Trading Her 9-To-5 for a Dream Come True With Eva Medilek

Eva is a certified high-performance coach, international speaker, author, and cultural inclusivity trainer. She has worked with men and women in personal development, leadership, inclusive intelligence, and mastering habits for success.

She specializes in helping busy professionals have more money, time, and success without sacrificing their well-being and relationships in the process. She uses her personal experience and leadership relationship, and high-performance training to teach you how to have it all without sacrificing it all.

In this episode, we explore what life was like before Eva became a coach. She knew that she had wanted more but didn’t know how to achieve it. She had lived her life doing what she was supposed to do - having a nine to five and trading her time for money. That changed when the economy crashed.

When she was let go from her job, she realized she couldn’t work for anybody else again. Her mindset shifted, and she learned that in order to grow, she had to take a chance on herself so she could have the tools and the support to have her dreams come true. To connect with Eva, visit website https://www.evamedilek.com/.

Watch Eva's Story

Transcript

Jennifer:

Welcome to the I Don’t Give a Should Show – a podcast exploring ALL the ways that women SHOULD all over themselves. How many times do you find yourself acting out of obligation or doing what everyone ELSE expects from you without stopping to consider why? Where do all those beliefs that are driving you come from? If you’re tired of feeling resentful, overwhelmed, stuck, exhausted or pissed off you’re in the right place. Shoulding all over yourself is a real thing, but it doesn’t have to be in the driver’s seat.

I’m your host Jen Sherwood, and I spent waaaaay too many years trying to prove that I was good enough and worrying what other people thought while avoiding conflict at all costs. Today, I don’t give a should – well not as many anyway and neither should you. I’m talking to women like you who figured out how to stop shoulding and start LIVING.

Today, my guest is Eva Medilek. Eva is a certified high-performance coach, international speaker, author, and cultural inclusivity trainer.

She has worked with men and women in the areas of personal development, leadership, inclusive intelligence, and mastering habits for success. She specializes in helping busy professionals have more money, time, and success without sacrificing health, well-being, and relationships in the process. She uses her personal experience, along with her leadership relationship and high-performance training to teach you how to have it all without sacrificing it all.

I'm so thrilled to have you here today - thank you for joining me!

Eva:

Thank you for having me, Jennifer.

I'm just super excited to be having this conversation with you.

Jennifer:

Me too - so let's not wait any longer.

Let's dive in, I would love to hear, and I know our viewers would love to hear what was it like for you when you were living under the sheds?

Eva:

You know, it's interesting because, you know, my age group, which is way over 50, you know, we had this, get your education, get a good job, you know, retire at a certain age and live off your retirement.

In fact, my dad still says, don't you have a pension? I'm like, no, dad, and God bless him, he's nearly 90. But my point in sharing that is, you know, living under the shoulds was really just for me, kind of on the hamster wheel of life, the rat race, you know, trading my time for money, you know, doing what I was supposed to do nine to five.

I worked as a dental hygienist for 40 years and never thinking that there was more for me, but always knowing that I wanted more, but not knowing how to get more, so I was doing what I should be doing.

And even teaching my children, getting a good education, getting a job, and basically working to make someone else rich.

Jennifer:

Yeah.

Yeah - I get that, that, that mindset of security, get a job, go to work, get your paycheck, get your pension all as well. But you're already saying that even then, when you were doing all the, you know, XYZ, there was still something in you that knew you wanted more.

Eva:

Well, I had these dreams and these goals, you know, I was in my second marriage, and my husband is from Germany. We actually got married in Germany, and we always had this dream of spending our summers in Europe.

Well, you can't do that, having a job. This is America - Europeans can take two months off, but really can't make it in America. It's like, okay, we had this dream, these goals, these visions of what we want our life to be, but no real plan to get there.

And it was just like, and I'm always thinking, okay, what job can I get in Europe? You know, what, how can I pack this, my professional over there? And that sunk in, it just came to me like, oh my God, I'm working for an idiot dentist in the United States. I'll just be working for an idiot dentist in another country with an accent.

I really, this depression came over me. Like, that's not how I want my life to go, but I don't know what to do. And it's interesting because as I was kind of plotting and planning, you know, the economy crashed, and it finally caught up to me and my profession, and I was downsized, and I was cut. And here I am just before, just on my 50th birthday, actually needing to start to interview for jobs. And it was during that interview process that was hugely humiliating.

When you have to dumb yourself down to get a job. And it's like, there's no way I'm going to do this. I cannot work for anybody else again. I need to find a way out, and, um, but at my age, I was thinking, it wasn't that I was thinking I was too old. It was just like, but what can I do at my age?

Because there was age out there, you get the young, young girls and young people out of school, and you don't have to pay them as much.

The competition is harder, and that's when I discovered real estate investing.

