In this post, Brandi Mechele debunks 4 commonly-held beliefs about fulfillment and success. Brandi shares that if we can loosen up our grip on these beliefs, we can begin to experience more fulfillment and success in our lives.
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Bio
Brandi is an intuitive and empowerment coach who spends her time guiding others and facilitating energy healing focusing on building the subconscious capacity. She has extensive experience working with high achieving female entrepreneurs, helping them align with financial success while staying through to their values and purpose. Her clients might initially come to her to scale their business and make more money, but they leave with a deeper sense of fulfillment within their lives on a holistic level.
Myrna: Can you share your backstory, what led you to begin this work? When did you notice a lack of fulfillment in your own life?
Brandi: I was raised as many people are to be very goal oriented. My parents were amazing in helping me to chart my course and set lots of goals, and I was very fortunate to be someone who excelled at many things; so, I had an impactful career in the corporate world. I escalated to being a VP covering the United States and Canada. I was a national caliber athlete in college and tried out for the Olympics and so I realized that I had checked all these boxes. I live in an amazing city, in a home of my dreams with a family. I had always had this idea that if you checked all the boxes, achieved all your goals that happiness would be kind of the outcome and unfortunately that's just not true.
Fulfillment does not come from success
I think many people come to realize that they've had the success that they've dreamed of and not been able to align any of with this inner fulfillment and inner purpose, and so I took a step back and said you know what's missing. I concluded that happiness needs to be its own goal, it needs to be its own purpose in your life, and that when you focus on happiness as a goal versus an outcome, that's really when you align with your purpose and find and find true fulfillment.
That's when I took a pivot in my life and got to the place where I am here today with you.
Myrna: I've heard this story so many times, in fact my very first coaching client when I became a coach was someone with a similar story to yours. She wasn't looking for happiness she was looking for this inner fulfillment and she quit her job and became a coach because most people get more fulfillment when they serve.
I want to circle back to when you said that happiness shouldn't be an outcome of a goal that happiness should your only goal. I can't leave that alone so how do we how does someone listening set the course to have happiness be their goal?
Brandi: I believe fundamentally that when you have high Achievers that it's really easy to make happiness a goal because they're used to aligning to goals and really knocking it out of the park. So through my own work with myself which took place over many years prior to becoming a coach, developed a four-step process that I call B.A.S.E and I think it's foundational to everyone's life.
What are your limiting beliefs
B – is about beliefs. What beliefs do you have? Especially the ones that are limiting in nature and how have you gotten to that place as it pertains to happiness. The reason I use happiness versus fulfillment is because I think that you have to be happy to be fulfilled. If you're not happy, if you're fulfilled you'll always be happy and if you're unhappy you'll never be fulfilled.
So happiness is oftentimes easier for people to align to than fulfillment because fulfillment feels so big like what is my purpose, what am I meant to do. But if we think of life as these moments and every single moment we're seeking happiness and ultimately we'll live this really full life that has a sense of purpose, has the service that you mentioned.
So the B really is about like what are those beliefs that are precluding that from happening.
Are in alignment for happiness
A – is alignment, vibrational alignment. What does happiness look like to you like oftentimes you ask people that question and they just don't know, they're like I don't know what makes me happy. They might think you know if I get married I'll be happy, if I have a big house I'll be happy, it's usually types of goals.
What does it take for you to be aligned? So we spend some time around that and then self-awareness really because ultimately we are co-creating our reality in every single moment. I think oftentimes we talk about manifestation as this idea of like I'll manifest a husband, a house, weight loss. I'll manifest all of these things, but when you take a step back from that and realize that your entire life is a manifestation not just the good things and then you really take back your own power.
S – Self- awareness because we create situations that pulls us out of homeostasis. We return to that same place over and over again and so that's really what the self-awareness allows us to do, because once we create awareness we can move out of searching to really having kind of this path to our our destiny.
