Rediscover Yourself with Radical Self-Responsibility | Stephanie Hickey

Manouchka: Hey Boss Mama. Welcome back to the show. This is the space where ambitious moms come to talk business, motherhood, and what it really takes to stop doubting and start executing. I am your host, Manouchka Elefant, and I use my 15 years in marketing to help mompreneurs grow with more clarity, strategy, and accountability.

On this episode, I am joined by Stephanie Hickey. She’s a dedicated sex, love, and relationship coach, passionate about guiding women to embrace radical self-responsibility in their pleasure, love, and relationships. With a focus on creating desire-led lives, she offers a non-judgmental, all-embracing space where nothing is too taboo to explore.

Manouchka: Hi, Stephanie, welcome to the Hey Boss Mama show. I’m so happy to have you here.

Stephanie Hickey: Hi, Manouchka, it’s so great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Manouchka: So, I’d love to get a better understanding of what it is that you do because it’s such a sexy and hot topic, and I think that it’s something we often overlook when we’re thinking about motherhood and business, but it’s such an essential part of our lives as women too. So, can you tell us a bit about what you do?

Stephanie Hickey: It is essential. It’s an essential part of our lives and our womanhood, so I’m glad you said that.

I’m a sex, love, and relationship coach, and I love helping women take radical responsibility for their own pleasure, their own happiness, their love lives, and their relationships.

So, I work with individuals on those topics to enhance their capacity for pleasure and their relationships, whether they’re in one or looking for one. And that trickles down to other relationships as well, not just romantic relationships.

Manouchka: Before getting pregnant, I thought that sex would never be something I would have to think about in my life because it was such a normal thing. And then I realized, when you have a child, it changes everything.

And I’m also interested in the aspect of how you manage that as a business while also having three daughters. That must be quite interesting too.

Stephanie Hickey: So, to answer that question, I mean, there are so many moving parts all the time, so I like to use what I teach in order to fully embody what I’m guiding women through.

So, that requires very intentionally scheduling out my days. And that includes scheduling out time to coach clients, to work on the business, to have actual downtime where there’s nobody interrupting me and I’m not working on anything.

That also includes time to include pleasure in my day.

I teach a lot of self-pleasure practices, very intentionally guided self-pleasure practices. So whether that’s carving out time to do that on my own, or extrapolating pleasure into all realms of pleasure, which helps feed into the woman’s body, I’m thinking, how many different ways can I increase my pleasure today?

Whether that’s through my senses, like taste or smell, through visuals, is my room really pleasurable to look at? Do I feel good in these clothes?

Manouchka: Sorry, I’d love to bounce off of that because my mom is a psychotherapist, and one of the things that she teaches her patients is about daily pleasures. And that’s one of the things that she says is a must.

Whether it’s even just taking the time to be present to enjoy something mundane, it doesn’t matter. It’s about recognizing something that felt good.

Stephanie Hickey: Ooh, that’s good. Recognizing something that felt good.

And so, there are both things, right? There’s intentionally setting out to do something that’s pleasurable, but then also recognizing, oh, I’m in a moment of pleasure right now. I’m really enjoying this pleasure.

That actually increases your capacity to feel pleasure, right? If you don’t let those moments just slip by, if you actually take a moment to acknowledge, oh, this is actually so pleasant right now, like watching the three girls play in the yard.

Manouchka: Yeah, and it’s the concept of being present.

Stephanie Hickey: Exactly. Yeah.

Manouchka: And so, tell us a bit more about how things turned out, because from what I understood in our previous conversations is that you already had two daughters and your business was flourishing. How did things suddenly change and transition?

Stephanie Hickey: Yeah, I did my certification for sex, love, and relationship coaching in 2020 when my middle daughter was about one and a half.

I completed that coaching, and then I continued working with clients and creating a group program, and I launched that for the first time.

Then, surprisingly, I became pregnant with my third daughter. It wasn’t planned, but that’s another story for another podcast or another time.

And so, the emotions that came with having this career I was building and really loving, like I really felt passionate about a career for the first time, and then feeling like, ah, I have to put it on hold again, and I have to have another pregnancy and go through the baby years again, and all those emotions of doing those steps again... it was a challenging time, I’ll be very honest.

