Creative Status: Episode 69: Nikki Senior: Evolving Beyond Old Roles & Relationships for REALNESS

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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.

Embark on a journey of self-discovery and transformation with Creative Status as we delve into the realm of evolving beyond old roles and relationships for REALNESS.

Join me (Oli Anderson) and Nikki Senior, a seasoned expert in personal growth, as we unravel the intricate dynamics of family systems, patterns, and the transformative power of foundational health habits.

Meet Nikki Senior: Nikki, a guiding force in personal growth, leads us through a personal exploration of family systems and their impact on our adult lives.

Drawing from her wealth of experience, she shares insights on transcending old roles and relationships to embrace authentic growth and realness.

Patterns of Origin: Nikki delves into the patterns ingrained in our family systems of origin, revealing how they can influence our behavior and hold us back in adulthood.

Discover the keys to raising awareness and breaking free from these patterns to embark on a journey of true self-discovery.

Transcending and Growing REAL: Nikki shares practical wisdom on how to cultivate awareness and implement foundational health habits, such as yoga and meditation, as powerful tools for breaking free from limiting patterns and embracing authenticity.

Creative Status: Where Authenticity Takes Center Stage

This episode invites you to implement foundational health habits, and embark on a journey towards authentic growth and realness.

If you’re seeking to transcend the patterns of the past and step into your true, evolving self, then this episode will show you that it’s probably less complicated than you might think to get started.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson

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Show Transcript: Evolving Beyond Old Roles & Relationships for REALNESS

This podcast is about using the creative process to become more REAL.

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there – Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. If you don’t know, this is a podcast about using the creative process as a vehicle for becoming more real. That basically means that you’re going with the flow of life instead of forcing life and making the unconscious conscious through your creative drives so that you can live a life that is aligned with your true values and intentions and that feels, I guess, more invigorating than the constant friction, frustration and misery that we get if we’re just forcing everything through ego. So that’s that.

If you don’t know as well… My name is Oli Anderson, like I said, a creative performance coach and author. Help people with all these kind of issues in their life and business.

Today’s episode of the show is an interview with Nikki Senior. Nikki is a coach as well and if I was going to sum up this conversation, I would just say that is a really good articulation and summary of why we can overcomplicate life sometimes but if we can bring it back to the basics and build structures and systems into our lives that allow us to just get in touch with ourselves with very simple things, yoga, meditation, all of those kind of things that just bring us back to our baseline being, basically, then we can inject that into our doing and go out into the world and take actions that are going to uncover our souls, so to speak, rather than cover them up with more fragmentation and confusion and all those things that the world likes to get us engaged with.

So, anyway, that was a very rambling introduction. Apologies for that. Nikki, thank you so much for your time. Everybody else, here’s the interview. Thank you so much. Boom.

Interview

Oli: Oh, hi there, Nikki. Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of creative status. This is going to be another one of the conversations that I’ve had on this show that could go in all kinds of different directions. I’ll probably go off on all kinds of tangents that are unrelated so apologies in advance…

But before we get into it all, do you feel like introducing yourself, telling people what you do, what you’re all about, and what you want to get out of this conversation that we’re about to have?

Nikki Senior: Hi, Oli Thank you very much for the welcome. Sure, I’m Nikki Senior. I am a mum of two. I’m a coach and trainer for the Mindspan group in England. And, yeah, I guess that’s all there is to know about me right now.

Oli: Okay. I love it. That’s short and sweet. To the point.

So, last time we had a conversation, you shared your story with me, or a little bit about your story, which is ultimately, if I can just dive right into it, that the last few years of your life had been quite challenging. you’d faced some, different trials and tribulations in business and all this kind of thing, and you kind of reached a turning point where it led you to all these kind of different philosophies about psychology and how the human psyche operates and things like that that led you down a path to get some coaching, and now you’re a coach yourself.

And ultimately, I suppose the story that you shared was about how, by understanding human beings and how human beings actually work to a deeper degree, you were able to kind of start putting yourself on a path towards healing, if you want to use that word.

So I’m throwing loads of information at you already, but how did that journey teach you, I guess, to be more human, if that’s a good way to say it, and to operate in the way that we’re designed to operate? That’s a big question to dive into.

