Episode 3: Laura Gisborne
0:00 Embracing Transformation for Women Over 40
9:18 Finding Purpose and Focus in Life
20:15 Women in Business
26:33 Hierarchy of Needs and Success Journey
31:40 Women’s Wellness and Empowerment in 3 Steps
36:59 Values, Beliefs, Books and Passion
ABOUT LAURA
Laura is an Internationally recognized speaker and serves as a business growth strategist for leaders in both the private and non-profit sectors. The innovative business model of her company, Limitless Women, exemplifies that companies can be both profitable and purposeful.
To date the Limitless Women community has raised over $700,000 for charities. Through their initiatives, thousands of women and children are receiving regular contributions in multiple countries across 5 continents.
Laura has served as a Guardian Ad Litem for foster children through CASA, Parent Education Coordinator for Family Outreach, Board Member for Habitat for Humanity, The New Peaks Foundation, and the Business Engagement Team of the Pachamama Alliance.
She is the author of the books, “Stop the Spinning – Move from Surviving to Thriving” and “Limitless Women” and has been featured as a guest expert on both CBS and ABC, as well as on the national hit show, “The List.”
Learn more at www.LimitlessWomen.com
Laura Gisborne: 0:00
When a woman is in this season of life, right where she’s again got a little bit of life experience behind her she’s not in survival mode, she’s now hopefully in the place where she’s got a little more autonomy, a little more self-confidence I think that the challenge becomes giving yourself permission to know that.Caroline Balinska: 0:18
Welcome to the Life On Purpose Over 40 podcast, where empowerment, elegance and health take center stage. I’ll be your guide on this thrilling journey to outshine your past self. This is a podcast all about transformation. We’re plunging head first into exactly what health, wellness, style, relationships and career look like as a woman over 40. You’ll be hearing from all the most sought after global trans lasers and experts. This isn’t just about learning. It’s about embracing your inner fierce, fabulous self. Let’s get started. Welcome back to the podcast. My name’s Caroline Blinska and this is the Life On Purpose Over 40 podcast. Thank you so much for joining me and it is a pleasure to have you here over to your first time or, if you’ve been here before, thank you so much for joining me again Today. I have the lovely Laura Gibson with us. She is an amazing person with so much business experience and I’m so excited to have her here today. She’s got over 25 years experience in business and she is going to be talking about passion, why, as women, we limit our beliefs and limit what we actually do with our lives, and she’ll be talking about everything when it comes to helping you create the life that you’re dreaming of and ways that you can actually join in simple ways, so I’m so excited to have her here. She is an amazing business owner. As I said, she has owned nine different businesses, from small boutique businesses all the way through to multi-million dollar wine businesses and a real estate empire, so she has got a lot of great information to give us today so let’s get into it. Laura, it’s so great to have you here. I see that you have done a million things with your life already and you’re quite young and you’ve got a lot more to go. I’m sure that you have got some things. I feel asleep, but you have raised close to a million dollars for charity. You’ve been an author, you have been a foster parent and you’ve got your biological children. How on earth do you have time for everything? I don’t understand. We’ve got a lot in common. You’ve had nine different businesses, I’ve had about 12, I’ve lost count and I think that we’ve both started a young age doing that. But what makes you so driven and how do you have the time for it?Laura Gisborne: 2:31
You know, I think. First of all let me say thank you. Thank you for having me, thank you for the invitation. I would say I’m not as driven as I used to be and I’m not quite as young as I was right, I’m 57 now, I believe. Caroline, in my early years I was driven because I had a desire to prove something right. You know it was more tied into trying to be enough and then what I’ve learned as I’ve been growing and maturing and going on this journey is that that’s not really the best driver. It wasn’t the healthiest thing for me to do so. Now I really look for what’s pulling me forward right, instead of me pushing. I look for what the imitations are and I’m a faith-based person, so I feel like God shows me opportunities. I feel into them, decide if they’re the right match for where I am in life and after I consider what’s important for me and I’m at home in my family, then I can make business decisions. Business decisions, yeah.Caroline Balinska: 3:26
So that’s it. That’s really interesting. It was a question I was going to ask you later on because, just watching all your Instagram posts, watching your YouTube videos that I’ve gone through, and because I came across to you, because I found you through a networking thing, and then I was quite intrigued by your story and also all the work that you’re doing and I had a question for you, but you’ve just touched on it now, so I want to go into that question. You talked about not feeling like you’re enough, and that’s something that I wanted to touch on because I think, as women, we all have dreams and we all have something that we want to achieve when we’re younger, whether it’s being a mom, whether it’s being a business woman, whether it’s being an actress or an artist or something. We all have some sort of dream, but we either forget about it or we choose not to move forward with those things. Why do you think that is? Why do you think women get like that and we get into this sort of worry? Are we enough the way we are?Laura Gisborne: 4:27
