Summary

Host Melissa Aarskaug interviews intuitive coach Fran Gallagher on leveraging inner wisdom in corporate leadership. Fran shares her transition from technical writing to empowering women leaders, tackling burnout, self-doubt, and societal pressures.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Intuitive Coaching
05:49 The Journey from Technical Writing to Coaching
10:00 Understanding Intuition in Leadership
14:36 Misconceptions of Intuition in Corporate America
17:11 Challenges Faced by Women Leaders
19:39 Distinguishing True Desires from Societal Norms
22:46 Strategies for Honing Intuition
26:41 Stress Relief Techniques through Visualization
30:26 Balancing Intuition, Mindfulness, and Data
34:00 Transformational Advice for Clients
36:16 Actionable Steps for Skeptics of Intuition

Transcript

Melissa Aarskaug (00:01.236)
Welcome to the Executive Connect podcast. Today, I’m excited to have my friend Fran Gallagher here with us to talk about intuitive coaching. Welcome Fran.

Fran Gallaher (00:14.313)
Thank you so much for inviting me, Melissa. I’m super excited to have this conversation with you.

Melissa Aarskaug (00:21.358)
Fran, now your professional journey is fascinating, inspiring, and very interesting. I want you to share with our listeners a little bit about how you went from technical writing to coaching, and now guiding women leaders, and really a little bit about what inspired you to make this transition of intuitive leadership coaching.

Fran Gallaher (00:46.773)
Well, when I was a child, I saw non-physical beings. So sort of like I see dead people, except without the gore. And I was raised in a family where there was abuse and neglect. And my mother would put me and my younger brother in a playroom most of the day. I wasn’t allowed to ask her questions. I never had nice little mother-daughter chats.

The bad part, of course, was that I didn’t get that kind of parenting. But the good part was that nobody could tell me there was not a knight in armor who stood outside my door. And I saw these non-physical beings. I saw faces in the wallpaper. I could see into worlds. I don’t have that ability now to the extent that I had then. But I do have some of that, of course. And I grew up

actually thinking I was stupid because there was someone in my world who told me that, but also I didn’t think like other people thought and I didn’t know the word intuitive. I didn’t understand why I could say the answer to the math problem without showing my work. The nuns, I was taught in a Catholic school and the nuns had no room for someone who could just answer the question. So,

By the time I was 13, I thought that I wanted to just abandon emotion and what I didn’t know yet the name of, but intuition. And I fell in love with math and science and logic. And I tried to deny the other aspects of myself as long as possible. But by the time I was in my mid-20s, I was bereft. I was empty. I had to sort of…

rework my path and go back to rehabilitate the intuitive part of myself. And somewhere in there, I ended up being a technical writer, as you mentioned, and I began to think that as I rehabilitated myself and reworked my path, that I could figure out how to teach this in a step-by-step manner. So I started a little group

Fran Gallaher (03:13.763)
And one of the members of the group, after it disbanded, called me about a year later and said, I didn’t know that his father was a big name consultant to the healthcare industry. And so this young man said, my dad and I created an institute and we would like you to be a faculty member for our program in intuition. So I ended up being a faculty member for eight or nine years.

and I’m not good at time, so I don’t remember whether it was eight or nine. And I was, it was a high-end program. We had the onerous task of teaching in resorts, and I worked with physicians, hospital administrators, and business leaders, teaching them intuition and meditation. So I taught the head of the VA, the head of the CDC,

the president of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, all kinds of heavy hitters. And I was the least weird of the faculty members, according to me anyway. And so a lot of people would choose me as their coach when they graduated from the program. So I had this wonderful business. I was working with C-level executives. I was doing team development. I was in a number of corporations.

And then the 2008-2009 recession hit and I fell from grace. And I was so ashamed because I tanked financially. Those companies closed their doors to outside consultants and I didn’t maintain business connections. I didn’t have business skills because I didn’t have to before. And so I’ve been working my way back ever since.

I have decided that women have more access to their intuition. And I’m not saying that men don’t, but women just have an easier route because I believe the intuition operates on the same circuits that the emotions operate on. So people who are more in touch with their emotional selves can learn intuition more easily.

Fran Gallaher (05:36.509)
So now I work with female executives and I still work with some men and it’s just more and better and all the time.

