Shivani Gupta (00:16)

I'm Shivani Gupta, and welcome to the Ask Shivani podcast. I believe that one of the best presents that you can give yourself is time to be able to sit down and ask yourself some questions. I believe that the quality of the question that you ask yourself will determine the quality of your life.

Shivani Gupta (00:38)

Welcome, everyone to the Ask Shivani Podcast. I am so excited about having Glenn Bailey on the podcast today. She is a heart centered leader that's got a passion for performance. And she is a very strong advocate for well being one of the things that we speak about on this podcast. She had a suit with a 17 year career behind us in senior commercial finance and an executive. She was working in some of the world's leading blue chip companies. And so she's a huge believer that where she developed heart framework and wanting people really to connect people to their hearts, and by creating momentum for change through developing communities. She's the founder of heart of human My goodness, I love that name, Heart of human, and particularly helps female leaders, some of which may suffer from imposter syndrome. Oh my goodness, I can so relate to that as well. And working in high stress environments to consciously create a life that they love, and become unstoppable just by being themselves. Welcome, Glin!

Glin Bayley (1:41)

Thank you so much, Shivani for having me here. I'm so excited for our conversation today.

Shivani Gupta (1:47)

Oh, me too. And the first thing Glin, I am fascinated, I know I met you recently, and you just really sparked a conversation where I went, I really want to have you on our podcast. Tell us a little bit about your journey. Tell us a bit about your journey. Maybe personal, maybe professional and maybe those major three or four turning points good, bad and the ugly, as we spoke about on this podcast, that have really transformed you into doing what you are doing today.

Glin Bayley (2:20)

Yeah, thank you. Okay, right, gosh, where do I start? I think the biggest turning point came in 2014. For me, at that time, I had started 2014 expecting my first baby, after what was a challenging journey of trying to conceive. So, I, my husband and I went down the IVF route to finally be able to conceive and then found I was pregnant at that time, which was lovely.

Unfortunately, that didn't last and that I miscarried early on in their first 11 weeks. And after that point, everything began to unravel. So, my relationship started to unravel. Just that the journey and the pressure of trying for so long, and then not having that go where it needed to go on, I ended up ending 2014 as essentially a separated woman, not with a baby, as I expected to her, finished the year with my husband and my family. And it was the year that I think changed, changed everything, you start with all these hopes and aspirations for the life that you're going to have. And then it ended looking a little bit bewildered, wondering what the hell is going to happen next? And at that time, I found myself really then questioning who I was, what was I doing with my life? And how did I get to how do I want to find myself again, at that point, were starting at the tracks of life only somewhat scarred by the journey, but I was, you know, essentially separated, heartbroken. And then figuring out Oh, my goodness, where did Where do I go next?

And so, I anchored in on connecting with my heart and my dreams. And my mom had reminded me at the time, she said - Well, Glin, you've talked about Australia for a really long time. Why don't you go and have some time to go and live and work in Australia, get it out your system, do something for you, and then come back and you can figure out what next. And in 2015, six months after, I'd separated I found myself moving to Australia thankfully, getting an internal transfer with the company I worked with at the time to live and work out here. But I think that sparked a huge big change of myself I was a senior finance executive working for large global blue chips. I was working for Twinings Tea Company in the UK, and then came to head up the Indian curry sauce business, Pat x here in Australia, New Zealand. And, anchoring in on my work became my main focus, it was the sense of let me own my work, because that's what I've got control over, I'm starting a fresh new life in Australia.

And, then about a year or so in, I had a change of leader and then found myself working for what was a really beautiful human initially to then working with a nice person who was also a narcissist, navigating suddenly having a leader who knew how to really build me up and then drop me down, and never really knowing where I stood and feeling on eggshells. And I had this moment of, I've just lost everything that I've ever wanted family, husband, the future that I had anticipated in 2014, and rebuilding my life here in Australia, I've given myself focus to create my attention and energy and work. And now I felt like you're taking that away from me, you're taking the one thing that I'm holding my identity to, in work away. And I think with having that stripped away, or at least it felt like it was being stripped away, and made the decision that I didn't want to be at the mercy of poor leadership ever again. And I've had experiences of great leadership in my corporate career and not so great leadership, whether it be bullying, or micromanaging, or in this case, narcissism. And I just thought, I don't want this and I spend an eternity giving all of myself to my corporate identity, and I've lost who I am in the journey. And then I took the bold move in 2018 to leave my corporate career, leave everything I knew in finance, and start a new path around heart of human focusing on myself initially around in my own self leadership, what was my journey to finding my heart? And how did I heal from my heartbreak? How did I heal myself from feeling 

lost and unseen and unheard into who I am and then thought, right, if I'm doing this for myself, how do I help other women do the same to thus, I executive coach one to one, and then started doing group leadership programs taking women on a journey. And then when COVID hit, I transitioned that business instead of being live programs over several months, it ended up being a eight week program, virtually, and that's what I'm working on now. I also am a negotiation consultant. So, I leverage my finance experience and my coaching experience and my understanding of human behavior in psychology. And I apply that in any negotiation consulting environment, as well. So quite a broad, broad background, I hope that's given you a bit of a flavor for my journey so far.

