Quiet Your Inner Mean Girl with Abbey Heagney

 

Abbey is a board certified health & life coach who helps women quiet their inner mean girl and create the habits, the confidence and the life they love. After years of struggling with body image, Abbey decided to stop listening to that negative little voice inside of her head – and it completely transformed her body, her mind and her health. She understands the struggles and pressures that women and moms face AND she is deeply convicted that every woman can create balance and confidence in their life – SIMPLY. Abbey Heagney

 

 

Links:

Website: Wellness with Abbey
Instagram: @wellnesswithabbeyh

 

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Transcript: 

Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.

On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.

Abbey is a board-certified health and life coach who helps women quiet their inner mean girl and create the habits, the confidence, and the life they love. After years of struggling with body image, Abbey decided to stop listening to that negative little voice inside of her head. And it completely transformed her body, her mind and her health. She understands the struggles and pressures that women and moms face, and she is deeply convicted that every woman can create balance and confidence in their life.

Jayne Havens: Abbey, welcome to the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. I’m so excited to have you on the show today.

Abbey Heagney: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Jayne Havens: So tell everybody a little bit about you. Maybe share a little bit about your personal background if you’re comfortable, and tell us how you are supporting women as a coach.

Abbey Heagney: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Abbey Heagney. I am a board-certified health and life coach. And I focus on helping women to quiet their inner mean girl and create the habits, the confidence, and the balance they want to live life the way they want to be living life. My journey, I mean, it goes back to when I was a young girl. I was about 12 years old when I really started struggling with my body, comparing myself to others. And that stayed with me for a very long time.

It wasn’t until I was about 30 years old, actually, when I got pregnant with my son. So he’s now 10. So yeah, 32 years old, that I realized that I had been trying so many different things and trying to force my life into a little box of restrictions and diets and exercise and all of these things that I think as young girls and women we’re told we should be doing. And it just never worked for me. No matter what I was doing, it was never enough. I never felt good. I was always comparing myself to others.

One day, I was like, well, if it’s not what I’m doing? It’s got to be something else. I started to really hear that voice inside my head and how awful it really was. I mean, I avoided mirrors most days because I didn’t like what I saw. And when I did look in a mirror, it was everything that pulls you down. It’s all the criticism that we tell ourselves a lot. And so I just decided one day I was just not going to listen to that voice anymore. It’s not that the voice went away, but I just was like, “Not today.”

And I started doing that. The way that I saw my body changed. The way that I approached eating changed. The way that I approached exercise changed, and I have found that to be like the red thread throughout my life. When I left my full-time job a few years ago to go full-time in coaching, and those same stories, the same comparison showed up then. I realized like this inner mean girl, she’s all over our lives. And I had to learn to quiet her down when it came to my business as it was with my body. I just think like that’s the thing we’re not taught in schools, right? That’s a thing especially as women really, really struggle with. So that is what I help women do.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I really, I relate to all of this. The reason for why I wanted to have you on the show is I think that what you help women with, it sounds like primarily with regard to body image and nutrition and taking care of yourself. I think it’s all really directly related to the work we do in our businesses, right?

That inner mean girl that you are referencing, I think, rears her ugly head in our brains as we’re walking through the entrepreneurial journey. It’s not much different, right? And I think just like women battle with whether it’s weight loss, or body image, or any of that stuff, we all battle with these thoughts in our head when it comes to growing a successful business. So I thought we could sort of take some of the tools that you use to help your clients and apply them to growing a business, or starting something new, or kicking into gear in a way that feels uncomfortable, right?

Abbey Heagney: Yeah, and I think that’s exactly it, right? It’s doing anything that’s different than our norm is going to feel uncomfortable, and most people shy away from that discomfort. Our natural human emotion is to want to feel good all of the time. But we can’t possibly create any change in our lives — whether it’s regarding our health, our fitness, our businesses, our lives, our families — without stepping into that discomfort.

And your inner mean girl, she’s like your safety mechanism. She’s like, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, you’re towing the line here. Come back in and we have to—” I always say it’s like, you’re not trying to get rid of her. She’s always going to be there. But if you can just know what story she’s going to feed you up, it makes it a lot easier to move through it.

