You Betcha She Did! Life Advice, Business Tips for Rad Women Entrepreneurs, Leaders, Coaches and

74 | Kim Galske's Journey from Military to Mrs. Wisconsin to Mastering Self-Awareness

• Ladies First Digital Media Company • Season 5 • Episode 73

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Ever wrestled with the feeling that you're running on a mental treadmill, going nowhere fast? Kim Galske, the brilliant mind behind Rewired Dynamics, sits down with me, to unravel the strategies that can break us free from this exhausting cycle. 

With a background that spans the crown of Mrs. Wisconsin to the intricacies of military service, Kim's insights into relational intelligence and the transformative 'uncoaching' approach her company uses are nothing short of revelatory. Through her compelling narrative, we explore how reshaping our language and fostering self-awareness can lead to profound changes in both personal and professional realms. 

Our conversation also shines a light on the importance of self-care, particularly for women post-divorce, and how relational intelligence is key to fostering trust and connection. If you've ever felt the desire to peel back the layers of your experiences to reveal a stronger, more connected version of yourself, Kim's story and the mission of Rewired Dynamics are sure to resonate and inspire.

Tune in as we discuss:

  • How Kim went from homeless 15 years ago to a successful business owner
  • Why relational intelligence is the key to fostering trust and connection
  • How we can use our struggles as springboards for growth.

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Speaker 2:

Did she really do that? You, betcha? She did. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of you, Betcha. She Did the podcast for women. Stage makers, entrepreneurs and leaders, especially in the great state of Wisconsin, share their wit and wisdom. I'm your host, Raina Rikiki. Today in the studio I have Kim Galski, and she is a woman you're going to want to know. Kim is formerly Miss Wisconsin, United States 2019. She's also a veteran for both the United States Marine Corps as a court liaison and a religious affairs specialist in the Army National Guard. She firsthand understands the complexities of human behavior and the drive it takes to share a message of resilience and inspiration, and that's something we all know. We need to work on that resilience aspect. Kim is also currently the co-founder and president of Rewire Dynamics, a company whose mission is fighting for the highest potential of people, culture and business. She's a very sought after keynote speaker, soon to be bestselling author and expert in relational intelligence. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1:

Wow, thank you, raina. That was like it's pretty awesome to actually. You don't get a whole lot of time to reflect on yourself, so when somebody reads your bio it's like, wow, that's pretty cool, I know, isn't that nice.

Speaker 2:

You're like. I have been doing some good work. This is great. Kim is right in Wisconsin, which I love, so we're going to dive in and start talking about your company, rewire Dynamics, and what I love about the company website is that you guys don't just coach people, but you teach people how to navigate relational intelligence. So tell us a little bit more about that. Why is that so key in the way that we interact with people?

Speaker 1:

We found from the very beginning that it was so much more than just being coaches. So we started becoming kind of the uncoaching brand, because we were having to relearn so many things, even for ourselves. And so you don't just wake up one day and decide to start teaching. You don't wake up one day and decide to start coaching. And this has been a four year journey of really diving into ourselves and knowing ourselves as leaders and knowing that there's so much conditioning that's gone on in our lives from the moment we go to school to the beliefs that our parents give us, to what our teachers give us, to what our jobs give us, that we become very conditioned in our thinking, almost robotic.

Speaker 1:

And so when people they finally call it like a midlife crisis, usually that's when we look in the mirror and go what the hell am I doing? Why did I choose this career? Why am I married to this person? What's my problem? Why can't I stand my kids? What's going on? All of these things that we think we need to go buy a new sports car in order to fill that void.

Speaker 1:

And what we realized was that is our awakening. We get to an age where we hit an awakening point that nobody's taught us that this is where we could end up and we finally are able to look back at our lives and go, wow, we really came through a lot. I wonder if I could do it better. And so when we start to coach people who are aware and recognize that I want to go higher, bigger, I want to go further, I want to walk away from my job, I want to start a new career, I want to have a better marriage or relationship with my coworkers, like all of those things that they feel stuck that's the biggest word that you know. They just feel stuck and for us, we come in and we kind of peel back the layers of not going back to ask about their past.

