 really happy to be here with Sophie. I think she has some encouraging things to share with everybody watching this. We're all working on growing our own authentic business, solopreneurs, and Sophie has some great experiences to share. Sophie is part of my group coaching mentoring program called Master Hard ABC. And, well, let me just, Sophie, let me have you do your introduction first and then we'll get into your experiences. So, I'm Sophie Messager, as you can hear from my ex, and I'm French, but I live in Cambridge, UK, where I work as a paying neutral educator and healer. And whilst I seem to have specialized in blending scientific and traditional knowledge and helping people acquire those skills to help their clients, really at the heart of everything I do, it's about helping both professionals and families having babies, listen to their intuitive knowledge and trust themselves. That's really the essence of everything I do. That's wonderful. And you have a science background. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that. Just so. Before I, so 10 years ago, I changed career to become a birth worker, paying neutral educator. But before that, I spent 20 years in biological research. I have a PhD in physiology of reproduction. And I worked in academia and I worked in the biotech and big pharma context. And then I went back to academia before I had my son who was 17 years old, turned 17 years old, two weeks ago. It's his birth. His birth was what led me to, I started retraining two years after he was born. Like almost instantly after he was born, I had a birth that I went from being really scared of birth thinking it's horribly painful. I want all the drugs to having a really, really empowering birth at home thanks to having higher the doula. And almost instantly I thought, oh, I don't want to, what am I doing now? Cause I want to do this. And I remember sitting in a meeting, even pregnant and thinking I'm bald. Wow. Work, do you see what I mean? Because my passion had already shifted. Right, yeah, exactly. And I remember thinking, oh, what now? And I've spent a couple of years soul searching and I eventually spent four years retraining while still working as a scientist. And I had an interesting period of teaching and the other classes in the evening was still working as a scientist during the day. And then eventually what happened is in the summer of 2012, a doula asked me to be a backup for last minute birth. And I ended up attending the birth on my day off on a Friday. And when I went back to work on the Monday, I thought, what am I doing here? Because this is so much more interesting. That dress you did and I just basically gave my resignation three months later. That was amazing. And what's unique about what you do is I wanted you to share your scientific background because you also have the spiritual side. Indeed. And you integrate the two. So tell us about that a little bit. Because you still have your scientific colleagues, academic colleagues. Yeah. But of course, you also have the maybe more traditional birth people that you know, maybe. And then you have holistic birth people and then you have the spiritual side to you. Like how... Yeah. And I'm emphasizing this point because there are so many people watching this who are also struggling with bringing more of their, well, authenticity or their spirituality, their woo-woo background or woo-woo interests into their work. Maybe they even work in a more traditional sense but they want to bring more of the spiritual out. So how do you take courage? You know, because what are they going to say? The people who know me for my, you know, credible professional person. So yeah, talk to us about that. So I think this is very interesting. I'm really glad you asked that because I've come so far from my, from my almost, at some stage I almost had shame about my woo side. But to go back to just give you a next, just sort of give whoever's listening and knew it and a, you know, a real extent of my woo-ness is that, you know, I'm as well as a PhD and very into where you get or I have, trying to become a Reiki practitioner and a Reiki practitioner, a teacher. So I've trained birth workers in doing Reiki. In fact, I specialize in doing it for birth, mostly because when I started attending births, you can't be in the room where a baby's just been born and not feel the phenomenal energy change in the room. It kind of blew my mind. I had trained in Reiki quite a long time ago in 2003. So way before I became a birth worker, there was always a part of me that felt really attracted to the esoteric. And I think I've always felt things like that. I've been like that since I was born. But I very quickly found myself, you know, doing a lot more of this training very, very fast. Like I went from like Reiki to Reiki master six months later because I was like, I want to do more of this. And then I eventually strain into something called Reiki drum where your channel Reiki drum. And I started using my drum in healing a lot. And that's from someone who the first time I was exposed to the idea of drum healing. I thought, what's that BS? You know, I thought, I used to sing all these things at no, at no rational, that no, that made no sense. But it was a case of I was exposed to these things. I felt what they did. And then I was like, this is amazing. Well, and it's indeed, it has thousands of years of history, it's, you know, science hasn't caught up yet with the healing power of that. Yeah. And in fact, I have a theory that every culture in the world does drumming, singing and dancing, and that in a Western world is seen as something only special people can do. And, you know, there's always been an element of using that for healing. But so in 2016, when I, so, sorry, when I started training to do Reiki, I had this really weird, difficult time because people kept hiring me because of my background of science. So people kept saying, are we picked you as a doula because you're not my hippie? And for a while, I even considered having a separate website for my healing work, almost that because I was