Women Branching Out: Hannah Marcotti

So happy to kick off the JOYful holiday season with Hannah Marcotti of Mama Space. Hannah blends a background in holistic health with a love of marketing and a generous helping of joyful living to coach holistic entrepreneurs and moms to create gorgeous lives.

In this interview we chat about:

• How Hannah got to this point in her coaching business.

• The Holiday Joy Up: 10 days of inspiration November 26th to December 5th
Cost: Pay what you can. You’ll receive daily letters from Hannah that include: recipes, guest contributors, soul work, and affirmations.There’s a Facebook group to support you, too. (afilliate link)

• Doing It All A free call for holistic health and wellness entrepreneurs, Monday Dec. 12, 2011 at 8:30pm ET.

• What the holidays look like at Hannah’s house.

• Hannah’s advice for momma entrepreneurs as we head into the holidays.

Enjoy the video or read the transcript below.

Hannah Marcotti believes that you + joy = the gorgeous life. The gorgeous life is the sparkle, the joy, the magical moments. It is your food intuition, your deep body knowledge, your desire. It is space, it is touch, it is yours. She is the coach who will guide your course there. Hannah can be found dancing in the joy of her own life surrounded by three kids, a puppy and a beautiful man she has had the pleasure of being with for 18 years. Writing, business coaching and helping others discover their joy in this world is her purpose, proving that we can take action on whatever our heart is willing to dream up. Dream, define and take the action your heart desires is her daily mantra.

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Transcript

Christie: Hi everybody! It’s Christie Halmick with Jewels Branch Creative and I’m very happy today to have Hannah Marcotti with me. Hi Hannah!

Hannah: Hello.

Christie: I wanted to read a little short bit from Hannah’s website. Hannah is a…I would call her a life and business coach for women and holistic entrepreneurs and umm …. I’m losing my train of thought, so I’m going to read what I have. OK.

This is what Hannah says on her website, about when she’s coaching you, what it’s like.

“I will ask you from a place of wanting your gorgeous life to unfold, to look at the tough stuff. To simplify. To not let yourself off in easy ways, but to walk through your fears and discover how all of your challenges become your gifts in this life. This gorgeous life.”

I love that because I think it sums up Hannah very well. The only thing that’s missing from it is this little piece, Joy.

So, I wanted to let Hannah talk a little bit more about what she does, who she serves and a little bit about the path that got her to where she is with her business right now. So go ahead Hannah.

Hannah: O.K. So by training I am a holistic health coach which means that I look at someone’s entire being entire self, entire world, not just the food they eat but their life that they are living. That’s how everything started out for me.

What I started to notice was that we would talk about food, but then we wouldn’t talk about food. We would be talking about passion and purpose and how those were all related.

It would always tie back into the weight that we were holding on to and just all the decisions that we were making in our life if we were feeling void in our passion and our purpose. Especially for women, especially for mothers, who were often taking time at home to raise their children and feeling like something was missing.

What I started to discover was that everything that we were working on could be looked at from the place of joy. Are you feeling joyful?

And I remember the defining moment when it happened.

It was in one of my groups and we were talking with a woman, we were going around the group sharing. She was talking about how unorganized she was and how she was going to school full time and she was raising her kids and it was just like so much. And I said, I asked her what do you think you need to do? What steps do you need to take? What’s causing all this difficulty?

And she said, I think I need a planner, I think I need to get a planner. And I said, “Really. A planner. O.K. So a planner is pretty sexy stuff. Let’s talk about this planner a little bit. Has it worked for you in the past?” So we started talking about the sexy planner. I said what if one day you picked your kids up from school, you put on your favorite pair of heels and your jeans that you love and you show up at the playground as kind of hot sexy mama picking up her kids at the playground. How do you think that would feel?

So that’s kind of where this whole think came from. Let’s not look at the planners because they are not working if we are not feeling joy in our life.

From there everything started to shift a little bit more. The other piece of it, I went to a school that is very large, and a lot of moms go to the school. Institute of Integrative Nutrition and they come out and they don’t really know what they are doing. They really fear marketing and not feeling like they have any clue how to run a businesses.

Over the course of the last few years. I’ve really fallen in love with marketing, and not your typical marketing, marketing that’s done more from the heart and that’s very much inline with who you are as a person.

I’ve sort of integrated these two different worlds. The world of holistic health and joyful coaching and creative business coaching. And that’s where I am right now.

