March 20, 2024 • 26 mins
This week we're looking into the past and letting go of what no longer serves us.
The past is rich in lessons and resources but often it holds us back from being able to create the future we want.
Links:
www.teriholland.ca/consultation
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https://www.aurahealth.io/teriholland
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Do we have to talk about the past? I really just want to move forward.
I hear something along these lines from the majority of business owners that I work with.
And I get it. These are high performers, just want to focus on what they want
and move forward easily and start accomplishing more of their goals,
(00:22):
creating the business and the life that they desire to have.
I get it. and yet
how can we move forward if we
don't start reassessing our past and
disconnecting from it you're listening to success in
mind the show for high-performing leaders change makers and entrepreneurs ready
(00:43):
to take your life and business to the next level if you're ready for whole life
success keep listening the past
becomes a problem for us when we use it to shape and shadow our future.
So you might think that each day you're making decisions based on the reality
that's in front of you and based on what's best for your future.
(01:05):
The truth is that the majority of your decisions are being made based on something in the past.
And so the past really does become a projection for the future.
The past becomes a predictor of the future, because what you've done in the
past is likely to keep repeating again.
So often when business owners come to me, they come to
(01:26):
me because they're stuck or they're not
getting what they want they feel like they're spinning their wheels
and not moving any further ahead and they're
tired of playing the same loop over and over and over again and so they come
to me and then when I say okay we need to look at what's happened in the past
and disconnect these old decisions you've made in the past these old negative
(01:49):
emotions in the past so that you can move forward into the future you want they go go, ah,
I don't want to work on the past.
I don't want to look at the past. I just want to move forward.
But how can you move forward if you are projecting your past into the future?
How can you create anything different than what you already know without the past?
(02:13):
Now, our past has a place. Absolutely.
The past is rich in learning and in resources for us. So here's an example.
Let's say say that there's crack in your sidewalk and it's raised a little bit.
So one day you go for a walk and you trip and you fall forward.
(02:33):
Maybe you catch your balance, maybe you don't, but you trip there.
And so the next time you're out for a walk, you know there's a crack there because
you remember tripping and so you're going to be cautious about that area.
That's where the past is useful because you know, hey, there's a crack there.
Be mindful of it. Step over the crack.
But what if that past begins to inform every sidewalk you ever walk on?
(02:59):
And so you're constantly worrying now that you're going to trip on a crack and
you're going to, you're going to trip, you're going to fall forward.
And so every time you're out walking, you start to become hypervigilant.
And now you're not only mindful of the one crack that you tripped on,
now you are hyper-focused on every possible crack in the sidewalk.
(03:21):
And maybe it gets even worse, so now you become afraid to even walk on the sidewalk
because of the potential that you could trip, because the one time that you did trip.
Well, now the past has become a problem. So now it's limiting you from going
for walks, from enjoying being outdoors. doors.
Now it's becoming stressful and scary.
(03:42):
So we want to use the past as a place of learning so we can learn from our past
mistakes, we can learn from our past behavior and make new choices for the future.
But until we become conscious of the learnings, we tend to hold on to the negative
emotions from the past and that can become phobias, fears, limitations we put on ourselves.
(04:04):
We tend to to hold on to limiting decisions that we made in the past.
So for that example, the limiting decision could be sidewalks are scary.
Well, that's not going to help
you in the future, is it? If you avoid ever walking on a sidewalk again.
A good decision, a positive learning from the past might be there's a crack
(04:25):
on that sidewalk and I can easily step over it whenever I encounter it.
But a limiting decision would be sidewalks are scary and dangerous.
And we do this all the the time. And I know this is just a little example of
a sidewalk, but think about how this translates into your business.
So let's say in the past, you had a bad client experience.
(04:45):
Maybe it was really negative. Maybe it cost you a lot of money to resolve.
And so now every time you go into a consultation, you're terrified of another bad client.
So you stop, you stop taking on new clients.
Maybe you start really downselling your services.
Maybe you start lowering your rates and minimizing what you offer because you're
(05:09):
so afraid of something happening again.
Maybe you get out of the business entirely and you quit.
You stop doing what you love to do because you're so afraid that something bad could happen again.
Or let's look at maybe things that aren't even associated with your business
and how they might be holding you back.
When I was in the second grade, I had a teacher, Mrs.
(05:35):
Sartori, who didn't like me. For some reason, she just didn't like me.
She had taught my sister a couple years earlier, and she loved her. She hated me.
And we had a project to write a story, and I wrote a story about my dog.
But I had been reading the newspaper with my dad and I'd been really interested
(05:55):
in newspapers around that point to my childhood.
So I wrote my story like a newspaper article and I put it into columns,
like just the way that a newspaper article is written in columns.
I wrote my story in columns and she handed it back to me and said,
why would you write it like this?
