We recently connected with Ingrid Cucchi and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Ingrid, thank you for being such a positive, uplifting person. We’ve noticed that so many of the successful folks we’ve had the good fortune of connecting with have high levels of optimism and so we’d love to hear about your optimism and where you think it comes from.
I wear my optimism as a badge of honour and its only in recent years I’ve realised just how much of a gift it is. My mum was a shining light and I like to think I got it from her. I also see it as a measure of my resilience. It is deeply ingrained in who I am.
My optimism comes from a combination of an intuitive sense of self-trust and trust in a higher purpose. It’s an inner knowing that I’ve learnt to tap into with more attention over time. And while it doesn’t make you any less susceptible to feelings of not enough or failure or that something bad is happening to you, what optimism does is offer perspective and an energy that moves you beyond feelings of doubt and negativity pretty quickly. When I’m coaching my clients, it’s a skill-set I love sharing and enabling them to move beyond stuck negative feelings and behaviours.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m a Future Strategist. It’s a job title I created and I love that in is this age of possibilities we can create our own niche careers, use our unique gifts and contribute to a better world. I work predominantly with women and businesses who want to challenge themselves to be the best they can be, to drive their thinking twenty years into the future. We work together to design strategies to get there.
We look outwardly at what is happening in the world as well as from within, through our bodies, our mind and our soul to come up with a unique blueprint. The blueprint is like a roadmap not only for all the things we want to prioritise in our lives. It’s also about committing to the principles of feminine citizenship as a means of contribution and living on purpose.
Right now, I am prioritising my health and taking three months off. I’ll also be deep diving into what the future of wellness should look like for my clients and 2025 will be a big year with some changes to how I work with clients and my offerings. Its exciting. Readers who get a buzz when they think about designing their future can drop me a line at [email protected] and I will happily let them know when I am open for business again. We have great plans for 2025.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Growth Mindset Look at your life and the world around you with an open mind, with great curiosity and a willingness to always be learning. Everywhere I go I look for possibility and listen for nuggets of gold.
One of my biggest takeaways at university was that knowledge is not all about learning facts, but the ability to find information, to make informed decisions and that you must read widely to shape your ideas. At the same time, I was delving into the world of personal development and trained in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis.
Lifelong learning, curiosity and willingness to look at many different perspectives has shaped my growth. Embracing the power of our own mind and body to curate our lives is taking my life to a whole new level.
Self-trust – To thine own self be true.
I learnt this lesson when I was first diagnosed with breast cancer. Everybody had an opinion and advice. We are conditioned to think the doctor knows best. The first specialist I saw I gave me an uneasy feeling and for the first time I remember pushing back about my treatment. In the end I chose to go to another doctor, in another city but with whom I felt very comfortable and seen by. That made a big difference.
Since then, if it doesn’t feel right or I have questions, I figure out what more I need to know and what I am really feeling about a course of action. I do this in all aspects of my life, but particularly my health. I feel so much better when I have listened to my heart, taken responsibility for getting more information, asking lots of questions and doing what is right for me.
As an aside, with regards to your health, it is the most important thing that underpins life and dreams. If you take one thing away from this interview and you know your health is not what it should be – start there.
Seek Guidance
While listening to your inner self, it’s important to also seek external guidance. When I was a single mum, it was mostly through books, as they were affordable. There is also great wealth of wisdom in your friends and family, remembering of course you don’t always have to agree with them, but their perspective can be valuable.
Now I seek my guidance from working with coaches and mentors. I also draw much inspiration from training opportunities and networking with other women in business. Some of my best aha moments come from working with my clients, supporting my loved ones and spending time with my grandchildren. There’s always a mirror when you work with others, that reflects back guidance for your own life and the synchronicity can be astounding.
What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?
If you had asked me that question, twenty or thirty years ago, I might have looked strangely at you. I was always the one everyone my age looked up to and I was expected to know the answers. I’m not sure I had any sense of what ‘overwhelm’ meant.
My world came crashing down when my marriage ended and for the first time ever at the age of 32, I felt like I might fall off a cliff face. So many new and uncomfortable emotions – failure, shame, fear, anger and overwhelm. I needed to ask for help – which I had never done in my life.
Since then, I’ve become well acquainted with overwhelm and most of the time my resilience has kept me going. One foot in front of the other. One day at a time. Parents dying, baby brother dying within weeks of my mum, breast cancer – not once but twice, best friend dying of ovarian cancer, loss of a second marriage and most of that happened in a space of six years. Did I trip over a black cat? Who knows? I just kept getting up because that is what you do to survive because I needed to look after everyone else (or that is what I thought at the time).
My advice, nothing gets better until, as they say, you put your own oxygen mask on first.
What I have learnt is that overwhelm and trauma often go hand in hand and to truly come out the other side, reflection and healing time are important. In hindsight, it seems I collected my trauma, moved quickly so I didn’t get lost in overwhelm and put everything away on the top shelf of a cupboard. Only one day (from experience), it falls out and hits you on the head – all of it.
The good news is that overwhelm is also a pre-cursor to expansion. This other side to overwhelm, feels like ‘excitement that got confused’. At that point you can move forward.
As a lover of strategy having big and little strategies is key; having nuanced strategies that work just for you, make them almost fool-proof.
When I work with people in a state of overwhelm usually they feel stuck. We chunk up – what is the big picture, the dream and we chunk down – how do you get through one day at a time. We come up with multiple options, we map what success looks like and then we tap into the power of the mind and the body to embed those strategies – that could look like meditation or hypnosis or nourishing and supporting the body, developing a business plan or changing careers.
And my golden rules – be open to possibility, understand you always have options and don’t leave things to chance.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tn20y.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ingrid-cucchi/
