Today is a solo show, and we’re going to talk about the Roadmap to Emotional Healing. I think it was about three years ago, maybe a little bit less than that, that I came up with a title for an episode, and the episode was going to be called “Roadmap to Healing.” And it’s because over the last three, five, six years since I started my podcast and have moved more into the life coaching space from the personal training, nutrition, and alternative medicine space, while I still use that, I have noticed that people will come after being in therapy for years, or even six months, and they’ll say, “Wow, two sessions and my whole life has changed, and I see things clearly, and I feel so much better, and now I know what I’m supposed to do.” And that just kept happening. And using law of attraction in my life, contrast is important. Contrast teaches us something. Contrast creates the next version. When something doesn’t go well for you, it’s clarification of what’s not working. You get to say, “Oh, I don’t like that.”

And what I’ve noticed, through all the different kinds of therapies and programs and counseling and books and content and expertise that I’ve learned over the years and have been trying on myself, because I’m always the person who does it myself first. I won’t encourage you to try something I don’t know anything about because I don’t know anything about it. And I do value that a lot of you trust me, and I want to honor that by only recommending something that I have tried, I have used, I have seen results from, and I’ve used with others and had results from. So, over the years, again, every time that somebody would come and say, “Oh my god, I’ve been in therapy for so long, and then just one or two sessions…” And I would complain to myself about what the problem was. And I realized the most learning I did and self-growth I did was in my marriage. I did some beforehand, before I manifested my husband, absolutely. But you don’t really learn it until you are in it. And I’ve noticed over the years, so many people who go therapy after divorce or after something happens, and very safely, you may talk about it for three, four, five, 10 years, and you may think you’ve dealt with it because you’ve spent so much time talking about it. But then you get thrust back into a situation that’s similar, and I see it over and over again, people respond the same.

Now, the reason why I came up with the roadmap was because many men, in my experience, and women too, don’t like the idea of an open-ended conversation about their feelings. In fact, I think we can all probably agree that most people relate to the word “stress” and say, “Oh, I’m stressed.” I don’t think any single person out there right now would say they don’t have some level of stress. That is a socially acceptable way to talk about your emotions. Now, if you say to them, “Do you recognize that everything you do is about emotions?” the majority of people, men and women alike, would probably say, “I don’t know. I’m not emotional,” because there’s this stigma about emotions, like that you’re weak and that you can’t handle things. It’s a reflection on your character. It’s a judgment of your abilities. And it’s so far from the truth, but yet it still stays in our society. It’s so prevalent that I think it stops people from wanting to do some work on themselves when a problem arises.

And that’s sort of the journey that I’ve been on. I’ve worked with lots of different healers and psychics and therapists and coaches over the years, and I’ll take the best parts of that and I will run with it, and then I will use it with others to see if it works for them too. And that’s why I’ve been holding on to this episode, “Roadmap to Healing,” for a really long time. In fact, I thought it might be a book. But what has happened is that it’s actually going to be a course, “The Roadmap to Emotional Healing,” because healing obviously has so many tentacles that need to be attended to. So, let’s take Dr. Nasha Winters’ book, “The Metabolic Approach to Cancer.” She’s laid out 10 parts of the terrain, the terrain 10. Terrain meaning the soil that you are cultivating around your life that creates whatever your reality is. And we can think of a tree and that it’s not about the fruits, it’s about the roots. The fruits are what come out of good roots. If you have a tree with bad roots, bad soil, not enough water, not enough nutrients, you won’t get the fruit. So, we have what is below also is above. When it comes to the terrain, taking her terrain 10, the emotional/mental piece is number 10. And there are other physical pieces of healing that she writes about, and others address different pieces of this as well that are also important. So, I thought it was good to get specific about the work I’m doing, which is the “Roadmap to Emotional Healing.”

