Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life.
Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.
Ever find yourself taking one step forward and two steps back in your creative journey? Join us on Creative Status, where we delve deep into the transformative world of self-sabotage with the insightful hypnotherapist and mindfulness coach Laura Artero.
Healing Through Acceptance: Uncover the profound connection between self-sabotage and the need for self-acceptance. Laura Artero, a seasoned guide in the realms of hypnotherapy, NLP coaching, and mindfulness, shares her empowering journey of breaking free from inner obstacles.
A Unique Method for Inner Harmony: Laura’s revolutionary approach doesn’t battle your inner critic—it transforms it into your greatest ally. Picture a world where peace talks with your inner self lead to genuine liberation, allowing you to embrace the person you’ve always longed to be.
Creativity Unleashed: Whether you’re an artist, writer, or simply on a quest for personal growth and creating the life you really want, this episode is will give you inspiration. Laura’s wisdom transcends traditional boundaries, offering practical tools for creatives and seekers of healing alike.
Embark on Your Journey to Freedom: Don’t miss this chance to gain profound insights and practical tips. Join us as Laura Artero guides you towards a newfound sense of freedom, where self-sabotage becomes a stepping stone, not a stumbling block.
Creative Status: Where Creativity Meets Healing
Tune in for a conversation that transcends the ordinary, as we explore the intersection of creativity and self-discovery. Embrace the power within and embark on a journey towards self-acceptance and creative liberation.
Stay real out there,
Oli Anderson
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Episode Links:
Laura’s website: https://lauraartero.com/
Laura on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/laura.artero
Laura’s amazing meditation using the Guardian Method to overcome your limiting beliefs: https://lauraartero.com/oli
Creative Status Links:
The Creative Performance Transformation Lab: olianderson.co.uk/creativeperformance
Follow me on Instagram: instagram.com/olijanderson
My YouTube channel: youtube.com/olianderson
Get my books on Amazon: amazon.com/author/oli
7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose: olianderson.co.uk/systemshock
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Free 90-Day Journal Challenge: olianderson.co.uk/journal
The Law of Attraction for Realness (mini-course): olianderson.co.uk/lawofattraction
Dissolving Self-Sabotage by Moving into REALNESS (Show Transcript)
Intro
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there. Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. It’s a podcast about using your creativity to help you uncover and accept the real version of who you are.
Today’s episode is for you if you’ve ever struggled with self-sabotage, if you’ve ever wondered if some of the actions and goals that you’re chasing are really yours, or whether they’re just something that you’ve picked up because it’s social programming or self-hypnosis and other things like that. It’s an interview with Laura Artero.
She is a hypnotherapist, a coach, a mindfulness expert, and she specializes in helping people with self-sabotage. This is a really awesome conversation. Loads of amazing insight. I found this to be very energizing and, put a lot of complicated things in a simple context. So I hope this helps you. Laura, thank you so much for your time. Everybody else, here we go. Boom.
Interview
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Laura. Thank you for joining me on today’s episode of creative status. You’re an expert in sabotage, not in a kind of terrorist, sense, but in relation to the human psyche and how we can delay our own progress by putting blocks in our path without even knowing it. So, anyway, I’m going to ask you a ton of questions about that before what I do. Do you feel like introducing yourself and letting people know how you ended up kind of specializing in this and also what you want to get out of this conversation?
Laura Artero: Yes. Thank you, Oli. I’m very honoured to be here. I can talk for ages about self-sabotage, and I love when there is a flow conversation that can get to good insights. so I have a background in hypnotherapy. mindfulness, self compassion. NLP coaching. I’m, a yoga practitioner teaching hypnotherapy.
So, I just say that I’m a, ah, big fan of the mind, and I think the mind is incredibly powerful if we know how to use it, and we don’t use it well most of the times. So we self-sabotage our efforts to be who we want. There are ways to get the training better. so, yes, this is who I am, and it comes to mind, I love to use my intuition a lot, and it comes to mind to share with you and with everyone that my first crush, ah, when I was a young girl, was Yoda from Star wars. That was not particularly handsome, but somehow I was so attracted by his power of using the mind. And so, yeah, this is where everything came from, probably.