Well, I think there’s two different layers to it, caroline. I think that there’s the not enough conversation, right? We call that the poverty consciousness in our world, and what happens in business often is that a woman will be, she’ll have the symptoms almost like being a doctor. She’ll have the symptoms of not enough time right, working really hard and just not finding enough hours in the day. Or she’ll have the symptoms of not enough revenue and she may have what looks good on the books but there’s no profitability. There’s a place where it never feels like there’s enough financially for her to take care of herself, and those are really signs for us that there’s something going on underneath for her as a leader. Now, the second question I heard was why do women take themselves out of the game Like? Why do they have a dream and then decide not to do it? Many reasons right To be in childbirth. We were just talking about being mamas. That’s different. It’s becoming more and more egalitarian, but we’re still carrying the babies in our womb. So we’re the ones who often choose to take the break from our career choice if we decide we want to be mums. I was in law school when I decided to get pregnant with my son, jake, and we were just talking about, who’s now 30 years old, and after Jake had been born, it was interesting because I had a decision to make Do I want to go back to law school and finish, or do I want to go forward with what’s happening here, which was I was in the process of opening my second restaurant and it was really enjoying what I was doing, so it didn’t feel like a give up. It felt like an opportunity to follow what was present in the moment that was more important or a more front of mind. And my husband asked me even years later I don’t remember exactly how many years, caroline, but years later he asked me. He said do you ever feel like you want to go back and finish your law degree? Do you ever feel like you want to be a lawyer? And I said you know, I don’t. At this stage of life, we really need attorneys to represent us who are very specialized in different things in real estate, investing and in different things that we’ve done in retail and restaurants. That’s the piece you know. For me is that I want somebody on my team who’s that’s been their expertise and they’ve got wisdom that comes from experience. I don’t want to try to go back and try to figure this all out again. Got another plan for my life, so that’s what I get.Caroline Balinska: 6:34
Yeah, fantastic. I think that you as a leader yourself and you helping other women understand their purpose. I think it’s really interesting that you are very clear on what you do want to do and what you don’t want to do, because I think that that’s also another thing that we get stuck on is that there are lots of options. You could go and do law, you could go and do these other things, but understanding that, having the drive to stick to you’ve had nine different businesses I’m the same, yeah, but still being dedicated to certain things and understanding that maybe that certain career path or that sort of business opportunity might not be the best one for ourselves, even though it sounds great to have all of these different things. I think that we can juggle a lot of things, but we can also be in a position where sticking to one thing is also important.Laura Gisborne: 7:25
Well, I think that there’s a little bit of a not now concept instead of a no concept. So what I mean by that is that if something comes through, that’s an invitation. I feel like it may be. It sounds like, again, you’ve had multiple businesses yourself. Every business that I’ve owned or started, was it kind of like gave birth to the next business, right, they were just used as an example. We have a tasting room and we sold $140,000 with a clothing in the first six months out of a wine tasting room. So it’s like, apparently we need a clothing store, right? So we went right next door and I’ve got a clothing store. So one business would give birth to the next business, and so on and so forth. When something comes in, that’s a distraction or an invitation or opportunity. What I found over the years that works well for my flow and I think everybody has to find their own is is this a no or is this a not now? You know, often, I think, the overwhelm that kicks in for women entrepreneurs specifically is so many things pulling on us in so many different directions at all the time, different times, right, and life is happening Like we make a commitment I’m going to do this, and then the dog gets sick, or the baby gets sick, or a loved one gets sick, or an elder needs us, or that something breaks the house. I mean like literally whatever crap is happening part of my French is happening, right, life is happening. So how do we stay on track with that? And it’s this place of recommitting and renewing our vows that, you know, really committing to what we said is important to us. I’m a big fan of building our businesses around our lives, not building our lives around our businesses, and I think that that’s a place that is a slippery slip for a lot of women is that they can get very engaged with their business. You know, it’s like a creation for us, right. It’s like we’re birthing this, this gift that we’re bringing to the world, and we get very emotionally connected. And we’ve got to have healthy boundaries. You’ve got to build a business that’s actually providing service without being owner dependent.Caroline Balinska: 9:17
So that’s interesting what you just said. So how would you go about focusing on something? Let’s say, for instance, exactly that we’ve started a business, we’re in a situation where we’re trying to make it work, and then we have, I don’t know, someone getting sick, or you’re in a situation where you have to help someone. What would you recommend to people to do in that situation? How do you focus? Yeah, let’s focus, but yeah, yeah, yeah.Laura Gisborne: 9:45
Well, I think it comes back to how do you live your life Right? I mean, do you live your life with intention or do you live your life on autopilot? And I think, if you’re targeting women who are over the age of 40 for this conversation, it’s not our first rodeo. I mean, this has been around for a while. We’ve had other opportunities to do different types of jobs, not just one thing or another thing. So at this point in life, it’s like where do you give yourself permission to choose? What are your priorities? What does your self care look like? What do your relationships look like? And then, where does the business fit in there? What’s the purpose of the business? Why do you have the business? The way to focus is to really be decisive in shoes, and I would say that we, as a species, just had a great opportunity to try this one on. It’s not even like that. The dog got sick. We had COVID-19 and the whole planet got an opportunity to pause and focus, and there was all these invitations online to pivot, pivot, pivot. I was like, no, don’t do that. Why change who you be? Why change your purpose? Why change what you’re called to do? What’s in front of you. What did you decide that you’re committed to, that you’re going to actually now recommit to and deepen, and the businesses that I saw that really took off and grew during COVID-19, with all the changes that were happening in the world, were the ones that were really clear. They had clean business models that were very simple and they chose to stay in their lane.Caroline Balinska: 11:13
