Episode 33 NLP & The Power of the Mind with Vassil Karamanov

Oct 20, 2021

Have you heard of neuro-linguistic programming? What is a quick NLP mindset strategy you can use to overcome anxiety? How does one overcome limiting beliefs?

MEET VASSIL KARAMANOV

Vassil is a Transformation Life Coach. His holistic skillset includes being a Master NLP Practitioner, Master TIME Techniques Practitioner, Hypnotherapist, EFT Practitioner, and Meditation Teacher.

Vassil aims to help people break through and experience massive transformations in all areas of life such as Health (physical+emotional+mental), Career, Relationships, and Personal Development.

He specializes in helping people step into massive action, eliminate bad habits and regain control of their power. His approach explores stepping into the higher self and tapping into the flow state.

Visit Vassil’s website. Connect with him on Instagram, Youtube, and LinkedIn.

IN THIS PODCAST:

  • What is NLP?
  • Coaching versus therapy
  • Thoughts and body

What is NLP?

NLP can simply be defined in two ways; understanding how the brain works, and the science of excellence.

What NLP is is they took some of the most successful therapists, psychotherapists, and hypnotherapists from the last couple of decades and they looked at what worked. What were they doing with their patients that created lasting results? From that field NLP was born, neuro-linguistic programming. (Vassil Karamanov)

NLP helps people deal with life’s opportunities and challenges. The strategies taught in NLP can be used in treating mental health issues because it focuses on what causes the problems that people deal with, and what is obstructing their thought processes.

The tools provided by NLP help people move away from their ego and allow them to adopt other perspectives to their life which helps them to approach their problems in different, more constructive ways.

Coaching versus therapy

Therapy requires many years of schooling, and it works under strict sets of regulations and laws, whereas coaching is more open-ended, and not bound to the same level of regulation.

With coaching, you still need to be aware of what is beneficial for the client. If the client is dealing with depression and anxiety, coaching may not help, and they need to be referred out to a therapist.

Clients can get the most out of coaching if their goals are to overcome their fears, change their life, and start building productive and healthy habits. Therapy and coaching can work together: coaching can elevate the understandings achieved in therapy.

Thoughts and body

Research has shown that negative thoughts create negative responses in the body. A negative thought is processed for seven seconds in the brain before the body releases hormones, such as cortisol, in response to the stress-inducing idea.

In this state, we are not our best, and we cannot perform and live our lives in ways that allow us to grow and mature.

Guilt, sadness, or jealousy, those are emotions that we can’t create … we can’t be our best selves or be in a flow state or bring our best personality [when we feel them]. No, it brings out the worst personalities, and that is why [negative thoughts] are important to [heal] because they can be slowing you down your whole life. (Vassil Karamanov)

Your mind may hold onto limiting beliefs because it is trying to protect you from the hurt you may have experienced in the past. Releasing them is the key to helping you move forward.

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Resources Mentioned And Useful Links:

BOOK | John E. Sarno – Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

Best Practices for Using Tarot Cards in Counseling Sessions, with Paula Spare

Yoga Revealed Website

Free 8 Week Email Course with Lisa Lewis

Practice of the Practice Podcast Network

Transcript

[CHRIS MCDONALD]

The Holistic Counseling Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Behind the Bite, Full of Shift and Impact Driven Leader, go to www.practiceofthepractice.com/network.

Welcome to the Holistic Counseling Podcast, where you discover diverse wellness modalities, advice on growing your integrative practice, and grow confidence in being your unique self. I'm your host, Chris McDonald. I'm so glad you're here for the journey. .

Welcome back to the Holistic Counseling Podcast. So glad you're here with me today. I'm your host, Chris McDonald. I heard today's guest on another podcast called Yoga Revealed, which, if you haven't heard it yet, it's awesome. You should tune in. I was totally sucked in and knew this guest would be perfect for my show. His name is Vassil Karamanov. He teaches people how to organize their neurology for maximum performance. He's a Master NLP Practitioner, Master TIME Techniques Practitioner, Master Success Coach, Hypnotherapist, EFT Practitioner, and meditation teacher. He's here today to talk about NLP and the power of the mind. Welcome to the podcast Vassil.