Oli: That’s very interesting. And I think you must be one of the only people in human history that has actually been able to say that they had an attraction to Yoda. Okay, so let’s start with that. Do you think that there were some qualities that Yoda was kind of trying to teach Luke Skywalker, and the world in general that are applicable to some of the main lessons that you’ve learned about the mind and how we can master it? If that’s not too broad of a question.
Laura : No, I think that I can reply in a very normal way. Train mind. We need to train the mind. If we mind lose, we may actually not go where we want to go simply because, the way the brain works is still like when we were living in caves, and it’s not working right now for us. And the way we use the brain makes the mind, in certain ways, they are linked somehow. So, yeah, that’s my answer. Train the mind.
Oli: That is 100% how I’ve experienced things, like, in my own life. And when I coach with people, a lot of the time when people’s lives are not moving in the way that they think they want it to be moving in on a surface level, it’s because they’ve basically lost control without even knowing of their mind and the direction that it’s unconsciously taking them in.
And so maybe this is a good place to start with a sort of definition of what sabotage is. I’ll share my definition, and then maybe you can let me know if it makes sense or if it doesn’t make sense, and then we can just take it from there. So the way that I like to look at it is people have goals for themselves. But a lot of the time, those goals are only really something that they’ve grasped in a kind of automatic way, or because of social programming, or because of some inner thing that they have going on where they feel if they attain a certain thing, then it’s going to solve all of their problems in life.
So, for example, simple goals that I might be talking about are goals in relation to their health. So maybe someone has set themselves the goal of losing weight, and it just never seems to happen. They keep telling themselves that they want to lose weight, but for whatever reason, they can’t, do the things they need to do to be able to make that happen. In relationships, people tell themselves that they want a relationship, but they either never find anyone.
Or if they do find someone, they end up pushing them away, with their wealth, with their business and that kind of thing. People tell themselves that they need more money, that they want to be more successful, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they set themselves this goal at the conscious level, but for some bizarre reason, they keep pushing away the success that they want. And, I think the reason for this is because even though they’re telling themselves at the level of the conscious mind that they want a certain thing, there is something going on unconsciously where they don’t realize that they actually want something else so much more.
So, for example, with the weight loss thing, maybe hypothetically, there’s somebody. They keep telling themselves that they want to lose weight, but they have some kind of unconscious thing going on where they’re actually scared to lose weight because maybe they’ll become so much more attractive to other people that they’re just going to be bombarded with attention, and they actually secretly just want to be alone because they love freedom, something like that.
And in each of those cases that I’ve given, I believe, like, if we consistently don’t get results that we keep saying we want, there is something going on inside of us that we’re not aware of that is causing us to choose something else more. And, because the unconscious mind is actually more powerful and it directs our actions more than the conscious mind, then we ultimately are, just setting ourselves up for failure. That’s the sabotage thing, I would say. And the only way to get out of that is to kind of make the unconscious conscious by training our mind so that we can be like Yoda.
Ultimately, they’re not as attractive and direct our attention to what’s actually going inside of us so we can see our, true intentions and then reconfigure them. So that was a mouthful. But when I think about sabotage and the mechanics of it, that’s kind of how I see it. So does that align with the way that you understand this and how you help people to stop sabotaging themselves?
Laura: Yeah, I love what you just shared. it’s very profound. And I think that everything, as you just said, lies in the fact that the mind is made by two parts, and you need to work with both parts or nothing. That there needs to be alignment between conscious and subconscious mind. We, tend to use just the conscious mind. So because of my background in hypnotherapy, I, love unblocking, the blockages. And they are in the subconscious mind.
So sometimes I use a metaphor to explain things, and this is my way of explaining them. So I imagine that, there is a part in the subconscious mind that I call the guardian of beliefs. And you can imagine, like, a little guardian, very powerful. That is, like, very diligent. And its role, or his role or her role is that of making sure that you stick to your beliefs. And the beliefs are things that, as you said, come from the social background, their tradition, their religion that you grew up in, or, things you said. those beliefs are just programs.
