Michele Christensen 0:06
Hello! Welcome to Sex. Love. Power. I'm your host, Michele Lisenbury Christensen. I'm a relationship and sex coach who has worked for 24 years with executives and business founders. And by popular demand, I've been focused on their intimate relationships for the past a dozen or so years now. As they sought my coaching to push the envelope on how good they could have it in life and in love and in sex. My extraordinary high performance clients have blessed me with a wealth of knowledge about how to create relationships that aren't just successful, but are truly great.
Michele Christensen 0:38
This podcast is where I can be in the conversations about love and sex that help every listener create those same world class results in their relationships. I'm so glad you're here. And today is kind of a special episode, because it's a retrospective. This is your peek behind the scenes of the first six months of Sex. Love. Power. My last episode was Episode 26. And I didn't realize until after I had recorded it that that means I've been doing this for half a year. And I was talking with a friend about it and she said, "I want to hear all about that. I want to hear about your process. I want to hear what you've learned. And I don't even know how you set up a podcast or what I was involved. So tell us about it."
Michele Christensen 1:20
So I thought I would. So today's episode is for you if you're curious about how I launched the podcast... how I think about it. I'm going to share the story of how I came to name it Sex. Love. Power. and what it was like for me to have sex be the first name of my podcast and some of the things that I was thinking about before that. I'll share a little bit about the tools I use, how my process for creating an episode goes, the whole team that's behind getting the episode out into the world and getting you that detailed transcript so that you can really absorb what I'm teaching, if you want, and what tools we use to get that done. I'll talk about why I don't interview other experts right now. And where we're going next. So let's jump in.
Michele Christensen 2:05
The podcast has been a dream of mine since I was a little girl, six, seven years old. I would climb up on the bathroom counter and we had those bifold trifold, two hinges, three hinges; three doors, I could fold two of the doors in on my face. And when you have three mirrors folded in on you, it creates this echo effect with the reflections. So there's hundreds of replications of the same reflection. So I had this large audience going off into the distance, all of my face. And I would talk for hours to myself and mixed together you know, like baby lotion and talcum powder, and put them on a cotton ball and dab them on my face. And when infomercials came out later, I was like I invented the infomercial years ago when I would do infomercials with my homemade potions and creams as a little girl. And now I see it as like Yep, I was podcasting way back then. Loved the sound of my own voice, always dreamt of being able to teach people something that was helpful for me. Whether that was you know, baby oil on my nose, or today the things that I discover by staying married for 20 years, without sacrificing the aliveness and pleasure that I really yearn for, to the stability of a long term relationship.
Michele Christensen 3:22
So that was really the very early genesis of the podcast. And more recently, I was at a business conference and was challenged by a friend there to "just start it already". It was on a short list of things that I wanted to do in my business, that I would do if I had time, that if I knew I could not fail, would be really inspiring to me. And I thought I would launch a relationship podcast for powerful women. And my friend said, "do it". That's the thing I dare you to do. And she invited me to get it done within 30 days or something. And that was in, I think, October or November of 2019. And I didn't get it started until the following August. But that's still pretty good. And considering everything that happened in the interim, I'm really proud that I did it.
Michele Christensen 4:15
And I'll say that my process since then has definitely had some bumps in the road. I had the goal to get out ahead. And certainly, you'll get advice. If you're starting a podcast, there's a lot of advice out there that says get a reserve batch produced, do things so that you're not under the gun every week to produce the podcast. And yeah, that'd be nice. And I'm still not there. And there have been times when I beat myself up about that, about making them just in time and about the pressure that that puts on me and my team sometimes to get everything out by Thursday when we want it to and there were definitely times around New Years where we didn't. We didn't get it out on time.
Michele Christensen 4:55
But really I've produced 26 episodes. Every week we've been doing them, it's been consistent. And as I really look at that, the only reasonable response is pride and delight and gratitude for the wonderful support that I've had and the wonderful response that the podcast has gotten. We're over 2500 downloads now. And that's not huge numbers as podcasts go. But honestly, the way that my clients respond, just my clients respond to each episode would be worth it, because it gives me a chance each week to do a succinct, yet substantive dive into a particular topic or particular conversation that we need to have. And I'm so thankful for that opportunity to do that teaching, you know. In a call with a client, I want to respond to them, I want to hear them, I want them to have space to talk and I want to get to the actionable. But a lot of times there is a whole set of larger ideas, perspectives on themselves, steps to take, there's a whole piece of education that I want to be able to give. And the podcast is a place where I can do that. And of course, I expand even further on the things that I talked about in the podcast, inside my programs.