Speaker 1:

Necessarily in the beginning it's more of just talk to me, just tell me how you are, what are your biggest struggles and challenges. It seems like such a cliche question, but when you give people the space to actually share what they're going through, there's a lot of gold in there that they don't realize, that they're on repeat. They get on this wheel of language and the thought around the language and that creates our reality. So my partner and I started to think, gosh, we're not really coaching. We're like navigating people through the space, because coaching is great and it's a word that everybody understands, but when we really look at how our method is the rewired dynamics kind of rewiredology, as we like to say is we're kind of recreating this space of how to get somebody to navigate the truth of where they are and feel confident in themselves, to know that they have all of the tools within them. They're not broken. We just need to remind them of who they are, and so that's why we're that navigation, uncoaching kind of respect to what we do.

Speaker 2:

Okay, yeah, that's kind of fascinating, that whole I thought of. Like we're kind of stuck inside our heads on this repeat loop. What's the? Is there like a scientific principles behind that, the kind of guide like why do our brains do this? How do we undo it?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so, like I said, it's been a fascinating journey to go back and learn. I didn't know in my past. I did not go to school for this. I, you know I'm I'm self taught um at absolute sheer curiosity and fascination with how the brain works, and not just in a psychology kind of way. I mean every respect to the study of the brain and our neuroscience and things like that is really really fun. I just kind of take a different direction and so I will ask you a question Do you know how many thoughts that we have on a daily basis?

Speaker 2:

Um, I'm going to. I know it's a really high number because I've read about this, so I'm just going to throw out 10,000. I feel like we have to make so many decisions right Every day. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And we'd really do have a lot thrown at us all the time we make. We have 60 to 70,000 thoughts a day.

Speaker 2:

So we really are super confused.

Speaker 1:

It is crowded right.

Speaker 1:

And so, when you think about it, I mean we have so much going on. We have we're making decisions all the time. We're in the car, we're driving Now we're listening to a podcast, an amazing podcast, on the way to where we're going and we're constantly taking in information and somebody asks us a question and then we go to bed and we literally hit repeat. And so what we need to realize and this is where people get to take full control of their future and their reality is that when you understand 60 to 70,000 thoughts or what we have, a day when we go to bed and we don't have a proper go to bed kind of routine or a way of processing some information, we will wake up with the same thoughts tomorrow as that we had today. So when I talk about being on repeat, that's what I mean is that we're not consciously taking the time to be present in our current lives, to unplug, to have meditation, to do a workout, to go for a walk, to hear nature, to walk in the grass, especially for those of us that live in very cold areas. When we're not really grounded and connected, we tend to get right back on the wheel and there is a scientific, almost like an addiction chemically. That goes on when, even when we're not in a situation that we like, when we're uncomfortable, we don't know how to get out of that, and our body becomes addicted to that chemical that our body gives a hormone and we tend to make the decisions every day to keep us in that space, because anything outside of that is different and scary to our body and our brain, and so we tend to keep ourselves in the same rut. That's why we feel stuck, like we know in the moment, when our prefrontal cortex is going. I don't really like this, but I don't know how to get out of it because I'm so addicted to my bad behavior and I justify my bad behavior, whether that's I don't know anger, whether it's being addicted to things like video games or pornography, or if you have infidelity or you lie, or drinking or retail shopping. We have so many different ways of how that manifests itself, and so it goes right back to the uncoaching piece.

Speaker 1:

We have to get people to understand and actually look in the mirror and go. You're not broken, there's nothing wrong with you. You've just been on autopilot for a really long time and you are feeling it right now. You're feeling heavy and exhausted and burned out and tired and scattered and brain fogged and you name it, and we really come in and kind of adjust like a chiropractor and we give them some food, words of wisdom and get them to understand like there's a lot of noise, because, I just said, we take in a lot of information like a super computer and if we can just slow that down, we can adjust our language, we can have language that we can trade up to instead of I'll give you an instance that trips people up all the time is we say things like oh, I should have gone to the gym, I should have done that yesterday, I should have had another conversation, I should have made the phone call, and I say stop shooting all over yourself.

