September 7, 2024 • 39 mins
Welcome to this episode of "Get Your Happy Back" where host Nina Lockwood explores a deeper understanding of happiness with Fiona Jacob. Fiona (Fee), a Certified Master Transformative Coach, shares her profound insights on why it's possible to find joy and contentment even amidst life's challenges.
Fiona begins by sharing a story of reconnecting with an old friend after 20 years, remarking on how astounding it is that the heart can remain constant despite time, distance and circumstance. From there, she recounts how she became aware of her true essence through a life-changing experience with Bill Cumming at Supercoach Academy. That recognition revealed to her the inherent wholeness and perfection of every human being, despite anything that may occur to them or be done by them.
Through heartfelt anecdotes, Fiona discusses the profound impact of understanding that our thoughts create our feelings and how this realization can enable us to shift perspectives to something more positive. Fee also shares stories of resilience she heard from women in war-torn regions, highlighting the power of finding and residing in one's true nature.
Join Nina and Fiona in this inspiring conversation as they explore the possibility of connecting to the deep wells of joy, creativity, and wisdom that reside within us all. Whether you're facing personal struggles or seeking a deeper understanding of happiness, this episode offers valuable insights and encouragement.
Connect with Fiona here:
https://www.instagram.com/fionafeejacob/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fionajacob/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This is Nina Lockwood. Welcome to Get Your Happy Back, stories and insights
that will inspire you to find new sources of happiness in your own life.
Hello and welcome to Get Your Happy Back.
And today I have one of my most beloved friends, Fiona Jacob.
Hi, Fiona. So glad you're here.
(00:23):
Nina, I was thinking before I got onto this conversation, oh,
I can't wait to talk to Nina.
I am both thrilled and excited to be here, and it feels like it's been way too long. So glad to be here.
Absolutely. But even though we haven't spoken in a long time,
you're always in my heart. So glad you're here today.
Bless you. That's wonderful, wonderful. I love when our heart can hold another human being.
(00:48):
And what's even more amazing is that we can hold more than one person at the same time.
That is so true. I am. Just a short story, Nina. I had not seen a friend of mine for 20 years.
And we had got married the same year. And she had gone off and done her stuff
in Ireland. And I have lived abroad for very many years.
(01:08):
I've lived in the Middle East for something like 25 years.
And we got in touch this year. And oh my God.
The capacity for everything to have changed and nothing to have changed from that heart space.
Isn't it wonderful? It's just like, okay, we look a little different.
(01:28):
Her kids, I used to babysit her now. Doctors, both of them.
But what was so profound and impactful to me was nothing had changed in either
of our hearts for one another.
And it's not just so delicious that we
can not see a human being for 20 years or two years or two months it doesn't
(01:50):
matter minus 20 years happens to be bad but and life goes on but our heart doesn't
move on i love that me too that's one gem of an example of happiness,
yeah i guess it is yeah so nice i don't normally read people's bios but i'm
(02:10):
gonna just read a little bit about yours because you have such expertise and
wisdom that everybody should know.
You're a certified master transformative coach and a supervisor.
You work with individuals, teams, organizations around the world.
What I really want to highlight is this statement.
(02:31):
You take an uncompromising stand for people's greatness and your passion is
waking people up to their true nature so they can live their most authentic life.
Wow. You know, as you read that, my arms tingled and not because,
but there's something so powerful about those of us who are just sleeping or
(02:52):
who are going through life.
I would call it in the maple syrup. You know what I mean? It just feels hard and sticky.
And it's just like, oh my God, there is something so much more beyond that for
every human being in the world.
And when we wake out to that, oh my gosh, the impact, the transformation,
the happiness, the delight.
(03:14):
The flow of life and energy of life that comes through us. Oh, yes.
So, yeah, I got touched by, that's very strange, I got touched by my own writing,
but it actually is the impact of that, the meaning of that for people,
not the actual words of it. Yeah.
I'm sure you've had this experience yourself of going from being in more of
(03:35):
a stuck place to being in more of a place of flow.
Can you talk about that a bit? Oh, I think that happens to me every day.
Welcome to the club. Yeah. I think one of the greatest shifts for me from that
real stuckness to just finding peace in my heart, if you would want to say it that way.
(03:58):
Take yourself back. We're going to take ourselves back to 2010.
So that's not a short time ago. That's more 14 years ago.
And I walked into a big room in New York. there were 50 or 60 chairs and there
were three chairs up at the front. And I think we were on 34th Street.
That sounds like a Christmas movie, but actually I think we were on 34th Street.
(04:21):
And it was the beginning of Supercoach Academy. This was with Michael Neal,
who this was his first ever Supercoach Academy.
And I had literally pulled my mortgage payments to show up in that room on that
day because I was between jobs.
I had a job. I was starting in Saudi Arabia as a director, but I was a little short on the cash.
(04:44):
That didn't matter. What was so cool, Nina.
Was the first morning of the first day, a guy called Bill Cumming walked into the room.
Now, for anybody who does not know Bill, Bill was probably at this time in his
late 60s, early 70s. He's very tall.
(05:05):
He wore a pair of navy dungarees, and I will call them hobnail boots,
but you know what I mean, like farmer's boots or outside workers' boots or whatever.
He had a navy jacket
over the dungarees he had
a check shirt and a tie up to here like
no i was going w2f like what
(05:27):
i paid all this money to do the super coach again and then a guy shows up like
he's a farmer i mean to be fair to bill if he'd had a piece of straw coming
out of his mouth i would it would have just made the picture right so what was
fascinating to me, Nina, is I shut down my head.
I went, what am I going to learn from this guy? Exactly.
(05:49):
An hour and a half later, he and I were sitting in a chair opposite each other.
And it's the first time in my life I experienced myself as perfect,
whole and complete, as a human being.
And I would have been at that point, 44, 45 years of age.
So this man dressed dressed in the funkiest clothes ever.
(06:13):
You could not convince him that you were not perfect, whole, complete, and lovable.
He was not going to take it. Didn't matter what you had done.
Didn't matter who you were.
Didn't matter if you were a terrorist or a king. It did not matter.
All that mattered is he knew.
He knew. He knew the truth of who we were. And you could feel that from him. And I did.
(06:38):
And how did he know? And how did you come to know? Because how he shared it
with such, I mean, he had worked a lot with people who had been in prison.
He'd worked with a lot of people in the Black community or the African-American communities.
He had seen real poverty. He had seen crime.
His own daughter had been raped, and he knew the rapist.
(07:01):
There was just so much that he had both done, but he'd also experienced.
And in all of that, in all of that, every single human he was in conversation
with, be they saint or sinner,
he knew the perfection they were underneath all of the behaviors and the bluff
(07:23):
and the actions they took and the words that they said and the cursing,
all of that. He could see their heart.
He saw my heart that day, Nina. That is amazing to have that experience.
I am guessing that listeners or viewers for this podcast maybe have never known
that. And I didn't know that.
(07:45):
I mean, I tried to convince myself of that for many years.
And I tried to date men and hope that they would find that or whatever.
You know what I mean? We go to all the ends of the earth sometimes to try to
convince ourselves that we're good people or kind people or nice people or a
good wife or girlfriend or whatever. ever, but we're kind of doing it the wrong way around.
