Are You a Woman Who Is Ready To Lead? | Ashley Ingram, Leadership Breakthrough Hot Seat

Creator of Healing is Possible. And the mission of the Healing is Possible Hot seat is to promote healing and possibility and to go deep so that we can make room for more life. I want all of you to get the most out of your lives. I want people that are managing their way through their lives to be able to heal the thing that maybe they don't think that they can heal. And every single week in the hot seat, I bring in influencers, leaders, and brave souls that are willing to do some breakthrough coaching to help all of us on our healing journey and on this journey called our life. Today, we have very special guest Ashley Ingram, known on Instagram as the unfuckwithable Woman, with us to talk about women in leadership and healing and shadow work. And a very special event that she's got coming up that I will be a speaker at. Ashley, welcome to the Hot seat.

Yay. Oh, thank you. I always am honored to get to do these because as someone who's been an interviewer for a really long time, you don't realize how much you are not the interviewee to do something like this. So these are really nice to get to be able to, like, encourages me to talk about my own story, which is something I'm a huge advocate for. So thank you so much.

Well, let's just dive right in. Ashley, it's an honor to know you and to be featuring you. Tell us about your story and what healing means to you.

Oh, man. Okay, so just to, like, not go on a complete tangent, so just to backtrack, I've lived a pretty interesting life. Parents divorced really young. Dad remarried, lot of trauma, especially in the female gene genealogy, lineage. I don't know. Female line of my. Especially on my mom's side. So I grew up. Life was pretty chaotic. You know, you have. I had two very different dynamics growing up. I had a single mom with a lot of her own trauma that bounced around from man to man to man. So we lived in a lot of different places. And then I had my dad, who, great guy, but workaholic, remarried and bounced around himself, so lived in a bunch of different states. So I grew up in what I call organized chaos. And always, always looking for a home base, but always feeling like I never had one, and I never knew what that was and wanting support, but never having that either. So having a mom who was too preoccupied with her own shit, her own pain, and then having a dad that wasn't existent, I didn't have a great relationship with my stepmom, which you do now, but I Did not when I was growing up because there was a lot of animosity between her and my mom. So I was like the derivative middle piece of that. So that really culminated when I became 16 and I got pregnant with my daughter. I have two kids now, but my daughter. I had my daughter 11 days after I turned 17. And when I got pregnant, I moved out on my own. So I've been on my own or I've been out on my own since I was 16. And I moved all the way from Florida to North Carolina with my daughter's father. Just picked up left. Like that was the theme of my life for a really long time. In fact, I used to say very proudly that I can pack up an entire house in one day, which is not a badge of honor I like to wear anymore. That's not anything I like to be proud of. So what happened was I found that going back now, being able to look at it, I always had that feeling of being in fight or flight. So it's constantly in a very unhealed space of fight or flight, survival mode. And it took me till my 30s to understand that. And so what that meant was in my 20s, I was just constantly recreating the patterns I grew up with. So I always remember saying I never wanted to be the parent that moved my daughter around or my kids around. I did just that. Did just that. My daughter's been to like four different schools, multiple different states. And the other thing that was really predominant was that I was attracting. I was attracting people who had really bad addictions. So my daughter's father was a sex addict. He later on became a meth addict. He's recovered now, thank God, but he's got alcohol problems. My son's father, my ex husband, is a current drug user, drug addict. He's no longer actually in the picture because of his drug addiction. So, you know, I really went through a lot of my life where my worth was determined by a. If a man would sleep with me. So I literally had no worth. And I was attracting these, I don't want to say shitty people because I don't like attack. I don't like