Koya Webb - Get Loved Up Founder & Author of Wellbeing Rituals | The Hidden Cost of Success: Why High Achievers Burn Out and How to Listen to Your Body

➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory Koya Webb is a former Olympic-hopeful track athlete turned holistic wellness expert. She founded Get Loved Up, an international yoga school and wellness community, and has built a following of more than one million on Instagram. She's the author of Let Your Fears Make You Fierce and Wellbeing Rituals, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Goop, NBC, and on The Steve Harvey Show. Her clients have included Stevie Wonder and Les Brown. Today she helps high achievers see what constant striving costs them, and how to build sustainable wellbeing instead of burning out. ➡️ Show Links https://www.instagram.com/koyawebb/ https://x.com/KoyaWebb https://www.youtube.com/koyawebb https://www.linkedin.com/in/koyawebb/ ➡️ Podcast Sponsors Hubspot - https://hubspot.com/ Huel - https://huel.com/scott (Code: scott) NetSuite - https://netsuite.com/scottclary/ Framer - https://framer.com/design (Code: SuccessStory) LinkedIn Ads - https://linkedin.com/scottclary Cohesity - https://www.cohesity.com/datacloud Whatnot - https://www.whatnot.com/ Monarch - https://www.monarch.com/ (Code: success) Cash App - https://cash.app/ (Code: cashapp10) MyFitnessPal - https://podcasts.myfitnesspal.com (Code: SCOTT) Life at the Speed of Play - https://getmarksbook.com/success ➡️ Talking Points 00:00 – Intro 04:22 – When Your Identity Gets Taken Away 06:58 – How to Rebuild After Life Breaks You 10:42 – Breathwork: Your Nervous System Remote 13:00 – Why You Need Time to Process 15:34 – Why Spirituality Comes First 17:09 – The Wellness Trap for High Achievers 22:40 – Sponsor Break 25:01 – Stop Consuming, Start Implementing 31:20 – How Trauma Puts You in Survival Mode 34:18 – The Signs You’re Not Okay 37:47 – You’re Not a Victim, You’re a Creator 40:57 – Breathe, Cry, Release 43:20 – Why We’re Afraid to Feel 45:21 – Sponsor Break 48:36 – Build a Life You Actually Want 57:15 – Stop Living for Everyone Else 1:04:22 – Use Fear as Your Compass 1:07:53 – Why You Have to Lean Into Fear 1:12:35 – Koya’s Message for a Better Life 1:15:02 – Koya’s Advice to Her 20-Year-Old Self

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Track and field was your ticket to travel, inspire, ticket to have purpose? What happens when your ticket gets taken?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  When that happens, you have to ask yourself, am I gonna let this break me? Or am I gonna let it build me? And for me, when that happened, I let it build me.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Today's guest is Koya Webb, a wellness entrepreneur, spiritual teacher, and author. She helps people create healthier, more purposeful lives through wellness, spirituality, and self-love. In this conversation, she shares her journey through adversity, emotional healing, and personal growth. You are not a victim, you are a creator. What does that mean?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  The first time you're harmed, you are a victim. However you were harmed, whatever happened to you, after that, it can build you, or it can break you. And then you say, based on that, this is how I'm gonna move forward. So you become a creator.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Why are we so afraid to feel our emotions?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I think we're afraid of judgment. We have a negative relationship with full expression. Most people are not fully expressed. I believe we're here to express.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  MyFitnessPal is a success story partner. Now, there's this thing that happens when you start paying attention to what you eat. And I think we can all agree that we wanna care about our health and our wellness and our nutrition. But more often than not, we just kind of think we eat clean. We think we eat healthy, but we're not really, really paying attention to every single meal and what makes up every single meal. But just by paying attention and starting to log and track what you eat, you start making better choices without really trying. And that surprised me because when I first started using the MyFitnessPal app, and I've been using it for a while now, it's a nutrition tracking app. And I started logging what I was eating. It started showing me my macros, which means how much protein, carbs, and fats I was getting. And then I started to understand why some days I felt good, high energy.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Some days I felt like garbage because those three things, proteins, carbs, fats, that's what your food is made out of. And the balance between them affects everything. So MyFitnessPal app truly changed my life when it came to managing my food, which managed and helped everything else. Now, on the premium version of the app, it breaks down those numbers by meal. So I'm not just seeing one calorie number for the day. I can see what's happening at breakfast, versus lunch, versus dinner, where my protein actually lands, whether I'm eating enough earlier in the day or piling everything on at night. And all of a sudden, when I'm crashing at 3:00, 4:00 PM, well, I can take a look and see, it's not so surprising anymore based on what I ate or what I didn't eat. So that's what I mean when I say

• 2:28Speaker 00

  that MyFitnessPal is a great app for awareness. It's not obsessive, it's not stressful, it's not time-consuming. It's actually the opposite. Guessing is stressful. When you have all that information, the food you eat, your nutrition, becomes way easier to keep up with. Also, a lot of people stress out that logging food is gonna be very time-consuming. It's not. And if it was annoying, I'd stop. But what I love about the app is that they've made it super, super simple. They've removed all friction in food logging, right? They have the largest food database out there. So whatever I'm eating is already in it. I can voice log, so I can just say what I'm eating. They have a barcode scanner that handles all the packaged stuff. They have a tool called MealScan, which lets me point my camera at my plate, and it breaks down all the macros

• 3:12Speaker 00

  and then logs it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever. And the app remembers my regular meals. And I'm really just in and out of the app in seconds. And on top of that, it connects with over 40 fitness apps and wearables. So my workouts, my nutrition, they're all in one place. See, food is the foundation of everything. Your energy, your sleep, your weight, your recovery, your performance at work, at home. And I really believe that when you start to pay attention to what you eat, every single part of your life improves. And to be honest, for me, it's the most useful tool because when I see the information, when I see what I'm eating, and I feel the effects of having good nutrition and good food at the right time, the decisions on what to eat become obvious. Not because someone told me to eat better, it's because I have the data.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  And the data makes it super, super easy to stay on track. So please do yourself a favor. Go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code SCOTT. That's S-C-O-T-T, all uppercase letters, for 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium. That is podcast.myfitnesspal.com, code SCOTT, for 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Koya, you said track and field was your ticket to travel, ticket to inspire, ticket to have purpose. Then one day, walking to class, your back broke. So what happens when your ticket gets taken?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  I think we've all experienced like having our heart set on something, and then it's, all of a sudden, taken away from you. And I think when that happens, you have to ask yourself, am I gonna let this break me? Or am I gonna let it build me? And for me, when that happened, I let it build me. And I didn't at first, though. I was depressed, I was crying in classes, I got sent to the counselor, and I got sent to a yoga class. And let's talk about a yoga class for an athlete, not someone who does yoga, because I do yoga now, but I didn't then. So I go in this yoga class. As a tight athlete, I can't even touch my toes. I can long jump, high jump, shot put, javelin, heptathlete, but I cannot touch my toes.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  I'm not flexible. So all this bliss they're talking about, I would find in yoga class, I did not feel. No one looked like me. I'm the only brown girl in class. I'm like, I don't belong here, right? And so I was very like, felt out of place. I felt unflexible. And it didn't make me feel any better at first. But then when I stayed with it during my first class, the teacher came with me and she said, she saw me struggling. She was like, Koya, don't worry about the poses. Just breathe. And she took this deep inhale with me and exhale. And I felt these chills all over my body. And for me, chills on my body is a spiritual yes. You know, growing up in the church, like I had this connection with God, and that was, that was the alignment for me when I feel the full body chills.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  And so when I felt that, I was like, alright, this hurts. I don't feel like I belong, but I'm staying here because I felt, I got that spiritual sign. And when I tell you it built me, after a year of yoga and recovery, I came back and was ranked 13th in the nation, helped lead my team to a conference championship. And then I end up going to LA to train in the Olympic Training Center. That's all another story, I didn't get there. But it healed me so much that I was able to do everything that I set out to do before I got injured. But I had to go in that valley. So I think it's important when you feel like your ticket is taken,

