In this raw and honest episode, I'm sharing why I've been quieter than usual lately and what's really been happening behind the scenes.

I've been going through a profound identity evolution over the past year - one that felt too big, too spiritual, too mystical to share while I was in the middle of it. If you've ever felt caught between who you're becoming and what you think you "should" be doing in your business, this episode is for you.

• 
  
• Why I chose silence over diluting my experience during this profound transformation
• 
  
• The internal battle between strategy and soul-led work (and why it felt like a wrestling match)
• 
  
• How trying to diminish your truth creates friction that stops you from moving forward
• 
  
• Why that friction isn't a problem to solve - it's information your system is giving you
• 
  
• What happens when you choose to honor the evolution of who you're becoming
• 
  
• The unexpected doors that open when you trust yourself more than you trust what others expect
• 
  

Journaling Prompts:

Where in your life and business are you showing up as a diminished version of yourself?
Where are you diluting your truth?
What friction are you experiencing that might actually be information about what you've outgrown?

Work With Gill
Ready to explore what's next for you? Book a Next Best Move call to get clarity on what you need to be focusing on.
https://www.gillmoakes.com/next-best-move

Connect with Gill:

Instagram: @gillmoakes
Substack: It's A People Thing: https://gillmoakes.substack.com/
Website: https://www.gillmoakes.com/

About the Podcast:
ReWild Your Business is the podcast for women doing the work their soul intended. It's about cutting away what doesn't belong to allow what does to thrive, finding simplicity in your work, and bringing the whole of who you are to the table.

If you've ever felt like you're drowning in systems, strategies, and 47-step funnels while the actual work you love takes a backseat, this one's for you...

The online business world has sold us a version of entrepreneurship that's unnecessarily complicated. The complex funnels, intricate launch sequences, social media strategies that require a degree in digital marketing, business models you can't explain without a flow chart. None of this is an accident.

The complexity isn't a bug in the system. It's an entire business model. Someone sells you a complicated system, it doesn't work (or it kind of works but feels exhausting), so you think you're doing it wrong. You must need the advanced training, the next level, the missing piece. And they've got you for another course, another certification, another mastermind.

Building a coaching business comes down to one sentence: Be visible where your people are, talk about what you do in a way that makes sense, have conversations with potential clients, make offers, deliver excellent work, and ask for testimonials and referrals.
That's it. Everything else is optimization for a business that's already working.

The Essentials

• 
  
• Clarity on who you serve and the transformation you create
• 
  
• A simple way to reach those people (ideally your own platform)
• 
  
• Consistent visibility and content that adds value
• 
  
• Actual conversations with potential clients (we're in a trust desert thanks to AI)
• 
  
• A clear offer that solves a real problem, priced appropriately for the value you create
• 
  
• Brilliant delivery so you can ask for referrals and testimonials
• 
  

Everything outside of these six things is optional.

This connects to identity work. Complexity sells because most people are operating from an identity that doesn't trust the simple path. If you fundamentally don't believe you're the kind of person who can build a successful business through straightforward means, through your actual talent, real relationships, and genuine value, then complexity feels necessary. It becomes armour, proof that you're a serious business person.

But the minute you step into the identity of someone who creates value, builds relationships, and makes offers from genuine authority, that complexity starts feeling like a chain around your neck.

Everyone who's built a successful coaching business did it through relationships first and systems later. Not the other way around.

Your Rewilding Move This Week:

Look at your business. All of it. The tools, systems, strategies, platforms, frameworks, social media channels. Ask yourself: what here is actually serving me versus what am I serving?
If you're spending more time managing your business infrastructure than actually building relationships, having conversations, making offers, and creating value, you've probably been sold complexity and now you're hiding behind it.

The antidote isn't another solution. It's subtraction.

Ready to Strip Back the Complexity?
If you're ready to build your business from a place of genuine authority and do the identity work around becoming the coach who trusts that it can be this simple, apply for a Next Best Move call with me. It's an hour of one-to-one time where we'll figure out what you actually need and what the simple version of your business could look like.
Apply Now: https://www.gillmoakes.com/next-best-move

There's panic in the coaching industry. Will AI replace us? Are we all about to become obsolete?

Here's the reframe: AI hasn't made coaching obsolete. It's made it absolutely essential.

The Truth About AI
AI is extraordinary. You can get a complete business strategy in 30 seconds, a marketing plan, step-by-step frameworks for anything. Information that used to take years to access is now free and infinite.
But people aren't flying... they're drowning in information, strategies, and plans they're not executing.

