's paradise.
Speaker: It's heaven.
Speaker: You know, it feels good.
Speaker: That's how I want everyone to wake up and feel every day when they go into their business.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Obviously, as business owners and entrepreneurs, there are days where things are challenging.
Speaker: But overall, I wake up every day really excited about my work because I'm clear about my purpose and how I'm showing up.
Speaker: And I've actually moved through the zone of bliss process.
Speaker: So the B is starting with what's your big idea?
Speaker: Oftentimes, even if we don't feel like it's attainable, we have a little tug on our heart.
Speaker: are so there's something that we're feeling called to do.
Speaker: Maybe it's wanting to work with women that are veterans or, you know, moms of domestic violence, like there's something that we feel called and passionate to do.
Speaker: So you start with the B, which is your big idea.
Speaker: That might be two or three things.
Speaker: It doesn't necessarily have to be one thing, but write those things down, those things down.
Speaker: And then you move to the L, which is thinking about, okay, so what are the things that light you up?
Speaker: Those are your passions.
Speaker: You start to write out all your passions and they don't have to be related.
Speaker: It can be, I love cooking.
Speaker: I love, you know, playing the piano, making music, whatever it is that you like to do.
Speaker: You write those things down.
Speaker: The first I is now, what are your innate gifts?
Speaker: Those are your God given, you know, gifts and skills that you were born with that you don't really have to think about.
Speaker: They come naturally to you.
Speaker: Perhaps you're a planner, you're super organized.
Speaker: You write those things down.
Speaker: The first S is now what are your skill sets?
Speaker: Those are all the things that you've acquired in your lifetime, whether it be from academia or from your work experience, and you write all of those things down.
Speaker: And the last thing is the final S, which is now looking at the big idea that you had, the population that you feel called to serve.
Speaker: What are some problems that you're noticing and what are some solutions that you can offer?
Speaker: And so once you move through this five-step process, you've now looked at your passions, you've now looked
Speaker: identified your big ideas, you looked at your gifts and skills, you've thought about some potential solutions you can offer.
Speaker: And then you pick one thing that might be a combination of a few of those things.
Speaker: So pull out the pieces that you're really excited about.
Speaker: And that is what you take to start building this business or this passion project or this side hustle.
Speaker: And so before I close out, like when I was thinking about what type of business, coaching business that I wanted to offer, I have a B2B, but I was stepping back into coaching.
Speaker: I've
Speaker: fact that I love astrology and self-discovery.
Speaker: I love business.
Speaker: I'm super organized.
Speaker: I love teaching.
Speaker: I took all of those parts of myself and I went through this process and created my coaching program.
Speaker: And so this is a really beautiful way to get clarity around how you want to serve and make a difference in the world.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I bet there's so many probably tidbits that stood out for our listeners because, you know, I think this is where we as women might need some help, right?
Speaker: We might need some guidance because we are not...
Speaker: And many of us were, you know, stayed working throughout, you know, having having babies, but many of us didn't many of us stepped away, or they can we came back or we dabbled or we this and that.
Speaker: But a lot of times, at this point in life, maybe you do want to do something different.
Speaker: Maybe you do want a fresh start, maybe just like your mom, maybe you want to morph the business from
Speaker: being a teacher to being something else.
Speaker: And so I think like going through that process with you would be incredibly helpful to moms.
Speaker: And so tell us, how do you share some of this wisdom as a mom?
Speaker: Like what do you do with your little, I think you said daughters to daughters, like how do you impart this wisdom on them?
Speaker: Gosh, that's such a great question.
Speaker: So I am a super spiritual person and I'm a one, three human design projector.
Speaker: And so I'm always learning and soaking up information.
Speaker: And I literally just realized about a year ago that I just like have so many things that I've learned and acquired.
Speaker: I'm like, I have to do a better job of sharing these things with my kids.
Speaker: And so right behind me, I have sound bowls.
Speaker: I've started bringing them into my world more.
Speaker: I'm super, I mean, we at the start that I'm a somatic practitioner.
