Patricia Lohan is a coach, a healer, and a Feng Shui expert. Patricia is amazing at magnetic life by continuously clearing the baggage that holds you back. She’s seen first hand the power of your surroundings and how Your inner world (your mindset/history) completely affects your outer world (environment) and vice versa… so when you work on both simultaneously, you’re set to achieve great things! Her aim in life is to bring her knowledge and positive power across the world, showing people they can achieve anything they want with the right mental attitude and tried and tested techniques.
What does Feng Shui mean?
Feng Shui originates from an ancient tradition that aims at creating homes and workplace that is for good health and harvest. Feng Shui is about creating powerful environments that can help bring about change in life. The environment that we surround ourselves with has a deep impact on our personality and on our performance in life.
Why do you think creating powerful environments is important?
The environment that you live in and surround yourself with can actually be a reason for stopping you achieve success in your life. When Patricia talks about creating a powerful environment, she talks about creating a magnetic environment for what it is you want. Patricia says she has come across many clients in her practice who have been on the path of self-discovery and personal development but they still feel stuck in their lives. She has been able to help them by transforming their environment and aligning it with their personality and needs.
How can we better organize our space and improve our environment?
The first thing is to make sure we have organized our space well. Patricia says general day to day things that you have been using lately but are not put in their right place are not a mess. However, you need to look out for things that you have been holding on to for quite some time but they have no use in your life other than the fact that they are connected to some event or you have an emotional connection with them. Patricia once had a female client who had been divorced for fifteen years but was still holding on to her wedding dress. She approached Patricia because she had long been trying to get in a relationship but all in vain. Patricia asked her to get rid of her wedding dress and within two days, she found herself a date and went out with the guy.
How do you set up an environment at your home that is actually magnetic?
Start with your front door. It is the place from where energy comes in. Try to figure out if your front door looks inviting. Does it have a number to make your door easily distinguishable? Does your door have a welcome mat? Make sure your front door is easy to open as well. Feng Shui has a lot of things about symbolism and struggle. If your front door is a struggle to open, it could mean that you are undergoing some sort of struggle or stress in your life. The next thing to put your attention is on the first thing you see after you open your front door. Does seeing it make you feel happy to be back home? Does your energy rise or fall every time you enter your home?
How do you identify the prosperity area in Feng Shui practice?
There are two different schools of Feng Shui. The one Patricia practice is called the classical flying stars school. They use a compass to find the prosperity area. The southeast part of your apartment, home or your office is your prosperity area. It could be a corner of a room, center of a living room or any other part of your home or office. Once you find that area, make sure to fill in your prosperity area with things that give you joy and fill you up with happiness and positive energy.
Were you always neat and organized?
Patricia thinks she is still not the most organized person especially in comparison with her husband who is extremely organized in all aspects of his life. The biggest shift for her was when she moved into her apartment in Dublin when she decided she would not move out of this apartment until she meets her soulmate and decided to make her bedroom her sanctuary. She thinks it was the best decision she ever made because it started her on this track of really looking after her stuff and also made her love her bedroom so much that whenever she would enter in her bedroom, she would feel happy.
What is one thing that is essential to make a magnetic environment in terms of prosperity and profit?
In terms of prosperity and profit, first, you need to find your prosperity area and make sure everything is properly organized in that space. Have a look at your kitchen as well as it is also linked to prosperity. Make sure that cooking utensils are clean, organized and well kept.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
The best advice that she has ever been given is to be persistent in life. She got this advice from her father. Patricia started her business on her own and initially, it was just about being perseverant.
What were you doing before you started your business as a coach?
She was in a family business of hospitality for seven years. She left it, moved to India to become a yoga teacher. She learned about Feng Shui in India and that is when she had her spiritual awakening. Patricia describes it as a scary transition of moving to Dublin and starting her new business around coaching and inculcating Feng Shui with it.
What advice would you give to someone seeking spiritual awakening?
Just keep following the whispers. Patricia had no idea why she decided to quit her family business and go to India to become a yoga teacher. However, when she got there she felt like being at home. She followed those whispers and that led the way for her spiritual awakening. Try to tap into your inner intuition and try to believe in your gut feelings.
life coach nyc
How can we connect with you?
You can find more information about her work through her website. Her website’s URL is
http://patricialohan.com
You can also follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PatriciaLohan.RestoringYouBack.ToHarmony/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lohanpatricia/
Ariane Leanza Heinz is a private vocal consultant. She believes your voice is as unique as your fingerprints and has the potential to be clearly heard when exposed to the right training. We are using our voices every day of our lives, and still, there is no class in school that teaches us how to efficiently use it. She starts with breathing techniques —aligning your spine and ribcage with minimal effort, she will bring you to the recognition of your own inner breathing system, which is directly linked to the nervous system and affects our ability to publicly present or speak. Ariane guides people of all professions: professors, singers, TV anchors, Ted Talk speakers/// and many more to discover their voice, gain confidence and presence. Her goal is for each person to optimize their breathing and get voice clarity — for their message to reach the heart of their audience.
Why is it so hard to access the depth of our voice?
Most of us have put up a layer around ourselves. We try to exhibit identities that are not linked to our true self. This prohibits us to access our inner spiritual voice. We try to think and act in a certain way resulting in a deviation from our true self. These actions are obstacles in our way to access the depth of our voice. We try to mold our personalities with certain expectations from our parents, teachers, society and even ourselves. These are expectations not aligned with who we are. It throws us off the grid.
How do you help people train for TED Talks?
Most of the speakers who are preparing for a TED talk present their content to Ariane. Ariane works on the content of the talk. She helps them focus on habits and actions that these people always do when they are in public but are not aligned with their personalities. Sometimes it is as simple as pointing it out to her clients and they can easily get rid of it. Sometimes, it involves working more with her clients to make sure they get rid of certain actions and habits when they are in public. Most of the people who give TED Talks are highly intelligent individuals and they have the ability to grasp a lot of information and to go along with all instructions in a very short span of time.lif
Can you share a story of an individual who you trained for a TED talk?
There was a client who had so much energy and was so much enthusiasm that he wanted to convince everybody with his thoughts. Anything he would say, it suggested the same monotonous tone where he was trying to convince people with his ideas. Ariane told him to calm down a bit and it is not necessary to convince everybody in every phrase. Ariane looked at the entire content of his talk and at all the intentions he had in each part of his talk.
How do you work on someone’s voice and help them in a situation where they are afraid of addressing something or speaking up?
When we are afraid of something we have our gazelle brain coming in. By a ‘gazelle brain’, Ariane means it's like a gazelle meeting a lion who now has to run away to save its life. Similarly, we try to avoid or get away from a situation where we are afraid to speak. The brain does not comprehend the difference between a danger or a situation where we are nervous. Ariane employs ‘The Silent Number’ system in her program to deal with such situations. It helps you reset your nervous system. She had a client who was struggling to find a job and was always nervous during the interviews. After only a few months of coaching by Ariane, she was able to secure a job.
How did you manage to regain confidence in your life and help others struggling with confidence?
Ariane was born in Geneva and received her formal education in Geneva. After completing her graduation, she got a job as a teacher involving music and art. Ariane shortly started to feel she wanted to do more in her life. She was looking for something more challenging. As a result, she got an opportunity to teach a senior class than what she was already teaching. However, soon she realized she wanted to be a performer rather than a teacher. She started to write her own songs and decided to move to New York to actually perform. She moved to New York on a student visa to study further. She lived in New York for 10 years. During her time in New York, Ariane wrote a lot of songs but always had trouble performing on stage in front of a live audience. That is when she came across the avatar course that helped her do inside out work and regain confidence. Avatar course is about consciousness work, going to the deep root of our patterns and changing them. She did it and was able to change her life. This was also the year she married her husband with whom she had been in a relationship for past five years but could not commit because of those patterns.
Can you share with us a deep-rooted pattern that you worked on?
She never knew why she wasn’t able to commit fully to her relationship. In her workshops in the avatar course, Ariane discovered that the reason she wasn’t able to commit to her relationship was that she never wanted to be like her mother who was just a housewife and did not manage to build up a professional career. She believed if she got married she would not be able to excel in her professional career.
Can you briefly explain what the avatar course is?
It is a nine-day course and puts you in power of your life. You learn tools to create your life and also to destroy the patterns that limit you to live your life to its true potential. You have nine procedures that you can do on yourself once you are done with the course. One of Ariane’s friend was able to stop smoking within 15 minutes through the methods used in this course.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
The best advice that she has been given is to never think that the truth that she knows or believes in is actually the real truth. There is always something to explore.
How can we connect with you?
You can find more about her work through her website. Her website’s URL is
Laney Schwartz is a food blogger and creator of Life is But a Dish. Before she ventured into the blogging world, she was an elementary school teacher. She has built a career harnessing her two favorite things, TEACHING and FOOD. Her goal is for you to have confidence in the kitchen and to create a place for you to find easy, approachable recipes to use in your everyday cooking. Behind every recipe, photo and blog post is her – just an everyday mom, home cook and girl who’s obsessed with food.
When and how did you start your blog?
She launched her blog in October 2014, however, she had been planning to start her blog long before that. Before starting her blog, she was an elementary teacher and taught kids in 1st and 2nd grade. One day while at work she came across a food blog and was impressed by the woman who was running the blog. Laney almost couldn’t believe that the blog owner was actually able to earn money by sharing pictures and recipes of her foods. She wanted to do the same for herself i.e. run a food blog. There are two things in life that Laney really loves doing. Those are cooking and teaching. She knew if she could start her own blog, she could do her two most favorite things in one and therefore started planning for her blog.
Did you always love cooking?
She has always loved eating and she has always loved food. She grew up in a family of great cooks. Her mother and grandmothers were cooks. In her childhood and school days, she never really got to cook because she was surrounded by cooks who always prepared the food for her. Laney didn’t cook until she got to high school because that is when there was no one around to cook for her. During this time, she discovered she really enjoyed and loved cooking.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
Laney believes she gets most of her inspiration from people who are in the same business as her. She has met many food bloggers through Instagram and Facebook. She follows them on regular basis. Laney also credits her audience. She feels she has a very engaging audience and whenever someone from her audience shares a picture of food that was prepared by following Laney’s recipe, that is itself a source of inspiration for Laney.
How many followers do you have on Instagram?
She has about 27k followers on Instagram. It took her almost four years to build the audience.
How do you make money from your blog?
There are many different ways through which you can earn money from a blog. Laney’s main source of income in blogging is through brand partnerships. She works directly with brands. She uses products of certain brands in her food and shares the recipe on Facebook, Instagram and in return, she gets money from these brands. Initially, Laney was open to all sorts of offers from all brands at minimal returns. After four years in the food blogging and being able to establish herself as a successful blogger, she now has the independence to choose the brands she wants to work with.
Other ways to earn money from a blog are to put advertisements on your blog and that generates income based on how many people click on those ads through your website.
What are some of the best practical tips that can be applied in the kitchen?
When you are cooking, something that can be really overwhelming is when you are not comfortable to try something new and only feel comfortable in cooking by following a recipe. If you want to cook some food by following a recipe, always make sure to go through the entire recipe before going to the grocery store. This is because you will know beforehand what to do with all the items once they are bought from the grocery store. Many times you start following a recipe, you are halfway through the process of cooking and you see a recipe step where you were supposed to prepare a certain food item beforehand e.g. put something in the refrigerator overnight. You didn’t expect this to be on the list, you didn’t prepare for it and you start to freak out. Knowing what to expect before starting to cook can help avoid these problems and you can only know what to expect if you read the recipe from start to finish before you start cooking.