(08:08):
We're, again, to use a mentor's explanation, we're putting horseshit on the
diamond that we are and painting that over with the nail polish that we consider
looks good today, as opposed to, wow,
the metaphor of the diamond is we are already that.
But we've been so clueless that we've been going, let's go to the nail tech
(08:30):
and get nicer nails and longer nails and whatever, trying to convince ourselves at that level.
And you see it's not about seeing it at that
level it's not seeing it it's seeing it and
recognizing the truth of who we are and how
do we do that how does that happen if
someone isn't as fortunate as you were
(08:51):
to have that experience with bill how does
one especially somebody who's going through challenge and
is looking for something to hold on to whether we
call it happiness or as you were
saying earlier that's one layer that the bubbly part is the surface and then
there's deeper levels to it so how does somebody find that because that will
(09:15):
change everything yeah it's it's such a beautiful and great question and i want
to give it the holes that it deserves.
So Nina, I guess what I see around that is we all come to life,
to this life, to living, to, you know, we're born and we come to life.
(09:36):
If you want to call it with a factory default or an energy of life or an aliveness.
And it has some capacities, or it has some energies, or it has some intelligence, you could say.
I mean, there's different words depending on who you listen to or how you even notice for yourself.
But imagine if we were simply this, we were an iPhone, and you come with all
(10:01):
of these factory default apps.
Whether we use them or not is not the iPhone's fault in what sense I mean it, what's it in?
Well, if you want to say God or the divine intelligence or the universe or solar
spirit or whatever it is that allows us to be alive and live in this life,
we've come with these beautiful acts, these beautiful capacities, these beautiful gifts.
(10:25):
And it's not that we have to put them into ourselves. So this is not a manufacturing operation.
This is a mining one. When we mind, when we know the truth of that we have come
to life already with these gifts, and these gifts are vast, but these gifts are the gift of wisdom.
These gifts are the gifts of having insight, new thought, new perspective, new possibility.
(10:50):
These gifts are the gifts of creativity. I'm looking behind you and I'm seeing
all of this beautiful art.
I hear your husband's writing a book and
that's a gift of creativity from source
there's also the beautiful gift of
contentment and joy and to me there are just different words for happiness because
(11:10):
happiness for me I have that categorized as oh I'm happy oh I'm sad oh I'm you
know so to me happiness is the most beautiful and delicious word and maybe the
deeper feeling is a feeling with contentment and joy,
joy, joy that bubbles up no matter what is going on in our life and the world.
(11:30):
Grace that bubbles up when life throws challenges.
And I have not been without challenges and nobody has in this. We're in life.
So it doesn't get to be a pretty interesting contact sports.
And sometimes you're kind of ruts and sometimes you've got the,
you know, the scrum of people on top of you. So, yeah, I mean,
(11:51):
everybody will have experienced their own challenges, whether it's health challenges
or family challenges or people around them who they love may die.
Life will life. But to know, but to really know at a fundamental truth level
that the who we are, this factory default,
those apps, those beautiful apps that we come with are inside of ourselves and available all the time.
(12:16):
No matter what's going on in the earth, even in the crazy stuff,
even in the wild stuff, even in the I've lost my mind stuff,
this grounded place of being, of flow, of life, of grace, of beauty,
of contentment, of joy, creativity,
of wisdom, is us.
It is the true us. It always has.
(12:38):
And it always will be because it's who we are. Okay, so I've got a question
for you. Another question. Great!
Out of many. Yay, enough questions.
Some people would say, oh, that's wishful thinking.
Oh. Right? They'll say, oh, you don't understand, or you haven't been in my shoes.
(13:01):
This is a pretty Pollyanna-ish perspective.
So for somebody who's very entrenched in life as a struggle,
with limited options to get out of that struggle,
what can you remind them, those people, who is really all of us at one point or another,
(13:23):
what can you say to them to invite them to be more open to this recognition? recognition.
So Nina, what I love about that
question, first of all, is we've all been there, but what is it there?
Meaning, what is it that or how is it that we see that life's a struggle?
(13:43):
And I'm not going to pretend that sometimes there are some financial issues
or health issues or relationship issues.
I'm not, we're not here to bypass what is real.
So there is a reality. But we've been given such a fantastic,
let's call it a system or passages or intelligences that whatever is happening in reality,
(14:07):
the money, the family, the health, all of that, is we have this like infinite
creative potential that when we start to wake up to, oh my gosh,
I can experience reality in any way.
I can have any experience of this reality is probably what I'm trying to say. Thank you.
Now, it's not to make yourself think positive. That's not what we're talking
(14:29):
about. I'm not. Can I, maybe can I tell you a story? Of course.
To illustrate. So, Nina, my, sorry, there's a big snort there.
My family have gone through quite a lot in the last two years with illness.
My mom has had half her bowel removed. My dad has been in hospital eight or
nine times with cardiac and renal disease.
(14:50):
Oh, my. And so it's been a struggle because, first of all, I don't live in the
same country that they're in. I'm in Sweden, they're in Ireland, which is my home.
And my brother, in the midst of all of this, had bowel cancer.
And he's the closest to my parents, so I had to spend quite a lot of time home with my mom and dad.
(15:10):
So this is the narrative in my head. Well, this is bloody great, isn't it?
I've got such a busy ball head. Oh my God, that means I'm going to have to cancel my clients.
And I had, I did, this is all happening, people in hospital,
in and out. And it was like my head went into busy mode.
This is the worst time. Oh, my God, the business will help my husband.
(15:32):
I go home and I take over as nurse.
Nurse is coming. She's going to take care of mom and the usual.
Mom was incontinent. Mommy helped in the bathroom. All of that.
And I took a step back at some point, Nina, and I went.
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right now, I dislike my parents. I'm nursing my parents.
(15:55):
And I went, where did the love go? Where did the love go?
Now, mom and dad, they were still sick. Mom was still in hospital.
Mom's still in the hospital. Do you know what I mean? So nothing changed on the outside.
And this is the beauty of the design here.
Nothing has to change on the outside for us to have a different experience.
I can't tell you, Nina, I fell in love with my parents more than I I loved them
(16:18):
probably before I was a teenager.
Because you know what we do. Of course. We're a teenager.
It's not that I haven't loved them. It's just like, yeah, their parents will
go home and see them. Yeah, let's have a good Christmas.
But it's like, no, I fell in love with these two gorgeous, stubborn human beings.
(16:39):
Like, for real. For new.
And nothing had changed. And the only thing, well, nothing on the outside had changed.
What had changed inside of me was, yeah, it was still a pain in the ass.
I still, you know, was not earning money.
I was still away from my business. I still had to cancel my clients.
I still had to go home to Ireland and keep it all going.
(17:01):
And it was all okay. And you were willing, that's a wonderful story,
Fiona. Thank you for sharing that.
And what I'm hearing and what you're saying is that you were,
what's the best word you became aware that you were less than loving and you stopped,
(17:21):
because that was a red flag for you and you asked that very powerful question and that's,
possible for everybody in every situation not the loving bit but the we look
at things in life and go oh my god this is hard this is a challenge how can
i do this this is terrible you know we We are in this flow of thinking that
(17:44):
gives us these horrible feelings that we're living in this urgency and intensity,
and it's like a washing machine going on full spin cycle. You know,
everything just feels like, ah.
But what we're actually pointing to is with this creative potential, we don't have to suffer.