Christie: That’s great. One of the things that’s come up over and over again as I’m doing these interviews is self care. One of the interviews was with Andrea Lewicki and she talked about curiosity, using curiosity as self care. One thing she brought up is joy as a from of curiosity or curiosity could be called joy. Part of what I think about when I think about you is using joy as self care, as a way to take care of yourself.

I found that I needed a reminder, so whenever I come to your website there’s always something there that reminds me to look at this bigger picture and to get away from my planner if I need to and be present where I am with my family, with my business. So I have found that to be…that’s one of the reasons why I come to your site. Because it gives me that feeling whenever I come there. So one of the things that….when did you do Joy Up, the original Joy Up?

Hannah: that was in August.

Christie: o.k. August

Hannah: the beginning of August

Christie: Can you tell us a little bit about that (Joy Up) and then talk about the next one that is coming up, the Holiday Joy Up.

Hannah: So the Joy Up ran when Mercury was in retrograde. It was planned for this time when I knew a lot of people were going to be feeling out of sorts, really just off and confused and really not able to make big decisions. Or big, you know, big moves in their business, or anything like that because they were going to be kind of trapped. And I knew it was sort of risky for me to be doing that because I did have a lot of technical problems happen, but I felt like it was the prefect time to support people around this idea of joy.

It’s funny that program I always say it felt like it was sort of channeled through me, I knew that it was going to happen. and I knew that it was my next big thing but I really didn’t know what it was going to look like or what was going to happen. So I had to have a lot of faith. And really the idea was can you increase the amount of joy in your life in 10 days?

That was the question that I put out there. And I knew that the answer was yes. I knew that we could do that. You hear a lot of talk about 21 days and longer amounts of time and for me it’s about creating rituals so if in 10 days you can pick one thing and turn that into a ritual in your life, so we started with things like drinking lemon water in the morning, or making your bed. Very simple things that you don’t align with joy normally you don’t think of. Just like you were saying curiosity is joy. There are so many things that can bring you joy because what you are doing is taking care of yourself. And you are focusing on just being present to where you are. So things like making your bed in the morning is your present self taking care of your future self. So when you go to bed later that night and you walk into your bedroom, which should be your sacred space, and there’s this beautiful made bed. That brings you joy. It’s such a simple joy and you say wow thank you I am so glad that I did that I’m so glad I took care of myself because now when I climb into bed I know that I have that power, I have that ability to take care of myself in the future and that’s really powerful.

Christie: So from that, you um…there was a Facebook group that supported that. And there was a lot of great conversation there.

You have coming up now the holiday portion of Joy Up. Can you tell me what you have planned for that? And when that starts.

Hannah: Yes, absolutely. So that (Holiday Joy Up) starts November 26th. It actually starts whenever you sign up because you can be part of the tribe. I like to send emails you know, here and there, so you never know when one’s going to come. So when I was doing the Joy Up, I knew that the next step was going to be the Holiday Joy. I had run a program last year during the holidays and it was one of my most popular programs and I was surprised by it I couldn’t believe the amount of interest in it because we feel really isolated and alone during the holidays which is the exact opposite of how we should feel. We’re spending too much money and we don’t want to. Our kids are getting gifts that we don’t want them to get and we have this…I should be there, but I don’t want to be there, I want to be here. So much conflict and so much stress and it should be the season of joy.

Everyone keeps putting pictures up that they are finding in all of the stores joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy that’s the message that’s coming, but we feel out of alignment with that message at this time.

So that’s the next program and it’s really just an extension of the Joy Up. It’s taking those same fundamentals that we worked with in the Joy Up adding a few more. So layering it in just a little bit more and anyone can join. It doesn’t matter if you’ve gone through the first 10 days or not the support is there regardless. A beautiful new tribe is joining the original tribe and it’s just really beautiful to watch it all sort of unfold every time I see.

It’s a “pay what you can” program. It’s hard for me to put a price on joy. I took that pressure off myself, I said I don’t want to do this. So many people in the world have monetarily have so much, and so many people do not. In my mind, if you can pay what you can to feel accountable for yourself to go through this process so that you will do the work, then that can look like whatever it does for you.

It’s been this beautiful shift, you know of those who have so much being very generous, and there are people who are telling me “I just lost my job” and I’m so grateful that I can still be part of this group.

And that is just like…that’s my joy.

