The Skeptic Strategist Who Became Spiritual

How Maeve Ferguson stopped fighting the inner work and built a business that Harvard professors apply to join.

Maeve Ferguson builds diagnostic assessment funnels for the highest end of the thought leadership market. Harvard professors. New York Times bestselling authors. She is data-obsessed, systems-driven, and the last person you would expect to credit her business transformation to weekly identity reprogramming sessions and subliminal audios.

She thought hypnosis was training someone to be a monkey on a stage.

What Maeve discovered,  after years of having the right strategy and the wrong clients, is that the business is her mirror. She was not attracting the wrong people because her offer was wrong. She was attracting exactly who matched the identity she was putting out. When she changed her identity everything changed.

I brought Maeve on because her story is the proof of concept for everything this show is built on. You cannot out-strategy an identity that does not match where you are trying to go. The inner work is not the soft option. It is the only thing that makes the outer work land.

We also go deep into the messy middle , the void between who you were and who you are becoming. Maeve moved through her transition in a few months. I am in it right now. If you are somewhere in that space of a personal transformation, this conversation will explain a lot.

Listen to the episode and find out.

About Maeve Ferguson

Maeve Ferguson is The Authority Architect, the strategist behind the diagnostic infrastructure that transforms established thought leaders from 'respected but replaceable' to Category of One.

Creator of The Client Engine™, Maeve works with 7-10 figure thought leaders, bestselling authors, and industry authorities, including Dr Arthur Brooks, Jen Kem, the Hyatts, Mike Kim and Selena Soo, building the systems that turn intellectual property into infrastructure that qualifies, converts, and scales without them in the room.

With a background in Big Four accounting and private equity, Maeve brings data-driven precision to an industry drowning in tactics. Her methodology helps clients build diagnostic authority that rivals Myers-Briggs and StrengthsFinder in sophistication.
She runs her consultancy from a working horse farm in Northern Ireland whilst raising two young children. Proof that brilliance with infrastructure actually works.

Connect with Maeve Ferguson

Website| LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You say you didn't change any strategies, you didn't change the methodology, you changed your identity, and suddenly everything worked.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

I had this extraordinary talent. I knew I was world-class at what I do, but the market that I was serving at that time, there was a huge mismatch between my capabilities and my ability and who I was attracting. But I had to almost bottom out and then shed everything that had gone before. It was almost like a shedding of who I used to be. The confidence and the self-worth and all of those other pieces are taken as a given.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

And that's I think where a lot of people give up. Welcome. Today with us is Meev Ferguson. And Meev is talking about what it means to lose an identity and to find it again and how this affects your self-worth and the value that you create and income in your business. So, Meev, I'm gonna just ask with my question. It's like, so you say you didn't change any strategies, you didn't change the methodology, you changed your identity, and suddenly everything worked. What's that mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Yes, it's a great, great question. Um, thank you so much for having me, Emil. So I am very uh system-oriented, uh, very masculine in my approach and big into automation systems, data infrastructure, and I love logic. And I really uh didn't get or understand this kind of what people call the woo end of business. And indeed, whenever I left corporate and come out into this, into this online space that we are all in, my level of understanding, or my level of ignorance rather, was that hypnosis was teaching somebody how to be a monkey on a stage. I'd never heard of energy, I didn't know anything about identity. So that was you know the frame of what I was coming into this world. And what I've learned over the last, what, like eight years in business now is that everything is energy and everything is actually connected to your identity. Essentially, you know, I've had the same strategy. We we build diagnostic assessments or better known as quiz funnels to bring in qualified leads into your business to convert into clients. And I have been using that methodology for years, and that's exactly what we do for our clients. But what has happened is since I have really leant into this identity work, and as uncomfortable as it has made me to kind of accept that something that doesn't belong on a spreadsheet does actually work, I have been able to shift my business from, you know, kind of having the 10K group coaching program, working with early stage entrepreneurs, to instead signing multi-sex figure engagements over and over again and working with the absolute highest end of the market.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

So I want to first of all, I love the woo of business. That's just a title in itself, the woo of business. I think you are absolutely correct, is that the first thing that people think when they hear somebody, you know, is a strategist, and I'm a strategist and I'm German on top of everything. So everybody expects that anyway. And then suddenly we come out with this woo-woo language and we talk about energy and connection and alignment and resonance and all these things, and people go like, have you gone mad? But really, what we are recognizing is the world has gone mad. So I want to now go a little bit uh into this space that you were in, like, because it what you did was working, sort of. So, what was this wake-up moment, or where did you say I'm even allowing this concept to enter and I'm letting my resistance of hippies and Birkenstocks and purple or white flowy clothes go?

