How Self Awareness Helps Ali Cammelletti Live Her Best Life

This transcript was created using AI. Please forgive any discrepencies.

[Intro] Welcome to Easy Style with Sami. I’m your host Sami Bedell-Mulhern. Each episode, I invite a friend, family member or colleague or just someone I’ve met on this journey called life to come and share their personal style and approach to business, parenting, life and everything in between. You’ll hear motivational and inspirational stories that will help you refine and build your own personal style. Remember, style is easy when it comes from within.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Hey there, and welcome to another episode of Easy Style with Sami. I am here with my guest today, Ali Cammelletti. Ali, thank you so much for being here.

[Ali Cammelletti] Thank you, Sami, I am excited.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah, well, we have known each other for years, haven’t kept up with each other so much in the last year and a half or so. So that’s one of the things that I love about this podcast is the opportunity to reconnect with other fellow entrepreneurs and just people in my life that I have enjoyed getting to know, you know, for whatever reason. So I’m really glad that we kind of have this chance to catch up on this podcast and for you to share your amazing story and journey with all of our listeners.

[Ali Cammelletti] Me as well, thank you so much. I’m excited to do this.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah. So why don’t we just start, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit and kind of tell people a little bit about what you’re all about, and maybe kind of what your career path has been?

[Ali Cammelletti] Yeah. So I have a company currently, where I do leadership and sales coaching. And I’ve had this company for about eight years. I’m a bit of a serial entrepreneur. Some would say I’m unemployable at this point, because I have to have my own business. It’s just who I am. I love it so much. I love the creativity of it. And I’m also a mother of a five and a half year old, very busy, and precocious girl that I adore so much. So yeah, let’s talk a little bit about my journey. I have always been career focused. Ever since I was young. It was about what I was going to do for college, getting out of college right away getting into career. And my first journey I call it was restaurants. So I have a hospitality major. And I managed restaurants down in the San Francisco Bay Area. And then I got burned out. And I was like, Oh no,

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] you don’t have a life when you’re managing restaurants, right? Like the schedule is crazy.

[Ali Cammelletti] Well, and I was in my early 20s, right out of college. And so I just worked like crazy. And then at a certain point, I’m like, Okay, I’m gonna buy a house. Oh, I’m in San Francisco, I have a house in San Francisco. That’s not realistic. And I just started really evaluating like, I don’t want this lifestyle for the rest of my life. And at the time, I had just gotten married the first time, and I had coordinated my own wedding. So I did a little bit of time in the bay before I came back to Bend Oregon, where I originally graduated from high school. And I kind of hung out and got back into our community again, and then started my first business. My first business was event planning.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Another busy career with less like with less, I mean, like your first two career paths, were really kind of almost in businesses that don’t allow you to really control your schedule and are very kind of non traditional hours. Did you like that piece of it?

[Ali Cammelletti] I was a workaholic. And that is what back in those days, I was really deep in my pleaser place. And so it was all about getting my self worth and showing and proving to my family that I was good enough. And so it fed it. It absolutely fed it. And that path was fed for about nine years, I burned myself out good that round. And I was doing like big fundraisers as well as destination weddings. And then on the side, I was teaching at our community college, like, you know, yeah, just going for it. And then I had a life experience in my 30s. And it was when I first started the actual event planning business, but I had my life just kind of turned upside down where I had a crazy tumor, I had half of my family pass, and I ended up going through divorce. And I still like did the event planning path. But at a certain point, it just had to stop. And I couldn’t keep up with any of it anymore, working through the trauma as well as trying to prove myself and so at that point, I then took a little stint and worked for a technology company which led me to the industry I work in a lot right now which is the vacation rental management industry. And during that time, I then started my path of wanting to have a child, which that was like mid 30s. I started our adoption process at 40. We got my daughter when I was 45. And this business I have now is primarily to have a balanced life. It was that I could do the coaching, and do what I loved, but also have a lifestyle that allowed me to now walk across the street and volunteer at my daughter’s school for an hour. No and volunteer for her running club and her bread and jam that they do on Fridays, that kind of thing. Love that. And just experience her. Because I worked so hard to get to that place of even having her in my life. I wasn’t going to have it be second, it is first.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Now, do you think that had you not had your daughter that you might have like your path might have been different? Like do you kind of credit her for the inspiration to really pushing you down this this path to make this consulting piece of your business? Work?

