The show’s guest in this episode is Melisa Keenan. She lives in Nevada, and after investing nearly $200,000 us in certifications and training, navigating her own traumatic relationship experiences and now influencing 1000s of 1000s of women. She understands the female CEO feeling trapped in the masculine and she helps women gain time freedom, intimacy and fulfillment without losing momentum.

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Intimacy and feminine energy for high level CEOs with Melisa Keenan

Hey, everybody, I’m so excited to be here live with you today. It’s so fun to be here live. And I’ve been thinking about my own leadership. And I’ve been thinking about people coming out of COVID. And one of my big realizations this summer and, you know, kind of over the last six months, I’ve been toying with this thought, and I wanted to share with you and it’s that I’ve decided it’s really useful to think of treating people like their cats. And, and it’s just like, I think people are different after COVID, I think they’re a little more skittish. And I’ve realized that just like a cat, like, they don’t want to be controlled. But if you sort of offer opportunity, so sometimes I find myself saying things like, hey, you might want to do this, but then I don’t push very hard. I don’t make sudden moves. So, like, if I invite someone to my house, to hang out, I don’t like, say, oh, let’s do this. And let’s do this. And let’s do this, I sort of say, well, maybe we’ll make some food and see what they do, if I don’t want them to leave, because I don’t want them to, like, feel too much pressure. And I don’t know what happened. I think people were home alone. And sort of, I know our family, everybody was alone in their room with their own device. And so, I sort of makeup that we might have all gotten sort of selfish about how we do recreation. So being with others, it takes some giving up of our personal preferences a little bit to do with others. So, it has to be really, really fun and engaging. So, we don’t want to be forced into it or cajoled.

Anyway, I love this idea. And I realized I’ve started using it in my coaching as well, like, what would you think of this or so it’s just a gentler approach to how people move. And I noticed when people try to move too fast with me, like they want me to do something and they try to they’re too exuberant in their positivity around it, I realize I sort of recoil. I want to be treated like a cat; I want somebody to offer opportunities. And then I’m more likely to come around and say, oh, yeah, that sounds really fun. And I just think I think about, you know, when I want to pet a cat, I sort of offered the opportunity for them to come to me, rather than me chasing them down. Once when I was little, we had a stray cat on our property, I think it was about four. And I thought it was the most beautiful white fluffy cat I had ever seen. And I wanted to grab it and hug it and hold it. And it turns out, it was a nasty, nasty stray cat that had lots of teeth and sharp claws. And it clawed me from my wrist to my shoulder and bit me and I think they had to catch it and find out if it had rabies to keep me from having to get rabies shots. And it was a stray, and it didn’t go so well for the cat or for me. So, you have to be careful when you approach cats. And I think right now we have to be careful how we approach people. And we can treat people like cats.

Now, I am super excited about our guest today because she’s an intimacy expert. So, I am very curious to hear what she has to say about my cat theory. And she helps high powered women CEOs use the feminine energy as a 10 times growth strategy, and I’m super excited to hear everything about her. She’s a keynote speaker. She’s an international best-selling author. Her name is Melissa Keenan. She lives in Nevada, and after investing nearly $200,000 us in certifications and training, navigating her own traumatic relationship experiences and now influencing 1000s of 1000s of women. Melissa understands the female CEO feeling trapped in the masculine and she helps women gain time freedom, intimacy and fulfillment without losing momentum.

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Melissa I am so excited to have you on my show.

I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for bringing me on.

Well, it’s great to have you here. And I want to I want to talk all; you know all about you and what you’re doing. And we also are doing this little book clubs’ segment. And we’re talking about the introduction of the experimental leader. And, and the scientist’s approach to leadership. And I am just curious, because you teach women lots of things. And I, you know, one of the core themes of this chapter is just, you know, I’ve been asked in a million podcasts, you know, can people learn leadership? Or is it innate, and I wanted to get your take on that?

Oh, 1,000%. And also, it’s innate, because it’s innate in all of us, I think we’re all leaders and, like, we’re all asked to lead in various different capacities, even if you’re called to be a parent. That’s leadership, if you’re, you know, any, even just in your neighborhood, like you get to choose if you want to be the leader, and, you know, lead kind conversations or whatever. So even maybe not in the most traditional sense of the word leadership. We’re all leaders.

