BAE - Visa
===
BAE - Visa: [00:00:00] Today I am here with Visa Shana Gum, who is a life and confidence coach, as well as a breathwork expert who specializes working with South Asian women to eliminate self-doubt, procrastination, and perfection so that they can reclaim their confidence and magic. So Visa was just telling me that she actually quit a very fancy job at Microsoft.
To pursue this journey of self-development and going through her own journey and now helps people who, has walked a very similar path to go here. I'm, so excited to hear about the story. Visa, welcome to the show [00:00:30] and yeah, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you.
I am so excited to be here. Oh my gosh. Yeah, me too. I'm so excited to have you. Visa, can you tell us a little bit, about your background and your journey, how you got here? Yeah, absolutely. So I was the typical Indian girl who earned the reputation of being the good girl. Like I was always so good at school and I prided myself on that reputation of just being good, right?
And I did all the things you're supposed to do to create the happy life, which is go to [00:01:00] school, do your best, get into a great college, then go get a job that pays you really well. And then get married and have kids. I literally did all of it in that order and then I just kept waking up with, I had two babies and I just kept waking up and I kept thinking, oh my God.
Like I've done everything I'm supposed to do, but I'm unhappy, but there was really nothing wrong with my marriage, and I had my health, so I had everything on paper that looked fantastic. But on the inside, I literally felt like it's gonna sound very dramatic, like I was dying. [00:01:30] my God. every day I would wake up and I would think, surely there's more to life than this.
the amount of shame that came attached with that thought was. Also horrible. So to how you started off the podcast of I had a job at Microsoft at this point, and from the outside it was everything. Like people were coveting it, right? Oh my God, you work for Microsoft, amazing benefits, amazing pay, whatever.
And I thought, no, it's the job that's making me really unhappy. So I thought, I'm gonna quit this job, which [00:02:00] at the time sounded absolutely crazy and impulsive, but I didn't know what else to do. So I did that and that didn't make me happy because now I was lonely and not making any money.
So then I thought, I'll just go start a business. That's what I need to do. I need to make money. That'll make me happy. So then I started a business, which wasn't my coaching business at the what I'm currently doing? It was a sleep consulting business. I did that for a couple of years.
Still unhealthy hold, say sleep consulting business. Yeah, it was teaching parents with young babies how to [00:02:30] sleep independently so they weren't sleep deprived. Oh my gosh. Okay. I, want to hear more about that, but let's start from the beginning. So you said that you were from India originally, is that right?
Yeah. And whereabouts in India? I. I grew up in the south of India. Tamilnadu is the state that I grew up in, and I lived there till I was 11, and then I moved to the uk. ' cause my dad decided he wanted to pursue his career there. And then I got married and then I moved to the us. So when, you were in the, did you do your schooling in the UK or in the us?
It was both in India [00:03:00] and the uk and then when I came to the US I was doing my MAs. I decided to do my master's here in the US after I got married. Got it. What, did you do your master's in? I got an M B A, he was a master's in business admin. Oh, wow. Okay, great. So like you literally were checking off all the good Asian kid boxes, weren't you?
I really was. I was like top three in undergrad, top 10 in M B A like in terms of where I graduated. So, you did the thing that your parents expected. You're growing up. You went to the top, you're top of your class, you graduated, you [00:03:30] got a job at Microsoft.
What were you doing at Microsoft? I was in digital advertising, so I had the fancy job of whining and dining clients and trying to win. Oh my God. Yeah. Seriously. That's a really coveted job. I could hear in the back of my head, my parents looking at me going we told you to go to the M B A.
Like, why didn't you do that? So this is an interesting thing because you, up until this point, you are the success story of, I wouldn't imagine so many parents. Having immigrated all the way to different countries to first and foremost, to the UK and then to America, then to see.
I'm so [00:04:00] curious. I wish that I could ask your parents how, what their thoughts were about when you quit your job, but I'm sure we can get into that. then to see you here in North America get into this fancy digital advertising job at Microsoft. And then one day you just woke up and you said, no, I'm done with it.
Yeah. I wouldn't say it was a one day, it was several months of just this, I don't know how to say it. It's you know when you're ringing a t-shirt, like a wet t-shirt and you're just. Twisting and it's getting pulled in different directions. I would say that was probably akin to what I was feeling [00:04:30] on the inside.
Oh my. 'cause there was this incredible job that supported us financially, what Helping us save for retirement, for a kid's college, pay for our mortgage, our vacations, everything. And then there was a part of me that said, that doesn't matter because you're so deeply unhappy. Let it go. And I was like, which one do I listen to?
Yeah. And it must have been scary, I'd imagine, right? You had this very secure, very stable job. Did you think about let me just keep toughing it out, [00:05:00] and I think that the biggest thing is you had kids as well, and I think so many parents who have kids go through that moment of, yes, I hate my job, but few, actually take that So I wanna come back to that moment. I, want to hear about that, moment where you decided that morning of just, I'm done and I'm writing this letter of resignation. I'm submitting it. What was that day like for you? That day was actually filled with a lot of shame and guilt. it was choosing between what I thought was going to lead to my happiness.
