IAM1114- Founder Empowers Women to Achieve Their Objectives

Ms. Howard is an entrepreneurial, Strategic Information Management Professional and Empowerment Mindset Coach with extensive experience. Collaborative communicator continually focused on building relationships and promoting synergy across business units to drive positive change. Ms. Howard quickly and accurately understands the need to lead and empower women to develop the confidence, clarity, and behaviors necessary to achieve their professional and personal objectives. Voices of Encouragement, LLC. strives to empower women. Our organization provides dynamic empowerment coaching to between the ages to women between 18-65+ giving them the essential tools needed to thrive as valued and empowered women. They work on many impactful initiatives to improve the lives of others and are very proud of the work they do. Learn about their exciting initiatives and what they are working on every day in order to promote change.

• CEO Hack: My morning starts the night before
• CEO Nugget: Believe in yourself and protect your dreams
• CEO Defined: Chief Encouragement Officer

Website: https://www.voicesofencouragement.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edna-howard-1486a915/
Instagram: voemetoday
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VOE4ME

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Transcription

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00:12 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share precisely the information you're searching for. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:39 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Edna Howard of Voices of Encouragement and ICE, which stands for Inspire Coaching and Empowerment Coaching and Consulting. Edna, it's great to have you on the show.

00:53 – Edna E Howard

It's amazing to be here. Thank you for the invite. I really, I'm going to enjoy it. I'm sure.

00:58 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. It'll be a great time for sure because you're doing so many phenomenal things. And what I wanted to do is just read a little bit more about Edna so you can hear about some of those awesome things that she's doing. And Edna is an entrepreneurial strategic information management professional and empowerment mindset coach with extensive experience, collaboration, communication, continually focused on building relationships and promoting synergy across business units to provide positive change.

Miss Howard quickly and accurately understands the need to lead and empower women to develop the confidence, clarity, and behaviors necessary to achieve their professional and personal objectives. Voices of Encouragement, LLC strives to empower women. Their organization provides dynamic empowerment coaching to women between the ages of 18 to 65 plus, giving them the essential tools needed to thrive as valued and empowered women. They work on many impactful initiatives to improve the lives of others and are very proud of the work to do.

And she's a fellow podcaster as well too. So I'm super excited to hear about all the exciting things that she's working on. And I love everything about empowerment, how it fosters change, and everything I read about her. I'm reminded of the quote is be the change that you hope to see in the world and a great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:04 – Edna E Howard

Yes, absolutely.

02:05 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here, a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

02:13 – Edna E Howard

Well, awesome. Thank you so much for that. Yeah. I've, I've always had a heart to serve. So I've encouraged others my whole life, but I think it matured as I matured both spiritually and over the years. I have the desire morphed into a passion to serve and help women who need help with their confidence, getting unstuck and just needing some encouragement and empowerment. So God really placed it on my heart to open up my home to provide a safe place for women to share and express themselves. And I think that I started that in 2010 and I was just doing it out of the natural inclination of people who need help. How can we get together and help each other?

You know, whether it was them sharing some issues or experiences in the workplace, and that was a lot of it was experiencing some trauma in the workforce, being struggling with the supervisors, the teams are just struggling in general. A lot of women need to define their purpose and they are trying to transition out of full-time roles into entrepreneurship. And so VLE became a place for women to really come together and encourage, connect, recharge, and help each other just get through life's challenges. So with that, again, it started in my home. So I considered a grassroots organization. It started small and we could begin to grow. And I started BOE.

And because it was clear and evident to me that women needed a safe place to share and express themselves. Just a place to receive some encouragement and coaching and uplifting. I wanted to be able to provide that for both the professional side and the personal side of development. So we created these workshops And I wanted to help women bridge their confidence, their confidence gap, you know, and make connections with other women who may be struggling so they can help each other. So at that time, I was really experiencing turbulence in my own professional challenges and just moving through that myself. And I'm a techie too.

So that was a part of my dilemma I have a technical side and I have a very people-oriented side. And so I found a way to intersect that. And that has been a blessing. But even though I started the OE, I still had my own experience and my own professional challenges. I was blessed, but I was still struggling within the professional space. So as a developer, I developed a tool and it was blessed enough within the organization where I work they identified me, and I was selected by the company's diversity equity and inclusion department as a technology all-star for developing an integrated tool that manages data requests So we call it the demand request management system.