Speaker 1:

And I believe that Brene Brown actually may have said that before I did, and we just didn't know it at the same time. But if we do that, it becomes a shaming thing to ourselves and we don't realize that every time we say we should do something that we're actually shaming ourselves and that has a chemical, biological reaction within our body, and but we don't pay attention to that anymore and that's that uncomfortable feeling of I just have anxiety and I'm uncomfortable and I have chest. You know I'm tight in my chest and I can't sleep and you know our language and our thoughts are really not for us and they're not aligned. So we come in and readjust and make that alignment so you can truly have that outcome and you can be your best self.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it helps you to make the choices that you actually want to make and that's a stuck. That's fascinating just the way. I don't know that our bodies do that and and they keep doing it, but we have to. It's like I like what you were saying about really having to be conscious and in the moment in order to Stop those thoughts from cycling and to get yourself out of it. I mean, that's something that's kind of missing in Humanity for a lot of us too.

Speaker 1:

We used to be able to sit down and have conversations. Yeah, and everyone's.

Speaker 2:

Everyone's so distracted all the time.

Speaker 1:

They are. They are and we can't multitask. That's a myth. We we actually can't do anything really well if we have 15 different things and 8,000 tabs open on our computer of what we're doing.

Speaker 1:

It's just not gonna work. You know we yeah, it doesn't same thing in the brain if we're not present and we don't mindfully do these things and Understand the process of what's actually going on. I enjoy the science behind it, so I've become this. I didn't realize that I I was such a researcher Until recently. Like I really enjoy learning this, so I can learn it for me, so I can actually be better for our clients and our teams that we work with now we're gonna pivot just slightly, because I know we're recording this interview in December, even though it'll come out in January.

Speaker 2:

But I know you just were a speaker at a conference that's helping to lift up girls and women and one of the main topics was around resilience. Talk to us a little bit, a little bit about that, like how have you found resilience in your life and how I know it helps us. So let's kind of dive into that topic.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, I think resiliency the whole thing started for me probably out of high school, maybe even before that. I just didn't realize that that's what I was working on. I had a much like a lot of the world. We have dicey childhoods, right. We have parents that aren't present, we they're working jobs and they have other kids and other responsibilities differently systems and all of those things. So none of us have a perfect childhood. I'd just like to say that my childhood taught me resiliency Probably sooner than I should have been, and I didn't really know what that meant until I got older and obviously now With what we do. But for me, the story that I shared on stage on Saturday was 15 years ago. I was homeless. So what people don't see is is that they don't see what happens in the dark.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I know, I know.

Speaker 1:

No, I'm like a four-year overnight success story like, or a 15-year overnight success story. But that resiliency piece for us, when we talk about resiliency is it's the awareness like I said before, it's it's the awareness of where I'm at now I and where I was before, and putting those tools in between to help you navigate life, so that that that gap in between the two becomes shorter and shorter. So that's building resiliency. It's your response to your environment, having the tools and not living in your past. That is actually building that resiliency so you can go oh yeah, today sucked, like we're gonna have those days. That's just the reality of it, okay, but now it becomes.

Speaker 1:

How do I choose to then acknowledge where it was and make a better choice, moving forward? And it's not always going to be perfect. This is a practice. We want you to fail fast, fail often, because that's the only way we learn. All that wasn't quite the way I wanted it to go. It's no different than changing a job or a profession, but that's what we were teaching the girls and the ladies that were there on Saturday was We've all been through something. That's been really, really hard. We all had our own level of trauma. Big tea, little tea. How do we work through those things and not let it consume us so that we don't become kind of the product of trauma? I think that I was asked to come in because of what we study with the brain and how we can shift the brain biology to rewire.

Speaker 2:

We are dynamics to rewire how we think about things in our approach to life yeah, yeah, that's such a good lesson that whole idea of bad things are gonna happen. I mean, it's just part of life, it's reality. But how do you handle it? You can control how you react and you can definitely learn something from every bad experience that will Further you. It's just whether you're open to looking at it like that, because I you know my own experience. I've definitely seen People gone down those two past, myself included. Sometimes I learned from the down times and sometimes I find myself all while. We need to get out of it because it's not.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, girl, have done the same thing. I'm not immune to what I coach, you know. I mean, and that's that's what people are like wow, you go through these things to.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah that's how this all happened. You know I have gone through some bad stuff. I've had bad thoughts, I have attempted suicide, I've had people attempt suicide in front of me. You know I've never gone down the path of like drugs and addiction, like that. But it doesn't mean that my addictions were serving me. My addictions were going to the gym Three day or three times a day and, you know, trying to tell myself that that was me being healthy. It was cheaper than going to see a counselor, a psychologist, you know, but really it wasn't serving me. My body still hurts, like. You know that.

