231 Susan Bratton: Pivoting To Opportunity

Susan Bratton has built an extraordinary empire advising men and women how to put the intimacy and passion back into their relationships. CEO and co-founder of Personal Life Media, Susan is as the “Dear Abby of Sex”. If only the Google, YouTube and Facebook algorithms loved her as much as her customers! Learn how Susan is pivoting her 8-figure business into supplements and energy bars while leveraging endorsements and affiliate marketing deals to take her business to the next level.

Melinda Wittstock:         Susan, welcome to Wings.

Susan Bratton:                  I’m so happy to be here and my wings are flipping and flapping behind me with beautiful wind under them from your love.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh, that’s so sweet. Oh, my goodness. I love that. I’m so excited to have you on Wings again.

Susan Bratton:                  I’m a redo. It’s so great be here back from my redux.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, that’s right. I think you were episode 7 or 8?

Susan Bratton:                  [Crosstalk 00:20:55]. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         This podcast has really, really taken flight.

Susan Bratton:                  [Inaudible 00:21:04].

Melinda Wittstock:         I love the interviews that I do and I’m so excited to talk to you. I know that there’s so much that’s happened since you were last on and you’re in a big pivot right now in your business.

Susan Bratton:                  I think the last time I was talking to you I was like super cranky and bitchy about my business. Wasn’t I?

Melinda Wittstock:         You-

Susan Bratton:                  I was bitching about my business pretty much the whole podcast.

Melinda Wittstock:         It was interesting because you came on and I remember this, you’d had a really tough day. You’d had an issue with YouTube because they were just shutting down your traffic. You couldn’t do any calls to action on YouTube anymore and I imagine this has something to do with your pivot.

Susan Bratton:                  It does.

Melinda Wittstock:         What gave you that idea?

Susan Bratton:                  One year later, what did you do to fix your traffic problem?

Melinda Wittstock:         I think what you do is so important for the world and it falls into these old ways of thinking, right, where you get in the Google algorithms or the Facebook algorithms, you get kind of lumped in with like porn or something.

Susan Bratton:                  Yeah, nobody can tell the difference between a passionate love making technique and you know whatever. I’m the antidote to porn, I teach people how to make love, I teach people how to slow down and have heart connected intimacy, and I teach very simple techniques that really have a profound effect on women and men’s sex life satisfaction. But I have difficulty getting traffic to my offers so my business has been flat over the last three years.

For the last three years, I have been looking at a myriad of different ways that I might start a new company, pivot my company, launch a new product, change the way I’m doing things, get a new skill set. Change out my, not my whole team, of course I would never get rid of my team. But you know like add new capability … I’ve just been looking and looking and looking at business models and business opportunities, buying businesses, you name it.

Trying to figure out what I want to do and what I think is a good idea. I’ve looked at some businesses that would have cost me you know a quarter of a million dollars in lawyers fees to set up and things like that. And wearing edited out was that I’m going to do, I’m going to keep the business that I have running just like I have it because it’s a solid, great, awesome business which is selling online programs that show people through audios, videos and eBooks, certain lovemaking skills like how to have an expanded orgasm practice with your long term partner. How to learn how to have female ejaculatory orgasms, how to create a relationship with your partner that allows you to seduce them toward more pleasure even in a long term monogamous relationship, how to feel like your soul mates in the bedroom. Whatever they might be.

And so I’m continuing to sell those programs and do all my great free content and be on YouTube which by the way they gave me my ability to link out to my website back again. And then they took it away and then they gave it back, and so I’ve been whipsawed by YouTube over that now a number of times. But I’m going to keep the business going but I’m getting in to a business where it’s what you would call continuity, where you sell something that people like and they want to keep re-ordering it. They’re actually consumable goods.

The idea is that I’m a big … I’m very healthy, I do my very best to eat very well, I try not to eat a lot of junk food, I try not to eat a lot of sugar. I really try to minimize my alcohol, I just try to do as much of that as I can. And one of the things that I have come to rely on are energy bars. I like that in the afternoon if I’m getting a little hungry or it’s a long time for dinner, or I’m traveling and it’s a weird time zone or what have you.

I tend to have an energy bar in my purse or my briefcase and with my backpack. And I thought to myself, I’d like to be in the energy bar business but I don’t want it to just be a healthy low glycemic index, gluten-free, sugar-free tasty bar. I would like it to be a bar that also has a couple of added ingredients that support my sexual functions.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh, I get it, interesting. Yeah.