Yeah, that’s interesting. So I find that purpose is something that a lot of women don’t think enough about, so where they’re saying as women oh, and I was just telling you that I’ve been through this, that I’ve just come back after three years on maternity leave, and I was always in e-commerce and I’d done certain things, and how I got into marketing for e-commerce was that I had a shoe label because my feet are huge and I couldn’t find the shoes to fit me, so I started wearing shoe label. I became a cobbler, so, like you, things turn in from one thing to another. And that was just when the instant was starting. We didn’t even like credit cards. Online was a new thing. So actually, in e-commerce at that stage. Then I got into e-commerce and I got into marketing because I was marketing my own business. I had a lot of people telling me how well I did. So I got into e-commerce and marketing and helping other businesses and it moved through. And now I’m in a situation where I’ve come back after three years on maternity leave and I’m thinking what am I going to do that will make me happy? And I thought I could easily go. I saw my company to another company and they said I can come back at any time and work with them. And I was like, okay, I’ve got this opportunity, that would be really easy, but do I want that? And I decided I didn’t want that. And I think that sitting down and I spent a lot of hours. I’m talking to this thing easily easily 50 to 100 hours sitting there thinking out what do I actually want to do with my life. Good for you, and yeah, and I think that I did that because I’ve seen the mistake that so many people have done. I’ve done it as well in certain business. What do you think it is that women need to think about when it comes to Having a purpose, working out what we want to do, working out what works for us and when you say, stick into it. But really discussing what that is. I watched a video of yours which was fantastic, about the hours that we have, and then you go through like these are how many hours everyone has. What are you doing with your hours? Yeah, that was fantastic. So how do we create the life of purpose, not just like having the hours, but then turning that into a purpose?Laura Gisborne: 13:32
So I want to rewind a little bit, caroline, because I think again, there’s multiple questions in the, in the share and in the question right, and I think the idea is that how a woman decides to stay on purpose can only happen after she’s done that soul searching. Right, you said you spent 50 to 100 hours really going deep and really deciding what makes you happy, what brings you joy. A friend of mine, katarina Rando, talks often about how our body is. It’s like a thermometer, right? It allows us to know something’s joyful. We feel energized, we don’t feel stressed out and tired, right, when we’re doing stuff like maybe you know, for me it’s like maybe I’m gonna sit down, I’m gonna be crunching numbers, looking at tax returns oh, not my funnest thing in the world, but it has to be done. But I have great people around me who are actually that’s their expertise. Let them do their thing and then I can look at it gently and know that I’m fully supported there. Um, when a woman is in this season of life, right, where she’s she’s again got a little bit of life experience behind her, she’s not in survival mode, she’s now hopefully in the place where she’s got a little more autonomy, a little more self-confidence. I think that the challenge becomes giving yourself permission To know that you’re capable, you’re sourced, you are resourced, you’re not alone, you can do a business, you can do a career, you can have different things available for you that fall into alignment with your passion. It’s not an either or conversation. I think what I hear often with women that I’m kind of out in the world traveling is the idea that this is what I do for my day job. But I really like to be doing is you know x, y or z it? We have the luxury today. There’s never been an easier time to be in business than there is today. You know the fact. I love what you’re talking about with the internet. I’m thinking about, like you know, we had brick and mortar businesses. We had restaurants. We had one website that we put up in 2005 that we never changed until we sold that business in 2014. Like we didn’t even you know. Like forget what was e-commerce. There was that. You know. There was the internet, but we were really sure. Nobody was so sure what it was or how it was doing. There’s no yelp. There was no social, social proof stuff. The whole world’s changed for us. So I think it’s you have the opportunity. I have a friend who I just was recently talking to has a Network in, based in India, that has several million women in her network and I just think, like how cool is that? You know how that you could actually have an opportunity to really create impact on a beautiful level is a very humble person. She’s not, you know, a celebrity. She’s just a person like you and I and she just had the right message at the right time To reach the women that really needed to hear it. And I think that that’s you know, that’s available for each of us. When we’re aligned with our purpose, we have congruence. When we’re trying to do something because we think we should or we’re doing it because we need to make, money Doesn’t always line up the same way.Caroline Balinska: 16:22
Yeah, I’m listening to you and I’m like that’s exactly. Yeah, it’s so true and it’s. I think it’s important that we remember that. And you spoke about a book that you love. It’s called multiple streams of income. Yeah, and I just want to get some ideas, because there’s a lot of women out there that are working in 95.Laura Gisborne: 16:41