Emotional regulation is key to happiness
E – is about, emotional regulation, and that really is the biggest of them all, any moment of unhappiness is really correlated to this origin story that we have. Emotional regulation, is a term generally used to describe a person's ability to effectively manage and respond to an emotional experience. There are times in our lives when we were probably really little where we were given these ideas about who we were. Our identity and how we showed up in the world and oftentimes we're looping around those situations. It can be Big T trauma it can be Little T trauma, but the goal is really to keep the memory of our experiences of our childhood.
So I believe that B.A.S.E is foundational to our lives and once we are able to harness kind of those four pillars we're really going to Skyrocket from there and live a life that's a good path
Myrna: I love it but as I'm listening to you I remember I've done lots of episodes on happiness including the happiness formula. Everybody's end goal in life is to be happy and you're right it's a little different from fulfillment.
Fulfillment vs happiness
Brandi: I was happy, I had the husband of my dreams, I had this beautiful child, I'd won many many awards in my corporate career, I always ran sales teams and I never finished below the top 15. So I had this body of work that was everything I ever dreamed of, I was a little girl from Detroit so I didn't have this idea that my life could be so big and so vast.
I sat there in my happiness and I said but there's still something missing.
Myrna: That happens to so many successful people. You said in your bio that people come looking for money because they believe it will bring them happiness but find fulfillment instead.
Brandi: Success doesn't equal happiness.
Myrna: I'm reading a book now by Eckhart Tolle called The Power of Now and Then in there he talks about goals. Goals in clock time and psychological goals. Clock goals is just saying by the time I'm 30 I'm going to be married. That means that your happiness or fulfillment is tied to this goal. A, psychological goal, is always moving. The target is always moving so that's that's one way to put it, but you hit the nail right on the head. Happiness is fleeting.
Beliefs and self worth
Myrna: How do you teach your clients to find this happiness end goal?
Brandi: B.A.S.E is the foundational practice around beliefs. Two of the beliefs you have to have is that you are worthy of having the life that you're seeking, and so say to people all the time that if you show me your life, I'll show you what you think you're worthy of having. So self-worth is like really pretty straightforward.
Myrna: So let's circle back to a couple of things, you're correct self-worth and self-love they're two big things that we package them together here for Simplicity; but self-worth and self-love is what the what has been communicated to them and it's usually in childhood or early adulthood. Somebody looked at you and and called you ugly and you carry around this beliefs that you are ugly all your life.
Those are great practices to build your happiness capacity as well as you know building your your self-worth and your self-love so so that's awesome all right so let's focus a little bit now on um some of the, limiting beliefs, that, black women, have that stops them from feeling fulfilled?
Brandi: Specifically in communities where black or brown communities you'll find that you have three generations that are in the same Financial circumstances. Nobody breaks out and I believe one of the reasons to show us about mindset is because in order for you to break out you have to have a different mindset, you have to have a different set of beliefs.
Having the right mindset for success
You have to have the mindset of I want to be successful. It's all about mindset and when you get the mindset right then you start challenging the beliefs. You're challenging beliefs that says women can never do this.
Myrna: I was born poor and I know what a, poverty mindset, is. If you have a, poverty mindset, you really can never be wealthy because even if you have the money you'll still be rich with a, poverty mindset. My whole work, my whole philosophy is about changing your mindset because once you change your mindset, you can have your dreams become a reality. The Bible teaches do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Conclusion
Tell us about your B.A.S.E coaching program and your framework. How can listeners get in touch with you talk about your website your social media handles.
Brandi: I appreciate that Myrna, I publish a free journal on the first and 15th every month and you can find that on my website www.brandimechele.com I am just on the precipice of launching a group coaching program and you can also go to my website and sign up there to be informed about that group coaching. If you were interested in working with me one-on-one or with the membership coaching and then if you were interested in working with me one-on-one or in the group you can also find that on my website so and all my handles are @Brandi Mechele on Instagram as well as on Facebook so I'd love to connect with your listeners and hear from them.