Christie: So if you sign up for the Holiday Joy, kind of give us an idea of what you can expect if you are newbie coming in what can you expect to get from you and that kind of thing.

Hannah: Absolutely, so its 10 days. Everyday for 10 days I send out a letter and it’s very… it’s a format. So everyday you know what to expect so it’s not like you have to rediscover the whole thing all over again.

A quote, a letter from me, the day’s soul work (which is the most important part) which you can just take in or actively do. Then there’s a guest or two each day. There’s a recipe and they are as healthy as possible, though in the holiday season we do add a little sugar and butter. They are all gluten free because I am. Then a daily affirmation. So each day you have this letter that you can sort of unfold in any way that works for you. You can take it all in or you can go slowly. Some people saved them up and went through them at the end, just took like an intensive day and went through them. So everybody has their own process. Which is really beautiful. Then the connection in the joy tribe which is on Facebook where we have a private group.We just share and talk and support and it’s just really lovely place to be.

Christie: It feels like getting a little care package each day whenever you get the email. Because it’s all about you, it is all about taking care of yourself and being present. So they are a lot of fun, from the Joy Up this summer, it’s fun to get those and see what your joy assignment is for the day.

What’s next? What’s next after Holiday Joy Up for you Hannah?

Hannah: So we have a …my partner, who I run a program call Mama Coach with, we have a free call coming up on December 12th. It’s at 8:30 eastern.

We are just going to be talking about doing it all. What it means to do it all. So raise a family, have a business, love your partner, spend time with them, exercise, eat well, everything. We are going to kind of throw that myth out the window and talk about what really happens inside of doing it all.

Then in January we will be launching something that we haven’t announced yet, so something’s coming. That’s just to support women and mothers who are running holistic businesses. Because we all need as much support as we can get. There’s a wealth of just amazing women with information that when we gather together it’s really incredible when that happens.

Christie: So what do the holidays look like at your house?

Hannah: That’s a good question. So for me the holidays are all about the magic and the tradition. So a lot of traditions that we’ve kept from when I was a child and a lot that we’ve had to make new to make our family work. For me, you know, it’s like sparkly lights and a Christmas tree and eggnog. And just trying as hard as possible to stay in the presence of what the season means and to not go too crazy with feeling obligated to be everywhere and to do everything. I haven’t sent Christmas cards for years and I may not do it again. Just taking things off my list so I can really enjoy the time with my kids and allow them to start to grow new traditions on their own. Not to be so locked into what I want to do. But to give them some breathing space so that they can create their own magic of the season, too. So that’s what it looks like.

Christie: On thing my daughters started on their own was an Advent calendar. We’d never done that, I’d never done that, my husband had never done that. They saw one somewhere and said what’s that and so we kind of explored that whole tradition and have brought that in. Every year they say it’s time for the advent calendar. Oh yes, I would forget if you didn’t remind me because it’s not so firmly entrenched in my mind as a tradition that I have. But it’s definitely their tradition that they’ve brought into our holiday celebration.

Hannah: Oh, it’s so nice to be able to give them that space. To have their own joy.

Christie: Their advent calendars are highly geared toward stickers so it pulls in the love of stickers that 8 year olds have. So it works on many levels.

What else would you like to say?

What kind of closing remark would you have for the mamas and the mama entrepreneurs out there as they head into the holidays?

Hannah: For me I’m back in this place of stepping outside of the rituals that keep me grounded. When I do that I start to feel sick and I get crabby and I start yelling and I don’t want to do that and I don’t spend time with my husband.

So right now I’m in that place of just finding my center again and to do that it’s through ritual. Making sure that I have my tea and things like that. I go and I do the dishes when they are piled up. I take time to sit down read so many stories that my bigger boys can’t read anymore to my little ones.

Really just going back to those rituals that ground me and center me and then my world opens up and so much is possible.

So that’s really how I think you can to reconnect to self care if feel that you’ve lost your way a little bit.

Christie: O.K. great. I thank you so much Hannah for stopping by and sharing a little bit of yourself with us today. Everybody I will have links to Hannah’s site which is Mama Space, which you can find at hannahsharvest.com. I will have that below the video as well as information on the Holiday Joy Up, which I highly recommend you do. Information on the call that Hannah mentioned the Doing It All (or not doing it all) call that Hannah is going to have in December. So I’m going to sign off. Goodbye Hannah, thank you very much.

Hannah: Thank you so much.