We recently connected with Diane Pauley and have shared our conversation below.
Diane, so great to have you with us and thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with the community. So, let’s jump into something that stops so many people from going after their dreams – haters, nay-sayers, etc. We’d love to hear about how you dealt with that and persisted on your path.
More than ever, I feel really strongly that this is a question I need to address because it’s an important part of my story that I’ve been wanting to tell, and I’m finally ready to share it.
A quote I’ve been holding onto lately has been ‘Bright women have dark stories.’ And I believe these women found their way out of the darkness by lighting their way through it. It’s that same light that got me through my journey, especially the darkest moments, and I’m proud of how my light shines bright today. But just because it does, it doesn’t mean that it was always turned on—it flickered for a long time, as I tried to find my way through the darkness.
I believe in the power of words, and the way we choose to use them matters because they have the potential to heal or harm. In my experience, I know what it feels like to experience the latter.
I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the kind of abuse that’s not easily seen—the verbal and emotional kind—the kind that leaves a mark on the inside. Growing up, I didn’t have to cover up what happened because no one even knew anything did, but I still wore a mask anyway. Because I believed I needed to be perfect, perform, produce, please, prove, and pretend for everything to be alright and for me to feel like I actually belonged.
I took the lies that others told me and believed them to be true, and it changed my entire internal operating system and taught me to believe that I would never be good enough. For a very long time, I questioned myself, second-guessed myself, and found myself standing outside my story, hustling every second for my worthiness because I didn’t know another way.
At the very same time, I yearned for words of affirmation—good words that would save me.
And those good words came, first from others, and then from me. I’ve been on a healing journey for more than a decade, and with every step forward, I’ve been learning to heal, rewrite my story, and weave myself back into the narrative where I belong.
Today, my business is called Gimme Sweet Words, and as a coach and writer, I hold a safe space for others to feel comfortable enough sharing their stories with me so I can hold up a mirror and reflect back what I see, affirming who they are in the process.
I share words of affirmation that I needed to hear because I know we all need to be reminded that we matter. I know the clients I work with matter to the people they serve, and it’s my job to help them weave together the powerful brand story they’re meant to share. Because there’s power in standing in your story, owning your worth, and using your voice—it’s how you stand out and it’s how people connect with you, believe in you, and invest in you.
I know that I’m reclaiming my voice every time I share and become more visible, and I know I can finally say what I mean now.
My healing journey is going to continue, but I’m not as scared to show up and be seen anymore, and that’s how I persist because I’m not speaking to everyone; I’m speaking up for myself and sharing with those meant to hear this message.
To this day, I have people from a past I’ve moved on from who reach out. When it first happened years ago, I found myself reverting back to that old internal operating system made to keep me small, in a spiral of self-doubt, and dimming my light.
And it’s taken a lot of deep work to get back to a place where I can feel comfortable sharing again, taking up more space, and shining my light because I deserve to be seen; I’ve taken back my power piece by piece and my brightness can now overtake the shadow others have cast in my life. I now have the words to express myself, and when I share, I know it’s coming from a healed, empowered, and fully embodied place. I’m standing in my story, owning my worth, and using my voice to share my truth with others because we all deserve to believe in who we are.
I’m sharing to heal, not harm, and be a reminder that our stories matter and there is power in telling them.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
As I’ve been working on my personal story this last year, I’ve also been working on how I want to position myself and tell my brand story moving forward. Today, I’m excited to share that Gimme Sweet Words is a brand storytelling studio focused on helping founder-led brands bring their brand stories to life. Together, we craft a story worth telling because the right story told well has the power to stand out and help others connect with you, believe in you, and invest in you.
And I know just how powerful it is to stand in your story and use your authentic voice to share it.
It’s how you end up leading with influence, inspiring audiences, and creating a lasting impact in your industry. Your story has the potential to move people, the power to create meaningful change, and the ability to become a movement people belong to.
The work I do with clients today does this by helping them learn how to brand their stories, build their brand structure, and elevate their brand presence. It all starts with getting to the heart of the matter and the root of who you are and why you do what you do. From there, we craft magnetic messaging and powerful positioning to help you author your brand story, build your brand authority, and create brand advocacy—we capture the essence of who you are and distill it into a story that reflects your personal and professional growth journey that others can relate to and see themselves in.
Together, we find the words to express what you’ve been wanting to say, and we use those words to paint pictures, tell stories, and stand out in the hearts and minds of the people you’re meant to serve.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. Mind your business or take care of your mental health and well-being as a business owner—I’ve been on a journey with my worthiness for as long as I can remember, and I didn’t know that becoming an entrepreneur over a decade ago would teach me so much about personal development. Because running your own business brings you face-to-face with yourself.
It challenges you in ways you don’t expect, it inspires you to grow, and it shows you your strength of character. As I’ve professionally grown, I’ve also personally grown and developed, and I think we forget that that’s a key part of being in business for yourself. With each new level of professional growth comes a deeper layer of personal development, and you need both if you’re the one leading it all. When I say mind your business, I mean do the work to focus on your mindset in business because it’s everything, and we are the ones reminding ourselves of the strength of spirit it takes to actually run a business.
As you begin to grow personally, you’ll find yourself becoming more embodied, expressed, and empowered in your business.