Susan Bratton:                  Vitality bar but it’s uncut, right now, who knows … I mean I haven’t launched it yet but I’m still going through, I’m hiring the formulators now, I know what I want in it, I’ve found out what is actually a clinically relevant dosage and what are actual herbal ingredients that really you can take that are safe, that you can eat all the time, that when you eat them all the time it actually support your sexual function and they’re not going to make you sick and they’ve been tested not just on mice or dogs or whatever, but they’ve been tested on humans in you know trials on humans tested on real people and they’ve shown to actually have a fact.

And that took me almost a year just to even figure out and go through all the data and the trials and the research, and see what was bullshit which is 99% of what’s out there and what is actually good for us. So my energy bar is going to be called the wink energy bar. It’s a vitality bar but it’s like of a [inaudible 00:27:05].

Melinda Wittstock:         I love that. That’s genius. Well you know it’s wonderful Susan, it really does solve your cold traffic program and then it becomes the ultimate, I mean a great product and business on its own, but also a tremendous lead magnet in a way into-

Susan Bratton:                  [crosstalk 00:27:23].

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. So it’s genius, it’s awesome. I could see lots of wink products.

Susan Bratton:                  Me too, because now here’s the interesting thing. When you were created and you were in your mommy’s tummy, you started out as a girl and we all started out as a girl. Everybody including men start out as female and about 16 weeks in utero were depending on your chromosomal orientation you go through hormonal bath that actually converts men into men from women.

The penis starts out as a clitoris, the clitoris is the OG sex organ. And so the clitoris is erectile tissue and you know it looks like a little starfish, it’s got a little head, a little shaft, a little arm, the little legs. That actually morphs into a penis that has two corpus cavernosum which your little legs that go down the chambers, and something called the corpus spongiosum. The penis and the clitoris both have an equal amount of erectile tissue in them and we as women are as dependent upon blood flow to achieve satisfying orgasmic experiences as men are. Yet, nobody’s talking about us women and our erectile function, no one’s talking about our circulation. Everybody’s talking about dudes and their ED and their Viagra and their blah, blah, blah.

But I think that in the future as people become more aware and women become more aware of that, we want to take care of our sexual function as well, we women who have or want to continue to have good sex lives, we have to take care of our circulation and our sexual function too. The wink is as much for women as it is for men.

Melinda Wittstock:         Well, women actually are a great market though too, so you know we talk about this a lot on the podcast where so many women are coming into their own in entrepreneurship, into their 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, interestingly. Not you know the image of the guy the dude in a hoodie you know in Silicon Valley working in his garage or whatever, that the actual optimum age to really succeed as an entrepreneur for first time business is 45, for men and women.

Susan Bratton:                  [inaudible 00:29:52] because generally what happens is your estragon starts to decline which means that the ratio of estrogen to testosterone that a woman has in her body the testosterone is increased on a ratio level, which gives you more balls to go out and being an entrepreneur.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh yeah.

Susan Bratton:                  Literally it’s testosterone. Supplement testosterone and I wouldn’t live without it because it gives me the balls to be the entrepreneur that I am.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s awesome. So that’s interesting. So not only that but also spending power. You think of the size of the market that you’re potentially addressing if you’re aiming this at women because they’re underserved, you’re right not served at all in this area, but we actually control the purse strings. So something like $14 trillion that women between 40 and 60 control right now dwarfs male spending.

Susan Bratton:                  Plus women by the energy, by the wink bar and they’ll be like, “Honey, I want you to eat this instead of those Doritos. No more of those.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, no, I think you’re really onto something.

Susan Bratton:                  [inaudible 00:30:54] guys and make them eat them too because we want to take … because women are doctor mom when you’re in the relationship, you’re usually the one making your partner take care of themselves.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. But I think this is so exciting Susan, I think you’re really onto something. And you know I want to talk about pivots for a moment because like in some quarters to hear people talk about pivots they get all hidden shame like, “Oh my god, they must have failed because the first thing didn’t work,” and you know whatever. But I mean to me if you’re not pivoting in business you could be completely missing an opportunity, or missing the market, or actually worse never finding your product market fit because you got to be open to change.

