Learn how to prioritize yourself first with the Soulfuleader program by Maura Barclay. Where you will learn how to lead yourself with love, trust, and purpose by following an evidence-based methodology. Maura is the founder of Unbreakable Woman and the author of the brand’s eponymous book. She is also a retired professional firefighter and a title-winning bodybuilder. Maura fought her way through cancer and harassment to find out that she was not taking care of herself. This opened her eyes to create the Soulfuleader. Join Baeth Davis as she gets Maura to share about her journey to become a soulful leader. Learn what the keys of change are in order to find the root of resistance in your life that is keeping you from growing.

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The CHI Sales Method With Manifesting Generator Maura Barclay

We’re going to talk with a Manifesting Generator named Maura Barclay about what it means to be a soulful leader. I’m going to tell you a little bit about Maura. We’re going to bring her on and we’re going to talk about soulful leadership. After, I’m going to share a bit about her design. She is a Neuro Facilitation Specialist, author and transformational leadership consultant. As a thought leader, she’s best known for her groundbreaking work in the intuitive empowerment field with her book and Unbreakable Woman programs, which she presented for decades across the nation for federal agencies, Fortune 500 companies and the US military. She worked as a firefighter. She is a two-time title-winning bodybuilder and a martial artist. All of this has informed her process of helping people to physically embody their personal authority and confidence.

Her cancer diagnosis in 2016 brought about the realization that she too had been ignoring her deep truth and hiding from her authentic power. This realization is what led to her creating Soulfuleader, which she’s going to tell you more about, and tools to help people surrender to something bigger and wiser than themselves. Her early career as a mind-body master and instructor traveling around the US, training teachers in therapeutic movement, meditation, and embodied anatomy has contributed to the evidence-based methodology she employs in her transformational intensive program. With that, let us welcome Ms. Maura Barclay to the show.

Thank you.

How are you?

I’m good. I know my bio was a mouthful. You did amazing.

It requires a lot of enunciation. It is a very good bio. It’s not too long and it says a lot about you. First of all, what is a soulful leader? Can you define that for us?

A soulful leader is a heart-centered person who leads themselves first and then others as a secondary aspect of their own personal leadership. It is about applying the management skills that you would use for anybody else to yourself first and making yourself the priority and being heart-centered in that effort.

What about people who manage teams? It seems to me that a lot of leadership consulting has to do with corporations and businesses. Does your work deal with business teams?

Leadership is about being the leader of your own life.

At this time, I have limited myself to working with personal leadership development with individuals. At the end of the day, everything that you do is going to transmit through whatever filter you have, whatever opinions you carry about yourself, whatever history you’re bringing into the party, family, origin, history goes all the way back to the roots. Whatever ancestral loading you’re bringing to the party, it’s going to translate through your leadership skills. I found that, in essence, the way to make a higher impact on a team is to start with the tip of the spear. When I work with individuals on their own personal leadership, it translates directly into how they lead their kids and families. If they have a team, how they’re leading that team.

I remember many years ago, I went to a leadership conference led by Stedman Graham. It was Stedman and 29 of us. It was about leadership. He had a 2 or 3-hour segment one afternoon and he said, “When I talk about leadership, what I mean is you need to be the leader of your own life and line up with what you value. That’s what makes you a leader.” It isn’t about fame, fortune or what others say. It’s about that alignment. What kind of issues do people typically present to you?

It’s interesting to me. I’ve come to the conclusion and I’m sure that you could validate this. There are no new problems under the sun. There’s a handful of general problems that come from a family of origin. What makes the problem seem unique is the unique people who are in those problems, the unique situation because every single individual is unique, but the problems are the same. The trauma can be put into buckets, would you agree?

Yes.

The buckets of trauma that are coming to my program are almost always exclusively family-oriented, people who are trapped in patterns from their family of origin. They cannot get out of it. It doesn’t matter how much personal growth or spiritual expansion work they’ve done. They keep hitting a ceiling. This is a common thing. “I’ve tried everything,” they say. These people have enormous shifts in my program because they have not gone deep enough.

Whenever someone says they’ve tried everything, I know that they’re skimming the surface. They have a resistance. It’s like code for, “I haven’t done everything.”

