Mel Wakely has transformed herself by doing a lot of inner subconscious work she’s found her life’s purpose and is on a mission to share her value through mirror coaching other women on mindset and visibility strategies that have helped to transform her business and her life. She’s a video Queen helping female coaching businesses get visible and happy using compelling video rooted in conversion and consistency.
Transcript
I’ve seen this amazing photograph of you on Facebook with your sunglasses on when you were four years old – where you said you were made for more – and I would love to know how you got from the little girl with the sunglasses to where you are now.
I think a lot of women in the entrepreneurial space feel like they’ve always been meant for more and it’s interesting actually because when I first came into the online space I was working with a coach called Andrea Callanan and she said I was a high achiever, but actually I always felt like I was an underachiever. I always tried to find the quickest route to get to fame and fortune and it was only recently when I realised I actually had to do the work, that things really started to happen for me and my business started taking off so that’s my story.
I’ve got an interesting background, I have got 15 to 20 years in marketing and PR I worked on some pretty famous campaigns including the Gail Porter projection on the Houses of Parliament which everyone knows and remembers.
And then you were bullied at work and you took a year out?
I was doing a big multi-million pound event for Covent Garden and I had the worst boss and I had a nervous breakdown and I just said that was it. I think a lot of women in the entrepreneurial space have got that Line in the Sand moment and that was mine and I never looked back – I didn’t go back into corporate after that.
I don’t blame you because it sounds awful – what was it like going around the world for a year?
Amazing! No kids, so I was with my husband in 2008. It was the recession so we just went to get away from all of that and it was amazing – we went everywhere apart from South America actually, but most of the countries we’ve visited.
Wow, that must have been one heck of a year – so then you came back from doing that and lived in Yorkshire for six months and set up an event experience agency…
My background is experiential marketing and events so I really wanted to do marketing for those kind of companies. I set up a consultancy which meant I could be like a part-time mum because I just had a child in 2010, my first boy was born and so I had this amazing consultancy working with event agencies and we had some brilliant times and I up skilled with Digital Mums which a lot of women did because they’re really amazing – they’re still going around now – and I learned all about social media and that kind of thing, from 2016 I didn’t really look back and everything was amazing! I had a really successful boutique marketing agency serving the events industry, doing their social media, PR on business developments – but then the pandemic hit the events industry so it was really hard, a really, really tough time and I was like – “Do you know what? This is probably serendipity, because I’m gonna come in the slow lane, I’m in my comfort zone here, I’m not feeling like I’m being stretched” and that’s when I pivoted and went right okay – online space.
That’s a complete change around and even at this point when we got up to the pandemic you’ve done all of these amazing things that have led you to what you do now – Really Brave Things and really hard things and the pandemic is obviously also really hard and now you have a completely different business, but there is a lot of similarities between these because you’ve carried the marketing through all of that
They all lead up to that don’t they? The big shift for me was working on my mindset, and I did quite a lot of story work and looked at childhood trauma and the inner child wounds – and I didn’t even realise that stuff was a thing, you know? I was the least woo person before I met Andrea Callanan – I would have laughed in your face literally.
So how did that change then what did she do to you?
Things happened and I was like, Law of Attraction and the Universe has got your back – you sit there meditating and you’re gonna like manifest a hot tub – yeah right! But I just got more into it and things kept happening and coincidences happened, people came into my world which I would never have expected and it was just as soon as I stopped pushing and just surrendered and just said let’s just do – take the action obviously, you need to take the action, you need to be intentional in what you’re doing but stop pushing so much. I’ve always been quite controlling and I just let it go and everything started to expand in my business
It’s like you’ve sort of taken it a bit easier rather than letting everything be hard, you’re just sort of going with it.
I used to control everything and always pushing and always needing and always like feeling a bit victim mode in your business you know, you’re blaming everybody else apart from yourself. I think I think it’s a thing with women as well that when things aren’t going right, rather than having a growth mindset about it, it’s quite easy to fall into that trap of being the victim and not taking responsibility for yourself and I think that was a big shift in my mindset when I started to take radical responsibility for myself.
I love that radical responsibility and again that’s quite a brave thing to do isn’t it? Because you can be the victim – that’s like the comfort zone isn’t it? Where you’re like, it’s not my fault, everything’s just happening but if you sort of take responsibility for it…
It’s my family’s fault – I mean my my father still doesn’t really understand what I do he’s not like, he’s not online at all he’s got no social media and I don’t think he even realises the kind of woo stuff that I do now. He’d laugh me out of the room. It’s quite funny.
So you are the Video Queen – but you also have this mindset piece, so how do these two things fit together?
