Female Disruptors: Deepshikha Sairam of Socialique Group On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Ask the question “what makes you come alive?” This question was posed to me by my Spiritual Mentor and it stumped me for days. We are so used to going through the motions of the day, following the herd and never questioning if the things we are doing in our life are making us come alive or leaving us dead and unfulfilled from the inside.
I coach a lot of women who chose an industry or a business niche because it was the “cool one” or they thought it’ll make them the most money. After years of long hours and sucky clients, they are still unable to thrive because it doesn’t make them come alive.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Deepshikha Sairam.
Deepshikha Sairam, is a Spiritual Business Mentor who helps thriving CEO’s leverage their energetic gifts for supersized results.
In addition to mentoring her clients to generate $30K+ a month with custom curated marketing strategies and energetic practices, Deepshikha is the creator and host of the wildly popular podcast, How to Womxn: Buck the System. Live your Truth.
She has been featured in Entrepreneur, Tiny Buddha, Elephant Journal, Self Magazine and the award winning Marie TV.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Before I started my business, I was a stay at home mom to two boys under the age of 5. I loved being a mom, but I was beginning to feel a lack of self identity. Moreover, I wanted to financially contribute towards my family.
I knew that I had more to give to the world, I just didn’t know what it was. While I was very satisfied with my choice to leave my job and take care of my family, I did want to do something for myself too.
This was a tough choice for me. Born and raised in India, I had seen first hand how the women in my family had sacrificed their dreams in order to raise a family, even though they were multi-talented. It seemed to me that I only had two choices, to be a stay-at-home mom or to leave my kids to a nanny and go back to a corporate role. Both these choices were not acceptable to me.
I also had this strong urge to carve my own identity. I used to joke with my friends that I wanted the world to know me by my name and not just “mom.”
I casually reached out to a friend of mine who had an Online Business and asked her if I could help her with social media marketing. I loved writing and I really thought I could help market her business and boost sales by creating engaging content & building a community for her. She said yes, and that’s how I got started!
I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I was good at it!
A few years in, and after continuous self exploration and experimentation, I saw that when spiritual and energetic practices are combined with right marketing strategies, women thrive as business owners. They start to create a momentum of impact and legacy that makes them money but most importantly gives them an opportunity to create joyful lives.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
I am disrupting the way Online Businesses are run with scarcity based marketing and a culture where hustle, grind and “crushing it” is normalized.
We live in a 3000 years old Patriarchal Culture that rewards hustle, hard work & grind and discourages rest, slowing down and decision making from our intuition.
We are a culture of talking heads who are only driven by milestones and are taught from a very early age to ignore our emotions and move on to the next level or milestone.
In short, we have been trained to live and work only from our Masculine Energy.
Masculine Energy is Doing, Thinking, Analyzing, Giving
Feminine Energy is Feeling, Expressing, Intuiting, Receiving
To be clear, I am referring to the energy of these words and not in terms of gender and sexuality. We all have these energies inside of us.
For many centuries now, Masculine has led, front and center. Feminine on the other hand has been suppressed. We’ve been cut off from our intuition, from feeling, from expressing. The result is a growing number of people who are burnt out, overwhelmed, depressed and carrying trauma.
This affects everyone but more so women, since their rights to talk, express, work, own a business were suppressed for a long time. In spite of doing what the society asks them to do i.e, work hard, push, grind ; women inherently feel unworthy, not good enough and are always asking themselves “what’s wrong with me?”
One of my favorite quotes from the book Patriarchy Stress Disorder: The Invisible Inner Barrier to Women’s Happiness and Fulfillment by Dr. Valerie Rein is “you’re a woman and therefore something’s wrong with you, but not to worry — we have a pill, a corset and foot binding to fix that.”
My work disrupts this status quo in a one-two punch.
First, there’s nothing wrong with you as a woman. You don’t need to be fixed because you’re not broken and you don’t have to become a version of the latest Instagram Influencer. Instead we unbecome. We shed the layers of patriarchal conditioning so that we can truly become who we always were. When women reclaim their power and find their strengths, they become unstoppable in business or otherwise.
Second, we don’t have to burn ourselves out in pursuit of our goals. We can marry the feminine energy of being and intuition with the masculine energy of analyzing and doing for a business that feels aligned and grows your spiritual bank account as well as your business bank account. We do that by combining energetic practices such as EFT, Chakra balancing, meditation etc. with custom curated tactical marketing strategies.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
It’s funny now but at that time it certainly wasn’t. 3 years ago, I launched my first online course. Instead of giving access to the course to the people who had bought it, I sent an email to my entire list & gave them access for FREE!! It was a logistical nightmare to reverse it. Thankfully I had 1000 people on my list and not 10,000.
The first lesson I learned is to always check and recheck who the email is going to. But, of course I learned that lesson by making the same mistake multiple times.
The second time, it didn’t hurt that much. By the third time, it was actually funny.
The most important lesson though is that we can’t do it all by ourselves. Creating, marketing, launching and delivering a course is a lot of work. As much as we’ve been conditioned to DIY and not ask for support, it’s like digging your own grave. No one should do it on their own, and asking for support is not weakness, in fact it’s the best thing we can do for ourselves and our business. So, since then I hired someone who was much more capable than me in all things technology.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Marie Forleo had a huge impact on me and how I run my business. She has shown me that even if you are multi-passionate, you can still find a way to combine all your passions. And as long as you stay truly aligned to your purpose and work towards it, you will create success for yourself.
Another mentor, Laura Belgray has taught me how to write email and copy that gets opened and read! She also inspires me to be unapologetically myself.
