From Radio to Radical Self-Trust: Carmen Braidwood on Intuition, Fear, and Reinvention

What if losing control was the very thing that helped you find yourself again? 🌟

In this heartfelt and empowering episode, I sit down with Australian broadcaster and intuitive entrepreneur Carmen Braidwood, who shares her courageous journey from the world of radio to a deeper life guided by intuition, authenticity, and radical self-trust.

Together, we explore how to:
 ✨ Move through fear and trust your inner guidance
 ✨ Turn challenges into opportunities for reinvention
 ✨ Reconnect with your authentic voice and confidence
 ✨ Blend professional success with spiritual purpose

This inspiring conversation is a reminder that your intuition never leaves you — it’s always guiding you home to yourself.

💛 Join our next Connecting to Spirit Bootcamp and begin your own journey of intuitive connection:
👉 https://www.connectedtospirit.com

🎧 Guest: Carmen Braidwood — Broadcaster, Media Coach & Intuitive Entrepreneur
🌐 https://www.carmenbraidwood.com.au

Transcript

Lisa Brandis: 0:00

Welcome to this special edition of Connecting to Spirit Podcast. Today I'm joined by the incredible Carmen Braidwood, a familiar voice to many Australians and a powerhouse of wisdom when it comes to communication. Confidence and trusting your intuition, especially when you're in the spotlight. Carmen began her career in Western Australia as a radio producer for six PR and hit 92.9 before stepping up to the microphone as a music announcer. 4 97 0.3 Coast FM and six KG Kalgoorlie. She later became a trusted newsreader for 94.5 and hit 92.9, building a reputation for her authentic voice and magnetic on-air presence. But what I love most about Carmen's story is how she has learn to transform life's unexpected detours. Into moments of self-trust, really deep self-trust and spiritual alignment. In our conversation, she opens right up about her amazing journey from the highs of breakfast radio, to a life-changing moment that really brought her to redefine success. Reconnect with her intuition and build a thriving business that helps others to show up with confidence on camera and in life. So whether you are a healer, a teacher, or simply someone learning to trust your inner voice, this interview is filled with heart and humor and hard one wisdom. That courage, reinvention, and. Radical self-trust. So let's dive in. I am your host, Lisa Brandis, and I'm here to help you unlock your intuition channel with clarity and deep dive into self-discovery, all while navigating the ups and downs of personal and spiritual growth. If you're ready to say goodbye to self-doubt, embrace your unique gifts and connect with a supportive community on the same journey, then you're in the right place. Whether you're just starting out or you've been walking this path for years, this podcast is here to guide you, support you, and inspire you every step of the way. So grab a cozy spot, settle in, and let's dive into some empowering insights together.