I thought quitting my job would lead me to my happiness. [00:05:30] Or choosing. The happiness of my own family. to me, it felt like a zero sum game. If I chose my happiness, it meant that I was letting my family down. Wow. And if I chose my family, it felt like I was letting myself down, which is why I felt so ashamed and so guilty because ultimately I chose me.
And that felt incredibly selfish. Especially as a woman, when you're told that. It's okay. Your happiness comes from your family's happiness. That's what I was fed. The messaging we are [00:06:00] told is women, right? Our worth comes from how happy do you make your family? And so when I decided to choose myself, it was going against everything that I had learned, picked up along the way from my culture, from my family, from generations.
Yeah. did your family support the decision at the time or was there a lot naysay back and forth? So my parents are really amazing in the sense that once I was married, they don't really get involved in family decisions. They're not nosy in that sense.
I'm sure they were shocked and [00:06:30] they probably thought I was making a terribly wrong decision, which I would come to regret Lisa, but they would say things like, are you sure? You can't get this job back once you let it go. So really loving things, but you can tell like what is the messaging behind it.
And then there was my husband, we've been married for almost 20 years and I have been incredibly blessed with the type of man I chose to marry. It was an arranged marriage. that's a whole nother episode in itself. But he's one of the really good guys. He was confused.
He was [00:07:00] shocked. He didn't really like the decision I was making, but he also said we'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. And so many of the decisions I've made since then have not made any sense to him.
I'd imagine for a lot of people it would definitely I'm, sitting here thinking about that because what it sounds like it was a decision made between kind of this idea of, let me pursue my passion or let me pursue something that my heart really sings to, and this path that you work so hard to get.
And props to your husband, first and foremost. 'cause I, think a lot of people's partners [00:07:30] may not be comfortable with the decision that you made. So props to him for saying, I don't understand it, but I support you in doing what you did. Did you know that you were gonna do entrepreneurship or become a coach or any of these things or, at the time I quit, I had zero plans.
I just knew I need to stop doing what I'm doing right now. there was a net to catch me, which is in the sense that my husband was still earning, right? So in that sense, I'm very privileged. I will acknowledge that. But I had zero plans and within two months of me quitting and being at home and becoming a stay-at-home mom is when the idea started [00:08:00] forming off.
I didn't enjoy working for someone. So what if I decided to work for myself? What would that look like? And when you start asking the right questions, I'm a big believer in spirituality. The universe delivers the answer. It, opens a door and then you start to go through that door and you think what if this is the thing I've been looking for?
And that's how I got into sleep consulting. Okay. Yeah. So let's, hear about sleep consulting. 'cause how do you, start a business? Can you go to school for becoming a sleep consultant? Is that a thing? So it is I [00:08:30] love this phrase. I came up with this idea, I'm sure it's not an original idea that from your biggest pain comes your power.
Oh, I love that. From tell your biggest pain comes your power. At that time in my life, my biggest pain was sleep deprivation because my son was not sleeping through the night. And so obviously as a new mother, you are the only one who can feed your baby and comfort your baby and put your baby to sleep.
So had a lot of like needed to be held. He was a coy baby. I was miserable and partly depressed because of the sleep deprivation as [00:09:00] well. Oh, wow. So I found this sleep program, it was a self-study program that I purchased online and I used the program and I started to get my child to sleep independently.
And it was life changing, like when you go from sleeping really well to not sleeping at all, and then to go back to sleep, you feel like a brand new. It feels like a rebirth. And I was like, oh my God, sleep is so important. And just at that time, the woman who created that self-study course, Was inviting people to learn how to become a sleep consultant [00:09:30] themselves.
And she was like, if you're a stay-at-home mom, this could be a great stream of income for you. And that's how I got into it. So I flew down to Florida, got trained by her, and I invested quite a bit of money learning how to become a sleep consultant. And it was my first step into what, does it mean to run your own business?
And what was that like for you to suddenly be a business owner? All of a sudden, it was the most uncomfortable period of my life because when you start your own business, all the demons come out of yourself. [00:10:00] It is running entrepreneurship. I truly feel, yes, we all get into it because we wanna make money, but it's really a personal development journey because every, that's a nice way to put it.
Every challenge, every personal belief and block that you have will show up through your business whether you wanna face it or not. Oh, yeah. And, so a lot of my own self-confidence issues, self-doubt, procrastination, self-criticism, like the negative self-talk, all of it became very amplified polarized.
During that [00:10:30] period It would kill me to pick up the phone and call pediatrician's offices to get a meeting. And I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. I'd be like, Nope, nope. I gotta find another way. And so my business didn't do very well. I tried to make it successful for three years and Oh wow.