[VASSIL KARAMANOV]

Hey, thank you, Chris. I'm really excited to have a powerful conversation with you about the mind and anything else that we talk about.

[CHRIS]

Absolutely. Can you tell my listeners more about yourself and your work?

[VASSIL]

Absolutely. Well, the main thing that you heard was NLP. I am a Master NLP Practitioner. Let's give you the two easiest definitions that we can ever describe it with. the first one would be the last user manual of the brain. It's literally understanding how your brain works and the other really easy definition would be the science of excellent. So what NLP is they took some of the most successful therapists, psychotherapists and hypnotherapists from the last couple of decades and they looked at what worked, what were they doing with their patients that created lasting results. And from that was born the field of NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming. So literally NLP is a modeling approach that offers a toolkit of techniques for dealing with life's opportunities and challenges.

[CHRIS]

I like that, life's opportunities and challenges, so it can work with both. So if somebody wants to improve something in their life, they can still use this.

[VASSIL]

Yes, absolutely. And a lot of your listeners, they're probably, they love mindset, they probably love self care, one of the gurus, when Doug guru, when it comes to coaching and mindset, is Tony Robbins. Have you heard of ---

[CHRIS]

Yes.

[VASSIL]

Okay. So Tony Robbins started with Reiki then he got NLP certified. As soon as he got NLP certified, he literally went into, the story is the closest fast food restaurant and he did NLP on people for like hours and hours. He says like, the game that we play in life is going to be determined by just how well we play the inner game. I, myself am a coach and I said, okay, well, if I'm going to be helping people with transformations, breakthroughs, then I need to study what the best studied, Tony. So I started diving into NLP and I started falling in love with it. With NLP, we can give people quick transformation. So it doesn't have to take months or years or decades to get results of lingo, of negative emotions or limiting decisions or anything like that that might be holding back and making you feel stuck. It can happen just one session.

[CHRIS]

That's incredible. That's really positive too, to know that there's something that can work that quickly because it seems like a lot of things are deep ingrained and it can take a long time, especially coming from the therapist's viewpoint, take a lot of time, energy commitment to really work through.

[VASSIL]

Absolutely. And yes, of course there's therapists that help out, that have helped many people get through tough times. And this is just another approach of therapy is not the right thing for you. At some point during our podcast, I do have a few NLP techniques that are extremely simple. I can give to your audience that they can use in their life.

[CHRIS]

That would be great. And then definitely, they could probably use them with their clients too.

[VASSIL]

Yes, for sure.

[CHRIS]

Excellent. So I'm guessing with the NLP, so this is something that's not just for coaching. This can be used in mental health therapy as well?

[VASSIL]

Oh God, yes.

[CHRIS]

Okay. So, I guess, is there a different way to use it with mental health or is it just the same kind of approach?

[VASSIL]

So what is your definition of mental health?

[CHRIS]

Mental health issues, I'm guessing like mental health counseling, because our listeners are mental health counselors, therapists, like anxiety, depression, those kind of things.

[VASSIL]

Yes. It could definitely be used for mental health because it's finding out what is causing people those problems. Why do people have problems and why do they have anxiety? Why do they have depression? There's a reason why that is and of course there's infinite reasons why that could be, but a lot of times it could be something that is figurable, something that you can figure out. It's just by looking at it through a different approach. So with NLP, we take ourselves out of our mind's eye and we start looking at the world in all kinds of different scenarios. So we'll look at through someone else's point of view and another person's point of view and just everybody's point of view. And when you start doing that, you in a way disassociate from the ego a little bit and you start taking in new learning lessons that you would have been completely blind to before.

[CHRIS]

That's fascinating because I never thought of it that way to really look at all the different perspectives. And I would think that could be therapeutic in the process itself.

[VASSIL]

That literally is one of the secrets to healing and coaching and NLP. I did say healing, but what I do is I don't help people heal and I don't even help people. I guide people. I guide people find the answers. So that's what I do.

[CHRIS]

Okay, so you're like the facilitator to help them find the healing within themselves?

[VASSIL]

Absolutely.

[CHRIS]

Which we do some of that too. Exactly, for sure. So I know you said you really like to work on being the master coach. So is there a difference between what you think is coaching and what is therapy?

