Do you have a support circle? Those people in your life that you trust implicitly to tell you the truth (even when you don’t want to hear it). The people you can call when you want to rant about something and you know beyond any doubt that you’re being unreasonable, but you just don’t care… it’s got to come out.

The people who don’t automatically try to find a solution for you, unless you specifically ask them for that kind of help.

The people who understand why you’re so disproportionately happy about a single line of copy for your website that you nailed and just need to boast about.

The ones who totally get it when you want to throw your laptop out of the window one moment then switch to “and THIS is why I do what I do”, literally 5 seconds later.

We NEED those people. Probably more than we need any other kind of support in our businesses. Entrepreneurial loneliness is a real thing, but you don’t have to stay stuck in it…

On the podcast this week I’m talking you through why having an inner circle / a support circle is SO important, and how to cultivate the support you need from the people already in your world.

If this strikes a chord with you, you might like to join me inside The Wild Way… it’s a fledgling community, but is shaping up nicely to be exactly that kind of circle…

JOIN THE WILD WAY: https://gillmoakes.com/wildway

On the ReWild Your Business podcast this week, I'm talking to Maria Cussell, an experienced leadership coach who helps high achieving leaders become even more effective by developing insight and understanding to move quickly to action, bringing them more success and fulfilment, both professionally and personally.

Maria spent over twenty five years at Barclays before building a practice of her own, and somewhere in the middle of her story she said something so simple I nearly missed it.

She said that when our real strengths come naturally to us, we assume everyone can do them. So we stop valuing them.

Ooof.

Maria spent years in corporate being told, in various polite and impolite ways, that what she was good at didn’t count. She could walk into a room and connect with anyone, any place, any time. A friend once told her that when everyone else in the business was drawing up strategies to get past people’s defences, Maria just walked straight through them. And yet that never showed up on a performance review, because what got measured was audit findings closed on time and synergies squeezed out of a merger. She was good at the thing nobody was counting.

Here’s what happened next, and I think it’s the part we all recognise even if the specifics differ. She started to doubt herself. Not because the feedback was accurate, but because it was relentless. A boss telling you you’re not hard-nosed enough. A 360 review suggesting the people who love your work simply don’t know what good looks like. Enough of that, over enough years, and you start doing the thing so many capable women do: talking yourself down before anyone else gets the chance. Maria caught herself mid-sentence doing exactly that in our conversation, thirty years on, and laughed about it. Old habits leave a long shadow.

Isn’t it crazy how easily we hand the job of valuing ourselves over to whoever happens to be scoring us at the time. And how rarely that scorer is measuring the thing that actually makes us extraordinary.

The thing you do without trying, the thing that feels too easy to count as a real skill, is very often the exact thing you should be building a life around. And the people who tell you otherwise, the ones measuring you against a scorecard that was never designed for what you’re actually good at, are not lying about the scorecard. They’re just measuring the wrong thing.

Worth asking yourself this week: what’s the thing you’ve quietly decided doesn’t count, simply because it never felt like effort?

There was a line Maria used… “When I coach, I fly”.

Underneath all the values language we throw around in this industry, I love this reframe - not “what do I believe in” but “what happens to my body when I’m doing the work.”

Finally, I ask everyone I speak to on this series the same question: what won’t you compromise on? Most people answer with a value. Growth. Honesty. Family. Maria’s answer was more specific and, I think, more useful. She said she can’t do work that isn’t fun for her. If it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a no.

Uncompromising in the BEST way!

Enjoy the conversation…

About Maria

“I act as a catalyst, enabling people to become ‘unstuck’ and move forward. My ability to hold multiple viewpoints enables me to empathise with the challenges faced by my clients, whilst also allowing me to challenge their assumptions.”

Connect with Maria on LinkedIn HERE.

THE COACHING BUSINESS ACADEMY

Enrolment is OPEN for the Summer 2026 cohort of The Coaching Business Academy...

The Academy is my 12 week immersive program for coaches who are ready to start consistently attracting and enrolling the right clients.

Check out the Academy HERE - if it feels like the right support for you then we’d love you to join us.

If you have any questions whatsoever, you can book a call with me HERE and we can chat it through.

Most money mindset advice sees revenue as a straight line, always climbing, every month meant to beat the last. But when you think about it, nothing alive, nothing that grows, ever grows that way, and I think that mismatch is where so much of our money shame comes from.

In this episode I walk through the four seasons of money: spring as planting and investment, summer as the unglamorous tending with no proof yet it's working, autumn as harvest, and winter as the fallow rest we tend to mistake for failure.

Which season are you actually in right now, and are you allowing yourself to be there?

This episode is brought to you by The Coaching Business Academy, which is starting its summer cohort on the 4th of August.

If you're sensing a planting season coming on, the details are at https://gillmoakes.com/academy, and there's a link there to book a call with me if you'd like to talk it through first.