Like I didn't get very far. And then when I did get clients, I'd be like, what? Like, how did you find me? Can I do this? My confidence was terrible. Yeah. I can imagine the struggle because we were talking about this earlier, but it's the mindset, right? It's I and as you're so [00:11:00] right entrepreneurship is a.
Trial by fire of seeing every single one of your self doubts wake up with you and beat you over the head with it. And you have to fight through that and then show up for because there's no structure. That's right. But I had some crazy things happen. Like I got invited to be on a morning TV segment to talk about sleep consulting but I had no idea how to leverage these things at the time.
It was literally just. Shooting paint on the wall, seeing what sticks. So I was getting burnt out with sleep consulting, which then led me into [00:11:30] network marketing. I decided to try that as a next step, which network marketing is really 100% personal growth and self-development journey. And then I did that for three years.
And then that eventually led me to coaching because I hired a life coach to help me. 'cause I realized, linking back to my original story, everything was making me un unhappy. No matter what I tried, the unhappiness still stuck. That is the one thing I couldn't change, So that is the point in my life.
I started to realize nothing in my external [00:12:00] world. Is changing what's happening inside of me. So maybe I need to go inside. When you say go inside, you mean to look at the beliefs and what, the stories were? Yeah. At the time I didn't even know that's what it was. I just knew something is going on in the internal landscape in the way I think.
And the thoughts I have something invisible to me. Is getting in the way of creating the life I want. What is that invisible thing? It's such an interesting thing because I think so many of us, and especially when we're starting up in our careers, things [00:12:30] seems almost simple, right?
It's like you get the job, you get the job, the fancy job at Microsoft, and you get happy. Or you, finish the degree and you get happy. You finish the M B A and you become happy you get married, you become happy, you have kids and you become happy. But at every single stage or, even if I quit my job, then I'll be happy.
But the truth is, every single stage, the demons that have walked through us have, I've walked with they don't go away just because we're changing our, environment. So you start working with a life coach. And what did you learn from that? So it was life shattering [00:13:00] because she opened my eyes to the way I talk to myself when, I'm not even listening to myself.
That internal chatter, she was the one who first woke me up to the fact. That you do have an internal voice and listen to what is it saying? And the way I talked to myself back then I thought was completely normal. And that's how most people talk to themselves, which is, oh my God, you can't even do this.
It was really negative and harsh. But to me, I didn't know that. I was just like, isn't this how everybody talks to themselves to improve? And she said no, [00:13:30] A lot of your unhappiness comes from the way you treat yourself. And that I wrangled with that idea for many months. I refused to believe her.
I was like no, it's not that simple. Why is it so hard for us to see that? Because I think it's been such an integral part of how we speak to ourselves from a very young age. So It's like a muscle that has become so strong that now when someone's telling you this muscle is actually not helping you be healthy.
It shifts your entire perspective and a lot of times we don't wanna let [00:14:00] go of our perspective of how we see the world, because then if you are wrong about that, what else are you wrong about? Oh God. Yeah. Absolutely mean, and we don't wanna be wrong. Nobody likes to be wrong. No. I've never experienced that 'cause I've never been wrong before.
But it's so true though. We're such creatures of habit, right? Like we wake up every single day and we do the same habitual things. And our thoughts are also habits in a lot of ways. We have a habit of the thought that come up and we have the habits of dismissing that. So at this stage, what would you say was the habitual thought that was showing up in your [00:14:30] head that was creating this internal struggle?
If I really went all the way down to the core of it, it is, I don't measure up. I will never measure up. I'm not good enough. I don't have what it takes. So it all boils down to the unworthiness. I think at some level we all carry this fear. I'm just not good enough and I don't have what it takes.
Yeah. I, think those are the two deepest fears that we all really have is I'm not good enough or I'm not worthy. Yes. And, those are of course, deeply [00:15:00] interlinked to each other. on the surface level, it shows up as self-criticism and self-doubt and procrastination and perfectionism.
how do those two things tie, together? How do they sync up? Yeah. Okay. So if we have this deep wound of, oh my gosh, I'm just not good enough. But when you are going about in your everyday life, that's not a. Conscious thought that we have. We don't walk around thinking, I'm just not, I'm not good enough.
I'm not good enough. How it shows up. Yeah. How it does show up is procrastination and, why it shows up at [00:15:30] procrastination is we are afraid to take action, right? One, first of all, what if the action I take is not the right action? Okay. And then the second part of it is, what if I do take the action and it still doesn't gimme the results I want.
I don't have what it takes to handle it, because then it really means the truth, which is I'm not good enough. So rather than deal with that fear, we just avoid taking the action. I think a lot of people when they're going through procrastination, I know when I go through procrastination, one story that I always just tell myself, I'm just lazy.
and actually, [00:16:00] this is what I always say. I just gotta do it. Oh God. cause I work a lot as well with coaching clients and number one they always say is no I, know what to do. I don't need any help. I'm fine. I'm fine. I just gotta do it. I just gotta do it.
