Gervase Kolmos is CTA Certified Mindset Coach for Mothers, and the creator of The Champagne Society. She is a passionate truth-teller and intuition-follower who believes that raising tiny humans is hard, but being human doesn’t have to be. A self-proclaimed “Real AF” life coach, she sets mamas free from the stories they tell themselves. She is obsessed with creating the communities, online and off, that she wish she’d had first as a new mom and then as a new mompreneur—safe spaces for mothers to grow themselves, their businesses and each other.
Gervase is a sought after speaker and moderator, and has spoken at the Center for Women NEW Conference, RebelleCon, Charleston Moms Blog and more. She has been featured on Lowcountry Live and in Skirt! magazine. In 2017, she was voted “Woman to Watch” as part of the Center for Women’s Charleston Most Influential Women contest. She has coached LulaRoe, Rodan & Fields and Beautycounter teams around the world, and her writing has been featured on the Huffington Post, Best Kept Self, Charleston Moms Blog and more.
Happily married for 8 years, Gervase is the mother to 5 and 2-year-old daughters and has called Charleston home for 14 years. She enjoys dance parties, bike rides, soulful conversations and champagne on a Tuesday and she unapologetically combines as many of those things as possible into her life and business. She firmly believes in “motherhood, AND” instead of “motherhood, OR” and that we truly do have the opportunity to HAVE IT ALL, if we believe we deserve it.
Hey Gervase can you introduce yourself to us?
Hello! My favourite job in the whole world is being a mamma to my two little girls, Aria (5) and Maya (2).My other job is as a Mindset Coach for Mothers via my business Shiny. Happy. Human. and a community builder via my event series called The Champagne Society. I love champagne and dance parties and my marine biologist husband, Kevin.
Can you take us through your background and share your journey that has ultimately brought you to where you are now as a mindset coach for mothers?
Before motherhood, I was like most ambitious control freaks I know. I would set my sights on a goal with the full intention of achieving it through old-school methods of control and perfectionism. When I became a mama for the first time, I had a full-blown identity crisis. I couldn’t play the game of life and career the same way anymore, because I had fundamentally changed. My bandwidth was drastically different and my focus shifted so much from career to my new baby at the beginning. Nothing seemed as important as getting to know her and getting to know the new me. I recognised one day that my whole life was out of alignment as I trekked to my corporate sales job and cried at my desk for how much I missed my baby and felt dissatisfied with my career.
I realised I always knew I’d be a working mom, but it felt really important that I was doing a job that I enjoyed so I could role model that type of lifestyle for my daughter. I also recognised I had a lot of human tendencies (people-pleasing, perfectionism, control, over-scheduling, guilt, victim language) that would need to be healed and corrected if I was going to be a healthy role model for my daughter and give her the best life possible (instead of unconsciously passing down all my old wounds and projections I had acquired over my lifetime). Basically, motherhood propelled me to be better and truer to me—it held me to a standard that defied the external metrics I had been measuring myself by my whole life and and demanded I respected the inner metrics of how I was feeling. It demanded I trade seeking to prove my worth for validating myself; seeking to be liked by everyone for loving my whole self; putting everyone’s needs before my own for putting myself first so I could be a strong foundation for my family.
In shifting so much in my own identity after motherhood, I realised this is essentially what every mother needs, and I began to walk mothers through my same process of undoing all the unhealthy habits we establish as adults to trade in healthy, sustainable habits to allow us to thrive as mothers and women.
What methods are you using to encourage mothers to be comfortable in themselves whilst creating a safe space for them through Shiny Happy Human?
Essentially, it all starts with the habits of our thoughts.
Mothers need permission—permission to feel the way they feel without making those feelings mean something about the type of mothers they are. They need permission to trust their motherly instincts. They need a community where they feel they not only belong, but they got this. I give them all of this in so many ways, and it typically begins with a subconscious thought or belief that is making their life harder than it has to be, that we identify and pull out by the roots!
When I’m working with women more intimately in coaching programs, we go deep into their mindset and beliefs. So much of the life someone has is reflected in the stories they tell themselves. While working with mothers, we identify those stories and the women rewrite them.
There is no “right” answer for every woman, so my job is never to tell a woman what to do. It’s to create the safe space for them to recognise and become aware of what they’ve been subconsciously telling themselves and then ask powerful questions to help them discover the perfect rewrite for their unique situation. It’s often a simple perspective shift that they may have heard a million times but unless they unravel the logic for themselves, it won’t hold true in their minds and it won’t stick.
Can you cover some of the aspects of your profession that some people don’t understand?