Always try to stay as organized as possible when you are cooking. Try to keep a big bowl right next to your cutting board so you can put the waste material in it. This will help you avoid creating a mess in the kitchen and make it comfortable for you to cook your food.
What is your most popular recipe?
Her most popular recipe is Turkey Meatloaf.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a food blog?
Just start. There is no perfect time for starting a business. You need to be consistent in your business as well. You also need to come up with a concrete and practical approach to generate concrete on your blog. Laney believes starting a blog can be a bit overwhelming especially if you set unrealistic targets. It is always fine to start with less; you can always add more later in your business. The most important thing is to stay authentic and you will always find the right audience for your blog who will like you for your work. If you try to follow other people, it may result in a burnout in long run.
What's your ultimate goal?
Laney’s ultimate goal is to write a cookbook. Recently, Laney has been presented with an opportunity of writing a cookbook but she believes it is still too soon to dive in this venture. As of this moment, her main focus is to grow her business and attract a larger audience to her work.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
There are many ups and downs in the life of an entrepreneur which can sometimes be demotivating and heart wrenching. The best advice she has been given is to never quit regardless of the constant failure and dejection that an entrepreneur can come across. You need to believe in yourself and in the services that you provide as an entrepreneur.
How can we connect with you?
You can connect with her through her website. Her website’s URL is
You can also connect with Laney through the following social media platforms.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lifeisbutadish/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lifeisbutadish
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lifeisbutadish/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/lifeisbutadish/
Kathleen is passionate about Conscious Connected Breathwork therapy and knows first-hand the energy, healing, peace, and joy it creates in one’s life. As a certified and insured Breathwork Coach, she has worked with many masters in the field of Conscious Connected Breathwork therapy. For over 10 years, Kathleen has used her Breath coaching and intuitive skills to support individuals in clearly identifying their areas in need of growth, healing and focused goal creation.
When did the idea of breathwork entered in your life?
She thinks breath had been calling her for a very long time because for the majority of her life Kathleen was extremely unsatisfied. She was seeking from a long time and she just did not feel good. She always tried to wore a smile, hung out with friends and family, went to parties but never felt sufficient in her life. She started to take personal development classes, workshops, going to different churches, reading different books but she still felt something was missing in her life. She did not enjoy her job either. She eventually ended up in Maryland at Innver Vision Institute for Spiritual Development (IVISD) with Iyanla Vanzant and that is when she felt her life started to change for better.
You mention you had a great childhood so how and when did you start to feel unhappy and unsatisfied in your life?
Kathleen recalls events from her childhood when she was as young as nine years old. She shares this particular story where she was upstairs at her home along with her sisters. She remembers she wanted to be involved in this particular event, to take action for herself and for her sisters. She heard her mother whimpering from downstairs and begging her father not beat her mother. As a child, it was difficult for Kathleen to process all of it. She knew her mother needed help but as a child, she could not do much about it. At that point, she felt it was her responsibility to protect her mother and do whatever she could do to keep the peace. She was always vivacious and outgoing but at that point, all she could think of was about her mother, her sisters and herself. Her mother divorced her father and at that point, the thought of being insecure had already taken its place in Kathleen’s mind. These events had a traumatic impact on Kathleen’s personality as a child. She grew up feeling unworthy, and undeserving.
Do you still speak with your father?
Her father passed a long time ago but Kathleen made peace with him before he passed away. She did a lot of breathwork to make peace with her father and was willing to forgive him. She wanted a vibrant and a thriving life for herself and felt it was only possible if she had the courage to forgive her father and move on in her life.
Why do you think breath plays an important role to gain confidence and clarity in life?
Breath helps us release cortisol which is basically stress. We as human beings are continuously bombarded by our surroundings; our senses are constantly active by the things that surround us. Most of us are almost always in fight or flight mood and that can result in excess accumulation of adrenaline in one’s body. If your body is flowing continuously with adrenaline, you are going to get adrenaline fatigue. You are likely to suffer from headache, high blood pressure, unease in the body and overweight. Breathing helps deal with stress causing hormones (cortisol) and also increases the count of endorphins, a group of hormones attributed with happiness and satisfaction.
Can we integrate breathwork with words and convert to stories related to things that arise?
Although as subtle as it is, breath can stir the emotions. In her personal and professional opinion, Kathleen believes sometimes our emotions are triggered in breathwork because we are resistant to expressing our emotions otherwise. Breathwork can be integrated with words to make the healing process easier and gaining deeper consciousness and clarity.
How did you build your business around breathwork?
The life of an entrepreneur is not for the faint-hearted people. One needs to be mentally strong to start their business no matter the services they provide. She worked with various coaches while building up her business from scratch. She still works with them on daily basis. She has got a business coach, a life coach, and a breath coach. Kathleen believes we all need support whether we are entrepreneurs or not. She believes she has been able to build up her business due to a lot of breathwork with her breath coach.
Are their different breathwork exercises for different types of healing?
She may ask her client to do a certain breathwork involving a specific area of the body. Lately, she has been doing breathwork around solar plexus. She does breathwork where she asks her client to inhale the color yellow and exhale the color yellow into every single cell of their body. Sometimes, she feels her client is resisting in a session and then asks her client to change the rhythm of their breath.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
She read the following line in a book “Above all else I would like to see things differently.” When she repeats this to herself, it brings her peace and so that is why she thinks it is the best advice she ever came across. She also shares the advice given by her mother who once said to her that “God is always with you” and that also brings her peace.
How can we connect with you?
Tamar Daniel is an award-winning fashion designer with 15 years of global experience working with top fashion companies. She loves marrying her passion for helping women further their careers with making luxe clothing that builds confidence. Tamar started out designing for Topshop and moved to Philadelphia for a position with Anthropologie. In 2015 Tamar founded her company TUXE. Her brand has been worn by top celebrates such as Meghan Markle. TUXE has been featured in The Oprah Magazine, Vanity Fair, and many more. Tamar lives with her husband and four kids on the main line and is always looking for a female entrepreneur poker game.
How did you come up with the idea of combining coaching with fashion?
It came about in two ways. Tamar learned that most of her customers brought a certain product because they had a very specific end use in their mind. Most of them bought a certain product just to boost up their confidence psychologically for a certain event.
The second event that led to the idea of combing coaching with fashion happened when Tamar engaged a coach. It was a new thing for her and she was not used to of it. She really liked the whole process of coaching helpful and actionable. She thought she could be of great help to her customers if she could combine coaching with fashion and that is how she came up with this idea.
What makes your product unique?
When Tamar was thinking of starting a bodysuit company, she really did not know if it was a sensible idea. To get around her confusion and doubt, she conducted several focus groups where her aim was to learn about the popularity of bodysuits among women. She gathered all the information related to bodysuits, how most of the bodysuits were only comfortable in first wear and the ways through which bodysuits could be improved in their production to provide a better overall experience to the consumer. She got to work with her factories to engine the product in a smarter and thoughtful way making her product unique.
How did you get Meghan Markle to wear TUXE?
Tamar built a relationship with her fashion stylist.
Did you have any business before you started your brand TUXE?
She started a sketchpad business in 2011. Tamar has always been good at fashion sketching. Sketchpad is a book filled with 420 figure templates in 20 different fashion-forward poses. Tamar came up with this idea to help aspiring fashion designers who love to sketch clothes but do not have the skills or the patience to draw proportional figures. She still owns the business but with some shares of a Californian publishing company.
What was it like growing up in London and Israel and then coming to the States?
Tamar has lived in different parts of the world and she believes she is comfortable living almost anywhere. She is able to adjust quickly to her surroundings. She easily adapts herself to different people, weather, and culture.
Did you always want to be a designer?
Tamar spent most of her Sundays at the Victorian and Albert Museum in London where they have an amazing permanent display of fashion throughout the ages. She felt at home whenever she was there. She started sketching from a very young age. She did not know anyone who did what she loved doing and it's hard to be something you don’t see anyone doing. She thinks as soon as she could put words to what she did, she wanted to be that i.e. a designer.
What was it like when you started your business?
Tamar had been working at an Anthropologie for quite some time. After giving birth to her fourth child, she decided it was time to quit big corporations and start her own line of work. She started with the sketchpad business but it was over for her because she got it licensed for a publishing company in California. She decided to start her own line of clothing. Tamar believes she did not prepare herself well before starting her business. This cost her a lot of time and money in the initial phases. In her first year, she invested a lot of money in her business with almost no returns. Tamar had realized she needed to change her approach towards her business.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
Tamar gets inspired by people building businesses especially women. She likes to read a lot of business publications, blogs, and articles. She follows people who are in a leadership position who has done something unprecedented and who are not making excuses to grow continuously in their lives and business and inspire others.
What has been something that you have been really proud of?
Tamar became a surrogate mother for a child and that is something she has really been proud of doing in her life. She is still connected with the child’s mother.
What is one piece of advice you would like to share with the listeners of this podcast?
Tamar talks about being relentless in life. Sometimes, in life its all about being consistent and perseverant. Tamar loves the word relentless as it is symbolic of continuous hard work and not giving up no matter how hard it gets.
How can we connect with you?
You can connect with her through her email. Her email address is tamar@tuxebodywear.com
You can also follow her on LinkedIn. Her LinkedIn profile’s URL is
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamardaniel/
You can also know more about her brand and products through her website. Her website’s URL is
Stephanie Jiroch holds an MA in Media Psychology, has ghostwritten for some of Hay House’s top authors and is the co-author of the Amazon best-selling book Before You Quit Writing, Read This! She is a life-long lover of words, Stephanie helps entrepreneurs, start-ups and small to mid-size enterprises reach larger audiences, gain raving fans and attain financial success through the art of storytelling. After spending years in the traditional marketing industry she quickly realized that brands with ordinary stories were far too common. Tired of the same old marketing tactics and selling strategies, Stephanie’s passion is helping companies stand-out from the crowd through psychology-driven brand strategy and story creation.
What is the biggest thing you have been able to conquer?
Stefanie always had a problem in opening up with people. She was not able to connect with anyone on an emotional level. She found it hard to accept love and was reluctant in sharing this emotion with anyone. It was only after she managed to connect with people, she met her husband whom she has been married to for past five years. The reason she had this idea around love and to be in a relationship with a man stems from the fact that Stefanie never had a relationship with her father. She had no brothers or sisters. Her mom passed away in 2003 and she had no immediate family member in her life. Those were difficult days for Stefanie as she was close to her mother. After her mother passed away, her whole world flipped upside down. Stefanie developed this fear of losing people and hurting herself in the process, therefore she decided not to open up herself to people. She was only 21 at that time.
How did you manage to reopen yourself to love?
She had a boyfriend in high school and Stefanie was still in a relationship with him during her time in college. She was even briefly engaged to her boyfriend. However, she felt she was never in love with him. She felt like there was no real connection and had to call off things between her and her boyfriend. After her breakup, Stefanie did not stop dating people but she never managed to get things past the first date. She had almost isolated herself and never wanted to get connected with someone on a deeper level. Stefanie says just like every other love story, the one involving Stefanie and her husband did not make a lot of sense either. She was traveling throughout Europe and was taking a two-week vacation. She was in Paris for one day and managed to arrive a bit earlier than planned. She was looking for directions on her phone to get free Wi-Fi. That is when she met her husband who approached Stefanie and gave her directions. Stefanie spent the rest of her time in Paris with him, getting to know more about the city and about her future husband. He showed her all the famous places in Paris within 48 hours. Stefanie was back in America when her husband asked her to move to Paris with him and explore their relationship. He was willing to send her a one-way ticket to Paris. Stefanie had not made her mind at that moment and it took her a week to arrive at her decision. She finally agreed and moved to Paris and to this day believes her husband won her over in every possible manner. She has been with her husband for almost six years now. She is a mother of two daughters and thinks only after becoming a mother she realized what true love is.