[Ali Cammelletti] That’s a great question. You know, I kind of joke that if I never had gotten her I would be traveling the world right now. Yeah. So I I’m not sure I can answer that. I will say that I have been pushed to a next level, which is my focus coming up this year, which is going to be keynote speaking. And I have been speaking publicly at conferences for gosh, I don’t know, 10 years, you know, and before that teaching, so I’m very comfortable with it. But that is because the traveling with clients being on site for a week isn’t always as realistic, where I can go do a keynote, and bring in generate more revenue for just three days.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Right? So you, I want to go back a little bit in your story. So you went from running your own business, and working really hard to working for a tech company. So I want to know, like what the transition was like for you personally going from running your own business and all of that trauma that had happened to working for somebody and then kind of how then you transition to know like, well, this isn’t right for me, I actually need to go back and running my own business like what did that whole piece kind of feel like? How did you come to some of those terms,

[Ali Cammelletti] the silver lining was that I am now doing the work that I’m doing like there are no mistakes. But that was probably one of the hardest three years of my life. At the time, I didn’t know it, I was going through menopause. And I was put in a position where I didn’t know anything. And it was such a small company that literally, we were doing everything, which I love that as an entrepreneur that fed my like constant learning piece. You know, we were developing processes, but you would call into resorts. And when you would hear the prompt, or you calling for a new reservation, you would sometimes hear my voice. And I was working in technology that I’m like, This doesn’t make sense. This isn’t scalable. What are we doing here, you need one person that does this, because this is not my wheelhouse to work in Goldwave. Right. So, you know, it really fed that. But then the amount of travel I was doing, and then trying to get pregnant and the stress that was coming from growing with the fast growing company, it had to stop. And that’s what really reset my world to what it is now. Of Okay, Ali, you have to look at your different traumas and handle them in a different way. You need new tools, you can’t numb through working yourself like crazy. And being a perfectionist and trying to prove yourself that’s not working for you. It’s time to change. And I think that sometimes when we struggle with fertility that will come out. Right. And so it shifted me completely. And that’s where I had to really lean into different tools. And it was tools of self care, big time, self care.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Well, I want to double down on this part of the conversation because I think, I think self care but also self awareness. I think a lot of people that have been through some of the things that you’ve been through, don’t come out the other side. So like what would you say to people like, how is it that you have been able to kind of say to yourself multiple times in your life, like, this isn’t working for Ali, I need to do something different and then have the courage to do something different, like those two things don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

[Ali Cammelletti] I don’t I’m not sure I know any different. That is how I am wired. But the other part is that book the body keeps score. My body always kept score and was telling me and I tell them little bit of this journey on the podcast that was released in January on self care, where I talk about the fact that the crazy tumor when I went to a naturopath and looked at the holistic part, because I needed to really investigate what brought this tumor on, what am I going to do, the doctors were telling me, it’s too big, we don’t want to remove it. We’ve never seen it before. And I’m like, oh, I need some other people to help advise. And I went to this naturopath, and she said, You are too much of a caretaker. And at the time, I was going into a situation where I was going to be caretaking for my grandmother, because literally my grandfather had been diagnosed with cancer and was passing. And I was about to get this crazy tumor out. And that’s it made me decide I’m like the tumors gotta go. And then I had validation at a later point my life of somebody else that had the same tumor, that it was very dangerous. And so the, my body told me back then, and I knew, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. And then it was just way too much to handle. So I just numbed through the entire experience with whether it be drinking and working like a dog just really threw myself always throwing myself in my career. And so it wasn’t until the again, the infertility, my body saying, Allie, you can’t have a child and be stressed, and be a perfectionist and try to control everything. This is something you have no control over. And I really believe the whole piece of childbirth and getting pregnant is something that is not a timeline or something you can control. Right? I mean, I will say the second time I had gotten pregnant, they didn’t hold. I was in Peru and I went and touched every fertility rock I could touch. And I came back and my doctors like this isn’t possible that you’re pregnant. I’m like, I don’t know, you just took the test. It says I’m pregnant. You tell me. She’s like you’re postmenopausal. And I was like, I mean, yeah, so the crazy things happen. And that was just, you know, my journey of it’s time to do things differently ally if you really want this life. And the weight of four and a half years for her was just brutal for me. And I had to get myself right in my brain. The anxiety and depression on top of one another, really pushed me to do things differently. And that’s when I leaned in pretty deep into EMDR talk therapy, essential oils and self care.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Would you say now since you’ve been doing a lot of this practice, since you’ve put so much effort into listening to your body that you react quicker now. So like you make those adjustments as you start to maybe feel things aren’t settling, right that you make those adjustments quicker and quicker every single time now.