Well, I think you’re you’re referring to a video that I have out there about like kind of the five books that every business woman should read. This is the one you’re talking about. So you know that the first book that comes before multiple streams of income is really around thinking grow rich. And I think that this goes back to again what’s what’s in our consciousness? How do we see ourselves? Are we at one and are we at peace with with God and understanding that everything we need is actually available if we’re willing to allow ourselves to receive? That’s a bigger issue, right, a bigger question of our tapping into our prosperity consciousness. What’s what’s available for us? Multiple streams of income is a book written by Robert Allen. It is a great book if you’re interested in real estate, investing or Multi-level marketing. You know direct sales type business or you’ve got a side hustle. You know a lot of women now I have in the gig economy have really cool businesses on the side. They work their day job, they do some other things on the side to express their creativity that brings revenue to them. The concept behind multiple streams of income is that you’re not dependent on just one stream, and I feel like more and more women when they find their flow, when they find their you know not only the internal game, the external game they start owning their resourcefulness around finances. There’s things to learn, right, and I’ll just say this because you had said it. There was an invitation to give my, to give a free gift, right. So I have a book called stop the spinning move from surviving to thriving, and I can tell you that today, as a person who’s financially dependent, is Extremely different than the way I was raised, extremely different than my family for generations really struggling financially, and I think there are things I learned. I decided that I wanted to learn About money. I want to learn about what’s the difference? I want to learn about wealth consciousness. There were a lot of things that helped me heal along the way. Personally, this happens to be one of those things. Professionally, I’ve done really, really well as a real estate investor for many, many years and I had to learn how to do that. You know I had to go to class, make the investment, do the first things that I was terrified of doing, invite, you know, a Bank to give me a loan when I was a really sure my credit was maybe good. I do go through all the steps, just like anybody else would in the world, but in stop the spending. The second chapter of that book is called overflowing abundance and I talk about you know, I talk about being really, you know, 19, 20 years old, working at a bank and writing a check on a Wednesday, taking it to the grocery store to cash Because I knew it wouldn’t clear the bank until Friday when my paycheck came in. You know, I was making four dollars and eighty five cents an hour at the time and I needed money for gas and what I was doing was illegal and thank goodness, just like you know, they didn’t come after you for the makeup charge, for the taxes. Nobody’s come after me for writing those checks. The checks cleared, I paid my bills, but it was that place of living on so much like on the edge. You know, really like how do I have money to pay for gas, to get to work? And so when you see someone today who has it looking like it’s together, it’s easy to think like, oh, that’s easy for them to say I want everyone to know that. You know, if you’re a woman who’s seeking to find financial independence, the resources are there for you. And you know, my book is just one one of those places to look and learn about kind of the habits of making money Be the easy part of your life. I think that again, there’s way more to your purpose than how much money you make.Caroline Balinska: 20:03
That’s fantastic and I’ll put that link for the free book into the show notes. So if I can get hold of that, yeah, I think. Thank you. I think everyone will be very grateful to get a read that Thanks. What if? Three things holding women back from starting a business?Laura Gisborne: 20:20
confidence always. You know we’re talking about this kind of thing like that. Can I do it? Who am I to do it? Kind of all those little monkeys on our back that they come along with it. And I would say you know the way to address that is is there one other person out there who’s doing what you want to do? Can you see someone else being successful in this business, in this industry, in this career? If they can do it, you can do it too. And Roman’s, and built in a day, right? I mean, it takes us time, and so there’s. There’s a place of having patients with the process, but also getting clear about business. The purpose of business Carolina, my opinion, is to provide a service to solve a problem. All businesses at their heart there’s a human that has a problem or business that is a problem. So I was like I have a better widget, I have a better way to fix that. Those two things come together. You have an exchange. We call it money, right. The services provided. Money comes in. It’s just a dance, right? It’s literally at the heart of business, whether you’re hungry, whether you need to go see a doctor, and it’s just business, right. So if you’ve got the idea of what you want to do with your business. Don’t let you be in the way, because there are people out there that need the service you provide. Right, so that confidence piece that we get out of your own way. And the way to do that is be thinking about how many lives can you change right, like, what can you do to make a difference? I think the other thing that happens for women often is that they’re around, they’re surrounded with the wrong people. You know people around you are the people they say I don’t remember who to give credit to for this, but they say we’re kind of like the sum of the top five people that we spend time with right. So If you have grown up, like I did, in a family of origin where there was constantly a money struggle, there was constantly you know the shame run money. There was all these issues. If I go to that source of that environment to get my education for a different way I wanted to be the people in that space are like, hey, you’re crazy, that’s never going to