And then like next I'm like, okay, sure. And then next week we go down the accountability of do you do it? And I'm like this week I'm just gonna do it. I know. I just gotta do it. This is what happened. They come up with a billion excuses over why it is but you're saying is that the deeper part of this isn't really just, I just gotta do it.
I just gotta willpower my way through it. Yeah, procrastination is not a laziness issue. It's an [00:16:30] unworthiness issue. And the reason for that is because we are afraid of dealing with the emotions that come up when you take that action. It's if you go to the gym, if you procrastinate going to the gym, we all know we need to go to the gym to get fit, but we all procrastinate on.
Why? One, we don't wanna feel the physical discomfort of when we go to the gym. But the emotional discomfort is what if I do all of this work and I still don't lose the weight? Which then means ultimately I don't have what it takes. I'm broken, I'm like, I'm just broken. [00:17:00] And that's a fact.
And nothing can be fixed. We don't wanna face that discomfort. And that fear, so we just call it I'm lazy. So you said that this all comes back to when we were kids and, we had this. Can you explain that a little bit more? Yeah. So it's funny, I just wrote an email about how self-confidence or lack of self-confidence really links back to our childhood.
Trauma. Nobody likes the word trauma. I'm gonna, I'm gonna break it down and make it simple. Okay. So I, read this amazing phrase where it said, trauma [00:17:30] basically just means you, it was a different experience to what you expected, and you didn't have the tools to handle it. That's, what trauma is, right?
You didn't have the tools to ex experience something in a safe way. As a child, I had a great childhood. And I wouldn't, if you'd asked me a few years ago, I would've said, no trauma. I'm perfectly fine, right? Yeah. But then you start to chip away the layers. And what I found was these what I called insignificant memory, so this is not even a blip in my consciousness, right?
Were in [00:18:00] fact affecting my everyday actions, relationships, my mood, my feelings, all of it. So to give you an example, One of the things was my uncles used to call me Blackie, right? Because when I was growing up, I had really dark skin. And in India fair skin is deemed as more beautiful and more worthy of beauty than dark skin.
So as, a joke, and they would say this laughingly and then tease me, right? They would call me Blackie and I didn't realize how much of an impression. It had left [00:18:30] on me until my adult years and I was talking to my life coach and during a meditation this came up. And I was crying at this memory.
I was like, I'm surprised. One, first of all, this memory came up and two, that I'm so upset about it. 'cause these are just things people do all the time in India, it's really normal, She was like, but no, as a child, this rocked your world. When you think about how small the world is for a child, which is just her caregivers, right?
Yeah. And you absorb everything. These people are telling you about the world and how it works. [00:19:00] So this happened when I was probably three years old that they call me this. So from that point in my life, I had carried a small wound inside of me that had said, because of how you look, you are not worthy.
Wow. And so that to this day, until it's healed will show up as lack of confidence. Unworthiness and all these other things that we talked about, like perfectionism, procrastination. this tiny little fracture. It's amazing, the rift it creates between the [00:19:30] person you desire to be and the person who you actually are being.
Wow. Is, this color? I don't know what the right terminology for this, but it's like this kind of color shaming or this color hierarchy. Is this still very prevalent? You would say? Yeah. 100% yes. There are skin lightning creams in India and if when you see like Bollywood portrayal, which is the Indian version of Hollywood all the. Main lead actresses that are cast are all really, fair skinned. So that they [00:20:00] skin could almost be white. So why do they do that? It's because that will bring in butts to the seats in the movie theaters because the, lead ladies more attractive. As a young girl, you're watching this and subliminally you're getting the message of my skin color is not good enough to be represented up there.
So therefore I'm not good enough. My skin color means I would never be good enough, it's, not just I'm not good enough, that I'm not pretty enough, but necessarily, does that also influence? I'm not good enough, therefore, at anything else yeah, I think part of your enoughness comes from your [00:20:30] identity and your identity comes from how you look, right?
Part of it is how you look, whether you like it or not, right? Like it has, like this, just the web, it just, when you start looking at it, it's in everything. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Oh, yeah, because that's a good point. Because we don't really contextualize oh, I'm not good enough at a, but I could still be great.
At b, we just feel this general worthiness because if your parents and your environment shaped this belief of where you're ranking, then we, just feel bad about Fra. Yeah. So the obvious link to the example that I've [00:21:00] just given you from my personal life would be, I'm not pretty enough, right?
I don't feel pretty enough. I'm not beautiful enough. Which then might affect the type of partner I attract or the confidence I show up in relationships, right? But the, subtle ways it shows up was in my own business as a life coach. I was hiding. I was scared to show up on like video and things like that.
So I would start off, I would have a strong start and then I would self-sabotage on things, right? And then I would disappear off of social media for days. [00:21:30] that part of that pattern I realized, was linked to the fact that I didn't feel good enough to be seen because I wasn't pretty enough.
