Jen Casey (JC): I would love for you to fill in our audience and let them know who you are and how you got started in this space because you are now at this totally new level. When we first met, you were doing health and fitness coaching through a network marketing company. To see who you are and where you are now is like… holy sh*t… you are just blowing up! You are serving at such a high level and it’s amazing to watch you be this voice for people.

Shannon Wooten (SW): Thank you, my goodness! I had a really good mentor because I have known Jen Casey for three years. I remember the first time I watched you do a live in the mastermind that I was in with you and you just came on like, “Hi!!” Meanwhile, I’m reading a script behind my very first live! I see you have such finesse and I’m thinking, “Yooo, how do I get on that level?!”

When I started out, I was in an MLM. I jumped into a mastermind with Jen Casey and started talking about emotions, confidence (and a lack thereof), and a disorder that I was uncovering as my husband and I were traveling our path of infertility. I remember posting in the mastermind about endometriosis, an auto immune deficiency, and infertility and struggling in this emotional darkness that was weighing me down. And YOU so beautifully said, “Why are you doing this MLM? It is not the thing that lights you up because when you talk about THIS thing, you’re lit up. You are on fire. It can be easy, it can be effortless, it can be the thing that fuels you where the words are like falling out of your mouth.”

…I was like, “I can’t talk about that!” I was still learning at the time, but I nestled into the words that you were saying and I sat with them.

It really was the impetus that said to me, “You need to quit this thing, you need to quit the stream of income that you know is there, and you need to abandon ship because it’s not what serves you or lights you up.”

I always say, “It’s a circle where a square should be.” I was trying to force myself into this mold of ‘Do not enter. You do not fit here.’

I had all of this crap around abandoning my downline and losing that stream of income and what people would think of me. It was the first time in my life I was like, “F*ck it. I have to do what’s going to light me up.” You were the very first support system that I had that was urged, “Go do you. Be unapologetic about it because what you do over here is vanilla, and when you’re over there, it’s fire. Everyone wants fire.”  

You were the first person that started turning my wheels around how I could become a coach and what is it that I would want to coach about. What voice do I have that I want to share in this world and space? That was the impetus that said,

“You’re going to be a life coach. You’re going to talk to people about emotional freedom and clarity and mindsets shifts around confidence. And by the way, you’ll write a book and it will be about infertility and it will be very transparent – and as some people have said to me ‘audacious’ – but at the same time, you’ll never feel more like yourself.”

JC: You just speak in poetry, it’s beautiful. I think there are a lot of women who will consciously choose to do something that feels safe because they think, “Well, if this fails, I wasn’t all in with it anyway. It wasn’t me baring my soul.”

Obviously, this is your zone of genius. This is your soul on fire. What was your thought process as you were stepping into this new version of you?

SW: Honestly, for years it was just living a life of wanting to fit in. I always feel like I straddled the line. I was the theater nerd, I took voice for years, and I have been acting since I was five years old. At the same time, I was a gymnast, a cheerleader, played volleyball, and ran track.

I never felt a place where I fit in. I never really was like, “Oh! I go on this box. This is where I go!” I’m more like the electricity outside the box. You can’t grab it. It’s crazy and very complex.

When I went into the MLM, I think I was looking for the ‘box’. I know everybody likes to say, “Lean into it,” but I don’t ever need to lean into anything. I’m always the girl that’s here for the adventure. I’m leaning off the cliff already and I dare you to hold me back. When you said it, it triggered something in my mind: how do I nestle into myself for the first time ever in life?

When I peeled back the layers of it, it was patterns in years of habitual behavior that I was just perpetuating; trying to fit into the box and coming to terms with infertility and autoimmune disorders and the fact that I was just being a f*cking poser my whole life was very humbling. And OWNING it was also humbling because I realized that you have to go first. You have to go first and I had yet to find somebody that I could relate to who was super complex and so outside of the box.

I have good days and I have bad days and I’m going to be able to live by it. I know that if I feel like this and there’s a chance there are other people who feel like this, then it really felt like a disservice to other humans in the world that are potentially in the same cyclone of trying to find the box that they fit in but can never can fit in.

So I took the mentality of ‘f*ck it’. I’ve never said ‘f*ck it’ in my whole life as much as I said it in that moment. Instead of trying to find my box, maybe I don’t have one. Maybe I am label-less. Maybe that’s just who I am and if I can operate all over the place and have a great life, I would never feel more like myself.

And that’s how I nestled into it.

You live outside the box.

JC: It isn’t so interesting how, in so many circles, it really is the blind leading the blind, in the sense that it’s people who are uncomfortable and stepping into who they are… following somebody who is also uncomfortable stepping into who they are. Everybody’s just walking around with the layers and masks. I think what you’re saying is really powerful. If you guys take a moment to sit with it, digest it, and understand what is possible if you step into that version of you… that is freaking profound.