And how did I go through that? A lot of mourning. A lot of allowing myself to feel the full spectrum of emotions I was having, which ranged from, oh, what a blessing, and what an exciting time, to, oh my gosh, I’m going to have three kids and they’re going to grow up together, to, oh my gosh, there are still two more years of me having to slow down and really be fully present for the family and the daughters, and basically put the business on the back burner a little, for the most part.

It was just challenging. I had a lot of tears and a lot of anger, and I just allowed myself to feel those things for as long as I was feeling them and move through them.

I think that feeds into something else I love to talk about, which is the pace of life. Women’s lives, at least in my demographic and in the world I’m living in, feel very quick and very fast-paced. Like, do, do, do, have to get things done.

That time really forced me to be like, no, this is actually a phase of life where I have to slow down and just be present for a new infant and family.

Even though my brain wanted to go, go, go, and build this business and have clients and be in connection with other women and do the thing that I love doing, that requires a different part of my brain and a different part of my energy.

So putting that down for a little while was really challenging, but it was all about acceptance. How can I really accept this right now, in this time of my life?

And yeah, here we are. The youngest is now over two years old.

Manouchka: I love what you just said. Going through the mourning and all the range of emotions, deciding that you had to adapt your pace, and also going through the joys of what’s to come while knowing that it’s also challenging.

But I feel like as women, when we’re talking about motherhood, and whether we’re in business for ourselves or not, we often gloss over the fact that there’s also a trade-off.

I was very naive when I thought, oh, maternity leave is going to be such a breeze, and then I’m just going to jump right back into things, because I thought that it would be like on Instagram. Like, oh yeah, I’m going to lift weights in the morning, have my smoothie, my baby on my hip, and my computer right next to me.

Yeah, I don’t think so.

Stephanie Hickey: Yeah. How did you move through that kind of reality check or new reality, which you had some preconceived notion of, which I think many of us do, and have no idea what the reality is? Where are you in acceptance of where you’re at right now? How do you move through your days with having both a business and a baby?

Manouchka: Well, I don’t know where people are going to find this episode or when, but the fact is, me doing this podcast right now is part of reinventing myself and doing something that’s in tune with who I am today, which is not the same person as 11 months ago when I gave birth.

And so, adapting around that and also acknowledging that my needs and my passions, although at the core they’re still the same, have transitioned a little bit.

But we’re not here to talk about me, we’re here for you. So I want to know more about reconnecting ourselves to our bodies and our pleasure, because that’s also something that is about accepting that it’s going to be different and that the pace might be different and things like that. I want to know more about that.

Stephanie Hickey: Yeah. After having a baby, so much changes in our bodies, our actual physical bodies, our energetic bodies, and our psychic space of now keeping a whole other human alive.

I think there’s a whole reconfiguration inside of us that happens that you can’t really describe or explain until you experience it.

And it’s a reconnecting to yourself, yes, yourself as you knew it, but also maybe relearning or learning, who am I now in this new role? It’s such a major role in our lives.

And so, there’s a lot of discovery that I think should happen, but that doesn’t always happen after becoming a mother.

There’s the discovery of your own body, your own pleasure, your own desires, and maybe new desires re-emerge that you never thought you would have.

Perhaps you became a mother and you’re like, oh, I actually don’t want to go back to work. That could be a totally new idea for somebody who grew up a very driven person and wanted a career.

So it’s a whole rediscovery process that I don’t know that we allow ourselves to have, or give ourselves time or permission to have.

I really believe there’s incredible power in the reconnection to yourself, your pleasure, and your desires, because those things can really inform how you want your life to look.

So I think getting really clear about those things and excavating them is really powerful.

Manouchka: So, we can actually find some parallels between regaining ourselves as a woman and also regaining ourselves as an entrepreneur.

Stephanie Hickey: Yeah, that’s right. Because as an entrepreneur, there’s another ingredient at play, right?

And so, what I’m hearing from you is maybe you didn’t have a podcast before and now you do, because it’s more in alignment with how you want to spend your days.

Manouchka: I see the parallel as being that it’s not just about what we used to know and how we used to live.

Before, if I wanted sex, I didn’t have a kid at home, so whatever, just see if my partner is in the mood too, or create the mood and all of that.