It’s like, “I want to feel like I’ve done everything so that I can stick my tongue in the canker sore feeling like a victim,” but no. It’s radical accountability. We’ll fix that right up, which I know you know a lot about. That’s one of the things. The other crises that I’ve seen are people who have a tremendous trauma through their parents and being in resistance to the truth of how it affected them. There is a lot of suppression and denial. People are coming to me in the midst of that because it’s starting to bubble up and they can’t control it anymore. It’s leading to health problems and problems in the relationship. They seek me out and we work through navigating the fear, in some cases, the terror of those experiences because they have been terrorized their whole life by them. These are pretty common issues. A significant amount of gay clients went through a lot of fear of being rejected by their tribe. They bring that into their lives. Those are primarily the people that I see and a handful of super high-performing corporate clients that are feeling outmaneuvered at work. They’re coming up against the ceiling of their worthiness issues.

What led you to create this program to foster soulful leadership. What was your journey? We heard a little bit about it in the bio but this particular way that you’re working with people now, what was the genesis of that?

First of all, I want to give you mad props. Anyone who uses the word genesis in this context is just beautiful. It makes my heart feel very happy. There’s the first thing. The genesis of this began with my ancestral contracts and agreements. I provided myself with my own trauma. I was molested by my father. He married an alcoholic woman, my stepmother. I went through a lot of cognitive dissonances. I had to become extremely compliant to survive in my tribe and I was angry about it. There was no physical, emotional or psychological safe space in my family. My response was to become a warrior, thus, the bodybuilding and firefighting.

Here’s the paradox. I did all that to prove how strong, powerful, smart, sexy and confident I was. I was also doing it because I needed a constant stream of external validation to feel whole and valuable because I did not get that from my family of origin. I didn’t know how to do it for myself. Because I felt like I’m not safe, the warrior thing was natural, but then I needed to get feeling valuable. I needed that self-esteem. All of these things were self-esteem boost. The firefighting was heroes’ work. I wanted people to be happy when I arrived. I wanted to feel valuable and important. Who doesn’t love a firefighter? That’s a no-brainer. It sucked getting the job. It was hard to get that job. Once I got there, it turned out I was just painting a lot of fire hydrants and washing a lot of trucks. Ultimately, I wasn’t getting the dopamine and external validation that I was looking for.

Eventually, I came to make all my decisions out of fear. I’m afraid that if I don’t do this, that this will happen or won’t happen. On my second marriage, I made it out of fear. He’s fine. That was my criteria at the time. I’m so afraid if I don’t marry this man, I won’t be a wife and a mother because I don’t trust that I am beautiful and valuable enough to be seen by anybody else so I married him. It was not a good relationship. I put myself under a tremendous amount of stress because I would not acknowledge to myself that I had made that very big mistake. I had married the wrong person. He was a completely inappropriate partner. I was using all my vital energy to try to heal and solve him. We had just adopted a child from foster care. I was so depleted of my own vital energy. I was so busy and outwardly focused trying to fix, arrange, clean and just hold everything together that I opened the door for cancer to thrive in my body. The tumor was right on my heart. It was so perfect.

How much clearer does it need to be?

Because of the nature of my personality, #ManifestingGenerator, I needed to be knocked to my knees to get it. I surrendered in that hospital bed. I surrendered to being taken care of. I surrendered to the solitude. I didn’t have a lot of fear about it. I was quite relieved to have cancer that was so readily curable. I was lucky. I got good cancer. I also recognized immediately how I had created the opportunity for cancer to thrive. I didn’t give myself cancer, but I certainly created the opportunity. Once I saw how I was not being a good leader for myself, once I saw that I was not listening to my truth, that I was ignoring it, suppressing the intuitive impulses from my soul, I was resisting my own greatness. Once I saw that, I was able to create practices and tools because of my vast experience as a mind-body practitioner. I want to be clear, vast experience as a mind-body practitioner, a leader of leaders, teacher of teachers in meditation and body anatomy, I help so many people transform their lives into becoming teachers of what I was teaching. Yet, for my own self, I still had all that suppression going on. I needed a teacher and cancer was my teacher.