Nikki: It is, yeah, I was struggling quite a lot in my business. I was under, quite a lot of pressure from, other people I was connected with through the business, and very much felt like I was under attack all the time. And it was a very difficult. And you’re kind of on the receiving end of lots of conflict and nasty accusations and stuff, and it’s not a very nice place to be. And as a person, I’m quite sensitive to that stuff anyway.

So from my perspective, I constantly just felt that kind of the bad vibes come in my way for want of the better, description. I think going through the kind of healing and the personal development work and really building my resilience. As you read about these topics and you do workshops and coaching and everything else, you begin to learn that people are viewing the world through a lens that’s been created through thousands and thousands of experiences and situations that have happened in their life.

And so if somebody’s accusing you and wrongly of something, or somebody has some bad feelings towards you, it’s not always necessarily about you and who you are. Quite often it’s about what they’ve experienced, and they’re just seeing you through that, like an assumption that you fit the model that they’ve kind of experienced before.

So I think from my perspective, in terms of how did that make me more human? I really stopped to think a little bit about, actually, it’s probably not very nice being in their mind, in terms of, if you’re constantly feeling like somebody’s out to get you or somebody’s doing you wrong, or you’ve got that assumption, actually, that’s quite a negative mindset to be in, and it’s quite challenging for those people as well. So I think I started to have more empathy, rather than just constantly feeling under attack and like I had to defend myself, I started to feel probably more empathy towards those people.

Oli: Wow. Okay. So I wasn’t expecting us to get straight into it to this extent, but I suppose what we’re talking about really is projection, right?

So it sounds like for whatever reason, you found yourself in some kind of a culture – I’m guessing it was kind of a corporate culture where it was maybe a bit…I’m making tons of assumptions, but it was like a dog eat dog kind of world – and because that culture was causing people to be unreal, i.e. inauthentic and kind of disconnected from themselves, there was some kind of a void within them – and the way that they were attempting to fill that void was passing their shame onto other people.

And it sounds like for whatever reason, you became, the vessel, I guess, within that culture that ended up taking on board a lot of this kind of projection. Is that a fair thing to say?

Nikki: Absolutely. The business was a franchise, and in a franchise model, you’re kind of legally connected to other business owners for a long period of time. So it’s a bit like being in a marriage, I guess, in some respects, it’s very hard to get out of it. I think when people are relying on you, it’s very easy to kind of go, “Oh, it’s all your fault. It’s your business model that’s the issue. It’s the things you’ve done for us or haven’t done for us that have caused these things”.

And, ultimately, if there was things going on in their life outside of it, you often felt that, from the communications you had with them.

Oli: Yeah. So ultimately, what we’re talking about, it seems, is the kind of shift that you went through in your relationship with yourself that caused you to be able to kind of protect yourself from other people trying to pass their stuff onto you. And I think this is something I see all the time.

Like if I look at society or just interpersonal relationships in general, a lot of the time all that’s going on is kind of, kind of dramatic games between people’s egos as they try and pass shame onto each other. And there’s just all these different blame games everywhere. And nobody really wants to take responsibility for their own stuff, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And if you’re not aware of that, you either end up, I suppose, falling into some role on the drama triangle where you’re either a victim, you’re the persecutor, or you’re trying to rescue someone who’s been a victim of all this stuff. And it’s all the same thing, people just trying to avoid their own shim.

Now, obviously I’m getting really deep into this and I’m making tons of assumptions, but is that the journey that you’ve been on, ultimately learning to kind of improve your relationship with your own inner stuff, your emotional stuff, your shame and guilt and trauma and all that kind of thing, so that you are more resilient, like you said.

But that resiliency is ultimately about just knowing how to, I guess, stay grounded and stay firm in yourself and not to let other people’s bullshit, pardon my French kind of infiltrate your experience of yourself and kind of shake you from your realness.

Nikki: Are you big brother? Have you had like a camera in our house or something? You literally just nailed it.

Oli: Yeah. There’s a lot of patterns that are just so common to human beings. That’s ultimately what the podcast is about. All my work is about figuring out those building blocks that make up the human experience. And if you understand them, and shame is a big one, you can actually reverse engineer what people have been through really quickly.