• 6:47Speaker 01

  you lost the relationship, you lost the job, you lost whatever, don't let it break you. Even if you feel broken in the moment, allow it to build you.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  How, though? How, that's the question. Because your identity was athlete, and it seems like almost every conversation on this podcast comes down to, okay, this was your identity, it didn't work out. And then on the other side of it not working out and you having to figure out what that new identity is, is the huge success, is the win, is the exit, is the enormous audience that you've built now on this message.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  But it's really hard to understand the difference between somebody who that same event happened to, who came out of it in a good place on the other side versus that person who, in your case, you were an athlete, you were a track star, your body breaks. How many people, I'm sure you can think of a few, where that happened and they never recovered?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  So many people, so many people. And in my book, The Last Chapter, I talk about the art of surrender. You don't know when you're in it. When you're depressed, when you lost a job, when you go through it, you don't know what the next job is gonna be. You don't know if you're gonna heal from the injury. Right now, my knee keeps going out on me. I don't know if I'm gonna heal through this or not. But every day, I still wake up and I do yoga because I know that healed me before and it can heal me again. And then, I just have to surrender. And you said, what helps you? And I tell every single client, one day at a time, one breath at a time. If you're always reaching towards the finish line, then how are you going to sprint

• 8:34Speaker 01

  like you need to sprint in that first 100 meters to get you there? You're gonna get exhausted before you get there if you're thinking about the finish line when you start the race. You gotta get out of the blocks. And I'm using track terms now, but...

• 8:46Speaker 00

  I love the sports analogy, so go for it.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  When I started to learn how to run, I could always run, it was natural. I chased the bus. That's how I got good at running track and field. I was chasing the bus, right? And I just, you know, I was always late, so I was always running. And I just got faster and faster. But the success on running something, whether it's 100 meter, 200, or 400, is getting out the gate fast. Your head is down, you're looking literally just four steps in front of you. And you want your stride to be as long and as powerful as you can in those first four steps because that's gonna place you for the rest of the race. So when you get injured, when you're like, you have to, you're gonna be in the darkness, like you are for the first step. Some people close their eyes and they just,

• 9:33Speaker 01

  they just pound it out, those first four steps. So that's like when you have something tragic happening. It's not gonna be light, it's gonna be dark. You're gonna be crying, you might even be depressed, like I was. But you gotta keep putting one foot in front of the other. And the more that now I teach people to lean into breath and the breath healing because I realize that that's the one free tool that can help us regulate our nervous system when we aren't sure, we're confused. It can keep us regulated enough to get us out the gate, right? Because if we don't get out the gate and we're staying at the block, you're never gonna run the race. And depression is stuck at the block. Depression is, or self-judgment, limiting beliefs, it keeps you right there. You haven't even started the race.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  But in order to get out of the block, you have to breathe. You have to know that there is something greater than what moment you're in. And not only does that take faith and breath, but it takes putting one foot in front of the other.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  When you're so caught up in the current situation, and that's clouding your judgment and your vision, and it's very hard for you to see the future, which is really what you have to do, breath, I guess, is just forcing you to sit with your thoughts, like with your thoughts and have clarity about where you're going. Is that, is that how it... It works.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Think of the breath as like a remote control for your nervous system. So your nervous system is your best friend. A lot of people, we don't listen to our nervous system, right? But it's your best friend and it's built. Our bodies are so smart. Our nervous system is built to keep us safe. So when we go through, you know, traumatic things, our nervous system is like, oh my God, that was traumatic. I need to make sure you don't do anything like this. Never have a job, never have a relationship, never try to run again because you might get injured, you might get hurt. So your body's like, oh, okay, I'm gonna keep you safe from that because it hurt you. So what the breath does as a remote control is like, I'm actually safe. It's normal to have injury. It's normal to go through breakups. It's normal to lose.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  I'm actually, I'm good. I'm, I'm, I'm not okay. I'm depressed, I'm sad, but I'm gonna get through this. So the breath helps to regulate your nervous system to say, hey, I'm not dead and this is not gonna take me out. So when you learn to regulate your breath, take those inhales and exhales, it calms your system down. But when you experience trauma, a breakup, someone yells at you, or maybe you were in a car accident or something, your body constricts and it tenses up. Your nervous system is on alert and if you don't regulate it, you will live out your life like that. That person's trying to hurt me. I'm gonna lose this job. I'll never be back on the track. That is your body's way of protecting you.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  So you, as a sovereign being over your body, have to let your body know like, what happened was human and I'm okay. It's almost like you have to parent yourself like you were parenting a child. Like when they fall down, what's the first thing you say? You're okay, you're okay. You wanna assure them that I know that hurt, but, but let's get up and let's see what happened, right? But all they feel in the moment is trauma. So they're crying, they're like, ah, something happened. And so when you say you're okay, you're like, they're like, okay, am I okay? Okay, I'm okay. And then they, and then you start to actually process. So that happens to us as adults. When things traumatic happen, we ask, am I okay? And we need to have something to say, yes, you're okay. Keep moving forward.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  So many people have traumatic events happen to them, they never process because there's so much going on in our lives. There's so much noise, noise, noise, noise, noise, like, and you know, I've, I know that a lot of what you teach is not about religion, it's more about some of the, but one thing that religion, any religion does is it forces you at some point in your day to sit alone with your own thoughts and process. And a lot of people are more secular than they have been and probably more than ever. And there's no point in their day when they just sit and process and, and sit with their own thoughts, regardless of what you want to pray to and what religion you are.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  That practice not being part of your life is, is so incredibly hurtful.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yes, I 100% agree. And speaking of that, I was raised religious, but now I'm very spiritual because I respect all religion, right? Whatever people use to develop a greater connection with collective consciousness or absolute consciousness, whatever you wanna call that, God, like whatever name, I feel like we're all different cultures, all different nationalities, everyone has a different name. I don't think that's the most important thing, the name. I think what's most important to understand about spirituality is the energy. And that energy, we're all energetic beings, so it's in plants, it's in your clothes, it's all of us, we're made of energy.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  So when you used to connect to that energy, that all encompassing energy that I personally call God, you might call it something else, that's where your power is. So the first chapter in this book, there's seven areas of well-being and the first area and the most important area is spiritual well-being.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  That's where you start.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  That's where I start. It is the most important, healing your relationship with yourself is healing your relationship with God. Cause most of us self-abandon, we don't listen to our intuition. To me, we are spiritual beings first. And when we leave these bodies, we go back to that collective consciousness. So what if during this time, the goal is, can you tap into that spiritual connection while you're in your body? And no matter what happens in your body, no matter what happens in your life, like, I'm a spiritual being, I'm okay, I'm okay. Cause that's the I'm okay right there. When you connect spiritually, that is connecting you with this collective consciousness that is beyond your body, beyond this lifetime. And that's why spiritual well-being is first, because it gets you through whatever happens in your human experience.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  It's so funny how that seems to be, especially for people that listen to, to this podcast. Everybody's very ambitious, everybody's getting after the next thing, trying to build, trying to succeed. And spirituality, it's the first part of your book, of your sort of wellness journey. It's probably the last thing that most people think about.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  I agree. And what's funny about that is we're 80% religious in the world. And I think it's even 80% Christian.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Out of like all the people in the world?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  At least the US. And what that tells you, and what that tells me, is that there's been a lot of religious trauma, right? There's been a lot of people using religion to control and manipulate. And that hurts your relationship with the divine, whatever you call the divine, the most high.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And I feel like that's what's happened to people. It's not that we don't want to be spiritual. Again, the body is keeping score. And if the body is saying, you're bad and you're this and you're a sinner and you, all these bad things, if you felt that when you were growing up, I mean, just think if, if you were a child and every day your parents told you like, you're bad and you, you know, you, you need to repent for that because you know, if you don't, you're gonna, something really bad is gonna hell, you're gonna just go to hell and burn up and you know, you're demonic.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  That is trauma.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  So I, the reason I feel like so many of us do attest to a religion, but we don't prioritize spirituality is because of religious trauma. And it is my intention to help people heal through that and develop a healthier relationship with the divine.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  So if somebody is so caught up in the day-to-day and like they have no free time, they wake up, they work, and I'm kind of quasi-describing myself, but they wake up, they work, they're trying to figure out how to prioritize their, their wife, their husband, their kids, and it's already tough. Where do they start? Like where do they start? And, and I want you to, cause a lot of, a lot of the things that you teach are things that founders, ambitious, career-driven people, they should all pay attention to, but they're the least likely people to respond well to that message, cause it's always like an afterthought. It's always later, it's always all do. And then what happens is I see these people after they've built their company and they've exited and they haven't focused on anything but the money.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  And then, you know, their third ex-wife and the kids hate them and, and their mental health and their physical health, they have no spirituality. And then at 55, 60, 65, now they're chasing after it. They're trying to get all these things back. And I haven't really figured out how to drive home the importance of all these other less tangible, less for them, real things, even though they are very real, but they don't feel real or as important when you're stressed out about all the emails and the calls and the, and the, do we make payroll next month and I wanna get that promotion?