And your subconscious mind, like a robot in autopilot, is playing those programs, even if they are a bit outdated. Most of them are created. We create them when we are very young. We are children. so the guardian of beliefs, make sure that you stick to your beliefs. But as you said, if your belief is, I cannot be attractive because I don’t like attention because blah, blah, blah, depending on what your experience has been, when you were four years old and maybe you had too many attentions or your mom kept saying, tell this in front of everyone and you felt you didn’t want to, then obviously, there will be your guardian of belief saying somehow, whispering to you, no, you can’t lose weight.
No, that’s not a good idea. And if you try to overcome the belief and force change, I imagine the guardian with a big microphone just calling all his army of thoughts, like, hey, come over. This person is not listening. Please pop in his or her mind and tell them to stop. And so the more you force change, the more you feel, doubt. It’s like your head is filled with self-doubt. I’m not good enough. I can’t do this. I will never succeed. And the more you force change and the more these thoughts will get louder and louder until you stop.
Oli: Wow.
Laura: And the problem with this is that if you keep forcing change but you don’t work with the blockage that is underneath, with the belief, you m are just reinforcing the belief that you will never be thin, that you will never lose weight because you will just become skeptical that you will ever be able to change. So it’s a trap.
Oli: Yeah. That’s amazing. And it’s so true. And I think it’s kind of a paradox because a lot of us, we don’t realize, like you said, that there are two minds operating within us at all times. And the only way, really, to get any results in life is to make sure that those two minds are in alignment. And, I think the default state for a lot of us is that we have set some intention for ourselves on the conscious level. But exactly like you said, this guardian is actually kind of causing a sort of internal conflict without us even knowing it.
Where it’s taking us off the path we think we need to be on. But the paradox, I guess, is that if we really want to get the things that we think we want at a conscious level, we have to resolve whatever issue the Guardian perceives at the unconscious level, if that makes sense. And if we don’t do that, we will end up in that state that you just, described so wonderfully, where we end up forcing life. And if we force life, that is always because of some unreal identity issue that we’ve got going on.
I think that is keeping us out of alignment. And it gets worse and worse and worse as the gap between the conscious and unconscious gets wider and wider, and it just becomes like a self-perpetuating cycle. Like you said, we get more doubt, we keep convincing ourselves we’re never going to do it, but that makes us want it more in some cases. And so we just keep running around in circles, and that will be the state of our whole lives, unless we can kind of crack open this relationship with the conscious and unconscious mind and see that the guardian needs to be appeased in some way so that we can unblock things and put ourselves back on a real path.
And this is kind of bringing us onto the territory of the podcast, the main theme of the podcast, which is, that actually the only way we can heal our lives and put ourselves back on the path towards wholeness is by making the unconscious conscious, bringing it to awareness, accepting what’s going on down there, and then taking a different kind of action based on what we have uncovered.
So I’m throwing a lot at you, but how do we do that? How do we start to close this gap and get back in alignment, so that the things we think we want are things that we want the most, if that makes sense. And there’s not some unconscious thing that we want more holding us back.
Laura: So I think the first thing, I don’t know if you agree, but the first thing is really wanting to change. And sometimes people don’t really want to change, they just think they want because they heard it’s good to change. And that makes a huge difference, because unless someone really wants to change, nothing will ever happen. But if you really want to change and you find this kind of friction resistance inside, so you want to do something, but you never end up doing it, then, as you said, I think it’s important to go and discover the subconscious mind. Knowing that the subconscious mind is good, it’s working for your highest good. It’s just that probably you need to change the direction somehow.
And one thing I always do with my clients, it’s to explain that the language used by these two parts of the mind is very different. So if you use logic, you will never get to the subconscious mind, because logic is not its language. You need to use imagination. these are metaphors, and that’s why I use a lot of metaphors, but also creative, visualizations and various types of. Yes, of imagination using all the senses. And this is the only way to get to the subconscious mind.
Oli: Do you think there’s an element where, you can look at, ah, your life, the current state of your life, and you can kind of start to reverse engineer what is going on for you. So if we use those simple examples from the start, like the relationship thing or the weight thing or whatever, if you keep getting certain results and you’re telling yourself that you want different results, is there something there where we can tell from the results that we’re actually hiding something within ourselves?