[VASSIL]

Yes, absolutely. Well with therapy, you have a lot of regulations that you have to follow. You have to go to school for a certain amount of time and with coaching, it's not that regulated. There's a lot of different coaching boards that you can join. I am a member of the IBCP, International Board of Coaches and I'm certified through Transform Destiny. So I have all my certifications through there. So there are not as many regulations when you are a coach. Then you do have to be careful who, what kind of people you are helping. If someone comes to me that does seem to have a lot of mental imbalances or depression, I would need to send that person out to a therapist, someone that specializes in that. But for the most part, if it's someone just having some problems in life, they're not happy or they want to take their performance to a new level, they want to face some of their fears, they want to find that passion and motivation and empowerment and find their purpose, then I'm definitely the right person for them.

[CHRIS]

I noticed, and we talked before we hit record that you have an eight-hour, was it a transformation session? Can you talk about what that is?

[VASSIL]

Yes. This is why I now call myself a breakthrough coach.

[CHRIS]

Breakthrough coach, that's the word. Sorry, my brain wasn't working for a second.

[VASSIL]

I offer an eight-hour breakthrough session. So this can either be on Zoom or it can be in person and it involves an area of life. So first we have to pick an area of life, whether it is, career and finance is one, family relationships, personal growth and development, health, and fitness or spirituality. And once someone comes to me with a problem, we find out which life area it fits in and then we dive in. Then the breakthrough session, there is a lot that I will explain about how NLP works and what NLP is and we take a deep dive on questions that are very specific to that life area. I will start like a detective uncovering certain things that they are saying and just by their answers, I will be able to figure out what emotions are, holding them back, what negative emotions have they been living with, what limiting beliefs are stopping them getting to where they need to be to their level of success.

What is their level of success? What is that mean to them? Also, a lot of times people can get stuck in life when they are conflicted about something. So one part of your mind wants something, but then another part of your mind wants you to stay safe and is trying to protect you. So it doesn't want that thing. And then that causes so much frustration and overwhelm and as a result, people just end up going in circles and circles and circles. And there's even NLP exercises to completely get rid of confliction so that you could get clear and that feels incredible when that happens.

[CHRIS]

So I noticed that was your ideal client is people who procrastinate, feel stuck, feel lost, not good enough. So there's some activities that you do with that then that helps them get unstuck. So what are limiting beliefs that, and how do you help with one? What would be an example of one?

[VASSIL]

Limiting beliefs? The fear of not being good enough, the fear of judgment. A lot of fears are limiting beliefs. So let me give you an example. The fear of judgment. There was a woman that I was working with that was in her forties. She has a daughter, she's married and her whole life, she basically suffered with the fear of judgment and she couldn't get over it. When someone has that fear of judgment, you are constantly in your head, you're worried about what people will say and when you go out, you're wondering what people are saying and you're bombarded by all these thoughts in your mind that you just can't relax and you're always on guard. And because of that, a lot of times you actually end up imagining scenarios that are not even reality. People tend to have this fear of judgment about the gym. People that don't work out or haven't worked out in years, they sometimes are afraid to go to the gym because they think if they are overweight or obese or are out of shape and they start working out with a lot of fit people, then everyone around them that is fit working out will be laughing at them or making fun of them silently behind their back when this is definitely not the case. But however people think this ---

[CHRIS]

That's their reality. They think that's the truth.

[VASSIL]

That is their reality. So what happened when we dug into hers for the fear of judgment was we found out that the first time she ever, ever, ever, ever developed the fear of judgment, which is called gestalt, a gestalt is the first time you experience an emotion or something for the first time. For humans, the most common time to experience this is in the imprint period between zero to seven years old when your brain isn't fully developed yet. So just imagine the first time you ever experienced like anger or sadness and when you were three years old, maybe then all of a sudden it was such a shock that you decided to form barriers in your mind. And then now, depending on what you experienced, it could be easily brought on. So the key is to find out the first time you ever experienced negative emotions and even emitting beliefs and fears.

So for her, we figured out that her father was a character, a very humorous character, but he was very sarcastic. And what he grew up with doing was he would make fun of a lot of people. It was just his way of joking around and she saw her father doing that and when she listened to that and when she saw it, she didn't want people to make fun of her like that. She didn't want her father to make even fun of her like that. So she decided to keep true to herself and not talk much and not show her true personality and always think about what she's going to do or say way too much where she developed this fear of judgment.