Jayne Havens: Sure. So in preparation for this interview, I actually spent some time listening to your podcast, which is really great by the way. The two most recent episodes that I was enjoying this morning were all about, well, two different topics. The first was waiting, and the second was hard work. I think these two topics are pretty intertwined, so I’d love to unpack both of them if that’s okay with you. Let’s talk about waiting first. People wait around forever before they actually do the thing, right? Why do people do that?

Abbey Heagney: Yeah. I think, again, it’s that discomfort. We think there is going to be a time where we won’t feel uncomfortable doing something new. We think, “When I’m ready.” I hear that a lot. “I’m not quite ready yet. When the time is right, when life slows down, then I’ll start. But that’s just not the reality of the way things go.

Again, anytime we do something new, I don’t know that we’re ever 100% ready. I think we just decide I’m less scared, and that’s what helps us to take that first step. Right? It’s like, you’ve got to want it more than you fear failure, when you fear not knowing the way. I think that’s the other thing that holds people back. It’s like, we want to know A to Z. How am I going to do this? What are all of the steps that I need to take? And then I’ll start once I’ve got that nailed down. But we can’t possibly know that until we start, until we take that first step, until we take the next step, until we troubleshoot.

And so I think we just have to acknowledge why are we waiting? What is it that we’re really waiting for? And it’s most likely one of those things. It’s like time, energy, readiness.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I think that you’re right about people wanting to know the entire roadmap before they start. I see that a lot in my work. Somebody is actually hopping onto my calendar later. I think it’s today or tomorrow. She’s actually been certified by another sleep consultant certification course, but she wants continuing education because she feels like she doesn’t know all the steps.

That’s what she’s looking for. She even said things like, “I’m looking for somebody to teach me how to create freebies and email opt-ins and how to write compelling email sequences. And it’s like, I cannot give that to her. She needs to come up with her own language. I will empower her to think outside of the box. I will empower her to go find the right tools.

There’s a million tools for email opt-ins. She could use what I use, but maybe what I use isn’t good for her business. She might need to try — what I use for my business might be entirely irrelevant for her business and not appropriate for her business. And so those are not the steps.

My steps are not her steps. Her steps are going to be different steps from my steps. And so I think it’s a very common thing. I think everybody wants to know how many steps are there on the trail, which ones are up, and which ones are down, and which ones are left, and which ones are right. They want the entire Google Maps or Waze. They want map quest instructions, right? I think part of success is failing or messing up and learning from those mistakes and trying again. But if we’re waiting and waiting and waiting, we never have the opportunity to make a mistake, take a wrong turn, learn from that. In my mind, that’s all a part of the process.

Abbey Heagney: Yeah, and I think you’re right. Like even if you were to give somebody, “Okay. Here. Do all of these steps,” that doesn’t necessarily help them, right? I go back to, like, when I really struggled with my body. I knew all of the things that I should do, needed to do. knew the steps, right? I think I’ve got two kids. One is 10 and one is, she’s going to be 7 in January.

I’m, like, they know what to do. They know what foods to like fuel their body with. They know that they need to move their body to have energy. It’s not the knowing that actually creates change, right? It’s the implementation. And you giving everybody like, “Here’s your business in a box. Go do it, and you’ll be really successful,” doesn’t make them successful. Because number one, they have to implement it. Then it has to work for their lives too. I think that’s like the breakdown of like you can wait all you want until you have every step figured out. But the steps that you’re trying to figure out may not work for your life or your life.

Then if you’re just like, “But here’s all of the steps. You don’t have it in you to troubleshoot, right? The inner mean girl is going to be like, “You failed. You don’t know what you’re doing. It’s never going to work,” all of these stories.

But if you can build up that confidence and be like, “Okay. I know some of the things that could help me. I’ve got support. I’ve got somebody who is a mentor. She’s been through this before. I can lean on her. She can help me to see what that next step is,” that’s going to empower you to see not only that first step, but then to uncover what that next step may be to and the step after that. But we can’t do it until we’re like willing to take that first step.

Jayne Havens: If we’re going to go back to sort of the weight loss metaphor again, because I think it’s something that’s really relatable probably for most people who listen to this show, just because it’s probably mostly women.

One thing that I think is really hard for people is, let’s say, you have like 50 pounds to lose or even 100 pounds to lose. Sometimes getting started on that it feels impossible. Because you’re like, “How am I ever going to lose 50 pounds,” or, “How am I ever going to lose 100 pounds?” But what if you just lost like half a pound and then you lose another half a pound the next week? Then all of a sudden, you only have 49 pounds to lose, or you only have 99 pounds to lose. This is something I can talk about with all the smarts in the world. But actually putting it into place is very, very challenging.

