Successfully in Love

0:01 This program is designed to provide general information with regards to the subject matters covered. This information is given with the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial, legal, counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas. At the end of the day, it's not about what you have or even what you've accomplished. It's about what you've done with those accomplishments. It's about who you've lifted up, who you've made better. It's about what you've given back than Soel Washington, welcome to Inspire Vision. Our sole purpose is to elevate the lives of others and to inspire you to do the same.

0:54 Katerino, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Hey, so it's lovely to have you. Where are you from? Where are you? Where are you at right now? I'm calling from Spain in Ibiza, Spain. Wow. Wow, what took you to Spain? Good question? What took me to Spain? I lived hero in twenty thirteen and I loved it. I absolutely loved it, and then I left and lived in lots of different places. I lived in Dubai, I lived back in London. I went to Vancouver for five years and then came back to London. And I realized I didn't want to be in London, and so I knew I wanted to, say, in Europe. And my husband and I'm kind of debating, like where do you want to go to?

1:35 Now? Where do you want to go to? And we both were learning Spanish at the time. I have to say, I'm not really learning about now. It's just really bad. But we landed on Spain. And because I've lived in this part of Spain before, I already had friends or had a network, and I figured why not? Why not? Wonderful? Well, I'd love for you to share with the audience who you are and really the story behind what you're doing. Now. Sure, so Mana's Katherina. I'm a high performance relationship coach and gender then I'm a social scientist. So what that really means that I work with a lot of high performance and I help them with their personal relationships, so specifically their love lives and the love relationships. And then from my kind of background academic background, it's in gender dynamics, so looking at masculinity femininity, looking at the different genders and how they operate in relationships between them, and the kind of bringing the two together. So how I got into this is kind of a multi pronged reason. But I had my own personal experience. So I've always been very kind of high performance, high achieved in my whole life, and you know, jumping through the hoops, trying to get the grades and climb the corporate ladder and all of that.

2:44 And in my late twenties, I figured it was time to settle down and you know, get married and have kids and blah blah blah. And I got engaged to my then boyfriend and everything seemed picture perfect. Everything seemed like it was, you know, a really wonderful relationship. And yet at the same time, I felt like something was off. I felt I wasn't convinced that it was really the right thing for me, but I didn't want to let it go. I didn't want to walk away from something. There was so much fear around that. And after really two years of going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, should I say, should I go do marital counseling seeing tons of therapists and working on myself. I did eventually decide to leave in retrospect. That was a very long process and there was a lot of kind of self guess slighting that I did there, which I now see as a very common theme. And actually every high achuting person that I work with this real kind of lack of self trust of what we know deep down to be true and this desire to get things right, to kind of to achieve, to perform, to to not have things kind of go wrong and kind of have that sun cost happening. So that's really what got me to kind of focus on relationship specifically, because that's also been my personal story from an academic perspective, it's a gender dynamicson from a professional perspective. My backgrounds behavior science. I was original best president for a science consultancy, doing a little consulting on people and how do you get people to be better at work, to be happier at work, and D and I and all of that.

4:16 And so really when that kind of evolved into coaching and I was looking to leave corporate trained to be a coach, trying to be an executive coach, realized a lot of executives are struggling with their relationships. Put two and two together, and here. I am, here you are, and you know, it's interesting you talk about high performance people and yet you know, and this is what I've found as I've worked with small businesses. Never in the corporate world I've got. But what I would tell my people is, you know, with the principles we're going to talk about here in business, apply it a life and just so you know. You're aware of that. And they found that that's very true. So as you talk about high performance people, obviously these are people that are going to really help help you.

5:00 But is there a difference in your opinion, between high quote high performance people and other people that are made not quote high performance relative to relationships. Yeah, one hundred percent. I think that the high performance kind of angle is really me doing that thing where you know, I serve the person that I was, that I relate with the most. That's not saying that the issues in relationship that I solve for aren't almost universal problems, right. I think specifically with the high performance the things that I run into is I could probably drill down a lot even further and talk about high performance individuals who are you know, high achievers who have an undercurrent of anxiety, who have probably been raised into high performing, high achieving families who were maybe absent growing up, and say they had a lot of responsibility on their shoulders and so they had to kind of mature very quickly, and because of that, they're very used to grinning and bearing it.

6:01 I hear this a lot done like do I just run and bear my relationship? Do I just suck it up? Do I just roll my sleeps up and get it done? This kind of mentality of I have to just get through this, and I am responsible. I'm not going to do the irresponsible thing like walking away from my marriage or walking away from my long term relationship. And so I think that's kind of why the high performance angle is very key, I think to the people I work so, I get it, I understand it. I've thought that way. I still sometimes do think that way as well. Plus, you know, the burnout, the stress, the anxiety from working sixty plus hour weeks, from having a lot of pressure, from having a lot of financial pressure, and all of these different things. It's a whole cocktail of challenges for your love life. Really, I don't know if I could fully kind of relate to someone who maybe you know, works a thirty hour week and doesn't have the pressure of having to be on a plane frequent or having to work long hours un feel disconnected from their partner.

