Join me on this Solo Episode where we rewind to 2013. I share the twists and turns that led me to become a Transformation Coach and share my ambitious growth plans for the next 12 months.

[Roksana] Hi, it’s Roksana Hussain. Welcome to the Personal Power Boost Podcast. I hope you’ve had a chance to checkout the 8 mini launch episodes. I shared a snippet of the kinds of conversations to come. This is the very first full episode of a brand new podcast. So I wanted to let you know my intentions and plans for the podcast.

This podcast is here to explore all the ways to activate and access your personal power. In each episode I will share them many ways on how we do this. The personal power to go from A to B or your desired life, and this includes an awareness of how you think, how you feel, and how you behave to develop self-efficacy to cultivate the belief, the identity and the capability to activate your personal power. My intention is to inspire you, motivate you, and give you actionable strategies to get you closer to feeling success and satisfaction in all areas of your life. We’re talking about your relationship with yourself, your relationship with others, your career, your finances, your mental health and your physical health, and I won’t be doing this on my own. I will bring on specialists and guests from all areas of health who will share with you their messages, strategies and methods for personal growth, and I know personal growth can feel complicated or difficult, especially when you’re feeling where to start, how to navigate, how to function, on top of feeling really drained. So I bring you inspiration, motivation and mindset hacks from some very regular, intentionally-aligned mums who have risen from the mess of the ashes to reinvent, create and live a life with meaning, purpose and joy. These are regular women who started life with no vantage point, but a pivotal moment led to self-awareness. Step by step, day by day, they embarked on a journey of personal growth which in many of their stories has led to new careers or professional growth. I will dive deep into their stories to find out who they are, where they started, why they were stuck, what did they do differently, so you’re able to get to know enough to test a new approach for yourself. You’ll hear from corporate career women, entrepreneurs, medics, artists, actors, musicians, scientists, homemakers and many other types of working mums who are intentional about how they live, how they work and how they show up.

I will also have full episodes like this one where I will share my personal and professional growth. I’ve decided to do solo episodes for several reasons, mainly because I want to hold myself accountable. Late last year, the universe aligned and it meant that Tariq became more available to support me in my personal and professional growth. You see I’ve been a transformation coach since 2018, working with clients on a 1 to 1 basis, and I’m not ashamed to say I struggled with the business side. I had a corporate background and my role as quality improvement lead was buried and highly skilled, but it didn’t prepare me for business. I’ve learned so much about myself. I’ve learned that when things get hard, I retreat, I avoid, I ignore and I sulk, so I made some big bold plans for 2020. Right now you’re witnessing the birth of one of them, which was to launch a podcast. I’ve managed this in the midst of COVID19 and today I ranked top ten in the UK within the mental health category. I just can’t believe it. I will do an episode just on how it all came about and the mindset I’ve had to cultivate to comfortably step out publicly in front of a new audience. In terms of growing my own coaching practise, so in addition to my one to one clients I’ve been wishing to move into the online and group coaching sphere, but I have so many reasons why I just couldn’t do this. Mainly time and know-how were my two biggest excuses. Well now I have no excuses. I have Tariq by my side taking care of all the technical stuff and the systems that need to be put into place, and I have Jamie. Jamie is my business coach and he will be my coach for the next 12 months to help me create the business of my dreams. I decided to be bold, courageous, ambitious this year. I did not let COVID19 stop me in my tracks. Right now we’re still in the midst of COVID19 and I want to come out of this space stronger than ever and have the best year of my life. I’m sharing this with you because I want you to know that I am in the trenches with you. I am working on my own limiting beliefs and developing myself professionally and personally every single day. It doesn’t end and I don’t really want growth to end. Every time I reach a new level of success in any area of my life, I there’s more work to do. New insecurities. So my personal growth or evolving is just part of who I am, and who I’ll always be. To help and guide others, I have to be willing to look within myself.

I want to be able to be vulnerable with you, my listeners, I want you to feel that you can be vulnerable with me, too. Sharing our growing pain, creating a space for discussions, and for expansion. And please don’t make the mistake of thinking that being vulnerable is a weakness. It’s actually an act of bravery and courage. See, I never stop yearning to inspire my clients, I will encourage you, show you how to heal your hurt, give you tools to lift your mindset and light you up, that puts a spring in your step, that helps you create a vision, a belief, an identity and a capability to go for it in your own life. Today, I want to give you a solo episode to share my back story with you. Some of you would like to know a bit more about me, how I got to this point.

