Fierce Lab

Dr. Krista Austin is a woman you want on your team. A sport scientist, currently serving as a performance specialist for professional and Olympic sport athletes, Krista has spent her career studying and coaching elite athletes for peak performance. A large part of her body of work is focused on mental health in pro sports, but you don't have to be a professional athlete to benefit from Krista's experience.

On this episode, we discuss many of the key areas that impact a woman's mental health including body image, financial strain as well as professional stress. Krista shares stories of how she has coached female athletes through personal and professional highs and lows, helping them find or regain their confidence. During our discussion Krista shares ways we can improve our mental health, tips for finding a psychologist, how our friends impact our success in life and why, now more than ever we need to raise a red flags when we're struggling emotionally. Her advice is applicable to any woman, pro athlete or not, and is especially timely as we face the impact of a global pandemic.

LaShae Baskin is Principal and Managing Director of the Austin office of Huckabee, an architecture firm. On this episode of Fierce Lab, LaShae tells us about the risks she's taken in her career journey, offering advice on "finding the gaps" to add value and planning for problems before they come fires. She also offers her experience and tried-and-true tips to become a successful leader. LaShae also shares how and why she's become a relentless advocate for her son and all children, leading her to her career at Huckabee.

LaShae’s career journey and some advice

Lashae started her career in hospitality design, which provided her with a design mindset that she values today and taught her about how a person interacts with a space. In 2008, with the Great Recession, the hospitality industry was hard hit, and LaShae was forced to pivot and began her retail journey. She tells us that when facing a stumble, it is okay to be scared and to not have all the answers, and stumbles provide learning opportunities. LaShae says it is important to learn to have thick skin, be adaptable, and to know what you are great at and to recognize what you don’t know.

Finding the gaps and planning for fires

Growing up, LaShae was taught to find more efficient ways to accomplish something, and later, she received valuable advice from a mentor who told that if she wants to grow and develop, she should "find the gaps" and solve them. In this episode she teaches us how we can do the same. In solving gaps, you look for ways to work smarter, not harder. LaShae also discusses finding problems before they become fires, which is a valuable skill to any company anywhere.

Leadership

LaShae offers her guidance for becoming the leader people want to follow, not one that they are forced to. She believes good leaders build good followers, but great leaders build better leaders. Being a successful leader means showing up every day and creating leaders that are better than you. To help grow leaders, LaShae teaches how to organize thoughts and speak with brevity. She tells us that as a leader, it is okay to not have all the answers, and that it is important to know when it is time to lead and when it is time to push someone else forward.

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Emefa Boamah, a grounded healer, embodiment coach, and mental health and radical self-care advocate, shares her mission to create a national and international movement centered on embodiment. Having immigrated to the U.S. from Ghana at 21 years old, Emefa has created a life for herself in a new country, anchored in values of abundance, integrity, and radical self-care. In this episode, Tara and Emefa discuss how trauma manifests in the body and specific ways to find healing through grounding and inner examination.

Emefa’s journey from trauma to healing and support for others
[Trigger warning: sexual abuse]

As a survivor of sexual abuse, Emefa talks about how one out of six women is sexually abused before they turn 18, and that's only the people who report it. Emefa explains that, whether it’s a “big T” or “little t” trauma, the body registers those traumatic experiences as pain, and everyone deals with healing in different ways. Emefa has made it her mission to help women heal from those traumas. She stresses that survivors of abuse are never at fault — and never alone — saying that therapy was the best decision she made for herself. Emefa identifies resources such as RAINN, DARCC in Dallas, and The Haven Retreat through Younique Foundation.

Being present and identifying stress in the body

The first thing Emefa does to help women reconnect with themselves is to bring them to the present moment and explore who they are and what they want in life. Emefa and Tara discuss how stress manifests in the body in physical ways, through clenched jaws, rapid heart rates, or anxiety and depression, as well as emotionally, such as feeling disconnected or apathetic. In a culture where hustle and burnout are prevalent, Emefa suggests learning to listen to your body’s signals, identify your stress, and fill up your metaphorical gas tank using tools from your imaginary toolkit.

Grounding exercises and other useful tools

Emefa walks us through her grounding exercise, where she firmly plants her feet on the ground, uses activating breath work, and connects with both the earth and her body. She shares about the concept of slowing down to speed up, as well as tools she encourages women to use to help identify and heal trauma in the body: breathwork, meditation/quiet time, journaling, movement, and personal rituals.

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Please be sure to SUBSCRIBE, REVIEW, and SHARE Fierce Lab with women who are looking for community and tools for leveling up.

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Eager for more tools and resources to help you find your fierce? Now you can access additional content across the four content pillars using the Fierce Lab app. Premium subscribers get access to articles, guides, checklists, video content, and workshops, as well as exclusive events for members only.