7:03 I'm sure the issues are very similar. Is just a different kind of context that makes sense? Well, yeah, and just who you're more familiar with, which is fine, and quite frankly, I think that you know, based on my experience, what we're going to talk about today is certainly. Pertinent to anyone. You know, you say they're only working thirty hours. There's a lot of people that are working a lot of time, not making a lot of money, and going through very same stuff. So from a behavioral standpoint, as you say you have a background in behavioral sciences, do you find that high performing people kind of have a very similar personality when when we get into that you know, I'm familiar with and I don't know if you are, with a disc the a s C personality, behavioral profiling, and you know, when I think about high profile I think about those left brain people who are really focused, extroverts and so forth. Do you find that there is a personality profile that fits into this quote high performance modality.

8:10 It's a really good question and what I've been grappling with, and I think that there is. And yet I also wonder if the people that feel called and drawn to work with me are a specific type of person right, because there's a lot of variations of higher performer. You know, I'm sure your master's a higher performer. I don't think i'd want to work with him, nor do I think you probably want to work with me, because I think our values would be very misaligned. Right, But at the same time that the personality traits and kind of the qualities might be quite similar. So I think there are I think what I see a lot of with at least my clients and the people that I work with, is this undercurrent that's kind of low level anxiety. I see that consistently where they might not even be aware of it, but someone might call out like, oh, you know, you're very type A. You're a bit highly strong or a little bit anxious. You always get stressed, think things, maybe you ruminate. These kind of patterns I see very consistently, and I bring everything back to kind of the root cause, and I look at from a kind of psychological perspective or where did this all come from? And why is it that you have this anxiety and this propensity to kind of overthink and yet you're a high achiever. They go hand in hand, right, The root cause is kind of the same, but I'm sure there's lots of different variations of it. That makes sense.

9:27 Well, it does. And you know, as you talk about the root cause, and I love that whole phrase because I think so many times people, you know, I see people go into therapy as you talked about and so forth, and a lot of times it's talk therapy. They never get to the root cast they never do. Right, Yeah, I have that same experience. I had that same experience when I had my dental practice. Was you know, people would come in and I had a little sub specialty in tempera mandibula joint disorder, and so people would come in and say, oh, I have and I'm going no, you have two. You have one on the right and one on the left. So now tell me what are your problems your symptoms, And then we would get into that whole thing and find out that you know, it has nothing to do with anything other than a neuromuscular situation that we could deal with. And so I love how you talk about that.

10:22 But as you have experienced people who are quote high achievers, you know, whatever that personnelity happens to be, do you find that there are similar imprints within their lives that literally are affecting and self sabotaging and those type of things, And if so, what are they and how do they come about? Yeah, again, a very good question. The main kind of I'll keep a reason that I'm want to get too deep into the weeds of psychology, but very high level. I'm definitely the story that what's for me is imagine you're a baby, you're born, You've got your parents. They're busy working, they're busy providing, they're busy trying to build a great life for you. Inevitably, they're going to be very preoccupied. Right, It's just kind of the way of the world that we have these days. They're going to be preoccupied. And often you might have a nanny, but they often they might just be pretty absent. It's not a conscious thing. They're not doing it deliberately, but they're busy, right, They are literally preoccupied, and in that vein they are becoming emotionally absent to you as a child. As a child, what we know is up between the eighties and zero and eight, your brain is very spongy and susceptible to everything that it receives, and you're not fully conscious, you're not fully able to kind of make your own judgments or your own kind of rational opinions about things, because you're a baby, you're zero eight years old, You're a tiny little thing. And so the experience of well, my parents are really busy, my parents are absent, or my

11:56 father's traveling. That was my case. My father's on a plane's international consultant. Like in McKinsey's styles, he was on a plane half the time, and so he's absent. And so the little kid's interpretation is going to be something around, Well, the parents not here, they're not responding to my cries, they're not helping me here, there's got to be something wrong with me. Probably I've probably done something bad, or I'm flawed, I'm broken, I'm defected, and classically I'm not good enough. Right, this belief of liarly do something with me. We personalize everything, and this actually this trend of personalizing a lot of what our parents do to us continues well through to adult age. I remember when I was twenty three when my parents I got a divorce. I immediately internalized it as it must be my fault somehow. Of course it wasn't anything to do with me. But it's this kind of very childlike response that we go into, right, and that's very much from the core wound place. So this child will internalize this feeling or this experience of there must be something wrong with me, I must be defected or I'm just not good enough, and that becomes core wound, and that then begins to fuel a lot of the behavior that that kid goes on to exhibit.

