Makena’s Story.

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

In today’s episode, I’m going to share a part of my story with you. And as you listen, I really encourage you to reflect on anything that you relate to.

Because as human beings, we learn best through stories. Before we had the written word, information was passed down through the generations by telling stories around the fire.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of fiction and fantasy novels and even memoirs. Where I’ve always had a harder time getting all the way through a nonfiction book, unless it’s a topic that I’m super fascinated by.

My wish for you is that you’ll hear something in my story today that speaks to you. Something that inspires you or gives you that next bit of clarity you’ve been looking for. 

Let’s dive in… 

I grew up in coaching. My mom, Gigi Sage, has been coaching since 1986. I was born in 1988. You would have heard some of her story if you’d listened to it in our previous episode.

And I loved it. From a young age, I was fascinated and was so interested in what she was doing. 

I loved the workshops and the people who would come – everything was done in person back then – and watching their eyes light up in front of the room as they talked about their visions and dreams for the future.

I was able to start sitting in and participating in these seminars. My mom let me start at the age of seven. And so it was amazing! I was in there – I just thought I was an adult like everybody else and soaking it all up.

The other thing I really loved when I was young was self expression and dressing up. I loved twirly skirts and had so much fun with it. Dressing up and crazy outfits. 

Gigi, my mama, was my biggest role model in all of this. She would wear her high heels and her cool outfits as she led the seminars. And I just thought she was the coolest.

And so, there were these years in my childhood of just being fully who I was and fully self-expressed.

I was homeschooled. So I wasn’t around a lot of other kids making fun of me or telling me I should or shouldn’t do something. I was able to really stay in that for a relatively long time. 

Then around 12 years old, my parents divorced and we went through after that many years of what I kind of call “our family’s dark night of the soul.”

Gigi shared a little bit about this in the last episode… Where my dad had stage four cancer and my mom had chronic fatigue and we went through a lot of financial ups and downs. 

And because I was hurting during this time – it was a really challenging time in a lot of ways – I swung the other way. I rejected pretty much everything I loved about our life before and just said “I need to go to a better place. I need to get good grades and go to a business school.” 

I became serious and very structured.

So there were these years where I was listening to my head over my heart.

And many people that I talk to can relate to that. That they navigated through a lot of their life that way, or maybe they still are. 

And even though I’d been raised being told, “You can do what you love and follow your dreams,” I still kind of swung this other direction. All I could think about was making sure I was successful and could have control over my life and make sure that I didn’t have anything bad happen again.

So I studied hard. I got straight A’s. I went to a fancy business school and studied international business and graduated near the top of my class. I got all these awards. I graduated Summa Cum Laude. 

It was everything success might be on paper.

But inside, I felt further and further away from the true me – even though I don’t think I had words for that at the time. 

I was partying too much in college as many people do. I just couldn’t seem to see clearly what I wanted. 

I thought I was going to go the corporate route and decided against that. I took a job for a few months after I graduated. Then after about six months, it wasn’t really working out at that job.

And I thought, “Well, I don’t see anything else that I really want to do. I want to be able to travel and have the flexibility and freedom that we had when we were younger.” 

So I kind of fell into entrepreneurship. It wasn’t even really a conscious choice. It was more that I couldn’t find anything else that I was really happy with. 

And so I just said, “Okay, well, what am I good at that people need? What do I have the best chance of making money with?” Because I had bills to pay and student loans. 

So, it really came again from more of this place in my head. And there was a little bit of heart in there.

I knew I wanted to be able to travel and have flexibility, but mostly I was still operating in the world of my head and what made sense and just surviving.

So, I started doing copywriting – which is writing marketing copy or different kinds of copy for speakers and authors and experts and coaches.

I had started helping Gigi with some of her copy, as we told in one of our earlier episodes, in her business and everything when I was about 17. I’d done it on the side through college. I never really thought anything of it. 

Then it turned out to be my first business. And later I would end up getting into marketing strategy and some other things as well.

This was really what I now refer to as my “shadow career.”