So there are really subtle ways that wounding from when you're a young child will show up in every aspect of your life. So I don't wanna write that article. I don't wanna film that video and we create stories around, oh, like I'm just too busy today. Oh, I don't know what Eat the right thing. But really it comes from, what if I put it And it confirms what I was taught when I was a kid that I'm not good enough. But it's all unconscious. It's just all under the water. [00:22:00] Exactly. That's going through. Is it something that a lot of your clients have brought to you or, that you've dug in and excavated for them? Yeah, it's usually that I excavate for them and I help them connect the dots because when they come to me, their problem is, oh, I just get angry all the time at my kids.
I wish I had more patience. I just seem to get more and more upset easily these days. I don't know why I want to be more confident at work. I feel like I'm getting more and more lazy these days. I don't have any confidence so that those are all the, they come to me with the symptoms.
Yeah. And they think I'm gonna tell them what to do, and [00:22:30] I'm like, I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to change the way you feel about yourself, because when you do that, then what do I do becomes a lot easier and you'll, be much clearer. And how do you do that with them? In the beginning, I have a four step process.
So the stage one is always awareness, like awareness of your thoughts. How you think is so important and how you talk to yourself affects everything in your life. So it's like turning on a switch, an internal switch, once they do that switch, they can't turn it off. Oh my gosh, I didn't realize I was so mean to [00:23:00] myself.
Or the thing that my kid does, I have no idea why, but it really triggers me. Can you help me understand that more? So that's the first stage. The second part of it is what I call uncovering, and that's when we start to connect the dots as to why are you the way you are? It's not because you're broken, it's not because you're inherently like wired wrong.
It's not because you're just unworthy, it's not that. It's because of the relationship maybe you had with your caregivers or your parents. Like I just started with a brand new client the other day. And [00:23:30] she had no idea that she was so hard and critical about herself. Until we uncovered how critical her dad used to be of her.
She just chalked it up to that she's just my dad. Until I started pulling out things from her and then linking it to the fact of you didn't feel safe to be you as a child. Because you are constantly walking on eggshells, worried about what your father was going to tell you. So no wonder it is today, you don't have a clear opinion or a strong opinion on anything. One of the things she doesn't like herself [00:24:00] for is I change my mind all the time based on what's going on around me. Like I don't even truly know what it is that I want. And she thought I'm just built wrong.
You know the wrong, you were born knowing what it is your desires were. It was just pushed out of you because of your environment and your circumstances. think that. So once like connect to the dots, it was like so much relief. So we realized that it's not so much that we don't know because I, know so many people who have experienced that as well.
It's that like they constantly overthink every decision, right? Like they'll make a decision and then five minutes later they'll have a whole other set of [00:24:30] decisions and it's ex and they just can't seem to pick one. And the source of that is that when they were oftentimes they were taught that.
Either their decisions weren't the right ones or that because they're dealing with parents, were causing the question they learned not to trust their own inner voice or inner guidance. Yeah. Or they grew up in an environment where, like I said, it didn't feel safe to be themselves. If you have a parent who has.
An anger problem, then as a child, you don't focus on how can I be my most self? Unique. You, are walking on eggshells, [00:25:00] making sure that you don't do anything to upset that parent. What's a healthy goal? Like what, should the parent be doing? In this kind of situation?
Oh, I love this question. So now as somebody who has gone through the healing journey and I have two kids of my own, I often ask myself this question if I don't want my kids to repeat the same struggles that I've had. How do I parent them? So part of it is creating a really safe environment for your kids to express themselves.
So I have been blessed with one child who, I have two boys, but one of them is [00:25:30] prone to. Like really intense emotional outburst, which means he experiences anger and rage that nobody in my family has ever had before that I can remember. So as a mother on the receiving end of it, it feels really scary.
And the normal instinct is to tell that child to like, keep quiet, go to your room. Calm down. Don't come down until like you control this, right? Yeah. Just stay in the corner. When we say that what we're really saying to the child is, Your emotions are too intense. You should be ashamed of having them because that's why I'm sending you to your room and you [00:26:00] are unpleasant to be around, don't have these feelings.
That's the message I'm sending him. If I do the traditional thing, but instead what I do is I reflect back to him. I can see you're really upset with me right now, and that's okay. I can see you really disappointed that I said no and, you are really angry about that and I respect that.
So really validating the emotion and the feeling and the reaction that our kids have is so important. ' cause it tells them it's okay for me to have these emotions and then channeling that [00:26:30] physical anger that he might be feeling into a safe way. So what I do before, I used to tell him, calm down, breathe, which.
Nobody wants to calm down and breathe when you're in the middle of a meltdown. That's the worst thing you can say to anyone. Now what I do is I focus on my own regulation. So I start taking deep breaths, even though he is having a major meltdown. When I focus on my own breath, guess what? Within a couple of minutes he starts to regulate.