What was your career like before your mother passed away?
She was pursuing a career in law. Before her mother’s demise, she had a complete plan set for herself to become a professional lawyer and studied accordingly in high school. She decided not to pursue a career as a lawyer after her mother passed away. She went into yoga teacher training instead and started teaching yoga. She had always been into yoga and was an important healing component for her when her grandmother passed away. She had an undergraduate degree in psychology and journalism and so she decided to go in psychology, marriage, and family therapy etc. She started a program in San Francisco at CIIS. She had completed two semesters when she felt a lack of interest in the program. She did not like the fact that as psychologist we need to diagnose. She felt it was limiting. She left the program and started a coaching certificate program. This was way back in 2009.
She was working primarily with women around sexual health, sexual empowerment and was also conducting workshops related to yoga. She also managed to work as a copy-writer and ghostwriter simultaneously. She was making extra money doing this work. She also got hired as an assistant to one of the best selling author in New York City. She was ghost-writing for this person and was also working as a Virtual Assistant(VA) for him. It was easy money for her Stefanie and she no longer had to be in the same place to do her work. She stopped teaching yoga, she stopped taking coaching clients and went full time into doing VA work.
How do you help somebody with the art of storytelling? What are some key questions we should ask ourselves to extract a story?
Her company BrandPsyche Strategies, mostly help women entrepreneurs and startups. Stefanie finds their brand story and shares it with the world. She focuses on finding their purpose and also makes room for profit. She does not like the idea of women quitting as entrepreneurs and going back to a job although some of them have good and lucrative business ideas. She helps them build stories that are able to attract their ideal customers.
One of the things you always want to do when starting out is to look for your competitors. What cause are you championing and who is on the other side of it? It does not have to noble or something big, it could be about some small issue that you plan to tackle. Make sure you are up against something, make sure that through the services or products you intend to provide, you can bring about a change in someone’s life no matter how small it is.
What are the seven mental triggers that boost website sales and increases audience?
There are really some amazing things that we can do to make our stories stand out. Seven things are social validation, reciprocity, scarcity, variety, personas, similarity, and stories. It helps our unconscious brain make decisions in split seconds as to whether or not, as a user, should we return to the social media page/feed or a website. Stefanie in her work helps brand owners deal with their clients by focusing on these areas.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
“It is okay to slow down.” Stefanie believes she has always had a hard time being patient in her life. She wants to get things done as soon as possible. She believes sometimes it is okay to be proactive in life but at times you need to slow down your pace and approaching things with ease. The problem with most of us is that we think we are in a race with other human beings. But the reality is, we all have our own races, we are not running any race with anyone except yourself.
How can we connect with you?
You can find more about her through her website. Her website’s URL is
https://www.brandpsychestrategies.com
You can also find her on twitter. Her twitter handle is
Abel Costa is on a mission to uplift global consciousness one person at a time. Abel holds a BS in Cognitive Science from the State University of New York at Empire College. He is a Licensed Massage Therapist in the State of New York and is registered as a Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist.
As an expert in the healing arts, he studied Polarity Therapy, Reiki, Body Mind Centering and Theta Healing to name a few. His 20-year meditation practice has led him to study all forms of meditation from Non-Duality and mentored in neuroscience with Zoran Jasapovic to Vedic Meditation with Thom Knowles.
As a therapist with 17-years experience, Abel understands how to support the working professional providing the tools to integrate their lives and to facilitate change at an optimum pace in an evolving world.
Background
Abel was born in the Philippines and spent his childhood with his step-father who was in the military. Abel moved around a lot from one place to another. His father was from Hawaii and so Abel visited Hawaii numerous times during his childhood. He always loved Hawaii and later moved to Hawaii.
What was your childhood like?
For many years only his close friends had an idea of his uproots. Abel thinks he is a sort of a person, who does not make many close friends, but the ones he has, they are like family to him. He is comfortable in sharing his feelings, beliefs, and likes/dislikes with them. Abel developed his interest in music, theatre, and dance as a way of channeling some of the pain, using movement and music as a way to focus. One of the things Abel got into when he became a therapist is called biodynamic craniosacral therapy. Abel deals with feelings and emotions that cannot be put into words. Most of these feelings and emotions are held in our body, in our psyche that we are not aware of. However, it influences our everyday life, our perceptions, and our decision-making process. Abel believes his childhood was influenced by such feelings and emotions which could not be put into words. He lived in a family that didn’t talk much. There was never any talk about Abel’s real father.
How did you get on a path to healing?
Abel believes it chose him. It was a slow gradual process. When he was young, he was obsessed with dancing and playing the piano. He was just 18 when he got into a ballet company where he was trained rigorously. When he got to New York City by the time he was 19, he heard about a person called Bonnie Cohen who is the founder of Body-Mind Centering school. Abel took a lot of yoga classes in New York and the best teachers he had studied with this woman. His best dance teachers studied with this woman. Bonnie Cohen teaches people to be embodied in their body on a cellular level. Through this woman’s work and through Body-Mind Centering school, he got on a path to healing.
Can you talk a little about mirror neurons?
Mirror neurons were discovered in the 80’s. Researchers conducted studies involving monkeys who were made to imitate humans washing dishes. The end result was that the dishes washed by humans were clean but those by monkeys were not clean although the monkeys were made to copy each step of humans. This is because monkeys were able to replicate the actions performed by humans but could not interpret the underlying intention of washing a dish. Mirror neurons help human beings learn through actions of other human beings and also help them learn the underlying intention of every action.
Has dance been a part of your meditation?
Abel believes it was an integral part of his meditation. He believes dance allowed him to be in his body. For Abel, being in this world was a painful experience as a child. Dance allowed him to feel his body in a three-dimensional space. Abel credits this to his teacher who went an extra mile for all of her students in her teachings. Eventually, Abel was drawn to Body-Mind Center school led by Bonnie Cohen. Abel thinks that was the foundation of the healing process for him. He was able to learn about different healing modalities through this school. He spent a whole decade learning and exploring different healing modalities. It was not just bodywork, it was everything including theta healing, learning to access his own intuition and do readings like a psyche person.
What is Feldenkrais method of meditation?
Feldenkrais method of meditation aims to improve human functioning by increasing self-awareness through an individual’s body movement. However, the movement is very minute and slow. You look at the whole body skeleton and structure.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
Some time in past Abel moved to New York where he started a project with a co-founder. It is called the inner-peace project. Abel was having issues moving back to New York after being away from the city. New York is now a hub for meditation schools and coaches. You can come across numerous coaches who are just into their practice and already claiming to be best at their work. And then there was Abel, who had been in this business for almost two decades but felt uneasy starting his work in New York. Her advice to Able was to “just do you” which actually meant that Abel should just focus on his own work and put in practice his vast experience to help him through his work.
How can we connect with you?
You can connect with Abel through his website. His website’s URL is
Cindy Cornell, a leadership and executive coach, came to coaching after an accomplished career in business where she was known for being highly motivated with a strong results orientation. In addition to and perhaps more importantly than helping her coaching clients to achieve measurable results, she helps her clients to lead happier lives. She holds the Associate Certified Coach credential from the International Coach Federation and is certified in both Executive and Life Coaching by Results Coaching Systems and New York University. A lifelong learner herself, Cindy is an adjunct member of the coaching faculty at NYU. She is also an accomplished trainer and professional speaker, creating customized content that leaves audiences in productive action.
Can you talk a little bit about the power of language?
How we show up to anything is how we show up to everything. When she is in a conversation with people, she is much attuned to the language they use. We put ourselves down very often in regular conversations by not accepting compliments from people that are generously given to us or putting a limiting belief out there that may have been true for us at some point in our life but does not hold true for other people in their circumstances. We hang on to those ideas and those beliefs. The more we think about them, the truer they become in our mind. Cindy in her coaching helps people come out of stuckness and through curiosity help them towards the path of awareness.
How was your experience coaching Anna Goldstein?
It was a joy for her to coach Anna. She believes her job as a coach is not to be the expert in anyone’s life rather helps people find their own wisdom through language and a set of questions. Cindy says it was great to watch Anna in her early days because she was committed to her ways of thinking and had the ability to judge herself justly and harshly. Cindy believes Anna allowed herself to grow through awareness and explored her interests to bring in what she wanted in her life.
Can you tell what a mind map is?
The idea of a mind map is that of a freeform. Get a clear piece of paper, get some colored markers and put an idea in the center of the paper. If you are starting off with a particular challenge or a goal that you want to achieve, write that in the center of the paper. After that, create branches from that idea and it will start to look like a spider or even a tree with roots. Each branch might mean an action step and could have smaller sub-branches associated with it. Mindmap allows you to make better decisions in your life and allow your mind to see things from a different perspective.
How can you relate coaching with neuroscience?
One of the things Cindy loves about coaching is that it has really evolved in the last few decades. It has come from so many other disciplines like philosophy, psychology, and adult learning theories. There really are so many different influences on coaching. The contemporary neuroscience is particularly interesting for Cindy because it allows us to see physically and chemically in the brain how we create new habits and what is actually happening in our mind. Cindy in her training helps her clients believe that they can train their brain just like we can train our bodies.
What are some of your favorite questions as a coach?
One of her favorite questions is a follow-up question and it is simply “what else?” You might come up with an idea or two. Cindy in her coaching encourages people to explore different ideas.
Her second favorite question that she often asks in her coaching process is “What does wild success look like?”
Third most commonly asked question in her coaching is “What was useful about our meeting today?” She usually asks this question at the end of her session with her clients.
How did you get into coaching?
Her background before becoming a coach was in business. Cindy had an undergrad degree in accounting, had her MBA in finance & marketing. She was actively involved in finance, operations, and international business for a couple of decades before becoming a coach. Cindy had to go back to school to train and become a professional and a certified coach.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
The most synced piece of advice that she has been given is to “always begin as you would like to proceed, to start as you’d like to continue”. Keep in your mind what your end game looks like and create a space for yourself that is going to help you achieve your end goal. If you want to have a challenging conversation with someone, you don’t have it from a place of angst or accusation, rather from a place of mutual respect and shared vision. You need to bring in that energy with yourself and other people will match with it. If they are not in the same space as you, you wait and hold until they ready to do that.
How can we connect with you?
You can find more about Cindy through her website. Her website’s URL is
You can also follow her on LinkedIn through the following URL
This is one of my favorite topics because I had an experience when I was 17 years old that changed my life forever. I think it’s one of the reasons why I do what I do. But, when I was about 9 years old it was the first time that I had ever gone to a tennis camp and I hit a ball and the coach was said, “Whoa whoa! Do that again!” And I did it again. After the first day of camp, he called my mom and told her you to have a tennis player in your hands and that I should start playing tournaments. So like any good mother would do, she enrolled me in my first tournament a couple of months later after I had practiced and took some lessons. And I played in my first tournament which was a Round Robin, which basically means you play everybody in the tournament.
Well, I lost every single match. And an umpire that was there went up to my mom (my mom was getting a lot of advice at this time) and she said, “You know your daughter is really good she has a lot of talent but she needs to improve her mental game.”