Now it’s not that simple because we also have some responsibilities. And with my business, it’s the same. Before, if I wanted to work, I’d just take my laptop out and it was right there. I just had to decide.

And now, I also have other responsibilities because I have a little one that’s under one, and that requires a lot of my time and my availability. I’m in more of a giving role than I was before.

And so I think there’s a link here with what you teach around people-pleasing and whether or not we’re living for ourselves as a human being, or whether we’re part of something bigger, because that’s the journey we’re on right now, or the season of life that we’re in right now.

Stephanie Hickey: Totally, yeah. I love working with people on people-pleasing.

There are so many different reasons that people can identify as people-pleasers, and there are different causes and roots for that.

My coaching is desire-based, so the first session we do is about uncovering what you really desire. Why do you want that? How do you think your life is going to change when you have that? How are you going to feel?

And you’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t, by how many people have no idea how to answer that question. They don’t know what they desire.

And after becoming a mother, some women believe it doesn’t matter what they desire.

So if you don’t know what’s really valuable to you and what desire really is for you, then you’re less likely to put boundaries in place, say no here or there, or say yes to something.

Because you don’t even know what that thing inside you is that you’re saying yes or no to, to protect or to open the door to.

And so getting really clear and really honest has a trickle-down effect with people-pleasing.

If I really know that I want to make a podcast, and I know why I’m doing it, and it’s really going to feed me in this way, and it’s going to bring more information to women or entrepreneurs, whatever the reasons are, then I know I’m not going to just bend my day to accommodate other people.

So that’s the link for me in my coaching, between people-pleasing and sex, love, and relationship coaching. It all really comes down to what the desire is.

Manouchka: Yeah. And I think we tend to miss the mark sometimes because we’re thinking, what is it that I desire? It’s like a situation, it’s more money, but we forget that what we desire at the core is feeling good.

Because our health and our mindsets, without that, nothing really matters.

And our sexuality, this is directly how we feel in our bodies.

Stephanie Hickey: Yeah, exactly. Our sexual energy.

Manouchka: There’s also something else that I found really interesting, which is the aspect of people-pleasing and allowing ourselves to be a little selfish.

I remember when I was a young woman and I started really enjoying my body and my sexuality. That’s when I decided that I didn’t really care about the other person, because it wasn’t a boyfriend or whatever, and that I was selfish. I was putting my pleasure first.

And that’s when I really felt pleasure for the first few times. Before that, I was pretending more than anything else because I didn’t know what it was like to really go for it.

Stephanie Hickey: Yes. Wow, that’s amazing that you discovered that for yourself. That when I put my pleasure first, when I know what I like and that’s the priority, when I get into a sexual situation, that actually brings more pleasure and my experience is more pleasurable.

That’s amazing that you experienced that and found that.

Yeah, I think that’s brilliant, and it’s definitely at the core of what I do with sex coaching specifically. Women getting to the root of what they find pleasurable. They have to explore their own bodies first and then bring that to the partner or bring it to the bedroom.

Manouchka: And I think we often get a little bit confused because pleasing others doesn’t mean putting ourselves second.

And I think it also comes with being confident and feeling good in our own skin, which is a process. Something that I think we learn as our bodies change, as we get older, and our minds change as well, because we become more knowledgeable about what we like or not.

It’s a lot about finding that balance between, I want to give, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to lose myself in that same moment.

Stephanie Hickey: Mm-hmm. Yeah, you’re consciously exercising your desire to give or to receive.

And selfishness is, I guess, part of that, but not in a bad way. It’s like, no, I’m allowing myself to receive in this moment, or I’m choosing to give in this moment because it gives me pleasure too, or because I really want to.

Yeah, that’s really wise.

Manouchka: So, how do you take people through the coaching? What does it entail exactly? What can we expect going through it?

Stephanie Hickey: So, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, it’s a desire-based system.

We always start off with uncovering what the desires are. And when we come to a core desire, when we kind of excavate and get down into what is the core desire that we want to work on, then we’ll spend ten sessions using all the different tools and techniques and exercises, including self-pleasure practices.

Manouchka: So, there are some practical exercises.

Stephanie Hickey: There are a lot of practical exercises, yeah.

Because we do talk, we do some talk-based modern therapeutics in there, but we also do a lot of embodiment work.

