High Powered Female CEO - Episode 7 with Claudia Spahr
When success seems to make you sacrifice... and you have to decide whether you will follow your dream and pioneer your way... or crawl back into the 'cages' that are appropriate for wives and mothers.
Chronicles of the High Powered Female CEO Episode 7 with Claudia Spahr incredible owner of Holymama where she and her company are hosting retreats all over the globe!
#FemaleCEOChronicles
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION
Melisa Keenan 00:23
Hello, and welcome to Chronicles of the High Powered Female CEO. This is episode seven and I'm so excited to bring on this guest. Claudia. Welcome, Claudia.
Claudia Spahr 00:34
Thank you, Melissa. Lovely to be here.
Melisa Keenan 00:38
So I'm so excited about this because Claudia and I have just met you know, minutes before this introduced by a mutual friend. And so I'm just here excited to get to know about your heart Claudia. But before we dive into the depths here, I like to… Do share with us who people usually know you as?
Claudia Spahr 01:04
So people usually know me as holymama as in H O L Y mama. But what a lot of people don't know is the struggles I had to get to be known, to have this success, and to have this 10 years now, nearly next year will be our 10-year anniversary. So this is what I'm going to talk about here.
Melisa Keenan 01:28
Wow. So, give us a little snapshot into, what does the holy mama do? What kinds of things are you doing in the world?
Claudia Spahr 01:38
So we support women and children. And this started just from a personal need. When I created the first retreat for mothers and kids back in 2013 when I was pregnant with my youngest child, my daughter. And I just felt there were so many yoga retreats around the world, but there's nothing where you can bring your child. So I created it. Personal need and it just grew and grew organically. And now we actually have trained leaders in over 20 countries. There are women doing this with their own brands. So this is not a franchise cause I didn't want to use that.
Let's call it a patriarchal model. I wanted to empower women to take my blueprint and run with it and create their own success stories, which is what has helped them.
Melisa Keenan 02:27
That is amazing. And right now you're tuning in from where again?
Claudia Spahr 02:31
I'm right now, I'm in the south of Spain. So I'm based in Spain, a Bita and the south of Spain.
And we do retreats in Asia, in places like Bali and Goa. Also, we've done retreats in Morocco, in Africa, and I'm actually looking to come to South America. I've just got back from Peru. And I'm very drawn to doing some retreats there as well. So we have retreats, but we also of course have online training and experiences.
Melisa Keenan 03:00
Wow. That's so cool. Okay. So now that we have a little bit of scope, I mean, gosh, that's so neat and so needed. I'm actually part of my intention in creating these conversations at, towards the end of the year, the second week of October, I'm going to be hosting a retreat and we haven't nailed down the details yet of location and stuff, but we're going to be hosting a retreat and we're inviting the whole family.
It's for the women who have created this success, a space, right? Where we can show for, we don't have the walls or the judgments and everyone's just in celebration of the richness and wealth and impact that we've created on the planet, but families are invited. So like. I love what you're saying and what you've created, it's so needed.
So let's dive in now to you know, kind of, I guess, a little peek behind the curtain to some of those struggles that you mentioned, that you had to go through being a mother and creating this success.
“It was never my intention to leave him behind. I wanted him to come along, but he wasn't ready to do that.”
Claudia Spahr 04:04
So I think what a lot of female entrepreneurs find, especially mothers. Is that we look after everybody's health first. So what happened when I was building the business is I would make sure everyone was happy. All the food was cooked. And then I would, it was a bit like working as a hobby or something that, I should feel grateful that I could do it. When actually very quickly, I was becoming the main breadwinner of the family and it was a bit like I had to make, I had to sort of shuffle off into the attic to do my work.