work right, because their belief in the reality is that life is hard, money is impossible to make. If I only had money that I’d be a better person. Guess what? I’ve been rich and poor. You’re still the same person you know you can have to be. It’s like this is life right. So I think that that’s the thing is be very careful, be protective of who you spend your time with. I will tell you that the most successful women that I know and I mean when I measure of success is not only financial freedom, but time freedom and the emotional freedom to really live their purpose and contribute in the world, always protective of their time. We all get the same 24 hours. You’re talking about watching the video, you know. I mean like that’s got to be. The thing that comes up often for women is how am I going to afford this? I don’t have time to do it. You all have the same amount of time as I do, as Caroline does, not to feel guilty about, but what is taking your time, that you’re giving your time to? That may not be serving your bigger vision. Yeah, that’s the piece. I think confidence is one of the things. I think the environment who you’re around is the piece number two. And then I think the third one is really again, how are you spending your time if you’re committed to something? And I have a friend, felicia Cersei, who says this. I was trying to give credit where I hear great quotes. She says if you want to know what someone’s committed to, look at their checkbook and look at the calendar and it shows like where do we spend our revenue, where we spend our money? You know where, where do we spend our time. It’s very evident what you consider important, because I’ll be in your calendar and I’ll be in your shop.Caroline Balinska: 23:38
Very, very true. I’m listening to what you’re saying. It just reminds me of conversations that I’ve had with past clients when I, before I, went on maternity leave and women who were sitting there frustrated I can’t take my business to the next level. It’s not going to the next level. And then the simple question of who cleans your house. Oh yeah, I don’t have time to do anything. Some cleaning my house all the time. I noticed in your video. I had to laugh. You mentioned, like all the things that you do, how you spend your time, and you didn’t go into things like cleaning. That was not one.Laura Gisborne: 24:14
All the women that are not getting the financial freedoms that they want.Caroline Balinska: 24:18
Cleaning their house is always what. I have found, something that has to come up from them all the time as an excuse. I have to clean my house. I don’t know if you notice that, but I notice that with a lot of people.Laura Gisborne: 24:29
Yeah, I think I think again.Caroline Balinska: 24:30
There are a lot of people out there that that love to clean and it turns them on. It does not turn me on.Laura Gisborne: 24:41
I mean it just doesn’t. And I am even as a young woman, when I was making it was making about twenty five thousand dollars a year when I had my first real job right to work for a job, right to work for an insurance company I hired someone to come and clean my house. You know, I mean that’s like what I spent my money. I spent my money, my rent and my car payment, my insurance, you know the stuff and had someone you know come and clean my house, probably at that point because I was single, living alone, maybe once a month or something, but you know so that it would be clean. But no, I just, you know, and I’m not, I’m not saying that a clean environment is not important. I think it’s very important. Your environment really, really indicates, you know, it supports you. Clean environment, a healthy environment, supports you. But using cleaning as an excuse to not do what you’re really here to do, that you’re uniquely designed to do, is not in my no, I think as well.Caroline Balinska: 25:28
So that’s always one of my first things they get a cleaner, get that task out of the house, because they out of your life, because then that’s at least one, two hours a week that you can concentrate on business. So I like to use with so many kids more. Now I want to ask you keep on talking about money, not being the driver for success. What is success to you? What do you think a woman should look at as being success?Laura Gisborne: 26:01
I think it depends. I think it’s really personal, caroline, I really do. I think it’s a very personal journey and I think you know, we know, I was the first person my family to go to college and I took a class on psychology. What I wanted a community college right, they started community college, went to state school, went to law school. I can tell you that what stays with me today in my work and I’ve been really blessed to be all over the world speaking and leading and communing with women in different cultures and just really this incredibly juicy work that I get to do today Is that there’s a hierarchy of need. There’s a guy named Abraham Maslow that wrote a book all about humans and their hierarchy of needs and then basically he says without me butchering up, to keep it super simple is that the bottom rung of this kind of pyramid is survival mode, right? So as I was on a meeting earlier today talking about being in Africa and walking with the women there to the river to gather the water that they needed to put in these great big barrels are so strong my daughter and I were there, put those barrels on their back, walk back to their house and then they were going to the river. This is about five, six hours a day. I mean, it’s not a simple thing to get the water to boil to feed their babies, right, and so that’s that like base level survival, right, that’s your sufficiency, your food, your resources, as far as a roof of your head, a safe place to live, running waters, that is. It’s not the same thing. Education is elected, by the way. It’s not. It’s not a given. So that survival mode is where most people are. What happens in the developed world, where you and I live, is that we have access to resources. We have things like access to free education, we have things like access to Running water and air conditioning and heating, and you know just this place of a little bit of ease public transportation. But we’re not aware, because it’s all we know, that we’ve skipped the survival mode, right. So that’s where the poverty consciousness comes