So, let me ask you some questions, and I want you to just answer honestly. How many of you, or how many people that you know, have gone to therapy and don’t like it and leave feeling disempowered? When I first started coaching, I’ll never forget, when I moved to California and I started my business, I, for the first time, had a life coach, and I was like, “Oh, life coach. Okay.” And there were so many different kinds. And there were business coaches. So, I thought, “Well, this is interesting.” So, I had a session with, who then became one of my very first coaches, Carol Chanel, and I remember feeling very empowered by the end of it. I had started the session with her. I had no idea what I wanted to work on. We discussed dating at the time and some resistance that I had to dating. And then, by the end of our session, I had processed some emotion. I might have cried. Maybe not. I don’t remember. But later, down the line, that was kind of the structure. I would come in with a problem; there would be some kind of emotional expression.

Now, this helped that it was on the phone because I’ve realized since then, working with people, that when you’re on Zoom and you’re looking at them, I feel like for me, it was harder to let go or not be so cerebral sometimes. But somehow on the phone where it’s just my voice and my coach, I could feel this relief, this vulnerability, this ability to sort of break down. So, every time I would have a session with her, we would talk about what I came in with, there would be some emotional release, and then I would always leave with a resolution and feeling better at the end of it, every single time. And I remember one time we didn’t actually get to it, and I really sat with whatever that was, and she didn’t like that either, and she came back and we did another session a couple of days later just to find that resolution of whatever that was.

Now, flip the other side to therapy. And I’ve been to many different kinds of therapists, doing many different things. And one of the beefs I had about it was we come in, you might be guided, you might not, you might be validated for what you’re going through, they’d ask you what you wanted to work on, what you wanted to talk about, there wasn’t any homework, there wasn’t any structure, but we’d be digging, and we’d be digging into whatever the root of whatever it is is. Well, sometimes, and especially in couple’s therapy, you don’t get anywhere. There’s like the resistance that you come in with, you and your partner, and especially if your partner has a lot of resistance to therapy. I mean, their shields are up, their walls are up, and it’s going to take a little while to bring them down. So, you’re going to go through your 50 minutes or your 55 minutes, and maybe at minute 45 we finally get somewhere, but now we have five minutes to wrap it up and leave. And I know. I’ve watched it happen. I’ve experienced it myself. There’s nothing worse than leaving an office feeling worse than when you came in. That, to me, makes no sense.

Now, this is one of the reasons why I call myself an empowerment strategist is because it’s taking both left brain and right brain pathways and acknowledging the need for both. And if you’re listening to my show and you’ve been listening for a while, my guess is you’re probably more dominant left-brained, because I am. But what I hope to lead you through and help to encourage you to do is to activate more of the right brain and to quiet down character 2. If you listened to Jill Bolte Taylor’s “Whole Brain Living,” I’m incorporating that now into the work that I’m doing. We want to acknowledge character 2, but we want to soothe character 2 into just sort of feeling safe. But we want to amplify character 3 and 4, and we want to maybe balance the energy of character 1. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please go back and either watch on YouTube, jjflizanes.tv, or download the podcast, “Whole Brain Living” with Jill Bolte Taylor. Again, this is another one of those new exercises that I’m adding to the roadmap that I create for myself and others, because if we don’t have a reason to be doing something, if we’re not expanding, if we’re not adding in new tools, if we’re not looking at things from a cause and effect or from a, let’s say, medical standpoint, a diagnosis and then a treatment plan, when you go to a doctor of any kind, they have to do some kind of testing to see where you are.

Now, why don’t we do that in talk therapy? We talk about it. But the problem with doing all the talking about it is it could take years before you have enough information and guidance to do something different about it. Not to mention that in traditional therapy, they’re not necessarily educators. They’re not coming in to educate you about psychology or mindset or emotions. It’s more of a guidance system. Maybe they’ll diagnose you, which I’m not a big fan of that either, of the diagnosis. “Oh, you have bipolar disorder,” or “Oh, you’re borderline.” Which for some people is a breath of fresh air and for some people is a death sentence. Not a fan of labeling. I think the label, if it’s negative, when you put it on, becomes like a piece of clothing that you never take off. It becomes part of your identity. It becomes your story. And hopefully, you know by now, I’ve been doing this show long enough that you know that you can change your story and that there are different perspectives to your story. Your story, the one that you tell, is only true to you. There are probably 15 other versions you don’t even know about because other people would see it differently. And that’s kind of the difference.