attacking people. I think we all just have our own trauma that we don't deal with. And so we deal or we don't deal with it. And that that manifests in some way shape or form. And so. And the other part of it is like, I recognize that and this is what Kickstarter the healing is. Everything that I was attracting outside of me was completely determined by something that I wasn't dealing with internally. So that was, that was like, that was the part of it. So I got divorced from my ex husband when I was 26. I literally had gotten told that I was under so much stress that I was going to kill myself. I was probably going to have a stroke or die. And this was after like almost dying in my teens from having a horrible eating disorder. So you can kind of see like how chaotic I was as a person. So it makes sense to me now, looking back, why I attracted the things that I attracted. I was unstable with jobs, I was unstable with living situations. Like. And I was constantly the victim of myself. I was my own victim. I was like, why does this keep happening to me? Like. And so, so I remember getting divorced at 26. Now I'm the single mom to two kids and I'm like carrying that stigma with me and I have to move back in with my mom. And me and my mom cannot live together for very long. Even now, even though I've done a lot of work, we still, that's a boundary. We don't live together. So I was living at her house. I had two kids, I was working a job that I hated. And I just remember I had this append. Driving back from a boyfriend's house that I should not have been hanging out with after a night of binge drinking, right? Because, you know, obviously I'm learning. And I'm like, it's like 4 o' clock in the morning. I'm not drunk for anybody who's out there. I'm not driving drunk. You know, hangover, but not drunk. And I'm just like, what are you doing? What are you doing with your life? What is this? Is this it? Is this really where, like where we're coming from and going to. And it's kind of what they call like a coming to God moment. So I had a coming to God moment. And I realized first I was really angry at God. I was really angry, like, this can't be my life. And then I realized, as much as I was angry at God, I was angry at myself. I was really angry. And I was like, I don't want to hate myself anymore. I was like, I knew enough, I was aware enough to know that hating myself was not going to get me what I wanted in life. And I said, and I sat there and I go, okay, well, what do you want? You know, the first time in my life I've ever asked myself, like, what do you want? What do you want? And I said, you know what? I Just, I want to be happy. I want to wake up and I want to love myself and I want to feel good about my body. I want to be able to look in the mirror, which is something I could not do at that time. I couldn't even look at the mirror and look at myself. I wanted to look in the mirror and look at myself and feel okay with myself. And I just wanted to be happy. I wanted to be a happy mom. I wanted to eventually have a relationship that was healthy and a partner that wanted to be involved in the relationship. And I said, all right, so that means we're going to stop dating. We're going to figure out, what does your worth look like to you? And we're going to go on this journey of healing, as they call it. So I made a pact to be celibate and not date for a while. And I've still primarily been single now for almost seven years. I mean, I've dated a couple times, but I've really been just me and my kids for about seven years now. And, yeah, right around I started, like, diving into stuff, but it took me getting to 30 and hitting my Saturn return for it to really, like, ratchet up. Like, I went down to Florida. When I hit 30, I hit my Saturn return. And I don't know if anybody out there has experienced this, but I think they say your first Saturn return hits around, like, 29 to 31. And so that's really the period of your life where you're like, what? Like, you start asking deep questions like, what am I here for? What's the purpose? Da da, da da. And I realized that my purpose was to help women. And it wasn't just to, like, help them feel empowered. It was to really give them a deep sense of empowerment, which is not something I can actually give them. It's something that's recognized through ourselves. Like, I can't give people their worth.

Tell us more, Ashley, about how did you connect to that clarity of that purpose? And what does even the word empowerment mean to you?