Yes, I absolutely agree. Or I wouldn’t do what I do. I believe that we all have, you know, these opportunities. And I also believe that there’s really specific skills that people develop, to help them, you know, on that journey, it’s not like they were born knowing them. It’s, it’s not magic, you know, we and I had an interesting conversation with my husband one time. And he really was challenging the idea that we do this early identification of natural leaders on the playground with kids, like, you know, we identify leaders, because they’re not actually identifying leadership, they’re actually identifying other things like, good speaking, or telling people what to do or gregariousness, or something. And they’re not really leadership skills. So, we actually identify people as leaders that have a whole different set of skills, because they’re more just people that we find sort of socially attractive, rather than good leaders.

Right? It’s actually a really pertinent topic right now, because my son was just suspended last week, for the first time ever. He’s 11. And and actually, as a result of the whole experience, we decided to homeschool him. And the main reason is because well, okay, let’s back up, we’ll tell you why he was suspended. He sent around a poll in his class asking how many of the students thought that the teacher and assistant teacher should be fired. So that was why, but unfortunately, the way that the domino effect happened, the assistant teacher, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And she quit her full-time job as a result of this poll. So, I don’t know that he would have gotten suspended had the teacher not had such a dramatic reaction, and then, you know, huge disruption in the classroom. But for me, it caused me to pause and really look at the experiences My son has had. And I know he has this innate ability to lead. But it’s in a different way than kind of what you’re saying some of these traditional, like, I’ll stand on the table, and I’ll tell everyone what to do or whatever. But there hasn’t been an environment yet in the school, to really support him to draw out those natural gifts of his. So, it’s actually really Burton it in our in our little microcosm.

I’m looking at it and I’m thinking, well, he’s doing data collection. He’s not actually saying I think the teacher should be fired. He’s actually asking a question and testing his hypothesis, like the experimental Leader in Me thinks this is not a punishable offense. This is a this is an environment that you only have a problem with if there’s a different problem. Like if a truth teller can’t be present in the environment.

You know, we talked to him about his leadership. And it was like, it was like, we’ve been telling him for a long time, you have this innate ability to influence people, and you’re going to have life experiences in your life, or you’ll get to experiment with this. And so, I’m, you know, right after it happened, and this the shame, I mean, my son is the kind of kid who did not take this lightly. And I said, do you see how you have this, and they have ability to influence people you like, but it’s not a good thing. And they said, well think of all the other ways you could have gone about it. Like if you could see that there was a problem going on. Maybe you could have What if you had sent her on a poll that said, would you be willing to make a card for the teachers because I can tell they’re stressed and think about the outcome that might have had or, you know, whatever, there’s a lot of different ways he could have approached it. And so, you know, I feel like, aren’t we all experimenting in our leadership?

Well, and I’ve been working as a business coach for a really long time. Getting a problem employee to quit is a really difficult thing. He may have just done everybody a favor.

I know if I know one thing about children is like, if you don’t have thick skin, you probably don’t belong around.

I mean, if you can’t withstand a poll, you probably shouldn’t be working in a classroom. Like, really, if you can’t have a conversation from that, it’s probably not the right job for you, which is probably why he was sending around the poll. Yeah, yeah, we got to be tough. Like, we got to be willing to, like, look at ourselves, if we’re going to work with children, and teach them anyway. That’s amazing.

One of the quotes from your, from your chapter, about leadership, where you said, the real work of leadership is slower moving and more grounded, contemplative, instead of bossy, quietly powerful, instead of loudly emphatic. I thought that in, you know, I had kind of saved that into my phone. Before I knew you were even talking about the cat thing. And everything you just said was, was that and, you know, I think that’s so true. It’s like the, the river and the riverbed. And the river water, you know, it rushes it goes, it flows, but it’s also just very flowing. And it’s often not super threatening, and yet has the ability to carve out spaces and crevices in these rocks, which clearly are so strong, you know, so obviously, tangibly like, I couldn’t just go out and carve into a rock and yet water that just flows and it’s just consistent and does its thing can carve out. And I think that’s a, you know, that’s how leadership is.