And I said well I wrote it like a newspaper article
(06:17):
I might not have said it like that I would have said I wrote it like the newspaper
and she said well that's stupid and she wouldn't look at it and in my childhood
mind I made all kinds of decisions about not being creative about not not showing my work to people,
that I'm stupid, that I can't write.
(06:41):
And those decisions didn't really begin to come to the surface.
I mean, I realized that they had been holding me back, but I didn't realize
they had been holding me back until I was doing my NLP training.
And it was during my trainer's training of NLP training, which was an extremely intense training.
(07:03):
And I was so afraid of failing, of being stupid, of being wrong.
All of these things kept kept coming up.
And I was working with one of my friends, Mark, and I told him what was coming
up for me during this training.
And he said, well, where does that come from? When did you decide these things?
And all of a sudden, this memory that I had forgotten about, about Mrs.
Sartori, I mean, I knew it was there, but I hadn't really thought about it in so many years.
(07:29):
But this memory came up and it's like it smacked me right in the head.
And I said, oh, I decided this in the second grade.
And I told him what happened. And we did a process, a very advanced process
of NLP to release those limiting decisions so that I could move forward freely and easily.
(07:50):
And I started to think how many other times had that held me back in my business.
And I wasn't even aware until that moment.
I didn't even know that those limiting decisions were holding me me back.
And they probably stopped me from writing, from being more creative,
from experimenting, from trying new things and taking risks.
(08:11):
In fact, I know one example where it had held me back.
I wrote one blog about a hike my husband and I took up the Squamish Chief that's here in the.
It's here in BC in Canada and it's this hike up a mountain called the Chief.
(08:33):
It's in Squamish and it's kind of advanced.
It's really hard and I wrote a blog about what I learned during that hike because
I found it really challenging the hike and I wrote this blog about it and what
I learned from it and I got a great reception on this blog.
People really liked it. I was getting a lot of of responses to it.
(08:56):
So I decided to submit it to a very big online publication.
I won't say which one, but a really, really big one. Actually, I will say, why not?
I submitted it to HuffPost and I sent it right to Arianna Huffington.
I was feeling bold that day and I sent it right to her directly.
(09:16):
And she responded and said, I think this is a great article.
Send this to my editor. her and she attached the email, send this to them and
they'll follow up with next steps for you.
I think this is great. We'd love to publish it. And do you know what I did?
Absolutely nothing.
I stopped dead in my tracks. I never responded. I never put forward that article.
(09:43):
And as time went by, I kept telling myself, oh, you've got to follow up.
You've got to follow up. I never did until it felt like it was too late.
And I realized in my NLP training, as I was working through these limiting decisions
that went all the way back to the second grade and Mrs.
Sartori's class, I realized that's what stopped me.
I was so afraid of it being wrong, about I was, I was afraid that I was wrong,
(10:10):
that it wasn't good enough, that it was like all these these limiting decisions
that were packed into this one event in my life.
So that's one example of where it was holding me back. But how many other times
I bet you that that had stopped me in ways I haven't even considered yet from
moving forward, from taking risks, taking chances.
(10:30):
It kept holding me back. It probably, now that I think of it,
is the thing that stopped me in my my podcast.
And some of you already know this story that when I launched this podcast,
it grew very big, very fast.
And very quickly, I was number one in self-improvement on Apple.
(10:50):
And the first time I reached number one, it was a little bit shocking and strange
to me, but then I dropped down by the next day and I was in the top 10,
top 30, and I was fine with that.
And then several weeks later, a couple months later, I reached number one again.
And this time I held on to it for 10 days and I was seeing names like Brenda
(11:11):
Burchard trailing behind me and it scared me. It was too much. It was too big.
Who was I to have a voice? Who was I to have a message?
And I stopped recording for months and months.
I had people messaging me saying, where's your podcast? Where are you, Terry?
And I wouldn't respond to them. And I didn't come back until my best friend
(11:33):
Stefano said to me, hey, I need your podcast. Record them for me.
Just record them for me. That's it.
And I slowly came back, but it took me a long, long time to start recording consistently again.
And even then, I would start to get some traction again, and I would stop.
And I would have to pick myself up and
(11:56):
sit myself down in front of the mic and make myself start again you
know I think that that little girl in the second grade had something to do with
stopping the podcast those feelings of not being good enough of being wrong
of being being well I was going to say judged but it wasn't a feeling of judgment
(12:16):
it was a feeling of being wrong it was shame.
That was the feeling. It was shame. So think about where you're stuck in your
business or where you're repeating patterns over and over again.
It's not in the present that's holding you back. It's not decisions you're making now.
It's decisions you've made in the past that are informing what you do now because
(12:40):
you're so afraid of tripping over the crack in the sidewalk again that now you're
not even leaving the house and you're holding yourself back.
So what is that for you? So that's the work that I do with my clients.
And we do this through a process that starts with a discovery process where
we go through all this stuff in the past and you get to empty out about everything in your mind,
(13:04):
things that maybe you haven't even thought of talking about before start to spill out.