I think about having gone through cancer as well. I see cancer now as a messenger from a part of the body that has been excluded from the conversation. That part of the body’s like, “Apparently, I have to start killing the host to get their attention.” I don’t notice it visit the willing and the humble. Cancer comes to the martyrs, codependents, over givers, invincible superhero, I can do it all Superwoman. No, you can’t. The heart chakra, especially for women, was where they get it. Whether their heart chakra or their sex organs. They’re either being sexually drained or they’re over-giving from the nurturing part of their body. That’s amazing that you were able to find the lesson in it so quickly. You went through this experience. I assumed you ditched the husband?

I did.

Congratulations. It was necessary to the healing. You don’t want to bring back the cause and the dynamic. You then stepped into developing your own business. Will you share about that? From what I understand, you had corporate gigs. You freelanced and did little projects here and there. Do I have that right? You stepped into being an entrepreneur. I know people are wondering how did you do that? Where did you find the courage to go from being an employee and under someone else’s leadership or in someone’s leadership to say, “I’m going to do my own thing?”

You are the creator of your experience. You are the creator of your life.

I had this interesting hybrid experience where somebody called me a mercenary, which I thought was funny. A corporate mercenary because I would go in and just be like, “Here’s how to empower all your ladies.” They love that. I was brought in to empower women, unbreakable woman. It was all about using your intuition and advanced situational awareness, which is very helpful in business. It’s understanding body language and how you’re using yours. All of these things. That was the training I was giving. In the process, I got headhunted by a CEO who brought me into their company to do that just for them exclusively. I love the gig but it wasn’t a good culture fit. Eventually, there was a leadership change. With that, the change of priorities and my program was eliminated. I was like, “I don’t feel like I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing.”

After the cancer, I vowed to myself to always listen to the impulse and follow it even if it feels like I don’t understand it. I divorced myself as a control freak, a very left-brained person. I’m a tactician. It’s hard for me sometimes, which is strange because I teach intuition. I understand intuition scientifically. I know where it comes from. The way that I did the pivot, I wouldn’t say I found the courage because it felt like a moral imperative. It felt like a spiritual imperative. I had it. I started to value my energy and my time. I decided that my time on this planet is so precious and I’m capable of so much good and so much change for people. People change in my presence. I’m so lucky to have this affinity. This is very valuable. I am not doing one more thing unless it’s in service to the gift, in service to the greater good. I don’t care what it looks like, I’m going to make it happen.

I think that’s when I found you. That’s when we found each other. You were my first coach. That was when I asked for guides instead of pushing, which a generator is not a great idea. Instead of pushing and trying to make things happen, I just got quiet. I went to Dr. Joe’s advanced meditation retreat. It helps a lot. It was my intention. The reason I went was to surrender. “Please, help me surrender, “ that was it. I just kept asking. I don’t have any experience because surrender meant all kinds of bad things in my house.

Surrender meant someone is taking advantage of you or using you like a toy.

I needed to allow that energy to resolve itself. It needed to move. I was like, “I have no idea what’s going to happen.” I realized at that moment, and this is part of what Soulfuleader is about, the unknown is a place of comfort now because anything can happen in the unknown. That’s where the universe lives. That’s where the higher self and the intuitive impulses operate. You can just sit back and let them do their thing. Just be clear in your intention and your focus on what you want. The unknown will work it out for you. You just need to get your hands out of it. It’s hard. It’s a practice. It’s a devotion. That’s how the whole thing happened. Once we found each other, I’m like, “Just tell me what to do,” and you did. I did it. It was good. It worked well. I want to make it bigger, which is exactly what I’m doing now.

Tell us about your program and how it works. The special sauce that you’ve developed. Tell us the name and what it is. If someone comes into this program, what can they hope to expect?

Soulfuleader is a 90-day transformational mastermind. It’s very intensive. We go deep and fast. The very first thing I do is called The Divine Selfishness Retreat. I help people embrace this mindset of, “I’m changing everything.” I got this from the advanced retreat I went to. I specifically chose a location that was different from my world so that I could experience something different. Sometimes we get so in the groove. To get out of it, there’s so much inertia. It’s like trying to get the ball out of the gutter. The way to do that is to create a different environment for yourself so that you’re contributing to the change that is forthcoming.