And so I got an opportunity and was honored to go and represent the company at an annual conference. And that was held called the Women of Color in STEM. It was held in Dallas, Texas. And I was so excited and I was so thrilled and I just knew I would be empowered and motivated by the women I would meet there at the conference because, I mean, these women were coming from NASA, they had developed all these amazing tools. And so I was in that space and I was excited. But what I found was something very different from what I had really imagined. The women that I met and was having lunch with and networking with, were well-degraded and super smart, but they lacked confidence.

They struggled with their self-esteem and they had some imposter syndrome going on. So on my way back home on the plane, I just got angry. I was like, why, why are they struggling when it's, they're amazing, right? But internally they were struggling because I knew, I knew somewhere along the way in their career journey, someone had chopped down their work or said something that made them feel they weren't good enough or didn't belong or took this, it just took their spirit. You know, even though they were doing the work that we're going through the motions, it took their spirit. So again, on the flight home, my wheel started turning in my head and I was like, I wanted to elevate the platform that I had already created in my home to make it a formal LLC.

Right. And so how And how that came about is it didn't really happen right away. I mean, it took me about 4 years I was still in my heart I wanted to do it I didn't do it right away. And it took me about 4 years. And so, the company that inspires coaches and empowers women into healthy mindsets, we kicked off our very first workshop in September 2016 and we were able to launch it and we were able to have a formal workshop And I say we because I developed an executive leadership team. I started calling women. I said, look, I need your help. What can we do? We got to get a place. We have to get this structure in place. Women need help. And so people came alongside me.

So I had an amazing executive leadership team to help me flush through ideas, flush through what things were gonna look like. And we came up with workshops like thought management, do it afraid, you're enough, you know, things like that that really speak to the spirit. So that's really where we started. I mean, we started, It started small in my home, then it got bigger in my heart. And then I decided, you know, this is time to do it. And the time was right. And even after 4 years of having the off-and-on workshops in the home and just really thinking, how can we do this bigger?

How can we do this larger? God placed it on my heart and even with the people I picked up the phone and called folks, they were no 1 said no. Everyone said yes and I remember specifically when I called 1 of my executive leadership team members she said to me, I told her the name of what it was Voices of Encouragement. She said I need some encouragement. So it just made me see that it doesn't matter where you are in life. If you're struggling in a space, sometimes you just need somebody to come alongside you and encourage you. So that's where Voices of Encouragement came from.

08:06 – Gresham Harkless

I truly appreciate that. And so I know you touched on a little bit touch how you work with your C. If their anything else that didn't cover their ma like your secret sauce that kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

08:18 – Edna E Howard

Well, I think the secret sauce really is, I call it my superpower. The superpower for me is I just truly believe in people, right? I believe that the power that I have is the power of encouragement and empowerment to really help people live their best lives. So my mission is to help those who like, who really feel like they need to be encouraged and moved in a space. And so that's a gift from me. I mean, it's like God gave me a gift and I can afford it to other people. And I know that some people feel like they're underutilized and I'd like to shed a little light on that and help them kind of get out of that space.

I think what really makes us unique is you know I have a heart again I have a heart to serve. I'm dedicated to helping my clients, we wire their mindset and coach them into sustainable transformation And all of our programs are custom-designed with biblical principles to help women renew their minds, strengthen their faith, and increase their confidence. So, and part of that, when I look at, you know, okay, yes, I'm an empowerment mindset coach. It didn't start off that I was an empowerment mindset coach, but I realized it doesn't matter how far you go or where you are, if your mindset's not right, you could stay stuck, right?

And so I decided that I was gonna get certified as a master mindset coach, which would help. A lot of women help me because you learn all about emotional intelligence and learn all about, you know, cognitive behavior. All of that is important in how we move in life, right? And how we engage. So, Gresh, I'm a wellness professional now who helps people make progress in their lives in order to attain greater fulfillment. And so I'm really dedicated to rewiring that individual's mindset and allowing them to be the very best version of themselves and unlock their full potential.

And through that, we have tools that we offer. We use the BOE platform to empower women, but also to give them some professional personal tools to help them be better. And part of that is we have our quarterly empowerment workshops, which we do. We just had 1 May 29th. It was excellent. We had some amazing speakers come on the platform. Monthly newsletter, we have an empowerment monthly newsletter that we do.