And then what we ended up realizing after we looked into her past was her dad wasn't a bad guy. That was just his way of building rapport with people. That was just how he communicated with people. But to her, that was wrong. So we found out that for her, it's through love. She's definitely an empath and now that she realized that she was able to completely let go of the fear of judgment, which is really good, because that was one of her goals since she has a daughter and she didn't want her daughter also mimicking that behavior.

[CHRIS]

I know of judgment. I see that in a lot of my clients. It is really strong for some people and it can be a challenge for them to overcome that, to kind of work through that even in therapy.

[VASSIL]

The fear of judgment is a pretty horrible one because as soon as you start thinking, most of the time you start thinking about the worst case scenario. Like, oh, people are judging me. They're going to think I'm, what are you saying? They're going to think I'm stupid. They're going to think I'm going to embarrass myself. They think I'm ugly. Those are some of like the most horrible ones right there. So as soon as you start thinking that what happens is, first of all, you saw something in the world that made you think of that. So some kind of sense came in. You either saw something, you smelled something, you heard something and now it led through a thought pattern. So this thought pattern goes in your head and it takes seven seconds for it to process and to really these hormones in your body, which literally make you feel horrible, which make you stressed out, releases cortisol, for example.

And then when you start having all those hormones released through your body, now you're feeling sad. Now you're feeling angry. Now you're feeling low. These are all low energy vibrations and when somebody's feeling low energy like that, whatever it is, guilt or sadness or jealousy, those are emotions that we can't create with those emotions. We can't be our best selves or be in flow state and bring our best personality. No, that brings one of our worst personalities out. And that's why this is such an important thing to completely get rid of because it could be stall you down your whole life and you don't even realize it.

[CHRIS]

And I found too, it just causes a lot of the anxiety, a huge amount of anxiety and makes it hard to go forward in life.

[VASSIL]

Yes. Speaking of anxiety, so that is one of the tools, a very simple tool that I wanted to give. So there is a very simple tool that you can use to get rid of anxiety. Would you agree that anxiety, when somebody has anxiety, they are either living in the past or living in the future?

[CHRIS]

A lot the future.

[VASSIL]

Yes, a lot of times the future and what are they doing?

[CHRIS]

Usually ruminating about something that's coming up.

[VASSIL]

Exactly. All right. So this is the thing. In NLP, we have something called time techniques. So time techniques is a modality that combines the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. And the first thing you have to do is figure out which direction your timeline of your life goes. So in order to do this, I want to guide you through this for a second, Chris, I want you to just close your eyes and take one deep breath, breathe an opportunity, breathe out any stress. Good. Now, every single person has a timeline, your past, your present and your future. I want you to think about where you were this weekend, ne memory that comes from this weekend, something you are doing, maybe eating, maybe you were out somewhere with people. I want you to notice that memory. Where do you think that is? I want you to take your right hand with your pointer finger, and I want you to point in the direction that you feel that your past is.

[CHRIS]

So my past with the memory or?

[VASSIL]

Hmm.

[CHRIS]

Okay.

[VASSIL]

Where do you think your past is?

[CHRIS]

What does it feel like? So I put it on my chest.

[VASSIL]

On your chest, okay. So does that possibly mean that it's behind you? So the different directions that we can have it is forwards, backwards, left, fight, diagonal, up and down. What about, let's see, for you close your eyes and imagine an event coming up for you in the future. Maybe it's this week, maybe it's next week. Think of one event that is coming up. Which direction is it?

[CHRIS]

In front of me.

[VASSIL]

There we go. So that is the direction of your specific timeline. It's very personalized. Your timeline is behind you and in front of you, the past is behind you and your future is in front of you. So that's the first thing that we have to establish for people so it could be very personalized. Now, go ahead and close your eyes again. And I want you to imagine something coming up in the future, that there might be a little bit of anxiety about in the future. Do you have anything like that? Tell me yes or no. Is there something tiny that you may, I mean, you might have something with a lot of anxiety. Maybe you don't have anxiety at all, but can you think of something in the future that has a little bit of anxiety?

[CHRIS]

Being on other people's podcast to be a guest gives me anxiety. I'd rather be the interviewer.