So, back to the roadmap. Do you have a roadmap? Do you even know where to start? So, today, and this is being published literally within 24 hours of me recording it, I finally, in Ojai, joined a gym. And Doug and I are joining together, but he had a little back issue yesterday, and today, Monday, would be our normal two-hour hike. And I said, “Well, I’m going to go to the gym tomorrow. So, let me join this morning, and then I’m going to go back to the gym.” Finally. Oh, it felt so good. And my trainer hat had to come on, although it was a small enough gym that there’s not too much distraction for me. But the reason why I had a hard time leaving being a trainer for so long is for the same reason I’m talking about this Roadmap to Emotional Healing. There’s a science. There’s an order. There’s a structure. There’s a reason to do everything in the order that you do it, in the intensity that you do it when it comes to exercise. There is a reason. It is not random. Yet so many people go to the gym, have no idea what they’re doing, just start pushing and pulling on things, getting on a cardio machine.

I was watching a class. This older woman, God bless her and everybody else that was in that class. And I took one look at her and I could diagnose that she has huge inflammation in her gut. She has huge gut issues. And because she’s older, she’s in this class and they gave her these little balls that are probably half a pound each, and she’s doing these weird exercises because she’s old. And I’m like, “The laws and the science of the body don’t change in terms of your structure and function just because you’re older.” It’s because people have this idea that “Oh, because I’m older and I’m weaker, I should move differently,” which is not true at all. I’m looking around thinking everyone in this gym… And again, there are people doing what they were doing, and I’m not judging. I really spend time focusing on what I was doing. But I know a lot of people that avoid things like weight training. Guys, if you want lean muscle, you want low body fat, you want a high metabolism, you want to look better in your body, you can’t skip weight training. You can’t skip resistance. Now, you can get resistance in different ways, but you can’t fix all the problems by doing cardio, or by doing some class that that older woman was doing. Every part of this is needed: the resistance training, maybe some cardio, and of course, dealing with your diet and your food and your gut. That’s where the success is going to come: in using all three of these.

So, now let’s bring that back to the coaching and therapy world. I learned it late, although many people still don’t know it or do it. I did an exercise. It was a core wound exercise, and it clarified so many things for me when I did it in therapy. It was couple’s therapy. My whole life changed in that instant. I thought to myself, and I even said it to the therapist, “Why isn’t every single person doing this exercise in one-on-one therapy?” And she just sort of laughed at me, like “Oh, yeah, that would be nice.” But I thought, “No, you don’t really get it.” This right here is gold. This is the diagnosis. This is where you start, because without understanding what your core wounds are, you just tell conversations over and over again, and stories about the same triggers. It’s the same issues, different person, different day, different state, different job. It doesn’t matter. It keeps repeating because you think it’s about everybody else. If you do not know what your core wounds are, if you do not know why you’ve chosen the profession you’ve chosen, or the friends you’ve chosen, or the reasons why your love language is the way it is, or why you get butt hurt when x, y, or z happens and other people don’t, if you do not know what your core wounds are, then you’re probably going to stay stuck in circumstantial conversations. It’s about the environment. It’s about how other people treat you. It’s about your choices or boundaries of protecting yourself.