Let’s start with the fact that i’m not a parent coach. I don’t claim to be the expert on potty training your kid or getting them to stop hitting their siblings. what i do do is help you shift your experience of those things. as a mindset coach, I help woman shrink the aperture and remove all the excuses (other people, jobs, etc) and get to the heart of their own behaviour, reactions, triggers, spirals and heal them. so if you come to me with “how to get my kid to listen,” that conversation will quickly float around to what’s happening with you when your kid isn’t listening and what’s going through your mind when you’re barking orders and why you think your kid should even listen in the first place. It’s quite a tangled web of beliefs that go into parenting, and my job is to just untangle your heap of thoughts. and you’d be surprised by how much in your life (and your relationships) can shift when you address your own issues first.
The second would be something I briefly addressed above, which is that it is not my job as a coach to fix you or give you the answers. My job is to hold you accountable to showing up for yourself and to ask powerful questions to help you tap into your own inner wisdom and find the solutions for yourself. It sounds simple, but you really do need another person to talk this out, because we’re so in our own heads and experiences that we usually can’t see what’s right in front of us without an objective party pointing it out in a neutral way and inviting us to see it differently. That’s what I do as a coach.
Where can you see yourself within the next 5 years?
I’m excited to continue to put all my heart into my family, my own personal growth and the growth of my community. I can’t quite say where that will take me, but I just know that mothers need community and I love giving it to them, so hopefully 5 years from now, I will have co-created a powerful community and platform for more mothers to find themselves and their people through the Champagne Society and my coaching programs.
What outlets do use to promote Shiny Happy Human?
I have an email list I write to often and then I use Facebook and Instagram the most. Also, word of mouth and referrals is a big driver for mamas.
How has your career impacted your own life?
My career has challenged me in more ways than I ever anticipated! Entrepreneurship has taken me on quite the roller coaster ride. There have been high highs and low lows, but I notice over time I’m just more and more resilient and grateful for it all. I find I’m much more present with my children because a while ago I quit trying to split focus of career and family, and I just committed to the idea that when I was working, I’d be all in, and when I was with my family, I’d show up fully. So I think it’s made me a better mother and wife. Not to mention, my career was the impetus for me to also dive much deeper into my own personal development with my own coaches, education and experiences and this has made me a completely different person, who I like much more and so does my husband.
What challenges have you seen to have been presented on a daily basis during the growth of your career?
I think everyone experiences the same challenges differently, because it’s all about what you make them mean in your mind. So early on in my entrepreneur career, I used to work through the daily challenge to “balance” family and career. Then I worked through that and it became the daily challenge to be disciplined. Then I worked through that and faced the daily challenge to just trust myself and my instincts and choices! I recently worked through a long-standing challenge to know and own and charge my value! So as I’m always working on myself in life and business, my daily challenges are ever-evolving, as well!
Which other leading entrepreneurs and pioneering game changers do you also admire and why?
Jennifer Lopez is my go-to archetype—her resilience, persistence, passion and penchant for being “extra” and glam, paired with her human-ness (and very human ups and downs) is so inspiring to me. Same goes for Oprah, and I’m obviously always trying to channel her killer interviewing skills.
I was so thrilled to interview Cat and Nat when they were in Charleston for their MomTruths live tour and I love them. Obviously they serve mothers, just like I do, and they do it with the authenticity that is so important to me. They are just themselves and growing, business risk to business risk, and they’ve killed it this past year! I just love watching them rise and cheering them on and their journey reminds me that it’s also possible for me!
I also want to give a shout out to an Australian mama named Tracy Harris (@mumswithhustle)— I’m a client in her membership community and have learned so much just from her way of being in business! I really admire her work/life balance and the ease with which she appears to run her biz!
How do you define your own success?
Success for me means having it all—the exceptional relationships with my kids and husband, friends and family, my own personal fulfilment and health plus a meaningful, impactful career I’m deeply proud of that sustains my family financially and models to my daughters the idea that you CAN have it all and live the highs and lows that are always a part of life with grace and trust and love. (I guess that’s actually quite a tall order! haha)
What does #BEYOUROWN mean to you?
Just be yourself and love yourself, and trust and believe it’s not even enough, it’s the key to having it all.
Finally, what are you working on throughout 2019?
We’re up-leveling The Champagne Society brand this year to bring mamas an unparalleled experience. We’re adding in $20 livestream tickets so mothers all over the world can tune in live or watch the recording and growing the community so every woman who is handed her new baby knows she’s not alone, she hasn’t lost her identity forever and she’s got this!
On top of that, I’m bringing back a group coaching program, Reclaim You, that serves the same purpose as Champagne Society, but on a deeper level, for mamas who are wanting a bit more than a night out, it’s the framework I’ve worked through personally to take back control of your identity and life after motherhood!
Instagram:@gervasekolmos @thechampsociety
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thechampsociety
Website: https://www.shinyhappyhuman.com