I think it’s how leadership is. And I think, you know, so many people are just trying their best. You know, sometimes their best isn’t good enough, but I think most people are really trying their best. Sometimes, you know, sometimes my best isn’t good enough. I’ve had times in my life where, you know, I was so frustrated with my children, I have three children. One is one is almost 30. And I have 17-year-old twin boys, I have a daughter who’s almost 30- and 17-year-old twin boys. And I’ve had days where I thought my children were horrors, and then I took a nap, and they were magically better. Be sure it was me. And, and so you know, it’s, and I’m pretty sure the same is true of my business, my work, you know that there’s times where we have reserves, and there’s times that we don’t you know, to find that quiet leadership. And then sometimes we’re just really loud. Amen. So, I want to know more about you. What are you up to in your work in your leadership? How Are You Experienced experimenting in your work right now?

Ah, I love that question. Oh, I want more of that. This year has been so beautiful. I started I’m one of these people who absolutely believe everything is spiritual, everything is divine and human at the same time. And so, I started getting all these hits about men. People just kept saying stuff to me about men and as you shared in my bio, I primarily worked with women I’ve also worked with couples all work with men in a partnership but hadn’t previously called in just a man to work with men and kept getting all these hits men, men, men, people, all different corners, um, to the point that it was like I can’t I’m paying attention. I’m now paying attention, right? And one man in particular kept nudging me like you should really write a book about connection and the some of the things you have found around men. And it was like in the beginning I was like, I never that wasn’t didn’t even occur to me. And yet as I as I started getting curious about this and why the universe kept saying, like pay attention to men. I had I kept having calls, I was holding research calls and things with men and really trying to understand what men’s experience is like, and also gleaning from, you know, the couples that I’ve worked with and stuff. And I, I realized that men actually feel less safe to be themselves and be fully self-expressed than women. That’s the pattern and theme that has shown up consistently. And so, as a result, I mean, to me, that’s such a tragedy, I cannot imagine walking around feeling like I have to put a damper on who I am, everywhere I go. And, and then I think about my son, and I think, oh, this is the world that I’m like, plunging him into, right. So, then the fascinating thing is, the more than I did these studies in which share some of you know, these all halls and perspectives that I was having, the more women just kept coming in wanting to work with me. And I realized women really are craving to understand, especially their partner, but you know, we have women carry around so much wounding from men from our ancestry from our own, you know, childhood personal experiences, we’re craving to understand men and be able to actually let the good man or the safe men that are in our space, into our hearts, we just keep up these walls. So, I so I have decided to write a book on understanding men in some form or shape, it’s all still just coming together piece by piece. And, and in this process, I’ve received all these new layers of healing around men, my story with men is deep and intense. And so, I started receiving layers of healing myself, I’ve realized I need to make a course and bring women along with me. So, I’ve got a course going, it actually just started Monday, enrollment closes Friday, that’s called understanding Him. And it’s to help women heal their relationship with men in whatever capacity that you know, they feel called to. It’s been such a journey this year. And I’m so grateful. It’s like, it’s like some blinders have been lifted from my eyes, because there are men who have made really, really bad choices that have affected things. But there are a lot of good men out there who don’t have the intention to trample over us or hurt us or, and, and I feel super called to bring this kind of healing to the planet right now.

It’s, I think it’s I’m fascinated, and I can’t wait to see your book. I think it sounds really interesting. I also work with couples. And I have thought for a very long time, that men are very marginalized in relationships, and that it’s very difficult for them to find their space. And we have a lot of language around that in our lives. We say things like, oh, she’s, you know, you got to talk to the boss. You know, I can’t book social engagements. You hear this language all the time, like, these are grown men, why can’t they book a social engagement. And then on the other side, we look at the statistics around women, you know, being in charge of children and the home and men not doing, you know, 50%, not even 30% probably in most cases. And I don’t think that that’s because men aren’t willing, but because women, all like there’s, there’s something in those systems, it’s in the systems that tells men they’re not capable or tells women they have to. So, we’ve got broken systems in our homes in all of our homes, around those things. And I and so. So, I’ve been fascinated for the, you know, by this for a very long time, I worked with a teacher named Larry Byram in Colorado years ago, who did relationship work. And he always talked about sort of the juxtaposition between intimacy and autonomy. And I mean, it’s a very heterosexual normative paradigm. So, I’m going to apologize for that. And then say it because I think there’s still two people and there’s still a broken like, like the paradigm still holds just depends on who holds which piece, but he would say that the intimacy in the relationship is limited by the man in the relationship and autonomy is limited by the woman. I think that can be fascinating. And that can be stretched, I believe to be one person limits the intimacy in the relationship and one person limits the autonomy in the relationship, but I think, in most heterosexual relationships those gender boundaries hold.