When we recognize, oh, my God, I'm really lost in the thinking about how hard
(18:09):
it is or how challenging it is or how much of this is a struggle or how terrible life is.
When we just wake up to that, something new and fresh and alive and more useful can come to mind.
Now, it may be that you fall in love with your parents or it may be that there's
a problem to be solved, but you can solve it or a creative way of seeing it
(18:32):
differently or whatever.
I can't tell you what that's going to look like for the person. What I want to say is.
We are given the gift of fresh new ideas every moment of every day, available.
That's always available, always available.
Nothing we need to do to get to that.
(18:53):
And when we're kind of just lost up in this crazy, busy-minded,
struggling thinking, and we follow that train of thought, well,
all that happens is we just don't have such access to this beautiful,
wise, clear, creative, powerful space and insight and even simple things like here's what to do next.
(19:16):
Sometimes that can just be the most beautiful thing. Oh, thank you. Oh, I could do that next.
Oh, that would be so cool. Oh, that would be so easy. Oh, and your shoulders
go down and it's just like, you can have insight in any moment,
no matter what's going on.
So this, if I may interrupt you, because I saw you were ready to keep going, and I want you to,
(19:37):
is that our thinking has so much to do with whether we're happy or not, right?
And that what I think I hear you saying, and certainly this is my experience,
is that if I am only habituated to following that track of, oh, my God,
(20:00):
I can't, this shouldn't be happening ad infinitum, is that we never have the
opportunity to say, oh, what else is possible? Yeah.
What you're actually pointing to, Nina, is that we tend to live in the feeling
of our, we're living in the feeling all the time. It's going,
oh, I don't like this. This is terrible. Oh, I feel bad.
(20:22):
Oh, I feel, why did she do that to me that way? And we're in the feeling of
all of this strife and urgency and intense.
It's just like, it's bubbling up like a witch's cauldron.
Feels like anything you drop in there might just die. But it's the cauldron
of suffering in a way. I love that term.
(20:45):
I have never said it before in my life. There you go.
But it's just like we misinterpret what our feelings are telling us.
Now, I've had feeling of angst and irritation and frustration and anger and
sadness, all of it. It's not like, oh, look at Fiona.
No, all of it. Maybe even worse than any human being on the planet. I don't know.
(21:07):
But when you know where your feelings are coming from, and it's not her,
them, or my parents, or I have to tell my clients I can't coach them today.
It's not coming from that.
It's coming from my thought created. Yeah, just my thinking about that.
(21:28):
And that gives me this, which is called a feeling.
And then it's almost like I put on glasses or a frame of which I look out in
the world and that's how I see it. Oh my God, this is terrible.
This is awful. My life is awful. My life is terrible. No, they're terrible.
Yeah. And we're just, that's how we see life.
It's like putting on a pair of dark glasses or a pair of glasses with yellow
(21:49):
tint or blue Lutene. It's like it colors our world.
Now, the beautiful thing is if we're aware, oh my God, I'm so caught up in my
own, believing my own creation here.
And we do. And it looks like it's really real sometimes.
And we're, yeah, we get lost in it. But as soon as we wake up to it,
(22:11):
as soon as we're aware, oh my God, I just left the planet with my crazy thinking.
Okay guess what we fall back into the now and nina when you and i fall back into the now.
That is where we access all of those beautiful gifts and intelligences in real
time, responsive to whatever is going on, whether it's a difficult relationship,
(22:36):
whether it's a money worry or concern, whatever it is, whatever is going on,
you get a real-time intelligence,
clarity, wisdom, new idea, creative idea, solution,
because we're in the real moment with the real problem,
with access to source and source
(22:56):
brings us the answers we need for that moment for in every now we get access
to what we need for this now and it's just taking a pause from our crazy yeah
our head that just goes around in circles and the noise well it has us so engaged it's kind of like.
It's almost like its own video game you know we're just like okay this is how
(23:18):
life is as opposed to No, there is some reality, but all that I'm seeing and
feeling right now is my creation of that reality.
And I have the potential and possibility to create a new experience of that
reality, which can be anything from moving from anger to irritation or from
irritation to happiness or from happiness to excitement.
(23:41):
We can move through all of this, but the possibilities we get to touch off the deeper,
deeper feelings that we are, and those deeper feelings are joy and contentment and ease and grace.
Space and they're available even if the world is mad,
(24:01):
even if our life looks out of control, we can still touch off the truth of who
we are and bathe in that and rest in that and come back to life rejuvenated
and refreshed. Amen, sister.
It makes me think of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk who,
during the Vietnam War, his, so much of his efforts.
(24:26):
At that time, with all of that destruction and the madness of it,
was doing what you are sharing with us,
going back in and realizing that his reactions were coming from up here many
times when there was that anger and hopelessness and frustration,
(24:48):
and bringing it back to himself,
himself with a capital S,
so that he could touch love, he could touch peace,
he could touch well-being, even in the midst of a war where his fellow countrymen were dying.
I've had an interesting scenario recently, Nina, where I was speaking in a Prague
conference on listening, and I had two wonderful conversations after I'd spoken
(25:13):
and after the workshop that I had given.
And one was a group of ladies from Ukraine. Ukraine
and as you know they're in the middle of
war with Russia and what they said was
if we hadn't known about how our thought creates our feelings in this situation
we would have been like everybody else we would have just been running around
(25:34):
and doing the sky is falling and and now they said look we have we're on the
front line with the troops we are helping them come back to themselves,
to their calm quietude, to not feeling stressed,
to just being grounded in themselves.
And I thought to myself, oh my God, I love that in what people think is the
(25:58):
worst scenario that can be possible,
exactly as you described in the Vietnam War, that people can live in quietude, calm,
in the flow of life, the energy of life, the alightness of life,
and thrive even in the midst of war. And you would think, well, that's not possible.
These women shared with me from their hearts that that is their experience.
(26:22):
And similarly, I had a conversation with Jenny from Israel who.
Had experienced the October 10 situation. And she said, again,
there were so many people just so panicked, so stressed. All understandable on both sides.
Understandable. But she said the peace in her heart was so embedded that she
(26:44):
cooked and she brought cookies to people and she would have conversations with
people on the street and just allowed them to come back home to themselves.
Ourselves because when we
are being this you know people steal
the truth of it it's not a i can't tell you what it is i mean i can but in my
(27:07):
speaking i hope it's not about the words i think i'm hoping that there's a deeper
feeling that is conveyed in the truth of who we're being and when When we are
being that, people feel that.
They come and they find themselves grounded for themselves too.
That's such a powerful reminder that it's the vibe that we're giving out,
(27:31):
and there's something you can catch it.
It's that sense of possibility that when someone is, as you were talking about with Bill,
someone who is radiating that kind of energy,
you can't help but be touched by it unless
you are so walled off that there's no space for it to get in but i think everyone
(27:53):
who has felt and i'd love to know your thoughts about this fiona too everyone
who has struggled almost everybody still has this wee little space inside them that says.
Maybe maybe it could be different maybe there's another way i have seen it probably
in two Two different ways.
So Nina, I think you know already that I was held hostage in Iraq for four and
(28:17):
a half months during the first Gulf War.
I didn't know anything about anything, really. I was just a 24-year-old,
panicked like everybody else, thinking I was going to die.
