Continuing our rising resilience journey through the lens of women entrepreneurs as they share their insights, their experiences, and their journey to success, in this episode, focusing on emotional resilience mastery, I interview Margot Mansfield who is an internationally known speaker, master trainer, mentor, and organisational development consultant.
Margot is a leader in emotional mastery, helping individuals and companies transform the way they improve performance. She spent the last 45 years specialising in the development of emotional literacy in the transformation of stress. She supports organisational leaders to excel by humanising their approach using her six-step breakthrough roadmap.
Margot’s story of emotional resilience is powerful. She’s overcome a tremendous critical car accident, a traumatic event that resulted in her going through numerous surgeries, a mental health crisis, and recklessness leading eventually to physical healing, spiritual growth, more formal education, contemplation, and life changing decisions.
INTRO
In this episode, you’ll hear insights from her journey that enabled her to rise resilient and bring her emotional resilience gifts to both individual leaders and the business world.
PREFER TO LISTEN?
Margot is dedicated to bringing about transformation by helping people discover the secrets of becoming secure under stress. She’s a firm believer that people can learn to use stress as an experience of unleashing their greatest potential in ways that they never understood was possible. And as a contribution to their health and wellbeing rather than at a cost. She works with individuals and business leaders to engineer organisational transformation through understanding personality differences and building emotional resilience skills to address those differences using her proprietary reality security inventory.
Deep trauma is not an uncommon experience, yet it is very individualised for any of us. Margot’s personal evolution essentially built her business. When working with leaders and their team members who are facing a future of changes, known and unknown that are wrought with stress. She says her gift to them is the magic of her combined knowledge and experience that fosters lifelong skills.
INTERVIEW
Jay: Let me say today I have Margot Mansfield wonderful client of mine, really privileged to have you on the Leverage Business Podcast, Margot.
Margo: Well, I am just thrilled to be here. It’s such a privilege for me. And it feels like my debut into the world of the online world. So, it’s very exciting for me. It’s great.
Jay: Well, we’ve been working together for, I suppose it’s nearly a year I’ve known you anyway. Yeah. So, I know that you’ve got lots of tales to tell. And also, particularly the people that you work with, you know, around personal mastery and emotional intelligence, which I think obviously have a great deal to do with resilience, which is our theme.
What I really love about the work I do is just the resilience that people exhibit and how they develop that. It’s a nice focus because the clients I work with really show that. They have their ups, they have their downs, but what really shines through when people are getting success is how they rise up, you know, even against adversity. And a lot of people these last few years have had a lot of stuff going on.
And I know, you know, you’ve got some personal health things, other people got family things, you know, we’ve had wars, we’ve had COVID, we’ve had all sorts of stuff thrown at us. So, there’s a lot around, you know, our own courage to continue and compassion and building confidence and working with the coach, you know …
Margo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jay: So just to go over rising resilience, the subtitle is tackling challenges and changes in your life and business with confidence, compassion and courage. So even if you’re not in business, in your career would fit equally. What part of the theme, when I invited you, kind of spoke to you the most and why? And my second question was how your own life experiences and resilience help you to help others.
Margo: Well Jay, when I looked at the first two questions that you were interested in, it was as if they were sort of combined into one answer. Because for me, of course, mind, career and work was at the top of the list simply because, you know, my business is called Mindful Mastery. The whole thing is about the mind.
So that is the first, but then it’s very connected to soul, the mission and spirituality. Because it has been really the [00:06:00] mission that got me started and the spirituality that has held me in there for so long through such difficult times. And so, it has been the spark of my spirit always being present to continue forward because of what my desire was and what my mission was. So, they kind of work together.
Margo: And like to just tell you a little story about that so that you understand why that is so important. Because the answer to the second question is for me, just a bottom line is that the evolution of my business is really the story of my evolution. And I say that because when I was 18, I was in school at the University of Hawaii, and I was asked to come back home to St. Louis to be in my best friend from high school’s wedding. And in the party that they had, I went with a guy who was going to be the groomsman, we were going out to dinner and I was riding with him and we had a terrible automobile accident in which my face was terribly scarred and my left leg.
And that actually changed my life forever. I was unconscious for 10 days. I awakened and when I looked in the mirror, I was in horror. And the horror of that experience, which I can reimagine exactly right now, stayed with me for decades. I did not look at my face in the mirror for decades.
I begged my parents to go back to school because I wanted to be with my friends. What I didn’t know, of course, at that time, because they weren’t even talking about it, is that, that, experience in my life really was a PTSD experience, and no one knew about it then. So in that semester back at school, I had a nervous breakdown.