And so that was my intro to this idea that there was more than just skill at play here. That performance isn’t just about what you’re good at. There’s also a mental component that’s really strong.
Fast forward several years later, and I started playing more tournaments. The more tournament’s I played, the better I got at winning and doing well. But I still struggled with the mental game for several years.You see I would sometimes win easily and other times it was a struggle for me (even against a player I knew I could beat). Despite my challenges, I ended up being ranked number 7 in the mid-Atlantic.
And then when I was a senior in high school I was in the Maryland State Tennis Championships (that’s where I grew up, I was seeded number two which basically meant that I was supposed to come in second place. But I knew deep down inside that I could win this tournament. And so I started working with a Sports Psychologist to help me with the mental game. And one of the things that she taught me was visualization.
I would go meet with her at her house, and I would sit on her couch, and she would guide me through a visualization — I would see myself on the court playing in these matches for the Maryland State Tennis Championships. I would picture myself, I would feel like I was there, I would I had a certain mantra that I would tell myself and repeat to myself to help keep me focused. I also had this anchoring technique where anytime I got distracted, I would come back and just fix my strings a little bit.
I did this mental rehearsal so much that when I actually went to the tournament it was like my body already knew what to do and I won that entire tournament in a breeze! It was like my brain my body had been there so much in my mind that I didn’t even have to think I was in a total flow state. Just no real thinking required. I was just able to let go and just be present and focused. It was the easiest tournament I had ever played. It was amazing and that experience just was so powerful for me because I really got to taste that visualization works.
Then many years after that, I forgot about visualization. Once I entered the working world, I hit the pavement and hit the ground running. I wasn’t really doing any visualization. And then when I hit a point in my career where things just weren’t working out for me. I had ten jobs in six years s– from 22 to 28 I had literally had ten jobs. I came back to the basics and asked myself, “What do you want?” I started to visualize what success would look like for me my life and my business. And part of what that vision included was me working for myself.
I wasn’t in a relationship at the time but I wanted to be in a relationship and I knew that one day I wanted to have kids. I wanted to have the freedom and flexibility to be able to spend time with my kid while I still worked. I wanted to do something also that was helping people making a meaningful impact. I wanted to have my own coaching business. And before I went to bed at night I would picture it. I did vision boards. I wrote about it. And now I can honestly say that in many ways I’m living my vision.
It’s not hokey pokey. There have been studies on athletes. There’s a story about basketball players who there are two groups of basketball players. One group actually practice throwing free throws and the other group just visualized. Who do you think did better? The group that just visualized did better because they never saw themselves miss a shot. So they were able to have this level of confidence in themselves. To give you some more science behind it the central nervous system doesn’t distinguish between real and imagined events. I mean this is true about fear too right. Look sometimes we have fear in our mind and we think that it’s real but it’s really not.
That’s why it’s so important to direct your attention towards what it is that you want and create a mental picture and rehearse it because what will happen is the mental imagery impacts what you actually do. Right. So part of where we the brain that controls imagery its part of the cognitive functioning. And so the brain is actually getting trained for performance and it really enhances motivation confidence and it primes your brain for success.
You can use visualization for your career, interviews, a conversation, relationships, every area of your life. This is a very very powerful tool.
I’ve included a 10 minute guided success visualization. I would love for you to do it and I would love to hear from you.
Sit back relax and visualize success.
Yanik Silver redefines how business is played in the 21st century at the intersection of more profits, more fun, and more impact. He is the founder of Maverick1000, a private, invitation-only global network of top entrepreneurs and industry leaders with participating icons such as Sir Richard Branson, Tony Hawk, Chris Blackwell, Tim Ferriss, and many others.This group periodically assembles for breakthrough retreats, rejuvenating experiences, and charitable impact opportunities — raising over $3M+. Yanik serves on the Constellation board for Virgin Unite, the entrepreneurial foundation of the Virgin Group and Branson family. And his lifetime goal is to connect visionary leaders and game changers to catalyze business models and new ideas for solving 100 of the world’s most impactful issues by the year 2100. In this episode we talk about how Yanik got started as an entrepreneur, knowing yourself is key to living your purpose, how to connect with influential leaders, creating a compelling vision, and more.
What got you started on your entrepreneurial journey?
Yanik’s parents were Russian immigrants who moved to the USA when Yanik was still a kid. Yanik’s father started his own business sooner than later after moving to USA and Yanik grew up working in the family business. Entrepreneurship was something he inherited from his father. Through his father’s business, Yanik developed many skills that shaped his career as an entrepreneur and helped him in launching his own products.
How did you start Maverick 1000? What is it about?
When Yanik worked with his father in his business, he learned about copywriting, advertising and many other things. He took all those skills and applied online. His first successful online venture was called instance sales letter. He managed to create an online presence by creating rich and customizable sales letter templates for people who were trying to sell their products. His business was going good in terms of money and profit but Yanik was not completely satisfied with his work. He looked at where he was in his life and asked himself a simple question “Am I happy?” The answer to that was a simple no. He was making a lot of money and he was helping a lot of people through his work. He enabled a lot of people to create presence and reputation in the online world. But he felt as if something was missing from his life.
This set him up on a new journey and through a lot of research and journaling, Yanik realized he was the happiest when he hung out with other entrepreneurs who shared the same interest as him. This activity of his turned into an idea and that idea turned into Maverick. Maverick 1000 is an initiative to form a society of great entrepreneurs who can collaborate and bring together a revolution in this world. Yanik believes that if one entrepreneur can bring about a major difference in a large group of people, then a thousand entrepreneurs can change the whole world.
What advice would you have for someone trying to align their work with some purpose?
It takes a lot of good self-reflection. Daily journaling can help you clear your mind and find purpose in work. It is scientifically proven that daily journaling makes us happier and help us gain more insight about ourselves and with what is going on with our lives.
How have you been able to establish great relations with business entrepreneurs and leaders of the tech industry?
He thinks he is incredibly blessed to have these intriguing people in his life. He believes he has always been able to bridge the gap between people and connect with them regardless of their conflicting interests. However, Yanik believes if you really want to connect with someone on a deeper level and with authenticity, then look out for mutual interests, beliefs, and motives.
Do you think being an entrepreneur helps establish such connections?
It helps in all sorts of ways. Yanik himself enjoys writing and he knows a lot of people have been able to connect with him through his books, writing and blog posts. If you have your own platform as an entrepreneur, you can connect with all sorts of people through your work. He shares the story of one of his friend, Ryan Holiday who wrote a book titled ‘The Obstacle Is the Way’. Ryan is a craftsman at his work and takes his writing seriously. Ryan managed to meet a senator just through his book. A certain senator read his book, loved its content and invited Ryan for a lunch with him. Yanik believes that as an entrepreneur, one should always try to come up with something that has a lot of value.
You mention in your book titled ‘Evolved Enterprise’ that one has to be exceptionally different. Why do you think this is so important?
Yanik has always been taught that if you need to be extraordinary in your life, you need to do things that ordinary people are not willing to do. You need to get out of your comfort zone. Yanik believes there is too much of mediocre majority around us. If you expect to leave an impact in this world through your work, prepare your self to be exceptionally different and learn to live without mediocrity.
Who has made the biggest impact on you and why?
Yanik thinks he is naturally a person who focuses a lot on future prospects and considers himself a visionary. There have been two people in his life who have helped him on these aspects in his life. The first one is Ari Weinzweig who is the founding partner of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses. The second person is his friend Cameron Herold who is the author of the book ‘Vivid Vision’. Cameron talks about one’s own intuition and vision in the book. Yanik himself believes a lot in vision and believes that an individual has to look out for potential opportunities, clients, and customers as an entrepreneur.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
If you want to become an expert in any field, you read or study one hour a day for three years. If you want to become a world-class expert, you study one hour a day for five years. Continuously follow where your interests are and work on your interests. Make sure you spend your time daily to improve yourself in a particular skill.
How can we connect with you?
You can find more about Yanik via his website. His website’s URL is
yaniksilver.com
Hillary Hendershott is the founder and chief advisor at Hilary Hendershott financial. She is a financial coach, money mindset expert, and experienced wealth manager. She has worked for nearly 15 years with people who want to preserve their wealth, make it grow, and eliminate financial stress once and for all. She is also the host of Profit Boss Radio, a podcast that highlights inspiring women who have created success in their financial and professional life.
When was the moment in your life when you decided to get hold over your relationship with money?
There were a few of those moments when Hilary felt that way. She was working in a commission only position during the mortgage crisis. She had a very low income during that period. She had some initial successes and gained some big commissions. She had built up huge expenses. She had already bought a condo but did not have enough money to buy furniture for it. She owned a BMW but was almost out of gas and did not have enough money even in her credit cards to fuel up her car’s tank. Her bank accounts were empty and her credit cards were maxed out. She had got herself in massive amounts of debts. This was when she decided to change her lifestyle and get hold over her irrational behavior with money.
Hilary graduated from college with a degree in economics and that too with the highest distinction. She was a certified financial coach.
What was the first action step you took to gain control over your wealth?
The first thing she did was to move out of the condo and into her mother’s guest room. She rented out her condo. She started to look for new jobs. She found a job as a financial advisor in her father’s firm. She got honest with people about her financial troubles. Hilary stopped going out on parties with people because she knew she could not pay for it and felt no hesitation in telling it to people.
What are a few things you figured out in your life to achieve financial stability?
Hilary had some mixed up mindset about money. Her mother was a frugal woman and would only spend money on important things. She had set up her priorities early in her life. Hilary was never given enough money by her mother to buy presents for her friends or to attend parties. Hilary developed a scarcity mindset. She grew up with this belief that there was never enough money to do things in life and also with a contradictory belief that buying expensive things would help her gain approval from people around her. She used to believe that being rich meant spending money. She only realized it after she got broke that being rich is about keeping money and using it wisely. She lowered her overhead expenses and found new ways to increase her income.
Are there key questions that can help people gain insight into what their money psychology is?
Hilary has a survey questionnaire pdf workbook on her website. Its called ‘mind over money’. It contains questions like what is it you believe is true about money? It asks you to look into your experiences with money. Is it easy to earn money for you or is it hard? Do you spend a lot of time at work just to earn more money? Do you believe working more can help you earn money? By answering these questions, an individual can gain insight to what their money psychology is.
Who are your major clients?
Her website says ‘wealth management for empowered women’. She almost exclusively works with women and especially women are in later years of their lives. Most of them are approaching their retirements or are executives in the workplace. She has had such type of clients from a very long time.
Hilary once had a millionaire client who had no idea about using a debit card. She used to write herself a cheque every time she needed money from the bank. The problem with most financial advisors is that they do not seem interested enough to work with you if you do not have a lot of money in your bank account. From a financial advisor perspective, it is perfectly fine to decline a client who does not have a big bank balance because you want to maximize your profits as well as an advisor.
To tackle this situation, Hilary has recently developed a new program called ‘ignite investing’ for people who do not have a lot of money in their bank accounts. It took her almost a year to launch this program. In this program, she aims to work with people who are willing to invest as low as $25000. She aims to serve these people adequately and efficiently through this program.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
Being rich is not about how much you get to spend, it's about how much you get to keep. This quote has enabled Hilary to change her life and the lives of so many people around her.
How can we connect with you?