13:05 What it does is a core wound is that really creates a belief, an internal belief inside that child. And what we know about the human brain is if you believe something, it's going to have to be true on the outside because your brain needs congruence, right, So if you believe something, it's going to work very very hard to recreate that reality on the outside. That's going to how law of attraction works. And so if you think about this belief or well, I'm not good enough, what's that going to do to the child. It's going to make them not believe that they're good enough, so they're going to work extremely hard to prove that they are actually good enough, or they're going to self subloge to go the other way and just believe that they really are no good and it's not even worth doing anything, because maybe they have another belief of everything's worthless. I'm worthless. But with the high achieves what I see a lot of is this kind of fuel, this urgency to prove themselves.

13:51 And I'm pretty confident most high achievements probably wouldn't even resonate with this when I'm saying it. I know I certainly didn't, as like, what's you talking about? You know, like I'm not like that at all. I work hard, ambitious because I love it. I love working seventy hour weeks, I love like all of this stuff. But it is a fuel. It's a fuel coming from this kind of internal sense of lack of not being enough, of not having enough and having to do more, of having to prove more, of having to work hard, of having to earn more. And that is what fuels this kind of high achieve mentality at least one kind of thread of it, and that is where we get a lot of high achievem it's from. And I pulled up my hand because that's definitely what fueled me well. And as you explain that, what comes to my mind is a lot of people experience that. And you know what I look at is do they have a higher achiever mentality but may not necessarily, according to the world and social society, be high achievers. And yet because they're self sabotaging, they're literally, as you say, on that other side, I'm not going good enough, and so they continue to prove themselves that they're not good enough. So quote, from a societal standpoint, they're not high achievers, but from an emotional mental standpoint, growing up as children thinking I'm not good enough for whatever reason that happens to be, they are experiencing the safe same self sabotage.

15:22 One hundred percent. And that's self sabotage, like you just said, it can shop in so many different ways. Right, Even the person who is high achieving, ostensibly performing well in society, and maybe they've made their millions and they're living in their big mansion, they can still be self sabotaging. Their relationships could be going down the drain. That's kind of what I specialize in, right, that they not good enough to have a healthy, secure, meaningful, loving relationship. I'm not good enough to just be No one's going to love me for just being me, And so the self sabotage there, it's not believing that I'm worthy or enough to have a healthy relationship. So I'm surrounding myself with possessions and going on holiday and all these experiences, getting quick day foramine hits because I don't believe that I'm good enough to have a loving relationship just existing as a human being. Right, So, I think that self sabage can really shop in so many different ways, including the way of just not achieving in society. I'm actually being more kind of classical self sabotage, procrastination, avoidance, all of these different things.

16:24 Well, and you know, I think we all observe some of these extremely successful high achievers and think, oh, I want a life like that. But as you work with them, and as we talk about possessions and ego and all of that, do we really want to be like them and have the same challenges or is there a different approach that can help us to become more whole, less self sabotaging and happier and learning how to find a really great relationship and keep a great relationship. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So from that perspective, why are relationship so important? I mean, I know the answer to this, but I want you to talk about it a little bit. Yeah, why are relationships so important in people's lives? And how does that ultimately affect them from a standpoint of living a fulfilling life.

17:26 Yeah, and that It's an important question that might have like an obvious answer, but I think I'm one even not so obvious answer to this, and that is when I set out to do relationship coaching. My end goal was never actually I'm going to help people get into relationships. It was never actually about that. It was more about, and this is what I originally kind of stelted out as was helping people build healthy relationships with themselves, recognizing that when you don't have a healthy relationship with yourself, you really have nothing. You are operating on a very shaky foundation because everything that you go out there to build, all the wealthier through the career that you build, whatever it is, it's not rooted in a stable core that stable relationship with yourself. It's shaky. And so when I started out with relationship coaching, that's what I wanted to do, was to help people build a relationship with themselves. What I realized was people didn't really care about this, right, because it's kind of framed as like self love and I'm doing quotation marks because it's such an overused phrase.

18:32 It's very wide, I stood, and it's so kind of wooing, cliche and fluffy. But actually self love is the most important thing that we can do because that is really how you become securely attached. It's how you develop a healthy self esteem, it's how you develop healthy self actualization. Autonomy, agency is really important things. Confidence, blah blah blah. But like, people don't want to talk about self love. And so when I was thinking about, Okay, well, what's an outcome or a kind of side effect of having a healthy relationship with this self, it's actually having healthy relationships. Because only when you have a healthy relationship with yourself and you have healthy relationships with others, and when you have healthy relationship with others, you actually develop in a healthy relationship with yourself. That's kind of one thing. The second thing that I realized though, was that in order to develop a healthy relationship with yourself, it's not enough to do personal development and just work on yourself in a silo.