I called my parents and I went home to St. Louis because I had to have several plastic surgery operations on my face and my leg anyway. So, I went back and when I was there, the plastic surgeon suggested that I go to a psychiatrist and so my parents found who the person that was supposed to be the best psychiatrist in St. Louis.
I went to him and on the third visit, he fell asleep while I was talking to him. I was so devastated that I got up out of my chair, I left the room, walked down the hallway and Jay, it’s as if it happened at this moment, I had this deep resolved decision that came to me. And that was, I guess I have to figure this out on my own.
And with that, it was the beginning of my business. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of my business. So, after this happened, of course I went back to school. I was in Hawaii, and I had an aunt there, and she asked me if I’d like to go visit a hypnotherapist. I didn’t even know what that was.
But I was so desperate to find out and to learn and to know why I was in such depression and thoughts of suicide. I didn’t want to live. It was as if my life was over and I didn’t know how to recover it. So I went to this hypnotherapist. And during the session, he took me back into the night of the accident in which they were doing the operation. And I was in the operation room. And there were two things that the doctor said that steered my life for the rest of my life. One was: Isn’t it a shame, she must have been a very beautiful girl. The second one was: She will never have the mental capacity she had once had.
When I came out of that session, I thought recognising what had been said would be the end of it. But it wasn’t. It was only the beginning. So, this is when I fell into further depression. I was so concerned about my mental ability that I made it through school and graduated with a degree in sociology.
The way I did it was to carry such a heavy load that I had no time to worry. All I had time to do was work and take tests. That’s all I could do. And I was terrified. So that journey, that experience drove me into terrible depression. But I somehow made it out of school. And took my first job, went back to Missouri, and I took my first job in social work. And I rose very quickly. In my job, because I worked hard and I loved what I did, and I became the executive director of St. Louis County, Missouri. And when I was a director, my friend from the YMCA told me about this psychologist who had this most interesting program.
The program that I hired him to come in and work with my staff when he did the program and he used the assessment that I use today, Jay, it was my first sign of hope it gave me life again. It was so important to me that I grasped it as if it was the best chocolate in the world. And I just devoured it and I couldn’t stop. It became my mission to teach that.
So a bit later, I had hope now and I decided to go back to Hawaii. I had the rights to the program, to the assessment, and I took it back to Hawaii. Because now I was on a mission to discover what was the matter with me. And so, as I went down that road, I didn’t know how to sell. I didn’t know how to do anything. I started my business with 200 dollars a child that was 2 years old – I was single – and people told me that I would never make it work. And I didn’t care what they said because I knew that I was going to do this. I was so committed to learning about it and then sharing it with everyone so that they could feel as happy about it as I did, even if they didn’t have the same experience that I had.
And that’s why I say, you know, that the first question is really both the mind and the soul, because it became my life’s work and that’s also part of the reason why I was so excited because it [online courses] would allow me to take my legacy to a larger audience because I realised in my process that other people had issues that might not have been as dramatic as mine, but to them, it was.
So, I started learning ways to work with myself. And the more I learned to work with myself, the more I passed that on to people. What started as a 4-hour seminar when I first did it with the psychologist and with my staff, now is a 4-day seminar because I’ve added so much information and knowledge for people to understand.
So that’s been my life’s work. It never was just a job. It was always a mission for me.
Jay: Wonderful story. Well, amazing and emotional and it’s, it’s just incredible like what you’ve been able to do and the commitment that you bring and I think there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that are heart-centred and mission-driven and all the rest, but this feels very, very personal in terms of the work you’ve done on yourself, and on your own. You’ve made it happen for yourself and being able to transfer that to other people and give them a structure to work through that perhaps you didn’t have yourself, that you had to kind of take that structure. I mean, you had the assessment, but that was just the starting point by the sounds of it.
Margo: Yes, yes. And you know, Jay at that time, because the assessment that I use shows the difference in how people think, feel and behave under usual and stress conditions, when I would go into companies to talk about what I was doing, I would use the word stress. And believe it or not, at that time, people thought that I had flown in from outer space because no one knew what stress was.
Jay: And now it’s all trauma.
Margo: Oh my gosh. It was amazing. It was amazing.
Jay: PTSD we didn’t necessarily put a label on it and realise it was quite as serious as that and how much ingrained into you and, you know, holds you back as well as drives you forward.
Margo: Yes, yes. Well, you know, Jay, interestingly enough, I didn’t know it was that till 9 11 and I belong to the American Society or the American Institute of Stress and when 9 11 happened, I was immobilised, literally immobilised for like a month. I couldn’t function and I didn’t know why. And they wrote an article, and I got that article, and it said that people, because that was such an enormous issue in all of our lives, and it happened so suddenly, that people who had had traumatic experiences. earlier in their life would have been affected by that. And that’s when I really realised, oh my gosh, I guess that was PTSD.