I’m gonna go back in time to share specifically what led to this point in my life. So let’s rewind to 2013. My daughter was one and a half, and I was holding down a career in the NHS while still catching my breath as an anxious mum. And you’re probably wondering why I was anxious. Well my girl arrived after years of infertility, miscarriages, and the hurt that comes with shattered dreams. Anxiousness had kind of become part of my identity. I am going to skirt over infertility in this episode because I plan to cover it in detail another time. So we were living and working in London. She was in a lovely daycare nursery four days a week, and home with me on Fridays. I had a really good work life flow, and I was becoming exceptional at pretending I had it all together. On the surface I had lost all the excess body fat from pregnancy, I was working out almost everyday, I was socialising and I was holding down a demanding role. To anyone looking in, I was a high functioning person juggling all the different aspects of my life with a demanding career. Deep down I was battling with perfectionism, worry, anxiety, and this responsibility to be everything to everyone. I just didn’t think I was doing any of it right in any area of my life, and my efforts never seem to match up to the standards that I had set for myself, but I was desperate to hold down this facade of being Supermum. Fear was driving my desperation to get motherhood right, even if it meant faking it. If I could convince her, my little girl, that I was a great mum, then all would be well and she wouldn’t have half of the demons to content with the I had endured. You see, I’ve been at the receiving end of a highly anxious, paranoid and depressed mum, and it had left me both wanting and scarred. I received love based on conditions, how much I did equated to how much attention, love and reward I received. I can see why I became a perfectionist. So in early 2013, I became pregnant again and this was where my descent started. I was just about keeping things together with my girl, and the news of this pregnancy completely panicked me and I believed another child would cause so much disruption to the facade I had created. I resisted the news and battled with the idea until around the 20 week scan. Seeing that little heartbeat on the monitor and knowing he was a boy somehow lifted me out of the resistance, and I surrendered to the news that I was going to have a boy. I wasn’t thrilled, but I accepted that he was coming. But by this time, guilt and shame consumed me for not welcoming this new pregnancy, especially after years of infertility and miscarriages. I was now not wanting to be pregnant and this really messed with my mind. Later that year when he was born, I felt joy for the first time, but very quickly feelings of guilt and shame would override that joy. As I held him in my arms, I remember weeping. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t want him for the longest time. He was just pure love and such an easy going baby boy. By this point, I didn’t like myself. The person who had resisted this new gift of life, and it became hard to look in the mirror. I couldn’t feed him properly. He had a tongue tie and this meant he wasn’t sleeping and nor was I. I recall there were two weeks of just pure hell, sleep deprivation crippled me and on top, my daughter was being a pure diva with her jealousy spiked by the arrival of her brother. I remember a few weeks after my son’s birth, I had hit an all time low in my mental health. I felt empty, alone, scared and the last time I recall feeling anything like this when my brother died. I completely, you know I just felt completely shattered but somehow I managed to put a smile on my face and get on with my life. We didn’t have any family support. We didn’t have anyone popping in with hot meals, or offering to babysit my daughter while I slept. We didn’t have anyone cleaning our house or washing our laundry and we didn’t have anyone experienced who could just pop by and spot that my son had a tongue tie or just to give me a hug and let me know that I’m going to be okay. So I mothered myself. When I found the courage, some days, some moments of some days, I told myself I’m not the only one struggling in this way and that this will pass, but mainly I counted down the hours of each day and some days seemed to never end. I got through those days and nights without muttering a single word of the emotional overwhelm to another soul. Occasionally I would bring things up with my mum friends and kind of things that they would connect with, so the workload or just managing two young children, but this was often met with, well this is normal, or it will get better and so my response often to that was of course it will… and you know why am I complaining? The thing is I needed to feel safe to really open up about my feelings. Having two babies with you doesn’t really create the conditions or lend itself for a peaceful conversation where you can sort of start and end your thoughts without the interruption of one of them needing you.