So, after doing this core wound exercise with enough people, and having them completely switch and shift and have aha moments… And again, there’s doing it and there’s interpreting it. Because you could do it, and you could do it for free. You can find it and do it yourself. It’s from Harville Hendrix’s “Getting the Love You Want” workbook. It’s creating your imago. Well, I do it a little differently, and I teach you how to read it, because they are using it for couple’s therapy, and they’re looking at both partners, and there’s a whole different path. And when I did it, I saw it as individual work to outline my behavior, because it made it very clear, and it made me stop doing everything I was doing in an instant because I saw it so clearly. So, if you are in a therapy situation, a coaching situation, I want you to ask yourself and your therapist and/or coach if you have not gotten the results that you want. I want you to ask them or yourself, “Where are we going? And what are the tools I’m going to need to get there? And is this something I could do on my own? Am I changing? Am I actually growing as a person and changing the way I behave, or am I avoiding situations? Am I not going to that place anymore because those people are toxic?”

Now, there’s difference with boundaries. Absolutely, when you understand where some people are coming from, let’s say someone is very angry. If you’re moved, if you’re triggered by their anger, that’s in you, and avoiding that person doesn’t heal you. But you could use that contrast to reflect back to you what you need to work on, take that on, do the work, and then test yourself. Be in the same space, be in the same situation, and now see how you react differently. Now, if you react differently and you have compassion for that person, you feel for them and you feel joy otherwise. Now you’ve healed. You’ve healed something. You’ve decreased an automatic response, a defense mechanism that you have. You’ve shifted a belief. You have healed yourself into being different in the same situation. Now, past that, if that person is angry, and maybe you don’t feel safe and you want to now leave because it’s not a happy environment, you want to be with people on a higher vibration, cool. Now you get to leave because it’s a boundary. It’s about self-love versus in avoidance because it triggers you.

So, on this roadmap, let’s talk about what would be on this roadmap. And after I did this work with a bunch of different clients, I then, in the Inner Circle Membership, asked everybody, “Hey, how many of you want to do this together as a group?” because I thought, “God, that would be so efficient just to have everybody do it together,” because doing it over and over again individually…which is fine, everyone is going to have different answers. But wouldn’t it be more effective if we did it as a group? And so many people said, “Yes, yes, yes, yes.” Now, shortly after that is when I created the Empowerment Strategist Certification, and we do it in the Empowerment Strategist Certification. So, I put a pause on that. But again, I’ve been sitting on this roadmap to healing for many, many years, and the idea finally got solidified that “Okay, it’s time to make this a course.” It’s time to invite you all to do this for yourself and create a roadmap for yourself. And that’s exactly what I’ve created.

So, let me tell you a little bit about that. In April, we’re going to be doing a one-time live, four-week Roadmap to Emotional Healing course. What does that mean? So, every Wednesday in April, 5:00 p.m. Pacific, 8:00 p.m. Eastern, and they’re all recorded, I will be going through and working with you on this core wound exercise along with a few other exercises during these four weeks. I’m going to take a group of people through these processes, so you can start by identifying the root cause of the belief system that you have, the patterns that you have, the things you keep repeating. We’re going to get to that root cause and we’re going to see it. And you’re going to see in this work how you respond when this happens, and you’re going to see your pattern. And then we’re going to show you how and when to do the opposite and how to heal it. We’re going to add some other tools, and by the end, you’re going to start to create your own personalized roadmap to emotional healing. And I will teach you about some of the other tools that we use and discuss when it would be appropriate. And it’s going to be case by case. It’s going to be different, but we’re going to do this together as a group.

So, in the Roadmap to Emotional Healing, which again starts April 6th, I will close registration April 5th. You have until April 5th. You can go to jjflizanes.com/roadmap. And the current offer is you get the four-week class, which is recorded and you have access to it forever. You get the “Anatomy of Emotion” course that I’ve created. That is a bonus. That’s $200. And you also get a one-on-one session either with me or one of my empowerment strategists. So, the whole package is $1500 value, but you can get it for $697 in full or three payments of $250. Once April 6th happens, the date is cut off and you cannot come in. It is a closed group for obvious reasons: because we are doing really deep, good work, and I want to honor everyone who has decided to do it and the time they took to get involved. So, April 5th is the cutoff. If you are not registered by April 5th, then later, you’re welcome to buy the course in May that you can do on your own. There will be no live Q&A. You won’t have access to me. And I’m not sure what the package will entail, but I can tell you for sure, as of right now, this is the only time this will be live, which means you’ll get one-on-one Q&A with me at the end of every class, as well as you’ll get a one-on-one session.