So I think that's quite typical. And I think we saw it also in the lockdown where everyone is at home and the women were doing, especially if they had if there was a family involved there doing all the chores, the household chores and trying to squeeze in work. So I think that is a big challenge in what happened to me when the more I became successful, the more the business became successful, on the more I got empowered personally, the more my marriage started to crumble. And the more that I think my now ex-husband felt something like, afraid that I was gonna become too successful or, you know, we have we'll have our limiting beliefs. I mean, it can be many things if you're with a partner, whether it's a man or a woman, but I think this happens, especially when women get into their power the month they're with, or the partner they're with, has to really support them, be able to stand in the shadow because sometimes you just really are in the supporting role and allow their partner to really stand in the light and be, you know, I'm using this, these metaphors in a way just symbolically, but allow them to keep rising without being afraid. I was never, it was never my intention to leave him behind.
I wanted him to come along, but he wasn't ready to do that. He had another idea. He had another path. And I think this happened, this often happens when women become successful. It's like one of the sacrifices you could say that gets some aid.
Melisa Keenan 06:29
It really, I see this all the time and you know, at one point I was doing kind of like crowded polling of this particular phrase. Are you afraid of outgrowing your husband?
And I got a massive reply to that, on so many levels, whether it be you know, this financial piece of outgrowing, the income being coming to the major breadwinner, right?. Or outgrowing them like spiritually, like the depth of person that you're becoming. So tell us a little bit more about that.
“After having done it for so many years, having the experience, having the know-how. And having this massive mission and vision that I wanted to birth, where you go from being a business owner to creating a legacy so that because you realize at some point you have to be replaceable, you can't be everywhere.”
Claudia Spahr 07:13
So one of the… I mean, there were many, usually, one or a marriage or a relationship breaks out and doesn't happen overnight. You kind of can see it, you know, it builds up and it took years, but there were definitely key moments and I think one of them was when I decided to create the certification for the retreat leaders.
Now, this was at a time when the business was growing and I had this idea and his response was, “why would you want to do that? Then everybody's going to copy you. And you're going to lose clients and that's not going to work because things are going well. But you know, that's like a really bad idea.”
And I needed to invest money so that I could work together with, I actually chose a coach, a business coach to work with so that I would have support in creating a very robust certification that wasn't just me sitting down, you know when the kids are in bed and jotting it down. And that investment actually amounted to his yearly salary.
I mean, I was on a very low, yearly salary. It was practically voluntary work, but still. So that was really triggering for him. What, in retrospect, I realized, and thank God I did that because it got me through the pandemic when live events just evaporated, what it was I have the mindset of an entrepreneur, or I have the mindset of an entrepreneur who sees opportunity, who wants to grow, who sees that the business has to expand in different ways and creating a certification was just a logical next step.
After having done it for so many years, having the experience, having the know-how. And having this massive mission and vision that I wanted to birth, where you go from being a business owner to creating a legacy so that because you realize at some point you have to be replaceable, you can't be everywhere.
So created that legacy. I had to share everything I knew. That's what I do. It's not about holding, withholding anything, or holding back anything. Now, if you don't have that entrepreneurial mindset and you're in that, what we often call, you know, limiting belief or scarcity luck that is going to jar. So, you know, it's a bit like, okay, if you're the one in the barracks that has the pants on because you're making the decisions that are actually for the greater good of all, and your partner, doesn't see that, something's got to give.
Melisa Keenan 09:54
Wow. And this is so big. I mean, I feel like we can. I just, I have this sense that there are women who are going to watch this who are watching this now, who need to hear this that what you're sharing.
Your story is so important because the piece that I wonder is, and it makes me emotional, like how many women choose to crawl back into their cage? And don't let their magic out, and don't let out all the power and good that they could do with that money because of the pressures of society and the way things have always been, and, you know, not wanting to rock the boat and not wanting to be alone forever.
Like all of those things are so real, but then to crawl back in, and I actually, I don't look at her with judgment. I have so much compassion for her, but I want women to feel like you know, we don't live in a day and age where we have to continue to make those choices, right? Like we live in a day and age where possibilities are unlimited.
And you said something before we started this conversation about women stepping into money. Do you want to speak to that a little bit? Because I think that's so tied to what we're talking about.