To, it's going to sound strange when you're a hostage, but I was actually swimming
in a swimming pool that was part of the compound, or the hotel compound we were staying in.
(28:37):
And recognizing that when I did this, just on my back doing backstroke and looking
up at the sky, it felt like Christmas, because it felt like those twinkly lights
of the stars were just with me. within reach.
And I had a profound knowing, and the profound knowing was simply this,
I'm okay. Now, nothing had changed.
(28:59):
There were still troops coming. There were still anti-aircraft guns flying off
into the sky every night, as they did, they practiced every night.
We still were, I was still a hostage.
But there's something that can shift inside of us so easily,
to know, I didn't know that I was loved, but I knew I was okay.
So I knew I was okay. Hey, and stuff still happened to me.
(29:21):
It wasn't like, oh, hooray, she's free tomorrow. No, I was assaulted and I was
held at gunpoint for hours.
And there was just, there was more stuff to come.
But the overriding, not even feeling, because it wasn't, it was just a knowing.
No matter what happens here, I'm okay.
Now that's kind of cool to know. Kind of cool.
(29:42):
So powerful. It's so transformative, as we say in the trade.
Yeah. Your background, I'll see if I can get around to a question.
Your background is in nursing, and these days your focus is working with coaches
and helping them create,
(30:03):
as we were using that term, transformational impact with their clients.
How are you, what's your, how do you do that?
Is that just, I'm assuming you share with them the very same kinds of things
that you're sharing with me now in terms of what's possible of taking that stop
(30:24):
and realizing that we have these apps, free apps.
Free apps, yes, exactly. Not even needed to be paid for. Right.
So that reminder or invitation to take a stop and notice, and then,
if we're lucky, remember that we have these other possibilities.
(30:47):
Would you say that's along the lines of how you share this understanding?
I'm going to say yes and probably slightly expand it.
So one of the things that I find with coaches, and I've worked with some,
including you, worked with some wonderful coaches who really see this,
(31:08):
what we're talking about for themselves. of.
But then one of a couple of things happens. Somebody comes in with a compelling story.
And it's very easy for any coach to go, oh my God, I don't know how to deal
with this. Somebody who's,
that's, say, been in jail, or maybe has a child who's died, or, you know what I mean?
(31:30):
Those may not have happened in our own world, and it's just like,
or for people, some of it is around finance, like they've lost all their money,
they're bankrupt, they might be out of their home in a month.
So, we buy into the story.
Now, as I said earlier, there's a reality.
I'm not saying there is not a reality.
Somebody may lose their house. Somebody has lost a child. somebody there are
(31:55):
things not so nice things that happen to people in life but as a coach,
our job is not to buy into the story it can be to be human like oh my god i
have no idea how i would be if that were to happen to me it's not to say that
we're not human but when coaches see that
(32:18):
a person can go through grief,
but have moments of joy and happiness,
because that's our nature.
We can go through financial troubles and actually find lightheartedness and
humor in it from time to time.
I'm not saying that we need to put that on things, but what we're looking at
(32:39):
are people beyond the story and knowing that they are okay, knowing that they
have everything they need.
Knowing that when they come out of their thought-created, fast-paced mind and
thinking that there are things to be done that can be solutions to look at that
(33:00):
they haven't thought of before,
simply because they're in the worry, they're in the anxiety,
they're in their thought- created imagination of they're going to soon be living
under a bridge with, you know, one bag.
The rats. yeah well the rat's in a bag from Saks Fifth Avenue or whatever it's
like but recognizing truly that we are okay.
(33:24):
And truly, we have everything we need. Our job as coaches is to wake that up
inside of another human being.
Even if the story is so compelling and so, oh, I don't know what to do.
It's like our settling down ourselves and finding our okayness.
Because when we are pulling from that space of wisdom and clarity ourselves,
(33:47):
when we create the space of okayness with another human being, in.
When they tap into their wisdom and clarity, they will find solutions and new
thinking and possibilities that they haven't thought about.
And that is our role as coaches.
So that will be certainly one of the first things I would have people look at.
(34:09):
Because that's why I get to listen to the calls and I go, yes,
but he has, I don't know, HIV or he's killed somebody.
It's like, Like, okay, and now how do we come back to ourselves and be in a
space of curiosity and listening and see what shows up for us?
What's the, not the best conversation, but what is the conversation?
(34:31):
What is the flow of life? What is there to be said here?
But it's coming from a different place within us.
It reminds me of that statement by Byron Katie, who would you be without your story?
Because if we're not in such, if we're not enamored with our story,
if we're not compelled by our story, then it seems to me that's when we can discover truth.
(34:57):
All of these possibilities within ourselves. And if that isn't happiness on
a deep and profound level, I don't know what is.
I so with you on that. And the thing about it, the stories is,
we've made them up in the first place. We are the author of them.
And you can fall in love with the story, that's fine, but you can also fall
(35:18):
out of love with the story.
It's like you can walk into a movie and you think, oh, this is a horror story.
I'm not sure I came to a horror story. I want to go to rom-coms.
You move back out of the movie theater and you go next door and you go see the rom-com.
We have the capacity always to wake up.
We are never that far lost. We might think we are.
(35:41):
We can never be that far lost, that we can't recognize the giggle,
that we can't recognize a good idea, that we can't recognize the flow or the energy of life.
Because that hum, that hum of happiness, that hum of contentment,
that hum of joy is the truth of who we are. And it never goes away.
(36:06):
Sometimes we're a little bit
off the radio station, we might have a little bit of static. That's okay.
But if we know all we need to do is put ourselves back on the station.
You get DAB Digital or whatever, FM, and it's just like we get stereo sound of ourselves.
It's such an important reminder, Fiona, to have you share this because it is
(36:28):
so easy to get caught up in the drama.
We don't see anything until there maybe is a little lull in the activity, right?
And then we can say, oh, oh yeah.
Hey, sometimes Sometimes he might choose drama because we love a bit of drama.
That's fine. But if, you know, you're creating drama, well, that's also cool.
Do you know what? I think I'm on for drama today. Okay.
(36:51):
It's a bit like if I get angry with my husband.
But sometimes I go, well, you know what? I actually want to be angry.
Because usually I get, yeah, but you know, you're just making that up, Faye.
You know, so I get the nice clarity and wisdom showing up. And I go,
no, dammit. I want to be angry. I'm going to stay.
You know what? It lasts about seven minutes and then it's just like, oh, well.
(37:15):
To keep yourself angry just to be angry is kind of like, that's an interesting way to be. Right.
It's worth asking the question after a certain period of time,
is it really worth it? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think I'll do something else.
So yeah thank you so much for being with me today I just as you know I always
(37:38):
love being able to spend time with you and see your face at the same time even
if it's only virtually it's still,
your gorgeousness and your energy and your,
the truth of what you're speaking about. So, two questions, maybe three.
Where can people find you if
they want to learn a little bit more about what you do and how you do it?
(37:59):
And final words.
So, first of all, Nina, thank you for asking me.
There is such a joy in being in conversation with you. Thank you.
People can find me in probably three different places.
On Insta, Instagram, I am under Fiona Fee Jacob, because I kind of use F-E-E
(38:23):
as my nom de plume, shall we say, or my author's name.
You can find me on LinkedIn under Fiona Jacob. Also very easy.
And I do have a website, FionaJacob.com.