And I think it’s so important to follow that up with until you recognize and decide to stop the pattern. Right? Like we can decide, hey, that we don’t want that experience. I mean, my husband and I actually just went live in my little free Facebook group yesterday, because I’ve gotten this sense that there are women who really want to step into this feeling what they’re scared, so I asked my husband, hey, can you come on, and let’s like talk about this. And one of the things he shared that I hadn’t ever heard him say before, was the voice of criticism that was in my head, you know, years ago, before we did all this work, the voice of criticism was your voice. And that was just like, never want my voice to be that yucky voice in somebody’s head. I can’t, we can’t control that, you know, to a certain degree, but I want to do what I can to make sure that that’s not my voice, I want to be a voice of autonomy. And I want to be a voice of intimacy, I don’t want to be a voice of limitation, and you suck, and nagging and all that, right.

and I and I want to acknowledge George, who just said hello to us, George, it’s great that you’re here. And I want to also invite people, you know, it’s great that we can take questions, if people have questions, you’re live, we can take questions, we can, you know, we show comments on the screen. So, feel free to interact with us, it’s super exciting to be able to do that on this, you know, live show. And, and I think it’s, it’s, it’s so interesting when we realize both the harm that we’ve done, and that we can change from doing that. I also am always struck. You know, I have a coaching certification and systems work. And that’s where I come from. So, I always go to data and, and research for my couple’s work. And I always find it really interesting that people think that they need to talk about their problems, it’s like a, it’s like Freud ruined couples healing, because talking about problems isn’t supported by the data to go in. And just like you can, you can work on some things together, you can create a new norm, but 69% of all problems are repetitive from Gottman research. And, and so if you want to improve your marriage, stop focusing on the things that don’t change, you can also start to change things that aren’t those things. So, I find it really interesting how sometimes people think authenticity and marriage is holding, they’re telling their partner what their problems are over and over and over again. And I think it’s really harmful and painful for people.

Because it’s not true authenticity. So, I don’t bring a lot of statistics and things like that into my work I’ll speak to when I when I work with somebody, I I’ll do some consulting work, but for the most part, I always bring them back to their own inner wisdom. And this is tied to true authenticity, right? Your true authenticity is not actually like complaining about your problems all the time. Your true authenticity involves true into me see first with yourself, then with your partner, and that is seeing into yourself that means what am I actually feeling? And what value what is something that’s so meaningful for me that’s missing in this situation, which is why I’m having these feelings. And then how can I communicate that to somebody that I love, in an effort to create connection, not create disconnection or try to control the other person. So true authenticity is actually going in into me see, right? And then bringing forward what we find. And if we’re unwilling to do that work, and we just want to complain about our problems. That’s not really authenticity.

Well, and I have a question for you. It’s kind of from this place, like what if, you know, you’re asking your partner to meet a need that they don’t want to meet.