Do you know what I mean? It’s like our lives are, they’re a reflection of how aligned we are, something like that. And I don’t want to make it too woo woo, but ultimately, if there’s some kind of a blockage, and we keep complaining about the same thing, for example, so we keep saying, oh, I can never lose weight, it’s so unfair. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
I can never find a partner. I can never, whatever it is, if we keep being stuck in a way where we do find ourselves constantly complaining about it, then the results are probably showing us that we do have this kind of a block. And, if we can reverse engineer things in that way, is that part of the journey, would you say?
Laura: I think that you understand that there is a block if somehow, even if you want to change, you can’t change. So, sometimes I think people that think, now I’m going to change, I’m not going to be afraid of speaking in front of others because it makes no sense. I just do three breath and it will be fine.
But then every single time you feel terrorized, and even if you force yourself, you can’t remember a thing before, and then you sweat and you just want to abort. your speech. in that case, there is a block. Absolutely. So it’s when you, no matter how much willpower you put into creating change, nothing happens.
Oli: Wow.
Laura: I don’t know if that answered your question.
Oli: Yeah, it does. And I think it comes back to this theme that popped up like 510 minutes ago about forcing things. I think that is basically the answer to my question, yeah. Because if we find ourselves constantly forcing life, something has to have gone wrong, because the only reason we would force life is because we have some identity thing going on.
We’re clinging to something without realizing, and so we have to use willpower to get the results that we want instead of acceptance. Something like that. The only way we can actually unblock, ourselves is by letting go in a strange kind of paradoxical way.
Like, we can’t force ourselves to change even if we want to. We can’t force life to change even if we want to. We can only accept what we have been resisting. And then in that acceptance, we automatically become more aligned in the way that you’re talking about, because we put in less friction between ourselves and life, and, that gives us a stronger foundation to make the changes that we want to make. M, what do you think?
Laur: Yes. Acceptance. Acceptance and never feeling that there is something going against you, but just understanding that whatever is that you feel is standing in your way. It’s a protection. It’s something you created to protect yourself. Maybe you don’t need that kind of protection. You just need to work to transform the protection. But before, somehow, you need to say thank you to the protection, you need to accept it. And is it, Oli, that at the end of the day, everything is about accepting ourselves?
Oli: Yeah, ultimately, I think so. I think that is the final lesson of our lives, that ultimately, if we constantly feel friction and frustration and we’re not happy with ourselves and with our lives, it can only be because we’re filtering everything through judgment. And judgment is the opposite of acceptance. And the only thing you can accept is what’s real.
And so, if we’re not accepting of ourselves, then at some level, some unreal thing has happened in our psyche, in our experience of ourselves. And so a lot of this stuff that we’re talking about is just about returning to what’s real within us so we can have a real relationship with reality.
So acceptance is 100% the key. And I think when it comes to sabotage and creating the lives that we actually want to be living, if we’re not getting those results and those results are something, the goals that we’ve set for ourselves are something real, not just something we’ve chosen because of our ego and our fear and all that kind of stuff, then acceptance is the most important ingredient, actually, I think, to changing things.
So let’s make it a bit more practical. It’s super important. But if somebody notices one of these blocks, they’re constantly banging their head against the brick wall. We can basically say, based on what we seem to have agreed, is that there’s a lack of acceptance at some level in their life. And for most people it’s going to be a lack, of acceptance, of some unconscious intention or choice they’re making without being aware of it, obviously, because it’s unconscious.
So if somebody does find themselves in one of these situations we’re talking about where they’re trying to change their life and they just can’t do it, or, they’re trying to bring something into their life, like a relationship or a business, whatever it is, and it’s not happening. How can they move towards acceptance in the way we’re talking about to start solving this problem in their lives?
Laura: I think that one way would be returning to the metaphor of the guardian of beliefs, of reassuring the Guardian. So whatever you’re doing, somehow, instead of saying, oh, come on, why, I can’t do this, I’m m not good enough. It’s just what you said, acceptance. Just say, yes, I am as I am. And that’s okay. Actually, I’m not trying to do anything dangerous. It is my intention at fill the gap years old to do this because, probably the subconscious still uses the program you created when you were six years old. And this part of the mind doesn’t know how old you are, that your intentions have changed.
