# A New Era: The Story Behind The Lucy Gernon Show

Lucy Gernon (00:00)

Hello and welcome to episode one of the Lucy Gurnan Show. I cannot believe I’m even saying this, but if I haven’t met you before, you are very, very welcome. My name is Lucy and I am an award winning executive coach from Carlow in Ireland and I work with women in senior leadership roles to support them to lead with more confidence and live with more balance. But the journey to where I’ve got to today has not been easy and I wanted to share a little bit about my story today.

 

and some tips and mindset hacks to support you so that you realize that nothing is impossible. You can achieve absolutely anything you want to in this one and only life. And that’s what I just want for every single person who is listening or watching this here today. So first, I just like to say that I am recording in the beautiful Amplify Studios in Carlotown. So if you haven’t actually seen the studio yet, I advise you to go and check it out. I will link the link in the show notes. So.

 

Let’s get into what you can expect in season one. So the angle in this season is we’re talking all about confidence in business and the confidence to chase your dreams, to set really big audacious goals and go all in. I remember seeing Matthew McConaughey on this reel on Instagram and he was asked about the best piece of advice he had ever received, which is something I asked my guests too. And you’ll be hearing lots of great advice.

 

And he said, whatever you do in life, don’t half ass it. Don’t half ass it. And it really stuck with me because I realized for myself for so long, I was playing small. I was half in because there was fear and imposter syndrome holding me back. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live a half life. I don’t want to live with any regrets. So here’s your invitation to really use this

 

season to learn from all of the incredible women that you’re going to hear from.

 

You’re going to hear from the amazing Enya Martin, who is a global sensation Irish comedian, who is also an incredibly astute businesswoman. You’ll hear from one of my long term friends and business mentors, Deirdre Martin, who is an expert in her field in neuromarketing and building brands that actually scale businesses. You’re also going to hear from a fantastic lady I know called Emma Butler, who is who left her nine to five to start her own interior design business.

 

But there was so much that got in her way in terms of mindset and confidence. And she’s going to be sharing how she went from where she was to where she is today as an award winning entrepreneur. You’ll also hear from the incredible Jess Kelly, who is a fantastic luxury artist who supplies art all over the world. She is known for her metallic prints. She is known for supplying some celebrities. And she started out her career in marketing in the corporate world. And she’s going to be sharing her journey.

 

You’re also going to hear from Katie McPhee, who is an award winning executive coach for women and leadership. And she’s going to be sharing her story. And she’s also a really good friend of mine. So we have lots and lots of laughs in that show. And in between all of that, you’re going to hear from myself. I am not here saying I am better than anybody or that I have all the answers because believe me, I absolutely don’t. But I do have a lot of tools in my toolbox that I wish I knew earlier in life.

 

And that’s what I’m going to share with you today. So before we get into the tools, I just want to share a little bit about my story to set the tone so you know who I am. So like I said, my name is Lucy and I am Irish, but I have clients all over the world from the US to UK, to Australia, to Dubai, to Europe all over. But the road to get here has not been easy. I grew up in the 80s and

 

I actually have ADHD, which was undiagnosed until last year. And anybody who has been diagnosed as neurodivergent knows that as soon as you get a diagnosis, your whole life makes sense, your whole existence,

 

way you spoke, the way you thought, why people said certain things to you, it all just kind of made sense. So as I look back at my life growing up, I was the eldest girl of three.

 

We grew up in the 80s. We didn’t have a lot of money. You know, there was a lot of unemployment around at the time, like a lot of families. And, you know, my parents did absolutely everything to support us in our education. Like I got emotional thinking about I am actually getting emotional now. This is called flooding ADHD stuff. ⁓ How much they sacrificed for us, you know, and I never felt good enough.

 

I always felt other people were better than me. I certainly didn’t ever think that I could become female entrepreneur of the year and build a global award winning business because who was I to do something like that? So I have a master’s degree in science. I studied biotechnology and I ended up in the pharmaceutical industry for the majority of my career.

 

But I actually started out in a solicitor’s office, right? I worked in law for a while. I worked in food and beverage. I even worked in Guinness sampling Guinness kegs up in St. James’s Gate in Dublin and some other food factories as well. And then when I moved into the pharmaceutical industry, I ended up running a microbiology lab there and working in quality operations, sterility assurance, and then moving into capital projects and finance management and stuff like that in that industry.

 

And while I really, really, really loved my career for so long, I don’t know, like I was like a square peg in a round hole. I am a really good problem solver. I love to solve problems like so many scientists and analytical people out there, but I wasn’t analytically minded. I’m more creative. I am more people focused. And because of like my ADHD that I know now, I really had to study people to understand how to survive in the world.

 

So I became obsessed with human psychology. I became obsessed with understanding myself because for so long I was a victim. So if you’re multitasking, please come back to me. If somebody told me no or I felt rejected, I was a victim. I would get upset. I would cry. It was all poor me because I didn’t know that I had the power to make change.