In sessions, we’ll explore the inner child. We’ll explore the inner masculine and the inner feminine, that kind of polarity work, and see what’s really alive or what’s really needing to expand.

We will definitely try to uncover some limiting beliefs or scripts or conditioning that you may have received around sex, sexuality, and pleasure.

And sometimes it can be really simple, like, oh, I always felt ashamed about touching myself. So we’ll start from there. We’ll start there really slowly.

And I will offer or invite clients into self-pleasure practices, which are very detailed and well guided, in your own time, in your bedroom.

And that can allow the learnings that we had in session to really go into your body and let you understand on a body level what we’re learning.

And I love it. I love the process. I love the techniques.

A lot of the processes and practices are based in Tantra and Taoism, so there’s a lot of energy work, getting in tune with one’s own energy body, being able to move pleasure around in your body and expand pleasure.

There’s so much to say. It’s hard to encapsulate it all at once.

Manouchka: So, could you give us an example of one person that went through your program, maybe where they came from and what it ended up with? What kind of beautiful transformation did they live?

Stephanie Hickey: So, I had a client come to me, and she was not in tune with her body at all, and also didn’t know what she preferred sexually.

She wasn’t that interested in sex, and she didn’t know why.

And so we began with what I’ll call simple, although it’s not always easy. We did body meditation. Naming what you’re feeling and where you’re feeling it in your body.

That can be really challenging for a lot of people. And the desire to escape your own body can show up in the fidgeting or the stories that come into your head, like, oh, I’d rather be thinking about something else.

So instead, I got her to sit and be mindful of what was happening in her body in that moment. Just naming, my belly is really tight, or my right foot is cramping, or my head is a little bit heavy.

Those simple naming exercises are the foundation. That’s the first thing we start with when you feel disconnected from your body and your pleasure.

So we started there, and over the course of ten sessions and some in-between support, because she was very committed to doing the practices between sessions, and would come back to me in our messaging app and say, I’m having a little trouble here, or I’m getting blocked here, or I don’t really know what you mean here, I would help her along the way between sessions.

And by the end, she was able to name what she loved about her own body and her own sexuality. She knew exactly how she wanted to experience sex.

She was interested in it. Going from it being almost a non-issue, or not something top of mind, to something she was really interested in, was a huge win in my view.

But then the way she was able to drop into her body by the end, it became so easy for her.

And when you can be connected to your own sensations, then you’re going to know what turns you on and what turns you off.

So that was a really special client that I feel very happy for.

Manouchka: That’s just beautiful. It’s really special to be able to help people reconnect, but also live fully because after all, sex is being alive, right? Having a libido is like having that energy, that little flame inside of us.

Stephanie Hickey: Exactly. Our sexual energy is the same as our creative energy, is the same as our life force energy.

And so, feeling that fullness and that aliveness and that vibrancy and that radiance is, like you said in the beginning, otherwise what’s the point of being alive and being able to experience all of the beauty that the world has?

Manouchka: And so, to be able to do all these beautiful things with people, how do you balance between your work time, your family time, and also create time for yourself?

Stephanie Hickey: My mom started helping about a year ago. I didn’t have her come in before that with my other two, but I guess I wasn’t an entrepreneur before.

So she helps a lot. I have her on hand. The older ones are in school, and starting in September, the little one will be in a toddler program full time. But I’ve had a lot of help up until now.

And my partner also had a schedule that allowed him to be available during the days.

So that’s my main answer, I’ll be very honest. A lot of help. Otherwise, one can’t do all of those things on their own.

And some weeks my priorities get pushed aside, like my alone time or my self-pleasure time or those things do get pushed aside.

I’m not somebody who is very strict about it all the time, and I’m not adamant about it all the time. So I give myself a lot of leeway in that.

I don’t punish myself or make myself feel bad because I didn’t get to the things that I know are important for me. I’ll just recommit.

Okay, I haven’t done this in a while. I haven’t gone to the gym in a while, or I haven’t had a self-pleasure practice in a while. I’ll just recommit.

That’s another way that I get through it. Letting go of what hasn’t worked and recommitting to what I know is good for me.

Manouchka: Yeah, I think we need a lot of flexibility and patience with ourselves, with our business, and also with the people around us.

After all, we have our expectations, people around us have their own, and our babies are not going to understand what it means when we’re at a computer and they’re playing next to us, and all of a sudden they want our full attention.