• 18:32Speaker 00

  How do you talk to these people? How do you get them to understand the importance of all these intangible, deprioritized in their mind things so that they don't wake up when they're 60, 65, 70, and then have that regret? That they didn't put focus on that stuff their whole life?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Hindsight is always 2020, right? And so just knowing that, the way I speak with entrepreneurs and business owners, it starts with awareness, right? And so a lot of them are not aware of just how much they're neglecting themselves. They're just been doing it for so long, they think, hey, if I, if I eat a healthy lunch, if I get a massage and I'm doing good, that's self-care. They don't actually understand how much self-care they need to be well. They don't really understand well-being at all. I mean, I've studied it and it's, it's, it can be tough to understand because our-

• 19:27Speaker 01

  I want to say our whole world is set up to keep us on this hamster wheel of work, succeed, scale, and do all this to provide, especially men, you know, and now men and women, because women not only have baby, you provide too, right? And so this is what we see on TV. So this is what we aspire to. So we got to understand we're constantly being marketed to on how we should live. And that way of marketing is unsustainable. And it's built on consumerism. You want to buy more, you want to succeed more, you can have a bigger house and make your family happier. You're doing all this to have a bigger house and make your family happier,

• 20:11Speaker 01

  but then you're not spending time with them. So they're actually not happy. And then, like you said, you're in your third wife. Because you didn't understand that spending quality time, which social well-being is in there, is more important, even more important than bringing a thousand dollars. Now, she might like that Gucci purse, but I bet if you took her to dinner every Friday and asked her, how is she doing? She would love you even more. She would love you even more. And that's what's most important. And that's what a lot of successful people don't understand. They, they feel like they're doing the right thing and they have good intentions to do the right thing, provide for themselves, provide for their family, their mother, their father, their everybody. They want to provide, they have a really good heart,

• 20:55Speaker 01

  but without the right awareness of like how well-being actually works, they unfortunately sacrifice their well-being building wealth. And then, once they get the wealth, they got to use that to then build their well-being.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  So silly.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  I know, but it's mostly because of lack of awareness. So my job, that's why I'm here. My job is help people realize how you can have both and how you do actually have to prioritize your well-being. Because guess what? When you are well, your partner is well, your children are well, your people in your job as well, because you've understood yourself more. So if you can figure out how to sleep, how having more sleep will make you more productive, then guess what? You'll set that up for your workers and coworkers and make sure like, hey, I need y'all to get, we're not going, we're not staying out to 2:00 AM, 4:00 AM. We'll stay up to midnight, go stay up to 11:00. But then you want to at least get six, eight hours of sleep. Come back, be fresh, right? You won't jet ship, jet set as much without getting enough sleep,

• 21:55Speaker 01

  because you know, eventually that takes your HRV down. You don't get enough sleep, you're going to be cranky, and that actually hurts your productivity more. So I really talk to corporations and bigs about productivity and how the goal is to increase your capacity. And to increase your capacity to deal with chaos, to deal with workload, to deal with family, you have to increase your well-being. And to do that, you have to be intentional about how you set up your day. And so then, once they are aware of that, then I help them structure their day. So they're getting enough sleep, they're getting the right food, they're doing conflict resolution with people at work and at home, and then they feel a lot better. But without that awareness, they won't have it on their own, because it's just outside of the language that they're used to.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  Life at the Speed of Play is a success story partner. Now, this is a book by Mark Pincus, the guy who founded Zynga. I've actually had him on the show. I met him in person and Reid Hoffman wrote the foreword, calling him one of the best idea people in Silicon Valley. The book is Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love. About 170 pages. It's already a national bestseller. It's his framework for figuring out whether an idea is actually worth going after before you put serious time and money into it. Not theory, the way he actually does it, and he's repeatedly built successful businesses. On top of that, you can read it in a weekend. It can change your entire life and give you the right direction if you're an entrepreneur. So right now, if you go to getmarksbook.com/success, you get two copies for $32. That's $16 each.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Mark is paying for the second copy himself because he wants you to give it to somebody, a friend who's been sitting on an idea, someone who needs to push, whoever. That's getmarksbook.com/success. Mark with a K. Buy one, second one's free. MyFitnessPal is a success story partner. Now, a quick story. A few weeks ago, I was in the middle of a very heavy recording week. So five episodes back to back. By Wednesday, I could feel it. I felt tired and I pulled up my food log in the MyFitnessPal app and I could see why I felt tired. I was heavily under-eating. I was not keeping up with my meals. My macros were all off. On weeks like that, staying on top of your fuel and your food and what you eat is the difference between being sharp on episode five and being flat. And that's the kind of thing you only catch when you're paying attention.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  And that's why I keep logging every single meal I eat in the MyFitnessPal app. It's not because I'm obsessing over numbers. It's not because I'm trying to diet. It's because I'm trying to have an awareness about what I eat in the day. And the app makes it so easy to maintain that awareness. I can point my camera at a plate with meal scan. It'll tell me exactly what I'm eating, all my macronutrients, proteins, fats, carbs. There's an intermittent fasting tracker. If I want to intermittent fast, it keeps my eating window honest. And it all syncs with my watch and all of my fitness apps, and it just runs in the background. See, food is a foundation for energy, sleep, recovery, performance. It is the one input that you cannot skip. So do yourself a favor. Track what you're eating.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  It'll make you feel better, perform better in everything that you do. Go to podcasts.myfitnesspal.com and use code SCOTT, all uppercase, for 50% off MyFitnessPal Premium. That's podcasts.myfitnesspal.com code SCOTT. How did you disrupt your own worldview and then actually incorporate these things? Because it's one thing to learn it, and I always talk about this on the podcast. Like, we are in this, we are in this place in, in, in podcast content and just in the world where especially people who listen to this, they'll consume and they'll read another book and listen to the YouTube video, and they just won't do anything. They won't actually change their life. And I always say, if, you know, it's, it's not to my benefit,

