#177 The Cost of Living in Systems Not Designed for Women

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #177 Katrina van Oudheusden

“The Cost of Living in Systems Not Designed for Women”

 

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing. Welcome to the Find Your Voice, Change Your Life podcast. I have such a thrill each time I get to meet a new person who comes into my life. I have no idea. Well, I have some idea because we have had some conversation and written back and forth, but for me, and for you the listeners, what you are getting is an interview that is fresh.

It is not prescripted. It is totally a new friend that I am meeting today, Katrina. She and I are going to talk about what it was like at some point in her life not having had a voice, the journey she took, and now the success that she gets to have because she has a voice. So hello, Katrina.

(00:52) Katrina van Oudheusden: Hello, Dr. Doreen. It is an absolute pleasure to be here with you and on your podcast, and just having this conversation today with your audience. Thank you for this.

(01:00) Doreen Downing: I am so glad you said that to my audience. Yes, it is with me, but it is my audience that is listening, and that is who we want to reach. You sent me a bio, so I would like to read what I can here.

This is Katrina van Oudheusden, a business growth coach and creator of the Create Her Method, a revolutionary framework that helps highly accomplished women grow their businesses without burnout. With a background rooted in Disney’s legendary customer experience philosophy, Katrina brings a unique blend of strategic precision and emotional connection to everything she creates.

I am enjoying reading this because I love that idea of being strategic but also open to the emotional levels that go on with us as humans. Through her unique offerings, Create Her Business Rewire, the Create Her Planner, and her in person Create Her Rest and Reset, she helps ambitious women reconnect with their natural rhythms and design businesses that flow.

I want to take a nice full breath and let that land because that is beautiful. The way you have worded that blends the art of customer experience with the science of business scaling. Turning clarity into cash flow, rest into results, and creativity into sustainable impact. You are a writer. You wrote this?

I did not because this feels delicious. This whole idea of flow and creativity, but also precision and a unique method that you have designed.

I like to always start with the end, meaning where you are now, and that is really not the end because it is always the beginning. I want people to know this because that is how I am feeling right now with you, Katrina. Wow. Look at what you have accomplished.

I know, based on all my interviews with people, they did not start this way. They had to find their way, and it has been a journey. So let us start there. Where did you start your journey in this lifetime, this particular lifetime?

(03:55) Katrina van Oudheusden: Where I am right now, if I had looked back in 2000 when I graduated from college, and I will totally date myself, I have no problem with that, I would never have thought this would be my path.

Leaving college, I had a degree in hotel, restaurant, tourism management. I had a culinary degree. I was headed off to the world of Disney to start my culinary career. I thought this was my life path. That was what I was going to do. I was going to be cooking. I was going to be at the happiest place on earth. I truly believed that back in 2000.

It is crazy that the last twenty five years, this last quarter of a century, that journey has evolved, shifted, moved, and changed. As a female entrepreneur, that shift from an employee mindset into a business owner mindset was one of the biggest hurdles I experienced.

It is a journey that we as women do not have a lot of training around. We are not really taught how women build businesses. We have not been gifted the role models of women building within their flow. We have been gifted a construct by men who have done incredible things, and I am grateful for their coaching.

But where I am today, with the retreat, with the rewire, with the planner, never in a million years would I have said that this was going to be my future.

(05:24) Doreen Downing: That is a quick snapshot. What I heard was the difference between a more masculine approach, maybe a ladder where you are climbing, pushing, forcing, and what you shared felt very different.

What you described reached me around flow and a feminine way of building a business and becoming successful as women. Thank you for that snapshot.

We as women do not learn this early on. We were little girls first. That is when we start learning through play, through family, through what we see modeled. So what was it like for you? Where did you grow up, and what was that early family environment where you were learning what it meant to be female?

(06:24) Katrina van Oudheusden: I am one of six children. My parents have been married for well over fifty five years now. They got married at nineteen and seventeen. My dad was nineteen. My mom was seventeen. They have gone through everything a couple can go through and raised six incredible children.

