Speaking and Communicating Podcast

There's research that shows that it literally changes your brain. Meditation changes your brain.

It increases the amount of gray matter in the part of your brain for thinking and learning, and it decreases the amount of gray matter in the part of the brain where stress and anxiety live.

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 beautiful Colorado. Brittany Hopkins Switlick is an author, yoga educator, and a keynote speaker.

Her book, Dancing with Ourselves is here to help us break free from reactive habits and learn to harness our inner critic. And before I go any further, please help me welcome her to the show. Hi, Brittany.

Hi.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you for being here. Welcome. Please introduce yourself to our listeners.

Who am I?

I'm Brittany. My ego's name is Brandy, just so we get that out right up front. My inner critic, Brandy.

I am a mom, I'm a wife, I am a dog mom. I found my way to being an author through yoga. I've been leading yoga teacher trainings for over 10 years now.

And there's a moment in every yoga teacher training where the trainees say, I thought I was going to just learn how to do the poses right. And I'm learning so much more about who I am and how I am in the world. And I need my mom to know these things.

I need my husband to know these things. I need my sister, my best friend to know these things, but they're not going to do yoga teacher training. So how do I get them to interact with me in these more kind of empowered ways in the world?

And it never occurred to me that I would write a book. But here we are. And I've written those things down that my trainees wanted to share with others in this book.

So I'm newly an author. I launched the book in March and this has been such a fun journey.

Congratulations. It's the same with me. I'm thinking if I attended a yoga class, it's about the posing and being calm and being present.

So what is it that you think pops out from within your attendees that makes them start asking those types of questions?

In the West, we think yoga and we think rectangle mat and leggings and bending yourself into a pretzel. But really, yoga, it's a practice that came to us from India and it is a way of living and being in the world. I'm just going to share it.

I went to India. I was chaperoning a trip for some kids that I worked at a boarding school with or for to India. We were on a hike, but really we were walking from one village to another village and we came across a farmer who was on his commute.

He was walking. We thought we were hiking. Naive me, I was 26 at the time, through the translator, asked this farmer if he did yoga.

He looked at me like I was crazy. Then he said some things and he gestured, and he gestured, and basically the translator said, I'm doing yoga right now. I'm present to my feet landing on the earth.

I'm present to the breath in my body. I'm present to what I'm seeing around me. I was like, yoga is a practice of presence.

The skills that I'm teaching in yoga teacher training, yes, they learn how to do the poses in empowered ways for their body, depending on how their body is, what are the proportions of their arms to their torso, to their legs.

But also, I'm teaching them how to get present to who they are on the inside. Parts of me, we talk about ego work a lot, and it's the part of ourselves that developed in childhood, that is trying to keep us safe and trying to help us in the world.

Yet, how we went about things as a four-year-old is different than how we need to go about things as a 20-year-old or a 40-year-old or a 60-year-old.

Yeah, is my ego running the show, having me in reaction as a victim, as a persecutor, as a rescuer, or is my higher self leading my life as a creator, as a challenger, as a coach?

I do blend, I bring in modern-day tools like the drama triangle and the empowerment dynamic into the yoga teacher training because it's just a modern language for what the yoga sutras are teaching us that are thousands of years old.

And speaking of the four-year-old, when you talk about being present, have you noticed how children will say, mommy, look, this is what I'm doing now. They are fully present in what they're doing. They're not thinking about anything else.

Whereas we grownups, while you're doing something else in front of you, you're thinking about your bills, you're thinking about an appointment you missed, you're thinking about anything other than what's in front of you, what you're touching with

your hands. So how does yoga help us to have that four-year-old practice of being fully present in whatever it is you're engaged in at that time?

5:48

Cultivating Presence

Great question.

Couple of ways. It depends on the yoga practice. So when we're on the mat making shapes, that's called yoga asana, and whether we're at home doing it with a recording, or just doing our own practice, or at a studio, we're practicing feeling our body.

