Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Regardless of how successful you are, I've had people that were vice presidents, and they were mega successful, but they still had the limiting beliefs.

They still were facing, you know, fear of failure and fear of rejection and hesitation and procrastination at times.

And once they overcame that, they became even more successful.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating with Constantin Morun, who is in Canada.

He is a podcaster and especially a holistic life empowerment coach and mentor.

He's here to talk to us today about the four pillars of self and the role that communication plays in that.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Constantin.

Hello, everyone.

It's such a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for having me on.

Absolutely.

Thank you for being here.

Welcome.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yes.

So as you mentioned, I currently live in Canada, been here for over two decades now.

Originally, I was born in Eastern Europe in Romania, which shaped up a lot of who I am today.

It gave me a lot of good lessons to learn, a lot of course gifts and skills that come with it as well.

By day trade, I work for Microsoft in the tech world.

I specialize in artificial intelligence.

Of course, communication is such a critical role in anything professional.

If you want to climb up the ladders, if you want to have an impact, communication is key.

But then of course, my passion lies in personal growth, personal development, professional development.

And you'll find me, as you mentioned, as a podcaster, but I'm also a coach and a mentor, helping people uncover their why, their purpose, and reward their brains and their minds so they can actually overcome limiting beliefs, what I call the thieves of our dreams, and of course, overcome those pesky challenges that we face day in and day out, such as burnout, stress, depression, anxiety, all things I have been afflicted with for many years in my life in the past.

First of all, let's just get the scoop from you since you're an AI.

Is AI coming to take away a lot of our jobs?

That's always an amazing question for me because the reality is that like any technology, there will be some jobs that will go away.

However, the amount of jobs that will be created, I believe will surpass the ones that we lose.

And the fear that most people have usually revolves around their job being taken over by artificial intelligence.

We're not necessarily there yet for most careers.

However, if you're someone that wants to take your career to the next level, partnering up with artificial intelligence will take you much further than most people.

So it's better to upscale and keep up with the times.

And now you work in software.

The very foundation of this podcast was a lot of technical, brilliant professionals sometimes struggle with communication skills because they're not really emphasized during the tertiary learning.

What has been your experience at Microsoft with regards to that?

Even before Microsoft, that's such a great question, by the way, Roberta, and I thought, I finished with a degree in mathematics and computer science.

So I came from the development world.

And when I was in high school, university, I could barely stand to speak one-on-one with someone I was always afraid of communicating, of raising my hand up or even reaching someone, let alone doing a presentation in front of the classroom.

Now, a couple of decades later, I'm doing conversations like this with you with no problem, other amazing people, but also I speak on stages in front of thousands and thousands of people.

Now, the reason I mention it is because most of us see certain challenges like public speaking, like speaking or communicating with others as a challenge that we have a very hard time to overcome or one that we may not even be able to.

And I want to give hope to everyone listening that you can absolutely not only overcome challenges like this, but you can master them, and you can achieve so much success in your life by just mastering this one skill.

Now, to answer your question at Microsoft, and now I'm part of their enterprise team, I'm part of their sales team.

Otherwise, you can imagine communication is crucial in anything to do with technology or with sales, with marketing, any of this stuff, right?

It doesn't matter if you are a developer.

If you don't know how to communicate your needs, but also listen to others communicate to you or communicate with your manager, you're not going to get very far.

What I've seen at Microsoft as well is that communication is a two-way street.

It's not just about what I tell you, Robertha, but it's what I hear from you as well.

Am I doing active listening, or am I just always listening to provide you a response and not paying attention to most of the things you're saying?

You were also being challenged in this scale.

It's not like something you were natural at.

So usually our listeners want to know what is it that you did because now you are completely on the other side and you actually help others with this skill as well.

Absolutely, 100%, Roberta.

That's a great question because most people will take a look at someone like myself or others that have overcome these challenges and believe, like you said, that they may be natural communicators from when they were born.

And some people are because they were in the right environment, they had the right teachers, they had the right mentors.

But most of us had to face those challenges head on and improve.

For me, it started with actually after university, I got my first job where I didn't necessarily need to communicate too much.