You can find her through her website. Her website’s URL is
https://www.hilaryhendershott.com
She also hosts a podcast show every Tuesday where she conducts interviews of various people and talks about aspects of financial planning, bitcoins, social security, and interest rate hikes.
https://www.hilaryhendershott.com/ep-0-welcome-to-profit-boss-radio/
Robyn Youkilis, a certified wellness expert, author of the best-selling book Go with Your Gut, and leading authority on gut health and weight loss. Robyn’s new book which we talk about on this episode, Thin From Within - The Go with Your Gut Way to Lose Weight is part coaching guide and part cookbook, with 75 delicious recipes, to help readers optimize their digestion and shed weight from the inside out. Robyn teaches you how to feel comfortable, confident and energized in their bodies, and how stubborn weight can melt away when they learn to tune into their gut. Robyn has been featured on Today Show, The Cooking Channel, CBS News, and many more media outlets.
Can you talk a little about your book? What is it about?
Her aim of writing book was to make people passionate about making changes in their lives. She wanted people to have a conversation around the word ‘thin’ in a new way. She aims to promote self-love through her book. She has not used the word ‘thin’ in reference to a body type but because we have just developed an ideal with the word ‘thin’. She wanted to connect with women who were still chasing this ideal consciously or sub-consciously. She does not talk about weight in terms of the number on a scale but more of what it is an individual is chasing. According to Robyn, a desire to lose weight means we want something different in our bodies and something different in our lives. She talks about meal preparation and food recipes in the book that can help you lose weight.
Can you tell us about the benefits of fermented foods?
Fermented foods are typically raw and have some pro-biotic nature in them. Fermented foods are good for your microbiome. A microbiome is a bacterium that resides in and on your body. It is responsible for a number of body processes that help our body run and function properly.
What was one of your first jobs?
The first job she had was when she was in high school. She was a ski instructor and rock-climbing instructor. She also worked as a babysitter while in high school.
How did you get into health coaching?
Robyn says she did not follow traditional route to becoming a health coach. It was not something she wanted to do from her childhood. She was doing odd jobs before going into college and she was also interested in acting. She did musicals as a kid and loved theater as well. However, she opted for international law in college mainly because she always had an eye for atrocities and wanted to help people around the globe. Later, she worked for UN for some time and in local non-profits doing criminal court work. She eventually found her way to Los Angeles and did small acting gigs over there. She started to get into cooking and food. She came across this nutrition school, The Institute for Integrative Nutrition which is considered as the world’s largest nutrition school. She enrolled in one of their programs and graduated as a certified health coach. She opened up a health coaching practice after she graduated. It has been nine years and Robyn has not looked back.
Did you ever think you would write a book?
Robyn says she was never a good writer. She recalls her time in high school when her best friend used to help her in work that involved any sort of writing. Robyn says writing books was something that really happened on its own once she started to list down all the things she was offering to her clients in her programs.
How did you end up getting a book deal?
Alex Jamieson, a famous food chef and health counselor who also happens to be Robyn’s friend invited her to a conference. Alex introduced Robyn to a literary agent over there and told the agent about Robyn’s work. That agent helped Robyn create her proposals for different publishers. Robyn eventually got a book deal with a publisher through her agent and was able to publish both her books through the same publisher.
What failure later became a success in your work?
She was very hesitant in doing group coaching programs in the first five years of her practice. Initially, she tried group coaching programs but was not very successful in it as only one or two people would sign for it. She decided to drop this idea of group coaching and went solo coaching for the next few years. Eventually, she launched her first successful group coaching program Rockstar Roadmap, it was a huge success. It felt fun, she didn’t feel it was forced.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
The best advice she was given was by Joshua Rosenthal who is the founder of The Institute of Integrative Nutrition who said: “Life is a long time”. It simply means that you don’t have to do all the things at the same time, you need to go slowly and steadily. You can do different things in different phases of your life.
Any final thoughts you would like to share with the audience?
Robyn advises everyone to take a moment every day just to connect with themselves. Say something nice to yourself before going to bed or in the morning.
How can we connect with you?
You can find more about her work and her books through her website. Her website’s URL is
Pain is part of human life. It’s not to avoid it, but to go into it with a sense of openness and curiosity. If we do that when pain arises we can use it for positive self-transformation. Pain is a guidepost for introspection -- it’s ultimately an opportunity to awaken and learn.
Dani DiPirro is an author, blogger, and designer living in a suburb of Washington, DC. In 2009, she launched the website PositivelyPresent.com with the intention of sharing personal experiences and insights on positivity, awareness, and self-love — things that didn’t always come easy to her! Since the launch of the site, Positively Present has grown into a global, go-to destination for positive personal development inspiration and resources. In 2012, Dani left her full-time job to focus her attention on growing the brand. Since then, Dani has expanded the blog into many new ventures, including books, a YouTube channel, and online courses.
How did you come up with the name ‘Positively Present’?
She was going through a tough phase in her life. She was unhappy with her job and her relationships were in a mess. This was way back in 2009 and she did a little research online. She came across this website of self-help and they talked about listing down all the things you want or are missing from your life on a paper. Dani made a list of those things and was surprised by two specific things she found on that list. She mentioned in the list that she needed to be more positive in her life and wanted to be more present. She thinks she used to worry a lot back then and fill up her head with all the negative thoughts. She started her blog for the purpose of becoming more positive and more present in her life. That is how she came up with the name ‘Positively Present’ for her blog.
What were you doing at that time for work?
She had a marketing job in a biotech company and Dani felt her job lacked creativity. She likes to be creative in her work and she felt stuck in that job because she was not able to explore her creative abilities. It was her first job after graduate school. She did not quit her job right after she started her blog. She took her time and for a few years she would look at other people’s blogs who wrote about self-improvement, about being happy and present.
How hard was it to relate yourself to the blog and come out open in public?
It took her a little while to put out her name on the blog. The turning point was when she realized that visitors on her blog were increasing on daily basis and her content was being read consistently by the public. She felt accepted through her work, it helped her believe more in her work.
How did you manage to grow your audience?
Back when Dani started her blog, social media was nowhere around. She mainly promoted her blog by talking to people about it, sharing it with her friends who in turn would promote her blog. Ever since the evolution of social media, Dani has changed her ways of growing her audience. She uses Instagram on regular basis to connect with her followers and increase her visibility. When she started out, she was writing every day. Now she makes sure to write on Mondays and Fridays. Somewhere in 2010, she thought she could make a job out of it. She saw other people doing the same, who were able to launch their own products and create business opportunities out of their blogs. It took her a lot of time from a simple idea to be able to quit her job and rely solely on this work. She managed to save money before quitting her job.
How has your life changed as a result of Positively Present?
She believes almost everything has changed in her life since she started her entrepreneurial journey. She feels happy and content in her life. She loves her work and is passionate about it. Dani says she has also made a significant change in her relationships. She tries not to surround herself with people who have a negative influence in her life.
Did you at any point felt you could not change your life?
She felt that way prior to starting Positively Present. She was known as a very grumpy and gloomy kid among her friends. She would always analyze a situation to avoid any difficulties later on. She developed this thought as a kid that she was a very negative person. As a child, she felt she could not bring a positive impact in her life and take on challenges.
What was the first thing you changed about yourself?
The first thing she changed about herself was that she got sober. By being sober, she was not able to escape her feelings that she had been doing in her past. She started to accept the way she felt. She started to look at her relations that were based on real substance. From personal change, she was able to change her relationships and get more control over her life.
Tell us about your artwork and design.
She started out with writing blogs but later got into design and art work. She usually designs stuff for her website on her own rather than finding other people to do it for her. She has always been interested in art. It is one of the biggest part of her business now.
Do you think creativity is linked with happiness?
Dani strongly believes that happiness is linked with being creative and innovate in life. The word creativity feels limiting to people who do not consider themselves artistically creative. Creativity has nothing to do with art though. It could be linked to cooking, raising children or even how well you manage your job. There are all sorts of ways to be creative. It is all about thinking differently.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
The best advice she has been given is to pay attention to her thoughts. If you really start to focus on your thoughts, you can filter out all the negative thoughts and make sure you get a positive outlook on life. Many times we occupy our brain with ridiculous thoughts that are not even true. We are influenced by some past events or personal stories/history.
How can we connect with you?
http://www.positivelypresent.com/
DaniDiPirro.com
https://www.instagram.com/positivelypresent/
Elly Molina is an Amazon Bestselling author, an international MindPower Consultant and visionary. She holds a Master's Degree in Linguistics from NYU and has been an educator for over 3 decades. She is the concierge consultant, trusted mentor, and intuitive adviser to Heads of State, Celebrities, Business Professionals and Seekers and has literally given thousands of readings in her life. She is the founder of Psi-Kids, where children and adults learn to develop, trust and utilize their mind power and intuitive abilities. Elly has appeared on FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, and in The New York Times. In this episode we talk about energy dynamics, exercise to access and strengthen your intuition, telepathy, and more.
How can we learn to access better qualities of energy? How can we communicate better from an energy perspective?
The way we are taught and raised, we are not raised to pay attention to energy on daily basis. We are not thought to ponder upon the fact that we are a part of collective consciousness. We transmit energy all the time, we are energy beings. We develop language and a conversation around energy. Perhaps the conversation around energy does not even exist right now, we are always looking to create new conversations and new words. Once we learn to create conversation around energy and we have words and vocabulary, it will be much easier to teach awareness of energy. We need to have a language around energy.
How can we become more aware of our own energy?
The best way to become more aware of your own energy is to get centered. This can be done with meditation, mindfulness and going into that state of silence. Our mind is almost always working but if an individual can give themselves a few minutes of silence where they can clear their thoughts, they might achieve a higher state of consciousness and become more aware of their own energy.
How do we access our innate intuitive abilities?
First, you need to believe you have those abilities. If you do not believe, then you won’t be able to access them. We are born as intuitive human beings; it is a part of our makeup. However, through our society and the way we are raised and educated, most of us are programmed not to trust in our intuition and to not even believe in its existence. Intuition exists in all of us, it is a feeling of knowingness, it is something very close to instinct.
How can we trust our intuition to make better choices?
First of all, we need to have a conversation with ourselves that intuition exists. We also need to teach children to use intuition to make choices in their life. We need to find out where it exists in our body. Our body intuitively starts responding to different situations if we pay attention to body language. Any time our body starts to contract, that means we might be in a situation not favorable for us. We need to learn these subtle things about how our body reacts to different situations.
How do you help children access their intuition and become more mindful and connected to their hearts?
Elly usually works with children who are around 8 years old but sometimes she has children who are as young as three years old. One of the first things she teaches these kids is how to be still because it really is very important to access one’s intuition. When children are taught to sit still, they are incredibly intuitive. She starts off with small steps like instructing children to focus on a candle for two to three minutes without moving their body. She tries to establish communication with children in reference to how they feel, what their heart feels like. This is how she is able to tap into their intuitive self. If she feels like the kid is more comfortable with this practice and is able to tap into their intuition, she takes it to the next level. She would have a stack of cards with different colors or different objects on the cards. Then the child is blindfolded and asked to guess the color of the card or the object that is on the card and they are able to guess it correctly.
What is dancing in the unknown?