• 25:34Speaker 00

  but if you just write one thing down and never listen to another podcast that I do ever again, and you go do that thing and improve your life, like that to me is, you know, for me, a job well done. That's all I care about. I'd rather you not listen to this show ever again and just take this one idea and then actually do it. But nobody does anything. They listen and then they go back to the status quo, they forget about it. So I'm asking, as somebody who changed her life and was that burnt-out executive entrepreneur, how did you actually do it?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Number one, you have to realize that implementation is more important than information. Implementation is more important than information. So you can, as you say, get all this information, but if you don't implement it, it's just information in your head. So the way I did it is first awareness. So being aware that, let's just talk about recently, because I've been doing this for years. This is my second book. And my mom transitioned. And she was my best friend and we were very close. So even though I knew all those rituals in the book, it didn't stop me from being dysregulated. It didn't stop me from being angry. It didn't stop me from wanting her to be here. So here I am, writing this book.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Here I am, just got married. I got married in November. My mom transitioned in February. Self guilt of not like being there, of not knowing. It was all of a sudden, it was unexpected. And the way I went from like, wow, this bliss is something I was looking for it to all my life, you know, being married. And then this traumatic grief, all of a sudden, it sent me on the biggest spiral down that I've ever experienced in my life. And here I was with all the tools, sitting in depression again

• 27:33Speaker 01

  and wanting to burn it all down because I felt so angry. And what happens when you experience trauma, loss? Again, it could be loss of a person, a breakup, a job, is when something rocks your world, is you're dysregulated. You're not your highest self. You're not thinking with your executive mind. So when we talk about neuro-emotional coaching, there are three states. There's survival state, emotional state, and executive state. If you're in survival state, and that could be loss of a job, loss of a person, heartbreak, whatever, that, that, and that's where depression is, you're surviving, you're just trying to survive. You can't make executive decisions, right? So I'm not making executive decisions for myself, for my marriage, for anyone,

• 28:18Speaker 01

  because I'm in survival state, because this bucket of grief that I wasn't expecting just hit me over. So until I process that, it's affecting me, it's affecting my marriage, it's affecting my, it's affecting everyone. And so I think awareness of when you're not okay, even if you're a good person, even if you know everything, we got to be honest with ourselves when we're not okay. We got to be honest with our friends and our partners when we're not okay. So I had to tell my husband, like, I'm not okay, of course you do, but like acknowledging yourself, like I'm not okay, and getting the support that I needed to process my anger and my rage and my pain.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  And I went back to breath work, which is now why I teach breath healing, because that is the one free tool. I have over 50 rituals in that book, but the breath, and I don't talk about the regular inhale exhale. I did the conscious connected breath, deep breathing for an hour, two hours a day, to really remove the anger, the constriction that I had in my body from this event. And so what people have to do, one is be aware when they're not okay, and then start with the breath, which is a free tool to regulate their nervous system until they can get back into first emotional state, so they can actually talk about their emotions and processing them, and then they can get to executive state, so they can actually make good decisions.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  But when you make bad decisions, you leave that marriage, you leave that job, you do something you didn't expect to with your kids, you're not there for them, that takes a lot longer to repair. And what happens is a lot of us, this experience in trauma is human. We're all gonna lose someone at some times. We're all gonna lose a job. We're all gonna go through breakup. Like, but if we making decisions in survival state, that's what rocks people's world. And so when I work with people, if they're in, I meet people in their darkest hour, and I'm like, come on, let's go. Let's start with the breath. Let's start breathing. Cool. Now let's talk about your emotions. Cool. And they're able to process them, and then they can get back to their highest self, their spiritual self, the person that knows what to do and why they're here.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  And confident and.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Confidence. That is your highest self. That is, to me, your spiritual self. And so the humanness, though, is real too, and it experiences trauma, it experiences loss, it experiences, you know, separation from people, and you have to process that in order to get back to your executive state. And so that's what I help people do, whether it's a parent or an executive, same thing. We all have the same nervous system that is going to go haywire if we experience things that are not in alignment with, this is not what I thought was gonna happen. I did this huge event. I thought it was gonna be this. How did I get $100,000 in a hole? I went for one night of just fun gambling, and all of a sudden, I just lost a million dollars. You know, you don't prepare for those things.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  And so you have to have something in place that can get you back into your fullest expression when you're knocked down.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  I'm just thinking about all the times when I should communicate what's on my mind, have the hard conversation, and you just feel like you just don't have the willpower to do it. But then other times, I'm just sort of verbalizing, like, we drift through these states sort of unconsciously. So one day, and I'm, you know, with your story, speaking about how you're going through this, and you want to communicate to your husband, you should feel obviously comfortable and confident communicating to your husband how you're doing, and you'd be fully understanding. But if you're in that survival state, maybe you diminish, you shrink yourself, and you don't feel comfortable saying things that would be, you feel like they may be received in an awkward way, or they may not be communicated

• 32:03Speaker 00

  in the way that you want to communicate them. I hope I'm saying this right. You just, when you're in a survival state, you just don't have the confidence to represent yourself the way you should.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Some people don't have the confidence, and some people think they're fine. Like me, I normalize microaggressions. I normalize trauma.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  But you're very healthy, and you do this for a living.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  I do this for a living, but I still was normalizing things that I shouldn't, right? I'm literally, like, someone could say something very disrespectful, and it affects me. My body's keeping it for it. It negatively affects me. I'm like, oh, it's fine. I'm okay. But that is me normalizing disrespect, right? And I did it for so long just to survive that it became common. So, but my body's like, this was disrespectful, that was hurtful, and you didn't say anything about it. You didn't process. So what happens is like, sometimes we don't have the confidence, but sometimes we're not aware how much we normalize trauma, and we normalize what our body is picking up as a threat. Like, when we argue with our partner, which we all do, I do too,

• 33:07Speaker 01

  and our body is picking up as a threat. This person loves you, you're spending the rest of your life, and literally, your body is picking up threat from this person I love, threat, threat, threat. And that's why it's so important to learn how to communicate. And something that we've been working on in our marriage is just like, don't wait. As soon as you feel like, mm, we have like, once a week, like on Sundays, where we get together and we talk about like, how was your week? And we share how our week was. Was there anything that, you know, was challenging? And we share our challenges, we share our wins every single week. And it helps us process, because if you do it every day, it can be a lot. It could be, feel like nagging and too much. But if once a week you just check in, then that gives you and your partner time to process. And so I think it's really about being aware.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  And for some of us, really beautiful souls and good souls, we have normalized being okay. You've heard of high functioning depression. That means we can still go because we've normalized. I don't have time to process the fact that I just lost someone I love, because I gotta still work, because I still gotta feed everybody. I still gotta take care. So we're used to moving along and not processing our trauma and our grief.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  That's what I was trying to figure out. Like, is there something that somebody can pinpoint in how they conduct themselves or how they act? Is it lack of, so for example, is lack of confidence in communicating with somebody, is that a signal that you're in a survival state? Maybe six months ago, you felt like having that hard conversation was easy, and you leaned into it, and now you're thinking about that hard conversation with your spouse or with a coworker, and the thought is just overwhelmingly scary to have that. Does that mean that you've, without even knowing it, slipped into a survival state, and there's a lot of healing and nervous system regulation that you have to go through?