[Ali Cammelletti] Absolutely. Like food allergies are a thing for me. And I am very aware of my body. Very aware. And so recently, I had another food allergy come up of garlic. And as soon as I was having, you know, stomach aches and headaches first thing in the morning, I went to that place of let’s try food allergies. First, they’ve always been a thing for me. And sure enough, it was I was eating bananas, which I wasn’t supposed to be doing. It was actually way which is in lactose free products that I was doing because of my dairy allergy. And so that shifted it big time.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah. So how would you like if somebody’s listening to this, and they’re like, you know, some of these things are resonating with me, but I just don’t know where to start. Like, I just don’t quite know how to maybe start to pick up the pieces or how to put one foot in front of the other or, like, you know, where would you do you have like a resource or a place like where would you send people to kind of start this journey on, you know, building on their self awareness and kind of making positive change.

[Ali Cammelletti] I am a big advocate of talk therapy. I am I mean I’m seven years in I believe at this point and I go every other week. Now it’s more talking about how to be a mother of a five and a half year old but she the EMDR because EMDR and it has an abbreviation for like rapid eye movement is something you know, but they use buzzers now, that is all about going to a place in your body that holds trauma and what that feels like and having the buzzers and being aware. So that brings in awareness very quick. And as we’re saying this was it may be the foundation that got me to that place of being so aware of my body possibly because that’s exactly what it does. And then because of the crazy tumor they said was pharmaceuticals that’s what made me lean into essential oils.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah. Yeah. Well and what I love about what you’re saying is that like this isn’t what you this isn’t what you Hold on, this is just you as a human sharing your experience. And so I love that. I mean, obviously, there’s 100 ways to go about kind of working through things. But I love kind of that experience, I’m with you 100% Talk therapy, like our whole family has been in talk therapy, somebody’s always in therapy in our household at all times. That’s critical. And it’s great to just like check in like to have that moment to just be like, maybe you don’t even realize something’s going on. But if you just consistently go every two weeks, you know, you never know like, what kinds of things things are going to come up. Um, but I want to touch on now like your business that you have now. Because I feel like it’s kind of a compilation of all of the things that you’ve done in your past. So when you were you said, You’ve, you’ve had your consulting company for about eight years, I know, I’ve gone through my own journey with my marketing business in like, the ebbs and flows of what do we do? What don’t we do? Who do we serve? Who don’t we serve all those things? So how did you take all those collective experiences? And how has that gotten you to kind of the sweet spot and the joy that you have with your business? Now?

[Ali Cammelletti] I believe, as a career focused person, you go out, you do the work, right? Learn, learn how to be great at whatever you’re doing, then you rise, whether you’re in a leadership position management position. And then after you’ve really mastered that, you end up coaching, you share. And I think it’s a natural progression, for me, at least. And so what happened was, I started out as sales. And that was my focus. And literally, I had a woman probably five years ago, and I was presenting on empathy. Excuse me, and she came up to me, and she said, I want you to coach me. And I was like, Okay, and so that’s where I started leadership coaching.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] And now, because I know you also went through some transitions, like you had to pivot during COVID, because you do work in the hospitality industry, and they had such a huge shift in that space. So like, has that been kind of a fun journey for you reinventing that and then also supporting tourism and hospitality in kind of this new landscape? Or has that been extra challenging?

[Ali Cammelletti] It’s very interesting, because what happened for me is opposite of what happened for my clients. So what happened with the clients that I coach now is they never got a break. They were full board, like their biggest years they’ve ever had. Their problem now is how do we even project because we’ve had so much revenue in that time period, and we can’t compare it and where are we going now? For me, instant shutdown, for over a year, almost two. And I went into it saying, this is the maternity leave, I never got, because my business increased by 100%, the year that my daughter came in, and I just worked. And so I embraced it. And I focused on self care connection. And that put me in a very powerful spot for when it was time to come back in. Because it gave me the energy to reinvent a little bit. I did some certifications, I launched my podcasts, neck leadership, which you were on. And I love that we have that together. And I also rebranded, which were a big part of doing my website and renamed my business to spark your mindset. So it was a fun and amazing.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I liked that reframe, because I think I think that’s true. Also a testament to the people that have survived the pandemic, their businesses, and have thrived during and post is like that attitude of, I can’t control what’s happening around me. So I can either go into panic mode, stress myself out, or I can figure out how to use this as an opportunity. So I think that’s so amazing that you were able to do that. And I would just to kind of bring this all full circle say that a lot of that is probably because of the work that you’ve had been doing on your personal self throughout the years that that gave you the tools to kind of have this holistic approach to your life professional and personal.