in. It comes in with this idea of like there’s not enough, because somebody’s been telling us where we’re too short or too tall or too white or too black or too fat or too skinny, whatever. The too much is is the flip side of that point. You’re not enough right. If you just have more, did more, you’d be more right. That’s a made up thing. So for a woman who lives in sub Sahara Africa, her measure of success is that somehow she creates a, you know, a vehicle for means and hopefully she’s able to do that, maybe through a healthy means of a job opportunity or a business where she can generate enough money to come up with $150 a year so that she can send her child to school. Because what we know is that education changes everything. Education absolutely changes my family and I’ve watched it all over the world. When a child has an opportunity of education, they now have possibility. They can have a different opportunity than their parents can have. Right, no different in my family. So the piece around success for her maybe like, hey, I was able to send my kid to school, I was able to feed my child. The thing of success for you maybe, hey, I’ve got this beautiful opportunity to reach people with my message and I feel like I’ve got a story to tell and my journey has been pretty fascinating and I want to inspire other women to tell their journey. Right, that might be your measure of success. For me, when I reached the next level of mesos hierarchy, is kind of survival. And then where does the other, than you reach this, this top level called self actualization, which comes after a lot of therapy and after a lot of personal development, work right, know yourself and who you are. You got confidence and you think pretty much do anything right. I lived in the space of this is fantastic. And I started being asked to speak and lead and I wasn’t a speaker, they had not written any books, it was nowhere on. My purview is like I think you got the wrong person. Why’d you go and get that to my friend Debbie? She would love that. That’s what she’s looking for, right? But I kept getting the invitations. I kept in the nudge and that’s really how I feel God speaks to us. Care. Let me feel like this is opportunities that come and you know it’s kind of like a knock at the door and then they keep coming and they keep coming and if you’re in alignment with it, you’ll put your toe in the water and go. And what was in my, what was in my opportunity that I couldn’t see, that I couldn’t see that makes sense, was the opportunity to not just be about myself, was the opportunity to build a business that’s a philanthropy first, business that can empower women in the private sector, women like you and I who have businesses and Create a vehicle where business owners can connect with people who actually are struggling for access to resources. And what happens there is, those who need resources get it. But guess what happens for the women who are the business owners? They get to give. There’s a space beyond self actualization. It’s kind of like you went to the pyramid, another pyramid. With this way. There’s a space beyond. That is, in the giving zone. Right where we get to give, we have businesses that get to create sufficiency and provide for our families and From the profit, from the surplus, we get to actually have business, be a force for good. We get to gather the opportunity to help give an education to a child who may not have it otherwise. Right to help give meals to people who you know our children of God. They deserve to be fed. So that’s the space that I think success is for myself and the women I hang out with. But we all had to start down here, right you had to figure out how to get through the survival mode and get to be aware of the other in the community, to learn about ourselves and get confidence and then move into the space of we get to give.Caroline Balinska: 31:21
Yeah, it’s beautiful and it’s fantastic, and I think that it’s. I think that you’ve explained in a really nice way that gives Other women the understanding of what that ladder looks like for them. Yeah, but next for them, wherever they are on that journey at the moment that you know They’ve got somewhere to go next. So that’s fantastic. Yeah, I want to move on to the quick round and ask you questions. And what are three steps every woman should? Every woman should take as soon as possible, whatever it might be? Three different steps.Laura Gisborne: 31:55
Okay, so You’re giving me a really broad like Okay, well, yeah, okay. So the first thing I will say is take care of your health. I mean, I just if you don’t have your health, you have nothing. And you know without getting to the stories behind the stories that my husband was diagnosed terminal 2017. I was sitting in a hospital and they were telling me he’s gonna die. I’m gonna take him home to diet. He might die, might die this weekend. I immediately went into, like what you know? Obviously it’s shocked in the system and who? Who can help me with this? Right, like, I didn’t automatically just assume that because this doctor was telling me it was over, that was over. When we have a healthy body, it’s easy to take it for granted. Right, we don’t in pains. I don’t really know what’s happening, so, which, it’s easy to take that for granted. I will tell you that your spirit, your essence, your purpose, your beingness Requires a physical form to be in, to enjoy life. Right, it’s our taste, our you know, our sense of touch, or you know we get to touch another person. All of this joy, all this yumminess comes If we don’t take care of our body. None of that’s gonna matter. Okay, we’re gonna miss out on so much richness of life. So I would say, don’t wait for the wake-up call, don’t wait for, you know, a death, divorce or disease to understand that you only get one body, so please take care of your body. The second thing that I think every woman needs to do she’s own her financial freedom, and that is a journey you know, again, depending on where you come from, there’s a lot of inner work to do. That’s actually, in my opinion, more important than the outer tactics. The outer tactics are not that difficult. That’s why I said if you want to read, you know chapter 2 of my books off the spinning. I’ll tell you exactly how. I grew up in a family of violence and poverty and sexual abuse and all the