 

I was putting my future, my emotion, my feeling into other people’s hands. And when you realize when something there was a moment for me when I actually ended up being really, really, really depressed and I was on anti anxiety medication, I was on antidepressants for many, many years. I was overweight. I was really miserable and I really struggled with my mental health, really struggled. I’d been to the doctors, all of that. But back in 2012, which is a long time ago now,

 

I discovered professional coaching and that’s when the game changed for me. I learned about mindset. I learned about how I became me, how you became you. You have a story. I learned how to control my saboteurs. I learned a lot about neuroscience and all of these mindset tools that completely changed my life. And in when I led teams in the pharmaceutical industry, I was leading teams from

 

site teams, global teams, like older men, Gen Z, trying to get projects together, trying to get deadlines done. And because I had all these tools, I was able to set really good boundaries. I have always been rigid with my time and you know, I’m a mom, my kids are the most important thing to me in the entire world and my husband. And for so many years, I sacrificed myself, my health, my time, family moments, all of those things for work.

 

And I know so many people do this, but I want you to know that you can lead. You can have a really, really successful career, even at senior leadership level, even as a CEO, as a founder, you absolutely can. But you’ve got to have the right tools, the right strategies and the right support around you to let it be easier. So that’s exactly why I founded my company, 360 Leadership, and we offer leadership training, executive coaching in lots of companies.

 

And then I have my baby offer, which is my flagship offer as part of that, which is called 360 Leaders Club, where we have designed it for the time poor woman who hasn’t got time to be spending all day and off sites, who wants tools she can actually implement to save her time, to make her feel more confident and to reach her potential that actually work. Right. I found a lot of courses I did were time, were theory heavy, whereas I’m all about practical tools and frameworks that I’ve designed myself.

 

There’s so many of them and I’m going to share a couple of them with you today to actually when you’re in that meeting and somebody makes you feel small, you have a tool to be able to speak up or when you want to say no or you want you know you need to set a boundary. But your inner critic is saying, no, you need to help this person. You need to work late. I can give you tools to be able to do that. And I’ve helped hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women in leadership at this stage who have literally gone from working 70, 80 hours a week wanting to leave.

 

to getting promoted, to getting leadership awards, to being an inspiration in their organizations. I’ve also worked with female entrepreneurs who are starting their businesses or who are scaling their businesses who have never had teams before and have not had proper leadership training that is designed for real world practicality. And that’s what I love to do. So just to give you a little glimpse, I suppose, for you, the reason I share that with you is because

 

I think a lot of people sometimes look at me as, you know, really confident and I get this all the time. How are you so confident on camera? If you saw the first video that I ever did, you would absolutely not believe it’s the same person.

 

I want you to know that confidence comes when you take imperfect action. Confidence doesn’t come before you do the thing. Your brain needs proof and evidence for you to feel confident.

 

So, for example, I a lot of the time I’m asked around industry Q &A’s or events. Like I speak a lot of events with hundreds of people. It doesn’t faze me in the slightest now. Why not? Because, number one, you make it all about your audience and not about yourself because nobody really cares about you. Everyone is so consumed with themselves. They’re not really looking at you. The second thing then is that, you know, it’s

 

It really is about you communicating something that you’re passionate about. If you are, you know, if you’re an expert and you are expected to be on a Q &A and you’re worried that you might say the wrong thing, please trust yourself. You get you’re all in your head. You’ve got to just come into your body, connect inward with your inner self, with your your inner knowing and just trust the voice inside. Because when we look for external validation.

 

I remember one of my coaches saying this to me.

 

We’re not actually looking for external validation. We’re actually looking for the opposite. We’re actually looking for people to tell us that we’re wrong, that we’re not good enough, that we’re not feeling the blank enough. So if you look externally to validate what’s possible for you, what you feel about yourself, you’re always going to be disappointed. Why is that? Tip number one, because of your core beliefs. So we all have

 

self-limiting and empowering what I call empowering core beliefs. And when I understood this, like my whole life changed and there’s a lot going around on Instagram and all of that about this. So hopefully lots of you know, but if you don’t essentially under the age of seven, you are trying to make sense of the world around you and you’re trying to stay safe. So your brain’s number one function is to actually keep safe in the world.

 

So when something happens, we need to give it meaning because our brain needs meaning so that it understands and can logically rationalize what’s happening. So if you were growing up in a really chaotic environment, let’s say like I’ve had clients who’ve had like 10 siblings and, you know, one parent and they’re living on a farm and, you know, very, very chaotic environment. Lots of things going on, lots of personalities.

 

You you need to survive in that situation. So you will either rebel and be like the rebellious one or you might be more submissive, which was me. I was like the compliant child. Now, I didn’t have that kind of childhood. But we all we all become who we are to survival. So if you have a limited self limiting core belief, which is like I am not good enough or other people know better than me, which is definitely one of mine that I still work on it still rears their head.

 

It’s because that was a way for you in your childhood to survive. So maybe my sister knew better than me, maybe my brother, maybe my mother, my father, because you look to them for guidance. Or maybe it was something completely different for you, like around perfectionism shows up for a lot of high achievers. Maybe you grew up in an environment where there was mess everywhere and your way of surviving was to be perfect. But these are all things, self-limiting beliefs.