But what I would say is that would probably not be the most vibrant area at
the moment that you can find me.
(38:44):
So Insta and LinkedIn are probably a little more alive right now. Final words.
I think what shows up, Dina, for me that at least arrives in my heart is for
everybody to touch into the space that they are already the happiness of the world.
You are already it. You don't need to be better or good.
(39:04):
You don't need to love God more or
less. You don't need to know divine intelligence and how it works or runs.
It's just the truth of who you are. And a truth cannot be an untruth.
I think you've just made my day oh bless you I think I've made you too and for
(39:26):
those of you who are listening or watching thank you for joining us and we will
see you on the next episode so bye for now.
Music.
This is Nina Lockwood. Welcome to Get Your Happy Back, stories and insights
that will inspire you to find new sources of happiness in your own life.
Hello and welcome to Get Your Happy Back.
And today I have one of my most beloved friends, Fiona Jacob.
Hi, Fiona. So glad you're here.
(00:23):
Nina, I was thinking before I got onto this conversation, oh,
I can't wait to talk to Nina.
I am both thrilled and excited to be here, and it feels like it's been way too long. So glad to be here.
Absolutely. But even though we haven't spoken in a long time,
you're always in my heart. So glad you're here today.
Bless you. That's wonderful, wonderful. I love when our heart can hold another human being.
(00:48):
And what's even more amazing is that we can hold more than one person at the same time.
That is so true. I am. Just a short story, Nina. I had not seen a friend of mine for 20 years.
And we had got married the same year. And she had gone off and done her stuff
in Ireland. And I have lived abroad for very many years.
(01:08):
I've lived in the Middle East for something like 25 years.
And we got in touch this year. And oh my God.
The capacity for everything to have changed and nothing to have changed from that heart space.
Isn't it wonderful? It's just like, okay, we look a little different.
(01:28):
Her kids, I used to babysit her now. Doctors, both of them.
But what was so profound and impactful to me was nothing had changed in either
of our hearts for one another.
And it's not just so delicious that we
can not see a human being for 20 years or two years or two months it doesn't
(01:50):
matter minus 20 years happens to be bad but and life goes on but our heart doesn't
move on i love that me too that's one gem of an example of happiness,
yeah i guess it is yeah so nice i don't normally read people's bios but i'm
(02:10):
gonna just read a little bit about yours because you have such expertise and
wisdom that everybody should know.
You're a certified master transformative coach and a supervisor.
You work with individuals, teams, organizations around the world.
What I really want to highlight is this statement.
(02:31):
You take an uncompromising stand for people's greatness and your passion is
waking people up to their true nature so they can live their most authentic life.
Wow. You know, as you read that, my arms tingled and not because,
but there's something so powerful about those of us who are just sleeping or
(02:52):
who are going through life.
I would call it in the maple syrup. You know what I mean? It just feels hard and sticky.
And it's just like, oh my God, there is something so much more beyond that for
every human being in the world.
And when we wake out to that, oh my gosh, the impact, the transformation,
the happiness, the delight.
(03:14):
The flow of life and energy of life that comes through us. Oh, yes.
So, yeah, I got touched by, that's very strange, I got touched by my own writing,
but it actually is the impact of that, the meaning of that for people,
not the actual words of it. Yeah.
I'm sure you've had this experience yourself of going from being in more of
(03:35):
a stuck place to being in more of a place of flow.
Can you talk about that a bit? Oh, I think that happens to me every day.
Welcome to the club. Yeah. I think one of the greatest shifts for me from that
real stuckness to just finding peace in my heart, if you would want to say it that way.
(03:58):
Take yourself back. We're going to take ourselves back to 2010.
So that's not a short time ago. That's more 14 years ago.
And I walked into a big room in New York. there were 50 or 60 chairs and there
were three chairs up at the front. And I think we were on 34th Street.
That sounds like a Christmas movie, but actually I think we were on 34th Street.
(04:21):
And it was the beginning of Supercoach Academy. This was with Michael Neal,
who this was his first ever Supercoach Academy.
And I had literally pulled my mortgage payments to show up in that room on that
day because I was between jobs.
I had a job. I was starting in Saudi Arabia as a director, but I was a little short on the cash.
(04:44):
That didn't matter. What was so cool, Nina.
Was the first morning of the first day, a guy called Bill Cumming walked into the room.
Now, for anybody who does not know Bill, Bill was probably at this time in his
late 60s, early 70s. He's very tall.
(05:05):
He wore a pair of navy dungarees, and I will call them hobnail boots,
but you know what I mean, like farmer's boots or outside workers' boots or whatever.
He had a navy jacket
over the dungarees he had
a check shirt and a tie up to here like
no i was going w2f like what
(05:27):
i paid all this money to do the super coach again and then a guy shows up like
he's a farmer i mean to be fair to bill if he'd had a piece of straw coming
out of his mouth i would it would have just made the picture right so what was
fascinating to me, Nina, is I shut down my head.
I went, what am I going to learn from this guy? Exactly.
(05:49):
An hour and a half later, he and I were sitting in a chair opposite each other.
And it's the first time in my life I experienced myself as perfect,
whole and complete, as a human being.
And I would have been at that point, 44, 45 years of age.
So this man dressed dressed in the funkiest clothes ever.
(06:13):
You could not convince him that you were not perfect, whole, complete, and lovable.
He was not going to take it. Didn't matter what you had done.
Didn't matter who you were.
Didn't matter if you were a terrorist or a king. It did not matter.
All that mattered is he knew.
He knew. He knew the truth of who we were. And you could feel that from him. And I did.
(06:38):
And how did he know? And how did you come to know? Because how he shared it
with such, I mean, he had worked a lot with people who had been in prison.
He'd worked with a lot of people in the Black community or the African-American communities.
He had seen real poverty. He had seen crime.
His own daughter had been raped, and he knew the rapist.
(07:01):
There was just so much that he had both done, but he'd also experienced.
And in all of that, in all of that, every single human he was in conversation
with, be they saint or sinner,
he knew the perfection they were underneath all of the behaviors and the bluff
(07:23):
and the actions they took and the words that they said and the cursing,
all of that. He could see their heart.
He saw my heart that day, Nina. That is amazing to have that experience.
I am guessing that listeners or viewers for this podcast maybe have never known
that. And I didn't know that.
(07:45):
I mean, I tried to convince myself of that for many years.
And I tried to date men and hope that they would find that or whatever.
You know what I mean? We go to all the ends of the earth sometimes to try to
convince ourselves that we're good people or kind people or nice people or a
good wife or girlfriend or whatever. ever, but we're kind of doing it the wrong way around.
(08:08):
We're, again, to use a mentor's explanation, we're putting horseshit on the
diamond that we are and painting that over with the nail polish that we consider
looks good today, as opposed to, wow,
the metaphor of the diamond is we are already that.
But we've been so clueless that we've been going, let's go to the nail tech
(08:30):
and get nicer nails and longer nails and whatever, trying to convince ourselves at that level.
And you see it's not about seeing it at that
level it's not seeing it it's seeing it and
recognizing the truth of who we are and how
do we do that how does that happen if
someone isn't as fortunate as you were
(08:51):
to have that experience with bill how does
one especially somebody who's going through challenge and
is looking for something to hold on to whether we
call it happiness or as you were
saying earlier that's one layer that the bubbly part is the surface and then
there's deeper levels to it so how does somebody find that because that will
(09:15):
change everything yeah it's it's such a beautiful and great question and i want
to give it the holes that it deserves.