You just need a constant dialogue, and the dialogue at the end is with yourself. And so accepting yourself and yeah, reassuring yourself, too, that what you’re doing is fine. I also have a background and a lot of deep love for mindfulness, self-compassion. And I think that self-compassion in acceptance, it’s a key factor.
So, usually I teach, usually all my clients end up listening to this, and getting this little lesson of how to accept yourself in the sense that you cannot be perfect because perfection does not exist. And actually, when you try to be perfect, what your old brain is trying to do is just try to be worthy of someone else’s attention, so worthy of the try, because alone in nature, you would never survive. And so when you try to be perfect all the time, instead of creating connections with others, you actually create separation. It’s not your ultimate goal.
So you want to accept yourself because you are the only person available to yourself 24 hours a day, every day. You need to become your, like my daughter says, your BFF, your best friend forever, because it’s the only person you are going to have forever. And so you want to. Usually I give, like, three steps.
First step is accept that what you are experiencing that moment is challenging. And, you know, sometimes we are not allowed to say that we are suffering because there are other people that are suffering much more. And that doesn’t take away. The other people are suffering very much. But you need to recognize and acknowledge that in that moment, even if it’s like, I don’t want to deal laundry right now.
This is a moment of suffering. And once you have accepted. So this is acceptance, accepted that this is suffering, you need to tend your own suffering, your own pain, because emotional pain is painful, like physical pain. And so you just want to, acknowledge that it’s okay to feel as you feel. And only then, third step, you can wish yourself to be happy, which I think is what everybody wants. And this is my way of interpreting acceptance and of teaching it, in practical ways.
Oli: That’s amazing. You’ve just said so many things that. Sorry, no, I don’t mean it like that. You’ve said so many things that are really powerful, that have cracked open this conversation even more. And I think, as you were talking, you talked about our ultimate goal. And the ultimate goal, I believe, for all of us, is to experience more wholeness within ourselves and within life. And the opposite of wholeness is fragmentation. And the journey that we’re all on, I believe, is a journey from a fragmented state.
Because in childhood, we picked up all these scripts and all these patterns that you’ve kind of alluded to, that we just end up running on autopilot. But that also causes to be kind of more divided within ourselves than we actually truly, are. The scripts and the programs cause us to live a life of non-acceptance.
And if we move towards wholeness over the course of our lives, we ideally become more and more accepting of who we are, other people, life itself, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so that ultimate goal is the same for all of us, and it entails acceptance. But there’s a barrier, for a lot of us to living in that way. And it’s identity. And I always call it the ego.
The ego is just the fragmented version that we’ve created of ourselves after we’ve disowned lots of important things within us because of the things that we’ve been through. And all of the disowned parts end up going into the shadow territory or the shadow self. And there’s an element I’ve found where some of the whisperings or the callings from the shadow self, they, appear to be sabotaging our lives, but actually what they’re doing is they’re destroying the unreal foundation that we’ve built because of the ego scripts we’ve been following so that we can put ourselves back on path to that ultimate goal of moving towards wholeness and acceptance and all those kind of things.
So hopefully that makes sense. But the question for you is, when it comes to sabotage, how do we know if we’re sabotaging. This is a bit of an esoteric question, I guess. But how do we know if we’re sabotaging things because the ego is stopping us doing something real, or if it’s the other side of the coin and the shadow self is sabotaging the goals that we’ve been chasing that are going to keep us in that fragmented state. And so it seems on the surface, until we’ve reached the kind of acceptance you’re talking about, it seems on the surface that we’re sabotaging the things we actually want, but what we’re actually doing is unconsciously destroying the things we think we want that are keeping us in an unreal state. Does that make sense? That was such a convoluted question. But does that make sense?
Laura: Yes, it makes sense. I think for us it makes sense. So I actually think that in a portion of our subconscious mind, there is the real you. Yeah, that’s what I think you call it as you want. I haven’t found the proper name yet. I don’t know if you can help in this. It’s like the real you. The real self, the whole self, for some people, is a connection with higher power. Some others, just something within.