This is a term that I originally heard from Steven Pressfield, who’s a great author. He wrote a book called “The War of Art,” which many people are familiar with. He also wrote a book called “Turning Pro,” and in these books, at least in “Turning Pro,” he talks about something called a “shadow career” – which is something very close to the thing you really want to be doing, but not quite it.

It’s like that thing where you can almost convince yourself that you are happy and fulfilled. But the truth is, it’s not. You don’t quite have your heart and soul on the line. 

So, an example might be someone who really wants to be acting – but they’re a cameraman. Or someone who really wants to be coaching, and instead they’re doing the marketing and the copywriting for coaches.

Now I look back at that and go, “that was absolutely my shadow career.”

In fact, I remember going to this business masterminding event. I think it was 2015 or 2016. So it was a few years into running my business. I was doing great, making six figures plus, and a lot was working. I was living in San Diego and I’d met the love of my life, Sunny. We were dating. I had great friends. 

So again, a lot was going well and I went to this business event. I’m in this room with all these entrepreneurs and I’m looking around me and they’re all so lit up and inspired by what they’re doing and their missions and their visions. 

And I found myself crying in the bathroom, just bawling my eyes out in a stall because I’m realizing – I don’t feel that way. 

I was good at what I did. I felt passionate about it and that I was helping people who were making a difference in the world. But it didn’t have that same feeling that I was longing for – of really feeling on path and on purpose – like I was doing the thing that I was put on this earth to do. 

And that was so hard to look at and to face into. Because something deep inside me knew that there was more I was meant to be doing. But I didn’t know how to make a change. I didn’t know what that change would be.

I’m not going to go into a deep version of the story, but some of you may have heard it. I started having panic attacks and anxiety around this time and other health issues. I really couldn’t find anything, there was nothing wrong with me. I did all the physical checks, and I could not figure out, “What this is about?”

And now I look back and I know this was my soul trying to get my attention and say, “Hey, you gotta listen up here. I’m here. I’m here.”

But at the time it was like – “Why would I make a change? Everything is working. Everything is good. I worked hard to get here. Why would I start all over?” 

And you know, that was my “something more.”

If you’re listening to this, your “something more” may not be a career change. You may not even know what it is. 

But often when people come to us, that’s where they start – with this feeling of, “There’s got to be more than this,” or, “There’s something more and I just don’t know what it is.” 

And I didn’t feel clear at the time either.

I had a sense that it might be a new career, but I wasn’t sure. I tried hiring a bunch of coaches and joining different masterminds and things to get clarity. But the style of coaching, the way they approached it – we came up with lots of good ideas, but it never felt quite right. And I didn’t know why.

Looking back now, I know it’s because we were coming from the head still. They weren’t tapping into and tuning into my deeper desire and aliveness. And that is what I continued and came to clarity. That was what made all the difference. 

But first I tried and failed to start a coaching business on my own.

So in 2017 I was like, “I’m going to do this. I feel like this is what I want to do.” 

I had no real plan and no support. I just went for it, and flopped basically. 

I was super embarrassed and thought, “Well, I tried and it didn’t work. So maybe this isn’t meant for me after all.”

Another year went by of continued anxiety and panic attacks. But just kind of like making do with that. Just saying, “Okay, I’ve got this good life. Things are working. I’m not going to rock the boat.”

And ultimately about a year later, things had gotten so challenging with the burnout and all those other feelings of anxiety.

Then my mom, Gigi, stepped in finally.

It’s not that she hadn’t supported me in those other times. But it’s an interesting thing in a mother-daughter coaching dynamic. If any of you have parents that are therapists or coaches or something like that, they can’t get in there and start therapizing or coaching you because you don’t want that, right? You want to be able to figure it out on your own.

So, she sat and supported me how she could. But mostly stayed out of things for a long time. Then finally she just said, “Oh my gosh! I can’t do this anymore.” 

So we had this experience – we went to Costa Rica. Which, funny enough, is where we are starting to record this podcast now.

We were leading a retreat in Costa Rica. I was coaching part-time in her mastermind at the time. This is early 2018. We got there a couple of days early and I was so into this thing of, “I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to do.” “What is this all about?” 