I love that. I love that. And that’s probably the most common thing that comes up right is I want something and there’s something I really value here. That’s driving what I’m asking for. And they’re like, I can’t do that. Well, first of all, you’re a step ahead of the game. If your partner is actually saying I can’t do that, or I am not willing to do that. Because so often people say yes, when they mean No, we are just very frustrating. And we’ve got tools to work around that too, because that’s so common. But if your partner is able to say no, or he’s showing you he or she is showing you over and over with their actions that actually no, they’re not willing to do that. What typically happens in that case is not actually a mismatch of values. Because we can all experience all the values all the time, it’s not actually about the core essence of who we are, it’s actually just about the strategies that we’re using to experience those values. So, so for instance, I may say to my husband, I really want to experience greater trust with you. And so, I want to see that you take out the garbage every single day. And right, that would actually be high level communication there, you check and see if you get agreement, maybe he says, yes, right, and then he doesn’t do the thing. So that’s an opportunity, what do we do when we make an agreement, and then it’s not met, that’s an opportunity to come back and create connection again, it’s like, hey, what’s preventing you from doing the thing that you said that you were going to do, and actually approaching it from Curiosity, so that you can, you know, get into the core of who this person is that you’re in a relationship with? Usually, you can break down and identify what values are most important to both of you. So, you can come up with a strategy that actually does work for both of you. And maybe he might say, well, actually, the truth is, every single day, I’m halfway to work. And I realized I didn’t take out the garbage. And I’ve been beating myself up about it all week or whatever, right? Like, we just get to open up another conversation. And I think that’s a place where couples will get stuck. Or really, actually any conversation where you know, you’re depending on agreements, we get stuck when somebody doesn’t do the thing, we think they agreed to or that they actually agreed to, and then we just stop there. And we sort of like, put our hands on her back. And like, well, I don’t know what to do. Now. You just open another conversation.

Well, and I think it’s interesting. So, I’m just going to bounce off of this a little and say, having been a coach of high performers for 23 years, I avoid agreements like that, like the plague in my practice, I avoid homework assignments that have accountability, because people pay me literally hundreds of dollars an hour, and break those agreements, often. And I don’t want them to break their agreements to them to me, even when they’re their agreements only for them, not for me. When they’re making agreements for themselves, they break them. And so, when you say that I’m like, don’t make those agreements, like I try to avoid those agreements, like do it a different way. So, like, I don’t know what that is. But like, I worry just about having those kinds of agreements that get broken, because I think in my experience, people don’t keep those kinds of agreements to themselves much less to another human. Like, are you setting yourself up?

It’s so interesting. And I’ve got some work around that too, because my feeling about that is if we make an agreement, and then we can’t keep it. So now we’re just talking about us personally, right? I say yes to something, whether it’s to myself a commitment to myself, to my mentor, or to my partner, or to my boss, I say yes. And usually what happens when we don’t keep that is that there are underlying feelings and values that we’re not getting present to. So, in the case where I’m making an agreement to myself, like I came up with the goal, and then I don’t achieve the goal. It’s simply because I wasn’t quite hitting the right values. Maybe I wasn’t even quite hitting the right strategy. If we find the values that really light us up, that really keep us in that expanded, like what I call our divine state, then we will do the thing, we’ll do it to the ends of the earth, until we switch and then we make a new agreement with ourselves. So, I think that what hurts so much about that is that we feel like these agreements have to be so static. And really, they’re ever changing because our desires are ever changing our heart. And that’s natural, because we’re growing. We’re changing. We’re up leveling, we’re changing our perspective all the time.

Well, and I think too, you know, in order to be able to make agreements with our partner that work, we have to also be able to say no to our partner, and I see that a lot that it doesn’t feel like if our partner says, hey, will you take out the garbage every day? If you can’t say, no, I can’t. Exactly if you can’t create in a marriage where no is an option, then you’re probably going to say yes. And then do it some of the time, do what you like, like, we don’t create a win scenario for ourselves.

It’s so true. And that’s such an important conversation to be had. That was something that took a lot of work for my husband and I, because I don’t like no. I don’t like, I don’t like, I don’t like space, and my husband needs space, he needs time to process like, I’m the kind of person that I know what I’m thinking and feeling what I want and all the things like now and he needs maybe a day or two or whatever, right or a few hours and so we had to create an environment that where it was safe to say no, we had to have that conversation. Like, I don’t actually feel safe to say no. And I want to how can we create an environment where I have the, you know, I’m not going to be afraid of repercussions for why say? And, you know, an example with that space thing is we would I needed reassurances, that’s what I realized. And we often shy away from that, too, like weak people need reassurances. No, all human beings need reassurances. So, my husband would say, I need to leave the conversation, but I’m not leaving the relationship. And we did that for probably like four years. Now, we don’t really need it anymore. I mean, if self gets really heated, we may, you know, utilize that, again, it’s like a tool in our back pocket. But yeah, we depended on that thing. Because I would be like, he’s telling me the relationship. I’ve had massive abandonment in my life. It’s just a wound that I have, I’d love for it to be gone, but it’s not. And that spoke directly to that for me. So then, you know, we’d be able to come back together and have the conversation later. And it was okay that he needed the space.