We're in warrior one, and we're asked to experience the mat beneath our hands and our feet.

We're asked to experience the breath in our body and breathe slowly, even though we might be doing a crazy hard physical pose, we're being asked to breathe calmly.

And we're asking to look to one spot to see what's right in front of us while we're doing the physical practice. My favorite thing about asana is that we're being asked to pull our shoulders back and stand up tall.

And basically we're power posing for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, however long you're in the yoga asana class or practice. And so that's impacting how I'm showing up for that hour then translates off the mat.

It impacts how I drive in traffic after that, hopefully, or how I interact with my spouse when I get home.

And then if we're talking about the meditation practice of yoga, yeah, for however long, five minutes, 30 minutes, however long you're practicing meditating, you're practicing noticing your thoughts and then letting them go and coming into the place

in between your thoughts. People often think meditation, they can't meditate because they can't stop their thoughts. And I always say there's good news and bad news about that.

The good news is you can't stop your thoughts and the bad news is that you can't stop your thoughts. But you can practice witnessing your thoughts. And it's the ego part of ourself that is thinking about this and that.

Our higher self is fine just being in the space between the thoughts and being the witness to the thoughts. And so there's different meditation techniques. There's like a body scan.

So we're going to give our ego the job of noticing how do my feet feel right now. Noticing how does my tummy feel right now? How does my chest feel?

How does my jaw feel? That technique, I tried it for probably 10 years, and it just didn't work for me. And it was my best friend, Molly, who taught me the Saatva Institute, a school in India.

Their technique is it starts with some breathing that kind of tricks your brain out of. It's a little bit complicated. So it's like, I got to focus.

It's like, OK, I got to focus on this complicated thing for two minutes. And now I'm going to give my ego a stick of bamboo to hold on to. And that stick of bamboo is a mantra.

It could be simple as so hum, which is Sanskrit for I am. And I give that metaphor of a stick of bamboo. I don't know where I heard it.

But the story is that in India, an elephant trainer might have his elephant and needs to get from one side of the village to the other. And they have to go through the market. And the elephant's trunk is so curious, wandering.

And it ends up wrecking things, knocking things down because it's so curious. But the trainer realized, oh, if I give that trunk a task of holding on to the stick of bamboo, we can make it through the market without disrupting anything.

And so my ego is like the elephant trunk wandering, is like, we need to think about this. We should be doing laundry. What's that email?

Did I respond to the thing? And I give it the stick of bamboo, the mantra. So hum.

I am. I breathe in. I think so.

I breathe out. I think hum. And then thoughts will come up and it's like, nope, hold on to that stick of bamboo.

Just think this. It's an interesting practice and it's a practice, not a perfect. And it's like some days, Brandy, my ego is like that four year old that's just throwing a fit, just wants to do anything, but sit there and hold the stick of bamboo.

And there's other days where she's my 16 year old self that's sulking in a corner, like, why are you making me do this? And there's other days that it's like, oh, we can land and it's fine.

But usually it takes me at least 20 minutes to get my ego calm down so I can get to the place where I can actually be in the space between the thoughts.

So Asana is one of the practices that helps us get present physically to what we're experiencing in our bodies that translates off the mat. Meditation and a practice that helps us get present to our thoughts and our mind.

There's research that shows that it literally changes your brain. Meditation changes your brain. It increases the amount of gray matter in the part of your brain for thinking and learning.

And it decreases the amount of gray matter in the part of the brain where stress and anxiety live. I tell my trainees, it's like you cannot afford to not meditate. Like it's the best thing you can do for your brain and your body every day.

You think more clearly when you've meditated. And then the third practice that I bring up is inquiry. It's journaling, it's self-reflection, like reflecting on why did I do that thing?

What part of me was reacting and why? We spend a lot of time with the yamas and niyamas in my yoga teacher training. The yamas and niyamas are kind of like the ethical practices.

