029: A sobering fear – Lily Troupe
In this episode:
In this episode of The Fearless Females Podcast your host Tegan Mathews interviews Lily Troupe who shares:
- How unhealthy relationships led her to alcoholism
- How the fear of loss turned her sober
- Her resilience in bringing up three children alone
- How changing her stinking thinking led to more opportunities in her life
Tegan’s Take Aways:
- Choose to see yourself as a queen and you DO deserve to be treated like a queen by your man
- The energy you put out is what you attract back so if you are worrying about money then that’s not the way to attract more wealth into your life, instead, focus on what little you do have and be grateful for that and then more will come
- Get rid of your stinking thinking – as in your negative thoughts and flip them to positive ones
- If you give power to your fears then you can’t manifest the energy to attract positive things into your life
- We are all one race – the human race!
About Lily Troupe
I’m a single mother of three, a grandma of one little girl, an entrepreneur, network marketing professional, coach, voice actor, extras actor and I run an Airbnb beautification specialist business.
Contact Lily Troupe
Lily Troupe – thought leader
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Show Notes: Episode 029: A sobering fear– Lily Troupe
Lily Troupe’s Fearless Story
My journey is an unusual one but some people may find some commonalities in their journey’s. My background is Polish/German family and I began my early adult years as a married woman to a Croatian man and it wasn’t the best marriage.
It was a very challenging marriage I guess because there were a lot of things that he hadn’t dealt with from his upbringing and that impacted our relationship tremendously. It was through domestic violence that he expressed his anger.
It wasn’t a constant, every day beating, it was just when he was extremely frustrated he would take things out on me. He would slap me, verbally abuse me and emotionally and spiritually. He was the type of person that if we did have an argument, he would take off.
Sometimes I wouldn’t see him for a day and sometimes it would be three or four days. I would continually take him back and I would forgive him and we would forgive each other. I always believe there are two sides to every story and not every physical altercation was my fault and the majority of them weren’t because of his upbringing and the way he handled things. But occasionally I was responsible for the argument.
This behaviour continued and we had children and I started to drink. As the violence escalated I felt I had to bury myself into something and that’s when I reached out for alcohol. It was an attempt to numb my pain but my pain increased and my problem with alcohol increased.
Eventually our marriage broke down and he went his separate way. He found someone else and actually did me a favour and left me with out two kids. It was approximately twelve months after that when I met my second husband.
My second husband was a naval officer in the US navy. He was a very handsome man and very hard working but little did I know that he had a problem which was related to his childhood. He was molested as a child and he then couldn’t have a normal sexual relationship.
He found that the only way he could feel good about himself, important or feel stronger was to have extra marital affairs. He was also arrested for sexually assaulting an 89-year-old woman which then led to him being deported and leaving me with our five-month old baby which I was still breast feeding.
I went back to work though, because I needed to put food on the table. He left me with bills, he left me with outstanding accounts on various things so I just had to take the reigns and pull myself back together and go back to work.
When I went back to work I was still breast feeding and I would take my pump with me and I would express during the times I needed to. My work was very understanding and I would keep it in the fridge, take it back home and my mother would feed my youngest and that was it.
Three years later I went back to see him but things were not the same so a few years after that we decided to get a divorce and life went on. Before he left and was jailed for what he did my son had told him he had found some bottles hidden in the linen cupboard where I used to keep some of my ‘stash’.
I had actually stopped drinking after my first marriage ended but had started again after my father died. Anyway, he had given me an ultimatum and said if I didn’t stop drinking he would take our youngest back to the States with him and take your older two and return them to their father.
He said if I didn’t go to AA, that was what was going to happen. That just broke me and I was so upset and I knew I had a problem. I thought I could control it. I was a ‘functioning’ alcoholic. But my life was falling apart around me. He actually saved my life by doing that.
That was my last drink and I continued to be strong for the kids and I have been seventeen years sober.
How did you turn it around?
My parents were my rock. My dad had passed away not long into my second marriage but my mother had a relationship with a neighbour who lived a few streets away. They were both part of the Polish community and they were very supportive to each other and he became like a grandfather to my kids.
I was working and at one point I was working three jobs which were eighteen hour days so I relied on them tremendously and they were my rock. But some days, I just wanted to stay in bed and I didn’t want to wake up. It’s taken those seventeen years for me to realise the amount of stuff I did do on my own. Then my mum passed away in 2008 and my youngest was nine then.
My eldest son and daughter would look after my youngest and they are really good kids and she is seventeen now which is amazing. So I just kept going. Yes, I had my dark days and contemplated suicide but then I thought, “Who is going to look after them if I’m gone?”
I was adopted. I lost my German mother two weeks after I was born so when I talk of my mum I am talking of my adopted mother but she was the only mum I knew and my dad because I was so young when I was adopted. They were my true parents.
What have you done career wise since then?
After my second husband was deported I was working in a call centre for an electricity company in Canberra which is where I am originally from. My contract ended and I was thinking, “What do I want to do now?”
I didn’t want to go back to call centre work and I didn’t want to go back to public service which is what Canberra is renowned for. I had no idea about business so I thought I would go to university. I had always had a recurring dream about sitting for exams and wondered what that was about.
Low and behold I think it was a hint from my dreams to go back to school. So I went back to the University of Canberra to study information technology but my head wasn’t…me and numbers just aren’t right for each other.
So I moved onto psychology but there were still a lot of statistics in that and I thought, “Can’t I get away from numbers?” So I pursued social work and finished my degree with the Australian Catholic University. I loved the work and was a practicing social worker for five years working with geriatric patients.