When I look back, I think about how blessed I am. Was it a perfect childhood? No, not at all. It was not the Brady Bunch, even though we watched that on television as kids.

What we did have were parents who did the best they could with the skills and knowledge they had, and they continued to evolve as human beings. They showed me grace. They showed me what it was like to argue and still fall in love with each other every day. They showed me how to get along with my brothers and sisters. They wanted what was best for me and still do.

They always said they wanted me happy and healthy. As a woman who has not been married and has not had children, I look at my parents for so much of what they instilled in me on my personal growth journey. I am truly amazed by what they did.

Learning to be female, I was more of a tomboy than a princess. I did not dream about marriage or happy homes. I was more interested in selling candy in middle school, making money, doubling it, buying more candy, and selling it again.

I think I had an entrepreneurial spirit, but I did not understand how to foster it. My parents were well educated and well employed. We were taught to go to school, get an education, get a good job, and go from there.

I challenged that in 2013 when I left my Disney career, much to the concern of my siblings and my parents. They questioned the entrepreneur path. They watched me struggle financially. They had doubts, support, and fear all at the same time.

It has been an interesting journey for sure.

(08:36) Doreen Downing: What you just named there is the support and the fear that can come from those around us as we take our own risks and make our own decisions. Sometimes what stops us is not only fear inside ourselves, but the fear we receive from the people around us. That is what I would love to hear more about right now. What did that feel like, and how did you navigate an atmosphere of fear, even though there was support? I think the listeners today are people we want to infuse with more inner strength so they can face the fears that society, family, and community place on them.

(09:29) Katrina van Oudheusden: A lot of that is personal development. One of the most fascinating things I have discovered is that when we become entrepreneurs, we realize we run the business. Because of that, we tend to do a lot more personal development than the average career individual. We are looking to find out what our flaws are and how to fix them.

I did a lot of fixing, or what I thought was fixing. I thought I could solve myself. I had to surrender that and understand that who I am is my most trusted self. From my parents to my brothers and sisters, and they are going to hear this podcast, I understand their love and concern. They have stability. They have a paycheck that comes in. They are living a lifestyle that suits them and they are happy in it.

For me, I want to change the world. I want to make a difference around women, time, and productivity. I want to be the loudest voice saying that women have been doing it wrong for decades, for centuries, and we did not know any better because we never had the tools. We never had a woman step outside the box and say this does not work for us.

I get where my family comes from. Over the last couple of years, as I have transitioned and really owned my voice, it has not been easy. It has been very difficult financially. It has not been roses and butterflies. It has been scraping by. It has meant doing Instacart and DoorDash just to get by.

But the vision and the dream, and knowing what we are creating and the conversations I am having, are what keep pushing me forward. Even when they do not see it, what I feel internally and the vision I hold pull me forward in such a strong way that I cannot give up. If I went back into a career, if I had to be behind closed doors or back in the kitchen, I know I would not survive mentally, physically, or spiritually after everything I have invested in myself. I am not designed for that environment anymore. Knowing that has taken a couple of years to figure out and to be strong in those conversations.

(11:53) Doreen Downing: I hear both the deep knowing of yourself and the power that gives you. I feel the fire in the way you express yourself. There is a lot of strength there. The people I work with want this kind of strength. They are learning from you today what it takes. I think you gave a hint. When you stick to your vision, there is something that helps you keep moving. It may not look like a big push forward. It may not be fast.

(12:40) Katrina van Oudheusden: It is going to be a throttle back and a slowing down. That sounds so counterintuitive to hustle culture, productivity, and the quick response for everything. But literally, throttling back and slowing down, as crazy as it might seem and as financially stupid as it might appear, is the greatest gift we can give each other as women.

(13:06) Doreen Downing: Let’s both take a breath right now and give that to each other. A big, full, expansive breath. And as I take my breath, what comes to me right now is trust.