worried those people were put off. And then luckily, I talked to a lot of people about that and I became very aware of the fact that trying to please everybody and trying to almost small yourself down to fit people's wishes wasn't a way to go about it. And so in 2016, I wrote a blog post called Confessions of a Hippie Scientist where I came out. And it felt very vulnerable because I'd only started blogging in 2015 and I was blogging very rarely. So this blog was a big deal for me. And I remember feeling very worried about how we would be received. But what I got was almost everyone who reacted was like, thank you so much. I feel exactly the same. And today I look back on this George and I think I can't believe I felt I had to like return that part of me wasn't there. And of course his client who didn't want the hippie stuff, I didn't give them the hippie stuff. It's like a buffet of things that you have. I was scared you're never gonna force them onto someone. But I started being much more upfront in my messaging online and about what I did. And then suddenly I got a lot more interesting clients. So one of my bucket list things which I achieved many times was to drum at a bus. And a couple of years later, I got hired by a woman who hired me for that purpose. So she got me to drum in the hospital. Wow. I drummed at a bus in the hospital. Oh my goodness, that is so, that's mind blowing. I mean, just to think about the baby coming into the world with that kind of sacredness of spirit instead of the typical hospital environment of that kind of sterile and traumatic, but anyway, this is really cool. Thank you. Thank you. And you know, fast forward to like, I think the last time I drum at a bus, which might have been in towards the end of 2021, I think, I drummed in the delivery unit and like the obstetric unit because I first started at home, then I went to the bus center and then that time I actually brought my drum in the obstetric unit. And by then it felt like, what's a big deal? You know, that come full circle. Wow. That's so interesting. I'm worrying about what the midwives and doctors might think, you know, because... Okay, okay. So now I found also George that I've written a lot more about those things and I feel, you know, what I learned back then when I decided to write this blog. In fact, a coach I've been working with challenged me to write this blog. Yes. And it was a pivotal moment for me because after that I started to say to all my friends, but if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one, but also the people who find that off-putting they're not the people you want to work with. So, you know, I suddenly got a lot more like holistic clients, people who got all energy work. Yes. I got much more exciting families to work with because, and then of course then came with the fact that people started asking me to teach them how to do that. You know, the whole energy work during the bus, in the bus room I started blogging about it and I told a group of bus workers, several groups of bus workers about a specializing basically making a recce course that was uniquely for people who worked in the bus world, which as far as I know didn't exist. I often pioneer things, George, it's almost in my makeup. Even when I was in science, I would within two or three years in the new field establish myself as a name in my specialty because what I've come to realize by working with a coach who is specializing in supporting neurodivergent families is I am, she was the first person to speak to me that I'm not just neurodivergent, but I am gifted. And I never understood what she meant by gifted because for me giftedness meant mathematical genius. But she suggested a book called The Rainforest Mine and I read this book and I really recognized myself. And one of the thing I have is meta thinking. So when I get into a field like healing or birth or anything, I consume information like in a very, like rather than going into a rabbit hole, I go a very broad and I start to look at the connections. The connections, so for instance, when I published a book about postnatal recovery in 2020, I did away from talking about any of the, this is my husband's from Hong Kong. So I never did, oh, you should do the postpartum like people do in Hong Kong because in Hong Kong, the main postpartum dish is pig's trotters in black vinegar. And if you're a vegetarian, it's not gonna be a very good option for you, right? So I just distilled it down to the main for what I saw as a main for categories that postpartum KFL into. And whilst I gave lots of examples by interviewing people for the book, what did you have in your culture? I never said you should do it like this culture. I was like the principle like this. Here are some examples, but they are four principles. And now I look back on everything I've always done. It's always been something I do without thinking. So a thing I talk a lot about in my blogs is how we tend to take for granted what comes to us easily. So I never used to think there was something special about my way of thinking. Until I realized that people, like not everybody thinks like that. Not everybody thinks like that. I so appreciate this because I know there are others watching this who probably can appreciate more how they operate differently than others. And to see it as a gift as you were gifted with that perspective to say, oh, okay. This is a gift that if I emphasize it can actually bring value to other people and to my own life more rather than seeing it as something strange or different and therefore to be oppressed. So please those watching this, feel free to comment below if you wanna share your own example. So thank you for inspiring us with your example of merging your integrating more of your spirituality and your authentic essence into your work and seeing how that brings you alive. And I think that that liveliness. And I still do the science. I will just say that the science is a big part of my work. I bring a lot of nothing more than finding scientific reference to back up. So I like to, you know, bridge the, bridge act as a bridge