And so I think it’s the same thing with business, right? People come to me and they’ll say, “I want to be making, let’s say, it’s $5,000 a month in my sleep consulting business,” which I think is a really reasonable goal. Just like losing 50 pounds is a really reasonable goal. But it’s also not something that happens overnight, right? It’s a process, and it takes time. It takes persistence, and it takes deciding that you’re actually going to do it and then the follow through to make it happen, right?

There’s so many baby steps along the way that get us to that 50 pound weight loss or that $5,000 a month income stream in our businesses. And really, the roadmap is not the issue here. It’s like the grit and determination to keep going and not just try something for five minutes and then say, “That didn’t work for me.”

Abbey Heagney: Right. Yes, and I think you’re absolutely right. I had a client maybe a year, yeah, about a year ago. She had a 100-pound weight loss goal. She was like, “It just feels impossible.” I told her what I tell everyone where like, “We’re just going to take it one pound at a time.” Because you can’t lose 100 pounds without losing 1 pound first. But then it has to be that you have to celebrate every half a pound that you lose, every decision that you make that moves you closer to that half a pound. I think that is something that we are very bad at doing. It’s celebrating ourselves. Sometimes we’re celebrating, like taking action and moving ourselves forward. But I think sometimes we’re also celebrating not doing things, right?

For me, where I started, I had to celebrate not going down that negative spiral of self-criticism. That didn’t mean that I jumped to loving my body. It was just like, “Hey, I’m not doing that today.” That’s where I had to start. I think for so many women, they just want to jump to the big milestones and you’re like, no, you’ve got to celebrate who you’re becoming coming too.

“I showed up differently today.” As you’re growing a business, “I showed up with energy to give to my clients today.” That’s huge. “I didn’t worry so much about hitting the $5,000 mark. I just showed up to serve them.” That is a celebration. But I think we miss so much of that when we’re just thinking, “I’ve got to be there. I’ve got to do this thing. I’ve got to take this next step, or I’m too scared. It feels uncomfortable. I’m afraid of failing. We can’t possibly celebrate any of that when we’re in that spiral.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I really hope a lot of my Center for Pediatric Sleep Management grads are listening to this today. Because one thing they all know I’m big on is celebrating the small things. I do that inside of our community every single Wednesday.

We have a thread in our Facebook group. It’s called Winning Wednesday. I encourage both students and graduates to share wins big and small. It doesn’t need to be the equivalent of like the 100-pound weight loss. It literally could be, “I hadn’t logged into the course in six months, and I logged back in today. I decided I’m recommitted to getting this finished.” Or, maybe it’s, “I had my first networking call with a pre-school director who I met through my sister-in-law or whatever.”

It could be the tiniest little thing. It’s not necessarily like I had 10 clients this month, or I earned this amount of money. I made this connection. I decided to put this into place today. I’m spending the afternoon on YouTube trying to learn search engine optimization, whatever. Those are all the wins that need to be celebrated. I work very hard to facilitate a community and a culture where that is the norm, but people are bashful about sharing the small wins. I think sometimes people feel like the small wins aren’t big enough, or it’s not worthy of a share. It’s not worthy of a celebration. I totally disagree. Because I think that it’s all of those little micro victories that lead to big change in your life and in your business.

Abbey Heagney: Yeah, and if you think about it, the way that you think about yourself, your energy is so much different when you allow yourself to see what is working, what you are proud of versus where your brain is going to want to take you as all of the negative things, the things that you aren’t doing, the things you haven’t done yet, how far ahead everybody else is. But you have to learn to celebrate yourself, and we should always celebrate. I love that you do that in your community. I do this with my clients every week. I’m like, what are you really proud of over the last week since we last talked? We talk about what they’re proud of, what they’re celebrating first. Because it just balances out your mindset.

Again, your brain’s natural thing is to go to all of the negative. So you’ve got to celebrate yourself. I was on two calls last week. It was like one day and then the next day where women came to celebrate themselves. They’re like, “Well, I don’t say that to be cocky or arrogant.” It’s like, no, we should be celebrating ourselves. That’s so inspiring to other women too.