But anyway, if that is what you’ve been through, and I suppose the transformational journey you’ve taken yourself on is about stepping away from all that, what were the main lessons?

Let me make it simpler for you, I guess: How did you learn to improve your relationship with your own emotional stuff, shame, etc. so that you are, I, guess, more confident and less likely to be shaken by this external stuff. And then two, how did you allow that stronger foundation within yourself to allow you to have a better relationship with other people in the way that you talked about briefly, really early on, maybe before the recording?

Nikki: Yeah. So just going back slightly, you mentioned the drama triangle, and it’s really interesting because I do feel like I was definitely sat in the victim mentality. for anyone who’s not familiar with the drama triangle, like the pusher, the puller, the rescuer – I 100% was sat in the victim kind, of position there, and often fall into the rescuer, always going out and trying to help other people through issues. It’s kind of like a part of who I am.

But some people say that, and this is, I guess, a bit more on the spiritual side. But some people say our souls come here and there’s, like, a lesson that needs to be learned. And you keep reliving certain situations over and over again until the point that you learn the lesson. I, was in that victim situation, I guess, or mentality for such a long time from my stepdad, who was quite emotionally abusive, when I was a kid, all the way through to my husband’s ex-wife and, managers at work and various other people.

Until I eventually had this situation where suddenly it was like, you cut the head off one, and multiple others appeared, and suddenly there was, like, multiple people in that situation with me. And they were kind of like the, protagonist, I guess. And I was in that victim space. And it took me realizing that there is something either in my behaviour, my energy, there is something in me that is attracting that to me, and having to take some responsibility for that and think, actually, what lesson am I supposed to be learning that I haven’t yet learned so that I can begin to move forward with my life, so that I can kind of stop this cycle of having this role in my life all the time?

And that was probably really powerful for me. So forgiveness, I think, was the lesson I needed to learn, both for the people who I felt have been against me, I guess, or attacking, but also for myself, for any of the.

Obviously, we all have things that we dislike about ourselves, and it was just that forgiveness and self-acceptance that I needed to learn about me. So, hopefully I’ve now ended that whole drama cycle. But you never know.

So I’m sorry. I don’t think that answered your question. But I just wanted to go back to the drama triangle, because when you mentioned it, I was like, this is something that I really recognized in that situation.

Oli: It’s, really interesting what you said about victim mentality in general and, the roles that we end up playing. So I think that roles are one of the main reason that people become disconnected from themselves normally, like you’ve kind of said, it goes back to our family, unit, like the family that we originated from and the roles that we have to play within those systems in order to keep that system going in the way that it’s accustomed to moving and going and all that kind of stuff.

And when we become attached to the role, that’s when we kind of go into hiding, in the sense of we have to disown certain parts of ourselves, like I don’t know. Our strengths and our weaknesses and all kinds of things. And if we’re not aware, then when we get to adulthood, it’s exactly like you said. We’ve got these unconscious blocks because we’ve identified with the role rather than with our realness, with who we really are.

And those unconscious blocks end up just attracting the same situations over and over again or, putting us in the same relationship dynamics again and again and again. And only if we get some new insight, some new learning that’s going to allow us to transcend that role and the truth that, it kind of the relationship with the truth that we have because of that role that we filter everything through.

Only if we get to that point can we transcend the unconscious block and actually free ourselves. And it seems like that’s exactly what you’ve ended up doing, is stepping beyond those roles that you just got used to playing.

So I guess the question there is if that’s all true, because, again, I’m making a bunch of assumptions and you don’t mind. How do you think you ended up stepping into that role of the victim? And what were the benefits of identifying with it, like, in adulthood? Because I think a lot of the time, even though we know the roles are at some level, we know the roles are unhealthy because they keep bringing these, same patterns into our lives, attracting the same dysfunctional relationships, or wherever it is, we kind of fight to keep them in place because it stops us having to face the truth or something like that.

And the truth, initially – I always end up saying this on the podcast – “the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off and make you miserable” because you have to let go of your illusions. And so there’s something like that going on in the journey that you’ve been on, that you’ve shed. And I suppose as you became aware of it and transcended it, that’s when you became free to be able to be who you really are, which is kind of what you’re showing up as now, by the sound of it.