I know you, and I talked a little bit offline about that, but I thought that's something I could do and learn how to do, uh, and get trained to do without quote unquote, going back to school and enrolling in a university for a degree, really go to targeted training on my financial education and have coaches and mentors along with the training to accelerate my success in real estate investing. And that's what I ended up doing at a high financial investment in myself.

I emphasize that because that high financial investment and that choice that I made to invest in myself in that way put my marriage in jeopardy.

Jennifer:

Oh, okay - let's hear about this.

Eva

Oh, you know, my husband has his traditions too.

He was born and raised in another country so we have some cultural differences and, um, you know, investing in yourself is not - you don't invest in coaches. You don't pay coaches thousands of dollars in this particular training. It's funny how we don't think twice about going to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for college or university, but when you get targeted training, I can't afford that. I can't spend money on that.

This really was the beginning of the shift in my mindset to go against, you know, my husband and, and take a chance on myself and risk losing my marriage so that I could have the tools and the support to have my dreams come true.

I really dug in and said, look, I'm doing this with or without you.

This is what passion looks like - this is a desire for a bigger, better life for yourself looks like.

Jennifer

As I'm watching and listening to you, that's what I'm seeing is that this, this voice inside of you that said you wanted more, was strong enough to push you past the fears that stop most people after this. And as I was saying.

What's scary as heck, but I'm faster, more scared than you are comfortable, don't you?

It's true, but I was listening to you, and I was thinking this idea of investing in yourself versus university is, I mean, investing in university is investing in yourself, but that's a much more traditional road. So again, security, but investing in coaches where you're actually getting into that mindset is so transformative.

I am in awe and in love with the fact that you were willing to risk your marriage to go do what you needed to do.

Eva:

I was only married one year - we were together for seven.

So it felt like a lot, but the point is my husband has always been an entrepreneur, and I've always been an employee.

This was my chance, and if I didn't take this chance now, if I waited until I had the money because I didn't have the money to invest, I would just downsize. I maxed out every single credit card that I had to pay for this education to the tune.

I'll share it with you because I'm all about transparency, $35,000 that needed to be paid in full without a student loan without anything. And so, not realizing that credit cards were other people's money. It's a way of loaning yourself the money for the investment. But being confident that if I invested all of this, if I risked it all, if I burned the boats, I would have to be successful.

I am investing to get out of this deep debt. It was a good debt.

There's good debt and bad debt.

I wasn't buying the car and the Louis Vuitton purses and the vacations - this was something that would serve me for the rest of my life. And I thought you know what? It's now or never. And my daughter at the time, I believe she, was probably in her early twenties. She's like mom, go big or go home, do the big package, go for it. And I'm like, yeah, I did it. My husband needed to breathe into a paper bag at this point because he literally had a panic attack because he knew I was going to do it. He saw the passion in my eyes to do this.

I'm like, I don't need to be smart. I don't need to be a certain age. I don't need to be a certain gender. I don't need to be a certain color.

This is something that anybody can do is get a financial education and learn how to create passive streams of income with the knowledge and how to use other people's money to do it. That was my first two-by-four to the head like something's got to change.

If I was going to live my dreams - it wasn't going to happen doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results.

Jennifer:

Yeah.

I was just, as you were saying that I was thinking, it's so interesting. We talk about the quote-unquote American dream, and yet you have these dreams that people have all the time.

I heard this term the other day, “fantasy goals,” which are just these goals we think about but we don't ever actually work towards, so I wonder how many people watching this have that fantasy goal of like, oh, I'm going to go live in Europe for the summer, or I'm going to, you know, fill in the blank.

But it's this fantasy goal that they don't ever actually take action on - you didn't just take action, you like turned everything inside out to make a plan and get a plan to do it.

Eva:

I mean, I do have a fantasy goal of thinner thighs, but I don't know if that's going to happen because of my body type, but that's the only fantasy. What is the fantasy goal? I read it as a meme. Like every woman's dream is to eat whatever she wants to not get fat or something like that.

That's the only fantasy because fantasy goals are really, you know, not, not attainable, but you know, for me, I started to know that if I did not take a chance and bet on myself and my success, depression was the alternative.

Jennifer:

Absolutely, absolutely feeling unfulfilled, unresolved dreams.

You get this two by four to the head, you go make this massive investment. And just listening to you, I have no doubt that you went in 120000% on these trainings and these goals.

So what happened on the other side of this?

Eva:

Well, you know, we became successful. My husband was my business partner begrudgingly, so he got the bag, and he survived the panic attack, and then he got up.

Then he was hands-off, you're going do everything, you know? And I'm like, okay, I'm the one still working the day job. He's an entrepreneur, and he's, you know, everybody's struggled during the crash of 2008, 2009, and we're now in 2010. And I was like, okay, I'll do what I have to do, and here's where the next should came in.