Oh, man. So that was fun. I say now it's intuition that it came, but I feel like I kind of have a direct connection to Divine Source. I think we all do, but I really can. Like, there are moments where I really hear it. And so I want to say that Divine Source just, like, knocked me on the head and said, this is what we're doing. Like, because I started asking, I was like, what are you doing with your life? Like, what are you here for? I had always had very damaged relationships with women. And I was a woman that sought relationship with women, but struggled to even like women. Like, if you had known me in my 20s, I would have told you I was one of those women. I'm not friends with women. They can't be. All the shit that they feed us about women are too catty. Like, I was that I was that woman. I was like, oh, you know, I'm not friends with women. I like guys more. It's da, da, da, da. You know, I was that woman. I was, I can tell you. And I realized that I didn't want to be that woman and that I actually was not that woman. And I started, you know, developing friendships with women. And something that I recognized was that women really struggled to own who they were, you know? You know, men don't have that problem. For most of the men that I know, there's never like this. I would like to call it an intrinsic disconnect where they're like, they. Men, I think kind of inherently know who they are. They're like, yeah, you know, I'm like, for the largest part, can't say they all do. But women often struggle to figure out who they are. And then they might know who they are, but they struggle to embody that. And that's. I'm, I'm like, I've been that woman. Like, you know, so when I think about being empowered, that's why I talk about being inflexible. It just means knowing who you are and being so grounded in that that nothing outside of you is going to disrupt that. So when I, you know, to me, being empowered means saying like, you can't see it behind here, but my mantra is, I'm a powerful, connected, open woman. I am that woman. It doesn't matter what people outside of me tell me, I am that woman. And I operate from that space. So that means that no matter what people say about me in this world, that's fine. That's their opinion. They're allowed to have it. That doesn't disrupt what I'm here to do. That doesn't stop me from doing the mission. And that's something you see so often is people. They could be like so passionate about something, and then the world will come in and they'll be like, they'll shrink. They'll go, oh, I can't do that. And so I got tired of seeing women shrink. I worked in all male dominated industries. I've been in a lot of leadership stuff. And I was so tired of seeing men being leaders. And I'm not hating on men, but there are phenomenal females out there. Like, ladies, if you're listening, you are phenomenal leaders. Women are phenomenal leaders. And I think what's missing in the world is female leaders and businesses and politics. Like, we run a lot of things whether we believe we do or not. And I got tired of seeing women that. So one day I was sitting there and I was like. I was in Florida. I was like. I was feeling myself. I was like, God, this feels great. I'm like, if I could just, like. I felt like, you know, that whole body like, oh, I feel really good about myself. I love myself. I'm like, I want to go conquer the world. And I said, if I could just bottle this up into, like, a pill, I wouldn't even sell it. I would just give it to women, like, if I could make them feel like, oh, my God, that's it. Literally, I was like, that's it. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna help women. I'm gonna help women become that. I think someone sent me the word unfuck with the bull, and it, like, it clicked together. I was like, that's what I'm gonna do. I said, I don't know what that looks like, but that's what I'm gonna do. Don't even know how I'm gonna do it. And it just. It just snowballed from there. It just. That's. That's where it came from. And I said, I'm gonna help women become and fuck with a bull, and we're gonna rule the world, and it's gonna be a good day.

And how long have you been doing your work with women? And I do just want to acknowledge because I work with a lot of men, too. Life purpose work, I think, is a challenge no matter who we are. And then I agree that there's something about women that helps families heal, communities heal, workplaces heal, and elevates the ability to live more fulfilled and freely. And so, to all the men that support us, thank you and Ashley, you for wanting to take that feeling of feeling yourself and using your trauma in your past to make a difference. But tell us more about. Since you decided this is my mission and purpose, what that's looked like and where we are now.