Michele Christensen 6:13
And through the years, I have created a great many programs actually from Sexy Wise now, which is about really trusting your pussy and letting her lead you and the wisdom that she has, to Orgasm School, which is about expanding pleasure. And coming from no pun intended, a pleasure orientation in your life, to Penetration School, which is to teach good guys how to really handle women, whether that's a woman who's upset, a woman who's upset with you, in particular, or a woman who you want to really give an experience of being held and cared for, to a powerful date, experience. And on upward in intensity to erotically really handling her and being a divine masculine presence in the bedroom. And then I've got the counterpart to that one is, is Receiving School. And that's really helping.
Michele Christensen 7:09
Now, penetration power and receiving power are things that women and men can both embrace that entire skill set. But I generally start with people who are female identified on receiving and male identified on penetrating, because those are the things they tend to want to strengthen coming in but as we master those skill sets, they get more. So I digress. I love taking little pieces out of all of that training, and being able to bring it for free to a wider audience. And that's the really delightful thing for me about the podcast. It's also been showing itself to be a place where I can take what's up right now with several of my clients, or that I've seen over the years, but it's up with a particular client now and deliver a little piece of just in time explanation that I know is relevant for lots of people. So a lot of times clients will say like, it feels like you made that just for me, and I say Yeah, I did. But you among other people. And that's really fun. So I'm really excited about that going forward to continue to do that. And I've got some really cool topics coming up. We're going to talk about men sexual trauma, we're going to talk about handling, we're going to talk about defensiveness, and going one up one down, kind of feeling like we have to get our partner's approval or feeling like they have to get ours and withholding our approval from them. And how all of that plays out. We're going to talk about libido and where our libido goes to sleep and how that can sometimes be sort of a spiritual wake up call. How our libido's disappearance can be the canary in the mineshaft telling us about something else we need to pay attention to. And so that holistic way of looking at desire. So, I mean, I'm lucky, you know, pinch me, this is what I get to talk about all day.
Michele Christensen 9:03
But I also want to share, as we're talking about the process of launching this podcast for me, you know, I think it looks from the description like I'm loud and proud about sex and love and power. But the truth is, I started with a survey to my community asking, okay, should I call this leading in love or leaders in love? And some people liked one and other people liked the other one and what I liked about that whole concept was that I know that my audience of any gender, my perfect people are powerful, they're ambitious, they go for great, not just good in every area of their lives. They are leaders, even if they don't have a leadership role, per se. They're people who make stuff happen and have a lot of active masculine power but also have a lot of active feminine or intuitive power. Their conscious self worth reflective, self aware people, they've done other therapy coaching, personal growth stuff. This is not their first rodeo in terms of growing and looking at themselves.
Michele Christensen 10:10
And so all of that I was trying to encapsulate in the phrase leader, and then leading in love or leaders in love. It's like, yeah, you're a leader. And then what are the unique challenges of that in terms of relationship? What are the things that you need to support having a great relationship that are kind of different than generic relationship advice, because that's really what I bring. And that's what clients have always told me is like, we've been to the Gottman workshops, or we've done Stan Tatkins work or, you know, Sue Johnson. There's lots of great stuff out there but a lot of times, it doesn't acknowledge some of the power stuff that comes with high income, or one person having a really big job, or both of you having really big jobs. A lot of times the relationship stuff doesn't adequately address invisible labor. Seldom Is there someone who has a lot on the ball with regard to sexuality and also with regard to the overall relationship. It's usually like one or the other. There's good relationship stuff, but not great sexual stuff at the same time. So I'm marrying all those things. And I wanted it to kind of talk about that.
Michele Christensen 11:17
But what I saw when I said, Okay, leaders in love or leading in Love is like, wow, everybody's response to those whether they like them or didn't like them. They weren't getting it, which of course, is my problem, right? It's, that's my mistake is Oh, these names don't actually convey what I'm wanting to talk about. So that was a really good learning for me. And I think it's good advice that I would give anyone now who's trying to name anything to share with other people is, don't name it for yourself. Let your audience name it. And that's really what I did is I was asking other people about it. And what they were saying back to me when I could clarify, well, no, this is what it's really about this, they just gave me the really simple language, like, What's about love and sex and power. And so that's what I was going to call it was love, sex and power.
Michele Christensen 12:08
But then, my friend Jessica, who actually has been a guest on several episodes came in and she said, "Nah you got to lead with sex, you got to put the sex first. It's just punchier. It reads more smoothly. Sex, love power." So I named it that. And I gotta be honest, I never asked to be a sex expert. And I still am really uncomfortable in some ways with that piece. I'm not uncomfortable talking about sex. I love talking about sex with people. It's a huge privilege to have people let me into that really intimate part of their lives. And sex is tremendously nourishing for me that arena of pleasure, of sensuality, of imagination, I think of it as. I think that creating an erotic space is a creative act. And for people like me, like you with really busy lives, really cognitively driven lives, we can get so disembodied. We can get so disconnected from each other, We can get so disconnected from ourselves and we can get so divorced from the divine, that sexuality is to me the royal road back to all of those things.