I became a workaholic and obsessed, so I would work on my entrepreneurial business in the morning, go to work, work on it at lunch, not socialize with the girls or go out to lunch with everybody. No, I've got to do this then come home, you know, do you remember, you probably remember this in the late 1970s as a commercial for a perfume called Anjalee. Oh my gosh. I, that still sticks in my head now. It's such a catch. I can bring home the bacon, and fry it up in a pan.

That was me. I was cooking. I was doing the laundry. I was doing all the shopping. I was working. I was building the business, and I was burning myself out. How could you not be burning out with all of that? I thought this is what I should be doing.

Well, creep up everywhere if I want it done. I gotta do it. My stuff. I don't need to ask for help. I've been approved to get a D, so that I was in that energy.

In that energy, I became burnt out, stressed out, overwhelmed. My health was affected. My mood was affected. And as we were achieving success, success was coming, but it was costing. It was costing my health, and my well-being.

And I remember my husband and I was starting to have real trouble communicating because I was always frustrated. I was disappointed. I felt he should be doing more to help me. I have to do everything now until there was always that heavy energy of just being overworked and always trying to get the business forward and more success, you know, and we got success. We got our place in Berlin.

You know, that was the dream we had happened. I gave us five years - we did it in four.

We were moving from, you know, earned income and real estate to more passive income strategies. The businesses grew, and we were actually inducted into the hall of fame and the company that I was getting educated in.

They asked me to work for the company to teach other people how I did it. So success was coming, and I remember we went to Mexico to try to get the spark back in our marriage, and I came back from Mexico, and it was great. We had a beautiful time.

I remember my husband went out to walk the dog. And, um, I went into the kitchen, and I saw he left his phone there. And I'm like, you know, he was supposed to send me photos of a real estate, you know, our latest real estate project, where the handyman was doing some work and put a new floor. So I could post on Facebook and brag, you know? Yeah. And I picked up the phone and my heart dropped. It was at that moment I realized that I was going to lose everything and he was falling in love with another woman.

My first thought was he's the last person in America that I would expect to cheat on me.

If you told me I would get a third eye or my husband would cheat, I would plan these eyelash extensions on the third eye. Like, okay, how much is that going to cost me if I added one more eye today's appointment, but here's what else shifted for me that I want to share with you, your, your listeners. Because it's something that I got when I work with clients who are so determined to be successful that they lose sight of what their real priorities are. I knew who I was in that relationship while I was in the business of doing was not somebody I wanted to be in a relationship with either.

Jennifer:

Wow.

What an honest reflection. I don't know how long it took you to come to that, but that seems like one of those moments when you have to get honest.

Eva:

As I was looking at the phone and realizing what was happening as my heart was shaking and, my body was shaking, my heart was palpitating. I knew at that moment that I had to take hundred percent responsibility for 50% of that relationship.

Jennifer:

I don't imagine that if you hadn't done the kind of work that you've been doing on yourself up to this point, that that reaction would have been the reaction you had.

Eva:

Oh, no.

It would have been, um, uh, waiting to exhale. The driveway burning up, you know, all of that. That's why I was careful where I reached out for support. When I was in this place, there were certain people that I knew if I told what was going on in my relationship, they would man bash my husband's a good guy, a really, really good guy, but he made some self-sabotaging choices because of how he was feeling.

Jennifer:

Yup.

And haven't we all in different ways, we have all done self-sabotaging behaviors or choices. They maybe don't look like this, but who can stand up and say they've never done that to them.

Eva:

It could be overeating. It could be alcoholism. It could be some form of self-abusing or abusing others. That was his, his self-sabotaging vehicle. And so all that was left for me to do was to find out where he stood in that and where we were moving forward.

Are we going to take this breakdown and break up, or are we going to take this breakdown and breakthrough? And we chose to do the work to break through.

Jennifer:

That is the key right there in all of this is to do the work. And what a testament to the two of your relationships and your commitment to yourself and to each other, really. I mean, this is just a heartbreaking, yet inspiring story at the same time.

Eva:

God, that's, uh, that was my next thought, Jennifer. I was like, we broke through this. This is going to be a great story to share already. You know what I manifest, I visualize what I want in my life. And, but the scary part for me, and it wasn't all roses, you know, was, you know, what the commitment we made was to the relationship we wanted and deserved.

That was the factor - we didn't really make a commitment to each other until we knew we could have the relationship. We want it with each other. It was a very real possibility that I couldn't get what I wanted and needed from this person. And he couldn't get what he wanted and needed from me. And the right action of integrity for both of us would have been to move on.

Jennifer:

Because you both took responsibility for your parts, this is why I imagine, I mean, I'm just making an assumption. Listening is why you are where you are today and why you are on the other side of a breakthrough.