• 35:02Speaker 00

  And you don't understand why you feel so different about that same hard conversation today than you did six months ago?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. When you don't have the confidence to speak your truth, it will keep you in survival state, because you have to be able to communicate how you feel. But this is how I help.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  It's a flywheel. That's what I mean. So like, maybe flywheel isn't the right word. It's like.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  A hamster wheel.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  A hamster. It's like a trap. Like, so you don't have the confidence because you are in survival state, and you can't get out of survival state because you don't have the confidence to communicate to get you out of that shitty situation that you're in. So then you're just stuck.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  So what I talk about in the emotional well-being chapter, if you don't feel like you can communicate, which is totally normal. I don't always feel like I can communicate, because it's like, you don't want to hurt someone, or you don't want to say it wrong, or you think, you're like, ah, I'm so much in my feelings. This is definitely gonna rub them the wrong way. Transformational letter writing is a run of the rituals that I talk about in my book. It's one of my favorite emotional well-being rituals. You still gotta get these feelings out of your body, or else your body is in high alert saying, I'm pissed and I'm not okay, right? So what you do with transformational letter writing, you're honest. You would not say this to the person. You would not say this to your partner, but you're honest. I feel disrespected. I feel like you don't understand me. You don't listen to me. You don't support me enough. We don't go out enough. You know, your job, I feel like my job doesn't.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  You just write down everything you feel, because your emotions matter, and you want to write it all out. But if you dump that on a person, they're gonna be defensive, and they're gonna come back, and they're gonna battle you. But you need to get that out of your system. So I highly recommend journaling. If you hate journaling, voice note it, get it out of your system, and then delete it. Do not send it. Don't send a letter. Don't send a voice note. But get it out of your system, because what happens is that if it's inside of you, it's causing harm inside of you, and it's causing dis-ease in the body. Most cancers are caused by separation of self and deep-seated resentment. And what is cancer? Separation of selves. So when we separate from ourself, we separate from people,

• 37:04Speaker 01

  we are causing this separation, this chemical process to start happening in our body. But when we start expressing ourselves, we're releasing that energy that could be stored, because our body's just trying to keep us safe. So I recommend writing it, journal it, saying it. And then when you get to executive state, communicating it, but not communicating it. If you feel nervous about communicating, there's a reason you feel nervous about it. So my suggestion would be process that first with a therapist, with a friend, or with yourself. But listen to your body. There is a reason your body is saying, if I say this, it's gonna be a fight, because you're probably right.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  There's a chapter in your book, and I want you to speak about, only as much as you're comfortable with speaking about it. It's chapter three. It's about you being a creator, not a victim, in your own life. And if people want to explore a little bit more about what I'm alluding to, they can obviously get the book and read about it. But you almost cut this chapter out. It's a very emotional chapter and a very difficult chapter.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  Explain the idea first before anything else. So you are not a victim, you are a creator. What does that mean? And

• 38:27Speaker 00

  how does that idea? And how did that idea? Help you get through different periods of your life, including the one in this chapter?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  I love this question because when you are harmed, the first time you're harmed, you are a victim. However, you were harmed, whatever happened to you. After that, it can build you or it can break you. And if when it breaks people, they keep replaying the harm over and over. And it keeps looping in their head and they keep experiencing it over and over and over and over again. It's like a loop. It's like being on a hamster world. When you say, man, I that sucked. I can't believe that happened. This is how it made me feel.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  And you're just honest about how it impacted you and your humanness. And then you say, you know, based on that, this is how I'm going to move forward. I am going to talk about it. I'm going to be mindful about it. So you're doing something about it. So you become a creator. And you start creating a world in which you're raising awareness about what happened to you, whether it's loss of a relationship, loss of a loved one. Like, you know, me losing, it helped me gain a closer relationship with my father and my sister. My mom's love, I embody it now. Like she's living through me. I carry her legacy with me. I wear her ring on my neck, you know?

• 40:03Speaker 01

  And I could be a victim of how she was treated in the hospital that made me so angry, how she was treated by family members in her past that made me so angry. Or I can let the legacy that she left me in her DNA and with her lived experience, fuel my very existence. And that is honoring her. So instead of being a victim, which I have plenty of things I could still to this day be upset about, I am a creator because I'm using her life and her legacy to create more love and abundance in the world. So it's just a choice. One causes separation and one causes unity.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  And I invite people to choose, choose love, choose unity, choose to be a creator. After, no matter what happens to you, it can build you. So let it build you instead of break you.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  How do you first approach when something stressful, traumatic, negative happens in your life? That's, you know, even the thought of

• 41:07Speaker 00

  of like dealing with it as opposed to just repressing it. And that alone can be difficult for people. So I think that I want to help people who are listening, understand the first step they have to take, which is probably the most difficult step when you're trying to deal with something difficult that you've had to overcome.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  First step is just breathe. Second step is cry.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Third step is throw an adult temper tantrum, right? We knew what to do as children. We didn't get through. We didn't get what we want. We scream, we yell, we cry. Like, we were so brilliant as children because we knew how to just let frustration out of our body for whatever we were frustrated from. But adults, we have to be polished. We can't get upset. We can't get mad. And I'm not saying go off on people or just throw, you know, fall out in front of your partner. They make you upset. But I do think it's important to have time to breathe, like take them in the moment. Just take a deep breath, right? If you're at work, if you're in traffic, if you're in the moment, breathe and create a healthy boundary between whatever you experience. And then from then, when you need to release, we're so scared, afraid to cry.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  I remember going two years not shedding a tear. Like, cry for what? I got things to do. No, I cried every day for three months. This was like, I want to say, six years from now. But I've learned how to cry. So yes, when my mom transitioned, I cried every day, morning and evening for the three months. And I didn't know, I didn't know I had that many tears in my body. So I think crying is very healthy and it's a way, I say, tears are pain leaving the body. So allow yourself to cry. It's okay to cry. It's very cleansing, it's very purifying. So breathe, cry. And let's talk about this adult temper. They have rage rooms, right? So if you get mad, instead of going out, so go to the rage room, get your pillow, punch your pillow. You know, go out in the woods, go hiking, just go in the middle of nature and just,

• 43:02Speaker 01

  just yell and then hug a tree. You know, there's so many things we can do to process so that energy is not sitting in our body. So I would say those three things. Breathe, cry, go out in nature and just yell, scream, or throw an adult temper tantrum.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  I like that. Why are we so afraid to feel our emotions?

