Gigi’s Story.

Hello, everyone. I’m Gigi Sage, co-host of the Way of the Muse podcast, along with my daughter, Makena Sage.

Today, I’m going to share with you a bit of my origin story. My personal transformation and my journey as a coach began over 37 years ago – so I could easily fill a couple of books with my story, as you can imagine.

But today I want to focus on a few parts that I think are the most relevant for you, the listener.

So if you haven’t listened to the first episode, go back and make sure you listen.

First of all, I want to share a disclaimer. I always like to do this because when I talk, I’m going to speak about men and women in binary terms. And I will also make generalizations that are based primarily on my observations of tens of thousands of people over many decades.

And I do understand that there are many shades of gray. So, there are non-binary gender identifications, of course, same-sex relationships, and also just unique qualities to each individual and relationship dynamic.

So if you don’t identify when I use the words “men” and “women,” or if you happen to be in a same-sex relationship, what I want you to do is feel free to substitute the words “masculine” and “feminine” instead.

Okay, so where did all this get started? Let’s begin way back.

The year was 1985. I was a single mom of two. I’d just moved back to Houston, Texas, and had gotten a job in the telecommunications field. And honestly, at that point in my life, I was looking for something… I thought, “there’s got to be something more.”

I was longing for something.

So it just so happens when I started to work for this company, there was this special woman working there. and she was so different from anyone else. When she talked, she talked about living her passion.

She shared with me a story that she was actually leaving the company in about three months. She was living her passion and going to be an actress.

Now you have to understand this is 1985, and I had no idea what she meant by living your passion, but the more she talked about it and how excited she was, I was like, “Wow, you know, I’ve never even thought about, what would I like to do?”

Up until that point, I had just been kind of on autopilot.

The other thing that she shared with me is that she had taken a seminar and she’s actually been working with this “seminar company” and that they came to Houston frequently. and she would love it if I would join her in the seminar, because she said that is where she learned about living your passion.

So I was like, “Oh, okay.” I didn’t really know anything about seminars back at that point, and also, there weren’t a lot of seminars happening.

So I was super curious, and also a little hesitant. When it finally came around and the leader came to town and a seminar was organized in Houston, I tried to back out, but she said, “Nope, you made a commitment.”

And it’s the first time anyone had ever said that to me before. So I ended up showing up, and there’s a much longer story to that, but I’ll keep it brief today and basically share with you that my experience in the seminar was profound.

I went into that seminar and what happened is, people sat up in front of the room and the trainer would ask these questions. Like: “What do you love doing?” “Have you ever had a dream?”

Then people in the audience would give feedback anytime they saw you light up. So this was the beginning of the question you hear everywhere now, which is “What lights you up?”

This particular trainer had actually developed this term. So we did this in the seminar.

First of all, when I sat up in front of the room and people asked me, this amazing curiosity of the people watching and then giving me feedback was so exciting, because I’d never taken the time to stop and really think about, “What did I want?”

I was pregnant and married at 18. Like I said, I had two daughters at this time and I was 27 years old and I was just on autopilot. So getting up there, having people so curious about me, and sharing what was on my heart, it was such an amazing experience.

The other experience was when I sat out in the audience and I watched other people, and we asked them: “What do you want?” “What do you love doing?”

And you would watch them light up. You would feel it. You would sense it.

I was mesmerized when I left that seminar. I was so alive and so curious, and I had this feeling in the class, “I would love to do this. I would love to work with people this way.”

So something sparked in me and I started to follow my curiosity and aliveness. I started assisting in these workshops, helping out with them. Over the years then the man who led them became my mentor, and we worked together for many years.

And so in this, I started to develop my work – and that’s a long story!

I followed my passion and people thought it was crazy. I tried to talk everyone I knew into coming to the seminars… My parents came, all my friends, because I wanted to share this new thing that I had found.

So as we developed and grew, we created a four year training program in the late 1980s. We developed this four year certification program for coaches, if you can believe that. We called them coaches and trainers back then.

So people would come for one month every year for four years – and they’d immerse themselves in 30 day trainings, and they would learn the skills of training and coaching with us. They would learn sales. They would learn how to perform so they could get up and have stage presence.

We had all kinds of doctors, lawyers, people who were curious about being coaches. All of those people came to us. And so this was a very exciting time for me. I listened to things. I went to seminars. And through all these experiences, I started to develop my own work.

I did my first seminar in Maui. It was called “How to Train Your Man,” if you can believe that. And I think I had like five or six women, something like that.