19:24 Because humans are relational beings. We are wired for connection. And the fact that your low self esteem, your core wounds, you're inner kind of trappings you're in a self sabotage stems from your first relationships, your relationships with your primary caregivers tells us that if we want to go back and do the work on you and heal your relationship with yourself, we've got to look at your relationship with other people. Right, So the relationships you have are almost kind of the conduit to getting you to having that self esteem, that confidence, that self all the brilliant, amazing things that people spend their lives pursuing. The thing is, you can try and meditate your way to it. You can do psychedelics, you can you know, see therapists fifteen years like either. You can do whatever you want to do working on yourself, but it's not going to do the trick until you start looking at yourself in relation to others, because it's other people that are the merior to how you attach to yourself. It's kind of a very meta response there. But does that make sense?

20:22 Well? It does, And I think as you say, if we are only focusing on ourselves, you know, a relationship with ourselves that can never be as accurate as we observe our relationships with others, and hopefully those relationships, whether they end up continuing on, whether they're friendships or romantic relationships or even relationships. With family members. Is we look at that, You're right, then all of a sudden we have a contrast of what's going on. And then I love the fact that then you start to do that internal looking and saying why why is this relationship so great?

21:08 Why did this relationship not work out right? Because this is the thing right. I remember having so many friends. And again I fell into this trap too, of thinking I've been in therapy for a long time. You know, I know myself inside out. I journal, I meditate, I'll be fine. I can get into a relationship and I'll figure it out because I feel very healthy and solid and stable within myself. But it's easy to feel healthy and stable and solid within yourself. It's very easy when you're on your own. It's incredibly difficult when you're in a relationship with someone who has the potential to be a soulmate and is going to trigger the heck out of you, because that's what relationships do, right, Because we are relational beings, So the work has to be relational if we really want to grow, which is why I think it's the most important work that we can be doing for ourselves.

21:59 Well, when you talk about those triggers, and you know, it's so fascinating, I experienced. I've experienced this my life. You know, I have four kids, and I happen to be a high d so I'm strong personality. I wouldn't say I'm a necessarily high achiever, though I grew up in a family that kind of demanded that. But I don't think any high achievements and high achievements to be good. No one does, no one. I was like, oh no, I badly, what I give you so much better? So yeah, But what I find is it's so interesting that I can say something to my kids and becoming from a point of I'm your father and I really want to be able to be there to help you, and yet their perception, for whatever reason, is I'm criticizing and therefore I see these triggers come up, and I experienced the same thing for myself. How how do we number one, how do we recognize the trigger that we have those triggers? And number two, how do we then start to work on those and start to minimize I would like to say eliminate, but at least minimize those triggers so that they're not affecting our relationships. And obviously, as you said, we observe that in our relationships, but there still has to be that individual work.

23:25 Yeah, yeah, Yeah, such a good point. The triggers are really indicative of where we need to be leaning in to do that in a work, right. I always kind of say that, at least with my clients, when we work together, that the trigger becomes a good thing because in the end, the trigger is pointing you to where you need to go inward and where you need to do some clearing and some healing and self soothing and all of the brilliant practices that we have of our sleeves to heal that trigger. And they're not something to run from, they're not something to avoid to numb out from. And really the main vehicle or resolving triggers is going to be to learn to go inward and to learn what I call it to dialogue with that trigger, to really begin to understand where is it coming from, what does it need, What would it look like to have a different manifestation of whatever the trigger's trying to get from you, because typically it is going to be an unconscious need that's trying to get met right, So it's this kind of in an inquiry process that ultimately yet it doesn't need you to be in therapy. It doesn't need you to be working with a coach for years on end. It's something that you learn. Once you practice it, you learn to embody it, and then you have got self mastery. You can go ahead and you'll be triggered until the end of your day. Is probably right. We're all going to be triggered. It's part of the human condition.

24:47 But it's like this kind of onion lay where you're feeling away the different layers of triggers to get more and more clear that that kind of call that kernel of who you are. And as we do that, you talk about meditation kind of in a negative aspect. Meditation daring. Oh okay, I was going to say, I do too. I try to meditate every day a lot of times for walking meditation. But it's interesting what you were saying, because as I was walking the other day and thinking about and I use self, I use sophagio frequencies that I listened to as I'm doing that, and obviously one is the heart and and so I'm thinking to myself, and that's where you really struck a note. You know, I need to have more self love. I need to be able to love myself, so on and so forth.