Interesting. So he's modeling you. He notice this mom is breathing [00:27:00] to keep her own self-control. Like I can see I'm upsetting her, so maybe I can do the same, like without saying any of this out loud. and there's also scientific research that shows when you do heart breathing, which is six seconds in and six seconds out it actually sends like electromagnetic waves from your heart and it regulates anyone that's in your surroundings too. Wow. That's fascinating. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is there is a modeling happening. Sometimes the best thing is not, what do we correct? 'cause I think a lot of parents probably know this, is that you could tell your kids all sorts of [00:27:30] things, but they're gonna learn from what you do, not from what you say.
Exactly. So when you start doing your own work and you start regulating your own emotional experiences, they go, oh, okay. That's how you do it. And they can also process, because being in a state of anger is not something that kids necessarily want to be in all day. They also want to learn how to get out of it.
Yeah. And Oh my, I can say so much about this. I love this. Let's keep going. This topic. Let's keep because what happens when you tell your kid to shut up or calm down and you shut that box, right? Like emotions are coming out and you're telling that child to repress it and suppress it [00:28:00] and put it away.
when that happens, emotion, which is just yearning to be expressed and expelled from their body. You have now locked it in their body by telling them to shut, right? Yeah because, you're not letting them express it. It has nowhere to go, but stay in their bodies because you're not telling them how to deal with the experience of, what they're going through.
You're just telling them how you want them to experience with you. You're just saying, I just, I don't care about how you look and how you are to me. I don't care about what you're experiencing. Yeah. And I'll, the analogy that I'm, experience that I'm thinking of, [00:28:30] it's like imagining a kid wanting to go to the bathroom and instead of teaching them how to go to the bathroom and use a toilet instead, where it's, just use a kind of a gross example.
We could probably think of a better example, but instead of dealing with that or, if a kid comes to you and saying, I'm hungry, you're teaching them here's how you stop being hungry. Don't talk about Instead of going no, let's go to the kitchen and make yourself a snack. Exactly. No, those are amazing examples.
And I, wouldn't have been able to parent the way I parent unless I had addressed my own childhood [00:29:00] needs. I can give out these techniques all day long to parents, but if you're unwilling to do the internal work of healing your own childhood wounds, these techniques will not be sustainable, and you're not gonna get the type of results.
That I have experienced myself. So you said there's four stages. Before you said the first stage is awareness. What's the second stage? So that's the uncovering stage where you start connecting the dots as to, oh, I'm not inherently broken. I was just shaped this way because of what happened to me.
The third stage is what I call becoming, and embodying [00:29:30] the, final three and four is actually integrated together. So becoming is really stepping into the person you knew you were always meant to become. So you start shifting your mindset and your beliefs. So your belief might go from, I'm really lazy to now, the new thought you have is, I think I can do this.
I'm capable of it. Let me just try. So it's like a stair step effect of how do we, now I'm aware of my patterns and my habits, instead of thinking the negative way. How can I become more accepting of myself and how does that then impact the self-talk [00:30:00] that I have and the thoughts that I have about what I'm being capable of?
So that's the becoming stage. You are like really stepping into this version, right? You're not quite there yet, but you are becoming, and then the last part is what I call embodying, which is where you are now, it's in your body. The changes. That's when, what does that mean? How, do we, Get into our body with the I'm in my body. This is something I wouldn't have been able to answer until about a couple of years ago when I went through my breath work facilitation program. So many of us are completely disassociated from [00:30:30] our bodies. What that means is I process everything that I see in this world.
Through just my head, which is my brain, my mind, my eyes, and maybe my ears. we ignore 80% of this body that lives below our necks. So everything gets processed through my eyes and what I hear goes into my brain. I make sense of it, analyze it, and then I move through the world based on that.
But our intuition, our genius, our creativity, our joy, all the feelings we want in the world. [00:31:00] Happiness, joy, gratitude, bliss, all of these feelings that we crave, guess what? They're not thoughts, they're feelings. And their emotions. And emotions and feelings are felt in our bodies, not thought in our minds.
And that's part of the reason that I was so unhappy for a long time. ' cause I kept thinking about happiness. But if you ask me then what does happiness feel like to you? I promise you there are physical sensations that are attached to every single emotion we have. So if I'm sitting here and just processing your question just now, this is a very different question, right?
[00:31:30] Because when I think, what does happiness look like? I think, oh, I'm on a yacht with my friends and fancy food. But what does happiness feel like it might be? I feel lightness in my chest. I feel bounce in my body. I feel relaxation in my shoulders.
that's a very different experience. Exactly. Fascinating. Exactly. It's actually much easier if you're new to this work and if this is a new concept you are hearing about, it can be really hard to go straight to happiness because a lot of us live in a world where we are [00:32:00] unhappy and discontent.
So to start associating, getting back into your body, ask yourself, when I feel angry, how does that feel in my body? Anger. A lot of times we clench up, we tighten. Our shoulders get drawn in, our breath starts to get short. A chest might feel tight. You might clench your stomach.