“When women come into wealth, something very exciting happens for the planet.”
Claudia Spahr 11:25
I can actually wrap it together. The two things, cause I think they're intrinsically linked. And what we said before was that we both, I think, believe this, that when women come into wealth, something very exciting happens for the planet because women are known and, well, we've got some examples like JK Rowling, Jeff Bezos, his ex-wives, are multibillionaires who went, I don't need all this money, but I know what I'm going to do with it. I'm going to redistribute it. I'm going to put it where it's needed in very smart ways.
So this is often seen, time and time again, where women get very rich, they do something really useful with their money. You know this is not building rockets for, you know, that could be useful for some people, but I'm really, you know, looking at the needs on the planet. It's about what, what is actually, how can we feed the children? How can we save the environment? I think something like 70% of, people who work in the environment are females. You know, things like Amazon watches, the head of these big global environmental organizations. So what happens when we silence this whispering, this urge, this dream, and it often does start as a whisper.
It starts as a whisper because we are so used to quieting down, to shut it down, to shutting up. Because a woman's voice isn't as you know, belittle, we've been, this is lifetime's hundreds, thousands of years of this. This is something that we've enabled. So we can't, you know, stand there and blame the men for it. We can blame the system.
But men have suffered too under this system, but what happens is we give our power away. When we stay in silence, we give our power away when we shut down our dreams, we give our power away when we make do because we don't want to rock the boat or move out of our comfort zone. Or, you know, sometimes it's this idea of, oh, but I had to put the family first. Oh. But I had to put the children first. This for me was a massive shift. And this is actually the chapter I wrote in this book about domestic abuse and domestic abuse has many faces. As we know, it's coercive control, it's psychological, and it's emotional.
And a lot of women actually, without realizing or ruin relationships that are emotionally and psychologically abusive when you're not witnessed and seen for who you really are and your, and who you really are, might not be so apparent even to you yet, but this is this kind of higher version of you, the you that you were born to become, the you that may have been there as a teenager, you know, before we start worrying about what everyone else thinks about us, that, sort of dreamy state, that we have the sort of between older than teenagers.
So, sometimes it takes you being in a very quiet space. And you know, we talk about, we spoke about retreats before that. I love retreats because I believe retreats create a safe environment. And Most of the time, our environment you know, is mean, in the world of the working world, it can feel the opposite. So we need that environment to start tapping into those visions and I think more women because women haven't had an opportunity to do this. I know men need to do it too, but I know that women have these ideas and visions that need to be nurtured.
We need to nurture them in ourselves and we need to allow others to nurture us. So, they can grow, it's like flowers, it's just an incredible ecosystem of expression when women start to tap into that. So, then they become rich.
So simple. It doesn't mean it's easy, but it's actually simple. It's a bit like when people say you just need to relax. Yes. A lot of things get, solved. A lot of our physical ailments get sold when we relax. And a lot of these things in life are actually pretty straightforward. You know, I'm at the age now, which five decades, which means that I have this clarity of life experience that allows me to really lean in now in a way that I think when you're in your twenties and thirties, there are women who, are already that clear, but I just see, look at my own life and see, gosh, it just gets easier. Really.
“When we feel safe, all sorts of amazing things start to happen.”
Melisa Keenan 16:45
I love hearing that. I think for someone listening and I'll let you share to whatever level you feel too, but for someone listening who finds himself in this situation where maybe they do feel kind of held back by the marriage and maybe the husband is deliberately doing that, or maybe the husband or the partner is more like just can't keep up, you know, not by any fault of their own, but I know so many women in the conversations that I have wonder how will I know? Like, okay, this is good. I can continue to grow my roots here. Or how will I know when it's time to release this coupling with this partner? So I'm curious, what you would say to that? Or maybe how did you know?