The truth is I had this fascination about communication, and especially the communication between men and women. So in my mentorship, we kind of played around and used the different things that my mentor had been teaching, and then also started to develop our work together.

So he told me at one point, “You know, you need to go out there and just get in a training room, put together a workshop.” And we called it “How to Train Your Man,” and I would teach women how to communicate with men in such a way where it’s collaborative. Instead of the war of the sexes – let’s go to more of the dance of the sexes.

So I had a little bits that I knew or learned, but I just got in there and saw, “What did women want?” And when I stood in my first workshop I have to tell you, I was so scared and I felt like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I can do this!”

But also seeing the challenges they were going through… this helped me rise above my fears, and go in service to the bigger purpose for myself.

So this was a very exciting time. I would start teaching these seminars. I had the opportunity early on to actually teach these in Europe.

And, really for the next, I would say 17 years, I did workshops on a lot of different topics. “What To Do With The Rest Of Your Life.” I did the “How to Train Your Man,” which eventually became “Power Connections.” And a lot of different seminars over my years.

My work developed by being in the training room.

And when I would get in there and work with people, especially with the women, I saw their pain – like in relationship, and their pain in communicating with men. So I started to develop skills, and then also started to see the breakdowns and help the women see those themselves and work through those.

So my passion from the very beginning was communication between men and women.

And my personal mission is to transform conflict into harmony in businesses, relationships, and families – creating a ripple effect of prosperity and peace on the planet.

I love helping people create harmony in their communication, and through my years of working that has gone into people’s families, into their relationships, and into their businesses.

Often I’ve had clients where I work with them in all of those areas of their lives. They hire me for one area, and then we end up working in many different areas. So a lot of my work also has been with particular clients over many, many, many years.

As I said, I got the opportunity to work in Europe early on. Much of my work was there. And one time I was leading a class – this is when it became “Power Connections” in, I think it was Cologne, Germany.

And a woman was in it and after the workshop she came up to me and she said, “You know, have you ever written a book?” And I said, you know, “I’ve been writing a book for the last 15 years, but I haven’t actually gotten it into print yet.”

And she said, “Well, listen, I would love to write a book with you.” So she brought me a bunch of books the next morning. You know, Mars and Venus and a lot of the very beginning books back at that time. Because this was around the year 2000. And so I said, “Listen, you can fly to New York.”I was living in New York at the time and we could do a shorter book of what I’m writing.

So she flew to New York. We made an outline. She said, “Can I go see if I can get a book deal?” I was like, “Absolutely.” So she went back to Europe and she ended up, I think, getting three different offers.

So we ended up signing in Germany to do a book, and then that book eventually got published in seven countries in Europe. And it’s what I still teach all the time. One of those skills is “Wending.” And we will talk more about that in the podcast.

It’s a very high level communication skill – it is this dance of being able to, in conflict, not come up against each other, but find a way to kind of “wend” through the situation and really get both people what they want.

So what Makena saw later as she started working with me – because we started about five years ago, our business together – she started to see that Wending was not just a communication skill– but it’s really a way of listening and responding to life.

So often when we work with women in our masterminds or in our other classes, we teach them this communication tool so they can use this as a way of life – which is what she says is one of the biggest things I’ve taught her.

And it’s a big part of what we do in The Way of the Muse™ because, as Makena shared her story, she really went into a lot of pressure and really thought she had to work hard. So this tool has really been the opportunity for her to take a whole different approach to business and to the way she manages all of her life.

So, to share with you a little bit also about the lifestyle in my family… Early on, I began designing my life very differently. So like I said, I had the opportunity in an early part of my career to go into Germany, to work in the Netherlands, to work in Switzerland, and that was very exciting as you can imagine.

So early on I had to see how I could develop and grow my life in a different way than most people were doing it, because I eventually had five kids. So if I wanted to travel like this, then I had to design my life differently.

One thing I saw is that I love to travel. I love to travel with my family. So I was running an international coaching and training business where I would go and spend two months in Germany – and then I saw that I really wanted to bring my children.

So early on, I started to homeschool my children. We got a nanny and so that way they could come live with us. They could be immersed in the culture. It was super fun because we were working with people that lived in Germany. So we weren’t like tourists, right? We were there immersed in the culture.

My kids learned so much. Several of them speak German. and they just had this very different lifestyle. They were playing and speaking with the Germans – and then other people from other countries.

So early on, I saw to live life on my own terms – and no longer be directed by society. I created a life outside of what was normal. And we had to set up systems for our life that allowed us to do this. So we had a nanny, and we had to go where our clients were, and we allowed our children to learn from these experiences.