Meanwhile, with all this going on in my head, Tariq was tangled in a complicated financial situation which added even more stress to my already overloaded mind. Now eventually things did resolve for him and we applied for a mortgage and moved from London to Saint Albans. By this point, my son was about five months old. But the movement, that I left my girlfriends, my support network, and moved into a new town where I just didn’t know anyone. And for some reason it made sense. Also I thought that I should be the one to coordinate to house move over six months, since Tariq’s working such long days and now commuting from London to Saint Albans. The children were still practically babies needing full time care and I took on the additional role of you know working with estate agents and lawyers to coordinate house moves. Somehow I pulled it off, but I was emotionally depleted and my facade of perfectionism? Well, that had slipped. It was one of the toughest, most demanding years of my life and with the emotional tank on empty, I returned to work in 2014. My deepest desire was to be able to be a role model for my daughter. I wanted to show her that women could have it all. I wanted to raise her in a wholesome way that enabled her to thrive and explore every part of her personality, her talents and her gifts… The thing is, I was in turmoil. I was conflicted and confused. Over the next few months, as I went back to work, I avoided thoughts that meant admitting that I just wasn’t lit up by my career anymore. I was working in a well-known Children’s Hospital with a talented team of experts. I had great relationships with medical superstars in their field. I had worked so hard to climb the corporate ladder, to achieve a role that made a difference… The conflict in my mind came from believing that walking away meant I was less of a role model for my daughter. It meant walking into uncharted territory and facing an unknown identity, since my career was such a huge part of who I was. My need to be and prove that I was successful weighed heavily on me. I was the first University graduate who had a successful career in my whole family. Just one generation ago my family were living in abject poverty. I’m talking about no running water, living in a mud Hut and having little to no access to medicine education. School and education were privileged and mainly just for boys, so walking away felt like a reckless move. Walking away kind of invited this possibility of making it even harder to return, since the facts are you know, I’m an ethnic minority, I’m a female, and now I’m a mother. The odds are stacked against me. Inside I felt foolish because I’d worked so hard for 15 years. I’d won mighty battles and now I felt stupid. Stupid for feeling confused, especially since I have two children to take care of, two more mouths to feed. I felt that my daughter was watching my every move, or at least that’s what I told myself. So you know somehow she could see the history of my life and judge my decision as reckless. And what made things worse was, at the time I believed my husband’s love and respect was largely due to my career choice. He often spoke about my career and he put me on a pedestal and I felt like I was letting him down too. There was a time when I couldn’t look myself in the mirror and you know I was unravelling. I felt ashamed, guilty, afraid of loss and being seen as a failure. The career meant I got to be successful, capable and deserving of reward. I was the exception in my family who had broken through and created a great life for myself. The problem was that things had changed at work and with hindsight, I can see I was not performing too well. Everything felt hard. The work, the relationships, especially the relationships with the new boss in town. The whole thing just felt horrid and difficult, and all of this meant I lost motivation in all areas of my life. I just didn’t care about things anymore. I didn’t care if I slipped a deadline. I didn’t care if I sat in silence throughout a whole meeting. I didn’t care about the quality of my work. I felt stuck and it took its toll physically and emotionally. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I didn’t identify with myself. It was as though someone had taken over my mind. I developed insomnia; I remember being awake at night and half asleep in the day. I could feel myself spiralling into a dark depression and as I felt more miserable with each passing day, all the while I was so conscious of time or the lack of it. I needed a time out but I just couldn’t escape this negative thinking loop. Honestly, it was like Piccadilly Circus in my head. I was so scared of making a bad decision that I made no decision. I was stuck, and then as if by chance, something pretty amazing happened, something special happened. So one day, it was around Christmas. My husband could see me suffering, but he didn’t really know what was going on. We ended up- I ended up telling him everything. We went through our finances and for the first time, I accepted that I did in fact have the options. It would be tight but I could resign. Bless him; he passed me his laptop to check the resignation email he’d written on my behalf. All I had to do was hit send. In the moment that followed, I felt relief, excitement, loss, failure, shame, guilt, and newness, all in one hit as I pressed ‘send’. Talk about mixed emotions.