And that's where these clients often say to me, not always, but but often clients
say to me, do we have to do this?
I just want to, I just want to go forward into the future. I don't want to think about the past.
Well, here's the thing. You're already thinking about the past.
You're just not consciously aware of it.
(13:25):
You're already dwelling on the past. You just don't know it.
And so our past tends to inform our decisions. It tends to shape our future
and color it the same colors of the past.
Between now and the end of your life is an infinite number of probabilities.
(13:45):
But as long as the past is projecting forward and shaping the future,
you are limited to the probable outcomes that you can choose.
Those unlimited infinite number of probabilities begin to collapse down into only a few choices.
And so you think you have choice, but you don't really. you are narrowed down
(14:09):
to the choices that suit your expectations.
So if you really want to break free of that and carve out a new future,
which means making money like you've never made it before, which means having
success you've never achieved before,
which means getting clients that you've never had, doing things you've never done,
(14:30):
seeing yourself in ways that you've never considered.
If you want to be able to do that, then you need to break free of the past in
order to move forward into the future that you want.
Now again, your past is not something bad. Your past is rich of resources and
learning, and it's important for us to be able to decipher what's a learning,
(14:52):
what's a resource, versus a limiting decision or a negative emotion that we're
hanging onto from the past.
That's what clouds our judgment and it stops us from creating the future that you want.
And so if this is resonating with you, and if you're like, Terry,
you are speaking into my brain right now, you are speaking into my soul,
(15:14):
this sounds like me, then book a consultation call with me.
I'll put the link in the show notes to make it super easy for you.
But it's time to break free of all those things that are holding you you back,
keeping you small, stopping you from creating the life that you want.
And it's not the decisions you're making today. It's the decisions you've been
making for your entire lifetime that are informing how you make your decisions today.
(15:38):
They're the things that are telling you, hey, there's a crack in the sidewalk
somewhere out there. So don't you dare leave the safety of your house because you might trip and fall.
That's the stuff we need to clear out. That's the stuff we need to get rid of.
The learning is there's a crack in that sidewalk walk right there.
You tripped last time. Step over it this time.
That's all. That's all you need to know. So we go through this process and I
(16:01):
take my clients through a process of letting go of limiting decisions from the
past, which we've talked about.
And limiting decisions, some people call them limiting beliefs.
We say limiting decisions because if you didn't decide it, how do you believe it?
A limiting decision is much more of a powerful position. It's resourceful.
(16:22):
Saying it's a limiting decision now puts you in the driver's seat because if
you decided it, you can undecide it.
If you chose this, you can unchoose it. But if it's just a belief,
well, where did it come from?
And then it's too easy to say, well, my parents or that came from my teacher.
You know, I don't blame Mrs. Sartori for what happened that day.
(16:42):
I think she was doing the best she could with resources she had available at the time.
But they were my decisions, the choices I made.
And at the same time, I also don't blame myself for those decisions because
I was just a six-year-old, maybe seven-year-old girl who was working based on
the resources that she had at the time.
(17:04):
And so I was doing my best and Mrs. Sartori was doing her best.
And I made decisions that were going to impact me for the rest of my life.
Well, until I learned how to un-choose them and to let go of those decisions, I can move forward.
Now, I see this with my clients every day, and often it's a teacher who said something to them.
That's, oh, that comes up a lot with speakers when I'm working with professional
(17:27):
speakers or aspiring speakers,
and they say, well, I'm afraid of public speaking because one time in grade three,
I had to read something in front of the class and I pronounced a word the wrong
way and all the kids laughed at me and I was so embarrassed and I never wanted
to speak in public again.
But now they're a 42-year-old business owner who knows that speaking is going
(17:52):
to help grow his business or her business.
I see this with my podcasters all the time where they know they have something to share.
They know that but there's something inside of them that needs to come out.
And they want to have a podcast, but they're so afraid of what will they say about me?
What will they think? Who am I to have a voice and a message and a platform to share it on?
(18:16):
Because at some point in life, something happened and they decided that they
weren't worthy of a platform, that they weren't worthy of sharing their voice and their message.
When I was growing up, my nickname was Mouse because I was so shy. I was so quiet.
And I spent so much of my life trying to figure out why was I so quiet as a child?
(18:39):
Why was I so afraid of my voice?
And I couldn't figure it out. Even through learning NLP, I still,
I couldn't quite get to that.
And then one day, it came to me and it was, I was doing the same kind of work,
letting go of stuff in the past.
And I was exploring an early, early event in my childhood from when I was a
(19:04):
baby, using these techniques and this process.
And as I was going back to it, and I was looking for something else in my past.
I bumped up against this decision that my voice didn't matter.
And I thought, whoa, here it is.
I just stumbled into the thing that made me quiet as a kid, that took my voice away from me as a child.
(19:31):
And it was, I had a really bad reaction to a vaccine.