Trust. If we do. But we have to know, it’s like learning to drive. When I learned to drive, the way you’re describing this feels like learning how to be in this vehicle called our body. And then our engine, our heart, feels like our big engine in there. And vision.

All the things you’re talking about today are about getting to know our machine, our instrument, our cells. And I want to hear much, much more about your particular journey. The waking up and the challenge of going from being an employee to an entrepreneur.

But I need to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back.

Hi, we’re back with Katrina van Oudheusden. Is that how you say it?

(14:18) Katrina van Oudheusden: That is really good. Yes, really good. It’s a Dutch name, so it’s not the easiest to pronounce. I get it.

(14:22) Doreen Downing: I love it though. Names are like music to me, how to say them. My name is Doreen, and depending on which country, people say it differently. The enunciation and the way you pronounce a name has, I don’t know, juice to it.

So Katrina, beautiful name. We’re back with Katrina, and we’ve been talking about having a pretty basic, good foundation, something most human beings need in order to feel grounded. I feel like Katrina has demonstrated that.

Of course, we’re little girls growing up in this big society. We try and go out and follow some course that looks good. You followed that course into hospitality. But something happened.

I know that something that happened might not have just been a clap and something woke up, but it might have been gradual. Tell us about the waking up, I guess is what I wanna say.

(15:42) Katrina van Oudheusden: The waking up actually took a little bit further in my journey. I thought the waking up and the voice change would have happened when I left Disney, but it was not that. It was actually later in my career. It was probably about ten to fifteen years into doing digital marketing.

That was my transition. I got into digital marketing. I took the Disney customer service philosophy and brought that into the digital space because it was vastly missing back in 2008 and 2013, in that time period. It is still missing today.

What was really interesting is, like you talked about, it was a very masculine environment. It was masculine in the kitchen. And when I stepped into the world of digital and online marketing and business development, it was still very masculine. Everywhere I looked, it was men running the show. And thank God for that, to be honest.

But the one moment that really shifted things for me in finding my voice was when I was wrapping up a call with a mentor of mine. We were talking about my next level of business, how to get to the multiple seven figure mark with what I was doing. I remember getting off that call, Doreen, and I was mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausted.

I could not imagine building my business the way we had just laid it out over the last hour of that call. It did not feel authentic. I did not like the way I was coaching people. I felt like I was missing something, especially with women.

So I got off that call and I hired a business muse. I want to check, am I allowed to say a slightly swear word on here, or do I need to walk around it a little bit. I just wanted to make sure because some women find this word really offensive, and I did at first too.

There was this one woman I was speaking with, and she is no longer a business muse, much to my chagrin. She asked me a question as I was sharing what I wanted for my health, what I wanted for my relationships, what I wanted for my business, and what I wanted for my life. She looked at me and she said, well, have you consulted your pussy.

(17:44) Katrina van Oudheusden: I did not understand the question. I was actually offended by the word she used because it felt like a derogatory term. At the same time, I got super curious because I was so offended and so appalled.

I asked myself, why am I so uncomfortable with this word. I struggled to even say that word for a really long time. But here is the thing. For all of our listeners, for the women and the men, the thread that question pulled was simple. What is the difference between how men and women build business.

When I went asking, the only thing I could definitively be told was that we do build businesses differently.

That was it. That was all they could tell me. We build businesses differently. How. The men have physically transformed the invisible into physical things that they do.

(18:45) Doreen Downing: The idea of a business growing, you could say you can quantify it. But where you are leaning right now feels more like business coming from a sense of being.

(19:00) Katrina van Oudheusden: Yes. And this goes even deeper. You are going to find this fascinating. We have been taught about the circadian rhythm. It is the twenty four hour clock. Sunrise to sunset.

It’s the male hormonal cycle. It’s how men hormonally cycle. They cycle within twenty four hours. It’s called the circadian rhythm. Do you know what an infradian rhythm is?