25:36 So let's talk about how can an individual, with what you have just explained, use meditation to be able to confront those triggers and to be able to work through them so that they're not being as deeply affected as they have been in the past. Yeah, and this is when meditation seem powerful. I'll never forget when I called off my first engagement. I was going through my mindfulness based stress reduction teacher training, so I was actually training to be a Mindflan's tea shirt And it was the perfect timing because I was going through absolute hell of just grief and despair and my whole world collapsing. But I had to sit through eight hours of essentially meditation T shirt training, which you can imagine is like three hours of meditation here, an hour of meditation here, all day every day. Oh yeah, yeah, it was. It was intense, but it was so powerful to just go inward and be with myself and you know, kind of go through that pain and come out the other side. Of course, there are waves of it went on for months, but it was still such a helpful tool.

26:45 And I do believe that I actually healed from that breakup much faster with that tool than had I just you know, drunk and gone out or whatever rebounded. Not that I didn't try to do that as well, but you understand that meditation is very pivotal. So what I always how my clients is even if you don't like meditating, even if you don't like sitting still and it's observing your thoughts for twenty to thirty minutes, you can learn to start to start to observe the sensations in your body and start to observe where does the trigger live, Because it's going to live somewhere, right, It's going to live really trap somewhere in the body and big on somatic. So where is it living in the body, How does it feel in the body, and this is already kind of starting to go inward into that process to connect with it. And then once you're connecting with it, you can start to build that internal dialogue of soothing it, of understanding it, of unpacking what's going on for it.

27:41 Where whose voice even is it? How old is that voice? Where is it coming from? And as you're kind of it's like you're being an inspector and you're just going through with a magnifying glass, trying to drill down into that trigger in order to give it more space, in order to let it speak. Because when we give something space and speak, it says what it has to say, and then it tends to calm down. Right. It's when we're numbing it out and repressing and avoiding it that starts to scream. Well, and what you're talking about reminds me of NLP NEU a linguistic program, because you know, to me that that very thing and finding out where's the pain located and then going back and discovering where did you experience that as a child, and then going in and reframing it.

28:25 That's what you're really saying. So what you're really what you're saying, though, is people can do that on their own through. A meditative process. But you talk, you talk about mindfulness, okay, and and I think for people to understand that that's a word again that's being thrown around all over the place. Yeah, but what is mindfulness and why is it so important that we seek to achieve mindfulness? Why is it important because life is passing us by and if we're not mindful of it and were even doing right. Really it's about I'm going to go back again to my kind of person. Example, I remember when I was in such such a hellish place, pulling off that engagement, being in the depths of grief and despair.

29:16 The more that I was able to become mindful of my own experience and be with my own experience and go inward, the better I felt, the safer I felt. Until eventually I got to this place where I was kind of cocooning in myself and just hanging out there literally being embodied, which is something I always tried to achieve before, rationally try to like study embodiment, learn the process and body. But it was actually through pain that I started to be more embodied and be with myself because there's nothing else really there for me to do, and that's when I found peacefulness. That's when I found kind of bliss there, living moment to moment, second and second being just in my body and being away of all the sensations of the experience of living because I realized that there's nothing to worry about. I'm here and I'm alive, and I'm breathing and I'm safe, and that's kind of really it. And the kind of the beauty of the world that had spanned to me and open up and I just remember having these moments of feeling very at peace after so many years of not feeling at peace, and this is, you know, in the depths of something really awful, having to pull off my wedding and like terrible things happening, but there was nothing else to do but to go inward. It was too scary to be outward. And that's when I discovered. I've been meditating for about ten years by this point, but that's when I discovered a whole new level of meditative depth, and I really felt the peaceless and the clarity that can come from it.

30:46 Well, and you know, I think that's that's the goal of everyone in their lives. Regardless of the relationships. That's well, yeah, they really are trying to achieve. And you know, we talk about mindfulness, we talk about it higher consciousness. I mean, the reality is, if I'm understanding, you. Know, we need to be aware of what's going on in our lives and why we are experiencing I think there's so many people that have become victims in their own lives because they're not consciously aware, they're not mindful, and they're not actually doing that type. Of focus on why am I experiencing this?

31:27 And what are those triggers that I'm trying to avoid, which is basically. Attracting of everything I'm trying to. Avoid exactly exactly. So, as you work with people, how many times do you find people that are telling you, you know, it's too late. I mean, you know there's I've been through relationships they just haven't. Worked, and I feel like now it's a little bit too late. Yeah, I do hear that a lot. Needless to sail don't work with me. Right, I'll kind of discover this. There'll be a moment of curiosity, will jump on a call, we have a lovely conversation, and then I kind of begin to feel this disheartenment, this like kind of defeated sense, And when I drill down into it, it really is a belief that it's not going to happen for me.

