Speaking and Communicating Podcast

And so, I wanted to help people choose how things were perceived in their environment, and therefore, how they show up in the world, and what is attracted to them through physics.

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 in to.

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 our guest today, joining us from Minnesota.

Julie Van Elswyk is a worthiness and love attraction coach, especially for women.

She helps us to rewire our subconscious minds using hypnosis and other methodologies so that we can create lasting change and stop self-sabotaging.

And before I go any further, please welcome her to the show.

Hi, Julie.

Hello.

Thank you for having me, Roberta.

I'm so happy to be here.

My pleasure.

Welcome to the show.

Please introduce yourself to our listeners.

Yes.

Well, I think you did a great job.

My name is Julie Van Elswyk.

I'm a Mindset Coach.

I'm also certified in Hypnosis and certified in Rapid Transformational Therapy.

And what I do is I bring all those qualities in to my work.

And I work primarily with women, although there are some men drawn to my work.

I never turn anyone away that's drawn in.

We work on mindset issues as far as confidence, past messaging.

A lot of my clients have been through therapy and know the root, but haven't been able to rewire the old tapes in their minds.

And so we work on that through both coaching, through law of attraction work, but also through hypnotic recordings, meditations that I give my clients.

We create them on the spot.

I set them to music.

And then these are rewiring tools that my clients can use in a slowed mental state to be able to integrate new messages around the work that we've done and around what they're wanting to achieve.

It's a lot of fun.

It does sound like fun.

And I only say this, which you mentioned.

I don't think at this point there's something we don't know.

It's just the idea of how do I implement it in my life?

Like we've heard so much of it, but we still don't change.

We still have the old patterns.

We still have the programming, the old voices.

That's where the challenge is.

And that's where somebody like you kicks in for us to say, okay, yes, I've heard this people, but why is it after 10 years, I still haven't changed?

Right.

Absolutely.

And it's habits of thought and habits of thought are difficult to break without some intention.

And so a lot of what I am is a compassionate support and a accountability to give the roadmap to changing these habits of thought and then walk with my clients through it, so that they have someone there, keeping them accountable to doing the work.

And the clients that I have that have amazing results are the clients that really want to change.

They want to change these habits of thought, and they're willing to listen to the recording every day, to check in with me, to take this work seriously.

And then they do change.

They do raise their confidence.

They do attract that job that they want.

They do find solutions that they may have been blocking before.

It's so much fun to see someone come into their light and into their worthiness to be able to shine in the world, because I think if we all have that sense of self-love and worthiness, and we cultivate that inside us, it's going to change the world.

It's going to change how we parent.

It's going to change how we respond to our spouses or partners.

It's going to change how we show up in our jobs with more authority.

It's important work.

And you're right, the knowledge is out there.

It's a matter of rewiring the habit.

Yes.

And when your clients do take the time to implement those strategies and tools that you give them, do any of them ever say, Julie, I'd love to, but I just don't see how I can fit this into my schedule.

I'm very busy.

Right, right.

So there's a couple different camps that my clients land in.

There are some clients that think exactly that.

They don't have the time.

And they continue to meet with me on maybe a weekly basis because they feel better during the session and they feel better after the session.

And that's enough for them.

And that's okay.

That's their choice.

But my real template and the template I encourage my clients to go through is really only about six, maybe eight sessions.

And that is, hey, if you jump in and give this attention, like a child or like emotions need attention, if you give this attention, these six or eight weeks of one hour a week plus doing the work on the daily basis will change your life forever.

It can change everything, how you show up in the world.

So I do try to gauge what my clients want to achieve and how serious they are about achieving it.

Because true change doesn't really take more than a few minutes a day, but you have to show up in that few minutes a day.

You certainly have to show up.

And what about meditation?

Because I know that one of the biggest challenges is, I can't stop thinking.

I hear the tape, I hear these affirmations, but my mind is always racing.

Yes, yes.

Meditation is a practice.

So a lot of times, if I have a fairly anxious client that comes to meet with me and the racing mind, which we can have just habitually outside of anxiety as well, that takes a little bit of undoing as far as we might make a short eight-minute recording first, just focusing on practicing, letting go.

And I have some strategies for that.

You know, watching the past hook to you like threads and watching thoughts of the future hook to you like threads and watching them sever from your body and allowing yourself to float in the present moment.

And it does take practice.

It absolutely takes practice.

It takes breathing to be able to slow down the whole body.

And it does take maybe anywhere from a week to four or five weeks for clients to really be able to get comfortable with that feeling of letting go.

Someone with a past history of abuse, for instance, might feel unsafe if they're not on guard, if their mind isn't always racing.

