We cover practical ways to bring softness, presence, and receptivity into leadership, sales, and decision-making so you can lead with clarity and joy. You’ll hear how aligning your energy supports better relationships, sharper vision, and sustainable growth.
If you’re seeking a small business coach perspective on productivity that honors your nervous system and values, this conversation will help you reconnect with desire, pleasure, and purpose in your work.
Full Transcript
Jennifer: All right. Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to this, today’s, I gotta remember what day it is.
Today’s episode of the Happy Productive Podcast, you guys. I’m so excited about today’s guest. Her name is Melissa Keenan and you’re not going to be, well, if you read the title of the show, you’re probably going to be like, oh my goodness, they’re going to be talking about intimacy. Yes, we are. And it’s probably going to get pretty juicy.
So, you might want to like, you know, pull up a chair, maybe take out a pen and pencil. You might pen and paper. You might want to take some notes, who knows, but we’re going to go there today and I’m super excited. Melissa, welcome to the show.
Melisa: Thank you so much for having me.
Jennifer: Yes, I’m super excited. So, you guys, Melissa is the go-to intuitive intimacy expert for high achieving spiritual CEOs. And she has some bestselling books and I, for one, when I went to her website and learned more about Melissa, it was just like, I want to buy what she’s selling. I just, I want more of it because it was just something that you don’t see very often where you’re tying like intimacy to like, you know, high powered CEOs. And so Melissa, just take a few minutes and just tell us a little bit about you, your story and how you came to be here with us today.
Melisa: Yes. So, I love the concept of being a coach because it’s a little like the Wild West in the sense that, you know, I would say I have lots of certifications and stuff. But my biggest credentials came from the school of hard knocks, which was my life and my own marriage, which nearly crumbled down to nothing with four children in tow and then ultimately, we rebuilt it back to what it is today and going through that process, I literally did not know what the goal was, because I had never seen, I’d never seen what we now experience and so as we, you know, apply tools and healing and changing, and I really stepped into more feminine energy and really understanding intimacy, and we got really vulnerable with each other, it was like, Oh, my gosh, what is this? I didn’t know that this was available on the planet. I have to share this. And so that was the origination. I mean, at that time, I didn’t even know that coaching was a thing.
I was like, motivational speaker, or what am I going to do with this? I don’t know what to do with this. But women need to know that was my big thing.
You know, in some of the challenges that my husband and I went, went through, I went to several different betrayal, trauma conferences, and had surrounded myself with women who, you know, I could link arms with, because we were kind of in trenches together and stuff and, and so I was surrounded by women who were like, we were sold a fairy tale and this is total bullcrap and now here we are in the thick of our lives with kids that have demands, and we have no answers, and we have no one to lean on and you know, that’s kind of like where we were at.
And so, building back from that, it was like, gosh, so I started my work, it’s been about five years, I started my work around just supporting women’s hearts, you know, you get started, it’s a little vague, I didn’t really know what my niche was going to be and as I continue to work with women, I realized it’s about intimacy and I started to see that business owners in particular had a certain set of patterns, especially women, that in our day and age, we tend to fall into more masculine energy, like the hustle, the do, the be, the achieve, the perfectionism, all of that and all of those were my nemesis in creating a strong relationship, because I just kept myself so guarded and walled with my achievements and my hustling, that I didn’t really have time to connect in the way that I crave.
So, as I started working with women, that’s how I niched down into really working with business owners and, you know, over the last now three years, I’ve worked with women and couples and I just this work is so precious to me. Like some people are like, I don’t want to hear people’s marriage problems, I’m like, I’m all in.
Jennifer: Well, and your marriage problems, whether it’s a partner or a spouse, whatever that is, whoever that you’re, you’re connected to, it’s a very real thing.
Because even as a business coach, I often find myself in a space where I’m working with a client, and it turns into, you know, their divorce, their husband cheated on them, that betrayal, it turns into, I don’t have a connection with my partner anymore, I’m going to be leaving them, they don’t know this, but I’m leaving in a year and, and let’s work on my business and it’s like, wait, wait, hold up, what, what did you just say? and so I end up finding myself in that space a lot and so it’s a very, very real thing that our intimate relationships and our businesses, I feel like are very, very connected.
So, I love that you’re doing this work and it’s such important work. One of the things that I’ll just put my dirty laundry out there so, one of the things that I hear my husband often say, it’s not that dirty, it’s just like, a little bit dirty laundry.
I often hear him say to me, I want you to be more softer, I want you to be softer. He wants me to be more feminine. And, and I kind of want him to be a little more masculine. But I think that’s part of because the space that I’m in where I’m in, you know, a lot of people are worried about their one business, I’m worried about 40 businesses of all my clients, right? So, I’m, I’m in this space where I have to be analytical, I have to solve a lot of problems. And I love what I do. I love what I do.
But it’s, it’s a very difficult shift for me to make to be like, I’m in this business world all day long. And now what I’m supposed to like, you know, put on a dress or something. I don’t even know and I grew up a tomboy, Melissa. So, the whole feminine energy thing, it kind of mystifies me. I’m I really like it, but I’m not quite sure how to even like get into it and if you work with women, I’m sure you probably hear this. So we’ll, we’ll just throw it out there.
Because I know somebody is going to be listening, and they’re going to resonate with this and go, yeah, Jen, like, I kind of have a hard time to figuring out where those boundaries are, and how to get into the feminine energy after you’ve been in a business space, masculine energy all day long. So I just love to hear your thoughts.
Melisa: Yep. And in some ways, it can feel really unfair. Like, what are you asking of me? You know, I’ve had women reach out and be like, I’m in a male dominated industry, I’m the only female at the boardroom table. And like, this is how I have learned to succeed.