Melissa Aarskaug (05:49.688)
That’s great. First of all, thank you for sharing that with our listeners about your childhood. And I loved hearing about the intuition and how it’s taken you on your journey. I know you talk a little bit about energy clearing and visualization with your coaching programs. Can you share a little bit about what that looks like and how you make a difference with your clients doing math?

Fran Gallaher (06:17.517)
sure, thank you. So guided visualization is a narrative. It’s like a bedtime story for adults, but not at bedtime. So it’s just a way that I use my voice and I use carefully chosen words to cause people to feel more comfortable and to relax. And this relaxation lets them learn more.

There’s all kinds of science behind this, but one aspect is that we’re working with an open focus instead of a closed focus. So when we look at little numbers on a page all day, we’re closing our focus. And if you do not balance that with open focus, you’re going to end up with anxiety or depression. And so that comes from a book called Open.

Focus Brain by Les Femi and Brad and I forgot Brad’s last name. Sorry, Brad. And so what I do is I allow people to relax and while they are with a guided visualization and while they are in that relaxed state, I use an energy clearing technique that an RN in Boulder, Colorado developed.

And it calls upon guides and angels and realized beings to actually, they’re the ones doing the energy clearing. I’m just acting it out on the earth plane according to the principle that you may have heard of, as above, so below. And this just removes the…

connections we have with people. one of the biggest ones is, let’s say you marry someone, especially if you do a religious ceremony. Well, a legal dissolution of the marriage is going to clear the legal part of the marriage, but it’s not going to reverse that spiritual religious vow that you made.

Fran Gallaher (08:35.719)
It’s also not going to clear the emotional connection. So this energy clearing clears that so that you can truly be released from that commitment. And then there are other kinds of connections we make with people. I also clear people for their relationship to money, their relationship to value, their relationship to support. One time I had a client

and he is always happy for me to tell this story. He had a son whose life had been full of tragedy, drug addiction, criminal behavior, and the son was unable to turn it around. And the father was tormented by this. And I cleared him for this relationship. And it just so happened, I use an open door or window to accomplish the energy clearing.

And when I opened the door, this enormous wind came in and he just felt like it cleared him and he was able to go on and remarry. And he is such a happy person. I’ve never met a happier person because he was able to release all of that. So I hope that was a sufficient explanation. I know it’s still talking about energy, but

Melissa Aarskaug (10:00.94)
Yeah, and I think intuition is such, I hear more of it than I have, historically in leadership, right? Using your intuition, making decisions on your next move and trusting your gut instinct. And I think intuition is such an intriguing and interesting topic when it comes to leadership and corporate America. I know over the years I’ve been working to

hone my intuition, trust my gut more. So I wanna talk a little bit about intuition, what it is and how people can learn to use it to make decisions like you were mentioning, to get married, to pick a job, to pick a spouse or anything that they’re really going for in their life.

Fran Gallaher (10:48.165)
thank you, Melissa. So intuition is just one way our brain works. So logic is when we drive away from the house and we go, OK, I turned off the light, I put the dog in, I have my cell phone. Intuition is we drive away from the house and we go, I forgot my cell phone. It’s the aha moment. It is a an insight or realization that downloads

entirely whole. So it can be complex, it can be a big idea, it can be a smaller idea. It doesn’t matter. It’s just that when it gets downloaded, it’s whole. And people will say, well, are you talking about abandoning logic? No, they can work together. I use the example of, let’s say you hear about a medication and you think, I should talk to my doctor about that.

So that’s your intuition. You go to the doctor and you say, thought maybe this medication might help me. Let’s say the doctor then does prescribe it for you. Then you would use your logic to follow the directions on the label. So it’s not either or, they work together. The other thing about intuition that has gotten such a bad rap in our society is that it is not rational. Now that doesn’t mean it is irrational.

It just means that there is no thought that precedes it. There is no reason. So if you’re walking down the street and you suddenly get the idea that you should walk on the other side of the street, you won’t have a reason until Wiley Coyote drops the anvil on the spot where you would have been. So intuition, as you say, it can be a gut feeling, but it can also be a heart.

The heart can receive intuition. It can also be something in the head. So any of the senses we use to perceive the external world can be used in our internal world. So if you close your eyes and you picture something on the screen of your imagination, you are using inner vision. And it’s about learning what senses you have that are open.