And so we have to train the mind that it's safe to slow down.

When that does happen, so many different positive effects take place.

There's been studies that our actual telomeres, which is the covering on the end of our chromosomes that protects our genetic material, and that also is indicative of our aging process, that our telomeres will actually lengthen, protecting more and reversing our genetic aging, when we can enter into this feeling of letting go.

And I believe that study that showed that, I read that in Dr.

Elizabeth Blackburn's book on telomeres, she won a Nobel Prize.

But that was about 13 minutes a day, and the results were shown after five or six weeks.

I might have those numbers a little off, but it's somewhere right around there.

To actually change our makeup, to change our chromosomes through this feeling of actually being able to relax the mind.

So it's important work.

There's a huge release of over a thousand chemicals that are anti-inflammatory, that help rebuild and repair, that are anti-cancer, that happens when we can do that letting go and meditative type work.

It is a practice, but I do have a formula that tends to work.

It does work for those that are willing to put in the time.

And I think 13 minutes is doable.

Yes.

When I make meditations for my clients, it's really in that 13 to 16 minutes window.

That's all it takes to change the entire chemistry of our body.

It's quite amazing.

How did you get started on this work?

I was a biology major in college, and I took enough psychology courses to declare a minor, although I never did.

And I've always loved the way the body and mind work.

I went on to on a different pathway career wise at first, but my oldest child was diagnosed with leukemia when he was four.

Those are the moments in life that stop everything and where we reevaluate.

You were talking about not having time.

I mean, there's things that come up where we don't have a choice.

We just have to stop and be where we are.

And that was one of those moments for me.

And it gave me the reflection, the ability to stop and reflect and say, what's important here for his healing, for his journey forward?

I went through diet.

I went through all the different avenues of health.

But what it kept coming back to really through my research is mindset.

That mindset is such a foundational aspect of our mental health and therefore ability to heal.

I had this ability when my son was sick because he was four and he went through chemo until he was about seven and a half to paint the canvas because he was that young in whatever light we chose.

I could present this to him in any different light.

And I wanted to be able to present it in a light of power, empowerment, healing, the strength of his body.

We talked about the drug, the chemo that went into his port as magical rainforest medicine because it was derived from a plant in the rainforest and called Vincristine.

I mean, he went into remission faster than they'd ever seen at an institution.

I believe those moments made such an impactful difference and it made me want to learn more about it.

Also, he received a misdiagnosis when he was first diagnosed that was fatal.

And we lived for about a week thinking that he had a fatal diagnosis.

Now, when they came back to us and told us that they had made a mistake and he really just had regular leukemia instead of Philadelphia chromosome leukemia, which was rare in children, I felt like I was given a gift.

Oh my goodness, my child only has leukemia.

And that mental attitude, I could feel the gift it gave us through the rest of his treatment.

I couldn't be anything other than grateful for his life, for his prognosis, being about in the 90 percents, regardless of having to go through chemo, regardless of the aftermath, regardless of any of that.

I could feel my mental state go down when I started to look at the problems that could occur to him in his future, cognitive delay.

But I knew when I focused on, there's a parabola with every problem, and somebody is on this end, somebody is on the end, the outliers that are having positive results.

Why can't that be us?

Why can't that be me?

And so I saw the power of mindset through all of this.

Now cognitive delay, my son was valedictorian of his class.

He got a presidential ride to college.

He's incredibly intelligent.

He's gonna get through college in three years, maybe three and a half if he takes up another major.

I mean, he's a very smart kid.

So going through all of that, there's much more to the story where, you know, I did have some PTSD from that whole experience, just so many emotions that needed to be processed after that.

When I went through some therapy, I found that those old tapes, even though I knew the answers and I had healed from a lot of that, those old tapes still did exist.

So, I came back to that mindset work.

I came back to, how do I want to view things and why can't I create the filter for which I see all of this through?

And that's really where I started on my journey.

It started with my son, but then it began with also my own healing and becoming a law of attraction coach and then going on to say, well, I want to take this deeper.

I went on to do the rep of transformational therapy, certification, and then hypnosis, to be able to give my clients what I felt like was the full package of support needed to really change that wiring.

It's one thing to be forced kind of into a state of gratitude, and it's another thing to choose it.

And so I wanted to help people choose how things were perceived in their environment, and therefore how they show up in the world, and what is attracted to them through physics.

That's really how I got started.

First of all, congratulations to your son.

And you as a mom, and I'm sure your husband was also in the same mindset.

I think most of what happened when he was going through chemo was the guidance and your mindsets, guiding him to also not be in a state of despair.