(19:25) Doreen Downing: Oh no, I don’t. This is brand new.

(19:27) Katrina van Oudheusden: The infradian rhythm is the female cycle. Did you know that there’s a circadian and an infradian? Do both men and women share both of these? Yes. Is one more unique to the other? Absolutely.

Women cycle energetically and hormonally in twenty eight to thirty days. What might that look like? That’s called your menstrual cycle, but you only call it a cycle when you bleed. But there’s so much more to women’s thinking process when we talk about rhythm.

I’m going to dive into this really quick because I thought this was fascinating. As I’ve dived into the circadian rhythm, I started looking at the physical manifestation around how business got designed for men.

Men have created things like the five AM morning, the Miracle Morning. Why? Because men’s productivity is at its peak when they first wake up, when they get stuff done. They literally wake up ready to go.

So they’ve built a structure that serves their hormonal cycle. High testosterone, high cortisol. In the afternoon, testosterone wanes. Guess what. They created happy hour, golfing, company meetings. They always happen after lunchtime. Why? Because that’s when they’re more open to communication and socialization and closing deals. They’ve literally built it around how they feel.

(20:52) Doreen Downing: Fascinating.

(20:53) Katrina van Oudheusden: But have women done this? No. Because we don’t even know what an infradian rhythm is. We don’t even know the four cycles of energy that we go through every month that give us superpowers that men will never be able to replicate. But we don’t weave and build our business within that twenty eight day cycle. We’re trying to cram it all into a twenty four hour day. That’s not designed for us.

(21:17) Doreen Downing: This is, it’s really resonating.

(21:32) Doreen Downing: And that’s what you’ve discovered then. Now we’re moving into what you’re doing in your life currently, in offering this perspective that is very easy to understand, especially the way you just did it in two minutes.

(21:51) Katrina van Oudheusden: Yeah. Well it’s fascinating because in that transition of trying to figure that out, I lost my voice. When you talk about where the transition of losing your voice was, that was in the last couple of years.

I was trying to figure it out. There’s no role model. There’s no female out there that’s modeling a way of life like this. They’re starting to be, and I’m finding the women who are out there, and we need louder voices.

So I would say the biggest transition for me was creating and testing and working with women to really design a new way of growing a business, of time and productivity, of creating events where you actually rest as women.

That has been a two and a half, three year process. And I think when you talk about what I’ve shared throughout this whole episode, this is the time period where my family has questioned me the most. This is the time period where more doubt has crept in. This is the time period of, do I get a job.

This has been the time period of, can I keep going when it feels like everything is against me. Until you get that first client, and you start getting the testimonials, and you start hearing the difference you’re making in women’s lives.

It feels like it’s taking forever to get there. But I promise you, when you find your voice, you can’t shut up about it. When you experience the results for yourself on living in a twenty eight day cycle, it’s like reawakening to a world around you that you didn’t even see.

You stop the productivity cycle and you start figuring out how to schedule and rest. The men appreciate it. The females are more magnetic, more attractive. It is truly something incredible to be a part of. That’s all in my experience so far.

(23:53) Doreen Downing: Oh, it’s a revolution and an evolution. I felt both the way you describe what’s possible for us. Well, we’re moving on. Tell us then, I get a sense of the work that you do. You talked in the beginning about Create Her, but let’s see how people can find you and what they might get from working with you.

(24:22) Katrina van Oudheusden: Create Her is actually divinely inspired. I went through multiple names over the years, but there was something about Create Her. It’s spelled C-R-E-A-T H-E-R. Part of that comes from the fact that women literally are creators every single month.

Whether you are in your infradian rhythm, pre infradian, or post infradian. I am still figuring out how to use words like pre and post menopausal, but it’s really like post infradian. If we start embracing our infradian rhythm and then understand that we are pre and post infradian throughout our lives, that cycle still continues.

Create Her was really designed as a way to, and I think all the guys out there, all my mentors that might be listening, because you gave me the framework. Then I went in and said, what do women really want. What has been interesting is that we changed the language.