So, the Roadmap to Emotional Healing. Are we going to fix everything in four weeks? Of course not. But we’re going to create your map, and we’re going to talk about the components that need to be dealt with in order for you to make these shifts and changes permanently. Again, it’s happened this way. It wasn’t like I started out wanting to do all of this. But I couldn’t help it. Somebody would come to me. And I’m going to read you a short testimonial from a new client. She had one session. Now, she’s doing the Emotional Healing course, but in between her one session, she could feel the changes. And I said, “Can you just speak to me about that?” So, she said… It’s really long, but this is the condensed version.

“The victim position was never discussed as a concept in therapy, but understanding this from your podcast and other reading material has been so valuable to me.” I asked her what the difference was between me and therapy. “I also felt like my therapist wasn’t challenging me enough or really providing me with the tools to challenge myself. Overall, I spent a lot of time in therapy telling stories about my life that were actually pretty irrelevant. And although I was responsible for discussing them, I wish my therapist would have cut me off and informed me of the silliness of it. I appreciate the types of questions you ask, and they are far more productive than the questions from my therapist, like ‘What were you feeling or thinking in that moment?’ You getting straight to the point of asking me how I’m going to strategize getting my needs met from no one other than myself is also a question that does multiple things. I think these questions are pushing me to learn how to process things more productively and talk back to the chatter that is untrue, unproductive, and sometimes plain old funny from its stupidity.”

Now, again, there was more to that, but the point was, again, it just keeps happening over and over again. I had another client who said that she would have never gotten out of victim mentality if it wasn’t for me, because her therapist was very kind and would validate her, but it didn’t change anything. So, I want to help more people do this for yourselves. Whether you ever work with me past this or not, or with one of my trainers, is not the point. The point is that a lot of people spend time being frustrated that they can’t find the solution to their problem, or they keep repeating their patterns, but no one’s ever taken you through an exercise like the core wound work, and then no one’s ever talked to you about creating a map and a plan, and “How do we get there from here? And what are the different roadmaps? What are the different ways I can gauge if it’s working? And what are the tools that I need to have or can use to help me through this? I don’t understand this from a structural level.” And that part of the left brain is really important to help guide and create a safety and a plan for the right-brained part of us that when it gets into that really scary, vulnerable place, it needs to understand there’s hope on the other side of this. And in my work, and in my opinion, if you’re not leaving your session empowered, if you’re not leaving your therapy feeling like you know what to do next, and you feel hopeful and excited and possibly have ideas about what to change, of course nobody wants to work on their emotions. Who the heck would want to keep going over and over again when you feel bad? Don’t you want to feel better?

So, if you’re interested, I would love to have you on our roadmap. Let me just tell you again some of the links. If you have not heard the “3 Reasons Why Traditional Talk Therapy Is Ineffective,” it is still available. The link is below in the show notes: jjflizanes.com/therapy. If you know you want to take the Roadmap course or check out more about it, you can go to jjflizanes.com/roadmap. And then last but not least, if you’re someone who is a coach already and you want to incorporate some of the work that I’m doing and you listen to my show, I have two slots left in the Empowerment Strategist Certification for 2022, where this Roadmap course is included. So, there are two slots left. It is free to apply. We have a conversation and see if it’s a fit. If that’s of interest to you, go to jjflizanes.com/cert. And all these links will be in the show notes. So, I hope that you can create your own map or come join us for this monumental one-time live class that I’m excited to gather people for, because I know once you see your core wound and you start to create a roadmap, you’re going to feel excited and empowered and hopeful that change is possible, and so is a new life.