At four years old, I cannot imagine, because grownups, it's painful.

For him to just power through that, is testament to how you and his dad supported him through that journey.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, I didn't want to put my adult baggage on him.

He was this innocent little child, and he was so resilient.

He would have a spinal tap, and then wake up, and he'd be kind of green.

But half an hour later, he'd be running down the hall to leave.

And the nurses were just astounded.

I thought, why tell him that's abnormal?

Why even give him the idea that that isn't the way his body works?

So I never indulge in the victim's story.

He would wake up and hear him go to the bathroom and throw up, and then he'd get dressed and say, I'm ready for school.

Never even mentioned to me that he threw up.

And now I could have gone in, and he could have heard me talking on the phone to my friends about how miserable it is, or how he's throwing up every morning.

And he would have been given an idea that he's weak, that he somehow should be feeling sorry for himself in this moment.

But the idea he had instead was I have the kind of sick that lasts a little longer.

That's what I told him.

There's different kinds of sick.

You know, some people get the flu and you're done in a week or you're done in three days.

You have one that lasts a little longer, but that's OK.

We'll get through it.

We're going to do all the things we need to do to get through it.

And so he just thought, oh, it's part of my sick, last a little longer.

I'm ready to go to school.

Just like some people, he'd go and get chemotherapy and see people after children, after bone marrow transplant.

They're totally bloated out.

They're in their wheelchairs.

And he thought, gosh, everybody has something.

I mean, we taught him that.

You know, mom had a spinal fusion when I was 17.

I can't bend my back.

That's OK.

I live my life in a different way.

On Adrienne, California, I can't live here out of her left ear because she had a brain tumor there and had it removed.

That's OK.

We all have our things.

You have this longer sick and you'll get over it and it's OK.

And so I didn't ever want to taint that beautiful innocence and empowerment that he naturally had as a toddler.

I think it was out of protection for him.

But also the wiring of his psyche is different.

Had you also brought in a different mindset, the opposite?

True, true.

There was another child in our community that was diagnosed with leukemia around the same time and we would go to benefits at their home.

And I would watch the father and this is nothing against his family.

Everyone deals with grief in different ways, but I would watch the father hold his son and talk about all the scary things and all the things that he could have happened to his body in the future.

To try to, I think, get to people's emotions to be able to donate to this charity, and that didn't feel good to me.

It didn't feel good as far as the ideas that were being planted at that time.

And so I never brought my child to that benefit first of all.

I would hope not.

Yes.

You know, we started donating and stopped going to the event itself.

But I really do think that for all of us, we can look back at our childhood and see how things were wired in different ways, intentionally or not.

I think I was very aware at that time that this is a potential wiring.

So let's try to do it right.

And you certainly did.

And now the gratitude part which you mentioned, did it even physically feel different for you when you were grateful that it wasn't the first diagnosis?

Because they say sometimes even your body feels different when you are grateful.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

You know, when I walk through things with my clients as well, we will climb up what I call the emotional scale, going from like a lower vibration and we'll work through the emotions and climb up into a place that feels better.

And almost immediately, their bodies and physical ailments feel better.

When our body is bathed in a lighter energy, it feels better and we can think about that, you know, if you go and you are lit up by something, you're having a conversation that feels really good, you're not aware of your aching knee in that moment.

You know, even if you have a slight headache, it's just less present in that moment.

And that was how I felt as well.

I'm very aware of, I think Jesus did that work, you know, when he just bathed people in love and wholeness, they calibrated to his energy and disease could not exist.

It just couldn't exist in that level of love and acceptance and wholeness.

And so I do believe we can train ourselves through repetition, through intention, to calibrate, to set our default thermostat a little higher and a little higher.

And yes, that time, going through that time of waking up and just feeling so grateful, so grateful to be alive, so grateful to be my son's mother, so grateful that he was alive, that I had another day with him, that he had this life waiting for him ahead and his prognosis was good.

I mean, that felt wonderful.

I was definitely happier than the people that were coming during the harder times to bring us meals, I'll tell you that.

You know, the people bringing the meals, they were somber, they wanted to shed a few tears, they wanted a glimpse of my son with his bald head, you know, and I was in a different mental place.

I felt so grateful for their service and love and so grateful to be alive and so grateful to be my son's mom.

And it just felt grateful for everything.

The power of gratitude.

Now, let's talk about silencing your inner critic.

So these recordings that we've had all these years, how do we then start to shift?

And the thing about the inner critic is I always say, if my friend goes through something, I'm a lot kinder to them than if I do something.

Isn't that funny?

Exactly.

