Female Head Talk Expert, Bree Stedman is passionate about helping women stop the negative self-talk that discourages and sabotages their life experience to gain more emotional control.

For 13+ years, Bree has worked with women in a leadership, mentoring, transformation and educating role. She has seen the struggle that women experience when it comes to creating a life of their dreams. Regardless of skills and experience, the common denominator that affects results is the way women speak to themselves.  Her Own Your BS brand is a no-nonsense approach to inspire, educate and empower.

• Tell us about the journey that lead you to start your own business?

There have been different chunks to my journey, because obviously we grow as a human and you grow particularly as a woman in different roles. As you come into your life, different things inspire you. So I initially got into business for myself just because I wanted a better income. And then 10 years later, after becoming a leader and sort of a person of influence, I realised that I wanted to do more than just the surface level influence, which is where I kind of felt like I was leading. I started to explore the deeper levels of what was going on for women.

I’m very, very passionate about women becoming more authentic and more genuine to live their own kind of defined life, rather than just following the road that we sort of expect to take. It has been a journey of personal growth and then finding a role that allows me to grow even further in that space.

• Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

Not even remotely. I remember one of my very first jobs, being at work six days a week and thinking there has to be more to life than just going to work and coming home and going to work and coming home. That’s kind of what led me into business in the first place.

But it has only really been in recent years that I’ve even considered myself as an entrepreneur, because up until that point I was following someone else’s model of business. It was back in 2012/2013 that I started to think beyond the model that I was in and started to see where I could create a little bit of magic within my own space.

So even the concept of entrepreneur is something that I’ve only really started to grasp in the last couple of years, and I’ve been self-employed for most of my adult life. I’m very open to it, and I think organically to be able to grow and expand and change your definition of what you want is important. We put so much pressure on young kids to decide what they want to do when they’re still in primary school or in high school. And really even in mid 30’s, I don’t even know what I want to be doing in 10 years’ time, let alone what I wanted to do when I was 18 for the rest of my life. I’m open to growth and I think that’s a really strong characteristic to have in terms of long-term success – being able to grow and change your definition of what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and who you love to connect with, and being flexible with that.

• What is one action or task you ensure you incorporate into your diary each week?

I actually really despise questions like that, because I think it is so against the grain of who we are as cyclic women. For a woman, who you are today and who you’re going to be tomorrow depends very much on the hormonal flow that you’re in. So depending on the time of the month, I’m a very social person, and I want to connect with people. Then fast-forward a couple of weeks and the last thing that I want to do is connect with new people, I want to be creative or I want to go into my own zone. The one thing that I do for me is check in with myself – what’s inspiring me this week? What am I feeling drawn to doing?

And because my business changes so much – I could be travelling, running a retreat or I could just be working with clients via the internet. It’s all very much dependent on what is in the calendar, but more importantly what I’m instinctively drawn to do, because if I followed that line of golden thread of inspiration then things just kind of happen organically and the risk of burnout becomes so much less. That’s what I see so many women trying to do; we’re trying to be routine and do the same things every single day despite what our nature is telling us to do.

• What do you attribute your success to?

Constant growth – constantly being able to look at where I have mastered a particular part of my life or a particular task, looking where I can improve, being vulnerable enough to recognise where there are still challenges and where there are still insecurities, and being able to look at those and not beat myself up as a result of it. I actually look at it as an opportunity to grow and be open to new concepts, new ideas, and new transformed versions of myself to move forward with.

• What local entrepreneur do you find inspiring?

I’m really inspired by the little people. The mums every day that think of new ideas or that think outside the zone, and act with courage to become more for their families, to give their kids more opportunities, and think outside of the square.

I mean, I’m obviously very active on social media, and here are so many examples on social media of women that are trying to do things differently. One in particular, Anastasia Dunstan, has More Than a Mama, and I absolutely love what she’s creating because she saw a need for mums in the Hunter who were feeling very disconnected to come back together and reconnect, not just as mums but also as individual women. I really applaud the work that she’s doing. But in general, any woman that can see a need and can see that she has some level of ability to be able to improve that space – they inspire me beyond.