Oli: That’s it.
Laura: The part of you you need to ask that question. And this is going back to the beginning. How can you tap to this part of you? That I think is your intuition. You need to train yourself to listen to the intuition, because the intuition is whispering so slowly, so little voice that you can’t catch it. And just as you said, all these fragments, I usually say these are like filters. Like if you have glasses with so many lenses that make you judge everything, and to strip yourself from all these judges, sorry, glasses or judgments is possible, and it’s actually happening all the time.
But unfortunately, your mind is censoring these beautiful insights. So you have an insight, and then, oh, no, that is not a good idea. What am I thinking about? No, I’m not good enough. And this and that. So it’s like training yourself to listen to these insights, and I don’t know what you think, but for me is the more you train yourself and the more you will be able to listen to those very wise whispers.
And, for instance, I use intuition a lot, when I’m with my clients, and it’s probably easier when you do it for someone else, but when you do it for yourself, it’s harder to listen to those whispers. And I think that it starts back to the importance of training your mind. And I think there are many, many ways of training your mind, but it’s about being intentional. In training the mind, there are a lot of, things around about the importance of training the body, and that’s essential because it’s part of the mind, too. But we should train the brain. So the mind is complete. Brain, body, soul, and however you want to call that other part, you need training to be able to listen to the whispers.
Oli: Yeah. What happens if you don’t listen to the whispers?
Laura: Life is driving you, and you’re not driving your life, right?
Oli: Yeah. Sorry. If life is driving you or somebody, instead of them driving life, that ultimately is a sign that they haven’t trained their minds in the way that you’re talking about, I believe. But how do we make that more clear? Like, what are the symptoms, I guess, of being driven by life instead of driving with life? Do you know what I mean? Can we reverse engineer?
Laura: Yes. I think it’s just what you mentioned earlier is that you are just conforming to what society wants out from you, although you don’t strongly believe in that. And so you end up thinking, if I get to that weight, I’ll be happy. If I’m going to earn that amount of money, this is when I’m going to be happy. When I get to that position in my career, this is when I’m going to be happy. But there will be always something else, so you will never be satisfied. You will never live with that kind of inner peace that makes you able to enjoy the little moments of life, because this is all we have.
Oli: What I’m starting to realise after this conversation is there’s like two kinds of sabotage. There’s the sabotage that is instigated without you knowing by your realness. That’s why I call it realness. The real, whole ‘part’ art of you. Whole part is a kind of contradiction in terms, but it makes sense in this context.
It understands deep down that the life you have built is not your life. It’s the life of the ego, which means it’s a consequence of you not having mastery of your relationship with your body and your instincts and your fears and all those kind of things. And also your social programming. And so you’re chasing goals that you think you want. And at, the level of the conscious mind, you’re telling yourself you want all this stuff, but deep down, you know it’s empty. And so your realness, if you don’t listen to those whispers, it’s going to basically destroy your life. And I often say, like, self-destruction in this way is self-resurrection.
Because only by destroying the unreal life that you’ve built, which seems like sabotage at the start, only if that happens, are you going to find a solid foundation to build something true. And ultimately, if you build something true, that’s going to move you towards wholeness and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that’s one kind of sabotage. The other kind of sabotage is where you’re chasing something that you actually do want, because it’s moving you towards wholeness, it’s allowing you to be more connected and accepting. It’s moving you towards acceptance. And it’s rooted in acceptance.
But then the ego or the fragmented part of you, because of your identity and your addiction to that identity, is going to sabotage your progress so that you don’t grow towards wholeness and you ultimately just stay the same. And those two things are, both experienced as sabotage. But the first one, because it’s motivated by our realness, is actually very healthy, even though it is going to be probably quite tumultuous at times, and it’s going to cause some difficulties.
So I guess the question there is, how do we know if we’re sabotaging ourselves because of some unhealthy thing that’s going on where we’re lacking acceptance, or if it’s just bad luck, or if it’s just an ego, kind of, it’s the opposite version.