It’s then an origin story. Every week, there is an unwinding. The five keys to change. There are a couple of keys. The way that I have arranged it is through the process of the twelve weeks. We continually define the root of the resistance. We can call it the wound, but it’s the resistance. We align. We use the energy centers in the body as they’re meant to be used to move the energy that’s stuck, trapped or blocked out of the physical body and back to the source. We are designed to do this. I help people understand how to leverage the instrument and then unwind. We can’t change what happened.

This is my favorite analogy. There’s a long story to it. A friend of mine who had lots of snakes as pets was a herpetologist. I worked with him for a little bit in college. He had a tree python as a pet. I didn’t go anywhere near that thing because it was an opportunistic feeder. I’m like, “This is not an appropriate pet.” It was this point of pride for him. It’s terrible eyesight. He was doing something. He had it around his neck. He’s gesturing. We’re watching television. I’m like, “How are you going to get the snake off?” He’s like, “Oh, no.” This is 5 pounds of raw coiled steel. We don’t get the snake off. I watched him take the teeth out and then unwind himself from the snake. I thought, “That’s what I help people do.” We get the teeth out, the internalization of the wound, and then you unwind yourself. You don’t bend the spoon. You bend yourself. This unwind process has been working beautifully. You got to get the teeth out first and then you unwind.

If you fight the snake, it’s just going to grip harder and then atrophy his arm.

That’s not the way. I’ve tried everything. I know because you keep trying to unwrap the snake. Stop it.

First, we have to take the teeth out. I’m going to remember that forever. Did you take the teeth out? You’re in a power struggle with yourself and with other people, which perpetuates the pattern.

You have to get rid of the resistance. The resistance is trying to change things that are not yours to change. Unwinding yourself is the only thing and the most powerful thing you can do. We have to be defined and aligned in place before we can unwind. Otherwise, you don’t have a context, a spiritual anchor and a heart-centered anchor to protect you and to help you in the fire of transformation. The fourth key is refine. This is where we do a super cool nuanced thing. It’s like refining the witness. That’s done through exercises to become present to your higher self, and then differentiate between intuitive impulse and thoughts like cognitive thought. These are nuanced. This is like high-level Jedi shit that people learn in my program. First, you have to get there. You have to get through 1 through 3.

After refine comes time. That’s the sustainable practice. The average amount of time it takes people to change is something between 14 days and 61 days. This is all been proven, evidence-based. It’s like everything stays or nothing. My program is 90 days so that I can take people through the cognitive. This is why I’m a Neural Facilitation Specialist. It’s the process of building new pathways. You need a coach to help you while those little pathways are starting to build. They’re still very tender and delicate. The old shit’s going to want to come. That’s when you have a coach to show you your progress and be like, “Here’s all the pruning. Here’s the evidence of the pruning, just keep focusing on the growth.”

Part of the special sauce that I bring to this is people have sustainable practices and they’ve been doing them enough that it’s just what they keep doing. They don’t want to stop because it feels so good. I don’t know if this is unique to me, with the exception of me saying, “Stop it,” wagging my finger, which is facetious because I believe the following. You can’t stop anything. You can’t change anything by trying to change it. You can’t stop a habit by trying to stop it. There’s all resistance in that. I tried everything. What you can do is define what you want and create a practice to focus on it. The other stuff will prune off naturally with zero effort from you.

I have a question for you. If you could teach everyone in the world one thing that would change their lives, what would it be?

Let go of any resistance because unwinding yourself is the most powerful thing that you can do.

If you ask me tomorrow, it might be a different answer. Now as I’m sitting here, it’s accepting two things. Number one, you are the creator of your experience. You are the creator of your life and accepting yourself fully, warts, stinky, shit and all that is part of you as this brilliant creator. Self-acceptance as a creator of your experience. The world would be a very different place.

How can people access your program?