Oh, man, that's been the journey. That's been the journey. I thought I was doing a lot of healing. So the journey to doing what I'm doing now, first and foremost, has been almost three years, actually about two and a half right now. It's taken on a lot of different forms. When I started, I really said, I'm going to start as a podcast, and I'm going to give women a platform to just share their stories. I think if you're asking where you start, start telling your story. Like, that's legitimately the most powerful thing I've ever seen in my life. There is something about vocalizing what you have been through and owning it. And so I always say that when you own your story, nobody else can own it. Nobody can hold these things against you. That's so important. Yeah, people can say whatever they want about me, and that's fine. I know my story. Like, you can't hold that against me. And that's the power. That's the power. I own my story. So that's cool. You can say what you want, but I know who I am. So it's been about two and a half years, and it's taken on a really. It's taken on its own life. I mean, it started as a podcast, and then I got into coaching, because I did coaching and all my other careers in different ways, shapes and forms. And I realized that women. The other strong part about it is women need community. Women seek community. If you go back throughout millennia, what was most powerful and representative was women in communities. So women in tribes, and you would go back, way, way back. And like, women used to come together on their periods into these, you know, these tents. They called them, I think, like the red tents. And they would come together and they would support each other and they would. You know, there's just always been community. And I recognize that one of the greatest wounds that we have right now is the wound of sisterhood, where women feel like they. They can't join in sisterhood with women. And that's such a deeply wounded thing. And so. So most of my career and my business has always been about providing women a platform to just accept themselves where they are and own that and own that, because that's the first step to empowerment, is accepted accepting who you are. Right now, it's not about when I get here, then I'll be happy with myself. It's like, can you be happy right now with who you are? You know, can you. Can you just be here with yourself? And what's funny is when we think that when we start doing it like that, oh, we're here. But most of my big healing, the shadow work part has come in building this business. Everything that I've had to take women through, I had to go through it first. So I like everything that I can take a woman through now. I've been there, I've done that. I've walked through that fire pit. Like, I've been there. And that, to me, is really imperative to the journey. And so I've run a TV show off of this. I've run an interview show off of this for God, for a year and a half. I've interviewed hundreds of women. I've heard hundreds of stories. Like, you sit there and listen to these things and you think, man, first. It gives you a massive amount of perspective on your own life. And to me, a lot of gratitude for my life. But it makes you realize that we're far more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. We literally have survived a lot. So. So now it's in this. Took me a little while. The leadership is something I've always done, but I didn't know that that's what it was. And it's not even like traditional leadership from the standpoint of business leadership. It's how do you lead as a person? Who. Who are you? Because how you do one thing is how you do everything. My mentor is, like, burned that in my brain. So for me, it's about self leadership and self mastery. So how do you show up in the world? Like my dad used to me all the time, how do you show up in the world? You know, we're in a world full of people waiting for change to happen. And a lot of the times what we don't realize is when we're sitting there going like, damn, I wish somebody would do something about that. You're probably the somebody that's meant to do something about that.

Oh, Ashley, so good. And I just go back to what you were saying about acceptance, because I think people think that means necessary, that they have to like it. You don't necessarily. Acceptance doesn't mean, like, you're happy with where you are. It just means you're willing to do the reality check. You're willing to look at, okay, where am I? And without being willing to face where you are, how do you lead in a new direction? And then I think too, I just want to also go back to what you were saying about purpose. It's not lightning striking and the earth moving and a dramatic. Now, I know. I don't think it's a whisper. Are you asking for the guidance? And are you willing to hear it at the whisper level? Because that's the magic. And I think, yeah, if we're waiting for someone else to take the reins, if we're waiting for some big dramatic sign or if we're waiting to love where we are before we'll move, we're not going to move. So a lot of your story, Ashley, I so relate to and for sure, your mission. I've been doing women's retreats for 12 years. And the best part is the first night where they're all sizing each other up, like, mm. And I tell them, in three days, you're all going to love each other. And they look at me like I have five heads and they don't believe me. And then in the end, oh, they love each other, you know? Have you come to one of my women's retreats? And that is so healing, because we do heal more in community. So I want to segue into the event that you have coming up. I'll be speaking and tell us, tell us about it. What are you doing now? Because you've gone from podcasting, TV interviews to now really a pretty massive event that you're putting together.