I know this journey has helped me challenge imposter syndrome and realize that I am worthy and I do have the power to stand in my story and narrate it for myself. This journey has helped me find a sense of safety within myself and learn to accept myself even when it’s been hard. That alone has meant the world to me, and it’s allowed me to creatively express myself in new and powerful ways over the years. This journey has helped me see my strength, recognize my resilience, and be able to have empathy for myself just as much as I have empathy for others, because I’ve gotten myself to this point. I did that.
2. Reconnect to your why and to your purpose because the answers you’re seeking are already within you—this entrepreneurial journey has shown me that I always find my center when I come back to my why and ground myself in my core purpose.
It reminds me that the answers I’m looking for are never outside of me, but within me. And by not letting shame narrate my story for me anymore, I’ve slowly begun to take my power back and have begun to author my own story and use my voice to share my truth and tell my version of events. I’m sharing from this place today, not with any filters, but bravely blooming in front of you, still figuring it out, and sharing all of my layers out loud because we all contain multitudes.
When you take the time to learn how to lead, share, and communicate from an embodied, expressed, and empowered place, what you say lands and what you share heals. This is how I share now—from my scars, not my wounds, telling you about the lessons I’ve learned. I’ve looked at the mess that I’ve gone through, and I’ve found my message in it, and I see how I’ve grown through what I’ve gone through. I had the strength to not only survive but to save myself and be the hero of my story.
As I’ve done the deep work to process what happened to me, I’ve created a new container for myself that I can thrive in, take up more space in, and be my full self in. This is a different kind of presence, and it’s one I’m proud to show up for.
3. Don’t go this journey alone because we end up going further together—I know that the work I do now is a true extension of who I am, and it’s a creative way for me to express what I want to say to the world in words. As a coach and writer, I create safe spaces where others can feel seen, heard, and validated for who they are—spaces where they can unmask, remove filters, and strip off everything everyone has ever told them to be so they can finally be who they are.
We all need this kind of support, and I know I still do, because we aren’t meant to do this journey alone—we’re meant to be in support to one another on this journey because we truly rise by lifting others.
When others around us hold up the mirror for us, they help us to see who we’ve always been and show us how much we matter, just as we are, where we are—because that, in and of itself, is more than enough.
As someone who is constantly workshopping her worthiness and diving deeper into her healing, personal growth, and professional development, I’m still learning this lesson at deeper layers with each new level of growth. I recently had a conversation with a client who hired me after meeting me, and I told her how surprised I was that I didn’t have to prove myself to her, and she reminded me that I didn’t have to because I showed her my soul, and it was more than enough.
I think that we come to understand how much we truly matter when we’re in conversation with someone who really sees us and we don’t have to pretend, prove, or be anything we’re not.
I’m consistently reminded of how much I need to hear this message, and how I can hold a powerfully safe space for others to hear this and know this as well. The reason I write and the reason I share is because I know the power that words have, and I’m no longer leaving the page in front of me blank for someone else to narrate what I have to say. I’m writing my story myself now.
What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?
This last year, I’ve been focused on my healing journey, and I’ve been challenging myself to be a full participant in that journey.
I’ve been so used to facilitating and holding space for others for so long that this past year, I’ve been really learning how to hold that space for myself. I also feel like I’ve been writing versions of my own story in different forms for years—poetry, songwriting, playwriting—and last year was the first time that I really honed in on what I want to be saying.
At the beginning of last year, I joined a creative writing program and started to adapt the different forms of my story I’d been writing into something new and truly creative. And toward the end of last year, to culminate this beautiful experience, I went on a creative writing retreat where I met other kindred spirits on sacred land in California, and for a whole week, we communed with nature and with one another. We tapped into our innate creativity, we nourished ourselves, and we truly took care of ourselves. I never felt that connected and grounded in who I am before.
During that retreat, I talked a lot about my mom. She died when I was young, when she was still young, and all of these years since she’s been gone, I’ve been yearning to know more about her. I know her presence was felt all over that retreat and when I left, I wrote down that, moving forward, I want to be in spaces and doing work where I feel fully like myself and where I feel her presence around me because that’s when I know I’m truly connected to who I am at my core.
After that retreat, projects that weren’t in alignment started to organically fall away, and I began work with truly aligned clients—clients I shared so many throughlines with. Each of them reflected different parts of me, my beliefs, my core values, and my vision for what I want to create next. That’s the kind of experience I want even more of now.
I want to do work that stems from who I am and that people can truly connect with on a deeper, more human level. I believe that brands that believe in themselves are the ones that people find meaning in and want to belong to.
And, for the first time in a really long time, I’m starting to believe in myself fully and see what I’m capable of achieving clearly. I’m starting to stand inside my story and own my worthiness. It’s about time.
Sometimes, we just need to look at everything we’ve been through to recognize how far we’ve truly come, to see the obstacles we’ve surpassed to get to this moment, and witness our strength of character because we are the heroes of our own stories at the end of the day. There may have been dark moments and messiness as we navigated our way through it all, but we were able to find the bright spots, too, shining our light and coming out the other side with a powerful message.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.gimmesweetwords.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/diane.pauley
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diane-pauley-2050b575
- Other: https://gimmesweetwordsportfolio.my.canva.site
Image Credits
Beth Photography
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