Fran Gallaher (13:11.689)
So by the way, the doors, the band, they got their name from a book called The Doors of Perception by Algis Huxley. And Algis Huxley was a proponent of using hallucinogens to open these doors of perception, which are just our inner senses. You don’t need hallucinogens to do that, although you might use that. But the whole idea is that we can open to our own senses.

and find out how intuition works in our heads and then develop that further. Once you know how your intuition works, you can follow on it much more easily and you can learn to trust it. It takes time and practice, but we want to know when we are receiving an intuition as opposed to a more logical thought if we’re using our intuition.

Melissa Aarskaug (14:09.068)
Yeah, I love that. think that’s a really good example. I know there’s a lot of concern, misconceptions, the intuition, like you were saying, is, you know, hocus pocus or woo woo or witchcrafty. As it pertains to the corporate world and corporate environments, what are some misconceptions that you’re finding with intuition in corporate America?

Fran Gallaher (14:36.651)
Well, a lot of people think that you have to have a special gift to use intuition. Another idea is that it’s just, as you say, woo woo. But let me give an example. So when I was a faculty member for the program in intuition, and by the way, it was from the Kaiser Institute, it was not the famous Kizers, but they never minded being mistaken for the famous Kizers. But I was…

And I don’t mean to brag, but I was a bit of a golden child in that group. And so I would be asked to meet people sometimes to impress them with the power of intuition. And I was nervous meeting this one executive. I shook his hand and I was immediately flooded with the smell, the sight, the knowledge of bazooka bubblegum. Well, I’m a blonde.

I didn’t want to talk about bazooka bubble gum to this man, but I was overwhelmed with this experience. So I was kind of forced to do it. And I said to him, why would I be tasting, smelling, seeing, and thinking about bazooka bubble gum? And he said, we have bowls of bazooka bubble gum on our tables during our executive meetings. And I said, who chose that flavor? Why not double bubble?

And he said, he named the person. And remember how I talked about a download? I got a download that that particular person was cooking up a fraud and embezzlement scheme and was conducting themselves inappropriately sexually in the workplace. And I told this executive that if he looked at that person’s cell phone records, he would discover all the evidence he needed to take care of the problem.

And the executive did that and then was my client for many years. So this is powerful stuff. If you want to call that woo woo, go right ahead. But it probably saved him hundreds of thousands of dollars. So if that’s what woo woo does, then I think we all should sign up. Don’t you, Melissa?

Melissa Aarskaug (16:48.366)
Right, right. You know, and I love that story and I love that you mentioned at the beginning that you work with women and I know a lot of your work is specifically for women that are over 45. What are some of the unique challenges that that type of female has right now in their professional journeys?

Fran Gallaher (17:11.679)
Well, a lot of us found ourselves in competition with male peers. And one way that we might have been encouraged through our societies, conditioning, through other kinds of conditioning, we may have chosen to become more masculine, to speak more loudly, perhaps to be even more direct than our male counterparts.

And we may have left some of our natural selves, our more feminine aspects behind. And now I believe there’s a balance of masculine and feminine in all of us. And I actually think I have a lot of masculine energy. I really identify as female. I enjoy my female expression, but I am more direct than many women might be. And so,

I have found that women have been struggling to have their voices heard and have their opinions be respected. And I think actually allowing more of your feminine aspect is going to help. I’m not talking about simpering or something like that. I’m just saying that competing with men using masculine

energy and a masculine affect has worn women out and caused them to feel like they’re no longer expressing themselves authentically. And so I want to coach women to be more truly themselves and find their natural expression and go where they’ll be listened to.

Melissa Aarskaug (18:59.244)
Yeah, I love that natural expression. So you talk a little bit about helping clients distinguish between societal norms and finding their actual true desires. So I know kind of what you were saying, sometimes you end up in a field, you become that it’s not really your desire. It’s not really your passion. You just, you know, show up to work to your eight to five go home, but you’re not really

you know, finding what makes you the happiest in your true desire. So how do you distinguish that in your coaching with women? And is there any strategies that you could share with our listeners in that space?