• 43:25Speaker 01

  You know, I think we're afraid of judgment. Like how someone is going to judge, or maybe even how we're going to judge ourselves. You know, I think we have a negative relationship with full expression, whether it be dancing or singing if we can't sing, or just being our full self. Most people are not fully expressed. And it's something that I talk about in my work a lot. So whereas someone can sing or not, I invite them to sing. Whereas someone can dance or not, I invite them to dance. Because if you look at nature in animals, everything is expressing itself in a beautiful way. And I believe we're here to express. So we have been trained to walk a certain way, dress a certain way, look a certain, that's not natural. We are primal beings.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Like, look at our ancestors, they danced, they sang, they ate good food. They were like, I gotta be this big, you know? They, they actually, back in the day, the thicker you are, the good, the good, you were, you were being treated good, the more wealthy.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  You were healthy, yeah.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  And so, I mean, I, I think whatever size people want to be, that's their business. But I do believe, love yourself wherever you are on that spectrum. Like, do you love yourself, big or small? Do you love yourself? Do you love yourself, no matter how much money you have in the bank? Do you love yourself? In all the different stages of your human experience, that's what's most important. It's just to develop a sense of self-love and respect. And most of us really don't know how to love ourselves, Barbara. We're not taught how to love ourselves. We're taught achieve, do this, look this way, you gotta be pretty, you gotta be, women gotta be pretty, men have to be successful. Now, men and women have to be pretty and successful. And if you're not, then you're losing, right?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Versus be yourself, express yourself. How do you feel today? What do you want to do today? Really, that's what the whole, the soul is here to do is just express, just like nature, just like animals. They're just here expressing themselves fully. And that's what creates beauty in the world.

• 45:23Speaker 00

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• 46:06Speaker 00

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• 46:50Speaker 00

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• 47:35Speaker 00

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• 48:20Speaker 00

  But they're touching my savings. And I can get a real answer based on my actual numbers. It is a financial advisor in your pocket. It costs less than an hour with a real one. So write your own money story with Monarch. Use code SUCCESS at monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code SUCCESS. I think what can also come of all these moments where you express yourself, sit alone with your own thoughts, it can, it can help you like really figure out what your, your goals actually are and not someone else's goals. Like, what are your goals? How do you want to live your life? And I don't think enough people think about that until it's too late. I think that, I think that the same reason why we don't express ourselves, the same reason why we don't, like,

• 49:05Speaker 00

  we are so driven by other people's expectations of us. It is so difficult because the jobs we do, the person we marry, the place we live, these are all, more often than not, not even our ideas. It's like, what did our parents say we should do? Like, what did our guidance counselor say was a good career? And then we wake up one day, again, at like 50, 60 years old, and realize our whole life has been someone else's.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  And we're so, because we're so, we're either distracting ourself from thinking deeply about what we want our life to look like, or the same reason why we're scared to express ourselves or to tap into our emotions. We're scared of just sort of going against the grain.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  And doing things differently than what we think we should be doing. And that's the same personality that's gonna lead to, it's gonna lead to a life that we don't actually enjoy. And I feel like more people, it all comes down to confidence. It also, it all comes down to confidence. If you can feel okay being yourself, you can feel okay having that tough conversation. If you can feel okay saying, hey, I don't want to do this job. I don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer. On the other side of that hard thing is a life that you actually enjoy.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I need you to write a book called Confidence is Secure.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  That's, but that's really it. But you can't, but you, your work is the first step. Because to be confident, you need to heal. You need to be regulated. And then you can have all these hard conversations and make these tough decisions.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. To be confident, you have to be self-aware.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  It all comes back to self-awareness. Because self-awareness is the missing piece of the puzzle. Because some people can be confident and confidently wrong.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  That's very true, too.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Even, because they're like, I'm confident, I want this job. I'm confident, I want this relationship. They think, because of how they've been marketed to. That's why self-awareness is so important. And the work that I do is because you sit there, no social media, no outside, no distractions. You put your hand on your heart. And we talk about different things, like what feels of us? What really feels good? And I pay attention to movement. I pay, and I'm empathetic, I could feel energy. So if I feel an energy shift, I'll say, I noticed when I said this, you moved or you took a deep breath. And we go deeper. A lot of people don't have someone to actually notice them and notice when they're actually abandoning themselves. We do it all the time.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  And a lot of people got a lot of confidence. But they got confidence following other people's dreams. They have confidence following what they saw someone on social media have. Well, I need to do this because that's what I need to be successful. So they might have the confidence, but without the self-awareness, they're not aware that scaling in this area is not even what you really want. I had a friend, you know, I'm gonna talk about myself.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Because I did something similar, but hers was more exciting. But I got a beautiful home. And at first, I wanted to wait to get a home. So I was married and pick it up with my husband. That was my vision. But I got to a point where I decided to do some deep healing work. And I wanted a home because I was paying, you know, $5,000 a month in Cali.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  And so I got this home. It's a beautiful home, my dream home, saltwater pool, island kitchen, cozy stuff in the master suite. All these things, right? Everything that I wanted, fireplace, all the elements, right? And I realized that I love this saltwater pool, but I want to be next to the beach, you know? So I thought, what I thought would bring me the most joy, like having this home. Now, I'm grateful that I have property. But really, I cannot wait to have a home on the beach. And it doesn't have to be as big as my home that I have now. And so was I confident when I bought it? Yes, did I have the funds? Yes. And it was a huge accomplishment for me because I did it all by myself. But at the end of the day, once I became self-aware,

• 53:06Speaker 01

  and we don't have to, we're here to make mistakes, right?

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Well, I know, but you can never figure out what you actually want.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Until you try, right? So it's like, you know, I just want everyone listening to know, you don't have to do it perfectly. You don't have to be figured out. But you do have to be honest with yourself. And you do have to be aware when like, okay, I made this choice. A lot of us make a choice and we just try to be like, okay, well, this is my choice and this is why. We try to explain why we did a thing, even though we know we actually don't even like it anymore. We try to intellectualize why we made the decision that we make. I can intellectualize why I bought the house all day. But at the end of the day, is that the thing that brings me the most joy? No. And that's where self-awareness is most important. It's like, I like it, I'm grateful for it, we'll probably keep it. But do I want a house on the beach somewhere? Yes. Yes.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  And be okay with the fact that the first thing wasn't what it, what you expected it to be.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Right. And it really was, but it just wasn't my highest desire. And I didn't know until I tried it. Or let's say you get married and you realize, actually, I don't want to be married. I want to be single. But instead of actually communicating that and being honest about that, you go and cheat on your partner, right? No, just be honest. You want to be out in the streets? And be out in the streets. Or be honest and say, hey, I want to be married, but I want to have multiple partners. Some people are, a lot of people are just not comfortable being honest with themselves about what they really desire. But if they were actually honest with themselves, they'd be better off. Their partners would be better off and the world would be a better place if we could actually really, truly becomes more self-aware

• 54:42Speaker 01

  and be more honest with ourselves.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  I wish, I wish more people would, would go through this healing process so that they, again, I just keep coming back to the word confidence because the only way that I know how to describe it.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  I want this book.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  All of the way that you live your life, the person you marry.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  It's so, it's so wild to think that people can't even have confidence in how they, you know, speak to themselves.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  That's insane to me.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Well, I think people don't realize that our thoughts are being like, okay, if you think about the way social media works, right? They pick up on the algorithm of what you like and then they feed it back to you. People don't understand, marketing is doing the same thing. It's picking up on your deepest insecurities and feeding it back to you and saying, hey, if you get on this app, like, okay, right now, for instance, the world is, you know, we're marketing marriage and children, right? Marriage and children, that is the American dream, right?