Spoiler alert, we're not going to go anti-vax here. I'm not going to get into that.
I'm just going to say I had a really bad reaction to a vaccine as a baby,
and it nearly took my life. I had to get a spinal tap.
Now, I don't consciously remember this event, but when I went back using regression
(19:55):
techniques through hypnotherapy and through NLP and timeline line therapy and
I went back to this event,
what I experienced was me as a baby on the table screaming at the top of my
lungs because of the pain of the spinal tap of getting a lumbar puncture and they weren't stopping.
(20:17):
Now I didn't make that decision linguistically. I didn't, I know as a baby,
I didn't say to myself, oh Terry, your voice doesn't matter.
It's not stopping anything.
But that's what it meant to me at the time. Without the language behind it,
that's what it meant that my screaming didn't work.
It didn't work. It didn't stop the pain.
And from that point on, I stopped using my voice.
(20:39):
Until in the third grade, the third grade, I was cast as a soloist in the Christmas concert.
And I got to say the punchline to a joke. and I was so excited because I didn't have to use my own words.
They were someone else's words and I was told where to stand and I was told
(21:00):
how to deliver the line. I got direction.
And I remember stepping up to that mic and belting out my line and the auditorium
that was full of family members and other students laughed.
And they laughed because I, this little mouse, I made them laugh. with my voice.
(21:23):
And that was powerful for me. And from that point on, I wanted one thing and
one thing only, and that was to be on stage, because on stage,
I felt safe to use my voice.
And then I would come off stage and I would disappear into this shy little mouse who was afraid to speak.
That followed me for decades.
I went to theater school to train to be a professional actor.
(21:46):
And I remember one of my teachers saying to me, you know,
his name was him and he said, Terry, I'm so fascinated by you because when you
go on stage, it's like this light turns on and you're absolutely captivating.
And then the moment you walk off stage, you disappear.
What happens to you? And I said, I don't know, Tim, this has been the story of my life.
(22:09):
And it wasn't until I learned NLP and I learned these tools.
And then I realized what was happening and how to start using my voice and how
to use my voice to communicate a message and share ideas and inspiration with the world.
And now I speak for a living professionally as a public speaker through my podcast. I train people.
(22:33):
I use my voice in hypnotherapy. I use my voice to create hypnotherapy recordings
that I offer on a platform called Aura, which, by the way, I'll also link in
the show notes in case you want to check out some of those.
But that was holding me back for a long time. And what I really wanted was to
be able to to express myself.
And now I can. So there are things that, you know, and by the way,
(22:58):
if you're listening to this and you're like, Terry, there's nothing holding
me back. I have everything I want in life.
My business is growing exactly the way I want. It's moving ahead the way I want.
I have the clients I want, the money I want, the lifestyle I want.
Everything is great. There is nothing missing.
Then maybe nothing's holding you back. And that's fantastic.
But if if you're listening to this and you're like, yeah, you know what?
(23:20):
Something is holding me back.
Something is stopping me from having the life that I want.
I keep spinning my wheels and going in circles and something just isn't connecting.
Something isn't working.
Then this is me telling you, book that consultation call with me and let's figure
it out so you can stop projecting that past,
(23:42):
into the future so that you can open up all
of those infinite outcomes for yourself and you can start choosing
like really choosing what you want in your future and creating a path to get
it that you're no longer being limited to the options in the future that are
just reflections and repeats of past behavior so that you can learn from your
(24:05):
past instead of being controlled by your past,
All right, those are just some things that were on my mind this week as I've
been working with some clients.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you got some value out of it.
Please share it with a friend who you think would benefit from it and leave
that five-star review if you did benefit from this, if you did get some value out of it.
(24:30):
Next week, I have a very exciting interview for you.
I mean, I get excited about all of my guests that come on, but this one was
a really special one for me.
Next week, I'm joined by Bob Berg, co-author of The Go-Giver and The Go-Giver
series of books, which if you have not read The Go-Giver and you are in business
(24:54):
or in leadership, you need to read The Go-Giver.
Or if you're a parent, I think there's great value in that for parents to teach
their kids as well. It's a simple book.
It's a story, a simple story about a powerful business idea.
I first read The Go-Giver in, I want to say 2018.
(25:15):
And it really informed how I do business and how I operate in my business.
I highly suggest it. I recommend it to almost all of my clients.
I have gifted it to many clients and many colleagues.
Because it is a powerful, powerful book. And I have read The Go-Giver,
The Go-Giver Sells More, The Go-Giver leader, and the GoGiver influencer.
(25:37):
And they are all fantastic books, very worthwhile reading.
And I have Bob Berg coming on the show. It's packed with so much value.
You've got to listen to this one.
I mean, you have to listen to all of them. Like, I don't know about you,
but I think that the guests that have come on this show are really exceptional people.
And you've got to listen to that one because he will really change your thinking
(26:02):
and you're going to learn a lot from Bob Berg on that episode.