So, I think I’m not the only one. There’s many, many people who have been through that.
Jay: Yeah. We’re carrying a lot inside us that we don’t label and we don’t necessarily share. And we just try and march on as you know, soldier on, so to speak.
Tell me a little bit about the clients that you support. I mean, how does stress, anxiety, overwhelm, maybe not trauma as such, but the signs of it, how is it showing up in them and how you help them.
Margo: Well, the way that it shows up, oftentimes they don’t realise the situation they’re in, Jay, until their body becomes involved in it. They become sick or they become, there’s something that starts to happen with their body. And what I learned earlier throughout my journey is that thoughts have frequency and that frequency. I learned this from a physicist. Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher years ago, and then I went through a program in which they hooked me up to electrodes all over my head, and then I would go through thoughts and it would register on a screen the frequency, my thought. And so I learned that thoughts have frequency.
That helped me to understand even more, more importantly, how thoughts were. And because the assessment that I use, the Reality Security Inventory assessment actually measures people’s thoughts and how they think about things. It allows people to begin to see the effects of their thoughts. So, the people that I would run into then and now, the issues of health would come up because stress begins as a thought. It doesn’t begin in the body. It begins as a thought.
In fact, you know, I, I oftentimes will have people in the seminar, think of one person they’re having difficulty with. And the second that person’s name comes to mind, they’ll be in stress. That’s how quickly stress happens. Yeah. What goes on is people don’t realise that they’re in stress until that stress begins to affect their immune system because the body has gone into fight or flight has gone [00:21:00] into fear and self-doubt. And so, the immune system becomes worn out, which allows the person to either catch a cold, get a disease. Sometimes things are multi-generational come forth. Then their body becomes involved.
So part of the issue – especially in today’s world, anger, cynicism, misunderstanding and confusion, because there’s so much confusion out in the marketplace – and these things make people feel out of control. And when people feel out of control, they immediately go into fight or flight- immediately.
It happened before when I started my business, but it was never to the degree that it is today. Today, it’s rampant.
Jay: There’s a couple of things that jump out at me, as you’re talking there. On the one hand, we kind of bury stuff and historically it’s there and we carry it around with us, it doesn’t necessarily come out. On the other hand, there’s the stress and anxieties that get triggered by certain people or certain things and there’s all sorts of long term as well as sudden heart problems, stroke, all sorts of things like that can happen if you get this continuation of the pattern, right? So, it’s not a one off. It’s like an up and down, an up and down. It’s like your body’s just in, in that fight or flight continuously.
Margo: Yes, yes, yes. Well, you know, interestingly enough, my son, who is now 39 was a drug addict for 17 years and he was put in prison by me. I testified against him because I knew that if he didn’t go to prison, something terrible was going to happen. He stole my car and he went to prison and in prison, six years ago, he went to prison and he. Read a book and it changed his life and he transformed in 24 hours.
Jay: Of course, now the question is what was the book?
Margo: The book was the Book of Mormon. He read the Bible first and then he read the Book of Mormon and there was a story in the Book of Mormon that related to him in his way and he stopped everything. And that was six years ago. He’s graduating from college.
Jay: Fantastic.
Margo: That’s how fast it can happen when you want it to happen.
Jay: Yeah, well it’s sometimes even when you don’t want it to happen, you’re not looking for it. Yes. Yeah, exactly.
Let’s change tack a little bit.
What would you personally lean into as these moments hit you, you know, if you could share a few of the ways that you help people, or things that you do for yourself, rise above those tensions, those emotions, those triggers.
Margo: Well, for me, Jay, I know so much about the subconscious mind, and I know that that’s what takes over when I go into stress or anyone else goes into stress.
And I know that it contains, there’s so much programming that we have in the subconscious mind about fear and self-doubt. So I allow myself to go through that experience. I intentionally allow myself to go through the fear and self-doubt. And get rid of it. Because it comes to an end and when it comes to an end, then I begin to think about what was it that caused the stress, what was the source of it?
And because I understand how to link thoughts, I can go back and trace what it was that happened that put me into a thought that was frightening, that was stressful. It was the thought that made it stressful. It wasn’t the incident.
Jay: How do you allow yourself to go through the fear and self-doubt? What’s the process? What’s the technique?
Margo: Well, the technique that I use, you know, and this is the part of the training that is oftentimes difficult for people to understand. It’s all in your brain. It’s not like you have to get something to do it. You just have to learn to work with the thoughts in your mind. The way I get rid or get through this, the self-doubt and the fear is I allow myself to go to the worst possible thing that could happen. And I look at that and say, what would I do? And I’ll find a way that if that happened, that’s what I would do.
Jay: Is that like hope for the best and plan for the worst?