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Yeah, so I think I I'm I'm a very open-minded person, okay, and somebody from Northern Ireland, that might not be a common thing, but I'm a very open-minded person and I'm very curious. So I I love to kind of dabble and mess around in things that I don't currently get, because my favorite saying in my mantra until the day I die is we don't know what we don't know. So when we are all of us, any of us, are working from our current level of knowing, we're going to get the results that we've already got. But there is always something out there that we don't know. There is always different things that are possible that we just aren't aware of because we just haven't been through that yet. So I think that A that's the very first piece. I was super, super open-minded. And with everything in my life, I actually got into this world because of business. So I'm very focused on business. I'm obsessed with data, metrics, KPIs, business growth, all of the things. And I actually fell into this world because you know, the promise of a coach away back when was, you know, solve this then, solve this energy piece, and really understand what's going on with the subconscious to explode your business. So I came in through that hook, but all I actually cared about was the business growth end of things. And it was actually just one of those beautiful things in my that's where I actually met my identity magician. That's literally her Instagram handle, the identity magician. She has worked with me in Omulai for almost seven years and has taken me through every single stage of business from those early, early days where you know everything is hard and everything is difficult, right through to, as I mentioned earlier, signing these massive engagements with massive names and everything in between. And so it's been a really interesting journey. And I think for me, the the initial piece was being super open to it. And then, as everything in life, when you get evidence, it's much easier to do more and more of it because I had so much evidence of this work in.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

Yeah, yeah, I got it, I got it figured out now. Now I don't need to do the work anymore.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

No gods, Casha, like I'm grand, I'm flying, and you know, thanks so much. Like I'm I'm good. Yes. And then I stopped doing the work, and then hey, presto, a couple of months later, Casha, I think I need to do some more work. So it's been it's been very interesting. I'm good. Oh no, I'm not. Oh, I'm good, no, I'm not. So I'm very, very strict now that even as things are flying, I'm staying in the work. And also what I'm discovering is the more and more of this work that I do, the faster and faster and faster the leaps are coming because I'm not taking the foot off the gas and I'm not stopping the work whenever the going's good.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

That's I I like that a lot. It's beautiful. So so your initial initial mindset was literally just um, I don't know what I don't know, which is a very strategic business mindset, actually, because as a strategist, we tell other people about blind spots all day long. And if we do that, we know we have blind spots ourselves. So just coming from that realization that we may, this might be a blind spot, I think is a very powerful, small angle to open a door to something that people may consider very woo-woo. And then the next question that I have is why identity? Why was it, you know, so people say about my spiritual connection with God, my spiritual connection, my belief system, my practice, why identity? What is it about the identity that is so unique?