I have a mastermind. One of the ways that I’m making it accessible to more people is I have it hosted on a wonderful platform called Teachable if you’ve ever heard of it. It’s great. I have all twelve weeks sequentially and you’re front-loaded in the orientation. Don’t be intimidated. There is 80 hours worth of tools that I recorded to a video because you never know what you’re going to need. You don’t have to watch all of them in the beginning, but as we go through, I’ll say, “You need the lame rampage tool for this,” or “You need the park bench tool for this.” Go to tools, find the video, watch it. Because there’s live coaching with this program, it’s a shortcut for me. Everybody knows what tools I’m talking about.

The way to access this is you can schedule a call with me. At this point, I have to personally talk to every person who enrolls. I have an extremely high success rate because I only enroll people who are ready. Having money doesn’t mean you’re ready. Being ready means you’re ready. I like to assess where people are on their path, how much resistance they have and how open they are to coaching and mentoring because people fight for the limitations. You’re like, “I can’t help you. You’re just arguing with me the whole time.” I have a special link for people in Aligned to Your Design and Life Purpose Mastery. It’s called You Time. That’s my scheduling link. I’m also doing a free Self-Doubt Release Masterclass.

Is there anything else you wanted to share with us about Soulfuleadership and this 90-day mastermind?

People who are interested in getting what they want, having a sense of personal authority in their own personal leadership, that’s what I help people develop. It’s this concept of heart-centered personal authority. The thing I love about teaching people how to do this, men and women but predominantly women, is it enables you to do every single thing. There’s a quantum unraveling or unwinding that happens once you hit that note of heart-centered personal authority. You can do anything once you own your sense of emotional and spiritual authority. That’s the missing piece for people.

The only other thing that I would want people to know is I have a very consistent track record. When people vibe with me, when there’s a resonance, they change. No one who’s ever come into my group didn’t vibe with me. I’ve had people who vibe with me who weren’t quite ready to come into my program. There is something about the resonance that I get with people where the emotional container that I create. Somehow, there’s some sort of magic that I’m so fortunate to have access to, even in a partnership. It’s not just me sitting here. It’s as soon as I get someone else in my field of influence.

I’ll tell you what my father said. This is very powerful and worth mentioning because my father was the one who molested me. I confronted him in a very heart-centered way from a place of pure love, emotional and spiritual authority. I said, “Are you aware that you did this?” He was drunk and high and all these things. We had a good chat about it. He’s now a Clinical Psychologist who has gone through my content and he said, “Fucking brilliant.” This is a man who doesn’t talk like that. He doesn’t say that because he’s my dad. That meant a lot coming from him because he would be the first to say, “I missed the mark.” He says, “You’re like the sun in a way and anyone who stands in front of you will be impacted unless they come covered up and unwilling. If they just allow it, they’ll get the tan.” I am so elevated by witnessing people allow themselves to own their emotional, spiritual authority. I’m very motivated to get people into the program.

Reach out and have some You Time with Maura and check out her program. With that, I’m going to bring up your chart. We’ll show everyone what this energy is about that you’re carrying. Manifesting Generator 4-6. Let’s start with that. The Manifesting Generator and truly knows what steps to skip. I think you’ve demonstrated that. There’s a speed that you move out. You help other people pick up the pace. You help them manifest. Whatever we do is what we help other people do, typically.

 The 4-6 is the community role model. You are always in forever being called into opportunities with groups, to be a role model to them about how to handle adversity and how to turn lemons into lemonade, as the saying goes, and make use of whatever life throws at you. The 4-6 is a genius at that. The Right Angle Cross of the Four Ways is a very humanitarian incarnation cross. It is the incarnation cross of a healer who helps teams, particularly and leaders of teams, to find their way. You know the remedy that people need when they need it. It’s very much as service energy, this incarnation cross, and a desire to give back to humanity, which I’m sure you’re aware that you do that.

Let’s look at your chart because not all manifesting generators are designed the same. What all manifesting generators have in common is they have a defined sacral. In fact, all generators manifesting and pure generators have a defined sacral. For the manifesting generator, there is a channel from a motor to the throat. The root is a motor, the solar plexus is a motor, the heart is a motor. You have the pure manifesting generator channel, the 34-20. It’s the only purely manifester generator channel. If it were to come from the root, it would do something like that or it would go up like that. One of the motors gets to the throat for a manifesting generator. You have a direct channel and it’s the charisma channel, which I think anyone can see.