In this episode, Tara speaks with Stephanie Hall, founder of a luxury brand of hand-blown colored glass named after her grandmother, Estelle Colored Glass. Stephanie started her career in South Carolina as an attorney and then pivoted toward her passions as an entrepreneur. Their conversation revolves around risk taking and career development.

Shifting gears and switching careers

From the time she was in middle school, Stephanie wanted to be a lawyer. So that’s exactly what she did. It wasn’t until she had graduated from law school at University of North Carolina, participated in two clerkships, and worked as an attorney for 10 years that she realized the law was not her passion — nor was it the right environment or lifestyle for her. Facing marginalization in the legal field, exacerbated by the fact that she was a woman of color in a male-dominated field, Stephanie decided to take a risk and make moves toward a new career. Especially once she had added the title of mother to her resume, Stephanie knew this change was the right trajectory for her desired lifestyle.

Stephanie advises women who are being marginalized in the workplace to advocate for themselves, find allies, and decide for themselves what’s best for them personally: staying and enduring or leaving and charting a new course.

Applying the skills you already possess

While Stephanie had a safety net — her job as an attorney, as well as income from a successful event rental business she and her husband had created and owned — she took the risk to create a business she could call her own, bringing along the lessons she’d learned from her previous entrepreneurial ventures to establish Estelle Colored Glass. The same was true of the skills she’d learned in her decade as an attorney, including her penchant for negotiation and strong argumentation skills. She leveraged these in presenting and pitching her new business to local media, potential manufacturers and suppliers, and more.

Risk taking in entrepreneurship

Stephanie learned that entrepreneurship takes sacrifice and discipline. It’s about putting in the time. Does that mean staying up till 3 a.m. to get things done? It did for Stephanie when it came to establishing Estelle. It also meant giving up TV time and even making financial sacrifices by eschewing certain purchases in order to invest that money in her business.

Early on, Stephanie embraced a mindset of looking for opportunities, knowing that starting a business does not mean it will be an overnight success. Stephanie encourages others like her to adopt this go-getter attitude, as well as persevere and resilience when you come up against roadblocks. She speaks about leveraging the contacts you already have to increase reach, leveraging local media and influencers (including Instagram DMs, or direct messages), and the importance of doing the research.

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On this episode of Fierce Lab, Tara talks to Nicholle Overkamp, a personal financial expert and business coach who runs the Wilcox Financial Group, which focuses on financial planning, and PowHERhouse Money Coaching, which focuses on financial coaching. She aims to help women develop positive money mindsets and get started or level up in financial planning and investing. In this episode, Nicholle discusses common reasons women feel apprehensive when it comes to financial decision-making and how to get started with planning and investing.

Nicholle’s work as a financial expert and business coach

Nicholle runs two separate companies — one for financial planning and one for financial coaching. The Wilcox Financial Group is a space for women to receive financial advice, help, and information in an understanding environment. She likens her other company, PowHERhouse Money Coaching, to a bootcamp for money and preparing for financial planning, with a focus on bettering women’s money mindsets. Their services help women become more comfortable with money by breaking down barriers and mitigating anxiety so they can take their finances to the next level.

Common barriers to financial planning

Nicholle says the biggest barriers are fear of being judged, the shame of thinking they should know more than they do, and procrastination due to anxiety and fear of the unknown. Women have also expressed that they sometimes aren’t sure where to seek help or don’t think the help they need exists.

Getting started

Nicholle offers advice for women who are getting started with financial planning. First, take inventory of what you want and what your goals are. From there, you can reverse engineer what to do and how long it will take to achieve those goals. If you don’t have any particular goals in mind, consider what you don’t want; some unrealized goals will probably come to mind. If you aren’t ready to start investing, look into your cash flow, and examine if you are being intentional with your spending. Nicholle stresses the importance of both having emergency reserve savings and simply getting started, even if it's with only a little bit of money.

Money mantras

Having a positive mindset about money is imperative. It's important to recognize the reasons behind a negative (or scarcity) mindset, as self-awareness is empowering. Money mantras are personal, based on what you want to achieve, and should be repeated daily. Nicholle gives some examples including, “I am worthy of receiving money,” and, “I am worthy of keeping money.” Tara also shares her own money mantras.

Listener questions

Tara asked listeners for their financial questions. They include topics like what to do if your employer doesn’t offer a retirement plan, but you still want to contribute; what should come first, paying down debt or saving; and where to get started with investing once you have an emergency fund and some savings set aside.

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If you'd like to receive more information about our upcoming episodes for Fierce Lab including tips, tools, and resources, go to our website, www.fiercelab.tarawilson.com, and sign up for our email list.

Please be sure to SUBSCRIBE, REVIEW, and SHARE Fierce Lab with women who are looking for community and tools for leveling up.