Like I’m cutthroat and, you know, I had one client who, who told me that she has had settings in her work where she’s walked in and said, Don’t you worry, I can swing my dick bigger than yours or faster than yours. Like, you know, and these are real. And that kind of pressure is very real and legitimate.
And so then to get into a partnership, it’s like, well, I’m not even sure what you’re asking of me. And I loved where you said, you know, is it a dress? Is it because women will reach out to me too and say, I just wish I painted my nails more often. Or I just wish, you know, I had more feminine hobbies and the reality is, none of that has anything to do with what your husband’s asking for. Like, he may say he wants you to vacuum more, but he doesn’t actually fill his love tank.
Jennifer: Yeah, we he’s out of luck, if he wants me to vacuum more, because that (8:00) is not happening and that’s why we have Lucy and Lucy is a wonderful vacuumer and she likes (8:05) to do it. Thank you.
Thank you, Lucy. Lucy cleans things that I didn’t even know could be cleaned. I’m like, Oh my god, really? That could be clean. That’s awesome. Okay, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. But I love where you’re going. So please keep going. It’s not some of those things that we think like putting on a dress or painting our nails. Keep going.
Melisa: So I call that cultural feminine, which that’s going to be different for every person because it’s based on the culture you were brought up in. What were you culturally told it meant to be a good woman? That’s a great question that I’ll ask my clients, like kind of as we’re getting started.
What were you told it means to be air quotes, good woman, right? Or what were you shown that that means? And for some of us to there’s, there’s like the, well, I need to be able to be sexy, I need to have I need to be thin, (but I also need to be curvy. I have, you know, all these body image things and etc. But it also could include like, I also need to be, you know, a high achiever in business and things like this.
I know my mom, growing up always had this starch white nurse outfit that she would wear every day as she was getting ready. And I would watch her put on her mascara and go out like suited up to go serve. She actually served in a Native American hospital and, and so that was my idea was like, oh, and she had this plaque that said Wonder Woman works here. Okay, this is what it means to be a good woman, right? So all those things, we take all those in and you wouldn’t believe I mean, we all think Oh, yeah, we’re so like, we’re feminists. We don’t like none of that stuff affects us.
Yeah, right. It affects us so deeply. Like the woman who’s like, you know, whenever I entertain guests, you know, it takes me five hours to set out the table because it needs to have all these decorations and all these things like, where did she get that from? Does she enjoy it? Because if she doesn’t, she should stop. Yeah. Cultural feminine is all these things and it behooves us to ask ourselves, what was I told? And then now that I’m a woman, which ones do I like? And which ones do I not like? Which ones do I want to get rid of? That’s our cultural feminine.
Then we move into feminine energy, or yin energy, which is your yin and yang principles that have existed since the beginning of time, you know and yin and yang is more about it is a softness. It’s about more of an energy state. It’s about kind of who you’re being on the inside and less about how you’re looking or adorning yourself on the outside or what kinds of things you’re doing.
Doing is actually masculine energy and so, the feminine is more about who you’re being. It’s turning forward rather than focused outward.
It’s focused on your internal authority rather than like seeking for the authority or advice of others. It can be a very spiritual space. But it’s also very open and receptive. It’s the part of us that says yes to play, right? Because we see play as a value rather than just a waste of time. It’s the part of us that says yes to pleasure. Like all of our sensations are feminine energy.
So masculine and feminine energy shows up in both men and women, and it’s not gender specific. But I operate under the assumption that women, people who are women, tend to have more feminine energy. And if they aren’t actively experiencing that, they probably feel out of alignment within themselves, which most of us aren’t, right? Most of us, we’ve been plopped into a world where it’s full of masculine energy.
So most of us are out of balance and have more masculine. We get more opportunities to exercise the muscles of our masculine energy than getting to exercise the muscles of our feminine energy. We just haven’t invited it to the table.
Jennifer: I love that so much. It helps me to really understand because you’re right, that cultural feminism, I think, oh, he wants me to be soft. He wants me to be girly. It’s just like, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. Yet as a coach, as I go through my day, like I’m very connected to source, we’ll call it source. I feel very connected.
When I don’t feel connected, I definitely feel out of whack as I work with people, you know, I’m empathetic, I’m caring, I’m solving problems, but it’s in a very, it’s in a very softer, feminine space. So that really helps me to kind of understand the difference. It’s not necessarily about if my nails are painted or not. It’s really more about that, that energetic space that we are holding. Is that right?
Melisa: And I would say at the end of the day, the question, especially when it comes to a partnership is, can I be open and receptive of him in the deepest possible ways that really in a partnership is why this conversation matters so much because the feminine energy is the breeding ground for relationships. Relationships really aren’t, can’t exist well only in masculine energy and that’s why you see, you know, there’s a lot of like cutthroat practices in, in, you know, high level businesses, right?
Because they want to operate solely in masculine energy. Like never tell anybody what is going on in your personal life. They’ll use it against you.
Never bring forward, you know, these more subtle nuanced parts of you. It’s all business, which means it’s all masculine energy. And therefore, you don’t have strong connected or committed relationships.
Feminine energy is what brings in the opportunity for like, Oh, emotion and connection and curiosity. And so when it comes to a romantic partnership, it’s just that question of like, am I really receiving my partner at the deepest level? And that’s a question even I ask myself continually, like what are the next deeper layers? Because it becomes this beautiful journey of healing. Like, Oh, where do I still feel the need to wall up? And why what’s my perception? How can I heal that? How can we heal that together? Is there something there that we need to explore?
Relevant Links Mentioned
- Melisa Keenan’s website and free guide: https://www.melisakeenan.com
- Women Manifesting Intimacy (Facebook group) – search on Facebook
- Melisa’s books – search “Melisa Keenan” on Amazon
Links from Jennifer
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