Michele Christensen 13:13
And it's a privilege to me to get to facilitate that journey for people. That said, the notion of helping people with their sexuality commercially, everything a professional sexual helper puts me into this industry that I find really unsavory. I don't want to be confused with pornography, or with ego driven schmaltzy bound Chicka Wow, wow, you know, kind of stuff. And also, a lot of my colleagues who I love and whose work really kind of turns me on. The presentation that they have is also so like, overtly sexy in this way, that's kind of stereotypical, you know, Shakti and like, you know, bracelet around your upper arm and move to Bali and there's this exoticness to it that is so foreign to my life and to my clients lives, that I don't want people to think that I'm that. But of course, you can't know me at all & think that I'm that.
Michele Christensen 14:14
I'm more like this sexpert next door. I'm a mom and my Dansko's and my jeans and skinny jeans for life. Okay? I don't care what the youngsters say, I love some jeggings. And my casual, not overtly sexy approach is a stand for everyone's sexiness. We are all erotic creatures. You are worthy of toe curling pleasure and of a life that is drenched in beauty, sensuality and spirituality. You get to have a soulful, high sensation, delightful, surprising, magical existence. I want that for you. I have cultivated that for myself amid being a homeschooling mom, being a business owner, being a householder here, doing the laundry and sweeping the steps, we can have this and that's what I stand for. We don't have to throw out our marriage, our motherhood, our steadiness to have the wildness that we crave.
Michele Christensen 15:19
And I think that question of, "Can I have the things I'm devoted to, and my erotic fulfillment in the same existence?" That's the question that this podcast seeks to keep us engaged in. That's the conversation, how do we do that. And it's not something where I'm standing across the finish line saying, "These are the steps." I'm saying, I've learned a whole lot about this. And my life is a living laboratory for this. And my work with my clients is a living laboratory for this. And I invite you into that conversation.
Michele Christensen 15:52
So that's what the podcast has become for me. And it's been such a growth process, because it's, I've had to put myself out there, I've had to let the word sex be attached to my name in an open way. It's not just relationships. Yeah, it's sex straight up. That's true. And that's still kind of blushy for me, for the reasons I just named. But really, I'm proud too because this is something that world needs, I have my shoulder to a worthy wheel. And it really feels divinely guided for me. It's a response to what people needed from me. And so I'm not pursuing it out of ego or thinking I'm the thing. I'm super sexy or know, what sexy is for you. It's more that I'm a stand for Yeah, you're a normal person with a normal body that's actually aging through the years, and you're sexy, and you get to fully enjoy and inhabit that. So that's been a lot of fun for me.
Michele Christensen 16:49
And I promised I would answer why I don't interview other experts right now. And I love podcasts with interviews on them, I love to listen to them and I have done a ton of interview interviewing through the years, I've interviewed Byron Katie, and Alan Cohen, who's one of my favorite teachers, and David Allen, and lots of cool big name people. And I'm a great interviewer. But there are some ideas that I'm not hearing in other places that I really want to put out first. And that's why in this first season, it's mostly just me. And there have been a few conversations with friends, and there'll be a few more, but it's really these conversations that I think we need to be having, not the messages of other experts.
Michele Christensen 17:32
So that's where we're headed for right now. And I'm going to wrap up there. I welcome any questions that you have. But it's my daughter's PE time right now. So I have to go do third grade, I get to go do third grade, gym. You can tell I'm a little bit nervous about it. That is why I said have to because sometimes it hurts, I get sore afterwards. You know, a little burpee never never heard anyone permanently. So I'm going to dive in and be with her in that. And I'm so grateful for the opportunity to have her be at school, here at home and get to be part of different parts of her day.
Michele Christensen 18:11
So as this podcast continues into its second six months of existence, and on through the years after that, I really want you to be a part of the community because the community behind the podcast is the beating heart of what it's all about.
Michele Christensen 18:26
The Conscious Couples Circle is at society.lisenbury.com. And I want to hear your questions. I want to know what episodes you want to hear in the future. I want to know your reactions to past episodes. So please come on over there. The link is society.lisenbury.com, and you'll see the link in the show notes at lisenbury.com/episode/027. Or any episode really, it's in all of them.
Michele Christensen 18:53
And as always, I would love if you would leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't subscribed, then you're not getting reminders of upcoming episodes. So please do subscribe in the Apple podcast or wherever you listen so that you always get notifications of the new episodes.
Michele Christensen 19:14
I'm so grateful for the support and encouragement that I've gotten for the podcast, and your beautiful questions and responses and engagement. And I cannot wait to see what's next for all of us together with Sex. Love. Power. I'm Michele Lisenbury Christensen. I'll be back here next Thursday with the next episode. And until then...May the light within you illuminate the world around you.