Carmen Braidwood: 2:34

Hello. Um, why don't we do something, something I love to do when I. Speaking on stages is ask, part of this concept around intuition versus fear, that's what I love to talk about, um, is just get you to write down the seed of an idea. Is there something that comes to mind that you would like to do? Is there something maybe that you've been putting off? Is there a reason why you came to today's workshop? Uh, jot it down. Whatever comes to mind. I don't need to tell a room full of reiki and, uh, intuitive practitioners to understand how that feels. But write something down. Uh, pop it on a piece of paper and, and save it for later. We'll call that your seed of an idea. So as, um, as Lisa just mentioned, my background is in the broadcast media, so that means TV, radio. If you've heard that it can be a ruthless career choice, you'd be absolutely correct. It is at times a ruthless place to play, but for me, for the most part, it's been a wonderful career that I went into with Eyes Wide Open. I absolutely knew. That there would be ups and downs, but I knew that I'd be on the right track if I just kept following my interest and my curiosity and ended up where I would like to be. And that's exactly what happened. About 15 years ago, I landed my dream job back here in Perth. I'm a West Australian native, and I'd been working all over Australia pursuing things like breakfast, radio jobs, that was my dream gig. And reading news on radio stations and on tv. I knew that the thing I always wanted to do was host a breakfast show in my home city, and sure enough, there I am. Uh, 2011, I get this gig in, in Perth and I managed to string together seven amazing years of hosting breakfast radio. Now the media is changing a lot. I see. See a few faces who might have grown up listening to breakfast radio. Like I did. But chances are if you joined the earth in the last 20 years or so, maybe you didn't. Maybe your idea of media is more social media or what we're doing right now, online, media, digital. See, back when I was a kid, it was. The dream job to go off and do something in the broadcast media for me, not everyone would feel that way about speaking on air, but for me it was something I absolutely wanted to do and something you need to know about Breakfast Radio Host is, they're a bit like footy coaches. They don't really retire their own accord. Uh, they either get sacked or they get to the age where they are. 65 and they're going off into official retirement, they don't tend to go, Hey, I've had enough. Now I'm just gonna move on to another job. And me and breakfast radio, I was exactly the same, but I was acutely aware that at some stage, just as I had replaced another breakfast radio host to start that job, I would one day be replaced myself. And sure enough, in comes my seagull of a boss. Uh, have you heard of a seagull? Mm-hmm. You heard a seagull? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Seagulls of those bosses who fly in poop all over everything. And then head back to the east coast. My seagull boss came in from Sydney, my co-host, and I knew something was probably up and he informed my co-host and I that, uh, we were done with the radio station. Thanks for your seven years. We are going a different direction next year. In fact, you don't even need to come into work tomorrow. Yeah. Wow. That was about 10:00 AM by 11 o'clock I was home and I'd made a couple of phone calls to my friends and family to explain what had happened. And by midday the story was on. Now on online newspaper publications and things like that. And now a lot of people hearing that story, I imagine, I find people tend to think, gosh, how humiliating to lose a job that way and to have stories written about you in the press that are a little less than flattering. For me, even though yes, there was the obvious reaction from that point of view, I had this overwhelming sense of what I now call my new sense, you know this capacity to just sort of go, everything's gonna be okay. I'm gonna wind up in a place that suits me even better. And that to me. Is intuition. That's that whisper if you like. And the challenge we all have with that whisper of intuition that everything's gonna be okay, is that fear which is more primal, which is an instinct, comes through much more loud, right? And if we're in a situation where we're not looking after ourselves, we're not protecting that capacity to channel intuition, we end up in a situation where the fear drowns it out like this big shout. For me, that absolutely came after a low point. I was, uh, found myself in 2018, uh, woke up in a hospital bed and didn't know how I got there, and it turned out that I was waking up from a coma after three days. Yeah, I heard that news from the nurse who woke me up and the first thing I remember saying is, I'm dreaming. And she informed me. I wasn't dreaming. Then of course, I worried about my family. I thought maybe we'd been in a car accident. Uh, the next thing that happened is she assured me that I was okay now, but, um, I had suffered a couple of seizures in the emergency department. Uh, one of those seizures I'd had fallen from the gurney in the emergency department and hit my head. I'd bitten my tongue. And that was as a result of a condition that I live with called Addison's Disease. And so what had happened is Addison's disease is, is a deadly illness, but it's very rare. And I had not been getting the appropriate medication I needed to stay alive. As you can see, it's an absolutely treatable condition. You can live with it. Uh, but at that stage I hadn't really nutted out how to live. With it. Now, that's not necessarily the bit where the fear came in. The fear came in a couple of days later when literally I'd just been moved out of emergency and onto the ward, at Royal Perth. And I take a phone call from an employer, a radio station employer, saying, Hey Carmen, we'd love you to start a brand new breakfast radio show in Perth. And instead of sort of saying, Hey. I know everything's gonna be okay. I can take some time to recover. I said yes.

Lisa Brandis: 9:03

Those opportunities don't come very often.

Carmen Braidwood: 9:07

I guess they don't, and I think that the, the, the scarcity Yeah. Was what did that for me. Right. There was this sense that if I didn't say yes there and then there would never be another opportunity. I found it really hard because I'd been in this low position, compounded with maybe losing my job a couple of years earlier, then ending up in the hospital bed. I was concerned that I wouldn't. Find a way through to that again, and my intuition of everything's gonna be okay, was just completely drowned out by that scarcity, which is at the base of it all this very primal, kind of instinctive fear, isn't it? You know, fear is something that. That is wonderful. Really, if we didn't have fear, we would, we, we, we could, we pretty much rule out is essential to life. Couldn't we? We say fear is absolutely something that has protected us for eons. Only thing is it's out of step with what we do now. Right. And it's, it's holding us back from doing the things that we need to do. And whilst I got a lot out of going into that, that job that I took, it put me in a situation where I was putting on the back burner my own little seed of an idea. And it wasn't until 2020, 2020 came along and suddenly my radio show that I've been doing for a couple of years then. I couldn't go into because of that chronic illness. Right. We didn't know what COVID was and I couldn't go into that radio station. I also couldn't go and host television shows out in the field. I couldn't go and produce stories. I couldn't mc events, all the things I'd been doing. but I'd, I'd had this, this seed of an idea like I asked you to write down there at the start, and that related to teaching a business owner how to. Make video content to grow their business, you know, and I'd been sitting there thinking, I'd love to be able to do something with that. I'd love to be able to turn that into something. And instead, I was doing as I'd done that day in the hospital bed, just saying yes to every single opportunity that had come my way because of that. Yeah, exactly that nothing else was gonna come my way. And the scarcity had totally gotten in the way of that incredible idea that I had, you know? And in the end, 2020 forced me into complete shutdown. It meant that I had no other job opportunities coming my way, and I absolutely took on that seed of an idea to help business owners. It meant that, in the face of border closures here in Perth, in the face of not being able to leave the house, in the face of not being able to go to work, I became an online business owner.