Speaker 2:

No, no it did not. Were those the things that led you to start rewire dynamics like how did how did that path come about?

Speaker 1:

You know, like I said, about 15 years ago I was, I was homeless, so I came off of active duty in the Marine Corps, spent seven and a half years trying to find myself. I didn't know how to fit back into the civilian world and nobody the military does not teach that someday will be in the military and will help transition. Is that definitely the goal? But through the seven and a half years of being lost, being homeless, god dropped me right here in the state of Wisconsin where I really at the time had no family, have no roots here. I literally was dropped. Here I'm with my son, who was six, and I went.

Speaker 1:

I dove into personal development and I thought I need to know me better. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know the seed that was planted. I got a great job In an in an industry, had no business being because I had no formal education on managing investment company. But I did it well for eight and a half years and what I realized is that my gift is creation. I like to create things, I like to dream things up. I want to help, support people, create their dreams, and that's what I did with that investment company was I helped him grow no-transcript. So I thought, okay, well, I'm just going to leave this very safe job and I'm going to go run a nonprofit for people that were me yes, people that didn't have the resources, they didn't know who to ask, they just didn't have their own voice. So in that three year process I obviously dove into understanding post traumatic stress more because this was a veteran nonprofit, so I was serving people like me, but not everybody was like me in the sense that they weren't on, they weren't stateside their whole enlistment. Some of them especially. I got out in 2001, six months before 9-11. So anything that came after me saw combat in a lot of ways saw combat when I was dealing with people like that coming in off the streets and not understanding who they were, or they were coming in right out of being discharged and thought that they had it all together and I was sitting there going.

Speaker 1:

But what do you want to do if time and money were of no consequence? What would you do in your life? And I think I just asked it enough that I actually started thinking, yeah, what would I do? I mean, this is a stepping stone, right, but I'm still getting paid by somebody. So what would I want to do.

Speaker 1:

And not everybody's an entrepreneur, right? I mean, you can say that too as an entrepreneur for yourself is not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. There are people that can, but they need more resources than most. So I mean, we put ourselves in a box all the time and I just chose to not be in the box and so. But I'd be remiss to say that if I didn't have my partner, fritz Bairici, if I didn't have him with me him being a completely opposite type of personality I don't know that I would be where I'm at by myself. And so it's been this process for me of what would I have done better if I could go back and coach myself, because I'm always coming from the standpoint of how can I be a better person? Because everybody I sit across from was me at one point.

Speaker 1:

Whether you're getting a divorce, whether you're addicted to something, whether you have children, whether you have trauma, sexual abuse, you know, between the two of us and our partners in our company, there's not one story that you come and tell us that we would be surprised by. And I think that that really floors people, because they've been taught to keep that stuff to themselves. They've been taught, you know, to not share too much because you don't want to be taken advantage of. And then when you tell them a little bit of your own story and how much it aligns with theirs, it gives them the freedom to know that we, truly, when we say we fight for the highest potential of people, we really mean that through our own vulnerability. So why do we get stuck? That's the biggest question, is, why do we get stuck? And it's that loop we get on where our mind, our body, like we're out of alignment. And once you get them in alignment, man, the sky is the limit.

Speaker 2:

Do you think part of getting in alignment is it is related to disconnecting, like you were saying, like you were talking at the beginning about a solid bedtime routine or getting outside, like getting rid of distractions, it sounds like is key.

Speaker 1:

I do more. We're distracted all the time, we just are. But you know, I made a statement a few years ago, well before this company, and we started doing this. That has it rings so true today is that we're so connected, we're disconnected, and I had I had yeah, I had said that about some veterans that were coming in and you know, how can you have some that are so connected to the world and some that are not?

Speaker 1:

And I'm like, because the connected ones are kind of looking in a different place and they've got their eyes and their mind in a different place, and then the other ones over here that want to be connected or disconnected from that and they're sitting right in front of them and it's like, man, we're so connected to things that were disconnected from each other and from ourselves. And yeah, I mean that's distraction is everywhere and it's going to, it's going to get you. If you're not cognizant and aware of how you take an information and listening to yourself, your body is trying to tell you I'm in pain, I don't feel good, I'm tired, you know, but we, we tend to use our achievements as like goalposts. Like you know, these are a badge of honor that I worked 12 hours today and, man, I got a lot done, like that's.