At the time, without realising, I was waiting for a sign. Like external permission or approval to make a decision about work, because I just didn’t trust myself anymore. I was even trying to get myself fired by not performing. I wanted the decision to be out of my hands. I just didn’t want to admit that the career that I had worked so hard for just didn’t serve me or my life anymore. I didn’t want to admit that the idea I was so right about, was now so wrong for me. If I was wrong about my career choice that I was so passionate about, what else was I wrong about? Possibly everything? So after weeks of lengthy conversations with Tariq, it became crystal clear that I was deeply insecure. I hadn’t evolved, I hadn’t healed from the wounds in my childhood and in moments of self-doubt, I became a helpless child. I became debilitated, I procrastinated and self-sabotaged myself. I also felt like a fraud in my own life. I couldn’t believe that I had the life that I did. Not in an, “I’m so grateful” kind of way, but more of in an, “I don’t deserve any of this” kind of way… and then this realisation that when another pretty special thing happening in my life, I realised that I needed therapy. I started to work with a therapist which then led me to discovering an amazing coach who helped me to heal and breakthrough all of the reasons for lacking self-trust. I saw many mindset experts over kind of a two year time period, and each one had different approach or a different method. but each one was taking me closer to creating the silence in my mind to be able to listen to my guiding voice that had my highest intention, to experience my experiences and for my inner wisdom to serve and guide me. I should also mention that spending day and night with my happy, happy baby boy, seeing the world through his eyes, through the eyes of a child, was amazing for me. He lives in the moment and I remember times where we would just sit and study a blade of grass, or we would watch the birds take off and land and without realising, this was the kind of mindfulness that I needed and my baby boy was here to teach me. He was the gift that I didn’t know I needed. So after months of personal growth, I created space in my mind and in my life to heal. I discovered the root cause of why I have his disease to please, and why I felt the need to show up as Superwoman. You know I always had an idea of why I was the way I was, but to be guided by experts meant that I got to work through the blocks and the pain in a very methodical way. Embarking on the journey to become my whole self to no longer resist, but to accept every part of me and to reframe my experience from the past as my source of strength was incredible. I started to experience self-trust again. I believed I was capable, I felt creative and industrious again, and when I started feeling like I was thriving, I developed a strong desire, almost this urgency to work for myself or to create something new… but at the time, I didn’t know what. All I know is I began experiencing joy and power from making progress. Making decisions and trusting myself. As simple as it sounds, these little factors led me to create the most extraordinary life and opportunity landed with a friend and before long, I began working with her to develop a business idea. Suddenly, I became fearless. Somehow I activated my personal power. I was spending all my time when I wasn’t on mum duties to learn, grow, and become an asset to my friends and my business partner. The beautiful thing was that then I could be there for my family and continue to take care of myself, and it was around then that I kind of realised that the secret to being a great mum and wife and to have a healthy mind/body, came from working on mindset blocks. It came from very small, consistent, daily progress, you know… small habits to create this momentum and progress. Not huge, radical action, because for me, that just wasn’t sustainable. I needed to be doing something small every single day that was taking me forward.

So the business planning was going well. We created this brand new concept in the UK. It was kind of like a wellness sanctuary for young people to enjoy and learn about mind management as well as how to grow and take care of their bodies. Kind of a cross between the spa and crystal maze if you like. So I started creating these conceptual business plans, I completed a detailed feasibility study, I did a financial scenario planning spreadsheet, and I also started finding potential partners who could help us with different aspects of business, and we did another sense checking with clients with future clients to see if the idea would float basically, but we didn’t stop there. We had so many excitable discussions about the potential ways we could work together. Kind of mapping out our finances, our hours, out rolls and our responsibilities. You know I felt so excited for the future. My friend at the time was working full time, and her plan was to reduce her hours or to take a career break so we could establish the business venture. She needed a year or so, so I just carried on training, learning, growing. I wasn’t in a huge rush since the children were so little. After a year, things changed. She realised that that she wasn’t going to be able to create the time, and we needed to find another way to make the business work, but there was still a problem. We just weren’t the right fit for each other. We were great friends, but when it came to business, there seemed to be a lot of pretty major differences in our approach. Much to my horror, I realised there was a lot of suspicion and mistrust. Trouble is, I was oblivious to this until I was being screamed at down the phone. I thought, if I worked hard and pre-empted all the needs of the business, that she would approve of me and I would be a worthy business partner. But this isn’t how it went. We ended up hurting each others feelings. I was made to feel like this big bad wolf, so I decided to walk away and sadly, our 12-year friendship didn’t recover from the fallout. Honestly, I appreciate the lessons.