It is a book written together with Betsy Chasse. She is the co-creator of a 2004 documentary film ‘What the Bleep Do We Know?!’. It was a movie about the quantum field and how we create our reality. It was a big hit. It showed that we are creators of our own reality. Betsy has been working in the film industry. She had this thought of writing a book in which she had the idea of sharing how she was drifted into the unknown in her life and how she explored new things. There were 16 people who contributed stories to this publication. The book contains some great stories and is full of wisdom. It talks about those moments when these people left behind the known and entered in the unknown sphere, trusting their instincts and underwent complete new experience in their lives.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
The best advice she has been given is to stop spending and start investing her thoughts, time and her money. Everything in life must be an investment. We know what it means to waste time and money but a lot of people have no idea what it means to waste a thought. Wasting a thought is obsessing over things we cannot change. It means to spend time in worry and have negative outlook towards everything in life. Our thoughts must be an investment to create a better life for ourselves and people around us.
How can we connect with you?
You can find more about her through her website. Her website’s URL is
Dr. Shivani Amin is a Family Medicine, Pain Specialist and Expert in Medical Cannabis. She began her career at Hoboken University Medical Center in New Jersey. Following a general family practice in Frederick, Maryland, she began to specialize in pain management. As a registered cannabis physician in the state of Maryland, Dr. Shivani has made it her goal to help educate the public on medical marijuana and is dedicated to the compassionate and responsible use of medicinal marijuana as an option for treatment. Dr. Shivani formed a company, Green Health Docs, as a way to educate the public and patients on the medicinal alternatives to opioids and synthetic drugs. Their mission is To combat the nation’s opioid epidemic and give patients back control of their lives with natural medications like medical marijuana. In this episode, we talk about the many many benefits of medical marijuana and CBD oil. I have personally been using CBD oil and have noticed that my appetite and mood is more stable.
How do you use a plant as medical treatment?
The biggest misconception about marijuana is that it can only be used as a drug. However, the plant has over 400 different chemical components and many components in the plant can be effectively filtered out and used for medicinal purpose. A lot of research is being carried out to filter all the components of this plant that can be used for medicinal purpose.
Some of the common components are CBD, PHCBE, PHC, VA.
Can you explain the difference between THC and CBD?
Both THC and CBD are part of marijuana plant. THC stands for tetra hydra cannabinoid. It is a chemical compound that helps patients with chronic pain and inflammation. THC can also produce that feeling of euphoria, cause hallucinations and can get you high. CBD is also part of the plant but it does not produce that psychoactive high. It is extremely anti-inflammatory. It does not have any side-effects either.
Why do you prefer the use of CBD in your practice?
The reason CBD is famously used in reference to medical marijuana is that it does not produce that psychoactive high. It can even be consumed by children. It is known for being extremely anti-inflammatory and has neuroprotective properties. Many believe it can be used to help people with seizures because of its excessive neuroprotective properties. It has also been shown to repair damaged cells and many believe it can be used to treat autism. CBD is also being studied for Alzheimer’s and for treatment against cancer.
Can CBD help reduce weight loss?
CBD is being studied to find if it can help reduce weight loss. It has been shown to reduce a person’s appetite and Dr. Shivani experimented it with herself. She takes a 15-milligram dosage of pure CBD every day and she has noticed it has reduced her appetite. It makes her go to gym and workout. However, Dr. Shivani advises everyone to be cautious with dosage as she herself was the victim of slight over dose sometime ago. She believes an individual should not consume more than 15 milligrams CBD in one day.
Can we use CBD with any other medication?
Dr. Shivani says CBD has not really shown any side-effects with any other medications. She says it is safe even for people who are taking their blood pressure medication and CBD has the ability to mix very well with other medications.
Would you recommend medical marijuana to people with addiction to drugs?
She believes medical marijuana has actually helped people who were addicted to drugs. She encourages such people to consume medical marijuana especially CBD because it does not have that chemical component responsible for producing a psychoactive high.
How did you get into this profession?
Dr. Shivani has always been a huge fan of alternative medicine. It has always been her passion. When she was a house officer she would always question why a patient was prescribed a certain medicine and if there were alternatives to that specific medicine. She always felt there were more than one ways to deal with diseases. She always felt we should put in efforts to reduce consumption of pharmaceutical pills and focus more on natural solutions. She was doing primary care and was seeing close to 30 patients per day. Many of these patients were coming in for pain, depression, and anxiety. She felt pharmaceutical pills were like were not the solution to the problem. She felt like she was not doing enough for these patients prescribing ‘candies’ to them on daily basis. She switched over and started to study alternative medicine for pain management. Once cannabis became legal for medicinal purpose, Shivani knew she had the opportunity to do more research on this plant that has tremendous benefits for health.
Do you believe there are many stigmas to marijuana?
Dr. Shivani completely agrees that there are many stigmas around marijuana. She has been working in medical marijuana for quite some time but even in her own family she has to face this stigma and people in her family are surprised that she recommends marijuana as a medicine for her patients.
Do you feel like you have to break this barrier of stigma around marijuana?
She thinks it is her life purpose to clear all misconceptions about the use of marijuana. This is why she tries to educate people with the proper use of marijuana. Shivani believes there is still a lot we need to learn around how the plant works.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
The best advice she got was from her dad who asked her to be herself and to do things that make her happy. At the end of the day, you are your best friend.
How can we connect with you?
You can connect with her through her website.
Her website’s URL is
Kelly Morris has guided thousands with her unique ability to bring forth the truths with yoga and meditation. In the wake of one of America's greatest tragedies on September 11, 2001, Kelly was chosen as the cover story for New York Magazine, as a leading light + voice of compassion at a time of great violence, fear and confusion. Kelly created The Infinity Call—a one-of-kind daily meditation experience for women around the world. It’s A LIVE broadcast for women only M-F, each session is available for 24 hours and then vanishes. The Infinity Call has been featured in the WSJ, One Kings Lane, InStyle, The Coveteur, Well + Good and many more. As you’ll see in this interview, Kelly is direct, frank, empowered by compassion, but mostly, LOVE. She’s like no other meditation or spiritual coach you’ve ever worked with.
What got you into meditation?
Kelly has been a lifelong practitioner of yoga. She has also done studies of a certain kind and has been involved in spiritual practice. Kelly believes many yoga teachers, practitioners and a lot of people in the spiritual field do not meditate. This is because most of them haven’t been taught how to meditate properly. She was brought up and raised in a patriarchal society. She wanted to break shackles and oppose the concept of a system, society or government where men get control of everything. For Kelly, the answer lied in meditation. Through meditation, she was able to achieve a greater sense of self-consciousness for herself and for women around her. Today, she is leading a live broadcast day in day out by the name of ‘The Infinity Call’.
What is ‘The Infinity Call’?
Kelly believes it is difficult to start a meditation practice at home due to various reasons. Kelly started Infinity for all call which is only for women. The Infinity Call is a live broadcast that women can join from any corner of the world. It is a live guided meditation that is led by Kelly herself and the focus is to increase self-consciousness through meditation and enable women empowerment. Women can have one to one meditation session via telephone, Skype or even an in-person session if they are from New York City. Kelly says hundreds of women have joined this program. We live in a world that is actually not safe for women and Kelly hopes to make this world a safer place for women through this program.
Why do you believe meditation is so important for you and for everyone else?
Kelly believes that for many people meditation does not seem like something very revolutionary. This is because the whole concept of meditation revolves around an individual sitting in a corner and chanting a mantra repeatedly and or perform a ritual in complete silence. Studies suggest that human beings generate a large number of beta brain waves during everyday life when we are mostly occupied with work and when our attention is towards the outside world. Beta brainwave state is associated with paranoia, anxiety, self-doubt, and depression. People who are prone to depression or anxiety are not able to produce GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) neurotransmitter.
People who are addicted to certain things like drugs, gambling or sex are also unable to produce GABA neurotransmitter in large quantity. Studies have indicated that people who meditate are able to produce high amounts of GABA neurotransmitter. Therefore, meditation can help people suffering from depression, anxiety and drug addiction.
Why do you think positive affirmations do not work?
Kelly believes unless you do not believe in that positive affirmation, it will never work for you. This is because you will not be able to produce the hormones and chemicals associated with that sentiment hence making it impossible for you to believe in it. If you want to raise your self-esteem and if you really want to believe in your abilities, you should first try to create the chemical consciousness inside of yourself, enable yourself to believe in it. You could do this by borrowing someone’s mojo, it could be some celebrity, your friend or a relative.
How do you take your clients through a meditation session?
Kelly trains her clients to retrieve their consciousness which is an individual’s greatest resource. Kelly intends to reach out to women across the world through The Infinity Call program. She says she expects women from different cultures, religion, race, country, socioeconomic status to join this program.
Where do you feel your passion comes from?
Kelly is deeply concerned with the ever-increasing number of women rape cases in America and around the world. She believes her true passion to work and for women, empowerment is due to the fact that women are constantly being persecuted in this patriarchal society and much needs to be done to stop this persecution. Kelly believes as a woman she can enable other women to look out for themselves, protect themselves and create awareness among other women who in turn can stand-up for their rights. Kelly believes women have the ability to heal the world.
How can we connect with you?
You can find more about Kelly and her work through her website.
Her website’s URL is
Sylvia Nasser is Certified Personal Trainer, Master Boxing Trainer, Holistic Health Coach and more.Sylvia struggled with weight and a distorted body image for many years. She became a diet pill addict at the age of 17. Needless to say, the health and fitness industry is overwhelmingly saturated with products and services that promise to deliver quick results. She’s not here to promise you a beach bod in 6 weeks. She prides herself on taking this stand – Fitness is a LIFESTYLE; it’s about moving your body for the rest of your life and loving every second of it.Because it’s natural. Humans move, jump, leap, skip…..we are NOT meant to remain stagnant nor are we meant to dislike our bodies and our circumstances. In this episode, we talk about Sylvia’s battle with diet pill addiction, how she became a fitness instructor, how to have fun with fitness and more.
Background
Sylvia was overweight as a child and always wanted to be a dancer and take karate classes. She played basketball and volleyball in elementary and middle school. She liked the idea of moving but always felt uncomfortable moving because she was heavy and that made it difficult for her to indulge in physical activities. She was unable to take part in a lot of physical activities that most of the kids take part in, all because of the fact that she was overweight. This made Sylvia a shy, introvert person and she felt ashamed of her body.
What contributed to you being overweight?
Sylvia and her parents lived in her grandmother’s apartment. Her grandma took care of her when her parents were working. Shortly afterward, her parents moved to Long Island and she had to live with her grandmother during the week and would meet her parents on weekend. She did this until high school. She had a very unhealthy diet while living with her grandmother. That contributed towards excessive weight. Sylvia believes there was also an emotional element because her parents weren’t there with her and that contributed to Sylvia eating unhealthy food all the time.
How did you become addicted to diet pills?
Sylvia was 17 when she moved to high school and around this time she excessively started to consume diet pills. She did not have a lot of friends up until her senior year in high school. She wanted to gain popularity among girls in high school. She wanted to look good for senior year high school prom. During this time, she joined the gym for the first time to lose weight and started to consume diet pills as a way to lose weight and look more attractive.
How did you enter in the fitness world?
After completing her college, she applied for master’s program in Stony Brook and got a scholarship in the program. She was able to complete her master’s program in a year. During that year, she joined a gym as a desk girl and got her gym membership for free so she was able to take classes for free. She fell in love with the fitness classes over there. She haphazardly fell into teaching fitness. One of the instructors in gym quit and Sylvia’s boss was looking for an instructor so she offered her the job which Sylvia accepted. She worked full time in corporate and taught classes part-time. It was during this time Sylvia started to believe fitness was her passion.
How did you build your business on fitness?
She got her group fitness certification and personal training certification through the Aerobics and Fitness Association of America (AFAA). When she had a corporate job, she had a business coach who was in the fitness world. This person helped her build her brand. He helped her start her first boot camp. Sylvia eventually had to break up the business relationship with her business partner and had to manage her business on her own.