So it's non-violence, truthfulness, non-attachment. There's 10 of them. They have nothing to do with anything other than how am I interacting with myself and how am I interacting with others?

My being violent towards myself or towards someone else. And violence doesn't mean like physically harming someone, but it's like I can be violent with myself just by over-scheduling. That's harming me.

I can be violent with the earth by taking more than is needed. Non-stealing is more than just taking things from someone else. It's, yeah, what are we taking from ourselves or others?

So we spend a lot of time with those in self-reflection on how we're showing up in the world.

11:59

The Ego's Role

Yes.

And I think there's so much, as this conversation goes on, that we're going to unpack from that. But let's go back to Brandy. How did you come to a point where you named your, is it an alter ego?

Is it a different version of Brittany? How does Brandy come about?

So two questions I heard is like, how did I come to name that part of myself? And then how does she show up?

In 2019, I had just recently had a repressed memory from childhood resurface that kind of took my whole life and was like a game of 52 card pickup, like take a deck of cards and just throw them all over and some land face up, some land face down and

it's reprocessing my life. I was 39 years old at the time. It was then that I saw, oh my gosh, I show up in life to different scenarios with a different version of me.

I was talking to my best friend Molly at the time and I was like, I can show up to teach a yoga class and feel powerful and open and confident. I can hang out with my friends and feel silly and okay with being silly and loving and unselfish.

But then I show up at home in this marriage. I had been with this man for 16 years and I was seeing that when I went home, I would shrink. I was afraid to rock the boat.

I was afraid to admit that I like Taylor Swift. I was afraid because he would make fun of me. I didn't feel like me as a business owner.

When there was a conflict with, like somebody was late too many times and it was like, I needed to have a conversation with that employee. I would get so anxious and not to not want to hurt their feelings. That's not powerful at work.

It's not powerful at home. Molly suggested, she's like, what if you name that part of you that shows up in those ways that don't feel like you? I was like, what do you mean?

She's like, I don't know, like Brandy. Brandy with an eye. Yeah, with a heart over the eye.

She's the part of me that feels afraid to rock the boat. It often shows up physically in my chest. My breath feels short, like I'm not able to take deep breaths.

I might find myself clenching my fist or clenching my jaw. And it's basically anytime I'm not feeling peaceful or powerful, you can, Freud talks about the ego, the super ego in the id.

The id is the part of us that's like, just eat the food, punch the guy, flip that person off. And then the super ego is like the judgy angel version. That's like, well, society says that we should be X, Y, or Z.

So we need to present ourselves in this way. And then the ego in the middle is trying to manage these two sides. And so I've just combined it.

The judgy part of me, the impulsive part of me, and the part of me that's just trying to manage the chaos inside is the ego. And that's Brandy.

Once you established that, okay, when I'm not showing up as myself, that's Brandy showing up. Do you then show up as the Brittany that you want to be? Or when Brandy shows up, what kind of inner conversation do you have with Brandy?

Usually I have to talk to that part of me like I would talk to my four-year-old.

I see that right now you feel like you don't matter. It makes sense that you feel like you don't matter.

Either if the make sense was like because that's what I learned in childhood, or whatever literally happened on the phone call or in the conversation or the email. It makes sense that you feel that way. Let's take a couple of deep breaths.

Let the energy move or maybe it's take a walk. Get the energy moving. It makes sense that you feel that way.

Take some deep breaths. I've got us. I'm a grown up and I've lived this long and I've seen that I am capable, I am intelligent, and I can figure this out.

We don't have to manipulate. We don't have to be passive aggressive. We don't have to be forceful.

We can make a request if a request is needed. We can adjust our energy. Yeah.

Usually for me, it's like I need to have a conversation with myself, pretending like I'm talking to my four-year-old. Some people in my yoga teacher trainings are like, I think I'm only that part. They feel like they're only the ego.

If my name is George, my ego's name is George because I only feel reactive all the time. There's moments, you can find moments, but it's really tuning in to what's happening semantically in your body. What are you feeling?