Claudia Spahr 17:42
Yes. I think a lot of women stay if there are children involved, a lot of women stay in relationships for the children and I did for years, and I didn't finish this thought before, but when I had that pivotal moment to realize that I had to leave for the children, because if you really tune into what's best for everyone, for the highest good of everyone, sometimes it does mean leaving and… Separation isn't easy for anyone, even for those who are, you know, can do it in a conscious way, and in my case, it was definitely a mess and it still is four years afterward.
But I know, that if I look back 10 years, it would still have been the best thing to do. And it's still, now is the best thing that I could have done because what happens when you stay in a situation that's, I mean, you could even go as far as calling it toxic, but I wrote a situation that is more than holding you back. It's making you shut parts of yourself down. What happens is we get sick. We become. Well, you know, we can't fulfill this incredible potential we have, and to create change in the world, which, you know, it is already two minutes to midnight. You know, if we're not, there's not plenty. I mean, the world, I was once had this, a sentence that I used, the world needs a lot of leaders right now, a lot of compassion integrative, feminine you know, the women who have that balance of masculine and feminine, and I would also say reciprocal leadership, like who able to see the big picture give back. So if you know, sometimes that might not be so clear when you are in this stuck relationship, but leadership sometimes also means just leading your life, in the way that is true to you. So the practical tip, I would say is take yourself away for a weekend or just be in your own energy, because this is the thing when we're very entangled with someone we can, you know, it's really good to have conversations and to, to talk to someone who, if you're thinking of that, you need time alone.
“Leadership sometimes also means just leading your life, in the way that is true to you.”
But at the end of the day, if, especially with, you know, I mean, it doesn't just have to be abusive, but if someone is charismatic or, you know, very good with words, they might override your opinion and they might persuade you that suddenly your take on that opinion and that energy and this is very typical. So to feel your own truth, you have to be alone. And that means also sleeping alone, waking up as yourself. I don't know if you're familiar with human design, but that theory says you should actually sleep alone because if you don't the neutrinos that are moving through everything, this is quantum physics are going to affect you the other, the person who you're close to. So my practical tip is: be by yourself and sleep by yourself a few nights and just see how you feel. See, if you can get some, you know, go on a retreat, see if you can get some insights, and then go back with those, speak to your partner, and see if you can find a solution.
Melisa Keenan 21:25
I love that. I love that. Thank you. Thanks for being willing to go there because as I said, you know someone watching in that place, I know that question, and I've been there myself and that questioning is this right? What is the best next step? And you want to make the best choice for all involved and it feels very heavy, but I love what you're saying because I know that innately when we drop into the truth, that's within us we already know all the answers.
Claudia Spahr 21:58
Yeah. And just to add to that, I think we often try and solve things with our heads when actually it's our bodies that know best and some of us are quite it's instinctive or intuitive for some of us. We have to go through an emotional process. And for some, we actually have to speak to a different group of people and hear the sound of our own voice and how we need to sort of get feedback. So, you know, we all need to just honor that truth in ourselves, but not sit alone and stew it in our heads because the head usually there's too many thoughts. There are too many. Oh, but what about them, or how do I solve this? And you could just end up having sleepless nights. It's just really good to let your body do its job. We’re animals at the end of the day and our bodies know so much.
Melisa Keenan 22:41
This has been just absolutely a treasure trove of inspiration because to hear from somebody like you, who has created the kind of empire that you have created in your business with something that is so, I mean, everybody loves to travel. Everybody would love to go on a retreat and to create that and have that be, you know that's your brand, that is your voice and your heart out in the world. I just am like, gosh so inspirational and helpful. And I have two more questions for you, mostly because I just want to get to know more of you and what makes you tick. My first question is. What is next for you?
Like given what you've created, that meant you're already on 20 continents or 20 countries, whatever you said there, you have so much. What gets your heart really excited about what you're creating in the next 10 years?
Claudia Spahr 23:40
So two main things, the first. Well, three. So business-wise, the two businesses and the third is just my kids get just exciting that they're going to be teenagers slowly becoming teenagers and, all that. And just the closeness of the relationship to them through after all we've been through, I actually believe that. We are actually becoming closer and closer now. So, that's been quite a journey. Business-wise so we're, as I mentioned, we're going to have our ten-year anniversary next year. And I really I've been keeping this sort of non-profit arm of holy mama.