And basically Gigi distracted me for two days. She said, “We’re going to put that all aside and let’s enjoy ourselves.”

We took long walks on the beach. We went and had a margarita. We got massages. We just chilled in this little beach town that we were in, and then we went and we led this retreat.

But something happened over the course of those two days.

I deeply unwound. I didn’t even know. I didn’t have terminology for this at the time. 

But we’re going to talk about this more in our next episode about “When Women Relax, We Become Wise”. 

I stopped coming from my head and trying to figure it out. I got into my experience, and then Gigi would just talk to me and ask me questions and I didn’t even know she was doing anything specific. I’ll share more about it as we go through I’m sure in some of these episodes.

Clarity started to really dawn – and it really felt that way. It was like, wow! I started to see glimpses of what I wanted to do. And I always knew deep down I wanted to coach, but not only that, I really wanted to do it with Gigi.

I really wanted to do it with my mom. It has always been a dream of mine. And I had sort of gotten disconnected from that dream. And this is so often when we work with people that deep down they know what they want, but they don’t think they do. They’ve convinced themselves they don’t. There’s all this kind of confusion on top. And we help them really tap into what that is.

And so through this process, I saw the vision. I saw that if I didn’t go for this, I really think I would probably get sick. My body was giving me signs that it was moving in a not-good direction and I felt like it would keep trying to get my attention louder and louder and louder until I listened.

And so I just said, “This is it.”

I know I failed at this one before, but I didn’t have support. My mom agreed this time to mentor me and coach me and guide me. She guided me in business and mentored me in coaching. 

But most importantly, she believed in me. 

And I remember thinking in those early days, “Wow, there’s no way that I could have done this on my own.” And that’s not true for everyone. That was just true for me. 

But I said, “I want to be a believer for other women who don’t have this kind of support in their lives.” And it was sort of the beginning of my mission and wanting to go out there and make a difference for others.

As I looked to make this shift in my business… She told me, “It’s not a leap.” I had tried to leap before from my previous business into this one. And she said, “It’s not a leap, Makena. It’s a transition. We have to make a plan. It’s step by step. It’s not going to happen overnight.” 

There’s so much I could go into about how I made that transition. But I’ll leave that for future episodes.

The important thing here is I had so much fear and so much self doubt in the beginning, but I kept going. And what kept me going was having a purpose that was bigger than me. That was a huge key distinction that Gigi made for me early on.

I said, “I don’t want to put myself out there and post on social media. I don’t want to get on these calls with people and ask them to work with me. It just feels so self-centered.” I just had all this stuff coming up. And Gigi said, “Makena, where is your attention?”

And I was like, “What does she mean?”

She said, “Is it on yourself or is it on others?” 

I said, “I guess it’s on myself.”

And she said, “Get your attention on the people that you feel you’re here to serve.”

That was like a light bulb moment for me. I shifted to focusing on the lives I wanted to touch and the mission I was about. And that changed everything.

So within eight months – a lot happened in those eight months of learning and putting myself out there. But within eight months, I had replaced my income through coaching and was able to transition fully. So, that was in late 2018, about five years ago at the time of this recording.

I could tell you a million stories, but I want to touch a little bit into The Way of the Muse™.

So what happened next was, I was building this coaching business and I was so much happier because the anxiety got less and less. Eventually the panic attacks stopped completely. 

I finally felt this feeling of, “I’m on path. I’m on purpose. I’m doing what I’m meant to do.”

Even though I was scared out of my mind so much of the time. And I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew that I was on the right track. 

At the same time, I carried all of my patterns with me.

I thought this would be this magic wand moment where everything changed. That I’d step into this business and everything would be working now. 

And a lot was, but I still had my patterns – which for me were things like overwhelm.

I would get overwhelmed all the time and overwork. I just got caught in this go, go, go kind of energy a lot. And I think about this quote now, which people often say, which is “Wherever you go, there you are.” 

And it was a little bit of that experience. Some things really shifted, but these patterns were still there.