Nikki: Absolutely. So I would say as you kind of go through life, and certainly when you’re a child, obviously, you pick up, don’t you, other people’s opinions and, ways of living. And something that I talk about a lot with my clients is how your beliefs are, like, something you accept to be absolutely true or real, so you never question it.

Obviously, my mum was with my stepdad in the first place, and so a lot of her, she’s quite a powerful woman. and a lot of her beliefs I accepted to be true or real, so obviously took those on as my own. and one of the things I felt or I found very difficult, probably partly as a result of the situation, because it was quite an, argumentative place to grow up.

Obviously, with his personality, forgiveness for me was, like, not…I could kind of move on from things, but I would never forget if somebody had done me wrong so being able to forgive somebody like him who had caused a lot of trouble or actually even learned to be grateful for some of the benefits he brought into my life, that was huge. That was absolutely huge.

And now I can gladly say, hand on heart, people used to say to me that when I spoke about him, my face would change. Like, I’d be angry. You could see it. And I used to be like, yeah, I’d run him over if I saw him. All that angry teenage stuff.

Whereas now I genuinely can say if I saw him, I’d actually thank him for a lot of the good stuff he bought into my life, like teaching me how to manage money and various other things that I just couldn’t see before I 100% couldn’t see it.

So that inability to, really fully forgive somebody and actually be grateful for the things that they have craved in your life, even some of the worst situations that we have, generally when you look back, something good may have come from it – not all of them, obviously, but many of them.

And if you can start to kind of let go of the anger, if you’re freeing yourself, ultimately, you’re doing it for yourself, but let go of the anger, forgive yourself and forgive them and actually find some gratitude for some of the stuff you learned from it or you’ve taken from it afterwards. That was huge for me.

Oli: Wow. There’s two really interesting things that you can kind of elicit from what you just said. The first thing that I never thought of before, but which is really powerful, is a lot of the time when we resist forgiveness, it’s because we’re fighting to keep the roles that we identify with in place.

So a lot of the time, something’s happened in the past, normally, like, in our childhood, whatever it is, and somebody has done something to us that’s caused us to play the victim or to try and be a big hero or whatever it is. And that whole role becomes the filter for our whole relationship with life.

And we need that to stay in place so we don’t have to face all of our underlying emotional stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like I said, the truth will set you free but first it will piss you off and make you miserable. And so, even though, we probably do know at some level that if we can forgive and move on, we’ll have a lot more freedom, we don’t want to forgive because holding on to that resentment actually keeps the role in place, because the role is unreal. It’s just a survival mechanism. And so if we can step into forgiveness, then we step into acceptance.

Forgiveness is acceptance and acceptance is about accepting the reality

And that brings us to the second point, based on what you just said, which is that acceptance and forgiveness are the same thing. I think the previous episode of the podcast before this was about forgiveness, and we said the same thing.

But anyway, forgiveness is acceptance, and acceptance is about accepting the reality. And when we get into accepting reality, it’s about stepping beyond duality and judgment. And so it’s not about somebody being totally good or totally bad, but about accepting that human beings are both. We’re light and dark, we’re shades of grey, however you want to say it.

And so even the worst people in our lives, probably there is some good stuff that has come from that relationship. There is a diamond within the huge pile of shit, and if we can just put our hand in there, we can find that diamond, and we can use that to move forward and keep growing and keep expanding and keep evolving in the way that we need to. And I am saying a lot, I apologise.

I’ve had a lot of coffee… I always do before these podcasts. But how, based on all that, then do we learn to forgive in the way that you’re talking about so that we can be more real and so that we can, I guess, step away from these roles that we’ve just become attached to because of resentment that we’re holding onto and probably don’t even know that we are holding onto it in many cases.

Nikki: So, for me, I was, reading a book, actually, and it was talking about the power of forgiveness. And it was saying, get a photograph of the person, if you can, and really kind of focus on them whilst kind of saying this. I think they called it The Forgiveness Prayer. I’m not religious but, yeah – so it was almost saying, like, “Essentially, I forgive you. Thank you, I love you, and I’m sorry.”

And I remember looking at, well, I didn’t have a picture of my stepdad, but I was like, closed my eyes, visualized him and tried to do this. And I thought, this does not feel good. I do not forgive him. I do not love him. And I’m not sorry.

