Mary Gooden shares the 3 Non-Negotiables | DFS 311

Jennifer, welcome to Destin for success.

I'm your host, Jennifer Takagi, and I'm very happy to introduce

my friend Mary Gooden today. Mary and I met in the summer of

2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana, a magical, amazing place, and I

can't believe it's taken as long to get Mary on my podcast. Hey,

Mary, welcome to the show.

Hey, I thought you were going to say summer is 69

but I'll do the summer. I'll do the summer of 2023 I don't know

why it's been this long. Hello, Jennifer, thanks for having me.

Thanks for allowing me to be my most self expressed person. It's

a pleasure to be on your show,

and you are extremely expressive, and you

have a very interesting journey that has brought you to this

point. And our conversation can go anywhere you want, but I do

kind of like your backstory a little bit on how you ended up

here?

How in the world did I end up here? Oh gosh,

there's so many stories, really. But I want to lock into the

truth of the matter, and I believe this for all of us

listeners alike, we all have a story that really matters, and I

think that each part of our experience during these stories

are just activations to get us to. You might call it your

highest timeline, your most abundant self, financial

freedom. And for me, it started as a panic attack, really just

my body went into to a shutdown mode because I was, like most of

you might understand or remember or still be locked into doing

too much, trying to do too much and be too much, always looking

for the reason Why I'm not successful, or why I'm not where

I want to be, or, worst of all, why am I not where the neighbors

are? She has

Keeping Up with the Joneses.

Jones's, you know, she certainly does make it look

good, and I want to I like that you said that because that's

kind of at the point where I was my friends adored that we had

all the things my husband, my husband, really, my husband at

the time was we were the Joneses. We had the dogs in the

cars and the big house and the swimming pool and two children.

I like to call it the American dream, but now that I have a

global audience, they're like, Well, you could call it the

Australian dream, or the European dream, or the Canadian

dream. It's that does that dream that really becomes our our

desire, or what we think is our desire to achieve results or

success that we've seen somebody else achieve. So my body started

really panicking in my mid 30s, right? You could call it a

midlife we'll call it a midlife conversation. I don't think that

it was any kind of terrible experience, but at the time, my

body, my heart, started doing the out of control, the panic,

and I quickly realized, like, this is not how I want to live

my life. I am. I don't want to be medicated like they gave me

Xanax that would last, that would put an elephant down, and

I didn't. I just didn't want that. I had two young daughters.

They were eight and 12, and my husband was in the military. He

was on in and out with the military, so I was like a single

mom, working 80 hours a week. Now I know you get that. I know

that work weeks are 40 hours, but when you're in the the

Career Zone, it often feels like you never stop thinking about

it. So I like to say I was working 80 hours a week.

Sometimes on Sundays, I'd go in and and get ready for Monday.

