Natalie Fayman – Rewiring Your Brain for Health, Happiness and Success

Hi and welcome to the You World Order Showcase podcast.

Today we have with us Natalie Fayman.

Natalie helps exhausted, frustrated, stressed out women, reconnect with their self worth so they can stop waiting for happiness and become superheroes of their own lives.

I was just telling Natalie, I love that so much.

I'm all about.

The superheroes and working in your superpower, stuff like that.

So Natalie, welcome to the show.

Thank you for.

Joining me and.

Tell us your story.

How did you get into this?

Oh, gosh.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

It is an honor and a pleasure, and it's nice to meet you, Jill.

And how did I get here today? Well, I have to say, it's been a long journey of misery for probably the 1st 2/3 of my life.

I am a veterinarian and 1st 24 years of my career I spent working in ER in critical care.

Which means that my shifts were anywhere from 15 to 24 hours long and very stressful. I was sleeping an average of three hours and.

Dates and my nights, weekends and holidays scheduled didn't really leave much room for any kind of a personal life.

So over the course of about, you know, 24 years, I pretty much damaged and destroyed every personal relationship I had.

My relatives forgot who I was and I kind of forgot who I was too.

I refer to that.

whole time span is like the black hole of my life where all I did was eat, sleep, work and that was it.

And you know, as it's just this heavy feeling of misery just kept settling heavier and heavier on me.

And I didn't really have a better way of managing that other than I was just soothing myself with food, like so many people do, especially women trying to drown my emotions and give myself energy and keep myself company.

When I was lonely.

So my weight crept up to about 240p at I think my worst point.

And you know, like, like most women I tried, all the diets and they would work for a little while.

And then I just couldn't keep it up anymore.

And then up, down, up, down and beating myself up every time I failed and fell.

Off the wagon and.

Group that was run by a life coach, which was something that I had never really.

Seen before and it was a whole new approach to weight loss.

It was all about finding better ways to manage your emotions, to give yourself what you need without using food.

Food and I really didn't realize until I started doing that work to what extent I was really relying on food to manage my own emotions.

And the crazy thing about that is that I went into this group thinking that I was there to lose weight and I was.

But what actually happened was that I learned.

how to be a happier, calmer, less stressed out person.

My relationships got better, my future started looking better.

I just for the first time.

Felt optimism when I thought about what am I going to do with the next chapter of my life instead of just pure misery and the weight loss just kind of seemed to happen all by itself.

And I realize you know, when I didn't have all those crushing, negative, painful emotions to deal with on a daily basis, I didn't really feel the urge to.

Dive into a bag of chips or a pint of ice cream on the couch.

at night. So that was that was kind of a big aha moment. And from there, you know, looking at the transformation that I saw in my life as well as some of the other women that were in that group and just seeing how much potential one person my life coach had to transform so many other people's lives. And to do so much good.

In the world.

I think the light bulb came on for me at that point and I realized like there is no better way that I could imagine spending the rest of my life than to do that and to bring that positive change forward to other people.

So that is that is how I got here and when COVID hit and all the things that I love to distract myself with kind of went away and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands, I found the coach training program and that was that was kind of the launching point of my journey to get here.

That's awesome.

I love that you're just so driven to help people not have to sit in this.

The misery that you were in

And I can so relate to the working so many hours and just like.

Like you're a slave to the job and which you've done all this study.

Oh yeah.

So you're like, you have to show up.

I mean, you've invested all this money to become a vet.

It's not like it's like, ohh.

Changed my mind.

And there.

Well, you know.

You are trapped.

A lot of people actually do.

They're I.

I'm in contact with a lot of early career veterinarians who are just one or two years out of school and all of a sudden, they're asking themselves, did I make a mistake?

I don't know if I can do this.

I can't handle this anymore.

Looking at 30 more years.

Of that and.

Just it.

It has to be so soul crushing to realize that something that you've been working so hard to get to for so many years.

All of a sudden, looks like torture.

And that's kind of where my direction is headed in.