Shivani Gupta (08:20)

That is amazing and, you know, also, as I was listening to you, they're going to really look at that, you know, we thought we were going to go from two to three, but you've gone from two to one, you know, or potentially three to one. And so my next question was really around, you know, challenges which you spoken about many working for a narcissist, you know, moving countries, even though that was one of your dreams to do that, but you know, there's a challenge in itself to be able to move countries and do all of that. And so, do you have a process or a system or a philosophy, like do when you've got challenges that come your way? Is there a way that you go about dealing with them, but I'm always fascinated by, tell me about how you go about whether it be small, medium or large, that sort of comes your way? How do you process it? How do you deal with it?

Glin Bayley (09:06)

That’s a great question and what I learned through my journey, and I guess, just to give context, as I'm a big believer that you can only take people as far as you've been able to go yourself. So, if you're going to be a guide for others, you have to be willing to travel further so that you can bring people on that journey. I'm not someone who likes to teach people theory that I haven't experienced through a sense of knowing because I genuinely believe there's a big difference between knowledge and knowing and the sense that in order for me to know I've really got to be able to embody my work.

So, my framework for surviving and understanding myself came through my heartbreak with my husband, and when I reflected back on the journey as to how did I go from that horrific year of having all of this high of this future that I was going to have, and then ending into picking myself up moving countries in my mid-30s, starting all over again, and then having the courage to leave my corporate career. And it came to really me following my heart. And when I thought about what does that actually mean, and this was discovered through it happened just by chance, because I was enrolled in a professional speaking program for 12 months. And I was just undertaking this course to help me communicate better incorporates, and just have a hobby outside of work for me to unpack, you know, an interest of mine. And through that program, actually, the concept was the greatest story you can tell is your own. And therefore, how can you teach people through sharing your own story and understanding your story, and mine came from understanding my heart and how to follow it and my steps, when I looked back at how I recovered from my heartbreak, and then how I've picked myself up from every single challenge that I've had, it's been these five steps, and it's called the heart self-leadership framework, the methodology.

So, my framework for surviving and understanding myself came through my heartbreak with my husband, and when I reflected back on the journey as to how did I go from that horrific year of having all of this high of this future that I was going to have, and then ending into picking myself up moving countries in my mid-30s, starting all over again, and then having the courage to leave my corporate career. And it came to really me following my heart. And when I thought about what does that actually mean, and this was discovered through it happened just by chance, because I was enrolled in a professional speaking program for 12 months. And I was just undertaking this course to help me communicate better incorporates, and just have a hobby outside of work for me to unpack, you know, an interest of mine. And through that program, actually, the concept was the greatest story you can tell is your own. And therefore, how can you teach people through sharing your own story and understanding your story, and mine came from understanding my heart and how to follow it and my steps, when I looked back at how I recovered from my heartbreak, and then how I've picked myself up from every single challenge that I've had, it's been these five steps, and it's called the heart self-leadership framework, the methodology.

And heart is an acronym for hope, and energy, action, resilience, and trust. And if I look at those five steps and look at how I use them, when my marriage ended, or when I was facing an environment at work, that was toxic hope was what I had to anchor in on. Like my GPS, you know, with the car journey, you're programming your GPS, and you need to know where you're going. That was hope for me, it was my programming of my GPS into what is the future that I actually want? And what do I know about where I'm going, that I can just allow myself to anchor in on that future. So then I can then start to figure out the pathways, I've got to take the route that I've got to map and what different opportunities, I have to realize that hope, and it's a deep, ingrained experience, because if you don't have hope, and most humans do, because if we, if we didn't have hope, we'd feel despair pretty much all the time. So, it's a sense of going I'm anchoring in on my hope that tomorrow has got to be better than today. The second element of it was energy. Because you can decide you want to go somewhere you can decide the future, you can decide your map, but unless you've got a full tank ready to support you to take that journey, you're not going to get very far with an empty one. And, so the energy part was all about how am I building my emotional energy up? How am I building my mental, my physical, my spiritual energy reserves, so that I could start to have enough a few are within me to be able to take this journey. And then the action step is all about really pressing the accelerator, releasing the brakes, and moving forward. Because, as I said, at the beginning, our knowledge and knowing only really comes through doing and you have to be willing to take the journey.