Yep. So that is you. When you start to notice, oh, this is what anger feels like in my body. That's actually a huge win. Because now you're not just thinking angry thoughts. You are now feeling angry in your body. And when we feel [00:32:30] it in our bodies, we actually have more power over letting go of that anger than just thinking about letting go of anger.
That's powerful. I love that. Thank you so much for that. I want to ask, you're welcome. I know that you work in particular with South Asian women and, I'm really curious about that. What are some experiences that South Asian women have brought to you that you have seen come that is different perhaps, or maybe that's not the right word for it or, what are some of the bigger experiences that they have brought to you?
Yeah. I would say the, things that are unique to South Asian women are, they are.[00:33:00] Extremely high accomplishers in terms of achievement, right? They're so driven, so ambitious, incredibly intelligent, but they are the first person who will also say, oh, but I'm not good enough. Like I could never do that. So the amount of self-criticism is extremely high in South Asians.
It's like disproportionate. having worked in Microsoft. I was the only brown woman on my team and the level of self-confidence that I saw in the white women compared to what I [00:33:30] felt it was two different universes. And I was always shocked 'cause I would be doing the same quality of work that these women were doing and they would be standing there and talking about how wonderful their work.
And it was, I'm not saying it wasn't, but they had no qualms about getting up in a room full of people and talking about how wonderful their work is and how wonderful they are. And I would be sitting there cringing. you shouldn't be able to say that about yourself. Your boss should be talking about how great you are.
So this, idea of external validation and recognition that's [00:34:00] huge in South Asian culture where you cannot talk and brag about your own work. Your parents have to do it or your teachers have to do it. Your elders have to do it, and that's when you are worthy of that success and that achievement.
And, this is impacting their work experiences as well. Absolutely. Because their boss is saying, look, you're doing great work, but you don't talk about it. You don't bring it to the table, and you don't share your magic with the team. That's a lot of the feedback that I got. They were like, you're too quiet.
Like you're doing great work with your clients. But you're not bringing the learnings to [00:34:30] us. You're not talking about what are the new ideas that you came up with to make this happen? Because I kept expecting my boss to do that part of it. I've already done the work. You should you should be recognizing my genius.
You're just waiting. You guys are both waiting for each other to praise the work. Exactly, And so, much self-doubt. And this mi good enough. And the solution to that is to go through the process and look at the, conditioning, look at the culture that led to it, and then then leading through the phases into embodiment.
[00:35:00] Is that right? That's right. And sorry, going back to the original question that you'd asked, the other thing that I see that's very unique to South Asian women is this idea of, because I'm a girl. I am secondary in terms of importance. So in Indian culture girls from the beginning are deemed as a burden in overt ways and subtle ways.
Because of the idea of if you have a girl, then when she gets married, the family has to give a certain amount of money to the groom site. It's. Dowry is [00:35:30] illegal. That's what was called a dowry, but it's now illegal. But before, people used to ask outright, okay, if you're gonna marry bring your daughter into our family, like what are you gonna give?
Wow. In addition to the bride, God, they'll called it dowry, right? So in India, there are still communities that grieve when they have a baby girl. I can't imagine the unconscious messaging behind that to grow up as a Yeah. Boys are celebrated and girls are grieved over. That didn't personally happen to me.
[00:36:00] In my family. I have an older brother, but all the messaging that you get from everywhere, you can't escape So when. My clients come to work with me. There is this idea of I'm a burden to others and part of the, I have to work really hard to achieve anything in my life. And the perfectionism stems from that generational trauma, whether you personally experienced it or not.
Our mothers did, our grandmothers did, our aunts and our great-grandmothers. And it goes back generations where women have had to [00:36:30] justify their existence. And so if I just worked really, hard and, gave everything I have, then maybe that will justify and make it okay for the fact that I, might be a burden to you.
Just to exist. Just for the right to exist. As opposed to being celebrated as a member of the family. Wow. So previously you talked about the idea of embodiment and I think some people, this might be a new term in and of itself, but to, sit in that, can you talk about what. That looks like in terms of how can we start embodying that and, stop procrastinating and [00:37:00] start having that unstoppable faith in who we are, that we can wake up with zero self-doubt and just go, I'm ready to take on the world.
So I love this word embodiment, right? Because it means to integrate into your body, right? And my mentor talks about this concept, Samantha Kelly, who you know That's right. Samantha Kelly, she talks about not having a top-down approach, but a bottoms up approach. And I'm gonna tell you what that means.
So oftentimes when we want to become something, we have the thought of, oh, I really want [00:37:30] to, maybe, let's say weight loss is the easiest one. I wanna become thin, right? I wanna lose weight. then, which then means I have to go to the gym, right? That mean a body then becomes, Moving, right? It goes to the gym to move.
So you are sending the thought of, I need to lose weight. And then you push that thought down to your body and then you get your body to the gym. That sounds very logical, but that's, a top down approach. Your body is taking command from your mind, which is an uphill battle, right? But what if we could help our bodies feel [00:38:00] healthy?