• 55:48Speaker 01

  But is it for everyone? Is marriage and children?

• 55:50Speaker 00

  Of course it's not for everyone.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. But is it highly marketed to everyone? So much so that if you don't do it, you feel like you're outside of the social norms.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  You think something's wrong with you.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so when someone feels that, based on everything around them, based on belonging, you know, even like if let's say you want to be the president or something, how often have we had a president who's not married? Married with kids, you know? So when everything that you think that is successful is literally outside of yourself, then you are on this hamster wheel of being something that you're not in order to belong. Most people are striving to be something that they're not in order to belong.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  How, how can you be happy? Because being ostracized by a community is like the number one fear that anybody has, right? So this is why people are scared of like public speaking. This is why people are scared of jumping on stage or why people are scared of even posting on social media. Because they're scared that they're gonna stand out and be different. And they're not gonna live up to these maybe real, maybe not even real expectations that all these other people who, like, I don't know why you care about everyone else's expectations and opinions of you, but we, we place everyone else's opinion in such high regard that we let them influence and dictate how we live our life.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  How do you, how do you remove yourself from that game that everyone else is playing?

• 57:21Speaker 01

  In order to be confident, you have to realize, in order to be confident, who you truly are on a soul level, you have to realize that every great person in the world has been ridiculed.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Think about it. Every actor, president, most, I, I, you know, my husband tells me not to speak in absolutes. Most, I'm listening, baby. Most have been ridiculed, put down, torn apart, most of the great leaders. So if you want to fully express yourself and be the greatest version of yourself for yourself, for your family and for the world, realize that you're gonna be ostracized. You're not gonna be, you're gonna go outside the norm. Because the norm has been trained to act and move in a certain way for the profitability of a few of us. For the profitability of a few of us. And if you are normal.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Then you are part of that hamster wheel that we're all in. You're part of the matrix, as they would say. So be willing to be abnormal, be willing to be ostracized, be willing to be talked about, be willing to be rejected, be willing to be completely annihilated. Like, I go through annihilation all the time. I, my entire life, and it has not stopped. No matter how many books I write, no matter how much I love God and how much of a good person I am, I am. And I remember my dad told me this when I was a little girl, and I was so mad at him. He's like, "Quay, life isn't fair." I was like, "Well, why not? I'm a good person. I do good."

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Life is, I'm like, and once I actually listen to him, life is not always fair. But you, what I learned, well, I needed a caveat to that to give me hope, right? And what I tell myself, life might not be fair, but you can be fair to yourself. And I think, E, every person listening to this, the only person that can love you exactly the way you need to be loved is yourself. And until you learn to love yourself and take care of yourself, you're always going to be looking at it for, from the world, and the world is not set up to give it to you.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  The world is set up to take, not because it's greedy, because it's set up.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  That way, yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  That way, right? And so I think if we are just honest with ourselves about that, we see it. We see it in the government. We see what's happening. We see people dying around the world. We, we see this. We can't close our eyes to this, right? So if we're willing to be honest and confident in the fact that this shit ain't set up for everybody to win and be well.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  And we are outsourcing all of our validation to everyone else.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  To a toxic system, and to a toxic system. We are literally outsourcing our happiness to a system that's not built to keep us happy. It's built to keep us wanting and striving. But what if we reverse engineered the system and we started to live for ourselves? We started communicating with each other, support each other, lift each other up versus compete, you know? Collaboration over competition, then that's when the world starts becoming a healthier phase. We're not fighting over land. We're making sure everyone has land, everyone has healthcare. That's when we heal. But it starts with them first. It starts within ourselves, within our partnerships, within our families. How many of us, we have torn up families? We're fighting over what? Money, control.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Things that don't matter at all.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  At all. But again, we're following a system that is unhealthy. And until we change the system within ourselves, within our families, we're not going to be able to change the system in the world. We gotta understand it first. In order to change something, you have to understand it. Most of us don't understand how we're being manipulated through the government, through religion, through all these things. But once you start to understand it, then you start to push back against it and you have the capacity to push back against it.

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  It sounds pessimistic, but don't assume that anybody has your best interests in mind, except you.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Right? Because they can't. No one, it's not pessimistic because it's true. If it wasn't true, maybe be pessimistic. Like, everyone's evil. I mean, everyone can be a little bad, but everyone's not inherently evil, right? To me, I think everyone is actually inherently good. But I feel that when there's separation, that's where the darkness comes, the evil comes, the separation. And if we start to think about, like, how can I, when I feel dark, or when I feel, like, negative, how could I shift that? Then we can help other people shift it. And that's why I do the work that I do, because it's like, I feel, I have to be honest about it within myself first in order to help someone else move through it.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  But if I'm not honest about all the emotions I feel, the anger, the rage when it comes up, how am I gonna help you move through yours? If I'm not, if I'm looking, "Oh, yeah, that's, that's your problem. Let me help you with your problem," right?

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  And you can't even be and live it yourself.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  No. How can I realize that, no, rage is a real emotion. We have it for a reason. In the emotional well-being chapter, I talk about your emotions, your ambition. If you have rage, the rage is there for a reason. There's a healthy boundary. Something that you're doing is outside what feels good in your body. Let's talk about it. Let's break it down. Now, do we need to remove ourselves from that situation? Do we need to change the situation? Who do we need to communicate? Then we can work on it. But first, we have to be honest about it.