between those two things. The best of both. Why not? Yeah. So I'm still, often people, when I meet people, they like, how can you do this weird energy healing thing even though you've got a PhD? And you know what? Today I don't feel the need to justify myself. So I said, because I can. Great answer. Because I can. And I bring the benefit of both worlds. And if you don't know that benefit, I'm happy to share it with you. If you're interested in hearing about it. If not, that's okay too. Yeah, that's it. I'm not, the other thing that's very liberating in this really embracing my full self is, which by the way, self employment has really made me blossom compared to like when I was an employee who didn't even realize how much I'd been boxed in until I started stepping out of, you know, one of the things I loved about doula work is you meet people. You get very into the details of people's lives and you meet people, many of which did jobs I never even knew existed. You meet such a breadth and variety of people and you get to know that very, very well because you're in that context of one-to-one work with a family. And when I was a scientist, I only hung out with scientists. But now I've hung out, like I keep thinking when you're just doing one area of work, you've done, you have a very narrow view of the world. And as I started, the more I worked in this field, the more I was like, whoa, I just didn't know. And my old self blossomed into my own uniqueness, which means I love science, but I also don't love getting like lost into just one area. I never really did when I look back on things, I always felt I want to like a bird's eye view of the whole topic and often make links, like I said, between things where even in my PhD, I remember saying to my boss, well, why do we have to do it like that? And how about this? And people who look at me like, you know, often I went to conference and I would say, am I the only one who thinks that's not going to work? Wow, yeah. And people would be very upset. Yeah, you're challenging. Even in fields of science, I knew nothing about, I would go and say, Matt, you're talking about something that just didn't work and you're gonna do the same thing. To give a specific example, you know, I went to a conference last year, I worked in science and they talked about how they tried to eliminate malaria using anti-mosquito drugs and anti-malaria agents in the 1980s and the mosquitoes became resistant to the drug and so did the malaria agent. And they said, we're gonna do it again with new drugs. And I was like, hello, did you just hear what he said? Yeah, they just have to say, well, let's just do it harder and stronger, then therefore it will work. What you're saying is that you have a natural ability to do systems thinking, which allows you to gather the principles of having a more holistic view allows you to see the principles that then it can be applied more widely to create new solutions, better solutions. And yeah, it's wonderful. So yeah, I wanna encourage everybody to look, if you think differently from your industry, if you have critiques of your industry, share them, you know? And I mean, this is kind of, I love this conversation because that's kind of how I have operated in my industry is I'm like, why are you doing that way? Why don't we try this way? And I try to bring in sort of, so this is great. So self-employment. So now that you are fully into the self-employment and of course you've been in for a while, tell us, how do you express, how do you find the courage or practice the courage to keep on putting yourself out there with your ideas and with offers that might not work? Maybe you have all this practice in your scientific background, but it's like, what is the lesson you've learned from all that, that others can benefit from? Like to keep putting the content out there, the offers out there that might be unique, that might be against the mainstream? Oh, so such a great, such a deep profound question. I mean, you know, as you know, George, I've worked with you over the last couple of years and one of the big things I've learned is not to put a lot of effort in what I think my audience what I think is right for my audience. And you know, today is really interesting because today I was doing a market research interview. Well, I was basically doing a mentoring session with somebody, but in that I was also asking questions. And what was really interesting is the measure of, this is somebody who's just starting in the field and has majoring in postal syndrome, which is something I've written a lot about and I've had to like overcome myself. And I certainly said to this woman, I really wish I could go back to my beginning of my self-employed business with what I know today because nobody tells you when you start a self-employed business how to run your business. You know, in the field of caring profession like doula and until I tell educators, people just think, oh, I want to help people, but there's none of that. So I, for instance, I've planned to write a blog this week about how to avoid burnout when inspired by what you shared on the call earlier this week. How do you avoid burnout? And I'm going to tell stories of how I've experienced burnout over and over and over again until I started to put myself first and understand that I used to let my clients run my diary, which is what I said to this woman today. You have to think, how do I want to work? And not just let your client dictate your working hours. So that's one aspect, so the how to have a balanced life. And then I would say I've only really been starting to work with that for the last two or three years. And then the other aspect was, I used to just produce courses based on what I thought people would enjoy was not pulling people, not asking anything. And one of those course, I took probably the most hours to produce has been one of the least successful courses because I did all that before I started working with you. And I didn't occur to me to think that people would not necessarily be as interested in that. And one of the big aspect of