32:21 It's not going to happen for me. You know. Often it if people who are kind of forty five plus and that actually there's some women that's even younger. There's a forty two plus, and it's this belief of just like, yeah, it's not going to happen, and I'm best off either just enjoying my life, which it's like having short term flames and going on a holiday. I keep hearing that, like people going on a holiday as if it's going to solve their problems, and having short term flings and going on holidays and just making a lot of money and being single and versus yeah, just fully giving up and being quite sad about it. It's and I see it more in women, which I find really sad. I find that really really sad. And some of my best clients have been men in their fifties who have refused to give up, and they've been like, Nope, I'm going to figure this out. I don't want to die alone, and they roll their sleeves up, and they might they might never have done any therapy, they might never have done any coaching. Some of them's game and they lean in and they show up and they do the work and they get into a relationship. We get into an amazing relationship, Like three months later one of my clients did, and or you know, or they're trying to improve their marriage. Because I work with a lot of people in relationship as well, and they're often deciding should they say, should they go? And they're not prepared to settle and tolerate CRuMs. But there are certainly people who are prepared to settle and not do anything.

33:44 And how do people end up in bad relationships? I have another question for you as you as you talked about men versus the women, do you find that as you get older, because that becomes a challenge as you're getting older, you're obviously getting more sitting in your ways, But do you find that there's a mentality a state that occurs as you get older that actually makes it more difficult for you to either be a good companion or to find a good companion. Yeah, it's to me, it's all an in a belief system bit of work if you are and again I definitely said this more in women, if you are believing that it's not going to happen for you, or there are no good men left, or there are no good people left. And I think the reason that happens more for women is because I think women, unfortunately and I can totally relate to this, have been conditioned to believe of their love life as a timeline. Right, you're perfection bright in your twenties and in your early thirties, you know you're a prime catch. My mid thirties time is sticking.

34:52 If you want to have kids by your late thirties, oof, you're probably past it in your forties, good luck. I hear that from men telling me about that woman. I hear that from them. I think it's absolutely disgusting and awfuland so sad. At the same time, we can't deny that. I think it does actually condition a lot of the mentality around Am I going to find healthy love at this point? Probably not, which is complete nonsense. We know that statistically not true. We know that if it's if you believe that you won't, well, then you won't. But if you believe that you can and you are worthy of it, even just a little bit, and you have even just a little bit of desire, and you're willing to put the work in, which doesn't have to be that much work. I tell my clients it's three to six months. That's it of prioritizing your love life, and you can transform everything completely, you can. But it's that self belief. What I think, what I see with men is that because men don't have that biological timeline or that kind of societal prush, and often actually the societal narrative with men is that they get better with age.

35:52 So I do see. That, right, right, terrible, I had to think that. Terrible, And so I see a lot more kind of hope and confidence of a lot of the men. But that also can come with a lum naivety. I've worked with plenty of men in their forties and fifties who think that, you know, they're the bees knees and they can get twenty year old and they're out there trying to date twenty year olds, and I'm like, you're looking for a life partner, you're looking for a wife, you're looking for someone who mean equal, what are you doing? No? Well, yeah, yeah, And sometimes I mean I observe, and I like your differentiation. I observe so many times, particularly on Facebook. I have a lot of friends, and it's interesting to see the women who get together and go on cruises together. They get together and you know, they go to this and that together, and they're always showing pictures of themselves in their group. I don't see that very often from men, but I definitely see that from the women. And are they developing a mental state to where they're not ever going to find that relationship because they're just finding they're just going to be with their girlfriends.

37:01 Yeah. I think. I think a lot of it is going to be societal pushback, right because women have been incredibly oppressed for so long, and there's been so many such a lack of freedom, and there's been so much bad behavior in a relationship. I mean, women couldn't have credit cards until the seventies, like rape in marriage will have legalize them. But there's so much horrible stuff. So I do believe that there's kind of this reclamation of freedom, but I think it can go. I think the energy can come from as a wounded energy. It's an energy of defeat, it's an energy of well screw everyone else. I'm going to just do my own thing, which is been coming from a place of I deeply love myself and I want myself to have the best life that I can, which very likely would involve having someone who deeply loves me. Right. That's so much more vulnerable energy, which I think can be quite scary to lean into, especially when the narrative around is there are no good men left. You know, all the men are, you know, cheats or whatever it might be.

37:59 Well, and for those that do, why do some people compromise and find themselves consistently in a wrong relationship, and they may get out of it and find exactly the same thing again, What is this about compromising ourselves and allowing ourselves to get into those wrong relationships? Yeah? Great question. It's back to that core wound. Right, So everything that I do, and my clients will probably sick of me talking about this is everything that I do all about take it back to the core wounds. Lay them out at the core wound place. Again. I love therapy, but I did fifteen years that I'm gotten as how much money as spent, don't know how far it got me? Right, just talking up here, it's all about going to the court, to the route, like you said.