As I look to, you know what I want to do with my programs in the future is.

To help people to be able to manage their stress, to maintain their optimism, but also to draw those boundaries that none of us are very good at drawing as far as how far, how much, how much of myself am I willing to give to my career?

Where do I draw that line?

Because speaking for myself and a lot of other people in healthcare in general, we are givers.

We're very generous people and we have no idea how far is too far.

We will give and give and give until we drop dead until somebody stops us.

But there's no cosmic referee out there.

Just waiting in the wings to say no.

Natalie, stop.

It's time for you.

You need to go take a vacation.

You need to have a weekend off.

You know there's nobody out there making sure that I'm getting a fair shake at life.

And it took me a very long time to realize that that was my job and not my boss's job. I had this idea.

That if I just worked really hard and made myself important and made myself valuable, that it someday there was going to be this reward, I was going to get appreciated and you know those things just at least in my situation, they just never happened.

You know, I realized, unfortunately for myself pretty recently.

My life.

I can't even be angry at the people that I worked for that basically just exploited and manipulated and took advantage of my generosity and my selflessness because the job of a business owner is to get as much work out of you as they possibly can and compensate you as little as possible.

That is their job.

Their job is not to make sure that I have quality of life.

It's not to make sure that I'm happy and fulfilled and satisfied.

Managing my life is my job and looking at it that way, I realized, you know, we're talking about the difference between victim and hero for the last.

30 some years of my career I felt like a victim because I was waiting for my boss to realize one day how valuable I was and to start treating me better and to start giving me opportunities.

And you know, a victim, as somebody who looks at themselves as powerless, somebody who does not have control of the situation.

And that is that was definitely my mindset for.

A very long.

Long time – to get rescued - and yeah, exactly.

Fortunately, now I realize that my boss was doing my bosses were doing their job.

I was not doing my job, so now it's time.

I finally realized I'm kind of running out of some days to do what I want with my life.

I just turned.

56 recently.

And I don't, I don't have to apologize for that.

I don't have to earn it.

It's my life.

And I got to do what I want with it, and that's finally starting to sink in that it's not selfish to do what I want to do with my time

But you were put here to do we all were given gifts that we were meant to share with other people.

And the old paradigm to me, it's passing away the paradigm of, you know, you go to work and you work for somebody and hope they're going to pay attention to you and they hope they're going to.

Value you, but they never do.

Especially these days, you know, in order to get a raise, you almost have to change jobs.

Because businesses aren't set up that way, the medical community is almost universally run by.

The medical mafia, I mean, there's a small group of people at the top that own most of the medical facilities around.

And they're just in it to get as much money as they can out of the public.

The government as much work as they can out of their.

employees and it just it really doesn't benefit anybody.

But I think the tide is turning and it's turning because of people like you who are becoming coaches and saying here.

Look, there's a different way we can do this better.

And I know that you help people overcome their self judgment, and that's a really big thing because we judge ourselves and.

Tell me what you think about it, and then I'll share my my.

Opinions. If I have time.

I the more the more thought work I have done, the more mental training that I have that I have brought myself through, the more I come to realize that it's that voice of self judgment that we all carry around inside of us that is responsible for absolutely everything that we experience about our lives.

It's responsible for the quality of our relationships.

It determines how courageous we feel about going for our dreams.

It determines every decision that we make.

How worthy we feel about asking for a raise or finding a better job.

How much we will put up with from other people.

What kind of treatment will tolerate from other people?

It is absolutely everything and in my case, and for a lot of women to determine how much I weigh because I was so busy judging myself and making myself feel miserable, that I was reaching for the only thing I knew how to make myself feel better.

Which was food

And, you know, didn't matter that I was killing myself and that I was slowly struggling to even just put my clothes on or tie my shoes or do normal daily activities as long as I could just make myself feel a little bit less pain.

Just in that moment, that was all my survival brain cared about.

And it's just that that voice of self judgment has to be hands down the most toxic influence in all of our lives.

It is pervasive it.