So after a few months, a pivotal conversation with a friend led me to recognising that I have a lot to offer as a coach. I’ve been coaching in different capacities for most of my career, but now I was thinking about focusing on individuals and focusing specifically on mindset rather than, sort of an organisational change management level which is what I’ve been doing in the past. I identify as both a corporate mum and as a business mum, and I know many people share the same traits as I do. Traits like being driven, wanting to build success, satisfaction, figuring out how to sharpen all major areas of your life without compromising any of them. So I did some research and I took an intensive course to learn NLP and Hypnotherapy. I chose to call my practise Roksana Hussain Transformation Coach. You know it felt bold and ambitious which felt good to me. I wanted to rise up to this challenge of creating transformation. I thought if I could create transformational mindset programmes for both working mums and mums in business, and to develop some new methods, I’d be really happy. I wanted my clients to avoid making decisions based on fear, but to make them from a place of hope and possibility. I wanted my clients to be more vulnerable, courageous, to heal, to progress, to own their life, and to just live more joyfully. After the decision, I started working with clients to gain hours and practise and when I felt ready, I created a website and just the basic means for clients to find me, it wasn’t anything elaborate. These days I select the types of clients I want to work with. The types of clients who I enjoy being around, who have a great vibe and no matter what, they show up for themselves. That’s important to me, and I’m finding that I’m connecting with people who share my core values, and this energy exchange is invaluable. I offer programmes online and face to face and I can do all of this whilst growing my business and fitting it in all around my family. Yes, some days are tricky but generally I enjoy so much more freedom now. No commuting or answering to tricky bosses, time off when I need – but don’t get me wrong, being an entrepreneur requires a great deal of self-motivation, connecting with my ‘why’ daily, and I have to be a little scrappy, you know have to fight for time, I have to fight for information I need, support that I need. Figuring stuff out on my own is so empowering. These days, I use fear. I see fear as my instinct and imagination figuring we need to be prepared this. This simply means I need to level up to the challenges ahead, now finding ways to use all of my emotions and feelings to kind of serve me rather than hinder me, and each day I’m trusting myself more, I’m listening, I make my own decisions and progress at a pace that I want. And as a transformation coach, I get to contribute, which is one of my core values. I offer programmes that I know other coaches charge way more for, but I’m exercising my prerogative to make some of my skills accessible to all. This matters to me. As a result of all of this, all kinds of working mums and a few men too are able to overcome Imposter Syndrome, Procrastination, Self-Sabotage that stems usually from unresolved wounds.

Setting up the coaching practise, I was not only able to be intentional and present with my family, but also to finally be able to focus on them in a more wholesome way, where time is available to us. To use that time to be fully present in the moment, creating memories and experiencing the experience of life, but not chasing time anymore. Often I work on removing this notion or this pretence of being super busy, where I end up scattering my energies too thin and becoming exhausted. I also get to spend time doing things I love, such as art all, all while building a business where I am willing to feel growth and progress can keep momentum going. In the end all of this means I am now able to be with my kids in a healthy, balanced way. I get to take care of their mum, to be a better role model than I ever, ever imagined, and I never miss a highlight of their life. We are all growing to be more honest and more vulnerable with each other, and the thing that is most important to me is now I get to be the mum I was desperate to be. There’s no façade. I’m real, truly myself, and I’m creating the conditions for my children to love themselves, to accept their quirks and their uniqueness, you know the very conditions that were missing from my childhood as I’m sure is the case in many of us. And what’s really interesting for me was everything changed when I became more vulnerable. When I reached out for help and through that I learnt to make fast decisions. To accept and love myself, to trust myself. The reason I desperately wanted to be right was because as a child, I felt I was always in the wrong. I couldn’t allow myself to be her again. Making decisions as a child had cost me dearly so I avoided them. To feel the pain of being told you’re wrong, you know it lives like a virus in your subconscious and has this ability to debilitate your trust, your wisdom, your talent, your genius. I would never have made all these discoveries without being vulnerable and reaching out to experts. Today it goes without saying, I’m a grown woman who owns her mistakes. I look for lessons and opportunities when things don’t work out the way I planned. I’m almost excited when things don’t work out, I invite failure because life has taught me that after every failure, there is gold. There is something amazing around the corner.

Thank you for listening to this solo episode. My hope is for you to understand why I feel so passionately about elevating mums, to help them learn to grow self-love and self-acceptance. You know a mum who is growing to love herself and work on her personal growth is through her actions voting for person she wants to be. And by simply doing so, she indirectly teaches her children how to love and grow in a wholesome way, and my wish is for the next generation to love and accept themselves and to see their quirks as gifts to activate their personal power in their everyday life.