You had a tough time dealing with personal health during the early stages of your business. What was it like?
When she decided to run her business solely on her own, she had to do everything on her own and it became very stressful for her. During this phase, she was also planning her wedding, her grandmother passed away and she started to develop symptoms that were not normal for her body. She was diagnosed with an extremely low white blood cell count and the doctors recommended her to take a bone marrow test to rule out cancer. It was a huge sigh of relief when cancer was ruled out of the picture and Sylvia finally realized she did not take care of her body properly and was constantly consuming things that were not right for her body. Even though any terminal illness was ruled out but Sylvia’s symptoms persisted. Her rashes would not go away, she was going bald, had a lot of pain while brushing teeth. She started to develop joints pain and could not move her hands enough to lift a dumbbell. After a lot of consultation with different doctors, Sylvia was officially diagnosed with Lupus. She knew why this had happened. She had stressed her body by taking in so much stuff and was completely overdoing it. She was excessively consuming different diet pills. She used to take two different fat burners, one Isagenix pill. She was excessively working out and extremely busy in her classes.
What is one piece of advice you would give to people struggling with their body image and their relationship with their body?
Sylvia says to have fun with your body if you can move your body easily. She herself loves boxing so she does boxing. Its not because she aims to lose weight through boxing and get her body in shape but only because she enjoys it. When you make fun the goal, it helps you get to your main goal easily.
How can we connect with you?
You can connect with her through her website.
Her website’s URL is
You can also find her on Instagram via the following URL
Tara Zirker combined her passion for writing and marketing and created Sunbeam Communications, a full-service, results-obsessed, forward-thinking digital marketing agency. Their goal is to create maximum impact for thriving brands and entrepreneurs by offering high-performance services such as Facebook Advertising, Google AdWords, and Funnel Analysis. She also is the creator of successful ads club to empower entrepreneurs and small business owner to successfully manage their facebook ads and lead generations. In this episode we talk about, the fundamental tools for lead generation, creating fb ads, the journey to 100K, being a boss mom and more.
What's your favorite food?
Tara eats a lot of bananas. She buys 5 -10 bunches of bananas a week. She had health problems that led her to eat a high carb low-fat diet. Her favorite raw dish is a raw lasagna.
When did you become an entrepreneur?
From a young age, she started businesses like car wash and greeting card routes, where she employees her neighborhood friends to work with her. She also had an online cosmetic company, which was featured in Cosmogirl magazine. The company took off for a little while before she left all her projects and went to college. She thought for sure that she would get a job, working from 9 to 5, before realizing that working for corporate isn’t her calling, and eventually building up her own agency later on.
What is your main goal and how do you help people with your agency?
Her company was a marketing generalist type agency, but now it focuses on Facebook Ads and Google AdWords. They recently launched a membership for business owners who aren’t quite ready to embrace an agency manage their ads, and support them through a curriculum. In short her business execute ad campaigns and manages memberships, teaching business owners how to do advertising on their own.
How did you get into this?
She took on a client which was outside of her normal space. Her job for her client was to strictly learn Facebook Ads, and it didn’t take more than six months for the client to outperform everyone else in the industry. Eventually, she started an ad side of her company, which in a couple of years started to outgrow the marketing side. Later the agency narrowed down the services to just ads, and the business is growing ever since.
What are the foundational tools for lead generation?
While training clients under Successful Ads Club, she starts from the very basic about what fundamentals you need to drive people in, such as landing pages and email. One another thing she says is that if you try to be of service to people along the way then it tends to take away a lot of the complexity. She says that sales funnel in an long experience. There is a free part and a paid part, and you want that free part to be a kind of an arc of what people will learn within your program. They should go on in a kind of emotional journey of what will it be like to actually be inside of your paid programs.
Do you think there is such a thing as giving away too much?
She doesn’t think so. She says that the thing the people pay for is experience and closed containers in which they feel safe to learn and be vulnerable. People don’t necessarily want information, they look for experience and personal guidance. She says that even when she gives away the entire ad strategy, what happens most is people come up to her and ask her to do it for them.
What are the basics of ad structure?
She says that the first phase to an advertisement is testing. She advises to test on a short, medium and a long copy, from a couple of sentences to as long as it takes you to tell your story. Then you want to test imaginary, including a couple of yours if you have a personal brand, both raw and designed images with text, and lastly, you want to test your headlines. Any good copywriter is going to spend fifty percent of their time or more on the headlines. Make sure it’s focused on the exciting parts of your program. She also says that testing with one audience, with a specific age, gender, interest, and other factors, will provide much better results.
How do you run a business as a mom?
As a mom, she was surprised to discover that instead of looking for more time to work, she is looking for more time to spend with her year old daughter. She thought that after becoming a mom she would still love to work and have that working mom schedule, and so she was surprised to find herself looking for pockets of time to be with her daughter. She says that being a parent and a working mom is a lot different than she thought it would be.
What’s been your biggest challenge?
She says that figuring out how to run a productive business and be the kind of mom she wants to be was the biggest challenge. It’s a lifelong journey, with each phase having its own challenges and victories.
Tell us about your 100K Journey?
When she was pregnant, she decided to coach entrepreneurs who were just getting started to reach the first 100k in revenue, which kind of validates what you are offering is worth continuing. She thinks that 100k is a good milestone to reach for, and is very easy to achieve if you think in terms of four clients paying you a little over 200 per month. During this journey, she discovered that she really loves about teaching lead generation, and thinking about lead generation is being the thing that she leads with most.
Do you have mentors?
She does have mentors and other strategists and consultants. She says why go through all the struggle figuring out things when somebody has done it quicker and better than you?
What’s the best advice you have ever been given?
It was a client and a dear friend of her, which was “treat everything you do like a mini marketing machine”. Don’t just post to a blog, share it organically, do a Facebook live on it and put it on your Instagram. If you are going to do a facebook live than announce it, tell people beforehand, plan it out, turn it into a mini marketing machine where people will share it and encourage others to share it.
Tell us how we can get in touch with you?
Her website is successfuladsclub.com. You can also find her on facebook (facebook.com/tara.m.zirker) and Instagram (nstagram.com/tarazirker).
How did you develop an interest for acting?
In high school, Shelly was obsessed with good grades and was a hardworking student. The summer before her senior year in high school, her father was diagnosed with cancer and that set her life in a completely different direction. She would stop obsessing about perfect grades and the life she always dreamt for herself. Her father passed away during her freshmen year in college and she went off the grid. Back then, Shelly would pursuit and find ways to be happy and content, something that was in abundance in her life as a kid. Shelly randomly took an acting class in college and enjoyed the experience. That led her to a theatre and she participated in various plays during her time in college. She did it for fun. As she was about to finish her college, she had no idea as to what she wanted to pursue in her life and make a profession out of it. She decided to spend her summer in New York and figure out what she wanted in her life. She showed up for an interview in an acting school and signed up for a summer program. On the second day in the program when she realized she was meant to be an actor. She ended up auditioning for their conservatory.
What did you do for work while you were a student in acting school?
Back when she was an undergrad student in college, she was interning at a marketing research firm and some of the people over there called her to volunteer for a deodorant by Dove. They wanted to test it on younger women and Shelly was perfect for it. Shelly thought she would get some money every time she would volunteer for Dove’s product. She had no idea that these people were looking for someone who would star in a national commercial for their product. As the process kept going, Shelly realized they wanted to place her in this commercial. She was still a sophomore in college when this commercial aired throughout the country and Shelly made a lot of money through it. She saved all this money and that is why she did not have to look for a part-time job and earn money while she was in acting school. Her savings helped her get through those years.
Do you have an acting coach?
Shelly believes training has always been very important for her. She has a couple of acting coaches that she works with depending on the character she has to play. She is always trying to keep herself on toes all the time.
Do you use visualization? How do you get in the right state for a particular role?
For some roles, it is just an easier fit for her. Once she had to audition for three different roles within 48 hours. With one of those roles, she read the script and she felt like she knew the character and it felt very natural to her. Shelly says there was an ease to it. And then there was another role on which Shelly worked a lot but was not able to play it with ease. She had to read the script, again and again, to get used to it. Shelly says when she is unable to comprehend a role, she always goes back to the writing, reads the script multiple times and tries to create a reference to that role from her own life.
Do you get nervous?
She feels very nervous all the time. She meditates and that helps her to be a little more grounded. For Shelly, auditions, in particular, are a breeding ground for crazy thoughts because Shelly always feels like she is out of place when she enters the audition room.
What do you dream of the most as an actor?
As an actor, she feels she is very lucky to have consistent gigs on TV for past couple of years. She, however, dreams of becoming part of a TV serial that goes on for multiple years and that Shelly is able to develop a family-like relationship with the rest of the crew.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
When she was younger, her dad would always tell her to just breathe when things got difficult or whenever Shelly was going through a rough patch. She did not realize the importance of this small tip from her father back then, but as Shelly has progressed through her life and faced different challenges, she says focusing on her breath in arduous situations has really helped her navigate through life.
How can we connect with you?
You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram through the following URLs
Twitter: https://twitter.com/shellybhalla
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shellyfromtheblock/
Jennifer Kem is a Brand Strategist and Marketing Expert, and the creator of Master BrandTM, the first program for small business owners based on the brand ideologies of larger, impactful brands. Her 16+ years of experience creating advertising campaigns, developing innovative products and services and guiding C-level executives to align their business strategy with their brand has produced millions of dollars in revenue for companies like Verizon, Oracle, Microsoft, Blue Cross Blue Shield and innovative start-ups in Silicon Valley.
What would you put on a giant billboard?
If she were on a giant billboard, she would want it to display a picture of different phases of a business and it would just say “If you are in business, you are never finished”. Jennifer believes that the most successful brands are pivoting all the time, they are evolving continuously. They keep on changing their approach to promote their business and keep up to date with market trends. If you are in business, always look for ways to improve, innovate while still following the best practices for marketing.
What are some of the best practices to help establish your business?
Jennifer believes there are always two important facets of a business, an operations team and a sales and marketing team. Sales and marketing team should focus on finding new and bigger opportunities to bring in revenue for the business and operations team should make sure it can fully make good use of a business opportunity and consistently earn revenue for the business. There should be a healthy tension between the sales/marketing team and operations team. To have these two components require leadership, so when Jennifer talks about two of the best practices to make consistent growth in business, it is about looking at the relationship between sales/marketing team and operations team.
Tell us about your companies.
She is the founder of KemComm Media Group which is a full-time brand experience and marketing company. KemComm mainly deals with corporate clients. They have clients like Verizon, Bank of Hawaii and Oracle. She is also the founder of training and development company called Master Brand. Master Brand focuses on small businesses and helps them scale-up their processes and align with the brand ideologies of larger, impactful brands.
How long have you been an entrepreneur?
She has been an entrepreneur for nine years. Before that, she was working in the corporate world. She was a marketing executive at her previous job. She took all the discipline and learning from her previous job and applied it in her business.
What is one belief or habit that has really changed your life?
Jennifer is highly invested in her emotional intelligence and personal development. She makes sure to make solo camping trip once in a year, be by herself. That clears the emotional clutter in her brain. She herself has a coach who helps her keep her mind bright and to make sure Jennifer is performance oriented. Jennifer also believes meditation can help her focus more on her goals and keep a balance in her life.
What is the difference between building a business and building a brand?