things, the messaging that Was very negative and would have kept me in that environment as a normal. You know, I moved right out of my family’s house into a relationship. I was living with a man who beat me on a regular basis and that was my normal to live in a domestic violence situation. It wasn’t until there were women who saw me when I couldn’t see myself, who raised a hand and said hey, come here, let me talk to you. Things can be different, right? Just again, for the grace of God and for the women who were really angels on earth, who saw me as a young woman and helped we move to a place of healing so I could go up my own ladder, right? One of those places is around financial sufficiency, and so financial sufficiency and financial independence Does not mean you have to have millions of dollars in the bank. It’s really not the secret, right? You know, the secret is to live within our means and to really plan for the things that we want to have, but it does not rocket science and it doesn’t take a lot of years. Every day that someone can start this, if they haven’t already done, it is the right day, right? If you haven’t worked on your finances, today’s the right day to work on it. You know it’s okay right, say anything with your health if you haven’t taken good care of yourself. Take care of yourself and go watch my video on self-care. Get asked about this a lot and I think it’s important, you know. Take care of this body. It’s very, it’s a precious gift for you. And then I think the third thing every woman that I have ever met needs to do is to be more kind to herself, to be more generous, you know, to really be patient with the process. I believe if we’re alive and breathing, god is not done with us yet. We are here for a reason. We’ve got opportunities in front of us. Be patient with the process. You know we can see what we can see. I feel like we’ve been shown things at our capacity. Be gentle, and the same way you might be gentle with a child or gentle with a pet, be gentle and more kind to yourself and you’ll see that you know you start to blossom in that self-love.Caroline Balinska: 35:35
Lovely. Those are three things that, and you’re right, take action immediately. They’re fantastic, yeah, good. What is one word that will describe your future?Laura Gisborne: 35:47
Oh, it’s so good. What’s one word that will describe my future? Um?Caroline Balinska: 35:51
expansive Fantastic yeah.Laura Gisborne: 35:55
Yeah.Caroline Balinska: 35:56
I’m going to see another Instagram. Thank you, yeah, I just.Laura Gisborne: 35:58
I, I’ve gone through, I, you know, my own health journey over the last few years and I just really had this amazing opportunity to tune up some things and I just Feel like, even though I am advocating for health and I’ve been, you know, I’ve been a yogi for 15 years, or more than 15, now 17 years Um, I’m a really active person and I had some genetic things, you know, that that needed to be addressed, and so I had. I had the luxury of choosing, at the luxury, caroline, of taking a step back and having. I had four surgeries in seven months this last year, uh, you know, and I was in bed for almost two months straight. So it was pretty, you know, a big thing for a person like me who loves to go. Um, but I knew that this, you know, this was coming into my life as an opportunity. It really was. It was an opportunity to heal some things and to really move forward even stronger than I was before. And, um, yeah, I just I’m fascinated to see where God takes me next.Caroline Balinska: 36:48
Fantastic, we are too. We’re looking forward to it as well, yeah, and on that note, we’ll put your link to your instagram in the show notes so people can follow you from our show notes. And what is one of your core values or beliefs that has shaped your actions, that you have made your decisions in?Laura Gisborne: 37:07
life, okay, so this is. This is a big juicy question and I’m going to tell you why. Um, I held a retreat in april. I invited. I’m working on another book right now, called the lead life. It’s really about my journey with faith and I thought I’m gonna bring together about a dozen of my girlfriends. We’re gonna go to the mountains and just have a conversation about. You know their journey and they came from all different traditions and I wanted to see you know, where did they learn to trust themselves? Where do they find that inner guidance? Where did they have their own communion with God? And what happened this? Why? I’m telling you the story is that on day one, I started with an exercise about core values. Now, this was supposed to be a like hey, what are you value? Let’s write it down. No, no, no, no. Here’s a little circle of life. Let me tell you what I, what I do as a gratitude practice every day Is give gratitude for the things that I value. And what that does, caroline, is it strengthens my experience, right.Caroline Balinska: 37:59
So before.Laura Gisborne: 37:59
I get out of bed, I’m actually like already fired up above all the goodness in my life, right, which is literally the way I start my day, and the women that my 12 girlfriends would end up being 19 girlfriends. Um, they would not get off. But I kid you not. For a day and a half, that’s all we did was talk about values and why they matter and what’s happening here, right. So so most people will say, when you ask them, what should they value? Do they value love? They value health, they value their, their careers, they value their families. You know, this is this is the thing we have a whole exercise about how to name those and have them be powerful Motivators to like, move you forward in the world in alignment with your values. Um, so I have seven of them. I have seven core values that I practice. Um, gratitude around every single day. I have to answer the question, but you know there are probably, like many of people, without giving you, you know, making this a 25 hour interview. You know, my values are around health. They’re around abundance. They’re around connections and relationships. They’re around the opportunity I have to make contribution in the world. They’re around gracefully growing. You know, being kind to myself some of the things I’ve shared with you today. And I had to add a value when I created my own circle of life, which was many years ago. I had to add a value about having fun, because I had a lot of leftovers from my childhood that you know. Work was valuable, but fun wasn’t allowed Right.Caroline Balinska: 39:23