But then I kind of added bits on the end of it – so it was like, “I forgive you for the hurt that you caused. Thank you for all the lessons that you taught me that were good. I love you because I love every soul on this planet because it’s all connected. And I’m sorry for anything I did that might have made the situation any worse.”

And so that kind of felt a bit less like I was doing something nice for him. Read into that what you will and kind of just enabled myself to learn to let it go and to really focus on, I think, as well. The fact that, again, considering the fact that we all have all these stories and beliefs and everything that go on in our head and we’ve all got our childhood, we’ve come from.

Every person you meet has this whole web of stuff behind them that you’re never going to know or understand fully. And generally we’re all here turning up, doing the best we can with the information and the stuff that we have.

Essentially that’s what he was doing.He was fearful of losing my mum, for example. Fearful that, if I was there, it meant he got less love. So, she might leave him or whatever. From his perspective, it was all coming from a place of fear. And when you start to understand that, it’s like, well, actually, does that make you a bad person or were you just holding on with everything you had and just behaving almost unconsciously and just kind of going through life in the best way you knew how?

And actually that probably was what he was doing. Yeah, it’s a difficult one and obviously it’s very complex in relationships, isn’t it? Especially in some certain situations. But for me, just trying to understand that he was turning up and doing the best he knew how and when I really looked at it objectively, there were some really good things that he brought to my life as well.

So it was trying to kind of focus in on those and, create that forgiveness and I guess almost do like forgiveness affirmations. I don’t like the word prayer. do like forgiveness affirmations around that to kind of get that into my subconscious as well.

Oli:  I suppose it all comes down to that thing. There’s like a saying, “hurt people, hurt people.”

And if you understand that, it does make it so much easier to have empathy and to just step back from all of this just emotional stuff. And the kind of projection that we were talking about at the start of the conversation, it just pollutes society, it’s all over the place. But it’s not because anyone’s to blame. It’s because they’re in pain. And if you understand that, then you can take your own pain out of the equation, I guess by having a stronger relationship with yourself, by just letting go in the way that you said.

So I guess the question now is how did…you’ve kind of alluded to it, but you’ve been through this process of kind of waking up and looking at yourself and stepping back from the roles you were playing and learning to forgive and kind of dissolving some of that core trauma or whatever you want to call it. And now you’re more resilient and your mindset’s changed, do you find that this kind of thing just slides off you like water off a duck’s back now or do you still kind of have some little niggles?

 If you found yourself in the same situation that you were in that you mentioned at the start of the conversation, where you, were working in the franchise and people were breathing down your neck and I guess chasing you for results and blaming you if you didn’t get them or whatever it was, how would you respond to that stuff now?

Nikki: that’s a difficult one. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to now. No. So I think probably less emotionally. Something I learned through that process was actually if you feel emotional or triggered when someone sends you a message or an email, just do not, like, you can acknowledge it by all means, but do not reply to it for 24 hours and go back and read it when you’re feeling calmer.

Because often you can read something and presume it’s got bad intent to it and it’s sometimes not that bad when you actually go back to it with a straight head but I think definitely less emotionally. I would have given a lot less of myself and, I think I was constantly trying to prove, like, the more criticism I got, the more I would try and fulfil what I thought their expectations were.

And actually that didn’t help. It just perpetuated the problem, made it far worse. So I think really just having that faith in myself and just saying, “Actually no, this is what I’ve agreed to give and this is what I’m going to do and that’s that”.

And yeah, hopefully not allow it to get to the point it did. I possibly would have walked away a bit sooner. but that’s in hindsight, isn’t it? But I think you alluded to this yourself. The relationship with yourself is really important. And when your confidence gets hit and when you don’t feel like you’re good enough, or you’re enough for whatever the situation is, you really do have to go back to actually starting to build a relationship with yourself and having that kind of confidence and self-belief, that is a massive core of it to me.

Oli: Yeah, I think that is the foundation of everything. If you don’t have an unconditional self-acceptance, which sounds like crazy to some people because they’re so used to judging themselves and stuff, but if you don’t learn to accept yourself, no matter what, then you’re going to get in trouble, basically, because the opposite of accepting yourself is judging yourself.