Yes woo and strategy – so a lot of my a lot of my clients when I first started teaching video content strategy were in the victim mindset basically and they didn’t want to do the work and so they used to hide and do anything they could not do the work – and I thought the only way to get them to move from A to B and get results for my client is if I do we do the inner work and work on your mindset because you need to ditch the visibility fears in order to stand in front of a camera and like sell your soul on Instagram. You know it is a hard thing, and when I first went live I was scared, I was petrified, it took me a lot of courage and I actually just did it because I needed to get visible because my back was up against the wall and I needed to bring the money in – so I trained up on different mindsets, different modalities. I’ve trained with um Nic Pidgeon – her positive psychology coaching academy and I did that last year and after January 22 I did that and then it kind of got me a little bit there you know but it was still quite surface stuff, I mean there’s so many amazing positive psychology interventions that are all backed in science and are really, really good if you’re very, very consistent in doing them but I was still not quite there and you know, something wasn’t quite right. I still wasn’t really feeling comfortable – until I met Jess Cunningham, the founder of Belief Coding and I met her for two days last October and it changed my life completely.
What is Belief Coding?
So Belief Coding is a mixture of different modalities that are already out there – it’s taking the best of several different modalities – it’s got positive psychology in it, neuro linguistic programming, NLP – EFT you know, tapping – and Kinesiology as well because you use a lot of your body and the way your body moves to work out where the discomfort is, what the trapped emotion is. I’m not a Belief Coding facilitator, so I can’t do the therapy on somebody else, but what I can do is I can teach you to do Belief Coding on yourself and do a self session and I’m trying to do that. You just sit and have a chat with your subconscious really, you ask yourself you know, is there a trapped emotion and then you ask yourself what age did this memory happen? And the memory usually comes into your head and then you talk to Mel at age four, two, baby in the womb – have a conversation with yourself and you make whatever that trauma is or the memory that’s stuck, you talk to Mel age four until Mel age four feels bloody amazing and then basically that sort of shift just clears things, it’s really interesting,
It sounds fascinating…
That means when you do that, literally in the moment which is visible in front of you, that’s amazing and then they’re more confident and able to do the video – people that couldn’t fly have one session of belief coding and they’re on a plane.
Wow!
So that is an extreme example but for what I’m teaching, for visibility fears, it works really, really well – a lot of my clients their fear of judgment is massive you know, worrying about what their partner, their friends, their old school friends will think about them.. self-sabotage and procrastination are two massive ones as is imposter syndrome – all of those I help my clients go through, using Belief Coding and at the same time I teach them how to record their journey with video because in today’s online space you have to be doing video.
Yes, I read on your Facebook earlier as a result of the pandemic 85% of businesses will use video as a marketing tool – that’s what you wrote and I just thought, yeah that seems so right but still people are so scared of it.
Since the pandemic everyone’s attention span has just been reduced and that’s why short form video, 15 seconds or less – people love it.
I could waste a lot of time doing it, I know I can get stuck.
It’s got to be intentional, because otherwise you can lose your life to the scroll.
But it is what people are interested in, so if you can use that Belief Coding to shift all those fears and get people confident enough to do that, that’ll impact their businesses so much.
Exactly
That’s brilliant – I think that’s really fascinating, I feel like we’ve talked about the Belief Coding a little bit – we could talk about short form video a bit too, because obviously that’s pretty important and you have an amazing freebie that you can share with everybody’s listening to this video?
Yes, I tend to work with women age 45 to 55 who have either come out of the corporate space, because of the menopause sometimes, they just can’t hack it anymore – or they’ve just thought, I could make more money online – but then they come in and there are all of these Millennials with white shiny white teeth and glossy long hair and they’re like “shit!” and then they feel really overwhelmed and they’re like “I don’t feel good enough” and they’re comparing all of those things that you do and that just kind of stops them in their tracks, so the mindset work is really important as well as the confidence to use it because we’re not that… Generation X you know, we weren’t born with a phone in our hands, no internet. When I first started working I had index cards for my clients, not even have a mobile phone, we didn’t have MMS we didn’t have MSN Messenger, nothing.
Yeah, I am a millennial, but only just!
Are you a 1981 baby?
1984 – I feel like that doesn’t quite count.
We’ll let you off!
So you think that the people who who you work with you said, 45+ they struggle a lot more than Millennials?
I think they’re not digitally native, so it’s more alienating and it’s like they don’t get things instantly, so it all feels a bit clunky trying to do the apps and I know because I felt like that as well when I first came into the online space – I was like what the hell is a Reel? I mean like why am I doing this? Why doesn’t it make any sense to me whatsoever and trying to work out how to edit and yeah and it’s like but you just I just persevered and now I help you and persevere and some people are more natural at it than others.
It’s just about just it’s just about trusting yourself really.
And doing that work to become more confident .