However, after the first job, I went into something that I never thought myself as doing, which was I started playing poker online professionally.

So like, you know, kind of like a game where you, there's a bit of gambling, but there's a lot of skill.

So with my background, it became easy for me as something that I enjoy doing, and there was good money in it back then.

And from there, I realized that as I like to learn things, I like to teach them, I would like to share them with people.

So how can I share them if I don't communicate well?

So essentially for me, it's putting myself in situations where I had to communicate with people.

Now, if I wanted to be a coach or poker specifically by then, I had to put myself in situations where one-on-one, I would have conversations.

And what we know from science and from our life is that success is built upon success.

The more you repeat something, the better you get at it.

It doesn't matter if it's something you like or something you don't like, because even negative things, the more we repeat them, the more they show up in our life.

Same with communication skills.

So I started repeating it.

I went from one-on-one coachings to one-to-many, to the point where in a couple of years, I was able to speak in front of 100 people.

Was it easy?

Absolutely not.

I made mistakes often, right?

I learned from them.

Which we all make.

Exactly.

I was going to say, growth mindset is where I was going to end.

What helped me the most is switching from a fixed mindset, which is something I learned in Romania growing up in Eastern Europe, to a growth mindset.

As I say, we all make mistakes.

And it's very important to highlight that because that's why a lot of people don't even want to make the effort.

They think everybody sounds so polished.

It could never be that.

Exactly.

Here's the interesting thing, Robertana.

It's something that some people may know.

But the words I talk to you right now, the words I'm saying, just the words themselves.

Make up only about 7% of what people take when they look at someone and they communicate with someone.

Less than 10% of how I'm communicating comes to you through the words.

The other 93% is divided into categories, which is the tone of voice.

How am I speaking?

Am I confident?

Am I coming through as authentic?

Am I yelling?

Am I talking softly?

The tone of voice.

And that's about 38%.

And more than half, 55% is my body language.

So here, because for those of you that are watching this on YouTube, for example, you can see my hands moving, my posture is sitting straight up or standing straight up rather, and other things about my posture, where my eyes are looking, my gestures of my face.

And that's how we can become better communicators by realizing that it's not just the words that people tell us or the words we tell them, but it's everything else, the full package.

Everything needs to be congruent.

Now back to the Microsoft question.

So in the enterprising division, you're in what about communication is so key and enables you to be productive at your job?

I love the question, Roberta.

I would say everything has to do with communication.

So I work in a division where I have colleagues, and I have an extended team I work with that are partners of Microsoft that we have to work with, and then the customers themselves.

And I work with people all the way up to the CEO level and down to the project level.

So you need to understand how to actively communicate and actively listen.

You can take whatever pain points and challenges and desires a customer has and then transfer them into something that you can do to help them.

So the communication aspect is everything.

If I can communicate both my needs and my wants, it's going to be very challenging for me to be successful in my job.

And again, as I mentioned, communication is a two-way street, so I also have to be good at listening.

I made a big mistake in the past, and it took me a while to understand properly what active listening was.

But I see many people up and coming in their careers, and even seasoned people in their careers are not doing a great job at that active listening piece.

And the active listening is so key because, as you said, you need to understand the customer's needs.

So if you don't listen very well, that's not going to happen, or you're not going to be effective at it, and so you're not going to deliver the best service for the customer.

Exactly.

And let's take an example for anyone that likes to hear examples or even visually imagine them in their minds.

You come to me, and you have a problem, right?

And you show me your problem.

If I don't actually actively listen, meaning that I pay attention to you undivided, I'm not actively thinking about solutions, what's going to happen is, as you start telling me your problem, my mind is going to go, well, I've got to find a solution for this.

And it's going to jump to so many different things.

And then what happens is, we tend to not pay attention to some of the things that come through.

So the solution you jump to right away, likely is not going to be the right solution for the situation and for the customer.

Now, replace customer with partner, with friend, with parents, coworker, you name it.

Replace it and you'll see a similarity there as well because it's all about letting them talk, paying attention to it, and them providing your response.

It affects you both professionally and personally.

Yes, 100%.

Now, let's talk about the four pillars of self.

What are those and how did you craft that strategy around the four pillars of self?