We also have the Women's Heart podcast show, which I have absolutely been doing for 4 years now. And that was something that I kind of stumbled into based on 1 of my coaches, 1 of my speakers who came out to coach the women on the platform and she was a podcast.

And she said, what are you doing between helping, and having these wonderful workshops? How do you keep your community motivated and encouraged? I said, we do newsletters. And she said, have you ever considered podcasts? So I just kind of said, well, yeah, I mean, I heard about it, but I didn't really know a lot about it. So she helped me get started there. And then from there, we kept the podcast show and also have something called the Positive Thinkers Club, which are motivational texts that go out every single morning at 630 a.m. For those who get up early and those who need inspiration in the morning.

And so we have about 50 women signed up for that and that's a text chain that goes out and it's automated so they get something amazing in their text every morning to get the day started and stay positive. And then lastly, we have DOE Connect, which really is a virtual networking platform where I've connected women through email introductions. And it's a great way for them to network. And then also I have inspirational books. I'm an inspirational author.

So I have 2 books I've published and you can find them on Amazon. But 1 is called Running Your Race, a devotional journal for first-year college students that was written from my heart to my daughter's heart. And I expanded on it.

And now I've, you know, put it out there for all college students. And then the second 1 is faith at work. And it's really for anyone who is in the workspace and needs some encouragement and empowerment. It's devotionals. It's a small devotional every week that you get. It's also power quotes to keep you motivated and also scripture. So really again, my mission is really to supercharge women's confidence cultivate a positive mindset, and help them make a mental shift.

12:11 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

12:20 – Edna E Howard

My morning starts the night before. I write down what matters most list, right? And because I'm a parallelpreneur and I work full time as a strategic information management professional, that's 1 side of it. The other side of it is I manage voices of encouragement and ICE coaching and consulting during my free time, which is in the evening time and on weekends. And so I have to be very organized. And so the night before I write down what I'm gonna do for my full time, right? And then what I'm going to do for VOE and ICE that day. So it's split, but what matters most is this has helped me tremendously stay organized.

12:56 – Gresham Harkless

I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you hopped into a time machine you might tell your younger business self.

13:06 – Edna E Howard

If I hopped into a time machine that's awesome I like that 1. Well from a mindset coaching perspective, I would say believe in yourself and don't worry about what other people think right Because the world is designed in such a way that it will take away your shine if you let it. And sometimes people are positioned to challenge you with your dreams. And so you have to be very, very protective of your dream in terms of who you're sharing your dream with and ensuring that you believe in it enough so you can move in that space.

13:33 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which you might've already touched on this a little bit. It's the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Edna, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:44 – Edna E Howard

CEO for me and this is what the voice of encouragement is officer. And so I believe is to create an environment to be empowered. So a CEO is for them to be to work and issues so they can be and be great and create a legacy through porn into others. That's really what CEO means to me.

14:10 – Gresham Harkless

And I truly appreciate that definition and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

14:23 – Edna E Howard

Well, thank you for that. I think that, you know, we touched on everything. I mean, just staying positive, staying plugged in, staying charged up every day and definitely getting a routine because your habits create your discipline, right? So get the right habits in place so that you can move into a space. And whether you're working full-time or part-time as an entrepreneur or full-time as an entrepreneur, you have to have some systems in place.

So I encourage that as much as possible. And the way you can get in touch with us to develop those systems, if you don't have those systems in place and you wanna learn more about Voices of Encouragement, then please reach out to us.

And We have 2 websites. The first 1 is www.voicesofencouragement.com. Very easy. And the other is the coaching site, which is www.beyondboeworkshop.com. Because what that does is it takes us beyond the workshop and it's one-on-one coaching, it's group coaching and it's a better way to connect with other women as well.

My email is boemetoday at gmail.com and you can reach me at 571-723-7748 if you'd like to be part of the Positive Thinkers Club, we can add you to that text. And then also lastly, I'd like to say as Coach Edna, we empower minds and we transform lives and we're looking for women who want to be transformed.

15:46 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Thank you so much again, and we will have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can follow up with you. But I love that empowerment word, as I mentioned in the very beginning because I think it creates that kind of co-creation of awesomeness that I talked about when we first hopped on. I think when we start to do that and we start to lean into that, and I appreciate you providing so many tools for that to happen, then again, we can make such a dent in the world. So appreciate you for being that change and helping so many people do that as well too. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of

16:14 – Outro