Lisa Brandis: 11:50

Yeah. So your business was birthed online just like mine was? Yes. where are you now? how's that translated to you in terms of alignment with your, bigger purpose? has it created a different feeling for you than when you were working for others and doing the presenting? how's it changed your life

Carmen Braidwood: 12:07

Completely? Yeah. there's a complete sense of. Not requiring what I was getting out of the television and radio career. Like I think that what was going on during that time was me proving something and proving that I could do it. Whereas now I have a greater sense of trust. Like you mentioned trust as you're talking about intuition. You know, trust is something for me that I describe as radical self-trust. Like you absolutely need to be able to, in the face of. So many people who are telling you something else and including your own fear, you need to be able to sideline that and back yourself completely without, it's almost unreasonable, it's insane.

Lisa Brandis: 12:52

And have you found the community that you've created has helped to create this or solidified. The success for you as well, Carmen has the, the people that you've brought into your circle. Yeah, for me, absolutely.

Carmen Braidwood: 13:05

Changed things completely because there was a scenario back in my media environment where the, I guess the, the validation, it's, it's about where we seek validation. And in media it was continually about this external seeking of validation. Whereas, in my business environment, I'm able to take responsibility for that myself. Internal validation.

Lisa Brandis: 13:32

Yeah. Oh God, you and I are like twins. It's like I'm listening to your story and just going. I can totally relate. thank you so much for sharing and for, for being here today. Does anyone have any questions that they wanna ask Carmen about her experience or just to say thanks for what she shared? I'm very grateful. I have one question here. What advertising do you like to do to promote your business?

Carmen Braidwood: 13:58

Yeah. Which advertising did I do? Was that the question With the online, business that you started? Yeah, during the pandemic I ran Facebook ads, which, you know, I didn't even make videos to, to promote my own business at that stage. And that was because I was still wrestling with my connection to perfection. And I had this false belief that I needed to do productions as brilliant, beautiful as I'd been making on tv. And I was really worried about showing up as my real self in video. Yeah. So instead we used, photos of me from television and just positioned it in the Facebook ads as an opportunity to train with a, uh, television presenter. And that, um, yeah, it, for me, that validated the offer. It meant that I understood that there were people in business. And incorporate who needed the skills that I could bring. And that worked brilliantly. Then I started to filter in my own video content once I let go, and I learned from the people I was coaching that it was really accessible and really that, that the new language that online was asking for, that we don't need to have perfect productions. In fact, we don't want perfect productions. We want the real person. We wanna see the things that go wrong. We wanna go behind the scenes. You know, the kind of interesting,

Lisa Brandis: 15:18

isn't it, when glitching doesn't happen and you watch someone sweating out with a start and it's like, it's kind, it's real, it's, it's, it's endearing, I think. Um, yeah,

Carmen Braidwood: 15:29

and that's it. I haven't run Facebook ads since then. You know, I, I've run them on the odd occasion, but for me, the main place where I. Gained traction, um, since then with the online business and now with my in-person work as a media coach is through organic marketing. It's through content that is just me out there being myself and sharing insights into what I do, including speaking on stages and sharing stories like that one.

Lisa Brandis: 15:57

Yeah. Wonderful. Well, everyone join me to say thank you to Carmen for sharing and coming on today. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. it's been amazing to hear insights If you'd like to learn more from Carmen or explore her programs, you can find at her@carmenbraidwood.com au and she's on LinkedIn as well, so I'm sure she would love to hear from you guys. So get connected. We absolutely love connecting with people and seeing how we can help them. And, she's also got a podcast I do. Modern

Carmen Braidwood: 16:25

media. The podcast is out there. Yes,

Lisa Brandis: 16:27

indeed. Nice. I've listened to a few episodes, it's awesome. So yeah, go and check her out.