So Nina, I guess what I see around that is we all come to life,
to this life, to living, to, you know, we're born and we come to life.
(09:36):
If you want to call it with a factory default or an energy of life or an aliveness.
And it has some capacities, or it has some energies, or it has some intelligence, you could say.
I mean, there's different words depending on who you listen to or how you even notice for yourself.
But imagine if we were simply this, we were an iPhone, and you come with all
(10:01):
of these factory default apps.
Whether we use them or not is not the iPhone's fault in what sense I mean it, what's it in?
Well, if you want to say God or the divine intelligence or the universe or solar
spirit or whatever it is that allows us to be alive and live in this life,
we've come with these beautiful acts, these beautiful capacities, these beautiful gifts.
(10:25):
And it's not that we have to put them into ourselves. So this is not a manufacturing operation.
This is a mining one. When we mind, when we know the truth of that we have come
to life already with these gifts, and these gifts are vast, but these gifts are the gift of wisdom.
These gifts are the gifts of having insight, new thought, new perspective, new possibility.
(10:50):
These gifts are the gifts of creativity. I'm looking behind you and I'm seeing
all of this beautiful art.
I hear your husband's writing a book and
that's a gift of creativity from source
there's also the beautiful gift of
contentment and joy and to me there are just different words for happiness because
(11:10):
happiness for me I have that categorized as oh I'm happy oh I'm sad oh I'm you
know so to me happiness is the most beautiful and delicious word and maybe the
deeper feeling is a feeling with contentment and joy,
joy, joy that bubbles up no matter what is going on in our life and the world.
(11:30):
Grace that bubbles up when life throws challenges.
And I have not been without challenges and nobody has in this. We're in life.
So it doesn't get to be a pretty interesting contact sports.
And sometimes you're kind of ruts and sometimes you've got the,
you know, the scrum of people on top of you. So, yeah, I mean,
(11:51):
everybody will have experienced their own challenges, whether it's health challenges
or family challenges or people around them who they love may die.
Life will life. But to know, but to really know at a fundamental truth level
that the who we are, this factory default,
those apps, those beautiful apps that we come with are inside of ourselves and available all the time.
(12:16):
No matter what's going on in the earth, even in the crazy stuff,
even in the wild stuff, even in the I've lost my mind stuff,
this grounded place of being, of flow, of life, of grace, of beauty,
of contentment, of joy, creativity,
of wisdom, is us.
It is the true us. It always has.
(12:38):
And it always will be because it's who we are. Okay, so I've got a question
for you. Another question. Great!
Out of many. Yay, enough questions.
Some people would say, oh, that's wishful thinking.
Oh. Right? They'll say, oh, you don't understand, or you haven't been in my shoes.
(13:01):
This is a pretty Pollyanna-ish perspective.
So for somebody who's very entrenched in life as a struggle,
with limited options to get out of that struggle,
what can you remind them, those people, who is really all of us at one point or another,
(13:23):
what can you say to them to invite them to be more open to this recognition? recognition.
So Nina, what I love about that
question, first of all, is we've all been there, but what is it there?
Meaning, what is it that or how is it that we see that life's a struggle?
(13:43):
And I'm not going to pretend that sometimes there are some financial issues
or health issues or relationship issues.
I'm not, we're not here to bypass what is real.
So there is a reality. But we've been given such a fantastic,
let's call it a system or passages or intelligences that whatever is happening in reality,
(14:07):
the money, the family, the health, all of that, is we have this like infinite
creative potential that when we start to wake up to, oh my gosh,
I can experience reality in any way.
I can have any experience of this reality is probably what I'm trying to say. Thank you.
Now, it's not to make yourself think positive. That's not what we're talking
(14:29):
about. I'm not. Can I, maybe can I tell you a story? Of course.
To illustrate. So, Nina, my, sorry, there's a big snort there.
My family have gone through quite a lot in the last two years with illness.
My mom has had half her bowel removed. My dad has been in hospital eight or
nine times with cardiac and renal disease.
(14:50):
Oh, my. And so it's been a struggle because, first of all, I don't live in the
same country that they're in. I'm in Sweden, they're in Ireland, which is my home.
And my brother, in the midst of all of this, had bowel cancer.
And he's the closest to my parents, so I had to spend quite a lot of time home with my mom and dad.
(15:10):
So this is the narrative in my head. Well, this is bloody great, isn't it?
I've got such a busy ball head. Oh my God, that means I'm going to have to cancel my clients.
And I had, I did, this is all happening, people in hospital,
in and out. And it was like my head went into busy mode.
This is the worst time. Oh, my God, the business will help my husband.
(15:32):
I go home and I take over as nurse.
Nurse is coming. She's going to take care of mom and the usual.
Mom was incontinent. Mommy helped in the bathroom. All of that.
And I took a step back at some point, Nina, and I went.
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right now, I dislike my parents. I'm nursing my parents.
(15:55):
And I went, where did the love go? Where did the love go?
Now, mom and dad, they were still sick. Mom was still in hospital.
Mom's still in the hospital. Do you know what I mean? So nothing changed on the outside.
And this is the beauty of the design here.
Nothing has to change on the outside for us to have a different experience.
I can't tell you, Nina, I fell in love with my parents more than I I loved them
(16:18):
probably before I was a teenager.
Because you know what we do. Of course. We're a teenager.
It's not that I haven't loved them. It's just like, yeah, their parents will
go home and see them. Yeah, let's have a good Christmas.
But it's like, no, I fell in love with these two gorgeous, stubborn human beings.
(16:39):
Like, for real. For new.
And nothing had changed. And the only thing, well, nothing on the outside had changed.
What had changed inside of me was, yeah, it was still a pain in the ass.
I still, you know, was not earning money.
I was still away from my business. I still had to cancel my clients.
I still had to go home to Ireland and keep it all going.
(17:01):
And it was all okay. And you were willing, that's a wonderful story,
Fiona. Thank you for sharing that.
And what I'm hearing and what you're saying is that you were,
what's the best word you became aware that you were less than loving and you stopped,
(17:21):
because that was a red flag for you and you asked that very powerful question and that's,
possible for everybody in every situation not the loving bit but the we look
at things in life and go oh my god this is hard this is a challenge how can
i do this this is terrible you know we We are in this flow of thinking that
(17:44):
gives us these horrible feelings that we're living in this urgency and intensity,
and it's like a washing machine going on full spin cycle. You know,
everything just feels like, ah.
But what we're actually pointing to is with this creative potential, we don't have to suffer.
When we recognize, oh, my God, I'm really lost in the thinking about how hard
(18:09):
it is or how challenging it is or how much of this is a struggle or how terrible life is.
When we just wake up to that, something new and fresh and alive and more useful can come to mind.
Now, it may be that you fall in love with your parents or it may be that there's
a problem to be solved, but you can solve it or a creative way of seeing it
(18:32):
differently or whatever.
I can't tell you what that's going to look like for the person. What I want to say is.
We are given the gift of fresh new ideas every moment of every day, available.
That's always available, always available.
Nothing we need to do to get to that.