So, if I'd said to you, Shivani, was that right, you've got the hope you've got your map, and you've got a full fuel tank ready to take the journey, you would have no idea what the experience of going from A to B would actually feel like unless you were actually on the path moving forward. So, the action step is all about how do I release and surrender the stuff that's not serving me. But the breaks that I put in my own way? And how do I more actively access my accelerators so that I can move forward even when I feel inertia? And when I feel fear. And so action for me, was moving to Australia, it was taking the step it was leaving my corporate career and throwing myself into that uncertainty, because I just knew if I was in that space, I have to figure out what next rather than live in this world of theory, and what if.

And then the R is resilience, because as with every journey, we hit roadblocks, there's obstacles, there's dead ends, and sometimes you have to turn around and reroute and re navigate. And the resilience is about that recognition that we're gonna hit difficult times. But you have to be willing to learn, step up, recover from all of those challenges and still move yourself forward. So, whilst Australia happened, and it was great, you know, starting your life over building friendships again, when you're in your mid-30s. And all of your friends who have been selected from my early 20s was a huge challenge and then starting the business after a successful corporate career where I had structure and systems and processes and suddenly, I'm a one-man band trying to do everything myself was a massive learning journey and incredibly, incredibly challenging. And then the final part is trust and back to I guess the analogy of sort of taking a journey in the car, it's the equivalent of when you're driving at night own, you only have a short amount of the path that's lit up in front of you with the headlights. And trust operates the same way you can only see maybe a small path of your journey ahead of you. But you have to know if you're willing to keep taking the action and move forward, the next part of the path is going to light up and you'll have greater clarity about what next as you start moving.

But most people wait until they have all of the answers until they know exactly what the whole path and the whole journey looks like before they're even willing to consider starting. And for me, I'm in the camp of I had to trust I had no idea what my life out of corporate was going to look like, I had no idea what my life in Australia was gonna look like.

But I had to trust that if I kept moving forward, if I kept trusting that there was enough light for me to see the next step, that I know what to do when it came. And that's the philosophy I now apply to everything I do. And as I said, it came by chance, but that sparked the fire to then go, gosh, this is exactly how I've recovered from my heartbreak. This is what I've done every single time. But I've just not known I didn't have the methodology codified in a way that I could articulate it and understand it. And then once I could, it just became the foundation for what I do in what I teach, because I'm living it daily. I go through the cycle, I have my moments of hiccups and bumps. And I'm back in resilience mode, again, trying to reframe, and recalibrate and move myself forward. And then I have to tell myself, Oh, gosh, I got to trust again. And then, you know, check back in on is my energy where it needs to be to go on this journey. Where have I emptied my cup? And what do I need to do? And where am I procrastinating in there? But what action do I need to take? So, it's part of who I am in the business is called heart of human because everything I do is anchored in on how do you follow your heart and how can you let it guide you to where you need to go.

Shivani Gupta (17:35)

That's incredible. I was thinking, how can somebody who's been an executive and in finance for 17 years, run this business called heart of human it sounds, you know, it's my kind of words Glin, don't get me wrong, but I was like, and then you've just gone through the system, then you've just gone through the methodology. I'm like, of course. And there it is. That's you combining the two aspects of who you are in terms of what you've created. Glin, what's next, tell us a bit about your future aspirations. So what are you wanting to do three, five years, it might be work related, it may not be? What are some of the other things that you go when you talk about those actions that you've taken already? What are some of the actions and aspirations that you've got for the next, you know, a few years ahead of you?

Glin Bayley (18:10)

I are so many things Shivani, I think when you start living from your heart place suddenly start realizing how much is available to you in life. And there's so much to go after my initial focus is for this year, I wanted to get on a board because again, if I'm focusing on helping females lead themselves and playing their seat at the table, again, about embodying my work, my belief is unless I'm able to show them that I'm going to claim the seat at the table that I want to sit at. And I can't show anyone else have to do the same nor integrity. So for me, I've got my AICD program coming up next month. And that's going to be my main focus to just get the support that I need to take that next step to showcase my commercial negotiation skills and leadership, coaching skills in a board capacity.

I also have aspirations just to grow the self-leadership framework through my online program, which takes women on a journey. And it's an interesting one because one of the areas that I had to overcome myself was this narrative that I had that corporates don't get heart, and that they just then the head over heart and the heart plays a secondary role. And I would love to see that narrative, in my own mind, be blown out of the water, and then for that to translate into more corporate female leaders recognizing that they can bring their heart to the table and because they bought their heart to the table, corporates live a better ecosystem in their culture and people because more women have been able to step into owning the truth of who they are, rather than this projective persona of who we think we should be, and how we have to hide ourselves behind various masks to be seen as credible, all of that conditioning that whereas we're conditioned by culture, so that's a huge aspiration of mine.