Like, I need a day to get ready for Monday. And you relate to

that Jenna were like, oh

my god, gotta prep for it. Gotta be ready for

it. Yep,

you always gotta be ready for it. So panic took me

over. I had already aligned with the modalities, for those of you

that love to talk from that soulful place of yoga and

meditation, but I just wasn't embodying the practices in my

body my heartbeat was telling me so took me four years, four

years to come to one of my three non negotiables, which is daily

connection. What? Why are you doing this, and what are you

gaining from it? And when we don't ask ourselves that

question, we'll get stuck on the roller coaster of the Joneses,

because we're still in comparison mode and we're trying

to compare our. Somebody who perceives to have this life of

grand success, but unless it's something for me or for you or

for what I believe, unless it is a soul inspired passionate

doing, it is not success is not so easily found, and that's what

I've learned. But so number one I always advise people is like

daily connection. It should be like putting pants on in the

morning before you go to the office or or the neighbor's

house, unless you got different neighbors, right? This might be

like, we're all going out front pants. But right, that became

and what it is, because I'm getting this question, where i

What the heck is daily connection? It's becoming a

loving witness to yourself, actually hearing what you want

you know when you're driving, and I don't know why I'm

speaking to people that might still have a job where they go

to work, but when you're driving to work, and you're like, I'm

tired of driving to work. I'm tired of getting up this early

in the morning, and you kind of, we kind of just pass these

things off as, oh, there you go again, bitching and moaning, and

that's not being a loving witness to yourself. In fact,

it's complete opposite, and most of us are still wrapped in that

place of that's just you being negative, or that, you know, we

just get we we just criticize ourselves. So becoming a loving

witness to myself, I'm going to shoot right all the way to

success, just for a minute. So you'll stay with me. Supported

me and creating a six figure business in 12 months time, a

virtual business, an online business, a global business, and

that business, what is it? You know? What is it? What is it is

in publishing, but not traditional publishing, not

three dimensional publishing. You might have heard it as it's

a hybrid publishing, but it is soul inspired publishing, where

we share our very non fiction life experiences as inspiration

for someone else. And if I would have never become a loving

witness to myself, I would have never opened my body, up my

mind, up my heart, up to receive that level of success based on

my soul's inspiration, based on being Jennifer. And I talked

about this before pre show, being fully self expressed, and

so I am. So yeah, self expression, full self

expression, will make you money, or will lead to your point of

prosperity. It will walk you right to the very front door if

you want it to be red or blue or purple. You know that dream home

to your most successful and sustainable life. And so that's

what panic did for me. From panic to purpose. I like to tell

it as yes, there is about a decade in between that time, and

I'm not going to say that. I don't believe in overnight

success, so I don't want anybody to put any boundaries in their

way, because you can't do it overnight. The more that you

become a living, loving witness to yourself, the more you will

find that, yes, you can shift and change things overnight.

You can and I, you know you're you're speaking

my love language here all the way around. And I want to go

back just one little bit for my own personal journey to tie in

here, when you're talking about the dream, the desire to reach

success, but might not have really been our dream, and for

me in my entrepreneurial journey, July of 2024 will be 10

years since I left my government job and became an entrepreneur,

and now I've had multiple iterations of myself, how I want

to show up, what I want to do, and I'm now at the point where I

believe that all the paths I've taken like have come together to

fruition in a really awesome, beautiful way that is going to

serve me well for many years to come. And the reason that's

important is every coach I hired, everybody I worked with,

put me on a path, but in actuality, it wasn't the path I

wanted to be on. And so it took a long time, and I I woke up one

morning, I had a. Meeting scheduled with a man to help me

with some marketing and languaging stuff. And it was

just, you know that the idea of download, which I had never

heard of till I met somebody who was a spiritual person, I was

like, What on earth is it download? For the rest of us who

aren't in that realm, a download is just like an inspired,

brilliant idea, and it's often called a download, because it's

downloaded from the universe, from source, from God, from your

higher self, whatever your belief system is. But I had that

moment, and I woke up and I was laying in bed, and thought, I am

stepping away from hardcore leadership development training,

and I'm going into the Woo. I'm going into the spirituality. I

am going, like, I read Akashic records. I'm going to do that.

That wasn't enough. So I learned holy fire Reiki. That wasn't a

lot of I learned Body Code, Emotion Code, belief code, and

now it's like, wow. I just learned High Performance

Coaching, which is the beautiful vessel to hold all of it. So,

like we you can be an overnight success, and you can also take

10 years to get all the pieces that you want to put in that

flower base and arrange it. So, you know, it all comes together.

But I love that full self expression will get you success

and money and the most successful and the most

sustainable, sustainable? Yeah, I love all of this because,

I mean, think about it. Think about sustainability

for a moment. The more I'm pretending, the less sustainable

everything's going to be. I'm not going to be able to sustain

it. Because when I'm done pretending that I like purple

and I start liking pink, everything that I've just

created, it's not sustainable.

I kept being told, you need to go you need to

work with CEOs. I'm certified in dis, behavioral profiles, change

management, like all kinds of stuff, because I love that

stuff, and I love talking about that stuff. But girlfriend

really did I want to walk into a corner C suite executive and

tell them how they were screwing up stuff, and this is how to do

it. No, that's a hard No. Can I do that? Yes, but what I do it

best is when they show up on my door instead of me seeking them.

Isn't that fun? But it not has how as I started to

unfold and really started listening like I really want

this, I really want to walk in this direction. And, no, I

didn't just burn everything to the ground every time. I mean, I

am a phoenix.

You have done that, but you don't have to do

it now. You don't have to do it every time. But you have,

you know, what I encourage others is you just

have to be willing to start listening, because it doesn't

require us to burn it down every time, when we actually take make

a practice of listening every day, because then that, that

whole idea of hurry up, some of that fades away, because I'm

starting to tune in. And then, like you said, Jennifer, you

start get these. You get these inspired invitations from the

universe, from God, from source, from your own mind, from your

own heart. And that's what those little, those little things in

in you are, you know, stop doing that. You hear your inner voice.