Yeah, I would love to talk about that, and thank you for asking the question.

So as I looked at my life and as I made progress in different areas of my life, I realized that there are usually four key parts to anyone's life.

There is the physical aspect of it that goes beyond just how we look, but also the sleep we get and everything else that comes around the physical side of it, like the chairs we sit on, the ergonomics behind it.

There's the spiritual side of it, which for some can be religion, for others could be that they believe in something greater than themselves, but it's all around the purpose and your why in this life, like what's motivating you, what are your passions, what's driving you to do what you're doing every day.

And it's usually not the need to make money or pay bills that's driving you, it's something else that's deeper.

And then you have the emotional side, which is something that growing up as a man in Eastern Europe during the communist era was very tough for me to wrap my head around.

And the emotional pillar of self is all about your emotions, how you handle your emotions, but also how you handle other people's emotions and let them impact you.

And lastly, there's the pillar of the mental side of things.

And it's your mindset, anything to do with how you approach a situation.

And the way I see it in our life is if we look at an analogy, I have a vehicle, and I have four tires on the vehicle, and each tire is one of these pillars.

You have the physical, the spiritual, the emotional, and the mental.

What happens if the tires are not aligned?

What happens if one is underinflated and one is overinflated?

What happens if three of them, let's say, are underinflated or running on low and you want to get to a destination?

You may be bumpy, you may not even get there, you may get into an accident.

There's lots of things that can happen.

And that's how I realized my life was.

I was focusing so much on, let's say, the mental aspects so I can get a great career.

But I was ignoring the emotional side because I had no idea how to deal with it.

I was, let's say, ignoring the physical side, right?

By overeating, I got bigger, and then it took me a while to get on the process, to get under, right?

Because, like most people, we have so many things on our plates that we start ignoring pillars.

And the idea for me is to balance those.

Sometimes, you know, there's a season when I'm going to put more effort into my mental game, and there's another season when I'm going to put more effort into my emotional game, or game rather.

And it's about not ignoring any aspects of ourselves.

Yes, if you think of, and we are not knocking ambition in any way, shape, or form, but if you think of, if you work those, I finish work at midnight types of jobs, and you're back at 6 a.m.

in the office, which means you don't have enough sleep.

So your physical health gets affected, even though your career is booming just because you do that.

So there's this imbalance in those four pillars.

Like I said, it's like tires on a car.

So there's a tire that's bigger than the others.

And to your point, they also have a ripple effect on the others, because let's take the example of not enough sleep.

And that was me, by the way, many years ago, because let's say I would want to be great at my job, but I also wanted to game when I had time.

So that meant I had to cut and sleep.

What's sleep going to impact?

Well, of course, your mental game, your mentality, because you can't be as sharp anymore, right?

You may have to cut on habits and put in some bad habits instead.

But also your emotional game is affected, because now you may be more irritated because you don't have enough sleep.

It may impact yourself.

Let's say anything, anything self, right?

Like your self-belief, you may make yourself doubtful more, because again, your emotional thing impacts a lot of the elements in your life.

Yes.

So now that we know these four pillars, that the fact that they impact each other, what is it that you coach your clients on when it comes to them?

I love the question.

The first thing that I always set the foundation is understanding how they can impact your life and how they show up in your life.

But it's all about understanding that every single one of us is a unique being.

When I work with someone, it's not about me teaching them what I know, because that will be the equivalent of me giving you a fish and then hoping that you're going to have enough food for the rest of your life rather than me trying to teach you how to fish.

It's about working with you to find your own answers, to find what speaks for you and find balance in that life, and find that why and the purpose that then propagates the balance across the pillars so you can find the joy and fulfillment you want in life.

And that's why I put in my title Holistic.

It's not because I said anything to do specifically with health, but it's because working holistically at all pillars of self.

We're not just focusing on the emotional and ignoring the mental side of things or vice versa.

And then when your clients come to you, what do they usually say?

Constantin, this is my problem.

Please help me.

Yes.

So my target demographic is either people in an early career or people that have been in a corporate job for a while.

Now, I've worked with other people as well, but it seems that people that are in those situations come to me more often.