JC: Before we jumped on, we were talking about the power of those tiny shifts in your business. You had shared at the beginning of making that one millimeter shift in your business and your thinking, and that’s what opened everything up. I don’t know that people necessarily are encouraged by social media to celebrate and acknowledge those small things. This isn’t even really a question but I think it’s really fascinating and I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

SW: Looking at it from the 1,000 mile perspective, I took a minute to nestle into, “Who would I be if I just allowed me to be me?” Not having a box to check off or some sort of compartmentalization for me to fall into because I don’t even know what I’m going to be like from day-to-day and I’m okay with that.

I get up every morning and I’m like, “What am I feeling today? Am I feeling leather pants or am I feeling this boho-chic dress?” What am I feeling? Oh, there’s just no box for it. I started to think to myself, “What if my business could be like that?” I started to see my whole life was like that.

I’m just going to continue to get to the next thing, the next, the next, the next, and the next. It’s a very externally driven life where I’m always looking for the next thing to be accomplished as a personal win, instead of allowing myself to be like, “Who was I in that moment? That was really f*cking amazing.”

I allowed myself to just be fluid in it.

I allowed myself to see that I could be a life coach to men and women (whaaat?!).

I allowed myself to see that I could be a writer while also being a life coach.

And I allowed myself to see that there was really no box that I had to fit into.

As long as I show up from a place of authenticity versus,  “Once I have the six figure launch, then I’m a good coach. Once I write a book, then I’m actually an author. Once I receive so many downloads, then I run a podcast.”

NO… I show up and I coach a program and even if there’s one person in it, I am a coach.

NO… I show up and I write content every day because I’m the author of my life, so I’m actually an author right now.

NO… I’m recording the podcast on Mondays and Fridays and even if I have one download, then I’m a podcasting person because I have the equipment and I do it.

It’s not about the validation of anything, it’s about the purpose and my energy behind it.

JC Seriously… poetry! I do want to talk to you about writing a book because this is a whole other level of discipline and showing up and believing in yourself. What was that experience like from being like, “I’m going to write a book,” to actually birthing this creative thing out into the world?

SW: I don’t know if most people just sit down with the intention of authoring something, because that wasn’t mine mine. I sat down and I said, “I don’t know how to understand what I’m going through.”

The emotion was so vast, it was so all encompassing, and it really drove my entire existence. I started to seek out the assistance of a life coach and they were reflecting to me like, “Do you hear what you’re saying right now?” I couldn’t hear it.

When I realized that I couldn’t hear what I was saying, I realized that there was a great potentiality that I wasn’t being with what I was thinking and what I was feeling.

So I started journaling and before I realized it, I had 20,000 words. It was emotions of, “Oh my god. I can’t believe I wrote that. I can’t believe I think that. I can’t believe I’m living that way.” I showed it to my husband one day and it was wild to see how I feel. I was in the experience for four years but I’m seeing it for the first time and letting him read it.

I realized that maybe I was writing a book.

And then I was like, “I’m not a writer.”

I was in a box again, as if you have to be intentional about it in order for it to be legitimized.

I went back to read through it and I started to see that I was grieving. I started to research about grief with addiction because I started to see that I was addicted to it.

I found comfort in my madness. I found comfort in my hurt.

What kind of person am I if I am going to my pain for comfort?

I started to see what my coach was doing for me and I wanted to learn how to reflect to somebody – because her reflecting to me – maybe I could reflect to myself. I started to learn that you need to be coachable to YOU. You have to coach you, too. I started to see that I was finding solace in my misery and I continued to write about it. I became aware that if I feel this way about this process, if I’m putting myself in a box that you can’t give up, even if it’s to your own detriment, that maybe other people would be feeling that way, too. That’s how I started to write the book.  

I also started to take myself outside of the box of, “Oh, but you didn’t intentionally author this…”

But what if you could be the author-less author? What if you could be label-less? What if you could come to the culmination of this book and decide that you’re going to publish it as is and then it can be another element of you that doesn’t have to be definable?

JC: Yeah, that’s beautiful. What does it mean to be an author? What qualifies someone as an author? Even for me, everything that I’ve ever written, I’m an author because I’m a content creator.

SW: Yeah! I mean, I see some things on social media that are profound. You rocked my world with that. Goosebumps. Thank you for sharing that. 🙂 To me, you’re an author. You live a life and that’s your story, so you’re automatically an author. Period.

JC: When you put your book out there into the world, what was that day like?

SW: I basically felt like I was going to shit my pants and cry and throw up all the same time! I think of it as literary food poisoning. That’s what it felt like.