(18:53):
And when we're kind of just lost up in this crazy, busy-minded,
struggling thinking, and we follow that train of thought, well,
all that happens is we just don't have such access to this beautiful,
wise, clear, creative, powerful space and insight and even simple things like here's what to do next.
(19:16):
Sometimes that can just be the most beautiful thing. Oh, thank you. Oh, I could do that next.
Oh, that would be so cool. Oh, that would be so easy. Oh, and your shoulders
go down and it's just like, you can have insight in any moment,
no matter what's going on.
So this, if I may interrupt you, because I saw you were ready to keep going, and I want you to,
(19:37):
is that our thinking has so much to do with whether we're happy or not, right?
And that what I think I hear you saying, and certainly this is my experience,
is that if I am only habituated to following that track of, oh, my God,
(20:00):
I can't, this shouldn't be happening ad infinitum, is that we never have the
opportunity to say, oh, what else is possible? Yeah.
What you're actually pointing to, Nina, is that we tend to live in the feeling
of our, we're living in the feeling all the time. It's going,
oh, I don't like this. This is terrible. Oh, I feel bad.
(20:22):
Oh, I feel, why did she do that to me that way? And we're in the feeling of
all of this strife and urgency and intense.
It's just like, it's bubbling up like a witch's cauldron.
Feels like anything you drop in there might just die. But it's the cauldron
of suffering in a way. I love that term.
(20:45):
I have never said it before in my life. There you go.
But it's just like we misinterpret what our feelings are telling us.
Now, I've had feeling of angst and irritation and frustration and anger and
sadness, all of it. It's not like, oh, look at Fiona.
No, all of it. Maybe even worse than any human being on the planet. I don't know.
(21:07):
But when you know where your feelings are coming from, and it's not her,
them, or my parents, or I have to tell my clients I can't coach them today.
It's not coming from that.
It's coming from my thought created. Yeah, just my thinking about that.
(21:28):
And that gives me this, which is called a feeling.
And then it's almost like I put on glasses or a frame of which I look out in
the world and that's how I see it. Oh my God, this is terrible.
This is awful. My life is awful. My life is terrible. No, they're terrible.
Yeah. And we're just, that's how we see life.
It's like putting on a pair of dark glasses or a pair of glasses with yellow
(21:49):
tint or blue Lutene. It's like it colors our world.
Now, the beautiful thing is if we're aware, oh my God, I'm so caught up in my
own, believing my own creation here.
And we do. And it looks like it's really real sometimes.
And we're, yeah, we get lost in it. But as soon as we wake up to it,
(22:11):
as soon as we're aware, oh my God, I just left the planet with my crazy thinking.
Okay guess what we fall back into the now and nina when you and i fall back into the now.
That is where we access all of those beautiful gifts and intelligences in real
time, responsive to whatever is going on, whether it's a difficult relationship,
(22:36):
whether it's a money worry or concern, whatever it is, whatever is going on,
you get a real-time intelligence,
clarity, wisdom, new idea, creative idea, solution,
because we're in the real moment with the real problem,
with access to source and source
(22:56):
brings us the answers we need for that moment for in every now we get access
to what we need for this now and it's just taking a pause from our crazy yeah
our head that just goes around in circles and the noise well it has us so engaged it's kind of like.
It's almost like its own video game you know we're just like okay this is how
(23:18):
life is as opposed to No, there is some reality, but all that I'm seeing and
feeling right now is my creation of that reality.
And I have the potential and possibility to create a new experience of that
reality, which can be anything from moving from anger to irritation or from
irritation to happiness or from happiness to excitement.
(23:41):
We can move through all of this, but the possibilities we get to touch off the deeper,
deeper feelings that we are, and those deeper feelings are joy and contentment and ease and grace.
Space and they're available even if the world is mad,
(24:01):
even if our life looks out of control, we can still touch off the truth of who
we are and bathe in that and rest in that and come back to life rejuvenated
and refreshed. Amen, sister.
It makes me think of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk who,
during the Vietnam War, his, so much of his efforts.
(24:26):
At that time, with all of that destruction and the madness of it,
was doing what you are sharing with us,
going back in and realizing that his reactions were coming from up here many
times when there was that anger and hopelessness and frustration,
(24:48):
and bringing it back to himself,
himself with a capital S,
so that he could touch love, he could touch peace,
he could touch well-being, even in the midst of a war where his fellow countrymen were dying.
I've had an interesting scenario recently, Nina, where I was speaking in a Prague
conference on listening, and I had two wonderful conversations after I'd spoken
(25:13):
and after the workshop that I had given.
And one was a group of ladies from Ukraine. Ukraine
and as you know they're in the middle of
war with Russia and what they said was
if we hadn't known about how our thought creates our feelings in this situation
we would have been like everybody else we would have just been running around
(25:34):
and doing the sky is falling and and now they said look we have we're on the
front line with the troops we are helping them come back to themselves,
to their calm quietude, to not feeling stressed,
to just being grounded in themselves.
And I thought to myself, oh my God, I love that in what people think is the
(25:58):
worst scenario that can be possible,
exactly as you described in the Vietnam War, that people can live in quietude, calm,
in the flow of life, the energy of life, the alightness of life,
and thrive even in the midst of war. And you would think, well, that's not possible.
These women shared with me from their hearts that that is their experience.
(26:22):
And similarly, I had a conversation with Jenny from Israel who.
Had experienced the October 10 situation. And she said, again,
there were so many people just so panicked, so stressed. All understandable on both sides.
Understandable. But she said the peace in her heart was so embedded that she
(26:44):
cooked and she brought cookies to people and she would have conversations with
people on the street and just allowed them to come back home to themselves.
Ourselves because when we
are being this you know people steal
the truth of it it's not a i can't tell you what it is i mean i can but in my
(27:07):
speaking i hope it's not about the words i think i'm hoping that there's a deeper
feeling that is conveyed in the truth of who we're being and when When we are
being that, people feel that.
They come and they find themselves grounded for themselves too.
That's such a powerful reminder that it's the vibe that we're giving out,
(27:31):
and there's something you can catch it.
It's that sense of possibility that when someone is, as you were talking about with Bill,
someone who is radiating that kind of energy,
you can't help but be touched by it unless
you are so walled off that there's no space for it to get in but i think everyone
(27:53):
who has felt and i'd love to know your thoughts about this fiona too everyone
who has struggled almost everybody still has this wee little space inside them that says.
Maybe maybe it could be different maybe there's another way i have seen it probably
in two Two different ways.
So Nina, I think you know already that I was held hostage in Iraq for four and
(28:17):
a half months during the first Gulf War.
I didn't know anything about anything, really. I was just a 24-year-old,
panicked like everybody else, thinking I was going to die.
To, it's going to sound strange when you're a hostage, but I was actually swimming
in a swimming pool that was part of the compound, or the hotel compound we were staying in.
(28:37):
And recognizing that when I did this, just on my back doing backstroke and looking
up at the sky, it felt like Christmas, because it felt like those twinkly lights
of the stars were just with me. within reach.
And I had a profound knowing, and the profound knowing was simply this,
I'm okay. Now, nothing had changed.
(28:59):
There were still troops coming. There were still anti-aircraft guns flying off
into the sky every night, as they did, they practiced every night.
We still were, I was still a hostage.
But there's something that can shift inside of us so easily,
to know, I didn't know that I was loved, but I knew I was okay.
