We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Abigail Gazda a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Abigail, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you’re open to it, can you talk to us about the best (or worst) investment you’ve made. What’s the backstory and the relevant context behind why you made the investment

I have invested a lot of money of my own learning, coaching, and business development.

To answer this specific question, I hope to help other avoid mistakes and make empowered decisions about their investments as well.

This example makes me giggle because I spent the same amount in two different cases; one I would spend a million times over and one I regret.

I spent $15k on my year-long coaching program to become an ICF accredited life coach. It was absolutely worth the investment. I have sent many people in the direction of that program and a handful have graduated over the years. 10/10 recommend the Accomplishment Coaching program.

Then, a few years into building my business, I was looking for my next coach and a women was showing up in my field a lot. A lot of her marketing had a lot to do with how much money she was making doing the same work I was doing, or so I thought.

She has all the right words, had plenty of certifications and experiences but when it came down to it, there wasn’t a lot of substance to her coaching.

It became very clear to me that she was better at sales than coaching. I regretted that decision.

I found value in the lesson and experience more than the coaching.

It helped me realize and accept that I am a really great coach and that confident people are getting paid more than skilled people.

It activated more of my passion to help healers, light workers, and heart-centered leaders learn how to become business savvy and financially literate enough to make a living with their gifts and share them with the world.

Abigail, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I transformed my passion for education into a full-time career as a motivational speaker, author, publisher, and life coach.

I take the most pride in being a heart-centered entrepreneur.

Over the years of growth and scaling, I always choose quality over quantity. I do not want my message, connection, and impact to be diluted by overcommitting, underdelivering, and burnout. This has helped my stay in alignment with the commitment of unleashing the hearts of others and helping them use their gifts to lead in love.

I am the CEO of Hearts Unleashed, a transformation company committed to empowering people to operate with full freedom, power, and self expression in every area of life.

I am also the Founder of Hearts Unleashed House Publishing and we help authors share their mission and message with the world. I coach people to both write and publish their books.

As a Clarity Coach, I support souls speaking up about their silent struggle and unleashing the authentic leader within. My areas of expertise are Subconscious Reprogramming, Emotional Intelligence, and Shadow Integration.

As the host of the Hearts Unleashed Podcast, I am committed to turning dreamers into doers and helping raise the frequency of humanity with the development of Emotional Intelligence.
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As a best-selling author, I personally thrive the most in life while adventuring, writing, educating, laughing, surfing, and roller blading around the SoCal coast!

I am a full time nomad living van life, touring the country, enjoying visiting clients, authors, friends and family, all while building more community nation (and world) wide!

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I appreciate this question because it gives me an opportunity to support anyone else deprogramming hustle and grind culture conditioning.

I grew up playing sports and became a collegiate athlete, playing basketball.

To no particular person’s fault, I was raised being told to be faster, stronger, quicker, more agile, more efficient, fitter, etc. The list really goes on.

There is that “never be satisfied” adage we glorify and it created a constant critic in me that I spend every day of my life healing, nurturing, and retraining.

She is highly competitive, deeply repulsed, and urgently getting somewhere, anywhere; because that was the message.

When I started to slow dow, heal my wounds, and become more aware of myself, I realized I do not want as much as I believed. I did not need to climb every mountain I happened upon.

The most important part of this lesson for me has been the difference between earning and deserving.

My athlete, hard work, mentality told me that I had to earn every single pleasure or accomplishment.

This leaked into how I ran my business,

I made sure to suffer before I could succeed.

It may not have been 5 am sprints in 50 degree weather but it was financial hardship before a high-ticket sale. It was anxiety before sales calls. It was miscommunications and breakdowns that had me doubting myself.

Even after I became remarkably successful, I would conjure up malfunctions, fears, and anxiety that no longer fit the life I was living and creating.

I had to decondition that hard work in the form of struggle makes me better or more deserving because after years as an entrepreneur, I was very skilled at my craft and running a business.

It really clicked for me when one of my coaches once asked, “How many books do you have to write before you are good enough?”

It stopped me dead in my tracks. (I had written 7.5 by then.)

I decided right then and there that I was enough. I was enough to charge appropriately. I was enough to be considered an expert in my field and I was certainly enough to make the difference I came to make without shooting myself in the foot to make it look harder, better, or more well deserved.

I learn deeper layers of this lesson with each new height that I reach in life and business and I get to suffer less and less along the way.

It is a major part of my work to help people understand the ways that they disempower themselves out of subconscious conditioning and set them free from it.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I want to encourage anybody starting a business that it is really okay to start a business from the ground up and fund it with other work.

I also believe you are the only one who will know when you have overworked a job to avoid going all in on your biz.

I started my coaching business while I was a ops manager of a corporate gym. As my business grew, I demoted myself, three different times, in the gym world to transition. It worked.

I was beginning to make a living wage as a coach and things were going well.

At different seasons of growth in my business, I have had to supplement my income to keep things going and growing.

I find that the social media influenced world we are growing up in can be very misleading as to how successful people are and then we compare or even quit because we don’t feel like we can keep up or make it.

When I was raising my prices, I attempted a major launch and ‘failed’ with zero registrations which meant zero income.

At the time, it was the best decision to get a new job to balance out 3 months of financial hardship and that job stabilized me in a way that then set me up for my highest paid year, not just as a coach but in any career I ever had.

I have now been fully self employed for 5 years and loving every minute of my freedom, autonomy, and range of motion in life and business.

I think it is important to find balance. I know people who hold onto jobs way too long out of fear, need, and desire for stability and rightfully so, but that does not a business build.

It will take a heck of a lot of courage to take the leap of blind faith to go out on your own and create your own income. It is certainly not for the faint of heart.

One of the quotes that has kept me going is, “live like no one else will so you can live like no one else can.”

I now live full-time van life, work my own schedule, make my own rules, and get to live a full life.

I am always grateful for what got me here and I am just getting started.

Contact Info:

• Website: abigailgazda.com. heartsunleashed.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_instagail_/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abigail.rose.7906/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClYjBA_abOrO2MBA4l5DMtg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCngqKGYibnYn59vqryCImug

Image Credits
Rebecca Root Anja Johnson