Judging perpetuates the shame and the trauma and the guilt and all that kind of thing. And, it just causes you to create this, fragmented version of yourself that you put out into the world to try and hide from that shame which gets you in all these kind of situations that you’re talking about. And I suppose what we’re really talking about is boundaries.

Like, in a way, what you’ve learned by going through this process is to value yourself and then to set and maintain boundaries that protect that value that you now have. And if you can do that, then obviously that’s going to allow you to have better relationships with other people. But it’s also going to allow you to get better results in life, because you’re going to be able to move forward in the way that you want to without letting all of these interpersonal dramas shake you from yourself and cause you to doubt yourself and all that kind of thing.

So if that is true, what have you learned about the boundaries thing in relation to, I guess, just moving forward in the way that you want to? Because I suppose it sounds like as well, you’ve been through this process of looking at your own stuff and how you showed up in relationships and how you could have had more self-worth and then had these boundaries that we’re talking about. But you’re using that resilience. You’ve now got to focus on, I guess, serving people more and contributing more to the world and showing up in a more real way and all that kind of thing. How is that all linked based on what you’ve learned?

Nikki: I think, always making decisions that are in alignment with your core values and actually knowing what those values are is absolutely paramount. And, yeah, I think that’s kind of the key one for me and also trusting your gut feeling, because there were – I’ve said this a million times in my career – I used to do recruitment and I was always like, if you have a bad gut feeling about somebody, do not take them on.

And I ignored that a couple of times in my franchise and I live to tell the tale. So, yeah, I think trusting your gut feeling is a really important one.

The best thing you can do for your life is learn to trust yourself

Oli: Yeah, you’ve opened up a can of worms now because “trust” is one of my favourite words. I always say this, but nearly every episode of this podcast eventually boils down to that.

The best thing you can do for your life, I truly believe now, is learn to trust yourself and learn to trust life. And if you’ve been driven by shame and all these unsavoury emotions that we’ve been talking about, you find that really, really hard to do because you start relying on your head and your conditioning and your desire to control and force life according to that conditioning, rather than just trusting the higher part of yourself, if you want to use that word.

And if you don’t trust yourself, that’s when you start outsourcing that trust to other people. And you get in all these kind of situations that we’ve been talking about. So how has this work you’ve been doing helped you to do that? How have you learned to trust yourself more, but also, by extension, to trust life more?

Nikki: I think one of the main tools I used, was meditation. for me, especially when you’re stressed, if anyone listening to this is in that conflict situation and it’s getting to you or upsetting you, it’s likely that your brain is not turning off much from it – you’re constantly in this cycle of how can I fix things, or there’s this problem, or perhaps even practicing the argument in your head that you’re going to have, or that you might have had. I was a nightmare for that.

So for me, having, a bit of space, doing yoga, doing meditation, really kind of just helped me to quieten what was going on. And it sounds so cheesy, but just to connect back to myself, I hear people saying that all the time, and when you actually get it, it’s like, “Oh my God, this is amazing”.

But it’s just having that space for you. And recently I hadn’t meditated for a while and I did a meditation for like half an hour and it just felt so like, it felt like going home. It was amazing.

And I just thought this is what pulled me through, and also, again, I talk about this a lot, in my job now, but we have so many thoughts going through our heads and when you’re stressed about something, it can be so noisy, and it’s like a freight train with writing down the side that’s just going through your head and you’re just sat there reading every single word. Stop reading – those thoughts are not all true.

And so affirmations again, I felt that they were really icky before. but when I started actually doing affirmations and when that freight train would start, I’d just go, right, stop. Do you know what? I love and accept myself completely. It was a thing I read in Louise Hayes book and it was just the first thing that came into my head one day.

So every time that a freight train would start, I’d just go, stop. I love and accept myself completely, and I would just keep repeating that until I moved on to some of the thoughts and forgot I was doing it. And it really just helped me just to kind of calm things down a bit so I could think a bit more clearly about what was happening.

Yoga and meditation return us to who we really are

Oli: Yeah, you’ve used another one of my favourite words, which is “yoga”. What you just said is it’s all 100% true, and it’s one of those things, what you said about home, like basically returning home to that feeling of just being you.