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Yeah, so for me, I actually started with confidence, believe it or not. So again, my background, I was very senior in corporates, are you kind of serious, accountancy background. I live on a horse farm in Northern Ireland, I'm from Ireland, and I'm working with people all across the globe. Part of that, like, and this is like the early, early stages of my business, part of the band aid, I guess, that I had to rip off was a confidence piece. So that's actually why I hired Cash in the first instance, was to help me with that visibility piece, letting go of what people said, you know, locally or opinions of what you know you're having to put in social media when you, you know, we're brought up not to shout about ourselves and you're just brought up not to blow your own trumpets. And then here you are, you know, on the internet posting about how great you are. So I did quite a lot of work in that, and then I kind of just got to the stage that it was confidence check, done and dusted, you know, that's sorted. And then it actually became a deeper piece of that. Like, I'll just try to talk through, you know, what I went through during this journey where I had, I knew I had extraordinary talent, I knew I was world-class at what I do. But the market that I was serving at that time, there was a huge mismatch between my capabilities and my ability and who I was attracting. And essentially, and these are they were beautiful people, nothing wrong with them as people, but very early stage, very um beginner-level problems, very basic, basic, basic things. And I had this extraordinary talent, and there was obviously a mismatch between what I was portraying out to the world, because what I was portraying out was exactly what, you know, you know, the mirror effect yourself is exactly what I was getting back. And then so then this is when I started the identity work with Casha of completely shifting my identity around myself and who I am and who I serve so much so that we've just, you know, in a rapid period of time, have just gone to the other complete extreme. And it's like what I would say about the identity piece is that the the confidence and the self-worth and all of those other pieces are taken as a given their like tables, you know, their table sticks, they have to be in place. And then the identity shift is the almost like the icing on the cake. And how I would describe it is like once you have that identity shift, it is impossible to go back. So it is like I cannot unsee what I now see, I cannot backtrack levels. I'm just working at a whole new level and attracted to completely different people because I did the ugly work, I did the hard work, I did the work where you were in tears, you know, all of that. I really, really dug deep. It wasn't easy, especially for somebody that's I just want to play in spreadsheets and like this is this work for me is uncomfortable. But it's like you can't go back once you get to that next level.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

No, you cannot. So my question then is so you're saying, and I have it on tape, is that you did not go and adjust the avatar. The avatar adjusted itself to the energy and identity you portray to the outside world.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Yeah, so the shift in identity allowed me to to bring in who I should have been serving, but my old identities didn't didn't match that. So I was getting exactly what I was putting out into the world. Because everything is always a a mirror.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

Well well, yeah, that's why we talk in in growth architecture a lot about resonance and alignment. And we believe that the resonance is like a radio frequency. What you put out is is the kind of energy that comes back to you, and people still feel like there's a doing involved, and sometimes it's just the being involved. And I think it's a very difficult shift for most of us because we are not used to the not believing the lie of the hustle. So the realization that it's an inside job more than an outside adjustment, take me to that point and tell me what you were experiencing at that point. Because if you build a career based on a certain set of criteria, and now you're arriving at another point, and now you realize that these criteria are not really the correct criteria, that cannot have been good. Or or were you relieved? Like what was your state of mind when you realized the transformation?

SPEAKER_00 13:00

I think it was actually probably a pretty ugly chapter of business. Anybody that's been through kind of that inflection pointly attest that they have been through the ugly crying, you know, and I'm not a crier, by the way. For anybody that's really like I am not an overly emotional person. And so, like to go through that chapter of almost bottoming out to then rebuild and then start to flourish and grow, it was almost like a shedding of who I used to be. And I genuinely sometimes look back at that person and it's like, and you see, you know, you have memories pop up in your phone, or you're like, here's your Facebook memory from you know, X number of years ago, and you were like, I can't actually believe that that's the same human being. It's like, how is that the same person that is sitting here now? And it it all comes like oh, like to be honest, it was like I completely bottomed out. I was it never entertained like not having a business. I'm like, there's no way I'm ever going back to being employed ever again. I'm very, very happy running my own company, but I had to almost bottom out and then shed everything that had gone before, just release it all, purge it all, take everything as lessons learned, all of those things, so that I could then rebuild. And I think having that openness to not being afraid, because like I had a successful business, not being afraid to let go of what you've built, not being afraid of like wasting anything because like nothing's ever wasted. You either win or you learn with years of lessons all stacked up, and you know, all of the the skills that we gathered and all of those things, and then almost like tied like a very nice bow around it, waved it off, and then just started a brand new chapter. And I think that's how then and then I for me, I everything is like bred from momentum, and the more and more evidence I got, the more and more momentum I got behind this work and behind this piece, you know, to the extent that I I meet for two years every single Monday morning in life with my identity magician who works with on me every single week, works with me and on me and all of the things, so that that's that growth just keeps compounding week on week.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Um, amazing. So did you recognize sort of the space in between the space? Like, you know, I'm experiencing this um right now as I come through this intense period of grieving after the fire. And now I feel like this this phase is kind of coming to a close. I mean, you know, the pain will always be there and the experience will always be there, but this um pants on fire feeling is now subsiding. But the new thing hasn't started yet. So some people call it the void, some people call it the messy middle, some people call it the horror show because you're literally sitting in between an old belief system and a new belief system. Could you tell our audience maybe a pointer or two, something that helped you to get through that? And how long did that last for you until you were sort of switching over to that new new gear?