Exactly.
And find it easier. It is hard it’s really hard making videos when you first start making them for definite and I was in the house by myself I was in the conservatory there was nobody else there and I threw up afterwards – how ridiculous so nobody there but you just get so nervous don’t you?
I’m not like that. I still have fear around public speaking, I’m totally fine if I’ve got a screen in front of me but if you put me in a room in a real live environment I will not do that, that really scares me, so I think I need to go and do a speaking gig next – if anyone’s listening and they want to give me one?
You’ll be great, I bet you’ll be absolutely fantastic
I just thought of it now I can feel my stomach getting stressed, like in a room – it is really funny.
We touched on your freebie and then we didn’t come back to it – I downloaded it earlier because I thought I should download this and see what it is – it’s AMAZING! Really good, so you know sometimes you get freebies and you just forget about them – this one I have bookmarked because this is something I want to be able to come back to.
Thank you Amy!
It’s really really good – do you want to tell people what’s in it that they can get it for?
The inspiration for my freebie came from lots of my clients, when you’ve got brain fog in the menopause days – which can be from anything from myself at 43 so you can be like in your early 40s, you have those days where you just can’t see the wood for the trees and you’re sitting in front of your laptop and you’re like “brain fog! What the hell am I going to post about?” and that’s where the inspiration came from – so when you’re feeling like that and you’re feeling like the creative juices have run out and you’re lacking inspiration this is a really nice piece tool that you can look through and choose an idea that works for your brand and it’s all designed for service based businesses because that’s who I work with, so there’s like the ideas for reels, 50 ideas for reels and TikToks, lives and stories.
Yeah, you cover everything – you can’t possibly possibly get stuck and you can go and have a look at that amazing list and see all the things that are available – it’s a really good freebie, so people can go get that and the link is in the show notes so they can go and do that.
You are going to share three hacks with us for doing video quickly, which sounds like something we could all benefit from because sometimes it’s just like it takes over your life.
One thing that everyone says is that it’s a time suck doing video and it doesn’t have to be, so I wanted to share ideas that I’ve got for saving you time and one is just my vanity.
Hack One
This is what we call B Roll – it’s a PR term “Broadcast Roll” it stands for – people are starting to use that term in the online space now and it basically means while you’re sitting working at your desk you just have your ring light set up with your phone in there and you just record like half an hour.
I’m doing that now – gold star!
Amazing! So going for a walk, I was on the escalators at Warren Street Station in London the other day -all those little bits of content you can use without any audio, you can add trending audio to it which will help you reach more people other than your followers and you can also just speed it up and just put text over the top so it’s really easy content to have a bank of that so just just get used to doing video selfies all the time.
Hack Two
If you like a filter which I do, I use Kylie and Whitney – Kylie I use the Kylie version obviously, because Whitney’s got massive eyelashes and that’s really not me – if you do like to use a filter try and use the same one across your platforms so you look the same across your platforms. I tend to record everything in Instagram because that’s where my filter is and then download it and upload it to other platforms – so that’s my main platform so that’s quite a good example but you can be brave and not use one as well that’s cool too.
Hack Three
The next one is photos so if you’ve got tons and tons of photos one of my best performing pieces of content recently was the one you were talking about at the beginning which is just photos of me through my journey which I’ve done a voice-over over the top and they make a video. Photos are so effective and on TikTok it’s really big at the moment because they’ve just allowed you to start doing Carousel posts but with music and video with photos and they’re really popular, doing really well so don’t think it has to be video all the time, it doesn’t have to be – you just have to think about how to animate it and bring it to life
Which you can do so easily in Canva as well can’t you with all those animations.
And stock footage as well. Absolutely.
We’ve got extra tips there that’s awesome thank you because it’s just so handy to be able to do things fast and we’re all so busy so that’s fantastic – so if anybody wants to know more about you which they should do after listening to this, where do they go to find out more?
It’s best to find me on Instagram or on Tik Tok and it’s at Mel Wakely m-e-l-w-a-k-e-l-y
Brilliant. Both of those links will of course be in the show notes along with the one for the freebieand that’s been that’s been fantastic thank you so much.
Thank you for having me! It’s been a pleasure.
Find Mel. Her Instagram, TikTok and the Visibility Content Bank mentioned in the podcast.
Mel has a fantastic free challenge running this week (5-8 June 2023) which you can find here. Step into your Inner Video Queen.
Amy Purdie, The Brand Explorer takes you on an Adventure to discover what your brand is all about, helping you with your brand strategy, brand visuals and content ideas. You can join Amy’s Brand Success Club or join her in your very own Private Brand Adventure.
Amy has been enjoying designing logos, brand identities, illustration, print work and websites – since 2007 fuelled mainly by tea and chocolate.