Fran Gallaher (19:39.317)
Well, it’s of course individual for each client, but a lot of us need to slow down. A lot of us need to find the pleasure and the excitement again. And sometimes we have to kind of go back in time to find that excitement because we’re burned out, we’re worn out. You know, one of my clients who was new maybe six months ago, she was like,

you fixed my life. I told her the direction she was going, where she was headed in the wrong direction and the places where she was headed in the right direction. And it really resonated with her own intuition. But she had been so bound up with arguing with herself about what was right and whether she was just indulging herself that hearing it from me allowed her to hear it from herself.

So I just think that again, we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot competing with men and not showing up authentically.

Melissa Aarskaug (20:49.506)
I love that. know a lot of times, you know, going back to that example, people stay on the same path and their signs along the way. Maybe they get fired from their job, and then they take another job in the exact same company, maybe a different division in the exact same role. And then there’s another side, maybe the business goes out of business and they get another job. So I feel like there’s a lot of times so many signs if we’re going like you said, down the wrong

We’re taking the wrong road. We’re lost. We can’t find our way. But I think it’s it’s like you were saying a lot of our programming, right? That you know, we went to school. We have an engineering degree. We need to be an engineer. We’re just going to stay that path. And I know for me, I went to school. I studied engineering. I thought that was my forever path that I was taking. And there were things that happened to me along the way that course corrected that path.

But I use my intuition to make decisions. And I find when we are using our intuition, and like you said, we’re getting quiet on the inside, things line up super easy to what we’re actually supposed to be doing or whatever our true desires are. It’s so much easier. know back when I was in engineering, I felt like I was racing upstream all the time. And when I pivoted careers, it was like,

It was so easy downstream. So in your coaching and for women that feel like they’re in that position, they’re undervalued in the workplace, they’re not seen, they’re kind of on that hamster wheel where they’re robotic through their life. What are some strategies that you would recommend for them to really hone that intuition and to really figure out what is their next best or their true desires?

Fran Gallaher (22:46.859)
Well, let’s back up for a moment and talk about our empathic nature. So a lot of societal conditioning emphasizes our empathic nature for women and de-emphasizes it, if not squashing it for men. And this empathic nature means that we more easily become people pleasers. We’re reading the people around us and what they need.

So we have got to have some alone time and some quiet time. So you will have to find your balance between how much actual alone time you need and how much meditation time you need. Because let’s say you live alone and you can have quiet time, you’re going to turn the television off, and you may not need as much meditation as

you, Melissa, might need with a full family life. You know, when I was a technical writer, I would come home from work, and it was a different time. I don’t meditate this long now. I wish perhaps that I did, but I would come home and meditate for 30 minutes before I joined my family. I would say, I just can’t deal with you guys until I have had some time to quiet down.

Now, I don’t feel like I have that luxury of 30 minutes now, and I don’t want to overwhelm anyone. I’m talking about a meditation that is three to five minutes long or 10 minutes, something that can easily fit in someone’s life. And then some quiet time, maybe where you have the television off. Maybe you have quiet time when you’re drinking coffee in the morning.

Just take a few minutes before the onslaught begins.

Melissa Aarskaug (24:45.806)
love that you said that and that is such an important nugget that I want to kind of pull back a little more. I know having four kids, a busy life, a travel schedule and a lot going on, it’s really hard to get those quiet moments, those quiet space. And I may come off hot from a flight home or hot off a day into my family life, but I think you’re spot on with that meditation, that quiet time.

and kind of taking down your day before you open the next chapter of your day. Otherwise, you know, the stresses of the day become the stresses of our families evening. And so I think I love what you said, it’s so important to carve out time. And I’m guilty myself of it. And sometimes I have to go sit in my car or in my garage or in my closet, or anywhere I could find a really quiet moment.

And like you said, it really just is gonna depend on your day and your life. Sometimes it’s on my way home from dropping my son off at school or, and it’s just those, you know, few minutes to just turn the radio off and just be quiet. And other days it’s an hour or 30 minutes. And I love that you said that because it should be an important part of everyone’s day, just having some quiet, take down time in your day.

I want to talk a little bit about stress relief. know with a world that’s always on always pop ups on our phone, there’s always more to do. I know you’ve developed some techniques and guided visualizations. Can you share a little bit with our listeners about ways they can go about doing visualizations to de stress their life and maybe create some calm in their day to day?