It makes us feel miserable.

It steals our happiness, it robs us of our potential.

Well, I feel like this is this is truly the one thing that I can focus on that's going to make the biggest impact in my life and in the lives of every everybody that I work with is to just turn the volume down on that voice of self judgment so that we can learn how to reconnect with the true value that we brought into this world the day.

That we were born.

And people have so much value that they don't really even realize and that the self judgment.

In my experience, most people are so busy judging themselves that they really aren't judging you and that's what self judgment is really about is you trying to take the place of somebody else thinking.

I bet they think this about me and therefore or I can't stand this part of me.

But by the having those thoughts, you continue the.

The action.

I think self judgment is the base upon which we build self, like judgment of others, because judging ourselves so harshly is so intensely painful that in some cases we feel like the only way that we can escape that pain is by finding fault with other people.

So judging other people in, in my opinion, is really just a symptom of the intensity of how, how poorly and how harshly we judge ourselves.

Like holding up that mirror?

You're getting it back.

So how?

How does your coaching program work?

To do one-on-one, do.

I actually, yes, I'm doing primarily one-on-one coaching right now. I have done group coaching in the past.

It just doesn't.

Recently just doesn't seem to work that I have like a group of people all ready to start at the same time.

So I just take them as they come.

But the way I work is, I mean, honestly, what has proved the most transformational for me in all the years of all the self development work that I've done, including my coach training program, the one thing that has really transformed my life and my perception and my experience of the world and myself and everyone in it.

Has been the positive intelligence program.

It is.

I can't.

I don't even have words to describe how amazing it is, but it has completely reframed the way I experience everything in life.

And so.

To have that.

Common language and common understanding I think is really.

Important so when people come to me with that kind of self judgment, that kind of emotional pain, the first thing I do is take them through the positive intelligence program because immediately trains them to recognize the voice of the judge, which is very sneaky and likes to hide.

And sometimes we don't even realize that it that it's at play behind the scenes.

But to be able to recognize when that is working in the background so that we can intercept it.

Turn down the volume and to learn there's a specific brain training exercise that can that can help you shift from that stress survival part of your brain, which is where all of our stress comes from our survival instincts and from fears about things that may happen.

And to be able to shift away from that survival part of the brain over to a more peaceful, more positive part of the brain, which that's where the right side of the brain based on MRI studies, the right side of our brain is where all our positive emotions come from our creativity.

Our inspiration love connection, our long term vision for the future, and there's a specific set of brain exercise techniques to teach people how to be able to access that part of the brain on demand whenever they need it.

Is it increased Austro Prisoning?

It's a process.

Not specifically, no, but it is based on neuroscience, which I find fascinating.

Being a science person myself, I'm one of the less woo woo people that you'll probably find in the in the coaching business.

But I love the fact that it's science based and they've actually done MRI studies where after six weeks of consistent.

Daily brain training 10 to 15 minutes a day, they actually see less gray matter in the survival area of the brain, where our stresses come from more gray matter in the positive part of our brain that I was just talking.

Thing about there is actually new neural pathways developing.

It actually helps you to rewire your brain.

And I have seen I have seen the results for myself.

I have seen it for other people you know, thinking about when I, when I used to have these really intense, long, stressful shifts at the ER and it would take me sometimes.

Two or three days to recover to where, like emotionally like I felt I wasn't going to have a panic attack if I had to go back to work and do it again.

I've got that down to about 15 minutes now and it's all just because of this consistent practice, this brain training that I've learned it has had, absolutely.

Definitive measurable effects in helping me create resilience.

There's so much science behind it, the nostril breathing thing.

When you were talking about the right brain being your creative, the right side being your creative part.

If you plug your right nostril and breathe through the left side.

Because you really only breathe through one nostril at a time.

But if you find yourself really emotional, if you plug your right nostril and breathe through the left when it, it stimulates that.

And it will change.

It'll change the Physiology of your body and it will keep you more focused.

And you could do the opposite if you're trying to like concentrate, you plug your left nostril so it stimulates.