And probably the last one on a personal level is I'm 41, I still haven't yet let go of the idea of being a mum and I don't know what in what capacity that's going to happen. I've got a third baby at the moment and I've also considered, do I go down the route of being a solo mum and going down that IVF doing it myself? Or do I just leave it in the hands of fate? I have no idea. But all I know is that when it comes to our dreams and aspirations that I'm not closing any doors. And then I want to be able to explore what it means to be an unstoppable heartland woman without any of the conditioning that society would tell us is the way to do it or not.

So, I'm wanting to break my own construct of what convention is and accept and embrace a life that fills me up from the inside.

Shivani Gupta (21:22)

That is so beautiful, and we almost need a couple of hours Glin just to talk about that. Do you have leadership philosophies that you kind of live by that abide by that guide you in terms of you know, sometimes people of spoke, sometimes it's people, but sometimes it's just a philosophy. So, and sometimes it's quotes? So, do you have one Glin or a couple of them that you really try and kind of live by?

Glin Bayley (21:47)

Yeah, I think there's two that come to mind. One is live your truth. Because, we spend a lot of time trying to live a life that actually isn't our true, but the truth of who we think other people need us to be.

And then the second one I really know is change leadership always begins with self-leadership. And we do a lot in corporates and in business environments, around leadership, and even in our family and home lives. And we're expecting change to happen and usually that change expectation is outside of us. Whereas I look at it and go well, if you change through your own self leadership, the world around you changes by default, because you you're a different person, and you're seeing things differently, and you're carrying yourself differently, and what the things that used to bother you before have no effect on you now, because you've learned how to condition yourself to be in charge, in any circumstance, regardless of the culture or the conditions or the environment. And when you have that level of self-mastery, I just think the world opens up so much more opportunity for you to create change and impact.

So yeah, they're probably my go to ones for myself.

Shivani Gupta (23:04)

And, Glin, I know we spoke a bit about that, in your intro, as I introduce you to our guests and listeners, I just wanted to know about your wellbeing. Do you have things you do daily or weekly? or yearly? What sort of wellness rituals or practices do you have that kind of keep you heart centered as well?

Glin Bayley (23:25)

I think that's the key thing. It's keeping connected to my heart, I noticed that I feel at my worst, and especially with the last 18 months of a global pandemic, when I'm in my mind when I'm in my head. So, for me, my daily rituals include, how do I get myself back to my heart, and I do that through mindfulness practices. So, whether that's walking on the beach, taking my puppy for a walk, and really connecting into what I'm feeling in my body. I do that through meditation because I find meditation helps stop the thoughts going. But the reason why I don't solely rely on meditation is meditation is great to stop the thoughts. But once you're out of it, if you've left your energy in there not so great place, you might have stopped it for a little while, but you pick up the same energy afterwards. So, what I tried to do escape, I can change my feelings first, go into a state where I'm just choosing each day, what could be a better feeling thought than the one I've got now. So, it's going okay, I'm feeling anxious. Okay, what can I do to feel less anxious? Or okay, if I choose to feel acceptance, and I choose a thought around, okay, I can accept this current feeling or this discomfort. Does that take me out of anxiety and that usually does and then once I've got myself into that space, I can meditate on clearing my mind and stilling it, and knowing I've already calibrated my energy to a different level. So, it's very, very body related. It's very heart related. And I would say my biggest focus is always - if you can change your feelings first, then your thoughts will start to start shifting naturally themselves. Whereas most of us try and change our thoughts but there's a billion different directions thoughts can take but the scale to calibrate your emotions is actually quite linear and it's a lot easier to step up a scale in emotions than it is to change your thinking because there's just too many different avenues your thoughts can take.

Shivani Gupta (25:33)

That's beautiful. I love that it's a really great way to define that is to say work on your you know, work on your feelings first and then let's see what that into. Glin, how do people get in contact with you, they want to follow you they want to know more about it. Tell us a little bit about how people can get in contact.

Glin Bayley (25:49)

My website is https://www.heartofhuman.com/ , I'm also Glin Bayley on LinkedIn. And I've got heart of human official on Instagram. So, there's my main three free channels and I do a regular podcast called Unstoppable Woman with Glenn Bailey. So, anyone that wants to tune in and hear more about the kinds of stories I share, I share a lot of my own journey and I interview others to share theirs on my podcast. So, to see how other people living their truth so that you can choose what would be your truth and live from that place.

Shivani Gupta (26:31)

That's beautiful, Glin. It has been such a pleasure having you. Thank you.

Glin Bayley (26:35)

You're most welcome. Thank you so much. Shivani It's been a real joy. And thank you for holding space for me to share.

Shivani Gupta (26:47)

I'm Shivani Gupta. And you've been listening to the Ask Shivani podcast where I'd like to ask some questions. Thank you so much for listening. Please follow Ask Shivani on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. And if you haven't done so, please go to the Apple podcasts and subscribe rate and review this podcast. It would mean a lot. Thank you.