Fran Gallaher (26:41.279)
Thanks for asking that. Yes, if you go to my website, ReallyFlourish.com, you can get access to a 15 minute guided visualization that my brother Tim Gallaher recorded. He actually composed and performed the music for it and then did the recording and produced the recording. And then if people email me, there’s a shorter one, a nine minute.

meditation that I can give someone. I would like to record some shorter ones because I recorded those at a time when I myself again meditated longer than I do now. But another simple thing to do is to just get quiet and imagine that you can settle in and settle down into your physical body. And as you do that, and for people like you, Melissa, who love that

heaven, sky energy, who want freedom, just know that as you settle down, your energy is going to expand. And it’s going to expand upward, outward in all directions, and downward. And that’s your energy field. That’s who you are as an energy being. And that energy field surrounds your physical body. And if you have any disbelief there,

Just think of the time that you felt someone staring at you and you turned and indeed they were staring at you. Or the way you can feel uncomfortable in an airplane seat because someone, may not be touching you, but they’re close enough that you can feel it because they’re in your energy field. These are real things. So anyway, if you just take a moment to settle in and settle down and let your energy field expand.

And then you can call light to yourself. This is the light of enlightenment. It is often pictured around the heads of saints and angels. And it agreed to accompany us on this sometimes dark planet. So we can call light to ourselves. We can breathe it in and light takes everything it touches to a higher order. So you can do that in one to two minutes, what I just suggested. It’s a simple, easy,

Fran Gallaher (29:07.177)
visualization that will take you into a meditative state.

Melissa Aarskaug (29:13.432)
love that. I know for me being, you know, sitting in those airplane seats, you know, getting on those planes and working at my desk all day. A lot of times I’m really tense in areas and so I’ll remind myself while I’m meditating or while I’m relaxing to

you know, release your hips or take your tongue off your mouth or let your arms down. So sometimes if you’re really tense, I have to remind myself to relax and, really check to see if I’m actually I might be like, I’m really relaxed, I’m really relaxed. And we know that I’m not really, really relaxed at all. And so I’ve had to like, Melissa, you know, let your arms down, let your legs down. So it takes practice Fran, right? It takes practice to get our minds quiet. And sometimes

Like for me, I have to pre-practice my practicing of getting quiet and remind myself that it’s okay to relax and there’s no fires that need to be put out and just to really get me into the relaxation state. But a word that I really love right now and I practice it in my own life a lot is being mindful and mindfulness. And…

using that to really touch base back with myself, like how am I feeling? And, you know, what am I doing? Do I need to be doing that? So I want to talk a little bit about how to balance your intuition with the data that you were explaining, you know, with a, you know, rock hitting you in this space where you, you know, you felt like you had to move to the other side of the street versus like our fast paced environment, our brains and the pop-ups and

So really how can leaders balance intuition, mindfulness and data in order to be the best versions of themselves?

Fran Gallaher (31:08.203)
Well, first of all, when you are good at processing data, you could be processing it both logically, and therefore with experience, and intuitively. So start to be curious about that. And as you do that, mean, people who love data, they will move into a flow state when they’re looking at data. Now, that’s not me.

But notice that that flow state is actually a kind of a meditative or altered state and begin to be curious about how your intelligence works and where it might be leading if you follow your natural inclination. know, I lately, I had lost mathematical ability for a long time because as a

Mentioned the nuns wanted me to show my work and now I’m just noticing with smaller sums That I doubt myself, but I come up with the right answer and then I go through it more You know step by step in a ponderous way and it’s like that was the right answer Would you just start trusting yourself again friend? So I trust myself with certain kinds of intuition, but that math part is slowly coming back but I really admire people who can

handle a lot of information and they may be using their intuition as they choose what intuition I mean what information actually has an energetic flow to it that leads somewhere. You have the way you have conducted this interview Melissa has just been brilliant and I can tell that you you’re almost like you’re snowboarding with the the conversation.

You’re following where the conversation leads, but you’re also tilting it a little bit here or there and influencing it in very skillful ways. So that’s both intuition and logic.

Melissa Aarskaug (33:20.834)
Well, thank you, Fran. As a newbie in the podcasting world, I’ve been getting better as the more I practice. And so I appreciate your kind comments. So, right back at you, Fran, you’ve guided countless professionals to thrive and just succeed in what they’re looking to achieve.