Jayne Havens: Yes, sometimes my graduates from my program will message me privately. They’ll either send me an email or a Facebook message. Or some of them I’m connected by phone, they’ll text me. They’ll say, “I was embarrassed to share this on the Winning Wednesday thread, but…” And they share it with me privately. I’m like, ugh, that’s so amazing. Sometimes they’re huge wins, and sometimes they’re small wins. But they’re all huge in my eyes. They’re all great. It’s like, uh, this needs to be shared with everybody. Because I think that, really, when we’re looking around at each other, like you’re right, there’s two ways to look at it.

Some people default to the, like, “Oh, everybody has all these wins and I have none.” That happens sometimes. But then, really, what we all need to collectively be working on is, okay, if I see all these people having these micro victories, I can have one too. Maybe I need to look within my own business and realize that I am having victories, even if I feel like I’m not really getting to where I want to be as quickly as I thought I would, right?

Abbey Heagney: Yes, and I think as women, if we can flip that comparison switch to looking at other women and hearing their celebrations and seeing them as evidence for what is possible. Versus, oh my gosh, it’s so much easier for them. They have this. I’ll never be able to do it. We’ve got to start looking and being like, “If they can do it, I can do it.” Because none of us are unicorns out there, right? None of us or anybody, they don’t have the magic sauce. It’s they’re just showing up in a way that really has inspired them. They’re not waiting. They’re not letting their self-doubt pull them

back. They’re willing to just show up for what they want.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, absolutely. There’s one thing that you said on one of your podcast episodes. I actually wrote it down. You said, “There’s a difference between hard work and working hard.” Can you unpack that for us? What’s the difference between hard work and working hard?

Abbey Heagney: Yeah, I think working hard is where most of us go the majority of the time. That’s thinking, I have to do all of these things and do them all of the time. It feels very hustly. It feels like it’s out of our control. It’s like the need-tos, the have-tos, the should mentality of our lives versus “I’m willing to do the hard work.” I know that creating change, whether that’s developing new habits, whether it’s building a new business, is going to be hard work. But it’s hard work that I’m passionate about doing, that I want to do. I think that’s the biggest difference.

Hard work. You want to do it. It will fuel you. It will give you more energy. Versus working hard is like the need-tos, the have-tos, the shoulds that are only going to drain your energy. At the end of the day, you’re going to be like, “I can’t do it anymore.” That’s what leads to burnout.

I talk to this with women all the time about work-life balance. They think like in order to climb the ladder, they have to work all these additional hours. I’m like, what if you didn’t have to? If it wasn’t about working more hours, how could you get this promotion? And it always slows them down. It shows them it’s like quality versus the quantity.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I think it’s also really being thoughtful and purposeful about the work that you’re going into. Because I think that, you know, sometimes people will come to me and they are interested in, you know. Maybe they’re teachers, or they’re nurses, or they’re whatever. They have a day job. They work for the man. They are looking for either a career change, or a side hustle, or a passion project. Sometimes they’ll say to me, “How much do I have to work? How many hours am I going to have to put in here?” That’s the question.

And so when they ask that question, I sort of throw it back to them. I’m like, do you want to be doing this work? Is this something that excites you? Is this something that lights you up? Is this something like, were you excited to get on this call with me today? Did you have excited nervous butterflies about the idea that you might be able to start a business of your own and support families in a really meaningful way and have something that you’re really excited and passionate about all while giving moms what they so badly need and deserve? Or, are you just looking for a way to make an extra $1,000 a month? Right?

Abbey Heagney: Yeah.

Jayne Havens: And if it’s the latter, then you’re in the wrong spot. I think that, really, worthwhile businesses are not often built just because people want to make a little bit of extra money. It’s got to come, to some degree, from the heart, from the soul, especially what we do. We do a really, I call it heart-centered work. The parents that we’re working with are emotionally drained. A lot of them are new moms struggling with postpartum anxiety, postpartum depression. They’re really in a tough spot.

We’re coming in, and we have the potential to really be game changers in their life. But we have to want to be there. Because it’s hard work, right? And so I think that when you show up and you’re like, “How hard do I have to work,” that’s the wrong question. Right? It’s the wrong question. I don’t know. I look at this as like, I get to work hard on my business. I love figuring out new things in my work. I don’t look at it as like, how many hours am I going to have to work today? People ask me all the time how many hours I put into my business. I don’t know. I have no idea. Because it doesn’t matter. I just do it when I get to. Not because I have to.