Susan Bratton:                  Well my passion is sexuality, I could have gotten out of the business that I’m in because it’s so frigging hard. I could have been like, “Oh I’ll just go do something else, fitness, diet, weight loss, anti-aging,” blah, blah, blah, anything. “Make money, entrepreneurialism, mindset.” It’s like a gazillion things that I could have potentially done. But I like to teach people how to have great sex. I’m good at it.

And there’s hardly anybody like me out there you, you show me a 57-year-old woman who’s going to tell you step by step by step how to have a passionate relationship with your partner. I mean, there are a handful of us. And so it’s a great market niche but it doesn’t even matter I’m just passionate about it. So and in the pivot, I’m both continuing to run my existing company as well as start a new company.

In a way maybe it’s more like it’s not even a product on extensions because it’s an entirely new organization, but I’m not giving up what I’ve taken 12 years to build, I have a fantastic company already. I’ve got 40,000 customers; I’ve got 320,000 people that read my daily e-mail newsletter. I have 23,000 people that watch my YouTube videos and are subscribers. So it’s not about abandoning what I’m doing, it’s about looking at business models that I can add on to what I’m doing and taking it to the next level. You know what else I want to launch? I’m really getting into physical goods now, because people are buying these products from someone there isn’t buying them for me and they would buy them from me if they knew I had them.

The next thing I want to make is a lube a sexual lube like trial, not trial sizes but like three ounce travel sizes of … Do you ever get those goo tubes on Amazon that are like tubes you can put your shampoo and stuff in, they don’t leak?

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah.

Susan Bratton:                  I love those things. They sell it on CVS and Walgreens too, those goo tubes rock and you can fill them with lube and take them on the plane with you and they’re great for massages as well as for lovemaking, as well as for your skin. If I like and what I always recommend to all my fans and followers is don’t use the lube but don’t use chemical lube, lower your toxic load by using organic avocado, organic sweet almonds, and organic coconut oils. They all have different [inaudible 00:34:17] and they feel different and you like them on different places in your body.

Organic avocado oil is a fantastic sexual lubricant, it’s very thick and smooth and it doesn’t cause any problems in your vagina. None of the three do. And so my plan is to have a three pack of lubes that you can then get the refill and refill them at home and they both will travel as well as lower waist because you’ve got these really high quality tubes that you use and use and use and use, and you’ve got one big gallon of your favorite oil so you can just refill.

I really like the refill; I don’t like having to throw out plastic bottles constantly.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh my goodness, well, this is awesome because then you become a conscious capitalist and evolved enterprise company where you’re getting rid of plastics in the ocean. I mean, this is a really major, major problem. There are lots of reasons to buy these products Susan, they’re brilliant. But to add on the fact that people are doing some good for the world makes it unbeatable.

Susan Bratton:                  Well and something good for their yoaning like not putting chemicals in it because the minute you … [inaudible 00:35:34] mucosa is a sponge, your mouth and your vagina have very similar tissue it’s called mucosal tissue. So if you wouldn’t drink the lube that you use you should never put it on your yoaning, which is why I want to come out with my organic lubes. Because then you could literally make a salad dressing and have sex with it.

Melinda Wittstock:         So what does it take to, have you had to learn completely new skills to do this business, so say if you’re going into like physical products where you had been doing information products. I imagine the sales funnels and things like that on an e-commerce basis are similar but what are some of the things where you’ve had to get out of your comfort zone to figure out how to do physical products, how to do supplements, how to find suppliers, like it’s just a whole other business.

Susan Bratton:                  Yeah it is. Yeah, definitely good manufacturers, finding them and that’s just through networking and being in masterminds with people and things like corporate governance and how I’m going to how we can how we’re going to structure the new company to manage you know taxation and liabilities and all kinds of things. It’s an entirely different business that has to be structured differently.

Amazon, Shopify, Warehousing and inventory, the faculties are perishable products, energy bars are you know maybe 180-day shelf life, where information products are evergreen. I never had to worry about any of those kinds of things, ship being international shipping, all those things. I’m just learning about it all right now. So it’s a firehose but it’s also doable, there are tons of people who already do it. It’s not that hard. We can figure it out.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, no, that’s wonderful I love that; I love that attitude. So I want to go back because not everybody would have heard your first episode with wings. And I want to go back in time a little bit to your early story and how you came to be the sexpert and what you do and I know that you again and this time, right, where were in of #MeToo and everything with a Supreme Court nomination. Oh my goodness. You know so many survivors of sexual trauma and this impacted you as a child I know.

Susan Bratton:                  Yeah definitely.

Melinda Wittstock:         And so take me through that journey of how you recovered, how it was impacting you and then the genesis of Personal Life Media?

Susan Bratton:                  Yeah, I think that so many people have been sexually abused, sexually shamed I mean, it doesn’t really matter whether it was something like one of your relatives sexually molesting you or it was getting pregnant the first time you ever had sex, even though you were using birth control and having to have an abortion the first time you lost your virginity or sleeping with a guy who literally kicks you out of bed and says, “Get dressed and go home. I’m not calling you anymore you suck in bed,” or feeling like you’ve had sex with all these people but never really got that connection and passion and surrender to pleasure that you thought should be in sex, or you had intercourse but never had an orgasm from it, or whatever, whatever it might be.

Those are all things that happened to me and many more, those are some of my stories. My husband and I almost got divorced after a decade of being married because our intimacy waned frankly, I’d had abuse issues, I never really felt that the sex was very satisfying after the honeymoon period wore off, and I wanted less and less sex with him. He got more and more withdrawn, he emotionally disconnected. I thought why the hell am I living with you, you’re not even paying attention to me, and he was like, “Well you’re not having sex with me.” We thought, “Oh God, what do we do about all this?”

So I went to therapy. He took me to therapy we went together, we went to a lot of sex workshops to try to work on our sex life because that was our one big issue was, it was just super frustrating with me and I realized I wanted to have good sex, I just didn’t feel like I was having it and through no fault of my husband, I mean he was as good as any other guy, it’s just the guys don’t they don’t know and teaches them what to do. And you know to them it always feels good.

You know it’s called the orgasm gap when 90 plus percent of the time a man has penetrated intercourse and he has an orgasm and you know maybe 50% of the time, sometimes some women can maybe have an orgasm from penetrative sex. It’s like so unfair. Part of the reason why is that women don’t understand they need to be fully engorged before they make love. And guys don’t understand that about women and so that whole idea of all our erectile tissue being the same as guys and the fact that you know he wouldn’t make love if he didn’t have a heart. And yet we do it as women all the time and that’s why we’re dissatisfied in our sex life.

We went back to school if you will and learn how to be good together. And once we started trying to repair our sex life and to repair our marriage, we started having incredible sex and we’re like, “We need to tell everybody about this.” And that’s how we ended up creating online programs couples could do or singles could do to prepare to find the one so that they would have a really satisfying sex life. And that’s what turned into Personal Life Media and here we are 12 years later three years of flat revenue going, I need to get more traffic, I got to start another company that I can actually market on Facebook and market on the Google content that work that isn’t about God forbid sex. That’s how the story started was through my of course, that’s how the story start. Through your own pain, your greatest wound is your biggest potential possibility, same old story.

Melinda Wittstock:         Well gosh. This is really, really true that often the thing that we struggle with you know perhaps when we look back into our childhood, whether it was some sort of trauma or whether it was just a lack or a gap or something. There’s always something there and it’s funny. Someone asked me this question not so long ago and I had a big revelation about like in my own life, and they were asking me why I was so interested in authenticity in marketing, enough that I would actually create an algorithm called “Return on Authenticity” to actually measure, I wouldn’t drive someone like what drive someone to want to do that.

I had to think about it and I realized that my parents, when they lost all their money my dad was this big stockbroker in Canada, he actually did the Coca-Cola IPO, like phenomenally successful. But then he lost all his monies, like partner embezzled money out of his company, all this like, it was just a disaster right. So I was sick recalled and I watched my parents try to well actually just be completely inauthentic because they were in such shame about what had happened, they had to kind of put on this pretense of being fitting in or whatever.

Susan Bratton:                  Being okay.

Melinda Wittstock:         So what’s interesting now whenever I’m mentoring any female or male entrepreneurs is how to get into alignment with your purpose and passion.  Like the clue definitely lies somewhere there in your childhood like, right?

Susan Bratton:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s true there’s a correlation with sort of startups we come up with are very much to do with, a problem that we ourselves are trying to solve internally.

Susan Bratton:                  I think entrepreneurial startups maybe, I think venture funded startups are more just … I want to say cold blooded but that’s not, I don’t mean it to be a negative thing I just mean more like strategic like we have a constellation of things, we’re creating a keiretsu, do you know what a keiretsu is? Have you heard that term keiretsu?

Melinda Wittstock:         You know, there’s an investment like an Angel Network called Keiretsu, but I don’t know what it actually means.

Susan Bratton:                  It’s a Japanese word and it essentially means where you have kind of a network effect of companies that all buy from each other and to help each other grow, it’s almost like vertical integration. Okay, so we’ve got a packaging company and we’ve got a manufacturing company, we’ve got a shipping company, and we’ve got a retail network and we’ve got … it’s almost like that.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, VC’s are going to think like that in their portfolio right all their portfolio companies.

Susan Bratton:                  So you’re going to start companies to fill gaps in the ecosystems that they’re creating. And I think that is why I like the fact that I’m not only continuing to run the company I have Personal Life Media but I’m also launching another company called Tantra Naturals because I’m developing my own ecosystem of both physical goods as well as information products in the sexual health and vitality space.

I don’t need to do other things that vertically integrate but I do like to think about the fact that, what does my customer need, what does my customer need, how can I help them, what are the things they’re doing, what are the things they’re worried about, what are the things they’re buying in their intimate relationship and sexual the world of their sexual health, and how can I help them.

One of the things I’m actually doing right now is I’m also, I went to three companies that I’m really, really impressed with and I said, I want to really tell people about what the three of you are doing, the three of you together work is essentially a very powerful stack of companies, it’s very similar to keiretsu, they are like a keiretsu. I said, “I would like to help the three of you do more business together and I would like to have you remunerate me for explaining what you do to the world. And essentially it would be marketing budget I want you to give me some marketing budget. I want you to pay me to tell people about what you’re doing,” because I mean I could do a little bit of it for free and I will and I have already. They knew me because I have been talking about their brands and how good they are.

I said, “You know I can only do so many things and I can only put my attention on people for so long without actually making money off of it. So you should pay me to talk about you, and help you with your market and your market positioning and help you do some deals together.” So they actually weren’t really quite interested in it and it’s one more way I can help my customer is by organizing companies that I know have products and services that are very good, but they’re not working with each other enough, they’re all just marketing themselves and they’re not working together but the customer needs all three things together for it to be the most benefits to them.

So that’s the way that I’m thinking about a constellation a keiretsu the way I’m bringing more money in through in its endorsement dollars basically. So I look at my revenue goals and I say, “Okay, well where am I going to spend my time? How am I going to make the numbers I want to make?” One way is through my information product company which as I’ve said is fairly flat as far as revenue because my advertising and media constraints, but I also have this market opportunity to serve my customers by telling them about these products and services that I can’t do it for free, my time is valuable.

So I’ve gone to these companies and said, “I’d like to be your spokesperson, I’d like you to give me marketing endorsement money, while I’m launching this third company which is the good stuff you can do to take care of your sexual health, the healthy way to approach your sexuality.” This is just what’s going on with me right now is how I’m thinking about my business and what I’m sticking to gather as my business revenue and strategy.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love it. I think it’s so interesting the affiliate model or this kind of keiretsu idea, where particularly for women because we are so collaborative and also because it’s easier for us actually if were not great sales people to sell someone else’s product. And so, and I love this affiliate model because I love really endorsing other people’s products, getting the word out for other women, and when we start as women to think more about abundance rather than scarcity.

Susan, you and I are both old enough to have often been the only woman in the room, where there were no female role models and women like fought hard for like tiny scraps like there wasn’t enough to go around that kind of scarcity. It’s nice, it’s wonderful actually to see that really changing where women are really stepping up and helping each other and I think the affiliate model is awesome for that because we can all align financially, so everybody wins financially while we’re supporting each other in business. I’m very drawn to that, I think what you’re doing is great.

Susan Bratton:                  Thank you.

Melinda Wittstock:         I really do.

Susan Bratton:                  I heard about endorsements and I was like, “Oh that’s income I should be making, because I like to endorse products.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly.

Susan Bratton:                  It was me. My title is you know CEO but my external title to the universe, you know my customers think about me they don’t think about me as the CEO of Personal Life Media, my title is trusted hot sex adviser to millions.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, trust, yeah.

Susan Bratton:                  Long time sex being such a scary and shameful thing, it takes me a long time to develop trust with people. I’m very slow to warm people up to my brand because they have to trust me or will never get anywhere, and trusted is the number one word in my title.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love that. Well trust I think is just like authenticity right now, so craved you know in this era of kind of infobesity and sort of slickness where sort of like everybody, there’s everybody a lot of people kind of saying not much and how does one differentiate. And it really does come down to trust and authenticity and how do you develop that. It’s a key differentiator. So this is just so beautiful.

Where do you see yourself in like you know a couple of years’ time? I mean you’re often this new pivot which is really, really exciting I love it. I think it’s going to just be an amazing new ride for you, really. It looks great. Where you see yourself in about five years’ time?

Susan Bratton:                  Well, I really like my lifestyle right now, which is my daughter, our daughter my husband and I have been married for 25 years we managed to get through that 10-year crunch and come together better than ever literally and figuratively. Our daughter is now 21 and she’s off to college, so we are empty nesters, I don’t have a cat, a dog, a horse or houseplant, [Paula Bratton Luya 00:52:50].

I mean literally there’s nothing living around my house except outside where the lawn guys can come and make it all green and beautiful. I can travel whenever I want, wherever I want, as much as I want and I work from the road I’ve learned how to be, have a laptop lifestyle. So I just shut it up my house and go wherever I want to go. So a big part of what I’m doing over the next decade is building my Tantra Naturals brand, helping people feel more pleasure and connection and health and vitality, building that business and scaling it larger than I have been able to do with Personal Life Media.

Continuing to serve people with Personal Life Media because I’m frankly addicted to the e-mails I get from people every single day to say without me asking, I don’t ask for testimonials, they just reply to me and say things like, “I love your email so much, I love your product, I’ve learned so much from you. You changed my life. I never knew that I could have all this pleasure. My husband I have never been happier. You know I went through so much and now I feel so good.”

Whatever, everybody from all walks of life across the gender spectrum around the world who write to me and thank me for having a positive impact on their life, I can’t let that go, I love that so much. That’s my healing work in the world. So being able to build a great physical goods company that people will be like, “Damn! These bars are good, I’m out again, I need to re order. Oh well I guess I’ll sign up for subscribe and save and get monthly shipments …”

Melinda Wittstock:         Recurring revenue.

Susan Bratton:                  Recurring revenue.

Melinda Wittstock:         The beauty of it.

Susan Bratton:                  That is my business going forward. I will never launch anything again that isn’t based on recurring revenue. That is what you want, you want people to know you, like you, trust you and keep ordering from you so that you’re not constantly having to sell new customers all the time. You’re growing your customer based and they keep re-ordering. That’s where I’m going. So travel, seeing the world, making people have great sex, making people feel healthy and making good food decisions and taking supplements that actually make them feel better. Those are the things that I am doing.

Thank you for asking me that question because it got me really feeling into the joy that I’m creating through the pain of learning how to launch this new business. It’s not even pain it’s just like, “Oh it’s also new and I don’t know if I’m going to make the right decisions.” But you know what, ultimately I will make all the right decisions because I don’t at first I will eventually, and my goal is making people feel really, really good. If they feel really, really good then they like me and I like to be liked.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s a wonderful. But that’s you see that’s just so beautiful. When you when you have a mission and you know when you’re really in your purpose and your passion, and you’re like aligned, you’re going to the north star. All the little zigs and zags along the way like what we could call failures or need pivots, big pivots, mini pivots whatever I mean that’s just part of the territory. You know that you’re ultimately going to get there.

I think the best metaphor I’ve ever really heard for this is really about sailing I love to sail, and if you’re sailing somewhere it’s impossible to sail in the straight direction like because the wind …

Susan Bratton:                  Yeah, you’ve got the wind, wave and the current, yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         Everything’s changing around you and so you have to tuck and jive, you have to kind of keep doing that, you’ve got to zigzag all the way to where you’re going. And I’d say it’s a wonderful metaphor really for entrepreneurship.

Susan Bratton:                  I love that zigzag all the way.

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. You and I just get on some little catamaran and have some of your …

Susan Bratton:                  How about a yacht?

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, yacht is more …

Susan Bratton:                  With the manservant.

Melinda Wittstock:         Our yacht, the yacht is a much better that’s much more Susan Bratton and Melinda Wittstock right there. The yacht with manservants. I’m there with you.

Susan Bratton:                  #manservant.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. Exactly, my dear. Anyway, I am so thrilled to have you come on the podcast again and catch up. Susan, I just want to make sure that everybody knows where to find you in particular, your amazing kind of Instagram feed and all the places where you are on social media. And then also how people can get these amazing products whether it’s all your trusted advice which we all need or these new products.