The left brain and.

The analytical part of.

Your brain, yeah.

Yeah, and it can concentrate better.

And it's just science.

It's how because breathing through your nostrils stimulates your brain in a way that breathing through your mouth never can.

It just like directly linked and there you're right, there is so much science behind meditation.

Focusing on your body, changing your mindset and all these things that people consider Woo is just the name that we put on this almost magical.

Way of dealing with things in our lives that.

There's increasingly more evidence that it's better than taking the pills.

Oh yeah, definitely.

You know and.

Yeah. No, it's 100% true. And as a society, we are so overly reliant on our left brain.

This is the.

This is where the rational logical analytical thought processes are, but it's also where our stress reactions are.

And that's where all of our self sabotaging behavior patterns are.

And we so underuse the right side of our brain that we almost forget it's there.

And so I think it is easy for people to kind of dismiss it as being too woo and, you know, energy, you know, what is all that stuff?

You know, people only believe what they can see and hear and feel, but I will tell you there are over a half a million people that have come through positive intelligence who can tell you specifically they now see.

Concrete and measurable improvements from being able to train the right side of the brain to come back from the coma that we've had it in for most.

Of our lives.

Yeah, it's really fascinating how much and how powerful your brain.

Is to heal.

Your body to.

To just make you feel better and it you don't have to take external things if you can right find the right patterns to practice.

To heal yourself and to get.

Out of that self sabotaging mindset.

That's very true.

People, we don't realize how much of our suffering is actually created by our own thinking by anticipating, by worrying if.

If we take that component away, the actual discomfort of whatever it is that we've been dreading is less than 10% of the whole experience.

And it's usually never turns out the way you are afraid it's going to turn out anyway.

Right, right. I can tell you 100% I everything I have ever spent time, energy, emotional distress, worrying about for my entire life.

All of that energy has been wasted because 90% of the time, whatever I was worried about never happened.

And the 10% of the time, it actually did happen just like you said, it wasn't nearly as bad as what I was setting myself.

It's those things that you don't see.

Yeah, but hey, you're not gonna see them coming, so you'll just have to deal with them when you get here.

Right.

But that's what life is.

Life is unpredictable and we stress ourselves out by trying to predict the unpredictable and control the uncontrollable.

Instead of just learning to trust ourselves to be able to handle whatever happens.

Exactly, exactly.

So what's the one thing you'd like to leave the audience with today?

I think the one thing I really want everyone to know is that the single most important thing that you can do for yourself, for the people who love you, for everybody who has to work with you is to start talking to yourself better.

If you have this narrative in your head.

That, like most of us do, 24/7 insults criticisms.

I'm disgusting.

I'm miserable.

I'm a loser.

No one could ever love me.

You know.

I'm a mess.

All these things that we say to ourselves all day long and we think that it's not having an effect on us.

But it absolutely is.

It's destroying our self worth, it's poisoning our enjoyment of our lives.

The most important, the most impactful.

Yeah, the most important and most impactful thing that anybody could do is to stop judging yourself and learn how to reconnect with yourself.

Worth talk better to yourself if you wouldn't say something to your child.

Don't say it to yourself.

And please don't say it to your children.

You speak positive things over your kids and you'll get wonderful results.

When you start.

Telling them things that aren't true and they buy into it that they start having problems with themselves.

Right.

So Natalie, how can people get?

In touch with you.

They could go to my website which is no limits coachingnow.com and there is a button at the very top of the page that you can Click to sign up for a free 30 minute call with me.

And there's all kinds of free resources.

There's videos, there is a whole I made like a whole page, just for the self judgment.

There's a free video that will teach you a little bit of this brain science and a specific mental exercise that you can do to start recognizing and shutting down that self judgment and creating more of those positive.

So that's there on the on the home page, there's a button that says silencing self judgment.

Just click that.

And it'll take you.

Right there.

And I also have a weekly newsletter that you can sign up for if you want weekly positivity and motivation tips.

Perfect.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you. Thanks for.