So thank you so much again for joining me today. I hope you have a fantastic week.
And I look forward to talking with you again soon. Bye for now.
Do we have to talk about the past? I really just want to move forward.
I hear something along these lines from the majority of business owners that I work with.
And I get it. These are high performers, just want to focus on what they want
and move forward easily and start accomplishing more of their goals,
(00:22):
creating the business and the life that they desire to have.
I get it. and yet
how can we move forward if we
don't start reassessing our past and
disconnecting from it you're listening to success in
mind the show for high-performing leaders change makers and entrepreneurs ready
(00:43):
to take your life and business to the next level if you're ready for whole life
success keep listening the past
becomes a problem for us when we use it to shape and shadow our future.
So you might think that each day you're making decisions based on the reality
that's in front of you and based on what's best for your future.
(01:05):
The truth is that the majority of your decisions are being made based on something in the past.
And so the past really does become a projection for the future.
The past becomes a predictor of the future, because what you've done in the
past is likely to keep repeating again.
So often when business owners come to me, they come to
(01:26):
me because they're stuck or they're not
getting what they want they feel like they're spinning their wheels
and not moving any further ahead and they're
tired of playing the same loop over and over and over again and so they come
to me and then when I say okay we need to look at what's happened in the past
and disconnect these old decisions you've made in the past these old negative
(01:49):
emotions in the past so that you can move forward into the future you want they go go, ah,
I don't want to work on the past.
I don't want to look at the past. I just want to move forward.
But how can you move forward if you are projecting your past into the future?
How can you create anything different than what you already know without the past?
(02:13):
Now, our past has a place. Absolutely.
The past is rich in learning and in resources for us. So here's an example.
Let's say say that there's crack in your sidewalk and it's raised a little bit.
So one day you go for a walk and you trip and you fall forward.
(02:33):
Maybe you catch your balance, maybe you don't, but you trip there.
And so the next time you're out for a walk, you know there's a crack there because
you remember tripping and so you're going to be cautious about that area.
That's where the past is useful because you know, hey, there's a crack there.
Be mindful of it. Step over the crack.
But what if that past begins to inform every sidewalk you ever walk on?
(02:59):
And so you're constantly worrying now that you're going to trip on a crack and
you're going to, you're going to trip, you're going to fall forward.
And so every time you're out walking, you start to become hypervigilant.
And now you're not only mindful of the one crack that you tripped on,
now you are hyper-focused on every possible crack in the sidewalk.
(03:21):
And maybe it gets even worse, so now you become afraid to even walk on the sidewalk
because of the potential that you could trip, because the one time that you did trip.
Well, now the past has become a problem. So now it's limiting you from going
for walks, from enjoying being outdoors. doors.
Now it's becoming stressful and scary.
(03:42):
So we want to use the past as a place of learning so we can learn from our past
mistakes, we can learn from our past behavior and make new choices for the future.
But until we become conscious of the learnings, we tend to hold on to the negative
emotions from the past and that can become phobias, fears, limitations we put on ourselves.
(04:04):
We tend to to hold on to limiting decisions that we made in the past.
So for that example, the limiting decision could be sidewalks are scary.
Well, that's not going to help
you in the future, is it? If you avoid ever walking on a sidewalk again.
A good decision, a positive learning from the past might be there's a crack
(04:25):
on that sidewalk and I can easily step over it whenever I encounter it.
But a limiting decision would be sidewalks are scary and dangerous.
And we do this all the the time. And I know this is just a little example of
a sidewalk, but think about how this translates into your business.
So let's say in the past, you had a bad client experience.
(04:45):
Maybe it was really negative. Maybe it cost you a lot of money to resolve.
And so now every time you go into a consultation, you're terrified of another bad client.
So you stop, you stop taking on new clients.
Maybe you start really downselling your services.
Maybe you start lowering your rates and minimizing what you offer because you're
(05:09):
so afraid of something happening again.
Maybe you get out of the business entirely and you quit.
You stop doing what you love to do because you're so afraid that something bad could happen again.
Or let's look at maybe things that aren't even associated with your business
and how they might be holding you back.
When I was in the second grade, I had a teacher, Mrs.
(05:35):
Sartori, who didn't like me. For some reason, she just didn't like me.
She had taught my sister a couple years earlier, and she loved her. She hated me.
And we had a project to write a story, and I wrote a story about my dog.
But I had been reading the newspaper with my dad and I'd been really interested
(05:55):
in newspapers around that point to my childhood.
So I wrote my story like a newspaper article and I put it into columns,
like just the way that a newspaper article is written in columns.
I wrote my story in columns and she handed it back to me and said,
why would you write it like this?
And I said well I wrote it like a newspaper article
(06:17):
I might not have said it like that I would have said I wrote it like the newspaper
and she said well that's stupid and she wouldn't look at it and in my childhood
mind I made all kinds of decisions about not being creative about not not showing my work to people,
that I'm stupid, that I can't write.