Speaker 2:

I know that's not okay. I was like let's stop normalizing, that is a good thing. It's like that's not good. That's not good for anybody.

Speaker 1:

It's not good. No, but again, that's the conditioning that's happened in the world, Unfortunately, is the saying goes, because I used to be a network. Marketing too is there's always somebody that's going to outwork you. There's going to be, they're going to be up in the middle of the night doing things that you, you, you don't want to do. No, I like my sleep so that I can wake up tomorrow and actually give you a good product. So, yeah, I just think that that's that's really just bad conditioning in the world, that you have to be that way and that's really not true.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you shouldn't have to sacrifice your health and personal sanity for your job. It's like that. That's not going to help anybody. Who's is there an ideal? An ideal client for Rewire Dynamics? Or who are the people you generally work with?

Speaker 1:

This is such a great question and I just first of all and I'll just pause for a second because I love being interviewed by professional interviewers so, reina, thank you. You're amazing. I love your questions, thanks. I love your interaction too. It's great. So our ideal client really is us, and four years ago when we were doing this, it was like everybody's our client. It's so typical Before you understand what niching is and the people that you actually really, truly want to work with. I know you understand that because you work with women that are out making a difference in the world. We have learned that we love our one-on-one clients we really do. But what we really love because Fritz and I are partners and we coach and we do everything together in this space that's what makes us very different is that we really really love business owners or upper management that are partners in business and their teams. Because where does influence start, reina? Do you know where influence really happens? At the top or the bottom?

Speaker 2:

My gut reaction would say the top.

Speaker 1:

but now I'm rethinking it Because I have to Right, yeah, and influence actually comes from the bottom. And so if we solely focused on either just one person or because we've had that happen where people have asked us in companies to come in and work with this person, when it's usually the person asking us to come in that needs the work but yes, that other person could use us but really where the stranglehold is coming is usually from the top. Any stranglehold of a business is going to be from the top. So our focus has been working with those partners at executive level, getting them to understand. If we're going to shift to culture, we have to have a common language. So thoughts and language have to be the most important thing. But the most important thing, even above that, is understanding who you are.

Speaker 1:

So it's really interesting to do these exercises in large teams, because even if we had 100 people in the room, we would still be able you would still physically be able to hold up a mirror to yourself, because you're the most important person in that space. It's not up to anybody else to fill your cup. Nobody can make you happy. Nobody is supposed to make you mad. You need to learn how to show up for yourself, and that's when the change happens in the culture, because now you're speaking a common language, you understand each other's personalities and we're trading up how we come to conversation by giving some visual tools, because our brains are supercomputers. So if we can gain that visual, that NLP, that neuro-linguistic programming to get you to see it and hear it and apply it in a safe place where everybody speaks the same language man, you can change an entire company.

Speaker 2:

I can see that it comes down to that idea, too, of what are the things that are actually in your control, and it's really just you, I mean, you can't control other people. Yeah, exactly you can't control that and then see where it takes you Before we head out. Are there any last tips or advice that you'd like to share? Just as a powerful woman out there in the world, I mean, you've obviously learned tons of lessons throughout your life, so this is a big question.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for asking that, because I was asked that recently, if you could go do whatever you wanted, if you weren't attached to your company, or even within your company, what would you do? I said I would love to work with women that have been divorced, that have raised children, that can't seem to find the love of their life because they lack trust and vulnerability in their relationships. I think for me, as I even transition in my career and who I am and how I show up in this world, I feel confident, now more so than ever, that I could speak to myself in these women, because I understand it to a level that we don't have time to talk about today, but I would never ask them to go through something that I haven't had the courage to go through. I think my big calling for this year is relational intelligence on a whole another level and really understanding our own personal communication codes, so that we can live to our highest potential.

Speaker 1:

I think, a lot of people can relate to.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for being on the show today. If you're interested in learning more about Kim and her company, rewire Dynamics, I'll have everything linked in the show notes. So please do reach out. As always, if you like what you're hearing on YouBetches she Did. Please share this episode with friends, sisters, neighbors, colleagues. You never know who might need this information today. Please leave us a positive review wherever you get your podcasts. They really help us find new listeners and when we do that, we lift up women everywhere. Until next time, take care.