Eva:

Yeah.

I say to him all the time, I'm so proud of us because part of me is, um, you know, looking at what from our early life experiences contributed to who we were being in our relationships. And, you know, I have this, um, relationship style assessment that I start all my high-performance clients off with to know how their past is showing up sneakily, sabotaging and damaging their success, their relationships, their health, all of it.

It's a really cool quiz that I put together. I'm really proud of that too but when I realized that about myself and my husband realized that about himself, when we did the work and realized things like what about our past caused us to sabotage our relationship that will affect our success or whatever we had part of my relationship style.

There are five that I identify with - I am the yo-yo, an acronym for the word style so the why and style is a yo-yo. It's that push-pull in that back and forth, and part of our M.O. is we always remember past mistakes, and we're so hard on ourselves, which makes us hard on other people.

Part of my growth and transformation from that experience was to leave the past in the past because the past was based on fear, but also not to worry about the future. I realize I get that worry from my dad now that you know my mom's gone, I see my bad one. I'm like, oh, that's why I'm like that, it's you? Really worrying about the future, which keeps me from really being present and enjoying the present and so we made a commitment to be present in creation.

The present gives you that creation energy, and so what we've been able to create as a couple, as business partners, as teams, as friends, as lovers has been amazing as long as we don't dwell on the past and worry about the future.

We've been able to manifest and be clear on what our goals are and our priorities on what we need to take responsibility for creating boundaries to protect our priorities and goals. And that's kind of my CPR formula that I work through with my clients is all at, um, you know, all of my clients are to get clear, prioritize and take responsibility, radical responsibility.

Jennifer:

Oh my goodness - beautiful.

I was literally going to say, so tell me how this impacts what you're doing now, and you've started that, but would you mind just sharing a little bit more about who you work with and what you do now?

Eva:

You know, I work with busy, high-achieving professionals, and I teach them how to advance their careers with how it costs their health, their well-being, and relationships.

You know, I'm a certified high-performance coach, which means that I went through the training with my coach, Brendon Burchard, who wrote the book high-performance habits, um, through his high-performance Institute. And we work on areas of clarity, energy, courage, productivity, and influence so that you can create consistent habits for success that bring you that consistency.

It's consistency in the key people here high-performance, and they're like, that sounds like work. No, you can be a high-performing mom, which means that you are creating habits, practice practices, and principles that continue to move you forward consistently. But you're clear on what to focus on in your goals and how to set those boundaries around that. And so that's a skill building that skill.

It doesn't come overnight.

I certainly didn't learn it from any behavior that was modeled for me in the household that I grew up with. But it really is what consistently is going to generate the energy that I need to be on my game and show up for my clients, my business, myself, and my family, so that my family always got what was left over from me because I was spent.

I've now learned how to generate little energy-generating habits throughout the day that give me that vitality to where they can't keep up with me. And I'm 61, my husband's younger than me, my kids are definitely younger than me, probably my dog. And I might be around the same age, running around like crazy running circles around these young people.

Jennifer:

Well, your energy is infectious.

I can imagine there are women watching this or listening to this who are like, okay, I want more Eva, how do I get more? So if someone is looking to connect with you or follow you, where can they find you?

Eva:

Well, definitely on my website, https://www.evamedilek.com/, but I have something fun I want to offer your viewers and your neighbors.

It's my relationship style assessment quiz that will show you what is sabotaging and keeping you stuck from moving forward that you cultivate in your early life experience, which means it grew some deep roots that you don't even know it's there anymore.

Jennifer:

I really want to emphasize that to anyone who's listening or watching, this is valuable information that Eva is offering to you right now because this is what's often referred to in therapy or coaching as your blind spot, these deep-rooted things that you don't even recognize her behind the scenes so let me stop talking and let you tell them how to get this.

Eva:

It’s https://www.evamedilek.com/quiz, and it'll take you right to it.

It's a 50-question quiz, and what it'll do at the end, it will generate your relationship style type and how it shows up. You may not know how it's showing up and things that may trigger you or things that you may habitually do that keep you from realizing the forward growth, success, momentum in your life and in your business that you may not realize and what the transformation goal is for that.

Jennifer:

Okay, I'm going to go take this quiz when we finish this!

I encourage everyone else to go and do that, and then I'm assuming on the website, they can find their way to socials that they want to follow you.

Eva:

Yes, you can follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn as Eva Medilek, and, um, what's the other one? Facebook. Yeah. How can I forget Facebook?

Jennifer:

Okay, Eva, this has been absolutely riveting and inspiring, and I have enjoyed you so much, and I'm sure our listeners have as well, so thank you so so much for joining.

This was fun, and to those that are here with us, thanks for joining us.