Abbey Heagney: Yeah, and also, going back to the waiting and the steps, your hours are going to be different than another person’s hours because of the energy that you’re putting out there. You could work two hours to somebody else’s five hours who’s just going through the motions. I just want to break down that barrier, especially for women, about being afraid of the hard work.

I think we fear it because we’re in that working hard mentality. It’s going to suck all of my time and all of my energy. I want to spend time with my kids, and I want to be able to enjoy my life. We’re just in this working hard mentality where it’s going to take everything away from us, versus when you show up for the hard work, it’s for you. It’s for your energy. It’s for your life. It’s for your family. We can’t be afraid to do the hard work. I’m like, “Let’s go. Do the hard work and put all the energy in there without spinning our wheels and spiraling ourselves. But if you’re coming in with like, “I just want to make quick money. How do I do it,” you’re going to end up spinning your wheels.

Jayne Havens: For sure. For sure. I love all of this. I’m really like, this was my morning pep talk. I’m feeling super amped.

Abbey Heagney: Awesome.

Jayne Havens: I’m thinking about maybe even eating healthier, which wasn’t the point of this talk. But I’m thinking about, how can I apply all of these thoughts that I’m actually really pretty good at in my business? I have control of my thoughts in my work, but I have less control over my thoughts when it comes to making healthy decisions for my physical well-being. So now I’m going to work on maybe applying everything that you taught us. I’m going to apply it back to the nutrition. I do appreciate that.

Abbey Heagney: It’s so good. I’ll throw one more thing at you. I think, as women, we’re very good at making decisions. As human beings, but women too, we’re very bad at honoring the decisions. We’ve got to get really good at honoring those decisions, right? If you think about you set your alarm, you set out your workout clothes, you’re like, “I’m going to wake up at five o’clock. I’m going to do my work out before the kids are up,” you’ve already made that decision. Then the alarm goes off and you’re like, “So warm and comfy in my bed. It’s so dark outside. It’s cold out there. I’m not doing it.”

Making the decision is not the problem. It’s the honoring the decision. That’s where you can take what you’re really good at in your business and start applying it to eating healthy. Or, for your clients, what are they really good at in their personal lives? Where are they showing up consistently? Where are they doing the hard work? Where are they not waiting? Then how do they honor that same decision in their business?

Jayne Havens: Yeah. I really love the word honor. That’s a nice way of saying commitment, right? Like follow through but in a way that really is sort of higher level. I like that.

Abbey Heagney: Yeah, again, it just brings it back to like, it’s for you. You’re making decisions for you, for your future, for whatever it is. And you just, you get to honor them.

Jayne Havens: Well, we’re recording this on a Monday morning. I have not botched.

Abbey Heagney: Let’s go.

Jayne Havens: I haven’t botched anything yet for the week. I haven’t had York Peppermint Patties for breakfast, so I’m feeling like—

Abbey Heagney: And even if you do, you just make the decision. You’re going to move on.

Jayne Havens: Not going to do that. I’m not going to do that again.

Abbey Heagney: I’ve already screwed everything up. I’ve wasted the day. I’ve messed up already.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, so it’s Monday morning. I’m feeling like I haven’t made any crucial errors yet, so I’m going to try and sort of like as I tell my sleep consultant, my parents that I support through sleep training, I tell them to ride the positive waves. So when things are going well, let’s keep going. Right? And really, let’s ride that positive wave.

So I’m feeling good this Monday morning. I’m so grateful that we connected. I love the power of the internet. Abbey and I literally connected in a Facebook group. She made a post about her business, which really resonated with me. I was like, I got to meet her. I got to learn more about her. I’m really glad that we connected. I hope this can be sort of a long-term business strategic relationship that we’ll have moving forward. I’m so glad we connected. Before we wrap up, where can everybody learn more about you? Maybe share, if you have a website, your podcast, whatever you want to share.

Abbey Heagney: Yeah, so my podcast is the Quiet Your Inner Mean Girl Podcast. I’m most active on Instagram @wellnesswithabbeyh, which is also my website. People can visit there and learn a little bit more.

Jayne Havens: Thank you so much, Abbey. It was great connecting with you, and we’ll do it again soon.

Abbey Heagney: Awesome. It was nice to connect with you, too. Thanks so much.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.

If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode.