Release Your Mind & Beliefs
We often hear the saying, "you are your own worst enemy" but how often do you examine what that really can mean for your business performance? As it turns out, there is a lot more psychological truth to this concept than many of us would believe.
Recently, our CEO Stacy Jones, sat down with a Psych-K coach to discuss how Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Psych-K facilitation, and mindfulness, can all be used as powerful techniques to erase self-limiting beliefs. In this blog, Hollywood Branded examines how to Erase Self-Limiting Beliefs with Your Best Self coach, Tanya Romanuk.
A Little More About Tanya
Tanya Romanuk is the founder of Your Best Self Life Coaching. Tanya uses her skills as a mentor and life coach to help her clients actively reprogram their subconscious mind and erase self-limiting beliefs that sabotage success. Using cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, Psych-K facilitation, and mindfulness, Tanya has helped her clients rewrite their limiting beliefs and make dreams become reality.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: You have a really interesting business of what you do. Would you tell us a little more about it?
Answer: Thank you, it's my passion project and it's my purpose. I fell into it in one way, but it's been creating itself for the past 25 years. I started my education work career when I was in my early 20's. I did my degree in psych and I started as a behavioral therapist in a primary school. Actually the primary school I went to, I was working with a little autistic boy and it was sort of a practice run. Learning how to interact with parents and learning how to interact with kids in that kind of an environment. The little boy was autistic, his parents were in denial, and the school was really unimpressed because the little kid was acting out all the time. I was so in over my head, I just thought, "I'm not authentic. I can't do this. It's too much for me."
So I went traveling, got some life experience, and I taught English overseas. When I came back, I fell into this marketing role, this business role, and I was reasonably good at it. I started to make money and develop contacts, and from there I moved into product management and suddenly, literally it was 25 years later, and I was a business person. But something really interesting that I had experienced along the way was that four times throughout this career, I had been with tech startups that either two years in, I just couldn't stand, or couldn't see a career progression for me so I opted out of funding went bust and we all lost our jobs.
And the last time this happened, I looked at this and I said, "The universe is telling you something. This isn't what you're supposed to do. You know you don't love this. You drive to work every morning, wondering why you're going back to the same job. So, maybe it's time to do something that you know is you and go back to your roots." But I hadn't been doing it for the past 20 years because of course the same limiting mindset came up. Too old to go back to school. I won't be able to pay my bills. This is the career that I've created for myself. I have to do this. And I had actually heard about this psychological approach, Psych-K, from a friend of mine, a couple of months previous. And so, after I lost my job, I said, "Well, let me just check this thing out, see if there's any workshops or anything kind of in the next couple of weeks."
And there happened to be one in two weeks. Pulled out the credit card, signed up, didn't even think twice about it. And very, very quickly I realized that I was the one standing in my way. That there was absolutely no reason in my life that I couldn't pursue my dreams. I had all of these opportunities in front of me, I just needed to give it a try. And so, I actually started learning Psych-K to become a facilitator and I did that. And over sort of the next little while, what progressed was, "Hey, I can do this for other people. I have these amazing experiences in my life. I've been divorced. I've lived overseas. I've been in business for 20 years. And now as a counselor, a life coach, and a Psych-K facilitator, I can help other people through these same transitions." And it's just, it's kind of come together in a way that I didn't expect, but I'm just having so much fun.
Question: I'd love for you to share a little bit more about Psych-K. What is that? When you say Psych-K, I know most of our listeners are saying, "What's that?"
Answer: To be honest, when I first heard of it, I didn't know what it was either. It does sound a bit kind of woo woo. And there is definitely a spiritual component to it, but it's rooted in psychology and kinesiology, Psych-K. And so Psych-K essentially uses a combination of talk therapy, and kinesiologic concepts to rewrite limiting beliefs that are holding someone back to become more supportive beliefs to support their future. And so, the thing that people don't often have as much experience with, you say talk therapy and every says, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what that is." But kinesiology is a little bit of a mystery to a lot of people based on movement somehow, and that's very similar to kind of what we're actually doing in Psych-K.
So, fundamentally what happens when we are born and we start to learn, and you've probably heard this concept before, but people become hemisphere dominant and one of their hemispheres starts to sort of deal with problems more frequently, you become kind of right-brained or you could become kind of left-brained. And over time, your right brain might be dealing with problems that your left brain would do a better job at. And through what we call whole brain postures and muscle testing, we can identify where you have limiting beliefs in your life that your subconscious mind doesn't really believe that you can actually achieve something, and we create a whole brain state.
So we create the environments where both hemispheres have an equal opportunity to problem solve together. We use muscle testing to ask the subconscious mind whether or not it believes something that you're trying to achieve. And muscle testing, it's a little bit like the same concept as when people are going into a lie detector test. Your body knows when you're lying and when you're telling the truth. So I will ask someone's subconscious mind, whether it believes something, muscle test one of their lens to see if it gets weak, and if it gets weak, that's their body telling me that their subconscious mind doesn't believe it. In Psych-K that's a really good thing, because that means we have something to work with.
So we then take that concept and through back to kind of the talk therapy approach, we identify what the preference would be. So, you don't have a love relationship in your life that you want? What would be your preference? Well, your preference might be, you just want more opportunity for love in your life. Or your preference might be, "I want to find my soulmate." And then we change that concept into first person, present tense, emotionally meaningful goal statement, and through the use of that goal statement and then creating a whole brain posture to it, we have an opportunity to rewrite that limiting belief into a supporting belief.