However, it comes from your design, so it’s slightly unconscious. You could be unaware of the charisma you have or could have been in the past, and the impact that has on people. This charisma wants to be left to do its own thing and be creative on its own. People are always trying to harness it, which isn’t helpful to you. It isn’t enjoyable for you, for people to harness it. You need your freedom to do things your way. It’s vital. You have the rhythm channel. You’ll set the rhythm in any group. You have gate 14, which is the love of work and prosperity, so it naturally comes to you. Then 46 is the embodiment gate. You’ve got it more than once in your design, which doesn’t surprise me at all. You spent a lot of time doing embodiment.

It’s in the realm of Uranus, which is going to make the way that you do it unusual and unprecedented, highly innovative. Maybe even some people might think it’s weird or strange, the uninitiated, but that’s where that body energy is coming from and you truly are here. I’m going to look at your desk work, to create a new system for people to get in their own rhythm with themselves. The way that you do this is by bringing your message of peace to the masses, peace and forgiveness. There’s a lot of that in your design of being this very joyful and loving negotiator of peace, bringer of peace, and especially to the people that you work with. It’s helping them find peace within.

That’s so funny because I just landed. They asked, “What do you do?” I said, “I help people make peace with their past.” That’s exactly what you just said. I’m like, “That’s it. That’s what I do.”

Your conscious son is gate 33, which is the past. Your brand is about the past. It is about healing the past. 19 heals it and it’s finding the right tribe. The people that come to you go take it a little bit further. Once they heal the path, they then need to find their people. They’re looking for the right people, whether it’s personal and professional, and you help them choose better.

I help them change their broadcast. Suddenly, they’re like, “All these amazing people are showing up.” I’m like, “That’s just you being amazing.” They’re just reflecting it and you’re like, “I recognize you,” and they’re like, “I recognize you.”

Any final words of wisdom for our readers?

No matter what happens or is happening, I invite you to trust that you are exactly where you are supposed to be to learn what you need to learn to get what you’ve asked for. If you need help with one of those things, please schedule a call with me.

Thank you, Maura. This has been a pleasure. Thank you to those of you that have joined us.

Important links

• https://Soulfuleader-academy.teachable.com/?affcode=785188_xdykomrq
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/maura-barclay-neuro-facilitation-specialist-453b974/
• https://www.Instagram.com/soulfuleader/
• Info@Soulfuleader.com
• https://www.Facebook.com/soulfuleader
• https://Soulfuleader.com/effortless/
• Maura Barclay
• Soulfuleader
• Teachable

About Maura Barclay

MAURA BARCLAY has a diverse and unique background that steadily built her expertise and reputation as an authority in women’s empowerment and harassment prevention. She is a retired professional fire fighter, title-winning body builder, martial artist and Therapeutic Yoga master instructor whose teaching experience spans more than two decades. She founded Unbreakable Woman® in 2005 and her book Unbreakable Woman® Compassionate Self-Defense & Empowerment was published in 2013. Working as a fire fighter in Boulder, CO gave Maura access to specialized training which informed her situational awareness acumen. She has direct experience with harassment having left her fire department job due to a poorly managed harassment incident. She went on to spend years traveling around the US teaching instructors embodied anatomy which helped develop the thread between behavior and instincts driven by the primitive brain. Throughout a career in male dominated arenas, including work as an EMT on an ambulance, a film production line producer and a military contractor, Maura gained a unique insight into the culture of male behavior and had to develop strong set of interactional tools be successful in those fields. The keys to navigating these challenges were compassion and a non-judgmental collaborative attitude that became the foundation of every Unbreakable Woman® program. She has presented seminars at such organizations as Starbucks World Headquarters, Fidelity Investments Headquarters, IMF, Gavin De Becker & Associates and many women’s empowerment conferences across the US. She was tapped as an SME to develop and implement an original sexual harassment and assault prevention program for the US Military. She has been a featured interview guest on regional NBC and CBS shows and Radio Overnight America with John Grayson (CBS Radio Network). Maura’s non-profit work includes year-round financial support to the Rape Abuse Incest National Network (RAINN.org ) which provides 24/7 access to assistance for survivors of violence. She also donates her time and her books to conferences and community service workshops.