So I knew I was okay. Hey, and stuff still happened to me.
(29:21):
It wasn't like, oh, hooray, she's free tomorrow. No, I was assaulted and I was
held at gunpoint for hours.
And there was just, there was more stuff to come.
But the overriding, not even feeling, because it wasn't, it was just a knowing.
No matter what happens here, I'm okay.
Now that's kind of cool to know. Kind of cool.
(29:42):
So powerful. It's so transformative, as we say in the trade.
Yeah. Your background, I'll see if I can get around to a question.
Your background is in nursing, and these days your focus is working with coaches
and helping them create,
(30:03):
as we were using that term, transformational impact with their clients.
How are you, what's your, how do you do that?
Is that just, I'm assuming you share with them the very same kinds of things
that you're sharing with me now in terms of what's possible of taking that stop
(30:24):
and realizing that we have these apps, free apps.
Free apps, yes, exactly. Not even needed to be paid for. Right.
So that reminder or invitation to take a stop and notice, and then,
if we're lucky, remember that we have these other possibilities.
(30:47):
Would you say that's along the lines of how you share this understanding?
I'm going to say yes and probably slightly expand it.
So one of the things that I find with coaches, and I've worked with some,
including you, worked with some wonderful coaches who really see this,
(31:08):
what we're talking about for themselves. of.
But then one of a couple of things happens. Somebody comes in with a compelling story.
And it's very easy for any coach to go, oh my God, I don't know how to deal
with this. Somebody who's,
that's, say, been in jail, or maybe has a child who's died, or, you know what I mean?
(31:30):
Those may not have happened in our own world, and it's just like,
or for people, some of it is around finance, like they've lost all their money,
they're bankrupt, they might be out of their home in a month.
So, we buy into the story.
Now, as I said earlier, there's a reality.
I'm not saying there is not a reality.
Somebody may lose their house. Somebody has lost a child. somebody there are
(31:55):
things not so nice things that happen to people in life but as a coach,
our job is not to buy into the story it can be to be human like oh my god i
have no idea how i would be if that were to happen to me it's not to say that
we're not human but when coaches see that
(32:18):
a person can go through grief,
but have moments of joy and happiness,
because that's our nature.
We can go through financial troubles and actually find lightheartedness and
humor in it from time to time.
I'm not saying that we need to put that on things, but what we're looking at
(32:39):
are people beyond the story and knowing that they are okay, knowing that they
have everything they need.
Knowing that when they come out of their thought-created, fast-paced mind and
thinking that there are things to be done that can be solutions to look at that
(33:00):
they haven't thought of before,
simply because they're in the worry, they're in the anxiety,
they're in their thought- created imagination of they're going to soon be living
under a bridge with, you know, one bag.
The rats. yeah well the rat's in a bag from Saks Fifth Avenue or whatever it's
like but recognizing truly that we are okay.
(33:24):
And truly, we have everything we need. Our job as coaches is to wake that up
inside of another human being.
Even if the story is so compelling and so, oh, I don't know what to do.
It's like our settling down ourselves and finding our okayness.
Because when we are pulling from that space of wisdom and clarity ourselves,
(33:47):
when we create the space of okayness with another human being, in.
When they tap into their wisdom and clarity, they will find solutions and new
thinking and possibilities that they haven't thought about.
And that is our role as coaches.
So that will be certainly one of the first things I would have people look at.
(34:09):
Because that's why I get to listen to the calls and I go, yes,
but he has, I don't know, HIV or he's killed somebody.
It's like, Like, okay, and now how do we come back to ourselves and be in a
space of curiosity and listening and see what shows up for us?
What's the, not the best conversation, but what is the conversation?
(34:31):
What is the flow of life? What is there to be said here?
But it's coming from a different place within us.
It reminds me of that statement by Byron Katie, who would you be without your story?
Because if we're not in such, if we're not enamored with our story,
if we're not compelled by our story, then it seems to me that's when we can discover truth.
(34:57):
All of these possibilities within ourselves. And if that isn't happiness on
a deep and profound level, I don't know what is.
I so with you on that. And the thing about it, the stories is,
we've made them up in the first place. We are the author of them.
And you can fall in love with the story, that's fine, but you can also fall
(35:18):
out of love with the story.
It's like you can walk into a movie and you think, oh, this is a horror story.
I'm not sure I came to a horror story. I want to go to rom-coms.
You move back out of the movie theater and you go next door and you go see the rom-com.
We have the capacity always to wake up.
We are never that far lost. We might think we are.
(35:41):
We can never be that far lost, that we can't recognize the giggle,
that we can't recognize a good idea, that we can't recognize the flow or the energy of life.
Because that hum, that hum of happiness, that hum of contentment,
that hum of joy is the truth of who we are. And it never goes away.
(36:06):
Sometimes we're a little bit
off the radio station, we might have a little bit of static. That's okay.
But if we know all we need to do is put ourselves back on the station.
You get DAB Digital or whatever, FM, and it's just like we get stereo sound of ourselves.
It's such an important reminder, Fiona, to have you share this because it is
(36:28):
so easy to get caught up in the drama.
We don't see anything until there maybe is a little lull in the activity, right?
And then we can say, oh, oh yeah.
Hey, sometimes Sometimes he might choose drama because we love a bit of drama.
That's fine. But if, you know, you're creating drama, well, that's also cool.
Do you know what? I think I'm on for drama today. Okay.
(36:51):
It's a bit like if I get angry with my husband.
But sometimes I go, well, you know what? I actually want to be angry.
Because usually I get, yeah, but you know, you're just making that up, Faye.
You know, so I get the nice clarity and wisdom showing up. And I go,
no, dammit. I want to be angry. I'm going to stay.
You know what? It lasts about seven minutes and then it's just like, oh, well.
(37:15):
To keep yourself angry just to be angry is kind of like, that's an interesting way to be. Right.
It's worth asking the question after a certain period of time,
is it really worth it? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think I'll do something else.
So yeah thank you so much for being with me today I just as you know I always
(37:38):
love being able to spend time with you and see your face at the same time even
if it's only virtually it's still,
your gorgeousness and your energy and your,
the truth of what you're speaking about. So, two questions, maybe three.
Where can people find you if
they want to learn a little bit more about what you do and how you do it?
(37:59):
And final words.
So, first of all, Nina, thank you for asking me.
There is such a joy in being in conversation with you. Thank you.
People can find me in probably three different places.
On Insta, Instagram, I am under Fiona Fee Jacob, because I kind of use F-E-E
(38:23):
as my nom de plume, shall we say, or my author's name.
You can find me on LinkedIn under Fiona Jacob. Also very easy.
And I do have a website, FionaJacob.com.
But what I would say is that would probably not be the most vibrant area at
the moment that you can find me.
(38:44):
So Insta and LinkedIn are probably a little more alive right now. Final words.
I think what shows up, Dina, for me that at least arrives in my heart is for
everybody to touch into the space that they are already the happiness of the world.
You are already it. You don't need to be better or good.
(39:04):
You don't need to love God more or
less. You don't need to know divine intelligence and how it works or runs.
It's just the truth of who you are. And a truth cannot be an untruth.
I think you've just made my day oh bless you I think I've made you too and for
(39:26):
those of you who are listening or watching thank you for joining us and we will
see you on the next episode so bye for now.
Music.
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