[VASSIL]

There we go. I want you to imagine maybe six months from now, you will be a guest on a podcast where there will be many, many viewers, many listeners. So that right there normally should give you some anxiety, right?

[CHRIS]

Absolutely.

[VASSIL]

Now I want you to think about your timeline, float up into the present moment, turn around and face forward. And I want you to travel all the way forward to let's say that event where you are a guest on someone else's podcast and it's a big podcast. And now what I want you to do is travel to 15 minutes past the completion of that podcast episode and tell me, how does it feel 15 minutes past the completion of that event.

[CHRIS]

The word that comes to mind is relief. It's like breathe out.

[VASSIL]

Yes. So now I want you to just float it up, turn around and come back to this present moment and open your eyes. Beautiful. So the key, if any of your viewers want to eliminate anxiety, is you just imagine 15 minutes past the completion of the event that is giving you anxiety, simple and effective.

[CHRIS]

I do feel calmer. Amazing. Oh that's really cool because I think that is a good mindset strategy too, to really think about that and connect with that, being in that place instead of staying in the place of anxiety because that's where I think people get stuck. Overall it's staying in that place of anxiety.

[VASSIL]

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

[CHRIS]

And I love the simplicity of that. It's not too difficult to remember or think through that.

[VASSIL]

Yes. It's one of the easiest, NLP techniques, but it's simple, but it's extremely powerful. And a lot of that I've thought it to, they use it and they love it.

[CHRIS]

When you said to think about something like in the past that happened like this weekend, you said to point somewhere. So that, you're just trying to find their frame of reference for the past? Was that what you were doing?

[VASSIL]

Yes, we were trying to find out which direction your past is.

[CHRIS]

Interesting. Okay, so I never thought of it that way. So everybody's got different directions.

[VASSIL]

For some people it's, their future might be up and their past might be down or their future might be right and their past might be left.

[CHRIS]

Huh? Wow. So I take it you found a lot of success using this technique with people.

[VASSIL]

This technique is my favorite technique. With it I have been able to completely eliminate anger, sadness, fear, guilt, any kind of fear, any kind of limiting beliefs and decisions. So it is my favorite technique.

[CHRIS]

Yes. That's pretty powerful. So you said a time technique. I know you said you're a time techniques practitioner. So is there other things involved with being a time techniques practitioner?

[VASSIL]

Yes. Well, so I just, yes, the time techniques practitioner is, I just mentioned some of those. So with the time techniques, you can help, you can guide people to experience new learnings and you can restructure certain memories so they can let go of stuff that has been holding them their whole life. Somebody experienced something pretty bad when they were younger and they're trapped, negative emotions there. Those negative emotions live in your unconscious mind your whole life. Sometimes they end up even reminding you, "Hey, I'm over here. You need to work on me." But we don't know how. So that's where that comes in. So it could definitely be used for that limiting decisions. So a limiting decision is the first time you decided to believe something like I'm not good enough. Okay, well, I'll give you, can I give you an example of one of those?

[CHRIS]

Go ahead.

[VASSIL]

So someone I was working with, he had the belief that he wasn't good enough. He is literally in his mid fifties, a man and he has two brothers. The older brother is someone he always looked up to. After we did, while we were doing time techniques, we realized that the first time he ever experienced the limiting decision, I am not good enough where he developed it in his mind was whenever his older brother was hanging out with him and then his older brother decided that he was going to go hang out with another one of his friends, so he said, "Can I come too?" And his brother said, no. So then in his mind as a child, he decided that he wasn't good enough. That's why his brother didn't allow him because he just wasn't good enough to hang out with his brother and his friend.

From that moment it was born. That's called a limiting decision and you hear a lot of people talking about limiting beliefs. So that what's the difference between a limiting belief and a limiting decision; is the first time it ever developed is called a limiting decision. And that's what I look for when I work with people. Once we find that, then we look at it from different perspectives and we try to take main learning lesson. It's because your mind is maybe holding onto that because it thinks it's trying to protect you, but it's not serving you anymore. So there is a key learning lesson there, maybe even two. Sometime there's two or three key learning lessons. And whenever you find those key learning lessons and then you can apply them for the rest of your life. You can completely let go of the limiting decisions and the negative emotions.