I’ve always had some kind of sponsorship or subsidies and donations, but I really want to properly launch a foundation where we have proper investment and we can play bigger. So that's the first thing. And the other thing is I want to write, I just want to create time to write. I've got a children's book. I've got the business book and I've got a, a novel and I've got it… I mean, yeah. Writing is the thing that lights me up. It's not easy to write. But I have got these dictation apps now that work really well with artificial intelligence. So sometimes when you have right, that's another good tip. If you have writer's block, just go for a walk and start dictating some ideas and you'll see that the page feels very quickly, and then you have to go back and edit that.
“We all need to just honor that truth in ourselves”
Melisa Keenan 25:08
I love that. Okay. My other and final question, Claudia is what would you say has been the most fulfilling experience or one of the most fulfilling experiences in your life?
Claudia Spahr 25:23
Wow in my life. And is this work-related or personal?
Melisa Keenan 25:29
Whatever, or maybe one from both, whatever you feel you want to.
Claudia Spahr 25:33
Well, I think personally, you know, being a mum I think birth changes you. So I came to motherhood later, I came to mother and in my 40s, I had my three kids. And I think coming to that, to this experience later, it was even more of a, wow, this is like, this has happened. Wow. I was just so grateful and to see it's like, I woke up the morning after my son, my oldest was born, which is he's going to be 14 this summer. And I just look into my eyes and I saw him, I saw his eyes and it was like, everything was just suddenly got a new meaning. So I think that was probably, that was a pivotal moment, I think, for a lot of women as well, when they become mothers, suddenly their career changes suddenly they realize they need to do another job and all that.
So I think that's pivotal. And then professionally, I don't know. Every single time I run a retreat and I see the transformation over the course of the week. I see mothers, especially when I work with the mothers coming exhausted, tired, overwhelmed, stressed, sometimes angry, sometimes like literally a breaking point. And then to see them leave. Yeah. I mean, just completely having gone through that portal of transformation, it that's just rewarding every time.
Melisa Keenan 27:08
I love that. Claudia, thank you so much for sharing with us today.
Claudia Spahr 27:14
Thanks, Melissa.
“You aren't alone with your experiences.”
Melisa Keenan 27:16
I feel like because, okay. You mentioned a book that you, that you authored and so I definitely will get the link from you. And we'll put that in the comments here at the top of the post. And then where can people find more information about your retreat?
Claudia Spahr 27:35
So our website is just www.holymama.info. That's the main website. So one word, well, yeah.
Melisa Keenan 27:43
I’m going to post that as well, but those who've listened can go and you know, check it all out. It sounds amazing. And any last words you'd like to share?
Claudia Spahr 27:55
No, I would just, you know, say to all the women here, you, want, you know, you aren't alone with your experiences of feeling like. The system hasn't caught up yet. You know, women are doing things now that they weren't able to do 10, 20 years ago. And we're continuing to create this new world for our daughters and, you know, for our daughters and sons, even those who are aunties, they're still, you know, for the ones who come after us. So just keep trusting in the fact that even if it's. It doesn't look so easy right now. Things are changing and keep being the change.
Melisa Keenan 28:40
I love that so much. That is exactly the reason why I have decided to do this interview series Chronicles of the High-Powered Female CEO to interview women like you so that we can feel for one, this sense of look at how many women are creating and pioneering this path. And that is absolutely possible.
And it doesn't have to look the way that it looked before, but also to create a community of women. Kind of just celebrate each other because I think so often we feel so you know, the higher, the success, the more the targets on your bag and it doesn't have to feel that way. And so if you've watched today, you know, share some love with Claudia and make sure you go and subscribe to all the interviews, make sure you get on my email list.
So you don't miss an interview. And just thank you again so much Claudia.
Claudia Spahr 29:32
Thank you, Melissa. Thank you, everyone.