Where are you feeling it? It's a clue for the people that are like, I don't have an ego or I'm all ego. It's like, no, there's times where you do feel calm and open.

It might be small glimpses like when you're taking a hike or when you're playing a game. It's like when you're fully immersed in something.

Because I'm wondering when you started acknowledging Brandy's existence, when you take those steps to be courageous, do you still feel the knots in your stomach like you did before you made that distinction?

It's a great question. Yeah, it's like, what energy am I bringing to the thing that I'm about to do that's scary? I want to share that when I started my yoga studio, I hadn't realized that I had this part of me, and I was a super accomplisher.

I'm going to prove that I can do this. But it was definitely from an ego energy. The feeling is that I'm not good enough, is a pretty standard human ego feeling or limiting belief.

And there was so much of producing the yoga studio that was from the energy of proving the limiting belief wrong. Like, I'm going to do this thing to prove that I'm good enough. And that was exhausting.

I had ulcer, anxiety through the roof, always trying to prove that I could do it.

Is that what you refer to as self-improvement overwhelm? Because I think a lot of us in the self-improvement era, we tend to do that. You know, they say, fill the fear and do it in a way.

Fail forward, even if you don't feel confident, show up as confident, fake it till you make it. We are constantly bombarded with those messages. Is it really detrimental to all this inner work that we're trying to do?

I feel like if we're doing it, not recognizing what we're feeling on the inside, it's like, but when I am in my higher self, I can still do the hard thing from the energy of, I know I am good enough, but it requires me first seeing that Brandy feels

not good enough. Like, I've done a lot of things, so clearly I'm good enough. But she still tries to show up every day and be like, are you sure you're good enough? And I have to get present.

Getting present is like, oh, what am I? I'm feeling stress. So what do I need to do?

Step one is really literally just sit up tall and pull the shoulders back and take a deep breath. I love the idea of butterflies in the stomach. Both come up when you're afraid and when you're excited.

Yeah, right. So it's like get the butterflies in formation and I'm going to breathe. I can be afraid, but not fearful as I'm doing the thing.

We say that a lot about speaking when you're about to speak.

Like I say, don't think of the butterflies as, oh, it's nervousness. I'm going to mess up, but rather I'm very excited. I'm going to speak in front of 500 people.

Yeah, I love that analogy.

Yeah, failing forward, I think, can be detrimental if you're doing it in reaction to a limiting belief of trying to prove something wrong versus just doing it because you can. It just feels so completely different.

In the list of limiting beliefs, I'm stupid, I'm ugly, I'm not good enough. I realized that I'm not good enough was the candy-coated version of I'm a failure.

When I had my first son nursing him wasn't working and he'd lost too much weight when he was in those first two days, right? And I was crying on the bathroom floor. It's like, oh, I'm a failure.

Yeah, underneath it all is the fear of failure. And it's just like, what's the worst thing that can happen if I fail? Actually, the worst thing that can happen is that I'll need to use formula.

Okay, it's fine. I have to sometimes let have that conversation with Brandy. It's like, what's the worst thing that can happen right now?

When my husband and I first started dating, it was like the fear that the other shoe is going to drop. It's too good to be true.

Oh, we often do that.

What's the worst thing that can happen is you guys don't work out. And then what? And then you'll be fine.

Life will go on because you've always landed on your feet, or you've had people to ask for support. You have to sometimes go all the way to the worst case scenario. So then it's like, okay, we've seen that we will survive the worst thing.

And here we go. We can do the thing because we are capable.

21:06

Rewriting Beliefs

Isn't that one of life's biggest ironies that you would think as we grow older, we become more confident because we have this resume of things we've accomplished and done and overcame and triumphed.

But somehow we always go back to this worst-case scenarios. Why don't that if something happens and there's a challenge in front of me, why don't I sit down and say, hey, look, I've achieved this and this and this and this. I can do this.