38:44 And so when we think about patterns of behavior like repeatedly ending up in relationships where you end up getting cheated on, repeatedly ending up in relationships where you feel put on a pedestal by somebody else, repeatedly ending up in relationships where you don't feel safe, we don't try your partner or your partner is like a distant or you know, bread crumbing, You like leaving your bread crumbs, and you have to really fight for more love. These are all patterns, and the patterns come from the wounds, and we really have to drill down into what is the core wound, what are the beliefs, and what kind of identity has been formed on the unconscious level, not conscious, the unconscious level that we then need to be dismantling and kind of upgrading or leveling up, whatever you want to call it, and clearing out the junk, the kind of the self sabotage that's creating this attraction to the patterns and creating the patents to be attracted to you.

39:37 Because ultimately it's all happened on an unconscious level. You can try again talk about it consciously. You can journal about it. You can, you know, rant to your friends and go to singles events and try to change the pattern and look for someone better. But if you haven't dealed with it, dealt with it on an unconscious level, on a core root wound level, it's not going to work. Why because you're unconscious mind is ninety five to ninety seven percent of your brain. It's like physically possible to try to consciously control your unconscious mind. It doesn't work. And you know, you talk about individuals that have established quote a self love, they love themselves. I can be on my own and you know, and I do that once in a while because I realize, as you said, there has to be that foundation of self love in order to be there for a relationship. But at the same time, there's so many people that get stay in that self love and I don't need a relationship and so forth.

40:37 What have you found? What does a relationship, a good relationship do for. An individual that has really developed that personal self love in a healthy way. What does a relationship do? What? How does it bring them to a higher level of peace and joy that they would not experience as an individual that is just good on their own. Yeah, there's two things. Well, there's obviously more than two things. It does many wonderful things, but kind of two things on a large scale level. It does healing and it creates safety. Right Like, on the one hand, most of us have wounds that need healing. I mean again, it's part of the human condition. If you have an ego, you've got woonds basically, and most of us feel deeply unsafe in our bodies in where we are in the world.

41:28 We won't be aware of it consciously, but there's going to be this kind of lack of safety. And so being in relationship, feeling connected, feeling loved, feeling chosen, feeling safe with someone, feeling trustful. Of someone creates deep nervous system safety, especially if they are on a similar page and they're also kind of you know, they've done there inner work and you're able to kind of coregulate your nervous systems together, and all of the love hormones, the cocktail of wonderful womens that come from that intimacy creates a lot of safety in the body, which is just a really wonderful, nourishing place to be and it's very. Healing and then the healing aspect of it. There's going to be triggers in the person that you love. That is how it works. The person who you are most drawn to from a kind of safe perspective, not like a trauma bond or a toxic relationship, but a healthy, safe, loving connection, they're going to be triggering you. Why because that is just kind of the beauty on an unconscious level of the people that we're drawn to, the people who are good for us, because they're going to bring out a lot of those cool wounds that need to be looked at. But because you feel safe in the container of that relationship, you're going to have the capacity to look at them and to do the healing with them, so you get to go even deeper in your healing.

42:40 When we're alone, not only do we not really see a lot of our triggers because no one other they're triggering us, but we also often don't actually feel safe to look at certain things. It's when you're in relationship with someone that you deeply love and deeply loves you back, that you can have that healthy bit of trigger not talking about like screaming at each other and throwing pots and bands, but you know, the little like bubbles of trigger that you can then look at together and you can feel safe looking at it. You can feel safe during the healing there, and so the evolution is is so much greater. As a saying by one of my favorite I don't even know if it's a plosoroho psychologic, but Alway says, like, you know, stage one of healings when you're alone, the rest of all the healing happens and you're in relationship because it's it's really in that union that you can go so much deeper. And we know that life is better when you've gone deeper. It just is because you're carrying less baggage. It's all the process of bringing yourself and when.

43:35 You're in that ideal relationship, life is better. Yeah, you know, I don't think we're meant to be alone, no, no, whatever that happens to be. So as we come to a close, well, I have one more question before we do this. You talked about coaching versus quote talk therapy. What is the difference and if so someone is really wanting to get some help, because as I know, you know, it's okay to try to do it all on your own, but there are times that you just can't. And as you said, you went through fifteen years of therapy with not much help. What is the difference.

44:17 Between an intelligent, well versed coach and going through talk therapy. Yeah, and that's a really valuable question because they're both important, Right. I always think of that as I follow the chomb model behable change. You need to have the motivation, you need to have the capabilities, and you need to have the opportunity to actually change, right, And so what therapy is really good for is actually creating the motivation. Therapy is really great for building up awareness, helping you see and understand where your triggers are, where the problems are, where maybe even some of the core wounds are. Helping you kind of like bring that magnifying ask and just take a deeper look and see the things that need to be looked at, and it builds up your motivation to actually change it hopefully because you see the impact that's happening in your life. What it's not great for is capability building. Often it's like you kind of stop at the awareness level. You might let a couple of tools and techniques, but you're not going to get the mass kind of capability building of well, how do I clear out the core wounds? How do I work with my unconscious mind? A therapy doesn't typically work with unconscious mind stuff that's more of the coaching territory. How do I tear up the collins? How do work with the unconscious mind? How do I actually build and drive the new capabilities of like learning? How to communicate of learning, how to set up the boundaries of learning, how to again kind of manage my malag up to behavioral responses.