Ultimately, what we’re talking about is going from, it’s a cliché thing, both not being a human doing and being a human being. And most of us are running around following the promptings of that freight train and the thoughts that it gives us about what we should be doing. That just causes us to false life, and we end up distracting ourselves from our being. And then really simple things like yoga and meditation and climbing a mountain or something, they just return us to who we really are.

And it kind of does sound cheesy because it’s a cliché. I’m one of these people. I’m always going around telling people to do yoga and meditate and get in touch with themselves. And if you haven’t experienced that, it sounds too simple, like, “Okay, I’m just going to do yoga and then I’m going to be in touch with myself, and then all my problems are going to be solved.”

But actually, it is that simple if you consistently experience that feeling of being real, which just means, I think, that we’re connected to life, we’re connected to ourselves, and we taste wholeness and the flow of wholeness, and we put ourselves back in the process of expanding towards more wholeness.

In the simplest possible terms, if we can do that consistently, we’re grounded in our real being. And then all of the decisions that we make about what we’re doing with our life are, connected to that same place as well. And it’s only if we do that can we take inspired action instead of just doing things to appease our ego and our freight train and to distract ourselves from life instead of living life.

And another word that I love – I’m throwing out all my favourite words today – is “dissolution”. Because when you meditate or when you do yoga and you get to the end of the yoga flow and you’re in shavasana or something, then you get this feeling of dissolution, or that’s what I get anyway. And all that means is that that freight train and my identity that rests upon it, it all kinds of melts away, and you’re just there in the moment, and that is all we really need, because that is who we are.

And when you’re in that moment, you don’t have any judgments holding you back. You just accept yourself, and it goes back to this affirmation that you were sharing. I can’t remember what it was. Sorry. But I accept, and I love myself completely. Or whatever you said in that moment, those moments, that’s the only thing you can do.

And if you understand that, then all of this stuff we’re talking about, about the drama triangle and the roles that we play, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it dissolves and it melts away, and then we have a better foundation for living a real life. So I don’t really have a question, but what do you think about everything I just ranted about?

Nikki: Yeah, 100% agree, I think. something I said to my yoga instructor the other night, actually, is, you know, when you spill a drink and you go and get a towel and you go and soak it up, and then you ring the towel out and all the water comes out?

That is how I feel when I’ve been for a yoga session. I feel like a towel that’s emotionally and energetically been wrung out. It just takes all the toxicity and. Sorry. Say that very well. Takes the toxicity, takes all the junk and just squeezes it out of you and you come out and you just feel like you feel Zen. That’s the only way to describe it.

Oli: I’m actually, astounded right now, because, believe it or not, before we started recording the podcast, I spilled a cup of tea all over the place, and I actually have a mangy towel on the floor next to me that needs wringing up. So this is, some kind of synchronicity taking place right now.

Nikki: It certainly is.

Oli: So most people are kind of running around and they’re adding tension to their lives because of all the, pressure that they’re putting on themselves to kind of follow that freight train or to catch up with that freight train. It’s like they’re running after the freight train constantly and living like that.

It just adds tension. And we all need a good wringing out, I guess. And if we can get that ringing out, then we’re going to find this foundation to be able to build our lives. But is that the final step, do you think? Or is it like most of us, if we’re in that, high tension, high stress state and we’re running around like headless chicken, we need to go through the process of basically ringing ourselves out. But then what do we do after that? If there is a next step, where do we go from there?

Nikki: So I’d say two things that just prompted for me. The first one is if you don’t listen when something’s not quite right in your life, then the universe, or your subconscious, or whatever you want to call it, will keep tapping and tapping and tapping and getting louder and louder and louder until eventually you take note.

And whether that’s a physical illness, whether that’s a group of people giving you a load of grief like me, whatever that is, eventually it will get so loud you cannot ignore it. So try and listen a bit earlier. It would be my advice, so you don’t have to go through the, massive breakdown. the second thing I would say is that I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Shrek.

Oli: Yep. Long time ago.

Nikki: You have. So I don’t know if you remember, but when he’s talking to donkey about, ogres, and he said, ogres are like onions, they have layers. And for me, your personal development, it’s a bit of a weird analogy, I know, but for me, your personal development journey is a bit like peeling an onion.