But that's not the first place we go to. Why is that?

In yoga, we call them simskaras, ruts. I often give the visual of my college campus, with all these winding sidewalks and beautiful grass lawns between the building.

But the grass was always worn out because the students would go the direct path because we were running late. And simskaras are like that. They're these ruts.

We just always go this way in our mind. Now, neuro-linguistic programming and neuroscience is seeing that it's the same thing in our brain. This thing happens, our brain goes this path.

I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. Right?

We learned it from something, whatever happened in our childhood, whether it was a kid at school being mean to us or failing a test, or lots of worse things that lead us to believe that we're a failure, we're stupid, we're not good enough.

So our ego is attached to that. And yoga ahamkara is the ego. Our ego attaches to labels, good or bad.

Our ego might be like, I'm great in some instances, right? And then other instances, it's like, I'm not great.

But we've been practicing that since we were children until we learn that this is what we've been practicing at age 30 or 40 or 50, whatever we're learning about it. We have to learn to go a different path in our brain.

So there's some neuro-linguistic exercises and I talk about one in my book. We have the limiting beliefs, we write them out and then we write the opposite. And you write it four times, I'm not good enough, I'm capable and strong as my go-to.

Write it out four times and then you say it. You set an alarm on your phone for 8 a.m., noon, 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.

And you say the limiting belief and the opposite four times a day for two days. And what we're doing is first we're linking up the new phrase with the old phrase.

And what you'll notice by the end of the first day is that you'll say, I'm not good enough and your brain will automatically add in, I'm more than enough. And then on the third day, you drop the first part. It's so powerful.

I didn't make it up, I think I saw it on Instagram. It's an addition to an exercise that I lead in my yoga teacher training that's like, oh, it's one thing to see it, but we have to reprogram our brain to take a new path.

Yeah, rewrite the story we've programmed ourselves, write a different one, replace it.

With any habit, we have to be intentional. If you're trying to create the habit of flossing your teeth, you have to set yourself up for success by having the floss right there by the toothbrush, or whatever it is you're going to do.

You have to be intentional with this habit of the way that we think and create a new way. So many people are like, that's such a great idea, and they never do it.

But if you actually do it, it is wild to witness, and I did it with every area of my life.

I did it around finances, any limiting beliefs I have around finances, any limiting beliefs I have around my physical body, any limiting beliefs I have around my relationship with my family.

It took me eight minutes to read through it four times a day because my list of things that I was reprogramming was so long. There's a lot to reprogram.

It certainly is. Now, let's go back to those who come to your yoga studio, and they say that the people that are close to them, how do they get them to get to this higher self level? Because those people are not coming to your yoga studio.

So if you feel that you've reached a new vibrational level, but the people close to you are still, whoever they are, how do you then merge those two worlds?

There's a lot of times where it's beautiful, where the people in their life are like, yes, tell me more, or yes, that's why I've written the book. They're like, here's the book. Do you want to do a book club with me?

And they do a book club with their mom or their best friend or their partner. And that's amazing. And then there's times where it's like, oh, they don't want to join me here.

And then they have a choice. Maybe that friendship or relationship evolves and falls away, you know, because I do have friends that are like, I'm not going to come near that with a 10-foot pole.

And I have to adjust my expectations of how this interaction is going to go. And that's where the drama triangle and the empowerment dynamic come in, because Brandy likes to be the victim and be like, they don't want to do the work with me.

Or she likes to be the rescuer. And she's like, hey, I have this tool for you, especially because I've got all these tools. Let me help you when they have not asked for my help.

And then she turns into a persecutor and just judging people for not being as enlightened as she is, right? And that's not a powerful place to be either. They shouldn't want to be friends with me if I'm going to show up that way.

But the opposite of the victim, of Brandy being the victim, is me as a creator. And my higher self gets curious, I wonder, how can we be friends? Or how can this relationship be a practice of acceptance of who they are and where they're at in life?