Speaker: And so I'm
Speaker: yoga certification and a breathwork certification.
Speaker: Like I have all of these modalities that have been really helpful for me over the years with regulating my nervous system and managing my stress.
Speaker: And I'm like, now it's time they're old enough where I can start planting those seeds in them.
Speaker: And so I started pulling them into my world.
Speaker: And so if we're having an afternoon where everyone is feeling overwhelmed and they're fighting with each other and bickering as sometimes siblings do, I'm like, okay, timeout, pause on everything.
Speaker: Everyone grab a bowl.
Speaker: And we literally set the bowls up and we have like a family sound session.
Speaker: Next to me, I'm really into nature and the cyclical nature of things and the moon and all of these things.
Speaker: And I go through with the moon, with the moon cycles, I go through a ritual and my daughter, my oldest daughter started, you know, asking questions and taking an interest in that.
Speaker: And she made her own moon book.
Speaker: And so she sets intentions as well.
Speaker: And so I think a lot of it is just having conversations with them and talking to them about things like, look at the moon, you know, like what phase is it?
Speaker: Like, I think as parents, like we we our children learn a lot from what they see.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so I also am very intentional about my lifestyle and personal care and soul care and making sure that they see that mom.
Speaker: prioritizes herself so that they can pick up on those things.
Speaker: But as much as possible now that they're getting older, I'm starting to plant seeds and just hope that, you know, the things that they are interested in, like they will gravitate towards those things more as they begin to grow older just by exposing them to those things.
Speaker: Yeah, it sounds like you're really modeling your own practices for them to pick up on, but then also teaching and being really intentional about that as well.
Speaker: So tell us a little bit more about the stress response cycle.
Speaker: Like you said, you know, we want to all learn from someone who really knows how to manage that.
Speaker: So what would you have to teach us about that?
Speaker: Oh, man, this is the thing that makes me so excited.
Speaker: I know it's like weird to say I get excited about talking about stress.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, so when I was a nutrition and wellness coach back in 2020, all my clients were coming to me for weight loss and we weren't seeing the results that they wanted.
Speaker: Weight loss, weight maintenance.
Speaker: We weren't seeing the results.
Speaker: The underlying thread in the commonality between all of these women, they were moms, they were, you know, working professionals.
Speaker: They were very busy somewhere getting PhDs.
Speaker: was that they were all really stressed.
Speaker: This was 2020, 2021, right in the height of COVID.
Speaker: And so actually, I started doing research as a coach to figure out, well, how do I support my clients better with stress management?
Speaker: And I learned about the stress response cycle, which essentially says that we as humans, when we encounter stress, we're supposed to have stresses intended to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Speaker: So the beginning is balanced.
Speaker: It's homeostasis where we feel cool, calm, and collective.
Speaker: Something happens, whether it's an internal stressor or an external stressor, and it shifts us into the middle of that cycle.
Speaker: That's the alarm phase.
Speaker: What's supposed to happen is that we are supposed to move through to the end of that phase and complete that cycle.
Speaker: So if you think about it like a circle, we're supposed to move through.
Speaker: What oftentimes happens though is that we don't complete the cycle.
Speaker: We just move from one stressor to the next and we kind of just go about our lives.
Speaker: We might forget about it mentally, but our bodies are still processing that stress.
Speaker: And so the stress response cycle educates us on the fact that we have to be intentional about not just eliminating the stressor.
Speaker: So it's not enough to leave the stressful workplace or to get away from the traffic or whatever is causing the stress, but you have to do things to your body to signal that it is safe
Speaker: So that your body can shift into a rest and recovery state, rest and recovery phase.
Speaker: And so it's literally, you know, somatic practices are really beautiful.
Speaker: Just doing things that help to ground you, give you two or three.
Speaker: Taking deep breaths is really helpful, you know, because when you take deep breaths, that signals the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps you to relax and restore.
Speaker: Physical movement.
Speaker: So moving your body any way that feels good to you, getting out for a walk, going for a swim, maybe a fun Zumba class, any sort of physical movement is helpful.