I love that I love I think that’s really important that people have a way to take a break or take a minute people get flooded, teams get flooded. In conversations, if you’re doing intense work with a team at work, they also get flooded. If you’re doing facilitation work with a team or you’re doing heavy work with your team, you probably want to limit yourself to an hour and a half before you let everybody take a phone break. And just get up and check your phone. Because people get tired. And when they get tired, they get flooded, they stop being able to process. And if heat happens, they’re not equipped for it in that moment. We had a question a minute ago about wanting examples on intimacy and autonomy. I just want to speak to that really briefly. And I could do a whole we could do a whole podcast on this. But intimacy, so when somebody limits intimacy, it’s sort of how deep they would go in a conversation and feel free. Feel free to jump into this and add your own two cents. But you know, we all have limit limits on how deep we’re willing to go. Like, if somebody says, how are you, you can say like, oh, my gosh, let me tell you about the whole thing that’s going on in my life and blah, blah, blah, or you can say, Oh, I’m, I’m fine, I’m good. And you get to choose what level of intimacy if you think about an iceberg, it’s a good metaphor for how deep you go below the surface for intimacy. And so, marriages have these natural limits about how deep we go. And we can’t go deep all the time, because we’ll be exhausted emotionally. And then autonomy is sort of the freedom we have to act. I think if it is the freedom, we have to act alone. So, my marriage, for example, I’ll give you an example. I took my kids in 2021. My kids who are swimmers, my they were 16 at the time, and I went to New Mexico, so they could swim and left my husband home in Ontario and lived away from him for three and a half months. And it changed the level of autonomy probably forever in our marriage. Because it went really well. It was fine. He you know, I kept checking in with him. I was like, are you okay? He wasn’t totally okay. He was really glad when we came home. But he knew it was best for our family. And he allowed himself to have just comfort for what was good for our family. And I had a blast. I walked away from all the COVID restrictions of Canada and was free and happy in New Mexico and he was fine with that. He actually had he had a grad student who showed up and he moved to them into our house for three weeks. And so, on Father’s Day he posted a picture of his new Family when he was walking around with their son, and it was totally funny, because he had imported a family from Brazil while we were gone, but that level of autonomy we both had, and we talked on the phone occasionally. But not all the time, like there, we didn’t feel needy between us, we missed each other, we were happy to see each other again. And we kind of realized, like, hey, I’d pick you again. Because we like being married to each other, but we don’t do it out of need. And that’s. So that’s that autonomy, the freedom to move independently. Do you want to add anything to those two?

Sure, I would say that. So, you know, a generalized stereotype that probably shows up more often than not, but not necessarily all the time. And I also think it’s important that kind of to define intimacy, we’ve, we’ve like alluded to it and stuff. But oftentimes, people use the phrase intimacy to mean sex or physical intimacy, when that’s just one aspect of intimacy. So real intimacy is like a closeness and connection emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, it’s, it’s all of those things. And, and so you know, because it’s like, well also, stereotypically men want sex more than women, right? That’s another stereotype that tends to be very common, but not the case for all partnerships. So, a man if you think about it, to me, that makes total sense. Because if you think about a man’s upbringing, he typically stereotypically is taught not to feel his emotions, it’s weak, don’t express what’s on your heart and mind, don’t show any of your weaknesses, all of the things, you know, vulnerability really is the breeding ground for intimacy and connection is being able to, like laugh and cry and snot and all the things together, and in do that in a connected safe space. So that’s true intimacy. So doesn’t it make sense that typically, the man would be the one who’s like, holding back, he’s reserved, he’s not expressing what he really thinks, how he really feels, you know, but he really enjoys poetry, or he really, like he’s, he’s got that guard up. Oftentimes, more so than then the woman. She’s cut her own guards, you know, traumas and things like that. And the autonomy piece that so this quote, of course, wasn’t for me, it was from some mentor of Melanie’s in the past, and that’s something I I’d be interested in, in doing more research on, for sure that the woman kind of holds the limit for like, hey, look, this is, this is how far you’re allowed to go. And I do see that in some of my couples, just as I think about that, you know, for instance, he may want to be really outspoken politically, and she might be like to just tone it down a little bit, or…