Both these women, just by being themselves, have shown me that I too can have a successful business on my terms.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
When an industry, a culture or a system is not serving everyone or ignoring the needs or existence of a section of a society, it needs to be taken down.
Taking the example of the Online Business Industry where “crushing it” and sleeping 3 hrs a day has been the norm, it’s important to disrupt it because more and more people are buying into the lie of a million dollar utopian business that you run from a beach in Bali.
People believe that if they just had the secret or worked a little bit more harder and slept a little bit less, they too can achieve the “passive income” lifestyle.
The truth is, business is hard but working harder doesn’t necessarily get you to the Bali Beach. You have to be willing to take a lot of blows, face a lot of failures and still come back at it with consistent effort. You also need to question a lot of your beliefs about working hard, money and self worth to sustain success.
What’s not positive is being disruptive just for the heck of it. By all means refine and change the systems but if something has stood the test of time in a positive way, let’s not throw the baby with the bath water.
For example; Persuasion Principles. While I 100% agree that marketers have misused persuasion principles unethically to lure more customers and advance sales, we don’t have to reject everything about persuasion.
Educate yourself on how you may be causing harm or using these principles unethically and then do better.
For example; a very common way to misuse the Scarcity persuasion principle is to say “We have only 3 spots left” in an Online Course or a Coaching Program, when it’s actually not true.
The right thing to ask yourself here is “is this true?” If not, don’t use it just to increase sales.
Totally ignoring all that we know about Consumer Behavior and disrupting is probably not going to do anyone good.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
First, ten. This advice from Seth Godin is GOLD in marketing. It’s so counterintuitive to the current culture where the emphasis is on more audience, more followers. Seth instead says that the secret to marketing is to find ten people. Ten people who respect you, trust you, need you, listen to you. If these ten people love what you have to sell, they’ll each find you ten more people or hundreds or thousands. Your idea grows and your business grows.
For me this has been like a commandment to live by. I am always in search of my ten people. I don’t care about likes, comments and followers. I find those ten people and if they love what I have to sell, great! If they don’t, I start over.
Joining the Conversation. This one came from my book coach, Emily Maher. In my moment of self doubt, I said to her “who am I to write a book that talks about self worth, courage and vulnerability?” That’s Brené Brown’s world. She has already done it.
She said to me something very interesting which I always try to remember everytime Impostor Syndrome creeps us “It may all have been done before. It’s not about being the first one to write about an idea. Your book is joining the conversation that’s already been going on. By writing this book, you’ll become part of the conversation.”
That was music to my ears because what an honor it is to join a conversation with legends such as Brené Brown with Courage or David Oglivy with Advertising or Anthony Bourdain with food.
Ask the question “what makes you come alive?” This question was posed to me by my Spiritual Mentor and it stumped me for days. We are so used to going through the motions of the day, following the herd and never questioning if the things we are doing in our life are making us come alive or leaving us dead and unfulfilled from the inside.
I coach a lot of women who chose an industry or a business niche because it was the “cool one” or they thought it’ll make them the most money. After years of long hours and sucky clients, they are still unable to thrive because it doesn’t make them come alive.
When you ask this question and then follow the answers, your life changes for the better. The level of joy and fulfillment is unparalleled.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
I am not even close to being done. I am changing Culture here. I am asking women to think differently and do business differently. I am creating a new paradigm of business where you don’t try to fit yourself in with the latest marketing strategy. Instead, we are coming back home to ourselves to become a whole woman and then we create our business from there.
It’s a whole different way. We’ve never combined spirituality with marketing this way before. We are leading with intuition, rejecting the masculine “hustle and grind” way of working and building businesses that are rooted in self worth.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
People usually don’t like change and when it’s coming from a woman, it’s even harder for people to accept. Women are deemed as “difficult” or their opinion can be totally disregarded. This is another form of Patriarchal Conditioning.
Mansplaining, being called out or cancelled are all challenges that women have faced for a long time when changing or questioning cultures or norms. It’s frustrating but we have to remember what we are up against.
The Women’s Business Ownership Act came into law in 1988. That wasn’t very long ago! We are changing cultures and it takes time. There have been thousands of women who’ve gone before us that have made it possible for us to vote, get a business loan or even write an article like this without getting lynched.
We are doing this for ourselves, but we are also doing it for the generations to come.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
I’d never forget the day I read You are a Badass by Jen Sincero. It was very early on in my business and I had started to realise that it’s going to take more than just business and marketing strategy to have the kind of business that I was dreaming of. After reading her book, I felt a boulder lift from my shoulders and the self doubt dissipate. I did believe that I am indeed a badass and fully supported spiritually to bring my ideas to life
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Break out of the box you are trying so hard to fit in. People (especially women) inherently feel that they aren’t good enough — both in their personal and business lives. So they either overcompensate by trying to please everyone or they shrink and play small. Neither is good. If life was an ice cream shop, you’d be Vanilla.
Plain, made for the masses. But we aren’t Vanilla. Someone is full of rainbow sprinkles, another is nutty and I am chocolate with a dash of chili. When we embrace being quirky, imperfect and multi-passionate, there’s no need to fit in a box or be Vanilla.
Imagine how great it would feel to add every element of our personality to our lives and business.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
This quote inspires me and reminds me of the fact that the only thing I really have control over is my attitude and what I do with myself. I can’t change the past and I cannot control the future so at any given moment, I have a choice to make — how do I make the most of it?
How can our readers follow you online?
INSTAGRAM @deepshikhasairam
FACEBOOK @deepshikhasairam
LINKEDIN @deepshikhasairam
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Female Disruptors: Deepshikha Sairam of Socialique Group On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.