It's No Longer an Information Gap, It's a Transformation Gap
People don't hire coaches because they don't know what to do. They hire coaches because they're struggling to become the person who actually does it.

AI can give you the blueprint. But it cannot hold space for the messy stuff in the middle, that deeply human process of becoming someone different.

AI can't sit with you in discomfort, mirror back your stories, or call out your excuses with loving directness. It doesn't witness your transformation in the same way.

You Don't Change Because You Got Better Information
You change because another human believed in your potential before you did. Because someone created space where it was safe to let go of who you've been. Because someone asked that one question that cracked you open.

That's coaching. No algorithm will ever replicate the power of human witness and intuition.

AI Has Made Information Free - Transformation Is Everything
Mediocre coaching, repackaged information and generic cheerleading, is absolutely replaceable by AI.
Deep transformational coaching that sees the person behind the pattern? More valuable than ever.
The world doesn't need more information. We need brilliant coaches who can guide people through the transformation they need to use the information.

AI isn't coming for your coaching business. It's raising the bar for what coaching needs to be.

~~~

Apply for a FREE 60-minute strategic session with me where we'll cut through the noise and identify the single most important action for your coaching business right now. This isn't about more information - it's about the right action at the right time: https://www.gillmoakes.com/next-best-move

This week I'm calling out something I'm seeing everywhere right now in the online business world, and honestly, it's feeling like an epidemic. Coaches are hearing they should differentiate themselves by being vulnerable, so they're sharing their struggles, their breakdowns, their trauma in real time. And look, it works at first - engagement goes through the roof, people respond, you feel seen. But here's the problem: they end up building their entire brand around their worst moments.

Every post becomes a wound on display. And then they can't figure out why they're attracting clients who are drowning, not clients who are ready to actually do the work and move forward.

When your brand is built on unprocessed trauma, you're positioning yourself as a peer in struggle rather than a guide through it, and that fundamentally undermines your authority.
There's a massive difference between real vulnerability and performance vulnerability. Real vulnerability is when you're sharing something you've processed and metabolised. You're offering wisdom, not an open wound. It feels clean because you're not searching for validation, you're genuinely serving your audience's transformation.

Performance vulnerability? That's when you're sharing trauma because it gets clicks and comments, when you're still in it and you need people to tell you you're brave. It's extractive, not generous.

So here's my invitation: stop sharing trauma in real time, audit your content to see how much centres on pain rather than insight, and reposition your brand around transformation instead of empathy. The people who truly value you don't need you to perform your pain, they value your wisdom, your authority, your frameworks because you're on the other side and can show them the way.

Mentioned in this episode:

This is the LinkedIn post I mention about my late husband:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gillmoakes_its-7-years-ago-today-that-my-husband-phill-activity-7143208724856270849-BFL-?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACuEtlUBCBw8uMiKIFcrgf3Kt-Gpw6nq80o

If you'd like to explore working together, book a call with me here: https://go.oncehub.com/alignment-call

Your modesty isn't making you more likeable - it's making you invisible to the people who desperately need what you offer...

While you're busy staying humble and worrying about looking like a dick, someone out there who needs you, can't find you. Or they find you but don't believe you can help them because you're playing small.

What This Episode Covers
We're tackling imposter syndrome, the resistance to "bragging," tall poppy syndrome, and all the cultural conditioning that keeps you making yourself smaller.

The Big Ideas
Confidence vs Arrogance:
A. Owning your expertise: "I've spent 10 years learning how to solve this exact problem. I've worked with dozens of clients who've got results. I know what I'm doing and I can help you."
B. Being a dick: "I'm the only person that can solve your problem. Everyone else is s**t."

One invites people in. The other pushes them away.

Imposter Syndrome Reframed
Imposter syndrome is a refusal to integrate your experience into who you are. Your clients didn't pay you for luck - they paid you for your expertise. When you refuse to own that, you could say you're not being humble, you're being slightly dishonest.

What Your Future Clients Need
They're scared, uncertain, investing money that feels like a stretch. They need confidence in you. Your confidence gives them permission to trust you. Your belief that you can help them creates space for them to believe in their own transformation.

Four Ways to Own Your Expertise

1. 
   
2. Talk About Results - Show what happens because of what you do