Your inner voice is really there to support you. When you take

the criticizer out of it, when you stop beating yourself up,

when you forgive yourself and all that becomes a loving

witness. Like, yeah, I got married at 17, and yeah, I

thought it was going to last the rest of my life, and yet, at 22,

years after, I decided, like, Oh, we're going to do it, you

know, I want to go chase my soul's desire. Everything

changed, everything shifted, and I ended up divorced. I ended up

with custody battles. I hired the most expensive lawyer on his

dime. I'm not, I mean, I'm pretty smart, but, you know, I

just, I had to go through all these experiences, and I was

really raw about it, like I was up in God's face, like, damn it.

Send me somebody who knows how to walk through this. Send me

somebody who can, who send me a coach, right? A coach Jennifer,

or a mentor that's going to try to walk me through it in a way

that doesn't fit well, God never sent that universe source,

whomever you like, to relate to. All I kept getting back was you

be the mentor. I'm making you the mentor. And so I started

listening to that I you know, this is many years ago, so I

started stepping in as the mentor because I got the

download that said, You, you, and the downloads come, or the

inspired invitations come when we're connecting and being a

loving witness to. Ourself. Otherwise it's just somebody

else's dream. Somebody else is telling you what to do, somebody

else's plan, especially in the entrepreneurial journey, because

it's like the first thing, like, I don't know how to do this.

I've got to hire someone. And then everybody's in your face,

like, did you hire someone? Because we certainly don't

believe in you. Did you hire someone. So I did it. I ended

up, you know, I leaped the net appears. The net appeared about

six, six years later, about a decade from the time that they

put me on Xanax. Four years later, I sold the home. I spoke

to my husband, my husband, at the time, he was all on board.

We moved to New Orleans, I decided to chase my dream of

owning a fitness club and opening a yoga studio. That was

what was really wanting to be part of other people's wellness

journey. And I already had the modalities, I already had the

yoga, I already had the Reiki. So it just made sense. Like I

was I thought, I'm retiring. Finally, I'm going to do what I

want to do. And he was a year and a half from his military

retirement. So in my head, it all made sense in his head. Oh,

my God. My, my, my wife of 22 years has lost her mind, and she

has sold everything that we work so hard for. I In essence, and

again, not everybody's relationships shift like this,

but I in essence, was coming on to my soul's journey, really,

truly, deeply honoring it, and I wasn't giving myself a no for an

answer anymore. I was a military wife of 20 plus years, not a

complainer, not a criticizer, I just took it. I took the

paycheck we got. We bought the big things with it, right? I

followed along until, until my body was like, No, it's your

turn. And oftentimes, when you do this with your relationships,

you might see this. I talk a lot about this on my podcast. Shine

your soul light is when I change everything changes, and lo and

behold, that whole 25 year experience was not a

disappointment. In fact, that 25 year experience is what helped

me create that six figure income as a brand new entrepreneur in

12 months. You know why? Because when somebody came along and

said, share, will you share your story in this multi author book,

it's a global project. I heard the word global because the

downloads from the universe were like bigger audience. Mary, more

people need to hear your meditations. More people need to

take your yoga class. More people need to experience your

retreats. So when this woman, this who later became my

publishing mentor and taught me everything that I needed to know

to create, this said that I was like, I don't have a story, and

the universe is like, yes, you do.

We started this conversation. Why don't you tell

us how you got here? Yeah, everybody has a story of why I

yes you do,

Mary and

and then, as I wrote it, it wasn't right then and there. And

then I, I wrote the story of my divorce. I wrote the 20 I wrote

a chapter on my panic to purpose, on my 25 year

experience in that part of life as a corporate carnival.

Whatever lover at the you know, I love my career because it paid

me money and it gave me this house, but my body didn't, you

know, my body was like, this is not this is not your experience.

But I wrote a story of that whole journey and about I wrote

another story in another book about my modalities, yoga,

Reiki, finding your soul's journey through yoga, meditation

and Reiki, or something to that. So four months later, I did it

again. Eight months later, divine destiny, publishing, or

publishing on purpose, really was born. I realized at that

moment, now I'm turning things around. So stay with me. That

story was the very access point to my six figure service. So now

that's that really is how I look at it. Every experience is a

gift to inspire someone else. It really, truly is. And when you

can view it as a loving witness, you will quickly realize these

doors that open. And I really will say that the only reason I

believe that I spent 25 years serving someone else's dream is

so that I would have a story to share that would then reveal my

own dream. And it would fund my own dreams, and it would allow

me the freedom, not only to fund the the dreams that I had and

beyond, but to help other entrepreneurs, other business

owners, other leaders, coaches and mentors, other people really

activate attuned to and align with their own dreams, and then

also open the six and seven and eight figure doors, or the the

retirement door that they always want. I mean, we all have those

things that we want to experience. I want to pay off my

mortgage, done beginning of this year. I want to, I want to

travel all the time, done partly because I met Kimberly Crowe,

and she said, she said, One day I travel full time, and my

little heart was like me too, me too. You know, what would it?