Speaker: And then mindfulness and meditation are also really helpful practices.
Speaker: But what happens is when we do those things, our body now knows that the stressor or the threat is over and it begins to reset itself.
Speaker: And we start the cycle all over again, as opposed to getting stuck in the middle.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: That was really, I really liked that.
Speaker: And it, what it made me think of was, um, myself along with several other coaches who work with, um, you know, stress clients who are feeling a lot of stress and a lot of pressure.
Speaker: A lot of times we as coaches, you know, we,
Speaker: almost start to take on a little bit of those emotions, right?
Speaker: We kind of get involved.
Speaker: And so I was taught a long time ago, how to not get involved with your clients is at the end of the session, once, you know, we've closed down and it's over to have a process to kind of get back to that rest and restore, like you talked about.
Speaker: And so someone taught me this idea of just like cutting the energy and like just cutting it.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: I know that's just like looks really silly, but it's almost just like a symbolic like cut of the end of the session so that then we can rest and restore, but then be able to go on and meet with our next client.
Speaker: And so I thought that was really interesting just to learn that little tiny trick to help get back and close that cycle and close that loop.
Speaker: Because think about it.
Speaker: If you're a coach and you have all these open circles, like you said, if it never closes,
Speaker: then that's a lot of pressure that we're taking on and a lot of stress that we're taking on.
Speaker: And so we do as moms, as professionals, as entrepreneurs, whatever it is that we're in our lives to, I love what you said about, about closing that loop.
Speaker: So that way you can then reset and restore and then be ready for the next thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the last thing I'll add there is that when we don't go through the process of completing that cycle, our stress builds or compounds.
Speaker: And so if you think about it, just like a dirty pile of laundry, throw one thing.
Speaker: And then the next day you're throwing something else like,
Speaker: eventually you get to the point of burnout because the stress does compound.
Speaker: And so I used to be someone who kept burning out.
Speaker: I was always hitting walls.
Speaker: And it took me to learn about the stress response cycle to make sure that I was actively working to complete those cycles.
Speaker: And so, yeah, of course I have days now where I feel stressed because I'm a human, but it's been years since I've hit a burnout space.
Speaker: And that's because I'm actively working to complete those cycles.
Speaker: And so similar to
Speaker: the analogy with or the example that you use with the clients, imagine just going every day as a coach and never cutting those ties or doing anything, right?
Speaker: You eventually get to the point where you're taking on so much of other people's energies and stress that that compounds and you end up burned out.
Speaker: And that's what happens to a lot of people, particularly in the coaching industry.
Speaker: And so whether it's, you know, professional, and we have to be intentional about completing those cycles, or just being moms and dealing with a lot with our own children, you know, their emotions and trying to help them regulate
Speaker: We have to make sure that, again, we are doing things so that that stress doesn't continue to build, which is where that completing the cycle comes in and becomes really important.
Speaker: Yeah, the active recovery or whatever type of recovery it is, but there has to be some type of recovery process in there.
Speaker: So, Dominice, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.
Speaker: How can people find you going forward?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So if anyone, well, I would say first my website.
Speaker: So my website is domrclifton.com.
Speaker: But for anyone who was intrigued by the zone of bliss today and maybe feels like there's a nudge, there's something that they want to explore,
Speaker: perhaps you're not sure what that is and you want to go through that five-step process, I have created a masterclass which guides you through that five-step process and includes a PDF download that you can download and really write and process through it.
Speaker: You can go to zoneofbliss.com and retrieve that free download.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Well, thank you.
Speaker: That sounds like a wonderful offer.
Speaker: I'm actually going to check it out myself just to get familiar with it.
Speaker: Well, Dominez, thank you again.
Speaker: We really appreciate it.
Speaker: Laura, thank you so much for having me today.
Speaker: It's been a pleasure talking with you.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to the Positively Healthy Mom podcast, because there's no manual for the hardest job in the world.
Speaker: Don't forget to subscribe and share with your friends.