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Yeah, so it was it was months, not years. What I would say is that I I didn't have the level of awareness to know that that is what I was in, and the reason being is that you haven't been on the other side yet, so you don't know that you're done on the other side until you're there. Um, what I did have, however, was blind, unwavering belief in myself and my own abilities. My screensaver and my computer is like 100% possible 100% of the time. There is zero opportunity for this not to work, and I will always gamble on myself. So I think that's what kept me going through it, even though I didn't know what was on the other side. I just knew that there was a real mismatch between what I was doing before and what I was capable of. And now it's almost like funny when you just because you asked this question, you're like, gosh, that is a good question. When I look back at that, A, that person is like unrecognizable to if you know for what I am today, and B, it's just all it's all part of the journey and it's all part of your story, and it's all part of growth. And I think for anybody who's either heading into it or is in the absolute depths of it, is like choose your equivalent of you know, me saying that I will always bet on myself because I I know if you know I know I'm how good I am at what I do. So, what is your equivalent of that to get you through to the other side when you will then look back and go, gosh, like remember that?

SPEAKER_01 17:58

That was gnarly, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

It's like ancient history here.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and and and I tell this uh to all my clients when when they when they go into this phase, it's it's like almost you have to say congratulations because you now have arrived at that. So thanks for helping our audience kind of like understanding what that what what what that part is. So now when you've done the shift and this identity work, so can you give us like some broad strokes? What is the identity work? Is it like somebody putting their hands on you? Is it hypnosis? What is it that you did?

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Yeah, great question. So uh Kashia uses a few different modalities with me. So that has really helped me because you know what it's like when you're in the thick of business and life and contracts and everything. Something comes up and this wordy thought just like automatically triggers, and having that ability to redirect um has been very powerful for me. Probably the biggest thing has been the subconscious reprogramming. So listening to she does these like completely bespoke audios that are about me and my business only, um, and listening to the subconscious reprogrammings every single day has really, really, really helped me. And that's probably the biggest thing, what I mentioned earlier about stopping the work. When I stop that piece of the work, that's what I noticed. I said, you know, a few weeks later I realized that gosh, you stopped that work. Um so staying in that, um, I find that really, really powerful. And then also a lot of subliminals. So, you know, I do a lot of coding and all of that kind of thing, a lot of dev work. Um, so you're it's not a thing that you want to be listening to music, less lyrics whenever you're doing this because it's like high level of concentration. But I love listening to those subliminals, just all everything when I'm not not on the call, I'm basically listening to are subliminals, and I have absolutely no idea how they work, um, but I just know that they do. So that's another element of it. And then just you know, as you know yourself, the work with MLP and all of those types of things inside of mouth, you can you know shift perspectives and just having that that coach in your corner who you know you're bringing something that you just feel is insurmountable, and within a 30-minute conversation, it's just dissolved and gone, and it's not even a thing. And I think just having that the common sense, I guess, to invest in yourself as a business owner and making sure that you're surrounding yourself with the right advisors and all of the all the rest to get you to where you want to be. I have spelt a terrifying number of hundreds of thousands of dollars on different advisors over the years, and I firmly believe that every single investment is worth it because when you surround yourself by the right people, when you surround yourself with the right coaches, advisors, mentors, etc., they have skill sets that we don't have. They know what we don't know, they have been places that we have not been, and whatever we're totally open to other people being able to help us more than we could ever help ourselves, that'll only serve you well in business.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Yeah, I what I like about this conversation is that you you're very honest about the fact that it's a practice and that unless you follow the practice on a daily basis, you fall off the wagon. And in my case, you know, once I sold my business and I made the money and I put it in the bank, I'm going like, I've done the work, I'm finished. You know, here's evidence that the work that I done is finished, only to find out that you do regress because your original programming or the draw of this programming of our world is so intense that it'll always pull you right back into it. Yes. And it just it's it's crazy making, but it's it's the truth. So uh talk to me now about what is the work that you now do with. Your uh founders and with the with the entrepreneurs, how do you help people?