Also through the years, Brianna, my daughter, love to perform and sing. And we did a lot of performing and singing. So at one point we created a family band, and this is where our kids learned music. This is also where my daughter Brianna got the opportunity to really follow her aliveness and passion because we created this band and we sang together as a family band.

We put on shows in Munich. We did shows in Austin, Texas. So through this, this was how I had quality time with my children, because we lived a very, fast-paced, exciting life. So we were always looking to see what would be something that we all love doing, in a way that we could spend our time there.

The other thing is, through doing the band, the kids also learned discipline. We had to rehearse, we had to put on shows and at this time, my youngest daughter, I think she was three or four, and she was in the band with us.

It’s so cute when I watch old videos of us all singing, “It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore, and my daughter has her little pacifier in her mouth.

So we always did these activities or things that were fun, exciting, and that created this connection in our family. Then we would always include our clients in that. This would give the clients a kind of role model of what they could do with their families, to find out what was the system or the way of play with their families.

Now, as you can imagine traveling – at that point it was with four children and then five children – leading seminars all over the world. There was a lot of complexity to all this. So we set up systems to where my children also had responsibility. They were part of the dynamic and system.

They would help set up the workshops and our travels. Everybody had a job that they did and everybody helped plan. And then when we were in other places, everybody helped. And so it was a very fun thing for the kids early on. They felt like part of the system. It wasn’t us just telling them what to do. They got to contribute.

It was funny because our nanny started doing kids camps. So we would be in New York and we’d have a lot of Germans or Americans come. And since they were coming for 30 days, often they would want to bring their kids. So our nanny would develop a kids camp.

All the kids would have responsibilities and then they would have activities. They all got to be leaders. We would have the families actually do shows together where the kids and the parents got together and they performed. So we integrated all the different things we loved doing into our life, our family, and our business – and that’s basically how I’ve grown my life, and what I’ve taught my children to do.

So following our aliveness… and anything that I had an interest in, I would put it on a list, and then at some point I would integrate that into my next evolution in my business.

Because I traveled and I love to travel, I had a workshop that I developed called “Arts of a Woman.” I started leading retreats early in my career. And I would always choose retreats to have women come and experience these different experiences of cultures.

So I did the “Arts of Japanese Woman.” And in that I brought in special guests. We did Ikebana, we did the Japanese tea ceremony, which I love.

So I would teach women in these seminars how to connect more with their feminine side, how to let go and unwind.

I did one in Cape Town in South Africa where I brought an African dance teacher. This retreat was on pleasure and women tapping in more to their sensuality. And so through the years I’ve done these all over the world.

For me, I always tapped into: what was I curious about – and how could I share that with the women that I was working with? So again, this was this natural evolution of what I love doing. And then I would implement this and put it into my work. And that’s how I’ve really grown my career, my life, everything.

In the 2000s, I think it was, I developed a method for women on how to communicate with men – both professionally and personally. And, that’s what my book was about.

Through the book, I got a lot of different opportunities. In the US, I started working in corporations and teaching women how to use skills for advancement. Because what I saw, even back in the 80s, is that women had started to go into business and through going into business, they were taking on more and more masculine qualities.

And they would come to me and they were in so much pain because they’d forgotten how to be a woman. They no longer tapped into their intuition. They just felt more like men. And so I started to show women early on that they could take their feminine qualities, they could keep those, and they could be in business with men.

And actually, the way they communicated with the men would make these relationships more collaborative and harmonious.

So I went into companies like JP Morgan Chase. I worked with about a hundred of the women in the senior VP area. I worked at Duke Energy. I worked with their top 80 executive women and I changed the dynamic on how they were approaching being in business and being leaders – from acting like men, into taking on their feminine qualities and still being extremely professional.

So that was a very exciting time and you can imagine it really made an impact for a lot of women around the world. I also talked about this in Germany too. So, I would show them how to keep their more feminine qualities.

And here’s the thing… You hear so much about femininity these days, but femininity is not one thing. It’s not about wearing flowing dresses, for example. I mean, if that’s what you really like, that’s perfect.

But femininity is a quality that a woman naturally has. It’s in our beauty and our receptivity, and it’s different for everyone. So it’s really about tapping into what that means to you. “What is it for you that has you feel more ease and flow?”

A lot of my programs got developed around that.

So through these programs, the other thing I would do is we did photo shoots. I did this all over the world and at that time, I would even take the photos, which was super fun. It was all about helping women tap into this different side of themselves where they started to feel sensual and playful and beautiful.