(06:41):
And those decisions didn't really begin to come to the surface.
I mean, I realized that they had been holding me back, but I didn't realize
they had been holding me back until I was doing my NLP training.
And it was during my trainer's training of NLP training, which was an extremely intense training.
(07:03):
And I was so afraid of failing, of being stupid, of being wrong.
All of these things kept kept coming up.
And I was working with one of my friends, Mark, and I told him what was coming
up for me during this training.
And he said, well, where does that come from? When did you decide these things?
And all of a sudden, this memory that I had forgotten about, about Mrs.
Sartori, I mean, I knew it was there, but I hadn't really thought about it in so many years.
(07:29):
But this memory came up and it's like it smacked me right in the head.
And I said, oh, I decided this in the second grade.
And I told him what happened. And we did a process, a very advanced process
of NLP to release those limiting decisions so that I could move forward freely and easily.
(07:50):
And I started to think how many other times had that held me back in my business.
And I wasn't even aware until that moment.
I didn't even know that those limiting decisions were holding me me back.
And they probably stopped me from writing, from being more creative,
from experimenting, from trying new things and taking risks.
(08:11):
In fact, I know one example where it had held me back.
I wrote one blog about a hike my husband and I took up the Squamish Chief that's here in the.
It's here in BC in Canada and it's this hike up a mountain called the Chief.
(08:33):
It's in Squamish and it's kind of advanced.
It's really hard and I wrote a blog about what I learned during that hike because
I found it really challenging the hike and I wrote this blog about it and what
I learned from it and I got a great reception on this blog.
People really liked it. I was getting a lot of of responses to it.
(08:56):
So I decided to submit it to a very big online publication.
I won't say which one, but a really, really big one. Actually, I will say, why not?
I submitted it to HuffPost and I sent it right to Arianna Huffington.
I was feeling bold that day and I sent it right to her directly.
(09:16):
And she responded and said, I think this is a great article.
Send this to my editor. her and she attached the email, send this to them and
they'll follow up with next steps for you.
I think this is great. We'd love to publish it. And do you know what I did?
Absolutely nothing.
I stopped dead in my tracks. I never responded. I never put forward that article.
(09:43):
And as time went by, I kept telling myself, oh, you've got to follow up.
You've got to follow up. I never did until it felt like it was too late.
And I realized in my NLP training, as I was working through these limiting decisions
that went all the way back to the second grade and Mrs.
Sartori's class, I realized that's what stopped me.
I was so afraid of it being wrong, about I was, I was afraid that I was wrong,
(10:10):
that it wasn't good enough, that it was like all these these limiting decisions
that were packed into this one event in my life.
So that's one example of where it was holding me back. But how many other times
I bet you that that had stopped me in ways I haven't even considered yet from
moving forward, from taking risks, taking chances.
(10:30):
It kept holding me back. It probably, now that I think of it,
is the thing that stopped me in my my podcast.
And some of you already know this story that when I launched this podcast,
it grew very big, very fast.
And very quickly, I was number one in self-improvement on Apple.
(10:50):
And the first time I reached number one, it was a little bit shocking and strange
to me, but then I dropped down by the next day and I was in the top 10,
top 30, and I was fine with that.
And then several weeks later, a couple months later, I reached number one again.
And this time I held on to it for 10 days and I was seeing names like Brenda
(11:11):
Burchard trailing behind me and it scared me. It was too much. It was too big.
Who was I to have a voice? Who was I to have a message?
And I stopped recording for months and months.
I had people messaging me saying, where's your podcast? Where are you, Terry?
And I wouldn't respond to them. And I didn't come back until my best friend
(11:33):
Stefano said to me, hey, I need your podcast. Record them for me.
Just record them for me. That's it.
And I slowly came back, but it took me a long, long time to start recording consistently again.
And even then, I would start to get some traction again, and I would stop.
And I would have to pick myself up and
(11:56):
sit myself down in front of the mic and make myself start again you
know I think that that little girl in the second grade had something to do with
stopping the podcast those feelings of not being good enough of being wrong
of being being well I was going to say judged but it wasn't a feeling of judgment
(12:16):
it was a feeling of being wrong it was shame.
That was the feeling. It was shame. So think about where you're stuck in your
business or where you're repeating patterns over and over again.
It's not in the present that's holding you back. It's not decisions you're making now.
It's decisions you've made in the past that are informing what you do now because
(12:40):
you're so afraid of tripping over the crack in the sidewalk again that now you're
not even leaving the house and you're holding yourself back.
So what is that for you? So that's the work that I do with my clients.
And we do this through a process that starts with a discovery process where
we go through all this stuff in the past and you get to empty out about everything in your mind,
(13:04):
things that maybe you haven't even thought of talking about before start to spill out.
And that's where these clients often say to me, not always, but but often clients
say to me, do we have to do this?