Oh my gosh. This one is. Ah. So I've wanted to do events for a really long time. I didn't know what they were. I think everything that I've done up till now has been leading to the event because I actually wanted. I want to do retreats at some point. So I'm doing the Women who lead summit. So keys to unlock your confidence, creating breakthrough and accessing your next level leadership. So it's three days really focused on helping women, specifically female entrepreneurs, gain clarity, focus, confidence and results. So we're really honing in on the self leadership aspect. So how are you showing up in your life? How are you showing up in your business? You know, what is it? A lot of the women that come to me, they feel stuck. Like, and I'm sure you've heard this, I just feel stuck, feel stuck. Like, literally feel like I'm hitting this wall and I keep coming up against this wall and I don't understand. Or maybe your business is like, you're a lot of like the women I work with, their business is like one to two years into their startup phase and they're like, I feel like my business is falling apart or I feel like I'm falling apart in my business. So really what these three days are is getting you geared into. Why do things look the way they look outside of you? And so it's taking a look at the inside and providing you resources to help you both work through that and transform the way your outside is looking. So whether that means your business is kind of at this really pivotal point, you're transforming it, or maybe you're going through a transformation and your life kind of looks shaky at the moment. So your business is like, oh, my God, I don't even know if I want to do this anymore. So that's what the three days are for. And it's really cool because I wanted it to be a summit, but I wanted it to be something where women got actionable tips. Like, Rebecca here is going to come in and run a training for the VIPs and we're really going to talk about how do you heal, heal your leadership, how do you become a healed and empowered leader? And so something that's key to the summit here is introducing the aspect of healing. It's not just about giving you inspirational content. And all the speakers are phenomenal. It's about helping you actually implement the things that you learn. And I think healing and self care is such a huge part of that. Like, that's been a huge part of my journey. So the summit is equal parts summit, but kind of equal parts workshop. Like, we're really gonna like, bring things in to make them tangible for the women who come in here. Because I don't want you to just leave and be like, oh, yeah, I'm super, super inspired. What do I do with it now? Like, okay, I want you to leave and feel like a. You've got a community so you're not alone. So it's not like you leave and we send you back out into the world and bye, you know, we will see you next year. No, there's a community that's gonna stay with it and I hope to grow it. And it's just. And it's also like providing you support on a personal level. So there's gonna be many options for the women there to work with other people and just, you know, my goal is for you to leave inspired, action, motivated, and to not feel alone anymore. Because I feel like a lot of us feel like we have to just kind of do it alone. I hate the term solopreneur. Like, I wish we could just eradicate that. No, don't do it by yourself. So, yes, the women who lead summit, it's just, it's something I've wanted to do for a long time. In fact, I'm actually, I'm getting ready to talk to a woman where I'm at now. And I'm talking about bringing this out into a live, like, like real live event that is going to become, become a workshop. Something like Tony Robbins like upw, but because I think it has the ability to transform people. And like I said in the beginning, the more women we have leading, like, from a powerful space, I think the more change we're going to see in the world. Because back to what you said, there's something about women showing up for themselves. And it's shown statistically that when women heal and show up for themselves, they are more likely to pour back into their communities. They're more likely to heal generational trauma. So you're talking about kids, like the next generation, not replicating. So we really. We're talking about, like, seeing change in the next generation. We want to eradicate things that starts with us. And so women are shown to be more likely to create that kind of change. And I'm not saying men don't, but the statistics, I work more on statistics with women. So women are more likely, like they say in leadership, when women are making a lot of money and stuff, women are more likely to pull, pour that money and those funds back into their communities, making sure that their communities are taken care of, making sure that their families are taken care of. You know, and I'm not just talking like kids. I'm talking about, like, they take care of their moms, dads, grandparents. Like, we take care of the tribe. And so. So that's why I think events like this are important, is to remind women like you. What is it that she said? The wizard in the wizard of Oz, like, you had the power within you all along. You just needed to see it. So I think for me, that's the key part to this event, is just reminding women like, you're already powerful. You're right there. We just gotta get you out of here and we gotta drop you back into here. And so that's why this makes me excited. Like, I get chills talking about. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so excited.

I have them, too.

Yeah.

And Marianne Williamson says, it's not our dark, it's our light that scares us. And women, we don't need to get more powerful. We need to get connected to that power and harness it and channel it and give it away to the world to make a difference. So, Ashley, how do people sign up for the Women who Lead summit? How do they get access?