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  I want to bring up one last idea that's actually from your first book. So your first book was entitled, "Let Your Fears Make You Fierce." In that book, there's an idea. You say, "Fear is our friend. It shows us places that we need more love." This is, the, fear is, in my mind, like, the opposite of confidence. So it, you're, you're saying that fear is a signal that shows us what we have to focus on? Explain that idea a little bit more, because maybe, maybe fear is what we look at, we lean into, and then through figuring out what is scaring us, then we, then we get the confidence we can use to go take on everything else.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  And I, I'll give you a personal story, and I think that this is, this ties into what you're speaking about with fear, and you tell me. But growing up, I was so scared of speaking in front of the class, like, giving presentations. Now, this is what I do for a living. And when I first started this podcast, I started a virtual, so you don't really think about the audience at all, because you're just in front of a computer recording on a Zoom. And then eventually, I was asked to speak in front of a very large audience. And my first speaking gig was at Inbound that House Pop put on, which is like 10, 15,000 people show up to this thing. And there were sponsors, like, "Hey, Scott, do you want to come out and speak?" So I did it. I was nervous as hell. I've said this story a few times.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  Like, I, it all went fine, but I was, you know, I was very stressed out about this. Like, the back of my chair was soaking wet with sweat. It was absolutely gross. But then what I did after that was I basically reached out to as many small event organizers as I could find in South Florida. And I said, "Hey, just have me on stage for 10, 15 minutes. I just need exposure therapy. I need to speak as much as possible to get over the fear." So for me, fear was a signal of something that I had to overcome, lean into. And now I speak, no problem on stage. It's, it's tons of fun. I enjoy it. But that was how I interpreted that idea. I leaned into the fear, and that turned into my job and my career. And it, you know, took the podcast to the next level. Now I can speak. Now I'm writing a book.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  Now I'm doing all these fun things. How does, how does somebody, outside of, in my mind, I thought I was a little crazy for purposefully signing up for things that scare the shit out of me? But how does somebody lean into the fear? Use fear as a signal for where they have to improve, where they have to focus?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  First of all, congratulations that you did that. I think that is so brilliant. And I think it's a beautiful story because it just shows that if you want to overcome it, you can. But you do have to do the work. So in the first book, I talk about fear, and I list the acronym. There's one acronym that fear is false evidence appearing real. So what was the false evidence? That you're scared and you have, you have sweat on the back of your chair. It appears real, like, "No, this thing is really scaring me." And the other acronym is face everything and rise. And that's what you did.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  When you set up all of these speaking, you faced the fear and you were able to rise. Because the false thing is that you can't do it, and that's not the truth. But when you face everything and rise and set yourself up, you just spoke on many stages. Or maybe you could have got a therapist, or maybe you could have just built your confidence in different ways by, like, practicing in your house, you know? There's so many ways you can face everything and rise. I love that way that you chose. And it doesn't have to look the same as my way or anyone else's way, but whatever you decide, how are you gonna face everything and rise? When I was dealing with my grief, how I faced everything and rise was doing the breath healing. You know, a lot of people going through traumatic things, they might journal, they might write.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  And the reason I give people all the rituals I do in this book is because I realized after my first book, people need more practical tools they can do every day, and they can kind of pick from, because there's no one size fits all, you know? So well-being rituals is a companion for people to flip through and say, "What ritual can I use today to help me feel better? To help me feel more confident? To help me feel more connected to myself?" Because that's really what it's about. When we experience fear, it's, we almost feel disconnected from ourselves. Well, you couldn't speak on stage. Like, I want to do this thing, but I feel like I'm so terrified by it, that I'm feeling a disconnection from this desire in my heart. But when you face that, you were able to do it.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  So it's really about noticing the fear, acknowledging the fear, and then facing everything and rise.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  And this line, "It shows us the places that we need more love."

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  Why do you say that we need to focus on these places as opposed to run from them? Like, for example, with me?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  Why is the advice not, Scott? You're not cut out for public speaking. Go focus on what you're already good at.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Right. Because I think that at the end of the day, we are innately talented, you know? Like, they would say, oh, if you're not a certain height, you'll never dunk, you know? And things like that. But we've seen people that can dunk who are not a certain height, right? They say, oh, a person can't run this fast. And then what do people do? They break the record. We've built planes, we've built cars. So we're always proving that there's a way, when there's a will, there's a way, you know? And so I think that's what this human experience is about, just seeing like, how much can I do? And in the last chapter of our book, The Art of Surrender, the subtitle is, how good can it get?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  So we get to ask ourselves, how good can your life get if you step outside of fear? If you look at fear as your friend, you can actually see how good life can get for you. And not as a life sentence. Fear is not a life sentence. Fear is just feedback of where you need love and support. And if you're willing to pour that love and support into yourself, you can go to the next level in your life.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  So well-being rituals, where is it? If you're on YouTube, it's here. It's available now. So we'll put all the links in the show notes. You can get it on Amazon. By the way, you have an all-star team of people that wrote these great little praises for the book. Dr. Brian I've had on, Mel Robbins, we're doing a little interview in Boston in a couple of weeks. Jay Shetty, Trent Shelton, I don't know, I don't know Queen Afua.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Queen Afua is my spiritual mother. She has this book called Sacred Woman. And when it comes from to healing the womb and healing from trauma, which I wrote about in my first book, she is the queen of that. And when you are growing, I think it's really important to have mentors and people that you looked up. She's one of my greatest mentors when it comes to well-being.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  In some of your content, you speak about having the person that believes in you before you actually achieved the thing. And you've had all these great people in your life. It's such a powerful idea and so, so, so important to like, have people that bet on you before you're even betting on yourself.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And at the end of the day, you gotta bet on yourself because at the end of the day, most of my life, I didn't have people. Like, growing up, I was a weird ball. Like, I was this nerdy girl who was also an athlete, who was trying to do all these things. My coach was laughing at me. He was like, Koya is so funny. She'll just say the most outlandish things, but then she do them. You know, and so people like, I'm going to London. I drive in New York. I'm gonna drive in London. Like, I just have a vision of something and I just, I don't have any boundaries. I just figure it out and get it done. And I think that is the spirit of inventors and creators. And I consider myself an inventor and a creator.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  You are, and you're helping, you're helping your peers. You're helping all the others, inventors and creators that are good at that, but bad at the rest of their life.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Right, right. And I think that's why community is all so important. We don't all have to be great at everything. We can just be great at what we're great at and you be great at what you're great at. And we'll come together and we support each other. That's the way humanity should work. We shouldn't be so separated. We just need to respect each other, respect our cultures, and then come together and share and celebrate versus trying to have everything one way. And I think, again, the way the world is set up is for everyone to march at the same beat of the drum. And it's just not natural.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  The first thing that this book speaks about is that burnout is no longer a personal failure. I don't even think you understand how real that line is. I speak about identity a lot. And so many people, again, this audience, when things don't go right, when they feel like, I haven't put in 14 hours today yet. I'm an abject failure, which is not true. Or, you know, the deal falls through, or the person quits, or they don't raise the... There's so many things where they just think that I'm not good enough and I'm not a great person because this thing didn't work out, or I wasn't able to work as hard as I thought I could, or I didn't show up the way that I know I can show up.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  What's your message? I mean, there's a lot of different, very tactical strategies. You mentioned a few of them in this episode. But what is the message to that high-performing person that continuously like just shits on themselves? Because they feel like they don't bring 150% of themselves to every single thing 24/7, 365, and they get burnt out and then they hate themselves even more for that?

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  I think the way that I moved from burnout to building a global embodied leadership community is to realize that burnout is just dysregulation. It's just a sign from your body that you've overridden it too long, right? And so sometimes when we're pushing for success, if we keep overriding our need for rest, our need for nourishment, then the body's keeping score, is adding up receipts. And eventually, we experience burnout. So burnout is not failure. It's just a sign that you've been dysregulated, you've been doing things out of alignment,

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  saying yes to things you want to say no to, self-abandoning yourself too much in your relationship and your job. So again, burnout is just a sign. It's not a sign of failure. It's a sign of dysregulation. And if people realize that, they can say, okay, well, how can I regulate? There are the rituals for the regulation right there. Through journaling, through breath work, through time in nature, through moving your body. Like, all these things are scientifically proven to help you be well. So again, that burnout is a sign of dysregulation. You start to do the rituals of regulation. You start to feel more balanced. And then, when it comes to embodied leadership, you start to get more clear on what is my capacity? How much do I want to talk to my partner?

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  How much do I want to travel? How much time do I want to spend with my kids every day? And not based on what society says, but based on how you really feel. And that's when you start living a really juicy life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  I love it. Koya, thank you so much. Where can people connect with you?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  koyaweb.com, social media, koya web, K-O-Y-A-W-E-B-B.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  The last thing I have to ask you, because I ask everybody, you've gone on this incredible journey of healing. You've had some highs, a lot of lows as well. You've navigated all of it. If you could go back and tell 20-year-old Koya one piece of advice, what would that be and why?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Girl, love yourself first and most. Put yourself first every single day. Start with the breath, look in the mirror, and be your best, most fully expressed self every single day.