Margo: It is. It is. And it’s really about grasping that fear and taking it to the worst level and then realising that’s probably not going to happen. Yeah, that is the worst thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, then, then I look at the probability of it happening and interestingly enough, See, part of what happens when people go into stress is that the fear and the self-doubt overshadow the thought process. They take it out of commission, actually, and the emotions take over because the emotions are seven times greater than the intellect. So, the emotions take over.
What I do is. Engage the intellect in the midst of the emotion.
Jay: Yeah, makes sense. I mean, it’s kind of like that out of control feeling that we all feel is kind of give yourself back choices and options.
Margo: Exactly. Because what happens then to us is we begin to feel in control again. Absolutely. Yes, and we are in control.
And then sometimes there’s different levels of extreme that it could go to. You know, it’s the worst, and then it’s the next, and then, you know, and you kind of work on through that.
Jay: Yeah. Yeah, what about just that general sense that sometimes you just feel, I’m not where I want to be that kind of uneasiness, sense of feeling a bit restless or a little bit lost in life, you know, yeah, does that show me what do you do differently in that kind of situation.
Margo: Well, generally, that is because we have set expectations for ourself that are unrealistic. And so what I do, I went through this Jay at a certain point in my life when I looked at my life and I thought I was going to be much farther than I was. And I, [00:29:00] I went through that process and I realised that in my plan, you know, it’s, it’s sort of like my mother used to say, Jay, she has to say, we make plans and God giggles.
Well, that’s kind of what happens. You know, we make these perfect plans of think how things are going to be and then life happens and so I had to come to accept that even though I wasn’t where I thought it would be, the journey that I had been on was so filled with so many things that I had chosen. No one else chose it for me to make those decisions. I made those decisions and obviously those were issues that I had to deal with. Otherwise I wouldn’t be there. I chose to be there.
And part of the issue that I find with so many people is they don’t take responsibility for being where they are.
Jay: I was just going to say, is it about just taking ownership of the choices you’ve made, and you’ve made the best ones you could at the time.
Margo: At the time, yes and if you look into it deep enough, you’ll see that there was a lesson for you that you learned.
The issue of the automobile accident for me taught me one of the most important lessons in my life, and that was that what looks horrible in the moment may be a blessing in disguise. And I think about that all the time when things happen to me. And I realise this is for my good, you know, the best and highest good is to come out of this and, and I think, again, that has to do with the frequency of the thought, because the frequency of the thought attracts to you that frequency.
Yeah, and the solution comes from there. I remember a story I can’t remember who was telling it now about, you know, a problem is like one of those pass-the-parcel gift wrap things. It’s like, you have to start taking off the layers and you have to scrabble around a little bit, but inside is a gift, like whatever is the problem is that you find inside the gift of learning.
Jay: I mean, this has been incredible and I could probably talk to you for hours about a lot of this stuff, not only from your own experience and stories, but, but also how you’re helping people and your mindset mastery.
In a nutshell Margo, what would you say is your positive superpower for rising resilience for yourself, for your clients just in general, what would be your thing?
Margo: Well, I have come up with that. That was a good question. And by the way Jay, I loved your questions because what they did is take me back into things that I had forgotten that I had learned and why I do what I do.
And so for me, sort of the superpower of what I will say to people is I want you to become your own best friend, that you value and appreciate who you are, so that you can value and appreciate other people.
Jay: Love that.
Margo: And to me, that’s what we all have to learn to do: to become our own very best friend.
Jay: I absolutely love that. And in a sense, it’s the coping mechanism for the fact that we live in a world where everyone’s kind of pointing fingers, everyone’s saying someone [00:33:00] else is to blame for their situation. And, we don’t often value and appreciate others as much as we ought to. We kind of want to get more than give. Yeah,
Margo: Yes, but Jay, that’s because we don’t value and appreciate ourself. Yeah, I think you’re right. How can you do something that you don’t know? Yeah, exactly. That’s how you learn. So it’s by learning to appreciate yourself. Yeah, then you know how to do that.
Jay: Yeah, now that’s the subtitle for the series is like that self-compassion. And I know somebody else I’m interviewing, Annika, you know, that’s part of her brand is, you know, compassion first, self-compassion first.
Margo: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Jay: And it’s the same in relationships. You know, it’s hard to love someone else if you don’t love yourself first.
Margo: You cannot.
Jay: It comes right back to the very beginning where you started to say mind, body, soul, they’re all connected.
Margo: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Jay: Love this conversation and thank you very much for your time.
Margo: Jay, I cannot tell you how excited I am to have been asked to do this and to, to work with you again because I miss you. So it’s awesome. And I really. I’m so grateful. Thank you. And
Jay: It’s been a privilege to have you share your story Margo, and your insights. Thank you. ​