And the opposite of the rescuer is the coach. I can't coach someone who hasn't asked me to be their coach, so it's really just coaching myself to stay in the creator curiosity place. And the opposite of the persecutor is the challenger.

And the challenger provides loving pressure. When I'm teaching yoga, a challenger might show up. I look at you and I see a possibility, I'm like, is it possible?

I think you can lunge two inches deeper. And in that moment, you might see me as a persecutor, or you might see me as a challenger, like, yeah, I accept that challenge, here we go. But only you get to decide if I'm being a challenger or persecutor.

So I might in a moment challenge a friend to see a situation differently. Depending on how they interact or react, then it's my clue to back off or stay in it with them.

But mostly, it's a practice of managing myself, not managing the people in my life around me. And it's like if they want to step into it with me, great. If not, great also.

And maybe things need to change. I mean, that's ultimately how I ended up leaving a 16-year relationship was finally seeing, oh, I've been trying to manage this other person by shrinking.

I've been trying to manage this other person by avoiding sharing who I really am. I can choose to see this as they're not stepping up, or I can choose to see this as I'm going to be honest with myself and choose what it is that I want and need.

It's a different energy of the ending of that marriage, depending on if Brandy's looking at the marriage ending or my higher self. We're evolving in different directions. I'm going this way.

Because the only person you can change is yourself.

So you've given us this brilliant exercise to rewrite some of the scripts and limiting beliefs we've had before. Is there one last exercise you can share with us before we close?

Yeah. The thing that first comes to mind is the Heart-Centered Gratitude Practice. Do you want to do it with me?

It takes us 90 seconds. Sit comfortably if you want to look down at a spot in front of you or if you want to close your eyes. And bring your hands on to your chest where you could feel your heartbeat.

And take a deep breath in and open mouth, clear it out. You know, we breathe in to our lungs, but imagine as if you could breathe in to your heart. And with each inhale, imagine the space around your heart expanding.

And as you breathe out, imagine the space around your heart softening. And continue to imagine that breathing around the heart space.

And take your mind to an experience, a time, whether it's recent or a long time ago where you felt complete happiness. Like what were you doing in this time where you felt complete and utter happiness? What do you see?

Is there a sound or a smell that you hear or breathe or notice? As if you were there right now, this place where you were completely happy. And when you're ready, open your eyes.

So I got that exercise from the HeartMath Institute. And they're an organization that does a ton of research on gratitude.

They have studies and they've graphs of people with heart rate monitors that when they feel the most slight amount of frustration, their heart rate goes, it's erratic.

And when the heart rate goes erratic, they've also scanned the brain and seen that the fight or flight part of the brain fires up when the heart rate is erratic.

When the person thinks gratitude, and it doesn't have to be grateful for something in the present tense, it can be something in the past.

When the mind thinks gratitude, the heart rate steadies, and when the heart rate steadies, the part of the brain for thinking and planning and all of the things lights up. And so when we're frustrated, we aren't thinking with our higher self.

We're thinking in reaction, the fight or flight. But when we feel grateful, and we calm our breathing down, and we calm our heart rate down, then we can be in action as our higher self. How cool is that?

Very, very cool.

Thank you so much, Brittany Hopkins Switlick, author of Dancing with Ourselves. Please share with us where we can get the book and your website so that our audience can reach out to you.

Yes, you can get the book wherever you buy books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target online. You can find me at britneyhopkins.com, B-R-I-T-T-A-N-Y, hopkins.com. Join me.

I have the video library. You can join me from anywhere for yoga classes. You can join me live online for yoga teacher training as well.

On Instagram, I have a YouTube channel, but all of that you can find through my website.

Brittany hopkins.com and the book is Dancing with Ourselves. Thank you very much for the exercises and for all that you've taught us today.

Thank you for having me.

My pleasure, Brittany. Don't forget to subscribe, liberating and a review on Apple and Spotify. Stay tuned for more episodes to come.