Well, there's two main programs I do with people.

One program, which is like an eight week program, it's about rewiring your brain.

I am certified in something called neuroencoding, which is based on neuropsychology.

And it's the idea of how your nervous system communicates.

It's about you learning how to spot limiting beliefs, the thieves of our dreams, things like procrastination, hesitation, self-doubt, fear of success, fear of failure, this is a bunch more.

And then as you identify them, you start working with them.

And then you get to a spot where you are actually relearning behaviors that you may have learned when you were two years old, three years old, seven years old, that you don't even know about.

So it's about rewiring yourself to overcome challenges that are keeping you small, that are keeping you in a place where you don't want to be.

Regardless of how successful you are, I've had people that were vice presidents, and they were mega successful, but they still had limiting beliefs.

They still were facing fear of failure and fear of rejection and hesitation and procrastination at times.

And once they overcame that, they became even more successful.

And I'll add one more thing before I pass it over to you, Roberta.

Take your time.

You're the guest.

When we're talking about the neural encoding piece, I also touch on the subconscious mind.

I'm someone that loves science, right?

I have a math degree, computer science.

I actually did engineering for a few years before I jumped into mathematics.

I love science.

If I can find research, if I can find something that actually correlates the spirituality side of it and what the world understands to be, then I'm all for it.

And our subconscious mind navigates about 95% of our actions on any given day.

So that means the 1 in 20 actions you take are not driven by a conscious mind.

No, those actions could be as simple as blood pumping in your veins.

However, it's also how you react to situations.

Because your subconscious mind, your brain, your ego, they want to protect you.

They want to keep the status quo.

Meaning if you want to make a change in your life and the foundations are not strong, everything is going to collapse.

That's why most of us, and I put myself in there, I wanted to go on a diet.

I tried so many diets in my life.

I was successful for one, two, three, six months, but then it all came crashing down.

Why?

Because my foundation was weak.

So you needed the rewiring of the old habits in order for that to be consistent.

Exactly.

It's not just the habits, but it's essentially, you can think of it as your subconscious mind, your limiting beliefs, your neural pathways.

It's rewiring and essentially eliminating and replacing those beliefs with something better, something that aligns with what's in your heart versus what society, your caregivers, your schooling implanted in you.

And again, no one wanted something bad for you.

It's just that it happens.

We live in a society that has certain rules and certain ways of teaching, and things are going to get imprinted on us by choice or otherwise.

Absolutely.

And it's usually not anybody's fault.

And I always say to parents, they do the hardest job in the world, and they deserve all the credit.

But there comes a time when you think, oh my goodness, I wish my parents had given me this or not said this.

They did the best they could.

So it's up to you to rewire as you grow older.

And as you said, use these techniques in order to improve yourself.

So let's go back to this example of the vice president, who's very successful, but emotionally they need help with that pillar, the emotional pillar.

They feel rejected.

They don't feel good about themselves.

What other pillars get affected as well if they do not heal that?

That's a great question, Roberta.

The answer for me is simple.

All of them.

If I'm someone, let's say I have a fear of failure, fear of rejection, self-doubt, how is that going to propagate in my other pillars?

Well, for one, I know, because I suffered from those things in the past.

I'm able to overcome most of them.

There's still a work in progress.

There's always work we can do.

But if I suffer with, let's say, self-doubt or lack of self-confidence, well, I'm probably going to impact my sleep because I go to bed at night, and things are going to repeat in my mind, and I'm probably going to doubt myself, and I'm going to beat myself up.

So first of all, it impacts your physical side.

It may show up a stress, which again impacts your physical well-being.

So you could get a disease after it or something else.

That's emotional to physical.

Now, emotional to mental.

Well, how do emotions impact our mental game?

Well, if I'm someone that wants to start a new habit and maintain it, if my emotions are weak, what ends up happening?

I'm going to sabotage myself.

Some people are more strong-willed, and they can fight through it, but it gets to a point where it gets harder, and you give up.

Not because you're a bad person, not because you don't want to, but because you have those limiting beliefs, you have those pivs of your dreams that are in behind the scenes, doing all this work that you don't even know, and they pull you down.