Yes. So and it's just going live today. The page is live. So, Rebecca, you're going to be getting it really soon. So it's called joinwomenwholeave lead not leave. Joinwomenwholead.com the event is called Women who Lead. But we want you to join us. So. Www.joinjoyn womenwholead. All1word.com and it's gonna take you to an opt in page. So if you really want to get the most out of your experience, I highly recommend you consider the VIP option. Like I said, Rebecca's gonna be training at it. But if that's not your option, if you don't want to take the advantage of a massive hot seat coaching, getting some really phenomenal trainings. We actually have the other woman who's going to be running one of the trainings is doing Theta healing, which I don't know if you've done theta healing, Rebecca, but it's like, if you want to clear trauma really fast, Theta healing is like insane. I've done it. But also what's cool about this, and this is why I say we bring in a kind of a workshop feel to it. We're doing an immersive breathwork session for everybody that comes in. So if you've never done breath work, we're doing breath work on day two and you're talking about, like, just releasing things out of your body. Like. So we're going to be doing immersive breath work. But yeah, you can go to joinwomenwholead.com There's a VIP option, but either way, there's going to be a Facebook group, Facebook community. There's just a lot of opportunities to connect with women on a really big level here. So I'm really excited to have everybody coming in and just seeing what we create from this.

And what are the dates? Tell people what the dates are so they can block out their schedules.

I'm so glad you keep me. You keep me focused. So the dates are July 11, 12 and 13. We're going to be going tentatively from 9am Eastern Standard Time to 3pm Eastern Standard Time. We'll go a little bit later on Tuesday because of breath work. But yeah, 9am to 3pm so that's a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. If you join the vip, you get access to all the recordings. So I know some people are like, oh, my gosh, Sunday. Or like, maybe I can't be there because I gotta work. That's fine. We do have the option to receive the recording, so we got you covered everywhere. So July 11, 12, 13, 9am to 3pm Eastern Standard Time. It's going to be aired through Facebook. And so you're going to be able to join the group and get to see it. And it's free, you guys. It's free, unless you want to be vip, but it's free, so no charge, you guys. No charge. Yeah.

Join us. I'm really excited to. To get to be a part of this. I'm really grateful that you listened to the divine guidance and that you followed your purpose and that you're modeling being a woman that loves being a woman. For you, for your daughter, for all of us. Any final thoughts, Ashley?

Just something back to what you said. You guys, the biggest part of my journey has always been the fact that I am powerful. But I was really wary of what that looked like and let alone accept accepting that I had power, accepting that I had a voice. The biggest thing that you can do is understand what you have and understand that there's going to be things that you need to do to work through it. But don't be scared of that. Like you said, I think people get really scared of the fact that we have a darker aspect to ourselves. But I think it's something I said. It's like the wound is where the light comes in. So when you're talking about healing yourself, like the darkness is where your light is going to come into place. And when you, when you uncover that, you release a lot of things, you know, and I guess the last thing I can say, and this is the acceptance piece, the key to the most important part of accepting yourself is it's not even just like, like you said, like accepting where you are and like checking in. It's when you accept who you are and where you're at. You release the shame and the judgment. And most of what keeps people stuck is the stories they tell themselves about what a shitty person they are. And, oh, I shouldn't have felt that. No, I shouldn't have done that. And it's like, you know what, we're human beings, things happen. Like we, we. We experience this life for a really big reason. So the sooner you can accept where you're at and who you are intrinsically, the quicker you can release the judgment, the shame, and the faster you will see your life take off. So that's my last two sentences to.

Take inventory of where you are in comparison to where you want to be. It gives you momentum without us even knowing it, when we are just willing to look, look and see. It's a start. And I love what you said too earlier, Ashley, about just start with telling your story. And that is a way to gain acceptance around where you are. So if you want to share your story, if you want free breakthrough laser coaching in the hot seat, if you are ready to heal and launch and take your life to the next level, message me. Join me here in the hot seat. We get raw, we get real, we get messy. We grow, and we promote healing for all of us. I am Rebecca Silence, creator of Healing is Possible. Thank you, Ashley, for joining us in the hot seat today. Join Womenholead.com. is that the website, Ashley?

Join women? I'll send you. I'll send you the links here so that you can take care of that soon. But yeah, joinwomen.com we want to have you with us.

July, is it? 11th, 12th, and 13th?

Yeah.

All right. All right. Mark those calendars. Thanks, all of you, for tuning in. Healing is possible. And we'll see you soon.