If I had to start my coaching business again from nothing, right now, in the back half of 2026, I know exactly what I'd do, and it isn't what most newly qualified coaches are doing.

In this episode I talk through the four things I'd focus on before anything else: having real, one-to-one conversations instead of building an audience, getting actual proof from real clients before touching my branding, building one plainly worded offer instead of a whole suite, and thinking in terms of my first hundred days rather than my first year. I also talk about what I wouldn't waste time on, including platform-hopping, waiting to feel ready, and letting AI write content that sounds like everyone else's.

If you're newly qualified and still waiting for your first paying client, this episode, and the free workshop I mention at the end, are both for you.

Mentioned in this episode:

The Natural Order of Things (free book)

Your First Yes workbook

Free live workshop: How To Get Your First Paid Coaching Clients — 21st July, 1pm UK / 8am Eastern

The Coaching Business Academy, Summer 2026 cohort

If you can't describe what someone gets from working with you in one breath, this episode is for you. I'm talking about why coaches pad their offers with modules, bonuses and add-ons (and why it's usually a confidence problem, not a value problem). I walk you through the three things every simple offer needs: format, price and promise.

Have you signed up for my FREE workshop yet?

1pm on 21st July: How To Get Your First (Or Next) Paying Coaching Clients.

Register here: https://www.gillmoakes.com/first-paying-clients-workshop

This podcast is sponsored by The Coaching Business Academy. Summer cohort starts 4th August. https://gillmoakes.com/academy

Your business doesn't become real the day you qualify. It becomes real the day someone says yes, and pays you to coach them...

This episode is about that first yes, and why most newly qualified coaches are sitting further away from it than they need to be. Coach training teaches you to coach. It rarely teaches you to get paid. So you land in the gap between qualified and paid, and start believing the answer is a better website, a tidier Instagram grid, a cleverer funnel.

It isn't. Your first handful of paying clients won't come from your content marketing. They'll come from conversations. It's a proper rewilding move: stripping away everything that doesn't belong so the real work of these early days can actually happen.

If this is your sticking point, come to my free live workshop on the 21st of July, How To Get Your First (Or Next) Paying Coaching Clients. It's a hands-on 90-minute session where we sort your coaching edge, start your list, build a simple starter offer, and I coach you on the conversations that turn into clients. You'll leave knowing exactly what to do.

How To Get Your First (Or Next) Paying Coaching Clients...

21st July, 1pm UK / 8am EST. Free, live, limited places.

Register for the workshop: https://www.gillmoakes.com/first-paying-clients-workshop

Get the Your First Yes workbook: https://www.gillmoakes.com/your-first-yes

gillmoakes.com

Here we go... the seventh and final layer of The Natural Order of Things, the one that really decides everything: Deep Transformation.

Here's the reframe at the heart of this episode. Your job was never to teach, coach, or deliver content. Your job is to hold space while your client does the work only they can do. You can't transform anyone. You can build the container that lets them transform themselves.

The small things, done consistently. Timekeeping, boundaries, kept promises, full presence. The co-creation that turns a perfectly good client experience into one people can't stop talking about.

And because this is layer seven, it's also where the whole framework comes full circle. Exceptional delivery feeds back into every layer before it. It grows your confidence, fuels your courage, and hands you the best marketing you will ever have: other people, telling the truth about what changed for them.

Get the free book, The Natural Order of Things: https://gillmoakes.com/natural-order-book

Download the prompts for this layer: https://gillmoakes.com/217

Come and do this work in community inside The Wild Way: https://gillmoakes.com/wildway

There’s one word that can shift the energy in a room faster than almost any other. Say it to a circle of purpose-driven, creative, soul-led women and you’ll see a collective clenching…

The word, of course, is sales. And I understand the flinch completely, because most of what we’ve absorbed about selling, consciously, but mostly unconsciously, through the whole culture of online business and through the grim experience of being sold to badly, has taught us that it’s something to be endured at best and avoided when possible. Persuading. Scripts. Handling objections. Closing strategies. Getting someone from a no to a yes through sheer pressure and cleverness.

If that’s what sales is, then of course you don’t want to do it. It would be a breach of your values. It would feel like a betrayal of the entire reason you started this work in the first place.

Here’s a dollop of good news: that isn’t what sales is. Not here. Not in this framework. Not in the kind of business you and I are building.

In this episode I'll walk you through what feel good sales look like...

This is layer six of the Natural Order of Things - you can grab the free book, which walks through all seven layers along with the journaling prompts to self-audit what’s solid and what isn’t, HERE

There’s a companion worksheet for this one at gillmoakes.com/216.

If you’d like to do this work in community with other women building soul-led businesses, The Wild Way is open - we gather together next at the full moon on the 30th of June.

https://gillmoakes.com/wildway