starting to gently do, because I'm not like you, except spreadsheet is something I have quite a lot of resistance to. So tracking gently what has been most successful. So a few weeks ago, I tracked last year's income and it was very clear that one of my five online courses is the third of my entire income. And then the course then go down in different order based on which one has been the most successful. And I thought, okay, clearly I need to do my next webinar on that course. And that's the webinar I've just ran last week that had 162. It had 246 sign up, 162 attendees. Out of this 162 attendees, I got 93 feedback forms. That is just so encouraging to hear. People bought 22 courses. Wow. Wow. And it's the biggest course sale. Usually in my webinars in the past, this is the seventh one running in two years. I usually had about 10 course purchases. So this is, you know, for me it still costs slightly mind blowing. Of course. I still don't quite, I'm trying to capture now how people find that about me have not quite, you know, I've introduced like a non-boarding form in that course to try and understand, you know, and I'm running like, I've started running interviews on the people doing the course. Like I said to them, come on have a half an hour call with me and I will ask you a question for 10, 15 years. And then you can just pick my brains and I've had two of those over the last week. And it's really, one last night was absolutely fascinating because this woman said to me, I had seen your course and it was in my consciousness. But then when I came to your webinar and I heard you speak, then I signed up straight away. She did the course in three days. Wow. And it's a long course, you know, she basically came to have this call with me on Monday and said, yeah, I think your course was fantastic. And actually a bit like you that I am the charge and deliver, you know, the. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is ready. So that process now, and I did the same before coming to talk to you today. I went and looked at and made you'd be very proud of me and extra spreadsheet with all my webinars to see the progress. Because when I started, I didn't do the free to attend paid recording. I just did free to attend. So my attendance rate has gone from 40 to 65%. Just to, just to, just for those who don't know, that's one of the strategies I teach is called the FTA webinar, free to attend paid recording webinar. So it's the recordings are free. Anyway, I talk about this more in my authentic outreach course if anyone's interested. But I'm celebrating with you, Sophie, because this is clearly, I can see the progress. You've stayed, I mean, a lot of people take my courses, not everyone implements and you implement and you actually do stuff. I mean, you do the market research, you do the free to attend webinars. And that's not a shock to me that you're getting progress. You're seeing the progress happen. So I'm so proud of you. And so given that this is the first of, you know, we're gonna talk again later in the year for sure, what are you looking forward to doing this year that when we check in in a couple of months, hopefully we can celebrate? So tell us about your intention. I love the idea of doing more net caring. So I'm investing in that. And one of the new things I'm trying out this month for the first time is to have a bonus. So I decided to have a bonus like live call with another professional. So I scratched my head to like, because I've just promoted this one course. I said, okay, let's look at the next course, the one then next one that's more successful out of the five. And I scratched my head thinking, who can I invite to do something that would really add value when I'm really excited because it's adding value to me as well. So I have invited a woman I met at the course last year who is an asteropath as well as a doodler and was gonna explain all the anatomy and biomechanics of using those Mexican scarf I had teach about doing massage and during labor to help when the baby is not in quite an ideal position when the birth is taking longer than expected. And so what's really interesting is I'm just as excited I expect that the people, you know, I have no idea whether it will be successful or not to like a still and to attend some slight, well, what if nobody turned up, but it's gonna be if people buy the course this month then they will get, and I will get this free, you know, live class. And I will also refer it to everybody who's already enrolled in the course, which hopefully will also sort of, you know, invite people who have kind of been involved in the course to like reignite and maybe share about it. And the idea was to then put that class inside the course as a recording that people have never done this before. That's great. And I'm hoping to like, if it's successful to carry on doing that. But you know, before I met you, George, I used to do all these things anyway, but I never thought they counted as marketing. I used to, I've always loved connecting with people. I've always found that delightful and much easier than trying to hard sell anything. And you know, I'm also really delighted I'm able to pass this on like the women I did a mentoring session with today. I said to her, you don't have to do all these things. And she said, oh, I've only got four to five students in my baby massage course. And I was like, when did you start? And she said in January and said, this is pretty amazing that you, because when I started before I knew you, I thought, oh, 30% of people open my newsletter is really bad. I must be really terrible at writing newsletters. And I had no idea that it was normal. No, yeah. It's not better than normal, 30% would be better than normal. But this is, thank you. I'm looking forward to, you know, next time we get together hearing more about the progress and your lessons. So I will put the links below this video for anyone who wants to follow up with your offerings, your journey. So thank you so much, Sophie, for sharing your story inspiring with us. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you.