Tapping Into our Intuition to Guide Us in Business and Life with Nikki Gingrich
Welcome to episode 74 of The Determined Mom Show. This is Amanda, Ted, and I have Nikki Gingrich here with me, and she is a mindfulness and meditation coach for busy and overworked moms.
She helps moms to find peace within the chaos, and we all have a lot of chaos. Literally, we can’t make the chaos go away, but we can find the piece within it. If we could make the chaos go away, that would be a huge, like, you’d be like a billionaire, I think. Someone has the magic potion to make the chaos go away, but you have an alternative for us, which is great. So let’s talk about that a little bit.
How You Get Started in This Kind of Line of Work and How You Got Started Working From?
My work from Home Journey has been very interesting, and it is not due to Covid. This happened a number of years ago, but I got into mindfulness and meditation. I was a full-time working mom. I had my first son, so he’s now seven, and he’s in second grade. And at the time when I was pregnant with him, I was working an hour away from home.
I was commuting an hour each way. And then went on maternity, I knew when I went on maternity leave that I needed to do something. Something needed to change. I couldn’t return to this long commute like it. It just didn’t, something within my gut said, this isn’t right. You need to find something else.
And I didn’t know what that something else was because I knew. But I also didn’t wanna be a stay-at-home mom full-time. I honor and give all the good vibes to moms who choose that path. That was not my path. I knew I wanted to work in some capacity and I ended up applying for jobs and trying to find a way to do it.
And I ended up going back to that position and it was just so detrimental to me. I’m exhausted, I’m tired. I’m driving an hour to work and I’m tr almost falling asleep at the wheel some mornings and crying and it just, the emotions were just so overwhelming. I knew it was gonna be hard, but I didn’t know how hard it was going to be and that was really the start of my journey.
So we fast forward, you kind of skip over a number of years cause I could go into the depths of the waters, but if I kind of fast forward a few years. Probably the next four years saying there’s got to be something. So I did end up leaving that job. I went back, and I ended up finding a new job that was working part-time and was 25 minutes from our home and it was still in the same field of work that I had worked in.
And I was like, oh my gosh, this is perfect. It’s amazing. I was making $0 cuz all of my money was going straight to daycare, but my soul was happy and that was really the first time I went, oh, this is what it feels like to really. In alignment, but I didn’t know what alignment was seven and a half years ago.
So I go on this journey and I continue. I ended up going back full-time to work about a year later and got pregnant again, had my second son, and started experiencing very similar emotions, but in a different set of something still not bright and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And I really dived into business for myself and what do I really want out of life?
And I just started this journey. I joined this company to work from home and I started learning about personal development and personal growth and I started reading and, I found podcasts like God, they were such a savior for me, and I just started surrounding myself with all of these entrepreneurs and people talking about, Personal growth and, and I was still, wasn’t meditating at the time, that would come later, but I just kind of started this journey and just filling my brain with all of this information.
But it didn’t happen until. And I wanna say I sat in quiet time, but it doesn’t mean I sat and didn’t think about anything. It was just I sat without distraction and I allowed myself to feel what I was feeling. And then that led to journaling and journaling out all of the stuff that I think I’d been holding onto for so many years of just journaling it all out and really just emptying all of that stuff that was inside of me out.
And that was really how the journey, I mean, it’s over a number of years. So that’s the Cliff Notes version, but the really shortened version of how I got into it. Mindfulness and meditation. That’s awesome. That’s a great story and I can relate to your story in so many ways because I’ve had all of those experiences that you described just in different stages or maybe not at the same time or just things like that.
It was like an impending doom and I feel like I spent those, I was also working from home because, so naive I didn’t realize like, oh, I’m not gonna get paid for my maternity leave. Oh, well that’s a whole different ballgame. And I worked out a deal to work from home.
But that took a lot of work to kind of get that piece up. So I did a partial pay work from home, made sure I was checking emails, and answering phone calls. So I never really, with either of my pregnancies or either of my maternity leave, had that full three months. I was still in some peace working, which I enjoyed, but it also allowed me to see, hey, wait, I can work from home.
This is possible to do and also in that same respective getting those juices flowing of, I have options and I just need to figure out what those options are. But it is, it’s like you spend those three months thinking, I don’t wanna go back. I don’t wanna go back. What else can I do? I can’t do anything else.
Without somebody talking in my ear was the most beneficial to me. I didn’t, I had enough chatter inside my head that for me it was, I don’t want someone else telling me how to think or feel. I just wanted to sit.
And that’s not what I was doing in the beginning. And now I kind of alternate between the two of do I need to sit and hear a certain message or focus on a certain thing. But in the beginning, it was, I just needed to learn to sit and be. I didn’t want somebody giving me advice or telling me how to breathe. I just wanted to sit, and that was so powerful. So I did that for the entire month of January and basically solidified a consistent meditation practice from there on out.
Whatever that is, but really make that commitment to be somewhat consistent. And maybe you could do, as I did and said, I’m gonna meditate every day for 30 days, whatever that means for you. But really make that commitment to do a longer-term consistency. That would be number one. And then number two would be to have trial and error to realize that what you try the first time might not always work.
And to also realize that meditation. Isn’t just sitting with your sitting cross-legged on a floor with your hands. Oh, like, that kind of, there are so many different ways to meditate. The purpose of meditation and the easiest way to meditate is to focus on your breathing. It is not to shut your mind out.
It is not to start to feel bad about the thoughts that come into your head. Your brain doesn’t shut off. I mean, even when we sleep, our brain is still going. That’s what dreams are. So meditation isn’t about shutting your brain off. It’s about focusing. So when you find those thoughts going through your head to look at it, and I had a, my therapist who’s a meditation teacher, had this great, concept and a lot of people talk about it up.
Think of your thoughts as clouds floating in the. And when that thought comes, you kind of, you might physically look up and say, oh, there’s that thought again. Okay, let’s come back to breathing. Or, this happens to me. You find yourself going down a rabbit hole and then all of a sudden you might be listening to somebody, but you have no idea what they said or what they’re telling you because your brain has started going down some rabbit hole and just let go of it and recognize it and I’m thinking about it.
And then focus back on your breath. That’s what meditation is. It’s not quieting your mind, it’s focusing your mind, and it’s focusing on your breathing. And then I think number three, so it’s like being consistent, knowing that it’s gonna be trial and error, and you’re gonna try different things, and then realizing that thoughts are gonna happen, thoughts are gonna come into your mind, and just refocus on the breath.
And it’s the consistency. This is a meditation practice that’s, Something that you do and once and done, like, Hey, I’m all enlightened. And I’m all grounded. It is constant and consistent and it happens all of the time. It’s like creating an exercise program. You don’t do the program for three months and then all of a sudden you’re fit and healthy for the rest of your life.