We also put on fashion shows. I’d get a store and ask them to let us use their clothes, and all the women in the seminars would wear their clothes. We’d invite people to come watch. We even sold tickets to them.

So again, I love beauty and fashion. So I developed my work around that. Everything I did was around: “What brought me alive?” “What did I enjoy?”

Because whatever that was – especially because I was working with a lot of women around the world – I saw that whatever was a longing in me, normally, it was a longing in other women as well.

We had a training facility in Austin for many years, on 75 Acres there. And we would have people come from all over the world. And in my office, I bought this beautiful white chaise lounge that looked out the window through the land. And that’s where I did my phone calls, and sat and worked on my computer. Because that’s what I love.

I love this way of being relaxed, and not just sitting at a computer and working.

Then there came a point. I had a dark night of the soul. Now, it wasn’t all easy and breezy. Of course, when I talk about this, I’m sharing the highlights, but as you know, having this kind of big life had a lot of complexity to it.

And I went through many challenges in those early years of growing my business and raising my family. But around the year 2000, I parted ways with the father of my younger children and around that same time, I walked away from a business that I had built for 17 years with my business partner.

I walked away from my clients. I walked away from everything. So as you can imagine, that was a very difficult thing to do. I tried to see how to walk away and not destroy everything. It was very difficult, no matter what, because my life, my business, my family, everything was connected.

When I did this, shortly thereafter, I actually got sick with chronic fatigue. Of course, later I saw that me getting sick had a lot to do with the emotional pain I was going through.

But there was much more to this. I’m not going to go deeply into this, just to touch on – it was a very challenging time for many years. We went through a lot of challenges and, like I said, kind of a dark night of a soul. And this was a very difficult time for me with my kids.

I actually had four kids at home at that time, and I let go of my nanny, and I ended up taking on my life – and I went from everything being handled with my teams and support, to handling everything on my own. And I can’t even tell you… Yeah, just that pain, that challenge.

But I felt so strongly about it, and on the other side of it, I knew it was absolutely the right thing.

This was also a time where I really learned humility, and my knowledge and experience and work with people took a new depth, because before I was kind of on this high, and honestly a little arrogant, I have to tell you. So when I had this dramatic change and I had to do everything myself, I had to really sit back and reflect.

So in that, I had a new way of seeing my work and a new way of seeing what people were going through. So this, I always say, made me into a 10 times better coach, and a 10 times better trainer, because I went through this experience. That’s always powerful, when we have challenges and then we can go back and share with other people.

And then I got the great opportunity in mentoring Makena – my daughter that I work with. Makena had a strong curiosity about coaching and she was so interested at an early age. But at one point she wanted to coach and then she tried it – and it didn’t work.

Then I just saw the pain she was going through in her copywriting business. And even though she was doing well, I stepped in and said, “Listen, I think I can really support you.”

So we decided to go into business together, and I decided to mentor her. And, during this time, it was very challenging at first, because as you can imagine, we’re a mother and daughter, and then we were business partners, and then we were a mentor and student.

And so what we did through the first few years was just a matter of her learning. And I have to say, she’s one of the quickest learners and people I’ve ever mentored. And it was very exciting though, too, because we got to work together in this way, where we got to grow together.

I had to grow. She grew. It was amazing to watch, you know, my daughter be able to learn these skills and learn them so fast. Something that took me 37 years and in the last five years, she’s learned so much.

Then for us to combine our love of helping and working with women, to empower women around the world to live these exceptional lives, and to also tap in and build their business from this ease and flow – and to also build incredible relationships, if that’s what they want, and amazing families.

So, that’s just a few highlights from my life – thank you so much for listening.

One thing I hope you take away from this story is that we all have countless ups and downs on our journeys. And if you’re feeling somehow like, “Oh, you know, I’ve made so many mistakes.” Or, “I failed.” Let my story be an inspiration for you, because I’ve had so many ups and downs and through that though, I’ve continued to take one step in front of the other and keep going.

A really powerful exercise we often share with our clients is to make a timeline of your life and write down your key experiences that shaped you into who you are today. “What were those turning point moments for you?”

You really want to go in and see, “What are the times where you had turning points.” Like when I met my mentor was a turning point for me. When I started working in Europe, it was a turning point for me.

Because in those moments you often will get clues about things that you love to do, or ways that you want to approach your life, and often these experiences play a role in what you’re here to do on this planet – and how you’re being called to make a positive difference for others

So thank you so much for listening to my story.

I’m excited to continue getting to know you through this podcast and sharing tools and principles that can help you design a life that’s truly in alignment for you.