So that's now impacting the mental game.

We talked about the physical.

How does it impact your spiritual game?

Well, if I'm someone that's not emotionally strong, I have some challenges.

And by the way, almost all of us have some degree of challenges in our emotional game.

Of course.

How are we able to connect with nature, with ourselves, with God, with the universe, whatever one believes in?

How are we to believe in a higher purpose, in a higher why, in a higher reason?

And even if you do believe, what's going to happen at the first signs of a challenge, you may actually revert back and say, you know what?

That's not my why.

That's not what I wanted to do, because it's hard.

Exactly.

So from the most people that come to work with me, about 99% is usually ending up being something in the emotional pillar that has to be looked at first.

Not the only pillar that has to be looked at, but has to be looked at first.

Because, and I'll give you an analogy here that I like to use with people.

Let's imagine you and I live on the same street, Roberta.

We have a beautiful home next to each other.

Unfortunately, mine catches on fire.

Right, yours is next door.

Now you come out, you want to help, and you have two options.

You can help put the fire out in my home, or you can start preparing to protect your home against the fire.

And what would your instinct tell you?

What would you want to do?

Well, don't they say charity begins at home?

I don't know, but I want to help you put out the fire as well.

Exactly, right?

And that's the thing is like, that fire, so the example there, what I gave there, ideally, you want to put the big fire out, because if you put it out, then your house is safe.

If my house gets engulfed and gets up, it doesn't really matter what you do, because the fire is going to jump, right?

There's very little protection you can do, which means that if we look at our lives, as you start digging inwards, you're going to start to see these big fires.

It might be one, it might be two, and that's where you want to start.

And then it's going to have a ripple effect on the rest of it.

Because you tackle something big, let's say, lack of self-love, that's a very, very common one.

Well, how is lack of self-love going to impact everything else?

It's going to make you have self-doubt, right?

Lack of self-confidence, lots of it makes you procrastinate, give you hesitation, overwhelm.

It's going to give you some sort of fears.

So if you tackle something as big as that, and you make improvements in it, you get to go farther, faster.

So something that took me, let's say, a decade to fix, if I knew the information I know now, it could probably get improved within, not probably, for sure, between three to six months.

Yes.

A lot of experiences leave an emotional imprint on us, right?

And that's why you start having a certain belief about yourself, because you had that experience, so that's mental.

That belief will then feed into what you think you're capable of achieving at work.

So that is now the career part.

And so they are all so interconnected, but it seems as though the emotional one seems to be the one, if it's not solid, it is the one where everything else doesn't become solid.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It's essentially a foundation.

I talk about this a lot with various people where they come to me and say, you know what, mindset is everything.

And I'm like, sure, mindset is great.

Definitely, it's something that you should aim for, to have a great mindset in finances, in your professional life, in whatever aspect of your life.

But what happens when your mindset is solid, but your foundation is weak?

Well, let me give you an example.

I go back to myself.

I want to go on a diet.

I've done my research.

I know that the keto diet, the carnivore diet are really good for me.

I start working on it, but I'm not touching the emotional side of things.

What's going to happen when I now enter a challenges work and maybe I can't get out in time to cook myself the dinner I want?

Sure, maybe one time or two times is going to be fine.

I'm going to be able to push through it because I'm strong.

But what happens if that repeats or other challenges start to show up?

What if you have a fight with your partner?

What if you have a fight with your parents?

Something doesn't go your way.

Well, unfortunately, like in my case was, because eating for me was emotional, not about the food itself, I would give in, right?

And one day of cheating or not eating good and beating myself up would turn into two.

And what happened there?

As soon as I slipped once, for the most part, the entire thing was ruined because I was beating myself up, because internally I had this dialogue without even realizing of how weak I was, how I wasn't good enough, how I can't do anything right despite my successful career, despite everything else has been successful in my life.

So when you're looking at the emotional period, it's all about realizing, and if we're talking about self-love, right, how amazing you are, and doing exercises what it actually reminds you, because our minds are very good at looking at the negative side first, again, for protection reasons, to keep you alive.

It's on you to train yourself, to see the successes in your life, so you can build additional successes on top of it.