Before we even get to the gym, feel worthy of having the sexiness or the good luckiness, right? What if we felt pretty and beautiful before we begin in our bodies? Then our mind then takes the command from our bodies of, I wanna be vibrant, I wanna be healthy, and then you go to the gym. So now it's a bottoms up approach.
So how do we do that? Okay. So that's through breath work. So breath work is an amazing modality that helps you get into a deeper state of [00:38:30] consciousness very quickly, right? We cannot keep doing the same thing over and expect different results. And so in order to create different results, we have to have different thoughts and different feelings and emotions in our bodies.
so when we do breath work, what happens is you tap into a different, This unconscious parts of you, that one shows you where is the wounding in my body that's preventing me from becoming the person I wanna be? So it could be one of the personal experience memories that I've shared. A lot of that has come through breath work where your, [00:39:00] body literally goes here's this memory.
Deal with it. And it's really painful. You're like, I don't wanna go back there and feel those feelings. But like I said, those feelings are already trapped in your body, and that's what's preventing you from becoming the person you are meant to be. So by going in through your breath, you bring it to your awareness, you bring it to the surface of oh, I don't even know what this memory has to do with anything, but I'm gonna go into it anyway.
I'm gonna feel the things that I didn't want to feel at that time. So you might feel grief, you might feel heartbreak. And then your memory actually [00:39:30] changes the way you feel about what happened, actually changes, because now you've gone back into that. There's a lot of science on how memories can actually change and the intensity and the whole, the memory has when you go back on your own terms, right?
So through breath work, you're going back into Emory, but you are setting the intention off. I'm healing this. I'm gonna look at this a different way. So then you unlock the energy that's trapped and it gets released out of your body into the ethos, right? For it to be transmute into something greater, which now has created space for that new [00:40:00] belief and that new emotion to come in, which is, oh, what happened really had nothing to do with me.
Maybe that's what you come away with. Oh some. My mother was suffering, which is why she said those words to me, and it really had nothing to do with my unworthiness. So you get to change how that memory plays out. And when that happens, guess what? The change has now happened on a body and a cellular level, so now you take a different kind of action.
So what's the actionable, let's say I'm listening to this, what's something [00:40:30] I could do today, now as a practice that I could take with me? Okay. So one of the easiest ways that you can start getting into breath work is what I call the side breath or the screen breath, depending on your intensity of whether you're feeling anger or frustration.
So if you're frustrated, go with the sigh. If you are really angry, go with the screen. So all you're gonna do. Is take a really deep breath. So assess, first of all, how are you feeling? Like, how am I feeling right now on a one to 10, 10 being I feel really great, one being I just [00:41:00] feel really down and heavy.
Okay, so take a self-assessment and then you take a deep breath and then Si breath is, you're gonna exhale through your mouth with a loud side. Ah, And you're gonna do that 10 to 20 times, and I guarantee you, you're gonna feel a shift in the heaviness and maybe the worry and the stress and the tightness that you've been holding in your body whenever there's so much just mental chatter going on in our heads like you're [00:41:30] just like, oh my God.
Like I wish I could make this stop. Use the side breath. And imagine all those thoughts being exhaled out with the sound of your own sigh and that breath. I love that. And the, scream breath is the exact same thing, but instead of a sigh, you can do a silent scream or a loud scream based on whether you have people in your house or not.
Maybe grab a pillow scream into a pillow. work too. But some days I've done it when nobody's at home and I let myself scream. Brilliant. As long as you're not waking up any considered [00:42:00] neighbors who are getting the cops called that, having that space. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah I've, done the silent scream of like, really opening your mouth wide and how you would normally scream. So cool. So it's amazing. So good. Okay, fantastic. Viza, thank you so much for spending so much time with us here today and sharing all this wisdom. How do we find out more about you or possibly even work with you?
Absolutely. So one of my favorite things that I offer as a free resource is free breathwork sessions. So I do [00:42:30] that twice a month it's virtual, so you get to be at the comfort of your own home. Just log into a Zoom link and I lead you through a whole experience. So I do that twice a month and I'll share the link, I'm sure you'll share with your audience, show notes on where they can register for it.
And I have dates already scheduled all the way out into the new year as well. Oh, amazing. just, for easiest thing is your website still. Ww.visa lahee.com. Okay. Correct. It's www.visa actually.com, but I hang [00:43:00] out most often on like TikTok and Instagram. Okay. Fantastic. Go finder.
on Insta, for, the people who are home who may not have access to show notes right now what's your Instagram handle so that they can quickly pull out your phones right now head over to Instagram and punch in? Life Coach Visa. At Life. Coach Visa. Perfect.
Thank you so much Visa for your time. We're so appreciative of your messaging and everything that you have shared with us today. Guys, go check out Visa's website and all of her free resources and her teachings on her Instagram and TikTok. Thank you once [00:43:30] again for your time, visa.
