Breda McCague, Transformation, Motivational Catalyst and Speaker, Breda McCague Coaching
Breda is an ex-Military Officer, Co-Founder of Lean-In Ireland, a Transformational Professional and an accredited Emotional Intelligence Coach. Over the years, Breda has educated and empowered herself and others in the area of emotional intelligence, the subconscious mind and the art of self-mastery and introspection. An accredited ECR coach in Emotional Intelligence, Breda uses both her personal experiences and her observations of the behavioural patterns she sees across the thousands of people she has coached to inspire others. Using her authentic trademark humour, she delivers fascinating, motivational talks to hundreds of people at events and a variety of seminars.
What is your favourite social media platform, and why?
LinkedIn, because I can find other determined transformational leaders there to share views and opinions with.
Tell us about you and your current role or area of interest.
I think this world is starved of an adequate understanding of emotional intelligence. Having had a massively varied career and an even more varied personal life, I am now someone who knows how to rebuild and recreate beliefs in people.
My mission in this world involves me teaching others how to get the best out of themselves and how to experience a fascinating Mastery across all areas of their lives.
What do you like about your career or area of focus?
I get to change people's worlds. I get to teach people how to understand their own minds, emotions, decision making and impacts in life. I can equip people all over the world to lift their own life's standards to a place where their life then begins to feel like the life they had always imagined for themselves.
What is the best advice you have ever received?
It was a question by a mentor years ago as I described what I was thinking of doing on a particular piece of work. He said, "why are you even asking me that? Surely you should just go ahead and do it. It's a super idea". That was a conversation that helped me realise how influential my own limiting beliefs were on my day to day decision making, how much impact my own self-doubt was having in my thought processes even after I had achieved so much.
I realised that way too many people are not aware of the level of limiting beliefs that they are allowing to feature in their decision making every day and began to see the scale of the damage that such a lack of awareness does to the outcomes of the one and only precious life we have been given!
What inspires you, motivates you, or helps you to move forward?
When I see my work improving people's lives to such an amazing degree, I want to do more of it! I want to deliver my teachings on a larger scale to massive volumes of people all over our planet.
What are you proud of in your life so far?
That I was the first female commissioned officer in my Military Barracks, and I'm particularly proud of that because the day I joined as a recruit, I was told a number of times by older male soldiers that women should not have been allowed to join the army, that I was only 5ft, one and would never manage the weapons! A few years later, I was leading those men, and they found that they enjoyed my leadership as much as I did!
What is your preferred way to meet new people/network?
I am a digital butterfly. I often find like-minded people quicker online, and that obviously has become even more the case during the world's respective covid lock down's. When I deliver talks at conferences or for large corporates, I often strike up new friendships with some of the people I meet and who then begin to follow my online bite-size videos. I love to collaborate with like-minded people.
What skills or qualities do you feel have helped you?
I know how to manage my fears. If an opportunity presents itself, I will always say 'Yes'. That can will do attitude has served me amazingly through all the careers I have had so far in my life!
What do you wish you had known when you started out?
I didn't need to blend in anywhere to be accepted by the people that mattered! The biggest lesson I learned was to be 200% Breda no matter where I am. I see so many having to hide behind personas in the corporate world, and I think that is the fastest way to lose the authenticity of a company's people culture.
The good news is I also see a lot of companies really grasping that nettle and speaking openly about it to encourage their people to bring their best selves to work every day. I see culture improving in small ways as a result of the hard work that goes on behind the scenes in the Corporate world. Every little bit helps!
Who do you most admire in business, academic or creative circles and why?
I am an out and out fan of Marisa Peer's work, and if you have not yet checked her out, now would be a great time! Search her on youtube and listen to some of her material to enable her to introduce you to new insights about yourself!
I also engage regularly with some of LinkedIn's best thought leaders. I produce interviews with some of them for our YouTube and do conferences with others that I am introduced to through mutual connections.
I admire those with who I cross paths that are trying to change the world to help the human race become less dysfunctional, more inclusive and balanced. That is synonymous with my own mission.