When I moved to Melbourne I continued with that work but the politics and the burocracy, it was really tough. To see people put into nursing homes because of having a stroke in their thirties and forties was really tough. It just didn’t sit with me right.
After that I did the Mindset Coaching course with a group here in St.Kilda Melbourne and then I got into network marketing and my personal development just kept on going. I was learning so much about myself and I was doing courses on NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) which is changing your mindset and your limiting beliefs.
A door started opening and I started thinking, “How can I use this to help other people?” At the time my fitness was out of this world because the company I was network marketing for was a nutritional based company and their products were just absolutely amazing. I had fantastic energy and I was just feeling so good.
I had done body building back in Canberra so I started body building again and I noticed a lot of women who would look in the mirror and say, “Well I’m looking ok, I’m feeling good” but then, like my pattern had been, they would re-lapse. They would go back into their stinking thinking and stop their activity and pack the weight back on.
So I thought it would be really good to work with women who needed support with that. So I approached a few gyms to see if I could do mindset coaching with some of their clients if I put in the effort and advertised. I didn’t get a lot of enthusiasm for it but I kept on going and I kept on learning and working on myself.
I continued with the health company that I am still with. I really wanted to be doing coaching but that takes a bit of time to develop clientele so in the meantime, to get the funds to grow my business, I started working with Airbnb’s and servicing the Airbnb properties. That was a lot of fun and I’m still doing it.
So there are a few different enterprises/work that I’m doing but it’s a lot of fun and I get to do things my way and in my time which is great.
Most Memorable Moment
It’s nothing related to what we are talking about now, it was when I went on a missions trip to Uganda in 2009, a year after mum passed away. I was singing with the church band and I had been asked by the church leader to sing a song.
There were 4000 people in the crowd and I sang this song and the crowd was just praising God and it was an amazing, overwhelming vision to see this sea of faces in awe. They might have been in awe of me singing out of tune, this white lady singing up there on stage ha ha ha.
But they had nothing and they were just there. The kids were playing in the dirt and it was just an amazing experience I will never forget. Coming home from East Africa…it took me a while to re-adjust. It was a culture shock.
What was the scariest moment for you?
I think the scariest moment for me was when my second husband said to me, “If you do not give up drinking and make an appointment to see someone from AA today, I am taking our little girl and you will never see her again.”
I was scared when my first husband would hit me and I didn’t know whether I would end up with teeth on the floor but that was a physical thing. This really shook me and made me wake up to myself and I remember thinking, “What am I doing with my life? How can I continue like this.”
My husband wanted to return to the US with our daughter and she meant the world to me. Sometimes fear can serve a purpose to make you step up to do what you want to do.
What are you passionate about today?
My biggest passion right now is building a movement of women who can see where they are in their lives right now, being stuck where they are, whether that is in an abusive relationship, or an unsatisfying job role, personal relationships or just being overwhelmed and seeing those women come into my movement and say, “I’m not happy, I want to change and I need your help”.
This is my why! The reason I do what I do is because I don’t want to continue to see women who are dissatisfied with their lives like I was. My life was so disrupted. People like to use the word dysfunctional but my life was disrupted by the events, my thoughts and my reaction to what was going on around me, so my life was disrupted.
There are a lot of people, men included, that are in a disrupted lifestyle, relationship, or present moment. So that is my passion now, is to help women to see that they are queens and deserve to be treated like queens which is why my movement is called, “The Gathering of Queens”. We are to be respected and we also give back and respect other people as well.
What is something in your future plan that scares you?
I don’t think anything really scares me. I think I’ve seen enough and I’ve felt enough and I’m an empath so I take on other people’s pain, that nothing really scares me anymore. I used to not know whether I could pay a bill or put food on the table and I used to worry, constantly like, “What am I going to do?” “What am I going to do?” and when I started the self-development I realised that the energy you put out is what you attract back.
Thinking about lack, and that was what I was attracting into my life so I don’t fear anything because if I fear then I am giving power to that fear and I can’t manifest the energy to attract positive things into my life. I used to think small but now I think big so the world is my oyster!
Five Fast Fun Fearless Facts about Lily Troupe
- Who inspires you? Tony Robbins, my coaches and Lisa Nicholls and Oprah. There’s a few there but they all have their own individual qualities and have risen from adversity themselves and become so successful in what they do.
- Favourite thing to do each day? To relax and reflect on what has happened that day and I think about how I can make tomorrow better and who I can help next.
- What’s something that still scares you? I still have a fear of heights! When I was in Switzerland in 2011 I was on a gondola going to Mount Tiplis and I lost it. I was screaming and I had everyone else around me just laugh at me. They thought I was over-reacting.
- Favourite technique or app or book? Books – Secrets of the millionaire mind and Robert Kiyosaki Rich dad poor dad – any of those books who get you to think outside the box and force you to think positively about your life, money, success.
- If you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing in the world right now, what would it be and why? Because I’ve been subject to it directly and indirectly. Being from a non-Australian background and my daughter being part African-American we have experienced it from all angles and that’s one thing I would like to fix. We all come from one race and that’s the human race.
Final Question for Lily Troupe
If you could turn back time what’s the one piece of advice you wish you could give your fourteen-year-old self?
Don’t touch any substance that is going to alter your mood or your self-control or your decision making. Even though I didn’t do hard drugs, alcohol still became a problem and it’s just so easy to get trapped by the feeling of being someone that you’re not just for the fun of it and it’s definitely something I would advise not to do.
A Gift for Listeners From Lily Troupe
A complimentary 20 minute one on one session to get to know more about Lily and discover how she can help you to move from being stuck and step up to seeing your true worth and being treated like the queen you deserve to be.