It's funny, it's ridiculous, and it's also kind of sad, because how are we being our own best friend?

I mean, this is the voice we have to live with all day long.

You know, Emoto in Japan did experiments with water, that if we pour love into water, it crystallizes in more beautiful forms than if we pour hate into water.

And then it crystallizes into these chaotic forms.

You know, people say, talk to your plants and they grow better.

We're just bathing them in energy.

That's all that is.

It's science.

When we're talking to our kids in loving ways and our best friend, you know, we're bathing them in that loving intention and energy.

What are we bathing ourselves in all day long?

That's the question.

Because our bodies are going to become a result of the energy we are bathing it with.

There's been studies where they've taken electromagnetic imaging back in the 60s, I believe, of uteruses.

And all the women who had uterine cancer had the same path, the same electromagnetic footprint pattern around their uterus.

But what was interesting is that the healthy uteruses were more coherent energy.

It looked more uniform.

It looked more organized.

Now, what they found was there were a few women who had the disorganized pattern and a healthy uterus.

But when they followed those women, those were the women who ended up getting uterine cancer.

So the conclusion there was that the energetic pattern around the organ preceded the condition.

So what I take from that is that we are bathing ourselves in an energy, and that is going to precede the condition that our body goes into.

Now, are some things maybe predestined in a way or whatever you want to call it?

Yes, maybe so.

But I think there's a way to bathe ourselves in coherent energy and come out with a better result.

So yes, this inner critic, it is more important than just our daily happiness, its quality of life, its quality of our body.

I have a free little guide on my website, actually, at julievcoaching.com.

That is a released inner critic workbook.

And it just goes gently through the steps and invites some journaling prompts through the steps.

The first steps in releasing that inner critic, and it starts with awareness.

It starts with what am I telling myself?

How do we bring awareness to that?

Well, think about the times that you don't feel good.

Let's say you went to a gathering, you come home, and you just feel icky about it.

Okay, what are you telling yourself in that moment?

If you could put it into a sentence, because a lot of times it's emotions, it's little fragments.

We don't think in full sentences as always.

So if you could put it into a full sentence, what are you telling yourself in that moment?

Oh, I felt intimidated by XYZ at this gathering.

Okay, why?

What was there?

I don't feel like I measured up.

I don't feel good enough.

Okay, well, there you're getting the awareness to the message.

And then we understand the intent of that message.

Now, this is the tricky part.

Our mind is not our enemy.

There is a reason that we talk to ourselves the way we do.

We might be disciplining ourselves with a switch, thinking that this is somehow going to whip us into shape.

Well, next time I'll show up better.

Next time I'll play small.

Well, I won't try to gather attention.

What is it trying to do?

It's trying primarily, usually, to do one of a few things.

One is to protect you, you know, don't become the center of attention because then you might be embarrassed.

Well, that probably goes back to an old story.

So just understanding the intention of some of the messages we have is so powerful in bringing them into the light and making friends with yourself.

Then you can say, what's the fear behind that and soothe it.

You be your own compassionate friend in that moment.

This guide is a start.

Again, it's a free download, but to be able to guide you through, how do I soothe that fear inside me?

What can I say if I'm writing a letter to myself as my own best friend?

Thank you so much for trying to protect me.

Thank you so much for trying to keep me safe.

And that did keep me safe as a child.

And I did cope in that way, and that was helpful at times.

It was helpful to play small with an angry parent in the house.

But now, I'm the adult, and now I don't want to play small anymore, and it's not helping anymore.

And so to be able to soothe that fear and redefine that inner voice when you come to kind of an agreement inside you, this isn't helping.

Let's be a team.

This is how I want you to encourage me.

Talking to your inside voice as if it's a friend.

This is how it would be helpful for you to encourage me.

Next time, let me know there's no danger here.

I'm okay.

I'm strong.

I'm safe to shine.

And then you can come up with, you know, reflecting and affirming it through affirmations, even walking through a visualization.

There's some techniques that I use, and a lot of them are laid out on this little free workbook at julievcoaching.com.

But, you know, we walk through that in my sessions with people too, in a slower, more in-depth way.

The foundation, I think, of our quality of life, physically and mentally, is to be able to redefine this inner voice and love ourselves, be a good friend to ourselves.

That is the path to self-love, absolutely.

And you were talking about letting go when we started.

That letting go of all that messaging that's accumulated for however many years will then make space for the new, better light, energy, better messaging, being a compassionate friend towards yourself.

Yes, absolutely.

It makes the space.

It's like dumping out the file cabinet so you can put in new information.

A lot of times in my sessions with the clients where it feels appropriate, we'll do visualizations around seeing where that messaging came from.