3. 
   
4. Be Confident in Your Messaging - Stop using "I think" or "maybe" or "it's just my opinion"
5. 
   
6. Be Specific - Specific truths sound like expertise; vague claims sound like b******t
7. 
   
8. Own Your Perspective - Say "Here's what I've learned" not "I think this might work"
9. 
   

Key Takeaways

• 
  
• Your modesty is not a virtue if it's keeping people from finding you
• 
  
• Your imposter syndrome is a refusal to integrate your experience
• 
  
• Your fear of being "too much" robs your future clients of the confidence they need
• 
  
• The people who need you are looking for someone confident and certain
• 
  

Ready to Do This Work?
If you're ready to do the identity work around becoming the woman who has the business you want, let's explore working together. I've been doing this for a long time. I'm good at it.
Book a call: https://go.oncehub.com/gillmoakeschat

00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:37 This Week's Topic: Owning Your Expertise
04:39 Understanding Imposter Syndrome
08:41 Overcoming Tall Poppy Syndrome
10:47 Steps to Own Your Expertise
15:06 The Identity Shift: Becoming Your True Self
18:16 Conclusion and Call to Action

For most of my life, I genuinely believed I wasn't creative. Like, hand on heart, I would tell anyone willing to listen that I didn't have a creative bone in my body. And I really believed it.

Why? Because to me, creativity meant one thing: being able to draw or paint. And since I can't do that (trust me, this isn't false modesty – I literally cannot draw to save my life), I wrote myself off completely.
But here's what I've finally realised: I've been using the wrong definition of creativity my entire life. And in doing so, I've been denying a fundamental part of who I am.

So, here's what I'm sharing with you in this episode:

• 
  
• The narrow definition of creativity I carried from childhood into my business
• 
  
• How I finally recognised that the way I think, write, and solve problems IS creative
• 
  
• Why this isn't just about creativity – it's about the identity stories we tell ourselves. The stories you might be telling yourself that are keeping you stuck ('I'm not strategic', 'I'm not good with money', 'I'm not a natural salesperson'...)
• 
  
• How your business will only ever be as big as the identity you're willing to claim
• 
  
• The loop that's running your life: identity determines actions, actions determine results, results reinforce identity
• 
  

Here's the truth: Your business will never outperform who you are. If you're keeping yourself inside a restricted identity – some clinical, small version of you – your business will never outgrow that.

This week's journal prompt:
What story are you telling yourself about who you are or who you're not? And where did that story come from?

I bet it came from somewhere outside you. Someone else's definition. Someone else's standards. Something you decided once, years ago, based on limited information or one bad experience or comparison to someone who does it differently.

Pay attention to who you actually are when you're not trying to be who you think you should be.

Let's connect:
Drop me an email at info@gillmoakes.com and let me know what came up for you when you listened to this episode. I absolutely love getting those messages – they honestly make my day!

And if you're enjoying the podcast, I'd be so grateful if you'd hop onto Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and leave a five-star rating and review. You wouldn't believe the difference it makes to the reach of the show.

Mentioned in this episode:

Unapologetic Retreats - we gift women the time and space to explore what’s possible for them, and be inspired to take action, unapologetically. (https://www.unapologeticretreats.com/)

Girls That Get S**t Done - a roaring, global network of seriously creative female bad asses that are shaping the world of design, marketing, business and brand. (https://www.girlsthatgetshitdone.com/)

Listen now and subscribe on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Your favourite podcast platform

00:00 Introduction and Happy New Year!
00:27 Embracing Creativity: My Personal Journey
02:17 Redefining Creativity and Identity
04:13 Challenging Limiting Beliefs
05:45 Recognising and Owning Your Creativity
09:25 The Power of Identity in Business
16:16 Breaking the Loop: Identity and Actions
17:08 Reflection and Journaling Prompts
19:01 Final Thoughts

In the first episode of 2026, I'm sharing five deliberate choices I refuse to apologise for in my business. These include not being present on all social media platforms, my pricing, saying no to unaligned opportunities, not always being relatable, and working long hours.

Yep an eclectic little bunch of insights this week - let's start this year as we mean to go on and get clear on what we're not going to apologise for!

Tell me what that means for you: info@gillmoakes.com

Want to explore working with me this year? Schedule a call: https://go.oncehub.com/alignment-call

00:00 Welcome to Rewild Your Business 2026!
01:09 Unapologetically Authentic: Embracing Your Business Choices
03:01 Social Media: Quality Over Quantity
05:08 Valuing Your Worth: No Apologies for Pricing
07:11 The Power of Saying No
10:11 Relatability vs. Transformation
14:28 Passion Over Balance: Embracing Long Hours
16:51 Final Thoughts and Reflection