 

that hold us back. And while I used to think, well, I’m a really, really high achiever and I’m successful and hard work is what gets you places. I wore that like a badge of honor. And I know so many women I work with do as well because it gives us meaning, it gives us status, it gives us purpose. But what’s it all for if you’re not enjoying it, right? So these things can be really good in a sense that you might be thinking, well,

 

I want to work hard like I have achieved that way. And that’s perfectly fine once it’s not affecting your health, your relationships or all the things that are really important to you in life. So my invitation for you today is really to have a think about what’s one belief you hold about yourself. And it’s usually I’m not fill in the blank enough. OK, what’s one belief deep down that you hold about yourself?

 

that you know is holding you back. And what might be possible for you if you were to make an empowered decision today to begin to work on that belief? So how you can do that is I’m going to give you one tool and then we’re going to wrap up the episode because I wanted this to be quick and actionable.

 

Once you identify your belief, you need and it’s really good to work with, like a coach one to one or a therapist on this, depending on your childhood. Right. So once you identify what that belief was, there’s an exercise you can do and you can even get a pen and paper and do this yourself where you sit in silence with yourself or with the therapist or coach. And you ask yourself, where did that come from?

 

What memories are springing to your mind about where that thing came from? Instantly, you’re going to say something like, this thing happened in school. It’s really silly. Or such and such said this to me when I was eight. It’s really

 

They’re the moments. It’s those small little things that as an adult, you know, are insignificant, shaped you as a child. So I had a client once who

 

used to play tennis and she was in school. And even before that, she never thought she was good at sport because her family were very competitive and she wasn’t a sporty one. And she was always told that. And she was in school one day and she told me she was playing tennis with a tennis coach and her friends and she she was they were hitting the ball against the wall and she heard them laughing behind her. So she assumed that they were laughing at her.

 

because she was crap at tennis. And after that day, she told me she was like she was in like 13 or something. She never played tennis again. And we did an exercise at one of my retreats where we look back at childhood memories and what she realized in adult looking back is there was so many reasons they may have been laughing. They could have been laughing at each other. They could have heard something funny. Somebody else said she.

 

didn’t have any evidence to support the fact that they thought that she was bad at sport. And she realized as an adult looking back, that was never a thing. That was my assumption because we make assumptions as humans to save energy in the brain, which I’m not going into today. That was her assumption. And for 30 years, she didn’t play tennis and she used to love it. And what was amazing is she messaged me a week after the retreat to tell me that she had taken up tennis lessons again and it got her back into health and fitness. So

 

That’s just a really simple example of something seemingly small to you as an adult. As you look back on a child, you’re like, that might have impacted me. Trust me, it did. And it’s all those micro moments that build and compound as a child over time because you’re forming these beliefs about yourself that are compounding. OK, so the one thing I want for everybody listening to this show is to a couple of things. Number one, you are good enough and you always have been.

 

No matter what that inner critic says to you, it is all bullshit. Number two, you can achieve absolutely anything. Nobody is more special than anybody else. A title doesn’t matter. How much revenue you generate in your company does not matter. Like how you look, how tall you are, how skinny you are, how fat you are, how beautiful you are, how you don’t like your nose. It doesn’t matter.

 

We are all souls living inside a meat suit. We are living inside a human body. You are not your body. OK, you live inside a body. And we all came into this earth exactly the same way as my granny used to say, or my granddad used to say, what did he used to say? Something like, bare arsed and naked. Right. And we all leave in the same way. In a box. So why is somebody, why would anyone be better than you? You have the same abilities. Yeah, you have a different brain.

 

But you can achieve anything you want. that’s what I want you to really, really take from this episode of the show. So I know we got deep today, but I’m in a deep kind of place and I just feel like hopefully this message landed with you. I would love for you just to really reflect on, know.

 

What would be possible? If you weren’t afraid.

 

What might your life look like in 12 months time if you were to really decide no more? I’m setting that boundary. I’m having that conversation. I’m going for that job. I’m starting that business. Do not have any regrets. Ronnie Ware wrote a book called The Top Regrets of the Dying and the two top regrets were number one.

 

I wish I had lived a life true to myself and not worried so much about other people. And the second thing is I wish I hadn’t worked so much. One man said to her, I remember every single soccer practice I missed, every single family event. all I remember is that I had a meeting. There was something for work. I don’t remember what the meeting was. I don’t remember what was so important. But I’m lying here on my deathbed remembering.

 

the times I missed in life. You don’t need to do that. You’re still here. You’re still alive. Seize every day. Go and reach your potential and have a lot of fun along the way.

 

So that is it for this week’s episode. We started deep. started reflective. We’re to be having lots of laughs in our next week’s episode. You can look forward to the amazing Ene Martin, who is an Irish comedian, a global superstar.

who juggles two businesses and she is going to be giving us an exclusive behind the scenes glance at her life, her business and how she juggles it all. So until then, I hope you’ve enjoyed the first episode. Come back next week and I’ll see you then. Bye for now.