I just want to, I just want to go forward into the future. I don't want to think about the past.
Well, here's the thing. You're already thinking about the past.
You're just not consciously aware of it.
(13:25):
You're already dwelling on the past. You just don't know it.
And so our past tends to inform our decisions. It tends to shape our future
and color it the same colors of the past.
Between now and the end of your life is an infinite number of probabilities.
(13:45):
But as long as the past is projecting forward and shaping the future,
you are limited to the probable outcomes that you can choose.
Those unlimited infinite number of probabilities begin to collapse down into only a few choices.
And so you think you have choice, but you don't really. you are narrowed down
(14:09):
to the choices that suit your expectations.
So if you really want to break free of that and carve out a new future,
which means making money like you've never made it before, which means having
success you've never achieved before,
which means getting clients that you've never had, doing things you've never done,
(14:30):
seeing yourself in ways that you've never considered.
If you want to be able to do that, then you need to break free of the past in
order to move forward into the future that you want.
Now again, your past is not something bad. Your past is rich of resources and
learning, and it's important for us to be able to decipher what's a learning,
(14:52):
what's a resource, versus a limiting decision or a negative emotion that we're
hanging onto from the past.
That's what clouds our judgment and it stops us from creating the future that you want.
And so if this is resonating with you, and if you're like, Terry,
you are speaking into my brain right now, you are speaking into my soul,
(15:14):
this sounds like me, then book a consultation call with me.
I'll put the link in the show notes to make it super easy for you.
But it's time to break free of all those things that are holding you you back,
keeping you small, stopping you from creating the life that you want.
And it's not the decisions you're making today. It's the decisions you've been
making for your entire lifetime that are informing how you make your decisions today.
(15:38):
They're the things that are telling you, hey, there's a crack in the sidewalk
somewhere out there. So don't you dare leave the safety of your house because you might trip and fall.
That's the stuff we need to clear out. That's the stuff we need to get rid of.
The learning is there's a crack in that sidewalk walk right there.
You tripped last time. Step over it this time.
That's all. That's all you need to know. So we go through this process and I
(16:01):
take my clients through a process of letting go of limiting decisions from the
past, which we've talked about.
And limiting decisions, some people call them limiting beliefs.
We say limiting decisions because if you didn't decide it, how do you believe it?
A limiting decision is much more of a powerful position. It's resourceful.
(16:22):
Saying it's a limiting decision now puts you in the driver's seat because if
you decided it, you can undecide it.
If you chose this, you can unchoose it. But if it's just a belief,
well, where did it come from?
And then it's too easy to say, well, my parents or that came from my teacher.
You know, I don't blame Mrs. Sartori for what happened that day.
(16:42):
I think she was doing the best she could with resources she had available at the time.
But they were my decisions, the choices I made.
And at the same time, I also don't blame myself for those decisions because
I was just a six-year-old, maybe seven-year-old girl who was working based on
the resources that she had at the time.
(17:04):
And so I was doing my best and Mrs. Sartori was doing her best.
And I made decisions that were going to impact me for the rest of my life.
Well, until I learned how to un-choose them and to let go of those decisions, I can move forward.
Now, I see this with my clients every day, and often it's a teacher who said something to them.
That's, oh, that comes up a lot with speakers when I'm working with professional
(17:27):
speakers or aspiring speakers,
and they say, well, I'm afraid of public speaking because one time in grade three,
I had to read something in front of the class and I pronounced a word the wrong
way and all the kids laughed at me and I was so embarrassed and I never wanted
to speak in public again.
But now they're a 42-year-old business owner who knows that speaking is going
(17:52):
to help grow his business or her business.
I see this with my podcasters all the time where they know they have something to share.
They know that but there's something inside of them that needs to come out.
And they want to have a podcast, but they're so afraid of what will they say about me?
What will they think? Who am I to have a voice and a message and a platform to share it on?
(18:16):
Because at some point in life, something happened and they decided that they
weren't worthy of a platform, that they weren't worthy of sharing their voice and their message.
When I was growing up, my nickname was Mouse because I was so shy. I was so quiet.
And I spent so much of my life trying to figure out why was I so quiet as a child?
(18:39):
Why was I so afraid of my voice?
And I couldn't figure it out. Even through learning NLP, I still,
I couldn't quite get to that.
And then one day, it came to me and it was, I was doing the same kind of work,
letting go of stuff in the past.
And I was exploring an early, early event in my childhood from when I was a
(19:04):
baby, using these techniques and this process.
And as I was going back to it, and I was looking for something else in my past.
I bumped up against this decision that my voice didn't matter.
And I thought, whoa, here it is.
I just stumbled into the thing that made me quiet as a kid, that took my voice away from me as a child.
(19:31):
And it was, I had a really bad reaction to a vaccine.
Spoiler alert, we're not going to go anti-vax here. I'm not going to get into that.
I'm just going to say I had a really bad reaction to a vaccine as a baby,
and it nearly took my life. I had to get a spinal tap.