[Ali Cammelletti] And being an entrepreneur. I was lucky enough that before the pandemic came, I had gotten to a place of knowing my business always comes in our as it’s meant to Mike I have a very holistic approach to how I operate as an entrepreneur, where the years before were anxiety ridden of like, oh, cash flow. Oh, I have a big client. I’m gonna lose a big client what’s gonna happen like these are fees Here’s that majority of entrepreneurs experience. And I had gotten to a place of when anything leaves, something else comes in. And it’s always meant to be. I’m a vision board person. I’m a manifester. Like, I visualize. That’s how I roll. And it allowed me to go into the pandemic with ease of like, I needed a vacation. Let’s do this.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] That’s so great. Well, Ali, we could talk about this probably for hours. I know your story is so inspirational to me. And I know the inspiration are inspirational to our listeners. And before we connect people with you, and let them know how they can find you, we have a few questions that we always wrap up every single episode with. So I prep my Listen, or I prep my guests, don’t you or I don’t put them on the spot. Okay, so where is one of your go to places for personal development, or where you like to go get information?

[Ali Cammelletti] It’s LinkedIn. Yeah, it’s Brene. Brown. It’s Adam Grant. It’s Simon Sinek. And they just had this little interview with all three of them. And I was like, in heaven. I was like, Are you kidding me? All three of them together? How does that even happen? Now we just need to throw on the Huberman lab and I would be really excited.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] We’ll have to link that up in the show notes so people can grab that that’s incredible. Would you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert? Absolute introvert. Yep. Um, what is one thing that is on your list for this coming year, personal or professional, your goal list?

[Ali Cammelletti] Personal is always work life balance, because I feel like it always has to be top of mind for me, professionally is I am working on a video and I am launching my keynote speaking. And so I have some goals, revenue wise, and how many I want to accomplish this year.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] So exciting. I’m so excited for you on that that’s gonna be amazing. What is one piece of advice that you’ve gotten from someone that has stuck with you?

[Ali Cammelletti] You know, I pondered over this. And I was like, oh, there’s so many pieces of advice, because I’ve been really lucky to be a part of mastermind groups that have really helped me. But I think the biggest thing that I have learned, and I’m sure somebody told me this, is you never stop marketing. And you can appreciate this, I can appreciate that. I stopped marketing with my first business when I got burned out and it showed like you always have to mark it. I don’t care how amazing you are and how great your business is. It will have a ripple effect later. Yep.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I love that. And I love when non marketing people say that because it just you know, validates something that we shall regular basis. Okay. Last question. What is one non negotiable in your life?

[Ali Cammelletti] It’s self care. And it’s always putting my daughter first in my life.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] But I love that you said self care. First. And I’m not saying your daughter second. But like I’m I love that you said that. Because you know, as women as moms, we can’t be the caregivers we need to be if we don’t take care of ourselves. It’s like put on your mask first before you put the mask on anyone else. Right. So I love the way that you frame that.

[Ali Cammelletti] Yeah, absolutely. I want to show up as the best person I can for her. So I have to be whole first in every way.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] That’s so great. Well, Ali, I thank you so much for coming on here. And for being so honest and truthful and sharing your experience and your story. If people want to connect with you more, listen to the podcast that you mentioned earlier about self care. How do people do that?

[Ali Cammelletti] Yeah, it’s spark your mindset. And you can just find that URL. And then snack leadership is the podcast. And the month of January, I focused on self care. And on my instagram with snack leadership. You can see I did highlights of every day where I shared something I did for self care leading into the new year. That’s so

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] great. Well, Ali, thank you so much for being on this episode, we will have resources and all of the links at easy style with cme.com forward slash for. And yeah, just thank you so much.

[Ali Cammelletti] Thank you, Sami.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I am so inspired by these incredible stories, which is why I wanted to share them with you everyday people that we’re meeting that we’re connecting with, that we’re collaborating with, to be able to hear their stories of how they got to where they are and really be inspired by them is really the blessing of this podcast. So if you loved Ali’s story, make sure you subscribe wherever you listen so you don’t miss an episode and I’d really appreciate it if you’d leave us a review on Apple podcasts. We have new episodes coming out every week and I am just so blessed and thankful that I get to bring this podcast It’s too late thank you so much and again if you want to grab the resources and show notes from this episode you can find them at https://easystylewithsami.com/4 and that’s s a mi thank you so much for listening and I will see you in the next one