In some ways they seemed even bigger and even magnified because I was aware of them now in a different way. There was so much more consciousness in there. And Gigi really helped me learn to navigate through those patterns and things that would come up. And this took years. Through the early years of building the business… 

Maybe it’s a lifelong process. I don’t know. I think there’s always something.  

But I worked on especially the patterns around too much go mode and around burning myself out and overwhelm. Those were the big ones, and it took me a long time to learn a different way of approaching life. 

So, you may have different patterns, and we’ll talk about this in future episodes. But this was for me, and for many of the people we work with, this is one of the big ones that comes up.

So now they pop up from time to time. It’s not that I’m enlightened and have nothing that ever comes up. But now these patterns feel like an old pair of jeans or something that doesn’t fit any longer. And let’s say that they’re too big – or maybe they’re too small. But let’s say that they’re too big and they don’t fit anymore.

I get in them and then I’m floating around in there. I have so much more awareness now. It’s like, “This doesn’t quite fit anymore.” So even when it comes up, I’m able to move through them more quickly and easily. 

Apart from what she taught me about business and coaching, Gigi also really mentored me in every area of my life. She helped me look to see how I could eliminate pressures and breakdowns in my life by putting systems into place, or using communication tools in my relationships. 

Largely in my relationship with my partner, Sunny. But also in my other relationships, as we started to grow our team. And so many different tools. 

These are the pieces that we’re going to start to share with you through this podcast.

We are in the process of writing a book called The Way of the Muse™. It is going much deeper into my story. About how she helped me with these different tools and everything. But through these episodes, we’ll also go into that, and specific questions that you might have on how you can do this in your life.

She taught me about how to follow my aliveness – and what that even meant. Which really resulted in me having so much fun, so much more energy and vitality as I incorporated more of the things that nourished me and brought me alive. And I started to release more of the things that drained my energy, or found a different approach.

I had so much more vitality, clarity, and life started to take on a new kind of depth and meaning. And there was so much more just fulfillment. I often say it was like It switched from like black and white to technicolor. And that was really, that has been my experience of what it has felt like. 

There’ve been so many ups and downs along the way. We call it often like an emotional rollercoaster. It’s called the emotional roller coaster of life. So many lessons along the way. Times when I thought it wasn’t going to work. 

I even got close to burning out again in the summer of 2022. 

This was a few years later now. And we’re building this business and we’ve got clients all over the world. And some old health issues started to pop back up again. I had this kind of breakthrough – a wake up call moment where I said, “Wait a second, something isn’t working here.”

A lot is working – even way more than it was before. And I’m not having the same kind of anxiety and everything else. I do feel like I’m on path and on purpose, but my body’s trying to tell me something. 

That for me has often been what the wake up call has been. It’s been some kind of something going on with my body that makes me go, “Wait a second, what’s the deeper thing that I’m not looking at here?”

So again, Gigi really supported me to see what that was. And this kind of ushered my next big “death and rebirth” cycle, as I call it. 

That first one was that time of stepping into coaching. And then this one. 

At first I was like, “Am I not supposed to be coaching? What is this about?”

It was really devastating and hard to look at. But I dove really deep into it.

I thought, “You know what? The only way out is through. I’m not going to resist this. I’m just going to dive in and see what’s here for me.” And I saw that it had to do with this stress and pressure that I put myself under. 

It was not so much the work I was doing. It was the way I was working, and some of those patterns I had brought into this business.

And so I really had a shift. I totally shifted the way that I approached everything in my life and my work. And that’s when things really started to click on a whole new level. 

So as we started to think about what was the book we wanted to write, I was interviewing clients of my mom’s – who have worked with her for five, ten, some of them 15 years or longer.

I was asking them, “What has Gigi taught you? What changes have happened in your life over the years?” And as they shared, I began to realize… one of my mom’s communications tools that she teaches is called Wending. And Wending is this really powerful, a little bit complex tool.

We’ll share bits of it in the podcast, but it has to do with the way that you approach conflict. In relationships, if there’s this conflict, instead of going up against the other person, how can you sort of be receptive and have this kind of listening aspect to things? 