Because like you said, it’s a very personal account with a very polarizing opinion, you know… going through infertility. My heart goes out to you whether you have infertility, secondary infertility, or you’re LGBTQ trying to have a child and you’re going through adoption process and you’re getting rejected. Anything where you’re trying to be a parent and you have the motherly or fatherly love and it feels like the world is rejecting you, my heart goes out to you.

Going through infertility, I get that the doctors and the people want you to have the hope, and I want you to have the hope, too. You deserve to have the hope if it’s in you, but I couldn’t do it to myself anymore. I was suicidal. I was depressed. I was terrorizing my husband and my family with my outbursts. I was ruining my marriage. I had disassociated myself from everybody, not to mention myself. I felt like this vacant human.

It came to me having the realization that I can’t do this anymore. And whatever that meant to whomever was in my general vicinity didn’t matter to me as much as I mattered to me because I was drowning in my life. I had to put it into the world because I thought to myself about all the other people going through something where they feel like they’re being suffocated by their life. They’re missing their joy, they’re missing their calling, and they’re missing the thing that lights them up.

This is a personal account of me saying, “I am giving you the permission to give yourself to say, “I am more than this and I can’t let myself go through this anymore, right now.” Whatever that means down the road, that’s what it means. But you don’t have to be digestible for other people.  On that day when I published that book I thought, “Wow. I’m probably going to piss a lot of people off. I’m probably going to be maybe even misunderstood.” I decided that in order to be okay with that, I also had to be label-less in that moment, too.

I didn’t write it for anybody to think that I was digestible.

I didn’t write it to offend anyone.

I didn’t write it to hurt anyone.

I did it for liberation and liberation only.

JC: And you’re not here to be everyone’s cup of tea.  I’m sure the feedback’s been amazing. What has been the most profound piece of feedback that you’ve gotten so far from the book?

SW: Every piece of feedback is profound and I just have to say that I cry all the time. I think it is those moments where somebody says to me,

“Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for hearing me. Thank you for allowing me to be understood and to let me know that, not just in this struggle, but in any struggle in my life, I get to decide the direction that I go in, and if that means I lose some people along the way, then that’s what that means. It doesn’t mean I don’t love them. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about them. It just means that I take ownership of the fact that I need to love myself more than I love anything in this world.”

JC: So good. I’m curious too, because this is part of putting yourself out there, being visible, writing a book, and sharing your truth… have you gotten haters?

SW: Yes! Yes I have.

JC: I think from a light perspective, if you’re getting haters and trolls that’s a beautiful sign that you’re reaching a sh*t ton of people and that you are creating something that is polarizing for people.

Anytime somebody doesn’t like what you’re doing, it’s just because it’s reflecting something in them that they either don’t like or that they don’t want to look at.

SW: It is a truly valuable lesson and we can’t be responsible for the filter through which people ingest us through. I don’t ever set out with the goal of, “Oh God, I hope everybody likes this.” A large majority of the time, I’m writing because it inspires me or is just flowing through me and I feel a responsibility to do that.

Ultimately, I wrote my book for the powerful woman that lived through my experience, and that powerful woman was me.

I don’t look back on her and shame her for not knowing what she didn’t know. I look back on her and I think, “Thank you for getting me to this place. Thank you for the struggle. Thank you for the highs. Thank you for the lows. Thank you for all of it.”

When I post something and somebody has an energetic response that perhaps is negative, I don’t look at it as if they hate me, I look at it as, “Perhaps that person is where I was when I first started writing that book,” so I receive it and I actually bring them into my energy field with warmth and love and say, “Thank you for giving me that because you remind me that not everybody is here to blow smoke up my ass. And I value that.”

JC: The bigger that you get, the bigger your target on your back is. You can receive all the things that people are saying and you can acknowledge when somebody is just giving a character attack and being an asshole for no reason.

SW: Yeah! This reminds me of something that my mom said to me when I was younger. I was bullied, and for those of you that can relate, I love you and I hope that you look at it as a character building experience for you and what the lessons that you got from it were.

When I was bullied, sometimes they would throw things at me when I was in the lunchroom or they would call my house and scream slut into the phone. I remember asking my mom if I could just switch schools. I was crying to my parents. My mom very frankly said to me, “Shannon, not everyone can be liked,” and I remember thinking to myself, “Why? Like why can’t they like me? What is so wrong with me that they wouldn’t like me?”

I remember wanting so badly to understand why wouldn’t people want to be my friend. As I got older and I started to learn that it’s just that energetic field saying, “You two are not for each other,” and every single time I get a hater on one of my posts or somebody writing me this long email about how audacious I am and reading my books through the filter of telling people to give up on their dreams, I realized not everybody can be liked. We’re not for each other and that’s fine.

JC: This is one of the big reasons why people don’t put themselves out there. It’s the underlying fear of, “I’m going to be kicked out of the tribe.” It’s that very visceral, primal fear that can hold so many people back from stepping into their greatness and their zone of genius.