45:43 How do I actually stop a trigger in its tracks? All of these much more practical, action orientated things aren't in the realm of therapy. There is typically retrospective. It's like looking into the past, understanding it, making sense of it, and then you come into the present and it's like, well, what now. And that's what coaching kicks in, because coaching is all about the present and look into the future, setting goals, building, building a process to get that, building a strategy, and learning the capabilities that you need to create the opportunities to have what you want to have in life. So I love that. And you know, the one thing that we haven't talked about, and I know you really focus on is the three phases process.

46:24 You know, it's based on behavioral science. So as we close and as you talk to the audience in a very short time, what are those three phase what are those three phase processes? And if you could share with the audience so that they could kind of get a sense of what they need to do in the direction they need to go. Yeah, absolutely, So the three phases are really three phases that I came up with on the back of, you know, being in that first engagement, deciding do I say, do I go? Doing all that in a word, landing on the clarity in the certainty that I needed to actually exit, and then eleven months lay to meet my house spend because it was a very fast process for me. I'm it's even faster now. But those three phases amalgamating a bit of therapy are really Phase one is the my brain's completely ride right.

47:13 Now, self sabotage. It's not the self sabotage, my brain has completely died my own process. Phase two I will get under skip to Phase two. Phase two is the behavior science piece. So it's where you're actually first phase is you're building the awareness. Like I just said in therapy. It's building that awareness, it's getting the clarity on like what are the different patterns? How can you actually clear them out at the root phase and get rid of them? Right? Because we have to do that. And so whilst I'm not a therapist and I never plan to sit there digging into people's lives and going into the nuts and crannies of all the stories, I don't actually believe it's very helpful to look at the stories. It's much more helpful to look at what are the core wounds and how do we clear those out? And how does a self sabotage manifest? So that's the first phase, really like clearing all of that out. Base two is a behaval science pace, which is really all about well, now that I've cleared all of that out and I can see more clearly, what does it actually want to need in my life and in my relationship to be actually happy long term? Most people don't know they know what they want.

48:11 They want. You know, a multimillionaire who's six foot three, Great, that's not what you actually need though, right there's a lot of egotistical proxies that we've been conditioned into thinking that we want the big house, the lifestyle, blah blah blah, the ide league, education, it's all nice things, but again they have no indicator on how happy you're actually going to be with that person long term. What you actually need is very different, and so you can't typically see what you need or connect with what you need when you're full of your own blockers and yourself Sabota. Actually, you have to clear that out first and then you come to getting clear on what is that you want to need. Once you're clear on what you want to need and you've got that clarity, then you can move to phase free, the integrity phase. It is how do you build your life to get into greater integrity with that.

48:54 So what that might look like is building a bit of a strategy to get your needs met. It might look like reevaluating your relationship and learning how to communicate better and communicate for your needs and communicate your boundaries. It might look like taking a state back and doing a bit of a life audit and shuffling things around so that you're living your best life now. But really the kind of the third phase is taking action on what you know now to be true about yourself. Having cleared out all of that self sabotage and junk, and that's where the self trust is really built. That's where we really kind of build that self actualization, that self esteem and in that process clearing out all of that rubbish that's holding you back, getting very clear, putting your life into integrity. You are going to attract the right relationship for you, whether you in a relationship or looking for a relationship, so much faster because if you know anything about you know, law of attraction or how any of the stuff works from behavior science point of view, you are clear to actually get out there and align with it to attract it. It's not wo it's science.

49:57 I know. I love that. How do people find you if they want to reach out to you and get some help? How do they find you? Yeah? Absolutely so. Www dotcatterin Apalonska dot com is my website and on there I have a free masterclass. I walk through this methodology and just how it works on a more kind of tangible, granular level, and I also talk about the common pitfalls who will fall into. So highly recommend going there. You can also find me on Instagram at katerin a Paloonska and just drop me a DM because I love to connect with people. Well, okay, yes, thank you so much for being on the show. This has been fascinating and I think that people are going to really get this, and I hope that they're voted to your website because, particularly as we talk about those three phases, and you know you took some time to do that, those three phases, I think really give you the methodology of being able to get to the.

50:51 Point where you have a good relationship. Yeah, exactly, exactly right. All right, Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate it, and folks, thanks for listening. Hope you really enjoyed it, and we look forward to having you join us again soon as a doctor. Doug Sane NOMS Day