That's so true, because yes, if you keep letting yourself down, then you just give up and stop altogether.

And I knew you couldn't do it.

I knew you weren't going to see it through.

But also, if you count your successes, they help you keep pushing, despite it being challenging.

I'll give you another great example from my life.

Quick story here.

Over a year or so now, I remember having to do lists like most people do.

I have to accomplish A, B, and C.

There's always a lot of things on the list, and it's very rare where you can really get to the end of the day and say, I've done everything I had on my list, because some things may take weeks or months.

And I remember going to bed often with this feeling that, I wish I would have accomplished more.

And it wasn't until I actually started doing an exercise where I was looking back at my day, from start to finish, without any judgment, without applying any labels of good or bad or anything in between, and just saying, okay, what have I accomplished today?

And I started writing it down.

It would be a five-minute exercise I did, write down what I was stopping.

And then at the end, the list was huge every day.

And it made me realize, wow, I actually accomplished more than most people do in a week sometimes, right?

More than most people do in a day.

So now it gave me something to celebrate, and I started to become aware of.

Because I like to say this, awareness is half the battle.

Most of the stuff we're not aware of, which means we can't do anything about.

I was actually going to ask you earlier about self-awareness in these four pillars of self-exercise.

Well, self-awareness and awareness is, as I mentioned, half the pattern, honestly, maybe even more in some cases.

And sometimes we're in a lane where we have like horses, blinders on, and we only see straight, and we miss things that are in our peripheral vision and behind us and everywhere else.

And that's why I always advocate, it doesn't matter if you pay a coach or a mentor to be in your corner to help you see your blind spots and help you see what you're not seeing, but you can find people to mentor you in your professional life without paying them, in your personal life.

Ideally, not someone that's very close to you because they're invested emotionally a bit more, right?

And they may not be able to be as honest as they should be, but you can always reach out and find people.

And now with the internet, there are websites we can go and find mentors.

And for me, it was the same until I actually put my ego to the side a bit and said, you know what, I should reach out for help.

I'm not perfect.

I don't know everything.

That's how my life transformed, be it in poker, be it in my professional life, and be it now in my coaching life.

As a coach and mentor, I should have probably five of my own mentors and probably two or three coaches at any given time, because there are different things I'm working with people at different times.

There isn't everyone needs a coach.

They may write back to you things you might not have been aware of.

I love that.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And we were just talking about something that came back to mind.

I know we didn't finish this thought, the mindset idea, right?

But if the foundation is weak, there's a problem.

And the foundation is an emotional pillar.

But there's another word for it that people are more familiar with, which is psychology.

The psychology you have, so the consistent thoughts we have either consciously or unconsciously about three different things, about ourselves, which we cover quite a bit, but also about other people around us and also about the world around us.

Let me explain it in a bit more detail here.

About ourselves is pretty clear, right?

If I keep saying, oh, I'm so stupid, oh, I'm never good at doing anything, I always procrastinate, I always leave things to the last minute, it's going to be perpetuated and it's going to keep showing up in your life.

But how about other people in the world around us?

Well, let's say you and I are colleagues, Roberta, and I want to be successful at my job, but then I see you as an inferior, I see my colleagues as inferior, so I always see the negative in you.

Oh, she's always late to meetings.

She's always not doing this, A, B, and C, despite all the amazing things you're doing.

It's going to cause issues, no matter how strong my mindset is, if I cannot overcome my psychology, what I'm biased, I'm putting people down, and I'm not looking at people as equals, it's going to be a challenge.

And same with the world around us.

If I'm someone that watches the news or goes on the web and looks at the negativity all the time, guess what's going to happen in my life?

I'm always going to think that way.

Exactly.

It's essentially like your psychology is everything.

If you have a strong psychology, then you can build any mindset you want in the world.

And imagine, regardless of what situation you are in life right now, we could all use a bit more work in our psychology department or our emotional pillar, because that's the foundation for everything else.

I truly do agree with you on that.

And I always look at myself, for example, because that's why I know best.

By all definitions, I'm very successful in my professional career.

But can we imagine if I actually took control of my emotional game a lot sooner in my career, how far along I could be?

Yeah.

That's the key here.