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Oh, yeah. So we work with um kind of the upper echelons of the thought leadership space. So the you know, we work with the big, big names, and what we do for them is we turn their proven IP, so their proven intellectual property into what we call data funnels. And essentially their IP becomes infrastructure, like an assessment, for example. So if you've ever been through Enneagram or Strength Finders or DISC, that is IP turned into infrastructure. And then the leads and the clients that come through that are given. But the real asset is the proprietary first party data and that we then monetize for those thought leaders. So essentially we build, you know, it's it's all systems, infrastructure, all of that from a marketing and sales perspective. And then we have on the back end the the monetization of behavioral psychographic data that adds a really incredible income stream to the businesses of these thought leaders so that they don't have to constantly launch to keep revenue coming in and they don't have to keep peddling so hard, like so many experts are doing in this online space.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

I like it. Yeah, we call this part a signature growth system. It's like when you take the knowledge and you organize it into a cohesive system, and then you have different entry points and price points, and then you keep them in a ladder moving through the process. Very few people do this and do this well. I understand what you're doing. I think it's uh one of the most powerful, powerful tools for anyone in business. But to your point, they have to know who they are and they have to have their positioning in place. You cannot do this from the bottom. You have to do this when you're already well into the journey, otherwise it will not work.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

Yeah, exactly. So that again, this is why you know we're working with the the highest end of the markets. Their IP has already been proven. They are Harvard professors, New York Times, best selling authors, that's caliber. Um, and their IP has been proven over and over and over again. And then essentially we're building the infrastructure that allows them to put the right message and the right offer in front of the right person at the right time.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

I love it. I absolutely love it. And so where can our audience find you?

SPEAKER_00 24:23

Uh, LinkedIn is probably the best bit. Um I'm sure we can get the link uh to LinkedIn in the show notes and then over on SubSec as well.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

Okay, so we'll we'll make sure we'll put that we'll put that in the show notes. So for somebody who's now listened to this interview, what would you like them to take away from it?

SPEAKER_00 24:40

Um I'd love them to be open to things that if even if they don't understand it, to be open and inquisitive to go and find out. Because if I had been closed off or closed-minded, I would never ever ever have had the identity shifts that I have had. And if you are in the messy middle, or if you're in that, you know, kind of that chapter that we spoke about during the episode, to grab what your kind of stake in the sand is and hold on to that vision with everything you have as you're going through kind of the the strawberry bits until you get out the other side because you will look back. Um, you know, I I look back and I almost chuckle, like, how on earth was that? How on earth was that me? You know, um it's so profound, the difference is so huge, but you got out of three to get out the other side.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Yeah, and I I think, you know, to your point, I think that's where most people give up. You know, they they give up before the miracle can happen. And as somebody who's going through this at this very moment and is in this void space, I can attest to the absolute discomfort that you have being in here because it tests your belief system on a level that you didn't think is possible. You are changing the way you're showing up, you're changing the way you're being perceived, you're changing the way you think, you're changing the way you send out energy, what you attract, and it's not working because the message hasn't gone out far enough yet, because the transmission is not strong enough yet. And that's, I think, where a lot of people give up and they get pulled back into their old, old system. So thank you for reminding our audience. If you're in it, stay the course.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

All right, Meev. This was amazing. Thank you so much for being on the show. What a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for having me. And that is it for us for today. As you can see, it seems like every episode we have now builds up on each other. So today we're talking about identity, and then we'll be talking a lot about the space that I'm finding myself in, the in-between space. So we appreciate you so much. We honor you, we honor your time, we honor that you are listening to these woo concepts and how to generate more energy and alignment in your business. Please share this episode with somebody that might find this beneficial. And as always, I see you again next time. And goodbye. That's it for this episode of the Business Growth Architect Show, Founders of the Future. If you're done playing small and ready to build the future on your terms, subscribe, share, and help us reach more trailblazers like you. And if you're serious about creating, growing, and scaling a business that's aligned with who you are, schedule your uncovery session at uncoverysession.com. Lead with vision. Move with purpose. Create your future.