What would it be like for you to to be able to do that? So this

is becoming the loving witness to ask yourself, what would it

feel like to pay off my house and be a loving witness and say,

What? What? What? What would be the easiest way to feel better,

to retire to love my partner more? You know, these are the

things that becoming, and this is just my one. I have three non

negotiables. We won't get into the rest, but if you want to get

into the rest, you'll, you'll find a way to to reach me, and

I'll also hope to to invite you to receive a gift from me, maybe

in the show notes about three of the affirmations I used in my

little book here. Yep, that actually I spent over that

decade using the words not of criticism, but of encouragement,

and that's why I wrote these affirmations out. But yeah, to

ask yourself these things, not on the fly, not after the day

that was like the stressed out day from hell. Instead of

saying, damn it, I'm ready to retire, that you could actually

be in a place that you could sit back with a cup of coffee or a

tea or whatever and say, What does it feel like in my body to

retire? What? What would be the easiest way for me to take a

step towards this, paying off this mortgage or traveling or

whatever you want, you know,

so it's, it's that that's taking that moment

to be quiet. Because if you, if you don't take the moment to be

quiet and be still, you can't hear the message. And I have a

story, and I shared it on various episodes and platforms

about the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, and I was sitting

at the kitchen table quietly. I worked in the Murrah Federal

Building, and I was sitting at the table very quietly, and the

message was very clear, stay home. Take care of yourself. And

I did. And less than two hours later, you know it, it all came

together. Had I not been quiet, I wouldn't have heard and I you

know, you were part of the corporate carnival. I love that

term terminology. I think it's so cute every time you say it

for a number of years, but I suspect that there were lessons

learned that have propelled you to where you are today. So

sometimes we're a supporting character in somebody else's

dream, somebody else's story, but then when do you get to be

the starring role of your life and your show? I would not give

up my government career for anything. I learned a lot. I

helped a lot of people. I don't even want to think about how

many hundreds of 1000s of people benefited from the work that I

did and the programs that I oversaw, and so I'm super glad

about that. But you know what? Bam, when I walked out that

door, I was thrilled and never looked back. So it's like how to

how to be happy and settled with all of it. This has been like an

awesome conversation, Mary, I always love hanging out with you

and your positivity and optimism and beautiful airy fairy way of

of looking at things and seeing things. And I say airy fairy

lovingly, because I think that's a super fun term.

I love that you had me. I think it means a lot too.

I know that we're coming to a close that that you can say

that, and I can say that too, Jennifer, that I wouldn't change

any part of it. And again, becoming that witness to

ourselves helps us get to that place where we say, I find I

learned as an Executive leader, how to how to manage and run and

access those amounts of money, even though they weren't mine,

right? I knew I learned how to do it, so I love that too, that,

you know, we can say that like, I wouldn't change it. I wouldn't

change anything so and I wouldn't change. Use the airy

fairness of me like I wouldn't change anything about any of it

for me to be fully self expressed is for me to walk in

sovereign success.

Well, we'll wrap it up with that, Mary. It's

been a delight. We will have information on connecting with

Mary in the show notes. Unless you do, you have a quick link

for people to get you.

Can you believe that I have a link right here

from my I'm going to give you my free gift of those, some of the

very powerful affirmations that I used to shift myself into my

full self expression just that little chatty. I gotta open my

screen up a little bit more to get the chat box. I think

I love it. Mary always brings such insightful

things to our conversation. So I'm so happy that I had you here

today.

I think that the best way is just going to www

dot. Mary Gooden, M, A, R, Y, G, O, O, D, E, n.com, and you can

do the forward slash a a gift. Or if you forget that part,

you're still going to get it. If you go directly to my site, it's

going to pop up and you're going to be like, Oh,

me, please. Yay. Thank you, Mary, it's been

a delight. Bye for now. I'm Jennifer Takagi, and I look

forward to connecting with you soon. You.