It doesn't matter how low on the totem pole you are or how far up you are.

You can always benefit from something.

And that's why a lot of top performers get attracted to working with me because they realize that there are things holding them back from achieving even more success.

And when they unlock that, then the sky is the limit.

Yes.

Especially once they start to manage teams and they have to lead people, then those holes start to appear, and they obviously need a coach and a mentor to be able to help them navigate that space, yeah.

No, it's also the same people that sometimes have a hard time asking for help because they've been go-getters all their lives, they've done it all themselves.

There may be a bit of ego involved, but there also may be an idea of not wanting to burden others, which is a very common theme.

Well, I just do it myself.

I don't want to impact Roberta by asking for help or asking for advice.

And I was one of those people, by the way.

And when I realized that, when I started working on the pieces, again, when a lot of transformation happened, because now I'm not coming from a place of ego, I'm coming from a place of I always want to learn.

There's always perspectives different than mine.

And while I don't have to agree with every perspective that is different, I can at least acknowledge it and see if I can gain or glean anything from it.

I love that.

I love that.

Absolutely.

If you look at why you have the things in your life, we can start to reverse engineer.

If I have something in my life I don't have it, it's because of an action I took or didn't take.

It's actually your feelings.

What dictates your feelings?

It's your thoughts.

Because if I have a negative thought, it's going to result in a negative feeling.

So let's say I have a thought, wow, I can't stand my boss.

I have to meet with him again tomorrow.

That's going to give me a feeling of anxiety, a feeling of maybe fear of meeting with him or her.

And that's what it's going to turn into an action of sorts, right?

Right, or even your attitude towards that meeting is going to be very different if you feel that way.

But it starts with your thoughts.

So it's like what you think is ending up what you feel.

What you feel is what you do, your actions, and what you do is what you have in your life.

And the big question people have is, okay, so the thoughts are the primary source for everything that I have in my life and the feelings I have and the actions.

What brings the thoughts in?

Of course, it's your environment.

Like we talked about, the world around us, the other people, also yourself.

Because when I beat myself up all the time, I bring thoughts of negativity there, which lead to feelings of negativity, will lead to actions of negativity, and then the having that's filled with negativity.

The interpretation of the experience, is that what also feeds into everything else?

It does, part of it, for sure.

Absolutely.

For example, if we were to work together, you can look this up and say, okay, how can I stop patterns of negative thoughts or beliefs?

It's usually a simple exercise, but it has to be done quite frequently.

When you catch yourself having a negative thought, stopping yourself by doing something physical.

Let's say I'm sitting down at the computer, typing an email, and I get a negative thought about the person I'm sending it to, or the situation.

I can immediately stand up, maybe shake a bed, which interrupts that pattern, celebrate that I've done it, I could be like, yes, Constantin, you did it.

Good job interrupting it.

And then replace it with something positive.

And what you're doing in that moment is you're interrupting a pattern you don't want in your life.

You're celebrating that you did it, which means you're sending signals to your brain that you did something that's giving you a good feeling, because as soon as you put a big smile on your face, you're going to get dopamine and other chemicals released, which makes you feel good.

So your brain goes like, huh, what happened there?

I want more of it.

So then it starts to relay that, you know, celebrating, praising yourself is actually a good thing, so you want to do more of it.

Then, of course, you replace it with a good feeling.

And you start repeating this into your life, and you're going to see improvements, because what you repeat is essentially what you're going to see in your life.

If it's good or bad, it's irrelevant, because your brain doesn't know what's different.

I remember what Tony Robbins said, you know, that he teaches this priming exercise when you wake up.

So because it says your emotional state is going to determine everything, how your day will go.

Exactly.

Absolutely right.

I have a similar exercise I do every morning.

Actually, as soon as I wake up and I go to the washroom, I look myself in the mirror, and as silly as this sounds, I put a big smile on my face.

I take a deep breath, put a big smile on my face, and I say, Constantin, I love you.

And then I celebrate.

That's beautiful.

Then I go about my day.

Guess what happens in the moment?

You're actually, like you said, you're priming yourself, because what does smiling do to you?