And at the same time, I feel bad because I shouldn’t be working around him.

That’s one of the things that I feel like I really need to separate, the working time and the mommy time.

It’s not always easy or feasible when I don’t have full-time help. And even during the day, sometimes my mom will keep him and then they’ll come over while I’m working, and just five minutes before this recording, for example, I get a call, like, can you come and pick us up? And I’m like, uh, no, I told you I have a call right now.

That kind of stuff. That’s being flexible because it’s life, right?

Stephanie Hickey: Yes.

The going back and forth is so... I don’t know. Is it ever going to end? I hope so.

I think that to myself too. Like, oh my gosh, they’re going to be out of the house one day and I’m going to miss it.

Yeah, I do that a lot. And I’m trying to get better at it, which is trying to get work done while they’re bustling around me. And then I just make myself really frustrated, and I’ll take it out on them because I’m frustrated, but it’s not their fault.

I should parse out my time so that it’s very clearly defined that no, I am working now, and then I’m not working now.

I have a challenge with really committing to not working when I’m with them.

It’s also, like you said, unrealistic sometimes. Sometimes you’re like, I just need to finish these couple of things. I need to get this done in this period of time.

But as they get older, I have a six-year-old and a ten-year-old as well, and they understand now. I can be like, hey, I need quiet time for 30 minutes, and then I’ll be back and I’ll be with you.

But yeah, with a little one, 11 months and a two-year-old, it doesn’t always work that way. And so that’s when you have to be very strict with going back and forth.

There’s no easy solution, and it’s not always easy to stick to.

Manouchka: I have one last question for you. What do you wish your daughters would say about you when they’re grown up?

Stephanie Hickey: What, are you trying to make me cry? Or is that your intention here?

What do I wish my daughters would say?

I knew how much Mommy loved me. I knew how much she loved me.

Manouchka: Oh, that’s just amazing. I love it. It’s giving me chills. It’s beautiful.

Wonderful. Well, tell us now, where can we find more about you, your coaching, and get connected with you?

Stephanie Hickey: I’m at WonderLoveCoaching.com, and my Instagram handle is @WonderLoveCoach.

My name is Stephanie. I have spots available for one-on-one coaching. I coach women, and I actually coach men as well, which isn’t labeled anywhere on my website, but I do have my male sexuality training completed, and I have coached men for many years.

So that’s just a bit more of a screening process.

I coach individuals on sex, sexuality, and relationships through one-on-one coaching.

And I have a couple of free workshops. If you want to check those out, they’re right on my Instagram link or on my webpage in my offerings, if you want to see what it’s about or if you like my vibe.

And I’m currently creating a self-paced course. I’m not going to say it’s small because it’s going to be jam-packed with stuff. But it’s a relationship clarity course.

It’s going to be three different processes to take an individual through issues that they’re having in their relationship, something like a dynamic that keeps showing up or some problem they’re having with their partner, but their partner is not on board for coaching or not on board for therapy.

So they can take some initiative. These processes are directly for people to do on their own.

This is my whole message: take radical self-responsibility.

Manouchka: Awesome. We’ll look forward to it then.

Thank you for joining me on this show. I hope you had as much of a good time as I did. This was really a fun way to connect, and I really enjoyed learning about what you’re doing.

Stephanie Hickey: Thank you so much, Manouchka. I really enjoyed being here and chatting with you too. And I think it’s great what you’re bringing to the world with this podcast. So thanks again for the opportunity.

Manouchka: So, there you have it. I really had a good time speaking with Stephanie.

Our conversation went in so many different directions, and some of the things that really stood out for me were when we spoke about self-compassion, people-pleasing, and also a lot about reconnecting to ourselves.

I thought that was really important because we tend to focus on the things we have to do and not so much on taking the time to just be present and reconnect to ourselves. And that is really important for any aspect of our lives.

So I’m really glad that we spoke about that.

That sense of connection, every time that I’m having those conversations with mom entrepreneurs, I feel like we have so much to share.

And so please join me as well in the Facebook group for Hey Boss Mama. The link is in the show notes. There, we can really talk about anything we feel like, whether it’s our business, our experiences, and also just ask questions.

So I’m looking forward to connecting with you in our Facebook community.