Anybody can build a business, create products, put them in the market and earn profit from them. The biggest difference between that and building a brand is that when you build a brand, you build a community around it. If you want to step in business, make sure to make a change and not just to commoditize. Try to create a community, let people feel part of it when they use your product. This is what you call building a brand. When you build a brand, you let people become ambassadors of your product. People would feel they are a part of your brand and that is how you will create an everlasting impact on your brand.
What is one action step for building a brand?
Think of how you can make people feel when they use your product. Ask yourself if you can somehow get them involved with your product, with your company. First, you need to know what you do on the surface; what is the main item/commodity that you provide. Then think of ways you can hook everyone’s attention with it so they feel connected with your business.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
One of her mentors said to her that “making money is boring but the boring stuff makes you money”. This is why it is important to bring in passion to your business otherwise you will never be able to enjoy the process and you will never feel fulfilled in your business.
How can we connect with you?
You can connect with her through her website.
Her website’s URL is
Ginny Muir has been immersed in the studies of gut health, hormonal balancing, the conscious feminine, relationship dynamics, energy work & breathwork. She wants to live in a world where we love ourselves for who we are: body & soul, light & shadow, pain & brilliance. She is a healer and a soul guide. In this episode, we talk about how to use breath work to transform stuck emotions in the body, ginny’s personal transformation, and more.
— Breathing is the most basic exchange with life
— Think about the way you breathe and what might that say about the way you live life
— Receiving the breath
— Working through resistance. You have two choices when resistance shows up: you can stop or you can expand through it
There are many different types of breathwork, each with different gifts & outcomes. I work with a specific breath pattern that supports emotional release.
You may access old memories. You may access grief. You may find profound exhilaration and deeper freedom and calm than you’ve felt in ages.
Quite simply, breathwork — also called pranayama in yogic traditions — is the practice of harnessing and controlling the breath. This meditative technique produces physiological, emotional and energetic shifts in the body. It is an active form of self-healing.
It has the capacity to ground the nervous system, drop you below the level of the mind and move unseen things stored deeply in your energetic being.
How can we connect with you?
To know everything about her business, you can visit her website.
Her website’s URL is
Lisa Curtis is the Founder & CEO of Kuli Kuli, the first brand to introduce the green superfood moringa to the US market. Lisa founded Kuli Kuli after working with moringa as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Lisa has grown Kuli Kuli from a Peace Corps dream into a multi-million dollar social enterprise. Lisa and Kuli Kuli have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other publications. She was also named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 "Top of the Class" for Social Entrepreneurship. Lisa is a frequent speaker at social impact and natural food conferences on topics such as supply chain transparency, building buzz, fundraising and millennial entrepreneurship.
Background
Lisa joined peace corps right after college. She was a politics major and took different classes during her time in college. It was then she developed an interest in the politics of Africa and wanted to travel to different parts of Africa. She wanted to see for herself how people with a daily income of not more than a dollar managed to live and conduct their day to day activities. Through Peace Corps, she was able to travel to different parts of Africa and live in rural areas. It was in Africa when she discovered the nutritious plant named moringa and was able to build a business around it.
How did you discover moringa?
She was in a small village in Niger where she discovered moringa. Being a vegan, her usual diet consisted of rice and millet, a diet that left her sluggish. Some women she was working within the health center told her about this plant called moringa. She got moringa leaves from a nearby tree and mixed them with a local snack called ‘kuli kuli’. She felt as if a new wave of energy had entered into her body and was astounded by the fact that such a nutritious plant was not very popular among the locals.
You mention you mixed moringa leaves with Kuli Kuli. What exactly is Kuli Kuli?
It is a peanut snack that is popular all over West Africa. The first time she used moringa was with a mixture of Kuli Kuli and so her first experience with moringa was with a mixture of Kuli Kuli. Later on, Lisa went on to give the same name to her food company i.e. ‘Kuli Kuli Foods’.
How did you realize you could make a business out of moringa?
Initially, she wanted to make it popular in the village she was working in. She was surprised that the plant was not very popular in the village and no one really thought of growing it. She thought of selling in a nearby city. However, in the days to follow, some militant group in Africa captured two Frenchmen and killed them. Due to the impending threat, all peace corps members were evacuated within 48 hours and Lisa found herself in the US again. She finally decided to start a food company in the US that would be based around moringa. She started talking to people fro the food industry. She got together with a few friends from childhood, showed them the business plan. They made plans of how they could import moringa to the US from Africa and introduce it to the women. Lisa finally managed to launch her company through a crowdfunding campaign and raised $53,000.
How do you think your crowdfunding campaign became so successful?
There were 800 people from twenty-three different countries that donated in the first crowdfunding campaign. Lisa believes it went beyond personal connections. In the campaign, Lisa shared her story of how moringa helped her in maintaining a nutritious diet through plants. She shared her idea of helping other women improve their diet and nutrition through this plant. She believes her story resonated with a lot of people because of its authenticity. Lisa believes when you seek from the heart and with conviction, people get behind you and help you in the cause.
Where do you get your moringa from?
When she started her business, she would get it from a lady in northern Ghana. As of now, Kuli Kuli is growing moringa plants in West Africa and also in southern America. They have also started to look at the possibilities of growing it in Asia as well.
What has been your biggest challenge in growing your business?
In the early days, fundraising was a challenge, it was really difficult for her to convince people to take this idea seriously. She would mostly get written off when she would pitch this idea to investors. She had to do a couple of part-time jobs during that period to make sure she had enough money for herself. As her company started to grow, she faced different kinds of challenges like managing and leading people and to make sure she has the right people in her team. Lisa believes the role of CEO is that of a captain on a ship; to make sure it heads in the right direction.
What are the major benefits of moringa?
Nutritionally it is incredibly dense. It provides complete plant protein, all essential amino acids. It is also high in fiber, iron and sodium as well. Moringa leaves are also natural anti-inflammatory
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
In the initial days when she started her business, she had a couple of part-time jobs to make her ends meet. At one point, Lisa thought of quitting from all of her jobs and solely focus on her business. That is when one of her mentors advised her not to quit her day job straight away, rather plan her business and figure out exactly how she was going to launch her business and get the momentum in her business.
How can we connect with you?
To know everything about her products and about her business, you can visit her website.
Her website’s URL is
https://www.kulikulifoods.com
You can also find more information about her company through Facebook
Life coach. Author. Hellraiser. Andrea Owen is passionate about empowering women to value themselves and fiercely love who they are.
She just released the amazing book, How to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t, 14 habits that are holding you back from happiness. its a straight-shooting approach to self-improvement for women, one that offers no-BS truth-telling about the most common self-destructive behaviors women tend to engage in. From listening to the imposter complex and bitchy inner critic to people-pleasing and more. She has helped thousands of women manage their inner-critic to create loving connections and live their most kick-ass life.
Background
Andrea is certified in the work of Dr. Brene Brown, who has done extensive work in the study of these behaviors that make us feel terrible. She calls these behaviors the armor. We use these behaviors in our day to day life to protect ourselves from judgment, criticism, failure, and things that are hard about life. Andrea studied more about these compulsive behaviors and came to the conclusion that there are fourteen different types of behaviors that human beings, especially women go through to protect themselves but in reality, these behaviors are the root cause of why many women feel terrible. The book is about identifying different behaviors that can keep you under-confident and that stop you from taking your life to the next level. Find out what they are and what they look like, confront them. These behaviors work counter-productive for you.
What was your inspiration for writing this book?
She wrote this for women to reclaim and take back their life. Andrea talks in a very easy and casual way so readers can easily digest her content and understand what it means. A lot of her readers call her their ‘very casual therapist’ because she writes in a very straightforward and easy to understand manner. The things she talks about in the book are very easy to apply in real life.
What is the first step that can start the process to happiness?
Andrea believes the first step to happiness is to identify what your self-talk looks like. She talks about self-talk in the first chapter of her book. Andrea says she cannot walk into any personal development conversation without asking someone what their self-talk sounds like. Many people hear that inner articulation that stops them from taking new challenges in life. She asks people to get intimate with that inner voice.
What was your self-talk like before you started the journey of personal development?
Back then, it was heavily around perfectionism. Andrea tried to be perfect in the way she looked and the way she would do things. She tried hard to control everything around her, including people she knew and she says it was very exhausting. She always had an anxiety of looking bad in front of others and what they would say about her. She tried to engineer her life in a certain way so as to avoid shame, judgment, and criticism.
What was your self-talk like when you decided to start your own business?
It was rough in the beginning, she recently had two kids. She started working from home and back then her self-talk was terrible. She moved to Utah along with her husband and for the first few months, they were not relying on her income so it was more like a hobby for Andrea in the first few months until she finally realized she had to take her business to next level and put more effort and hard work so as to increase her profits.
How is excellence different from perfectionism?
Perfectionism is doing things and engineering your actions in a certain way as to how people perceive you. Excellence is doing things so that you feel proud as to how you are showing up in your life. Andrea believes no one would feel proud if they are struggling with insomnia, anxiety or health issues just because they are selling themselves to the idea of perfectionism.
What is one piece of advice you would give to the listeners?
One of her favorite activities is to break down the areas of life into career, family, friends, body, relationships, the past and the future. Ask yourself, what your self-talk looks like in those areas, how do you talk to yourself when things get hard in these areas? These self-talks are your triggers.
Why do you think that the thing we want in our life is the thing we are afraid of?
Andrea herself does not have a proper clue why that dichotomy exists. Maybe it is because we want it so much and so much is at stake, we are afraid of failure. Maybe because it requires us to be a better version of our self and requires us to work hard to become a better version of our own self.
What is the best advice you have ever been given?
Back when Andrea believes her life was falling apart, she was nannying part-time for a family and the mother of the child gave her this advice “No matter what you do, just take care of yourself. Now is the time to take care of yourself”.
How can we connect with you?
You can connect with her via her website
As humans, we are action-oriented and tend to place emphasis on all that we are doing and accomplishing. There is nothing wrong with this of course, as it allows us to accomplish a great deal. However, when we are focused on the “do” as the starting point for all we can “have” and “be” in the world, it traps us in the belief that we must fix and solve and achieve to get results and be of value. This can lead to an endless cycle of never feeling like ENOUGH or fulfilled …
We get stuck in postponing happiness… When I…
“When I get a new job; I will be happy.”
When I meet the man of my dreams; then I will be happy
when I lose weight, Then I… will be happy
Sound familiar?
We are conditioned from a very young age that achievement equals happiness, approval, and recognition. And we can get fixated on what we need to have in order to feel a certain way.
But where do feelings come from?
The inside or the outside?
Feelings come from the inside.
It can seem like they come from the outside but they are actually generated by our thoughts.
I want to introduce you to the model be, do, have.
By first becoming clear about who and what we want to “be,” we are better able to consciously make choices (“do”) and produce outcomes (“have”) that are in alignment with our core selves.
This is the “Be-Do-Have Model,” an approach that achieves far greater results, and is ultimately easier and more satisfying.
BE
It’s about cultivating the state of mind and embodying who you are.
Who are you and what is important to you?
How do you want to feel?
Who do you want to be?
DO
When you make decisions from a positive state – you take better actions
What actions make you feel the way you want to feel?
So for example, if you want to feel happy, does complaining make you feel happy? If you want to feel confident, does exercising make you feel that way?
What can you DO to be the person you want to BE?
HAVE
When you take actions from a positive state – you are more likely to get your desired results.
What are the results and outcomes?
What does success look like to you?
Who do you want to be in 2018?