Laura: I think that everything lies in understanding if you really want something or not, if it’s your real desire. And of course, it’s not easy to understand that. But probably you start working out with what your desires you think you have. And then if you’re banging on the wall, willpower is not enough, then probably there is a blockage there. And you can sometimes m by yourself.
Very often a guidance is helpful, because otherwise you go too much into your conscious mind – you can unblock the blockages, maybe discovering also why, you have certain beliefs. But sometimes it’s not necessary to discover. It’s just to transform these beliefs. But then when you get where you want, does that make you very happy? M. it’s a question for your, realness.
Oli: Yeah.
Laura: For that true part of yourself. And I think, at the end of the day, I think that life, I was having lunch with a friend the other day and we said, yes, life is a project. Yes, is life a project? So if you run it as a project, it can become very interesting. You do a lot of self-discoveries and trials, errors, but there is growth. And that is what keeps you somehow interested, into your life if there’s no project, there’s nothing intentional. Then it becomes a little bit like, empty. and it requires, as you said, sometimes to go through some kind of suffering to destroy what you have created. Because this is how you resurrect. Yes. And when people are willing to do that work, then life is super interesting.
Oli: Yeah. It’s the best project going. Do you think there’s a, kind of phenomenon when people are working on this stuff, that when they first start a transformational journey in their lives, they think they want all these things?
So they think they want to lose weight and they want to start a business and they want to do this and they want to do that. But then when you start working with them, for example, in your practice, you dig into some stuff and they get to a point of acceptance of their realness. And then a lot of the things that they were chasing just slip away. And so it comes back to the idea, I guess, that a lot of the goals they were chasing, it just belonged to the ego.
It wasn’t real social conditioning and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s no longer about not getting results because they realize exactly like you said, and I suppose the main theme of this conversation, because you kind of came up at the start.
But actually, the only reason they weren’t getting the results that they wanted and that they were sabotaging, in scare quotes, was because their true intentions, their real intentions, were just to accept themselves, basically. And accepting themselves would have meant accepting some totally different intentions that they’d been hiding because of social pressure or whatever it was. And when they dig deeper and do the work, they align themselves with that stuff and then they end up flowing with life instead of forcing it. Something like that.
Laura: Yeah. Flowing, yeah.
Oli: Wow. How would you sum up all of this that we’ve been talking about? We’ve covered a lot and, we bounced all over the place because of my, rambling. But how would you sum this up? What is the main theme of this conversation or the main lesson? And can you let people know where they can find you as well if they want to work?
Laura: Yes. First of all, I enjoy this conversation so much because it makes me have great insights. And I love how you summarize all that we shared. And I think that the main thing is to start working on your growth, self-growth, and you can start from different places. Some people start with seeing a coach, seeing a therapist. Some other people start meditating, start listening to things.
It doesn’t matter, but just start the journey so that when you start, there’s so much to discover and step by step. It’s an incredible journey – so that probably would summarize everything. Just start somewhere. And I think that it’s important to train your mind. Start in one way that will lead you somewhere else for sure but it’s so important to start training the mind and working with the mind.
Oli: Yeah. Do you know what, the training the mind thing is the key and the reason it is the key in the context of everything we’ve said, when we’re training it, really all we’re doing, I think, is teaching it to accept what’s real. And that’s it. Like, training your mind means that you get out of that hamster wheel of focusing on things that are not real or, mental, cognitive distortions or limiting beliefs whatever it is – focus on the real stuff, and you can learn to accept who you really are. And then all of these issues we’ve been talking about, like the gap between the conscious and unconscious start to take care of themselves and you get into that flow. So that was awesome.
Can you let people know what your website is and where they can find you if they want to have a session or anything like that?
Laura: Yes. Thank you. So my website is my name and last name, but I’m going to spell it because it’s not so easy. So it’s, ah, Laura, or Laura, and then it’s Artero. Artero.com.
Oli: Brilliant.
Laura: This is where you can find everything, right?
Oli: Well, I will share that in the show notes, but Laura, thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a good one.
Laura: Thank you.
Oli: I really, really appreciate your time and all this insight and everything. So thank you.
Laura: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I hope we’ll stay in touch.
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