I’m not going to describe the whole thing right now, but there’s this dynamic that happens there that’s kind of like a dance. And in that dance, in the end, you both get what you want. You get so much more of what you want than if you went directly up against somebody. And so it’s this beautiful tool, and it’s Wending because the word Wending means “to move in a direction, but sometimes by a less direct path.”

So what I realized as I was listening to these women share about the impact she’s had on them, and as I started to reflect on what changed for me, is that Wending wasn’t just a communication skill, it was a way of life. 

And that way of life is The Way of the Muse™. It is this beautiful way, as we talked about in the first episode, of dancing with life. And I see it as this dance between really go mode and flow mode – between the masculine and the feminine, which are inside of all of us. And how we learn to navigate and dance between these energies to move through our lives.

So I knew that we had to share this with women and with people everywhere. And I had been business coaching for years. We had a coaching certification. We already had our “Wealthy World Changers” mastermind, which is our program where we work deeply with women from around the world to help them step into whatever that “something more” is for them.

But an even bigger, deeper mission was calling at this point, which was The Way of the Muse™. That’s our response to that calling. And it’s been woven through everything all along. But now, we’re really stepping into that with the podcast and the book. 

And we have an incredible membership program where women connect with like-minded women who are also on this journey of personal growth and transforming their lives in every area.

The Way of the Muse™ to me is this way of dancing through life. It is opening up to what wants to come through you from God, the universe, source, whatever you call it, from your higher self. And when you have that experience, if you’ve ever had an experience of going into a flow state and feeling like you just forget about time, that is the way of the muse to me.

That’s the definition in some ways of what the muses were said to be all about. It was this creative inspiration that flowed through you. And so that is what brings us here today where we are sharing this with you, creating this podcast for you. 

You can read more about all of this on our website at www.wayofthemuse.com.

But for now, I’ll really close this episode with this: 

If you are feeling burned out or exhausted in your life… if you can relate to that part of my story, then just know that burnout isn’t just physical exhaustion. It’s exhaustion of the soul. And that is what I really learned there is, your soul is speaking to you.

It’s not about how much you’re working. It may be that too, but it’s something that you’re not maybe getting the message, or you can’t figure out what it is. But there’s something there and we’re going to give you ways to start to tap into what that is. 

And if you’re feeling the call to something more, maybe you don’t relate to the burnout piece, but you feel the call to something more – listen.

If you don’t know what that “something more” is or how to get there, get support. There are so many great coaches out there these days. And of course, we’re always honored when you feel the call to come and work with us.

I want you to have a takeaway and something you can apply from the episode today… 

In our first episode, we talked about journaling on the questions of, “What am I longing for? And, What is my ‘something more’?”

If you haven’t done that yet, I would start there. Write three pages without stopping or thinking, just let whatever wants to come through flow through. 

If you have already done that, then the next question I would encourage you to reflect on is, “What’s stopping me?”

Maybe you have fears or doubts. Maybe you feel like you’re too busy. Believe me, I had all of the above. Whatever it is, you want to identify what that is, because that is what’s in between where you are and where you’re longing to be. 

And once you know, here’s the empowering thing about getting clear: Once you know what’s getting in the way, then you can see how to get support or solutions to move through it.

So that is what I would say today is to really look at, “What are you longing for?” “What’s your something more?” And if you’ve looked at that already, then let’s see what is stopping you? What’s getting in the way?

So that’s the episode for today… 

Thank you for listening to my story. It always feels a little vulnerable to share some aspects of it, but I know from experience that it’s just so powerful when we hear each other’s stories. 

And please subscribe if you’re enjoying this podcast. It’s very new still and we are so excited and delighted to share it with you.

Really the part that’s about us and is really in service to you through our stories that’s coming to a close here. Now it’s all about you and about how we can support you with things that are going on in your life.

We want to hear from you. You can reach out to us. If you want to be on a future episode, you can go to www.wayofthemuse.com/onair. And we have an opportunity for you to get coached for free in exchange for having it be aired as an episode here on the show.

So those are going to be really, really powerful, but for now, please subscribe. Please share this with the women in your life and we’ll see you next time.