Maybe it's apparent, maybe it's a circumstance.

In a hypnotic state, we can allow our subconscious mind to bring something forward.

That's a representative of where that came from, a situation.

And oftentimes, we'll look at it and define it, see it for what it is, and be able to cut the cord with that situation's power on our life anymore.

There was a philosopher that said, the child is the parent to the man.

I believe that was the quote.

And what it means is that we as adults are still being sort of driven sometimes by our inner child and by the beliefs.

We were given as children when we look at it and say, gosh, I'm an adult.

I can do what I want.

I can redefine my life in any way that I want.

I don't have to live by these chains around my ankles anymore.

I can redefine it.

And that's some of the work that we do with my clients one on one.

To engage emotions is very important.

So a lot of these visualizations are simply to get past the critical mind through a slowed state where wiring can happen more efficiently.

Children are in that slower state of mind, you know, the alpha wavelengths and in their brains.

And that's why they can learn music so quickly or languages so quickly.

And so when we slow our minds, we get into that alpha state of brain and we can integrate information more quickly.

It bypasses the critical mind.

Then engaging the emotions to be able to cut the cords with certain situations, to be able to have our say, speak our truth into that situation and redefine it and then sever it from our current existence, the power it has over us.

Keep the respect for it, keep the awareness, but sever the power and be able to integrate that new information to involve our emotions and really be able to straighten our course as adults.

Rewrite the story, you know, where the parenting of the inner child, where we become our own parent and we can start to go back and write some of those stories that we picked up along the way.

And it changes our lives.

It certainly does.

And this faulty humans who we are very grateful for, known as our parents, they did the best they could.

So with the tools they had.

Yeah, absolutely.

Any last words of wisdom for our listeners who also want to start this journey, especially because you spoke about how when the mind is slow, is it best to do these exercises when you're just waking up or when you're going to bed?

When is our brain the slowest so that we can absorb all this into our systems?

Well, our cortisol kicks in right when we wake up.

And a lot of people find that there is a drowsy period that is great for doing meditation, for doing that self-love work, for talking to yourself as your own best friend as you wake up to start the tone of your day.

I would say do it right away, because otherwise that cortisol is going to go up and you're going to be off to the races.

Right before bed is a very natural slowing and it's a wonderful energy to put yourself to sleep in, continues to integrate into the night.

What I also find is follow your own body's rhythms.

To go and try to do a meditation, you've got done with one busy meeting at work and you have another one coming up and your mind is firing, firing, firing.

And to try to do a meditation at that point might be more difficult, less fruitful, because it's more difficult to enter into that letting go and tell your practice data.

However, if there's a time that you naturally come down during the day, for me, it's late afternoon.

I am going, going, going all morning and I have lunch and I do a little more work and then I just come down.

And when I come down and I just need a little rest, I'm like, perfect, I'll do a meditation and then I can just slip in.

And it's so easy.

So I would say pay attention to your own body's rhythms, your own mind's rhythms.

When there's times where you're just need replenishment and you're feeling slow anyway, that's a beautiful time to just let your brain drop into that surrender.

You know, if you're not gonna work with a coach like me, if you're not gonna, you know, go download the workbook, one tip I would say is just simply practice the feeling of meditation for even one to three minutes to start.

And the tip I would give is that it's not about trying.

It is absolutely about giving up.

It's about surrender.

A scientist on the East Coast, I think he was at Princeton, who was trying to prove that we could put our brain into those alpha wavelengths.

And he was singing hymns, monitoring his own brain, doing meditation, trying to put his brain into alpha, and was having a hard time.

And it was after a couple of weeks that he finally said, oh, I give up.

I just give up.

And he took a deep breath and surrendered, and his brain immediately went into alpha.

So that is the key.

It's that surrender.

It's that giving up into now, feel the past drift away, feel the future drift away, and just give up into this present moment and be.

And that in and of itself will do wonders for creating space between your thoughts to be able to see how you're talking to yourself, to be able to evaluate, oh, I'm irritated.

Interesting.

And get curious about that before you just let it flow into your actions.

Slow down and surrender.

Words of wisdom from Julie Van Elswyk from Minnesota, who is a law of attraction and worthiness coach.

Thank you so much, Julie.

And most importantly, thank you for sharing your story.

We really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

This has been a pleasure.

My absolute one as well.

Before you go, please repeat for us where we can find the free web book, the website, julievcoaching.com.

That's right, julievcoaching.com, and the Release Your Inner Critic Workbook is a free download.

I'm so thankful for that.

Thank you, Julie.

Thank you for having me.

My absolute pleasure.

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