Susan Bratton:                  Well, you can always find me on Instagram, I’ve been posting I think some my best stuff on Instagram right now.

Melinda Wittstock:         You’re on fire on Instagram.

Susan Bratton:                  You know what Instagram makes me do is net my thinking out to the most essential piece of information that I can give about a particular subject in sexuality, and that’s @Susanbratton. It’s just my name, no brand, just Susan Bratton. B-R-A-T-T-O-N. The brat that weighs a ton but doesn’t. I have a couple of gifts for you today. These are just the get to know me type things.

The first one is the soul mate embrace, And it’s actually a hug technique, it’s a way of creating more masculine feminine polarity. Strong women like us, we need our men to really hold us in a very masculine way and calm our nervous systems down, and we can be equals outside the bedroom but we need to feel that masculine strength in the bedroom. I do. Anyway do you?

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh yeah absolutely. No, that’s really true.

Susan Bratton:                  Your boyfriend is so sexy on that too.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh thank you.

Susan Bratton:                  And I just adore him.

Melinda Wittstock:         And yet sensitive, and yet so thoughtful and sensitive at the same time.

Susan Bratton:                  He is, he’s a gorgeous man. I hope you’ll try the soul mate embrace, get Steve to do it with you. It’s basically what happens with guys is that they will hold you and then when you relax they let go instead of pulling you tighter, that’s the essence of it. But there’s some little tiny things about it that if you read this very short little download and you’re like, “Oh okay, I see what she’s saying. I’m going to teach him how to do that for me.”

And then you relax into his arms to a level of relaxation where your, I always say you know you’re good when the drool starts coming out like when you get to the point where you’re so relaxed that you’re actually your mouth is watering and a little drool was coming out, it’s a signal to your body that you’ve entered total relaxation but you’re also because you’re being held by this very sexy man who’s holding you in a way that you’ve never been held before in this way that just makes you feel both safe and secure and fully loved.

It starts once you get completely relaxed it actually starts to get you turned on. A lot of people think that when you want to get turned on, you start to stimulate yourself like that arousal comes from stimulation, it doesn’t. Arousal begins in relaxation and then once you relax you find that you’re suddenly calm and you’re tuned into your body and your body has let go of all the stuff that was in your mind because you’re relaxed and now you’re just connected body to body with this gorgeous man who’s just silently laid there holding you and feeling you relax and relax and relax into him.

It’s just creates a magical moment. As a matter of fact Isa Herrera whom I think you know she’s the pelvic healer, she’s one of my partners. She said that she and her husband David because she was going to send this out to her list so they could begin to know me like me and trust me. She said she and David did it and she said, I was so fidgety, I had a hard time, we had tried a couple times before I could finally surrendered to him. And I realized that he had never stayed with it that long and the only reason we stayed with it was because I was going to tell other people to do it. And I had to make myself do it and she said, “Now, I love it. Now, I get it. I was not relaxing with my man at the level that I should have been. It’s changed the way we enter into our pleasure together.”

So it sounds silly like I’m giving you a hug technique the soul mate embrace, but you would not believe how profound this simple thing is. That’s what I will leave you with today, there’s always more, so much more. I love profound and simple techniques that really make a shift.

Melinda Wittstock:         I’m going to put a whole bunch of links to this and your other products Susan, because everybody really should have them. So in the show notes everybody really read those and go and get Susan’s offers really …

Susan Bratton:                  Well, that’s a freebie [crosstalk 01:02:35].

Melinda Wittstock:         And it’s a freebie but you know I want to make sure that people can find all the cool stuff you do.

Susan Bratton:                  Oh yeah of course.

Melinda Wittstock:         So oh my goodness I could talk you for hours.

Susan Bratton:                  Thank you so much for having me again I love and honored. Can I come on every year?

Melinda Wittstock:         You can. Of course you can. No, you got to come back, you got to come back when …

Susan Bratton:                  We have to see how the wink energy bar did and wooh.

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. I know. No, you can come back any time. I really do, I mean that’s going to be great. So yeah, so when you’re getting closer to that let’s definitely have you back on again. Love it.

Susan Bratton:                  I’ll be sending you some.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yes, please. I owe you.

Susan Bratton:                  Great.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’d be awesome. Oh my God. Susan, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.