So now I value adventure, fun, that’s my next question is what’s the fun fact about you?Laura Gisborne: 39:28
Oh, my goodness sakes, what’s a fun fact about me? So a fun fact about me is that when I was a child, I always wanted to be a ballerina. Okay, and at age 27, after I gave birth to my son, jacob, who is now 30, so he did math in 57, I started taking ballet classes at a community college and I thought it would be like relaxing and anything but, but I took ballet lessons for 10 years Fantastic, yes, and I loved it. And when it was time to be complete, it was time to complete. It was time for me to move into yoga, but it was. You know, something that people don’t know about me.Caroline Balinska: 40:05
That’s really nice. So because ballet is very, very good for your body, so that would have kept you very, very toned and very strong. Fantastic. And what’s one of your passions outside of work now?Laura Gisborne: 40:20
Oh, what’s my passion outside of work? Now? It’s an interesting question because my, my work is so, so crazy, cool. You know what I mean. Like I created what’s grown into now for the brand of limitless women as a vehicle to really marry my, my love of giving back and charity work with my knowledge of building private sector businesses. You know I had like two feet in different worlds for many, many years. While I was building my, my private sector businesses, I was always volunteering and on profits, which we see in my bio, and then growing and growing, growing and my contribution there. So to have a business where those two things are married is like heaven on earth for me. And the thing I love the most is to be with my children. You know the fact that my adult children choose to spend time with. My daughter just moved here. I moved to Texas and she followed me. She lived in Los Angeles and she followed me and bought a house here and then my son just got accepted to medical school here in San Antonio. So to get to spend time with them as adults, the fact that they want to spend time with me, is just you know what a cry, it’s just really, it’s such a blessing in my life.Caroline Balinska: 41:26
That’s really sweet. I have one more question for you and this last question. First, I want to tell everyone I did mention it before that YouTube video that is about your. It’s on your channel on YouTube. It’s the five books that you recommend. Do you have one of those? I’m going to put a link to that actual video as well, because I thought it was really interesting. Do you have one book that you recommend, or is that all five that you recommend?Laura Gisborne: 41:53
Well, it’s a great question. I’ll tell you something interesting because you’re, as a person who you know you’re a marketing whiz, I can tell you’re all your presence, your branding is just gorgeous, caroline, I want to tell you that again. I think I told you that in an email, thank you. What’s interesting for me is that when we sent that out, we do a free gift on Fridays. It’s called free gift Friday freegifridaycom. When we sent out that video, it was like our highest click-through rate of anything that we’ve like here. I am teaching all this stuff about business and all these good things about life, and all people want to know is what books to read. So I’ll leave you. I’m glad that it worked and people are excited about it. That particular video is around business books, right, and I would say the most, the most impactful book and I feel like I say this you know I learn from the Bible constantly. I learned from stories and pieces like that, so I would say that’s probably the most impactful book for me. The most impactful life-changing book that is in the more in the natural right, more in the regular world, if you will, more than in the spiritual world is a book written by a woman named Louise Hay called you Can Heal your Life, and someone handed me that book when I was young and anorexic and in a domestic violence relationship and it coincided with another woman reaching out and helping me go and find counseling that I could forward on a sliding scale. The timing of it was just so very life-changing and catalyzing for my life and I think there’s some simple principles that just opened my mind to what was possible for life to be joyous and fun and free. And you know I’m a typical overnight sensation. I think, if you fast forward, that was that was 20. So let’s say you know 37 years ago. But that book I think I bought, you know hundreds of copies at this point for friends and family and just said, hey, you can heal your life, it doesn’t have to be so hard. I think that’s probably the book I recommend every woman to read if she’s struggling with what’s next.Caroline Balinska: 43:50
Fantastic. Okay, that is fantastic, and there’s so much insightful information, thank you, and I think, after so many years in business, of course you’ve got so many more things that I’m sure you can share, so I’d love to get you back here at another stage. Thanks, and you did mention a few things that you’ve got some stuff coming up, so I’m sure the next time we speak, you’re going to have some more information of new things that you’ve got in the works as well, always, Always You’re definitely someone that sits around doing nothing.Laura Gisborne: 44:17
That is no no, no, and even when I was sitting around healing you know it was an interesting thing because I, you know I was healing there was, there was something in that right Giving myself permission to do that. It’s beautiful. If someone wants to connect with me, I know you’re going to share our LibetlessWomencom. It’s easy to find me online. The free book Laurafreebookcom is pretty easy. Free gift Fridaycom. You know we’ve got great little URLs. Come be in our playground. You know just amazing women based community of women supporting women, and so, however, we can lift you up. It’s always our pleasure to do that.Caroline Balinska: 44:50
Definitely, I’ll put all your show, all your information, in the show notes. And, laura, it’s fantastic having you. Have a wonderful rest of your day and thank you for joining us, and we’ll definitely have you back on the game soon. Thanks, caroline.Laura Gisborne: 45:02
Thank you.Caroline Balinska: 45:03
Thank you everyone.