[VASSIL]

So that's an example right there. And then we can also use time techniques for future pacing. So future pacing is imagining a scenario that you want to achieve. It's literally like a visualization where we go into the future in your timeline and we watch, you achieve it, like you're watching a movie. So you see yourself in the screen and you try to experience it with as many of your senses as possible. And there's certain things that I guide you through and that I say, we get answers from your intuition. This is one of the most powerful techniques right here, because right when it's done, people end up feeling extremely empowered. A lot of times they end up getting some interesting downloads and answers that they've been looking for.

[CHRIS]

Visualization is so powerful. I've used that a lot with clients too. It really can make a huge difference in where they want to go and how they can get there. You never know what can come up. That's pretty powerful stuff, isn't it?

[VASSIL]

It's really powerful stuff. I love it. I'm obsessed with it.

[CHRIS]

I can tell. So I know we're moving along in our time. So I wanted to get to your back pain because I'm someone that's had back pain all my life and tried so many things. And as I told you before, I just had fault starts as far as, oh, this can work. Oh, you got to try this. And of course, nothing works permanently for me. So how were you able to heal your back pain with your mind?

[VASSIL]

Well, so about five years ago, I ended up hurting my back. I started after I had a deadlift session at the gym with one of my friends and the next day it was just excruciating. So I went to massage therapists, chiropractors. They couldn't help me. I went into two different physical therapists. They couldn't help me. More chiropractors. It was herniated discs. So after trying doctors for about a year, I went to get advice from a surgeon and he looked at my MRI. It was like, how are you even walking right now? You need to get going to surgery. Well, that's not like an easy surgery. There's long recovery from something like that and you're gambling your health. So there's a chance that it could get better. There's a chance that it could stay the same and there's a chance that you could make it even worse.

I did not want to gamble that. So I was working for myself and I decided that I was going to heal holistically, no matter how long it took. I started diving into personal development, meditation, NLP and how the mind works, Joel Spenza, like listening to just as many powerful mindset stories as I could. After about, I lived in pain for pretty much like three to four years. So it became normal. It was pretty sad. But finally I came across a book called Healing Back Pain by John Sarno. He mentions that a lot of physical injuries that the human body can go through, we have the ability within three to six months to heal all the way, most of the time, depending on the injury, especially if it's a back, especially if it's back pain.

So mine at this point had been four years and what was happening, why was it still there? What was happening was in the beginning a lot of the doctors that I went to, they told me don't bend over. You're going to make your herniated disc worse. Don't lift weights. You're going to make it worse. I mean, they even told me not to do yoga. I couldn't do anything and I was just standing for a while for like 30 minutes, was hurting my back, laying down a while I was hurting my back. I couldn't run. And when I would start to feel a little bit better and better, then I would be reminded don't do that because you can make it worse. So I just started living in all this fear of always hurting my back and making it even worse. That was a pattern that was built.

In NLP we talk about patterns, these beliefs. Unfortunately, the doctors that were helping me out in the beginning, and it's what they studied, they had programmed me not to hurt myself, which ended up causing me to live in fear. And every time I was living in fear, my brain was reducing blood flow to my back, which created the back pain. This is called TMS, tension myositis syndrome. It can happen with a lot of different things. It can happen with ulcers. It can happen with other illnesses. And a lot of illnesses can happen from certain emotions that people have been putting off. So in this case I was already healed, but I didn't want to keep, I didn't want to reinjure myself. As soon as I went into that fear state my brain literally reduced blood flow, which caused real pain.

I was able to figure out the right things that I needed to say to my conscious mind, so I can rewire my mind. And there's 12 particular things that I have to say to myself from the book and I had to continue reading them for a few weeks. Ever since then, I have had zero back pain. I mean, I've been working out, jogging, swimming, you name it, yoga. I'm doing yoga all the time and yoga's taken it even to a new level now because I've improved the blood flow in my body now because of yoga, because of the range of motion. So that literally was the key.

[CHRIS]

That's so inspiring though, because you hear about treatments and things and sometimes it's hard for people, I know for me and for other people to know where to go. But that's great to hear that. So inspiring that you were able to find success with that. Because I don't know if I've ever heard anyone really say that they've helped heal their back pain. Usually, it could be a chronic thing.