It happens really, really fast. It's really quite phenomenal. You see people go from within 15 to 20 minutes sometime going, "Oh my God, yesterday, that thing happened. I didn't realize. I could have done that." And so what happens is that the emotional attachment to the limiting belief goes away. The limiting belief doesn't go away. We all have these beliefs. They don't necessarily leave, but the emotional attachment you have towards it goes away. And because the emotional attachment goes away, it opens up your conscious mind to start seeing more opportunities for you in that area that you can take advantage of.
Question: How is it you would conduct a session? You would sit down with them, I'm assuming this is something that's done in person, which is not very friendly and COVID-19 right now. But for our listeners, as well, for them learn some tools, how would you process someone through? How could even someone try to do some of this themselves to change mindsets and open up the ability for them to actually see the possibilities that are in front of them that match with the dreams of what they want to have come true?
Answer: Well, in actual fact it can be done over the phone, and it can be done over Skype or Zoom just like this. And I think that's something that a lot of people are kind of confused about. So, I do probably 90% of my facilitation over the phone and over Zoom and it works just as well. The understanding there is that because we are all one, and because the universe is infinite and we're all connected, I can actually tap into the collective unconscious to be able to muscle test on your behalf.
So then in a session, it looks very much like an in-person session in that respect. We spend a little bit of time getting to know each other. We talk about the specific issue at hand. And through that conversation, usually what comes off, is kind of the one core issue that someone is having that they want to change. The hardest part I think for people is coming up with the alternative. When your subconscious mind and your conscious mind is so rooted in the, "I can't," and the, "I should and I don't have the option to do this," it's really hard to put yourself in that first person perspective of what you want and having it right now.
So the goal statement creation is probably the most challenging. We usually come up with five or six different goal statements, and then we ask your subconscious mind, which of the goal statements is kind of the best one. And usually it's the one that people tear up to. Then we progress into the muscle test. And so, we ask the subconscious mind if it believes that statement to be true, and when we identify that it isn't, we have five or six different whole brain postures that we can select from. And again, we ask the subconscious mind, which of the whole brain postures we should be using for this goal statement? We select one. And then I talk the partner through it online so that they do the posture. And it's almost always combined with visualization. So if that goal statement was, "I want to find my soulmate," my goal statement might be, "I have an amazing soulmate partner in my life."
Question: Are you saying the universe helps you connect the dots after that and be able to see that there's more opportunities?
Answer: Yeah, that's right. And it helps that sense of achievement as well. It's like, "Oh, I'm actually doing this now." And just like in anything else, even in business, once you've taken that first step, the second step becomes easier, and the third step becomes easier. And the fourth step just appears to you and you go, "Oh, I didn't realize, but this is super doable. I can do this. I can have this." So we often as well, will do sort of a different, take a different layered approach.
There's different techniques in Psych-K. Sometimes people will have a lot of stress associated to a particular situation. And so we have some, we call them balances to work through the perception of stress that someone has over a particular issue. We also have ways of looking for messages and meaning and repetition in people's lives. That's a really phenomenally amazing balance as well. I really love it when people come to me and they say, "So this thing keeps happening in my life." And I go, "Oh, the universe is trying to tell us something, let's find out what it is." And that's really amazing.
Question: So what does someone need to do? Where would you give our listeners some guidance on how they could better tune in? Is it meditation? Is it mantras?
Answer: Well, there are a lot bunch of different opportunities. I think meditation is really the best and the first approach for people to take. Your subconscious mind is incredibly loud if you can listen to it and giving yourself that opportunity to just listen to your thoughts, you'd be amazed at kind of the things that will end up coming through. But there's also some kind of more strategic, some more tactical things. I've created a limiting beliefs, quality assessment for people who come to my website. So, you can go to my website, you can take it. It takes about 15-20 minutes, and it helps identify where there might be places in your life that you have limiting beliefs holding you back.
On my website, there's also three other free resources. One of them is mindfulness meditation that's called the Heart, Mind, Gut Meditation. And it kind of leads people through what your head thinks, what your heart thinks, what your gut thinks. And once you've kind of gotten through all three of those people go, "Oh yeah, that makes sense to me." There's visualization techniques on my website as well that you can try. But fundamentally, the best thing to do is just use perceptual positioning, put yourself in someone else's shoes.
How often is it that someone says to you, "I don't understand why you're not doing that. You have the skills to do that," but we can't see it. Put yourself in someone else's shoes. What do they see that you don't? We can't see our own limiting beliefs. That's why they're limiting beliefs, right? But other people can. It's so easy to look at other people's lives and go, "They could be doing that better. They could be doing that better," but we can't do that for ourselves. Perceptual positioning gives you that opportunity to step outside of yourself, step into someone else's shoes, and look back at yourself.
And it's really easy. Try it with someone that you know. So try it with someone who knows you well. For example, well I'm going to put myself in my sister's shoes. What does she see? And then put yourself in a stranger's shoes, and ask what the stranger sees. And that can also really help kind of trigger areas in your life that you're not able to see clearly.
Check Out The Podcast!
Tanya has a LOT of great information from her experience in Psych-K Facilitation, check out the podcast below to learn more about how to drive your business with a clear and purposeful mind!
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