I’m curious your perspective on what is the most transformational piece of advice that you could give to your clients or something you’ve learned along the way.

Fran Gallaher (34:00.853)
Doubt is a hobby. If you want to doubt your own intuition, have at it. You’re going to be busy for the rest of your life. But if you set aside doubt, and what happens sometimes is some people do have strong intuition, but they’ve coupled it with doubt. They’ve grilled themselves. Really? Is that what you think? And so the intuition is so…

quickly followed by doubt that they end up conflating the two. And so if you could start picking apart the moment of intuition and the moment of doubt and just quit it with the doubt. And I’m not saying that you’re always going to act on your intuition or you’re always going to be right, but quit going around and around and around the darn subject and allow yourself to receive the intuition.

and then decide if you want to act on it. But start noticing it and give yourself a feedback loop. How many of us will have had an intuition, we may not follow it, and then later it’s like, that was right.

Melissa Aarskaug (35:14.08)
You’re right, right? I can’t remember who said this quote, but whether you think you’re going to fail, or you think you’re going to succeed, you’re right, right? So if you start out of a gate, I’m not going to, you know, I’m not be able to do this, whatever you’re, if likely, you’re not going to be able to do it. I always tell myself that doubt and fear and negative goal setting. if I want to, you know, achieve anything, I need to start down that journey, bump up my knees a little bit and

get back up on the skateboard and try again. So I love that you said that about Dad, I absolutely agree. Kind of towards the end here, I wanna get your insight on those people who don’t believe intuition is a thing and maybe they’re skeptical of it.

They don’t think it’s a thing. What is one actionable step that they can take today to work on their intuition, whether they believe it in it or not?

Fran Gallaher (36:16.745)
Well, they probably know the nudges. They know that those people are going to be more likely to have gut feelings, I’m going to predict. And we’ll call those nudges. And just start noticing the nudge and again, write it down and then see what happens. And over time, the track record of their own nudges may well convince them.

of the power of their intuition. And you know, some people will refuse to use the word intuition. That’s how they get around it. And they just say, well, it’s my gut. It’s just my gut. Well, that’s fine. Go ahead and just start paying attention to what your gut says. And even if you don’t act on it, write it down and see what happens.

Melissa Aarskaug (37:06.478)
I love that you said that because I’m guilty of one of those people. I’m math and science person. I’m like, Oh, it was my gut. It was my gut. Now I understand it was my intuition, but it took me many, many years to get to the place of using the words intuition for all my math people and data people out there. I get you. I see you. I understand, but give it a try.

Kind of in closing, I want to ask one last question. Any final thoughts or anything that your intuition is telling you that you want to share with our listeners?

Fran Gallaher (37:44.967)
Two two quick stories one is that Einstein did what he called thought experiments which were really visualizations and he visualized riding a light beam through the universe and he saw what happened with his inner vision Then he applied mathematics to describe it Okay, did everybody just hear that so he was a woo-woo person

And you can say that’s wonderful. He discovered the theory of relativity and how nice and pat him on the head, so to speak. But it also led to nuclear power, the atomic bomb, very real things. The second thing is another person who used their imagination. There was a young man who spent a winter in a cabin. And after a while, it became clear that there was a mouse in the cabin with him.

So he sketched the mouse all that winter. I believe it was in the North, like Minnesota or Michigan or something. And then he started giving life to this caricature that he created on paper. And that woo-woo winter that he spent characterizing a little mouse, he was Walt Disney, and that led to the Disney Corporation. So.

I don’t know about you, but millions of dollars, billions of dollars, that doesn’t seem so woo-woo to me.

Melissa Aarskaug (39:18.75)
I love it. I bet was those were great stories. Thank you so much for sharing Fran your wisdom, your experience, your knowledge with our listeners today. Your insights and intuition are really inspiring. And for all of our listeners who want to connect with Fran learn more about her. Like she mentioned, connect with her on her website, really flourish.com. Connect with her on LinkedIn. And thank you to you for being here today for him.

Fran Gallaher (39:48.095)
Melissa, thank you so much for inviting me to be here. You are a delight and you are a heck of an interviewer. So thank you.

Melissa Aarskaug (39:56.376)
Thank you so much. Until next time, stay curious, stay inspired, and that’s the Executive Connect podcast.