[VASSIL]

That's right. Well, yes, it was a chronic thing. And then right after I healed it was also a mindset shift for everything because I found someone that I started dating and I fell in love and then I decided to move to Austin and my life just, I started to go on this winning streak and it felt weird because for about four or five years, I was living in pain and pain was normal. So then my mind was, this is one of those things, my mind was trying to say, how long is this going to last? Do you deserve this? This is too good to be true. But I had to catch that because if I give that trap self power, then that's what can it could, it could reverse it. Literally it could go wrong again.

And I talk with a lot of my clients, is the trap self versus the heroic self. We have those two voices that trap off that, always talks us down and tells us we can't do something, that we're ugly and that we're stupid. And then you have the heroic self that tells you, you should do this, pushes you to do your goals and it inspires you and tells you to focus on your self-care. With a lot of my coaching, I teach people how to eliminate the trap self to a degree to where you can take away its power, and there's a lot of different techniques, and give power to your heroic self. That's where you start to feel empowered when you start listening to your heroic self.

[CHRIS]

So being careful which one that you feed.

[VASSIL]

Yes.

[CHRIS]

That's huge for sure. Now that makes a lot of sense. Now that sounds like an interesting book too. I'll see if I can find it and put it in the show notes because I would love to be able to share that and see if we can help other people with that. So do you have any other takeaway or advice you could share today that might help other people who may be just starting their holistic journey?

[VASSIL]

Yes. If you're just starting your holistic journey, just know that it's possible. Whatever you're looking for, if you're trying to heal holistically, it's possible. The answer is out there. I would suggest networking with a lot more holistic people. Keep listening to podcast like this, that are just very educational and empowering and teach you about the power of the mind. And there is a formula called the empowerment formula. It's called cause is greater than effect. This is what this means; is, have you noticed that in life, the norm for a lot of people is if they don't like where they're at, they're blaming the people that they grew up with, their parents, their friends, their environment, their finances, their jobs. They're living as victims. What does that result in? Feeling stuck?

So for anyone listening right now, if you literally feel stuck right now in some part of your life, I want you to really think about it. Are you living in effect? Are you looking at the reasons? Are you a victim of your past? And if you are, I want you to really challenge yourself to transition over to cause which means that now you are taking control. You realize that yes, you can't always control the environment and the people, but we can control how we react to it and we can take action. So if something negative happens to you or if some kind of problem happens to you, you need to say, what can I do next time so this doesn't happen again. What can I do better next time and then move on instead of just wallow and live as a victim forever and ever, and ever, and feeling stuck. Because that's not going to help you and that's not going to help your loved ones. That's the key, the empowerment formula; you want to go from living in effect to living at cause.

[CHRIS]

Empowerment. That's the key, empowering yourself. And knowledge is power too and I think the more you can learn and experiment with and see what works for you, that's the key too.

[VASSIL]

Absolutely. Never stop learning.

[CHRIS]

Yes, for sure. So what's the best way for listeners to find you and learn more about you?

[VASSIL]

So definitely look at the show notes so you can see how to spell my name. It's Bulgarian. It's a really long name, but I would love it if you check me out on Instagram, take a look at my website. It'll be linked on there. So Instagram and Facebook are my two favorite ways to connect with people and of course, yes, check out my website.

[CHRIS]

Excellent. Thanks for coming on today, Vassil.

[VASSIL]

Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation.

[CHRIS]

Yes, this was great.

[VASSIL]

Loved your podcast.

[CHRIS]

Thank you so much. And thank you to my listeners for continuing to support the show. Please take the time today, if you have not yet to subscribe, rate and review wherever you get your podcast. And once again, this is Chris McDonald's sending each one of you much light and love. Take care.

If you're loving the show, will you rate review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform? We just started this and that helps other people find this show. Also, if you're feeling uncertain about your modalities and you want to build your confidence to be your unique self, why don't you to join my free email course, Becoming a Holistic Counselor over at holisticcounselingpodcast.com.

In my Becoming a Holistic Counselor course, you'll get tips for adding integrative care into your practice, what training you need and don't, and the know-how to attract your ideal holistic clients. If this sounds like the direction you are headed, sign up at holisticcounselingpodcast.com.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.

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