Like, if you put a smile on your face, guaranteed, you cannot be pissed off, angry, upset in the same moment.

You cannot be both at the same time.

So if I put myself in a good mood, sure, I can get back into a bad mood pretty quickly.

But if I continuously bring myself in a good mood, interrupt the bad mood, I'm teaching my brain, my subconscious, to always look for the positives.

How you allow everything around you to impact your life.

You always have a choice.

You can look at the good side of things, or you can look at the bad side of things.

And of course, I respect on that.

There's different ways you can look at it.

So if you come to me, Roberta, and you're angry, and let's say a meeting, I could be judgmental right away.

That would be my old me, again, angry and doing this.

She's not respectful of my time and whatnot.

So I go down the path, which ruined my day, for sure.

Or I could come from a compassion point of view.

So let's say more from the love side and say, you know what, I know she's got three kids at home.

She barely gets any sleep.

You know, she's not maybe doing well in her relationship, whatever the case might be.

And I can bring compassion.

But here's the beautiful part.

You don't even need to know any of the things I told you to have compassion for another individual.

Because we know from our own life that if we go through stuff in life all the time, so most other people do.

Which means that if someone is not on their best behavior, that means either they have some trauma from earlier in life, they're going through some stuff right now or something in between.

So we can extend compassion.

Yes.

Any last words on the four pillars of self?

Anything I didn't ask you, you were hoping to share today?

The biggest thing for people to take from this, and it's something I struggled with a lot, is it's not about perfection, not even close.

Mastery could be a goal, could be an intention, and also about being aware and cognizant of the fact that you should feed all the pillars as much as you can.

There will be a season when one of the pillars will take center stage.

Let's say you want to work on an emotional pillar.

Of course, you're going to put 60, 70% of your work into it.

Then you can give 10% of the rest, not ignore them.

And the best analogy I can give it there, Roberta, is let's say you had four children.

Would you ignore one of them?

I hope not.

Right?

Most people will say, of course not.

Well, think of these as your children.

Now, again, in that example, if I have four kids, and let's say one of them happens to be in high school, and he's into sports, and he's got some big games and stuff, I might focus a bit more time on him or her, but I'm not going to ignore the other three.

So think of yourself in this scenario as well, with these pillars supporting you.

That's right.

For example, you're someone that hasn't been taking care of their physical side.

Let's say they are in a physical scenario, and honestly, they're overweight, but maybe they're fighting a disease, or they're fighting a situation where, you know, they have insomnia and they can't sleep properly.

It doesn't matter how weak or strong your emotional game is.

Your physical pillar becomes the main one.

So it's about identifying that big fire that we talked about earlier.

Which one is the big fire?

Let's go put that one out first and see the ripple effects it has before we tackle anything else.

Please tell us a little bit about your podcast, the title, where we can listen before you go.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Roberto, for that option.

So my podcast is titled Unleash Thyself.

It's all about realizing that you have infinite potential and unleashing that amazing masterpiece that sits just below the surface.

And my podcast is about personal development, self-discovery, and spirituality.

And I have guests on the show that we talk about any of these topics, anything around self-improvement with spirituality in it.

And I also have solo episodes in which I take a topic and I do a deep dive.

If you want to know more about the pillars of self, I actually have solo episodes for each pillar, and then there's more stuff I'm working on, so you're more than welcome to go check those out.

You can find them on Spotify, Apple, any of the big podcast platforms, or YouTube at UnleashThyself, and the same website, unleashthyself.com.

And if you want to talk to me, if you want to work with me, the easiest way is to send me an email, constantin at unleashthyself.com, while everything gets sorted out, or come see me on LinkedIn, Constantin Bo Morun.

I love to talk about anything related to personal development, self-discovery, spirituality, and of course communication, which is a big part of all three.

Unleash Thyself.

Constantin Bo Morun on LinkedIn, unleashthyself.com, and Unleash Thyself Podcast, hosted by Constantin.

Thank you very much.

This has been so enlightening, and more than anything, I've enjoyed our conversation today.

Likewise, Roberta.

Thank you for the amazing questions and for the chance to be here to speak to you and your audience.

My absolute pleasure.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking on Communicating Podcast once again.

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