Now, I don't consciously remember this event, but when I went back using regression
(19:55):
techniques through hypnotherapy and through NLP and timeline line therapy and
I went back to this event,
what I experienced was me as a baby on the table screaming at the top of my
lungs because of the pain of the spinal tap of getting a lumbar puncture and they weren't stopping.
(20:17):
Now I didn't make that decision linguistically. I didn't, I know as a baby,
I didn't say to myself, oh Terry, your voice doesn't matter.
It's not stopping anything.
But that's what it meant to me at the time. Without the language behind it,
that's what it meant that my screaming didn't work.
It didn't work. It didn't stop the pain.
And from that point on, I stopped using my voice.
(20:39):
Until in the third grade, the third grade, I was cast as a soloist in the Christmas concert.
And I got to say the punchline to a joke. and I was so excited because I didn't have to use my own words.
They were someone else's words and I was told where to stand and I was told
(21:00):
how to deliver the line. I got direction.
And I remember stepping up to that mic and belting out my line and the auditorium
that was full of family members and other students laughed.
And they laughed because I, this little mouse, I made them laugh. with my voice.
(21:23):
And that was powerful for me. And from that point on, I wanted one thing and
one thing only, and that was to be on stage, because on stage,
I felt safe to use my voice.
And then I would come off stage and I would disappear into this shy little mouse who was afraid to speak.
That followed me for decades.
I went to theater school to train to be a professional actor.
(21:46):
And I remember one of my teachers saying to me, you know,
his name was him and he said, Terry, I'm so fascinated by you because when you
go on stage, it's like this light turns on and you're absolutely captivating.
And then the moment you walk off stage, you disappear.
What happens to you? And I said, I don't know, Tim, this has been the story of my life.
(22:09):
And it wasn't until I learned NLP and I learned these tools.
And then I realized what was happening and how to start using my voice and how
to use my voice to communicate a message and share ideas and inspiration with the world.
And now I speak for a living professionally as a public speaker through my podcast. I train people.
(22:33):
I use my voice in hypnotherapy. I use my voice to create hypnotherapy recordings
that I offer on a platform called Aura, which, by the way, I'll also link in
the show notes in case you want to check out some of those.
But that was holding me back for a long time. And what I really wanted was to
be able to to express myself.
And now I can. So there are things that, you know, and by the way,
(22:58):
if you're listening to this and you're like, Terry, there's nothing holding
me back. I have everything I want in life.
My business is growing exactly the way I want. It's moving ahead the way I want.
I have the clients I want, the money I want, the lifestyle I want.
Everything is great. There is nothing missing.
Then maybe nothing's holding you back. And that's fantastic.
But if if you're listening to this and you're like, yeah, you know what?
(23:20):
Something is holding me back.
Something is stopping me from having the life that I want.
I keep spinning my wheels and going in circles and something just isn't connecting.
Something isn't working.
Then this is me telling you, book that consultation call with me and let's figure
it out so you can stop projecting that past,
(23:42):
into the future so that you can open up all
of those infinite outcomes for yourself and you can start choosing
like really choosing what you want in your future and creating a path to get
it that you're no longer being limited to the options in the future that are
just reflections and repeats of past behavior so that you can learn from your
(24:05):
past instead of being controlled by your past,
All right, those are just some things that were on my mind this week as I've
been working with some clients.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you got some value out of it.
Please share it with a friend who you think would benefit from it and leave
that five-star review if you did benefit from this, if you did get some value out of it.
(24:30):
Next week, I have a very exciting interview for you.
I mean, I get excited about all of my guests that come on, but this one was
a really special one for me.
Next week, I'm joined by Bob Berg, co-author of The Go-Giver and The Go-Giver
series of books, which if you have not read The Go-Giver and you are in business
(24:54):
or in leadership, you need to read The Go-Giver.
Or if you're a parent, I think there's great value in that for parents to teach
their kids as well. It's a simple book.
It's a story, a simple story about a powerful business idea.
I first read The Go-Giver in, I want to say 2018.
(25:15):
And it really informed how I do business and how I operate in my business.
I highly suggest it. I recommend it to almost all of my clients.
I have gifted it to many clients and many colleagues.
Because it is a powerful, powerful book. And I have read The Go-Giver,
The Go-Giver Sells More, The Go-Giver leader, and the GoGiver influencer.
(25:37):
And they are all fantastic books, very worthwhile reading.
And I have Bob Berg coming on the show. It's packed with so much value.
You've got to listen to this one.
I mean, you have to listen to all of them. Like, I don't know about you,
but I think that the guests that have come on this show are really exceptional people.
And you've got to listen to that one because he will really change your thinking
(26:02):
and you're going to learn a lot from Bob Berg on that episode.
So thank you so much again for joining me today. I hope you have a fantastic week.
And I look forward to talking with you again soon. Bye for now.
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