Outside of your professional/work area, what hobbies or interests do you have or what other areas of your life are of real importance to you?
I joined a rock band coming up to my 40th that was made up of my colleagues from the Finance industry. That band did more for me than just provide enjoyment. It became a crucial step on my personal transformation journey too. Picking up an instrument again after ten years of a break was a brave step and the one that helped empower me to take back the reigns of my own life and make some massive transformational life changes.
If you are reading this and you describe yourself as someone who 'used to play music' or 'used to play a particular sport or enjoy a particular hobby, I want you to think about the spark that activity used to ignite in you, and I want you to think about taking something like that back up again. If I can manage to do it within the difficult conditions of my life at the time, we can all do it! Your spark is an essential element of your happiness and your well-being.
Has the pandemic had a positive or a negative effect on you and/or your business, and how have you managed it?
Back when I commuted 4.5 hours a day, I used to wonder how I would ever time to create more online material to share my knowledge and experience with those online. Low and behold, Covid arrived and effectively resulted in me being locked into the house. That also brought me new problems, but in the middle of all the problems, I made my first Breda's Bite-Size video and popped it up on YouTube.
I went from knowing nothing about video lighting to creating my own online vision board studio, and I delivered talks from it to people all over the world on mind mastery, leadership, motivation, teamwork, emotional intelligence, diversity and inclusion.
Do you have a mentor, or have you ever mentored anyone?
I have lots of mentors, and they are from all walks of life. I mentor a significant amount of people too. A zoom mentoring session can be every bit as powerful as one in person. I have supported people through some amazing personal transformations during lockdowns. Live's have been utterly transformed as I zoomed from my digital studio in the attic!
What advice would you have for someone looking to get into the same area of work or interests?
Start to put your knowledge, expertise and skills to work any way you can. Use them in your day to day work life; start to use them here and there in your personal life too. If you want to learn how to do, what you would like to do well, it takes practice. No matter what you want to do in life, you should have vision boards.
I have helped men and women from all walks of life get their ambition into a focused state with clarity and excitement for their futures included. I even have kids doing vision boards for themselves. Your mind needs clarity and goals that excite the hell of it, and then it can find ways of making those goals and dreams become realities to some degree for you!
What do you feel is the most common reason for people failing or giving up?
Personal change and transformation is hard work! I think people start off well, and then they hit the hard bits, and those hard bits keep coming. Transformations and successes are not a given, and they don't fall into our laps. We need to put a lot of practice into how we allow our thoughts to run and how we let our minds control our emotions at times.
I remember years ago thinking to myself, and surely this shouldn't be this hard before realising it was a perfect case of if something is worth doing, we must decide to do it well! The trick is to stick to your vision like glue, get yourself into an unsinkable mind state and just keeping doing what you know will get you to where you want to go! Do whatever it takes!
Is there a phrase, quote or a saying that you really like?
"What other people think of you is none of your business!" When people absorb that line enough, and it becomes their default thinking, they get back all the energy they had been burning on their fear of being judged and their fear of failing. Fears are keeping people seriously stuck, and many of them have never been taught how to spot their fears at play in their decision making.
What companies, brands, or institutions do you like or do you think are getting it right?
I see so many companies trying so hard, and I think they are all a million times better than they were a decade ago, for example. Still, cultural change and successful brands take time to become and are serious work to create successfully. So for me, it is progress that matters. I think progress has been good over the last decade across most industries, all things considered.
How do you define success, and what lessons have you learned so far that you could share with our audience/readership?
I always asked people to think about whose standards they measure their success with, it's a bit profound, but I see people deciding they have done well in life, and they sit back and start planning retirement. Just because that is what they have seen happening around them does not mean that that was the path laid out for them.
So, many people do not actually ever get to use the talents and skills they were put on this earth to use. It's a depressing thought when you realise many people are conditioned to be happy with a very average life. I want to stir up the spark in my human peers and show them how to live an extraordinary life. Average is easy, but awesome is worth it!