Even like weekends away with friends, or, you know, coming home to the family. I mean, it sort of makes sense, even from like an evolutionary point of view. Like, who, who was home with the children and who was out, you know, hunting or like, even from that very basic perspective, the autonomy to move, you know, who had the autonomy to move and who didn’t? And who, you know, so, I think these are fascinating. I’ve found these fascinating concepts. It was 20 years ago that I worked with him. He has a book, but it’s not his name’s Larry Byram. And he has a book, but it’s not I think it’s not, yeah; he has a book out. It’s not a book that I recommend a lot because it’s, it’s sort of more technical and isn’t specifically about these things. But he was a great teacher. And these were really interesting things that he brought to.

Also know some really conservative families that still exist today, right where the woman feels so trapped and like a slave to the children a slave to the home, and she can never go anywhere, while her husband has a job outside of the home, has friendships outside of the home, make sense for him to have golf appointments outside of the home, whatever. Right. And so, so I think again, it’s like it’s not, you know, cookie cutter for all but…

Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s but I do think that there’s a way that autonomous autonomy and intimacy, if you can spiral those sort of up and down like intimacy going deeper and autonomy expanding, then those are pretty good things to work on rather than, you know, what your partner did, or, you know, there are different ways to approach relationship that has a shot up fulfillment.

I know for us, the more we leaned into intimacy and really allowed ourselves our most authentic selves to come forward and be together, the more autonomy we both experienced, it was like, I like new every part of him. So, when he was delighted about something, I delighted about it, you know, when he like, wants to take a risk or whatever it’s like, I’m like, right in it with him, like, you know, I’m excited. And he’s the same with me. So that has really set us free in so many ways.

Yeah, I, there’s a couple of moments in my life that I can specifically remember that made took our relationship to really deep places with my husband. One is my when my mother was dying. And I was like, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I should go or stay or, and he just looked at me and he said, Go, go as much as you want to go. I’ve got it. I’ve got home. Don’t regret. You’ll never regret being there. You might regret not being there. Just go. I’ve got you. And I was like, Oh my gosh, like even now. Like, I’ll cry like it. Having someone hold me like that, like, hold my family hold things that were dear to me. That’s intimacy. It’s not it’s not the second like it’s not, you know, sexy underwear. It’s like that, like being held that deeply that my knee and mine were important to him. I love that. Yeah. Well, I suppose we could stop there. I mean, now that everybody’s crying? Um, no. Where can people find you, Melissa?

Yeah, absolutely. So, my website www.melissakenan.com. Lots of free resources there any shows or talks, I’ve been a part of articles like posted, I’ve got a blog there and stuff. But also, if you’re on Facebook, it’s really easy to just type in a search woman manifesting intimacy, if you happen to be a woman, you can pop into the free Facebook group and lots of free content in all the places.

Cool. Well, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for your time, it’s been a blast talking with you.

Thank you so much, Melanie, I couldn’t agree more.

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I loved being on the show today with Melissa Keenan. And our conversation just really takes me back to the whole idea that the quality of our conversations really makes up the quality of our relationships. I hope I really want to challenge you this week to go out and have quality conversations with people that you care about. And my guess is that there might be a conversation or two that you’ve been putting off because it was summer because the kids were about to go back to school or because you didn’t want to create waves or because of something that was, you know, on your mind, but I want to challenge you to have those important conversations. I want you to go and have a conversation you’ve been putting off this week. Go experiment!

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Melisa Keenan

Melisa Keenan helps high powered female CEOs use their feminine energy as a 10X growth strategy, as the go-to intuitive intimacy expert for the top 1%. She is a keynote speaker, International Bestselling Author and USA Today Bestselling Author.

After investing nearly $200K USD in certifications and training, navigating her own traumatic relationship experiences, and now influencing thousands of women, Melisa understands the female CEO feeling trapped in the masculine. She helps her gain time-freedom, intimacy and fulfillment without losing momentum.

Melisa enjoys dancing, singing, working, and praying at her hobby-ranch in Northern Nevada where she lives with her husband and four children.

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