We stopped using words like achieve, and we started using words like accomplish.

(25:24) Katrina van Oudheusden: We stopped using words like I charge for my service, and we started saying, I receive for my service.

(25:31) Katrina van Oudheusden: We stopped using the word goals, and we started using the word intentions. We started changing language.

So when you work with me, you get a sense of finding your unique flow. It’s different for every woman I work with. Whether you have children, you do not have children, you are a caregiver. Our seasons of life are always evolving.

What you get is an authentic female perspective. A sense of being your true self. Understanding that your brain does not work the same way every single day and honoring your rest. So you can step into being the wife, the parent, the sister, the aunt, the mother, whatever you choose to be in that moment, and giving yourself permission to be your most authentic self. That’s really what I love working with women around.

(26:21) Doreen Downing: Right now you are stepping into being the daughter.

(26:25) Katrina van Oudheusden: Very much so, yes.

(26:27) Doreen Downing: I also get that it’s not just a role we move ourselves into. It’s a deeper sense of embracing what that represents, how to be it more fully, like being the daughter.

(26:45) Katrina van Oudheusden: It is. And it’s so interesting because the women I work with are so afraid to schedule time off. I actually teach women to block three to five days off their calendar every month where they are not allowed to take a client. They are not allowed to check social media.

(27:00) Katrina van Oudheusden: They are not allowed to be checking social media. They are not allowed to do any of that crazy stuff. There really is a time to reflect and listen to your body, because that downtime, especially if you are in your menstrual phase, really matters.

I also have women who follow me who are no longer in their infradian rhythm. They are post infradian. They started following the moon cycle. That was their request. They are still finding their energy cycles and adapting their lifestyle to follow that moon energy, which is very much the feminine energy that is out there.

It has been fascinating because they are teaching me as much as I am learning from them. The community of women, the collaboration, learning together what business, productivity, time, family, health, and self care really look like.

It has been an incredible journey for me that is really just getting started. I look forward to the next couple of decades of working with women, handing this off, and letting it continue to be a new way of looking at life through a different lens for women. That is what I am really excited about.

(28:15) Doreen Downing: Beautiful. I get a sense of the ancestral today when I tap in and receive. And in the beginning you used the word vision. I am thinking that instead of go climb the mountain and reach your goal, it is more about having the vision.

(28:44) Katrina van Oudheusden: Yeah. Taking the women with me. We are all going together. I feel like we are all connected. I am learning from you. You are learning from me. The younger generation is learning from both of us.

That wisdom we have as women is important to pass on. If you want to follow me, I am Katrina van Oudheusden on LinkedIn. I think Doreen has that in the show notes. I am also becoming more active on Pinterest because there are a lot of women there.

Other social media sites are kind of boring to me. I have been on them since about 2006. I do better answering emails, to be honest.

(29:31) Doreen Downing: I do too. I think it is relational. We like open channels with people. That is why today has been so much fun with you.

We are at the end, and I like to pause, take a full open breath, and have you listen. One of the lessons you are bringing today is listening. What it takes to pause and tap in. To me, that is where voice comes from. The true authentic voice comes when we stop, listen, and then express.

If you could share some final thoughts that come through as you listen to this now moment.

(30:25) Katrina van Oudheusden: For your audience and the listeners, I want you to be present to who you already are naturally and tap into your body. Do not let anyone tell you that what you feel is inauthentic or not real.

There is so much truth when we sit in silence. I invite you, wherever you are in the world, to step outside, close your eyes, and breathe. Take two minutes. Feel the warmth of the sun. Feel the breeze against your skin. Experience that moment.

I promise you will feel reconnected to yourself and everything around you. It will provide clarity and a whole new way to look at your day.

(31:09) Doreen Downing: And a whole new way of being in your day. Thank you so much, Katrina.

(31:17) Katrina van Oudheusden: My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.