 Like, you take a layer off and you’re like, oh, I feel good now. It’s all nice and fresh and new and you feel like maybe I’m there now maybe I’m good. There’s always another layer. It’s like an infinitely peeling onion.

So I think as you get to that next stage, once you’ve rung the towel out, then you will get another knock from the universe, your subconscious, whatever else, and that will show you the next thing that you need to work on.

But the process gets far more enjoyable, in my experience, as you go along. Once you’re aware of it, and you can start to recognize those things and those knocks. You do start to deal with it sooner. And, yeah, it just becomes a bit of a game that you play with the universe. Rather than always feeling like it’s kind of happening to you, you can co create.

Oli: Yeah, that’s amazing.

The journey of life is going from fragmentation to wholeness

There’s always another layer of the onion, because we’re talking about wholeness, basically, right. The journey, as I see it, as I’ve said 3 billion times now on the podcast, is we’re going from fragmentation to wholeness.

So something happens in our childhood, like I said, it causes to become disconnected from who we really are. We create a fragmented identity, and then we basically spend the rest of our lives trying to return to wholeness. But because wholeness is just this connection to everything else, we can always go deeper.

And that’s why there’s always another layer of the onion. Because basically what we’re dealing with as we peel these layers away is, our perceptions and our interpretations. And because we’re human beings, we’re fragmented creatures in fragmented bodies, we’re always going to have that, I suppose, veil to some extent between us and pure wholeness. But thankfully, we eventually die and we just become connected to everything. And that’s wonderful.

But, yeah, there’s always another layer to peel with. The thing you said about, if you don’t listen to your unconscious mind, or the universe, or God, or whatever word people want to use, eventually you’re going to have no choice but to listen, because it’s going to scream in your face. There’s going to be some kind of an incident that takes place in your life, or you might get ill, or whatever it is, something’s going to happen that’s going to cause you to face the truth that you’ve been avoiding.

What are the subtle whispers? Or how do we know when life is whispering to us so we don’t have to have it shout in our face? What are some of the signs it might be giving us, if that makes sense.

Nikki: I think, for me, I knew that I wanted to do something purposeful. And, I went from different job to different job, changed industries, changed careers, always kind of looking for, what is this thing? I want to help people. I want to do something useful. I don’t know what that is. And I would get a manager that might be really nasty, or, maybe I wasn’t very good at one thing, or a boyfriend had dumped me, so I’d bugger off to Grand Canaria for six months. Whatever happened.

But I think the bit where I started to notice the knocking was, when things started going wrong in my business, really, and financially, the business was fine from an external perspective, it looked great. Internally, there was a lot of stuff going on between me and these other, people. Had I felt that I was able to just go, do you know what?

I’m going, and I’m going to get rid of this business and go on and do something else, then I would have done. I think the knocks got louder because I didn’t really connect to myself. I didn’t go and do the meditation; I didn’t go and do the yoga until I actually needed those things to help me cope. Had I done those things earlier when I knew things weren’t quite right, perhaps I would have had a bit of an insight to what I wanted to go and do next. But, for me, I didn’t kind of find that stuff until a bit later.

Oli: That’s an amazing point that you just raised. Like most people, they need to flip the script, and so they plod through life feeling, I guess, the void that you talked about. They need more purpose, or they’ve got a restless feeling or an itch for something. They feel that and they think it’s normal, but actually they only feel that because they’re disconnected from themselves.

It’s a distancing from the truth, ultimately. And when things do get too bad, that is when they turn to yoga and meditation and spirituality and whatever to try and solve the problem. But actually, if they do it the other way around and do yoga and so on and so forth as just a default, then they won’t need to fill the void, if that makes sense.

Most people only turn to those things when there’s a need, but actually, if you don’t turn to it, you just use it because it’s going to reconnect you to who you are. Then a lot of this stuff that comes from needing to fill the void, like the quest for purpose and all that kind of stuff, is going to dissipate, it’s going to dissolve. And, I don’t know, that’s something that’s really helped me. It’s just so powerful.

So this has been a very rambling conversation. I have to be honest. This is the first one I’ve recorded in 2024, and I think I forgot how to do podcasts professionally. But I think we covered a lot of good stuff and I appreciate everything that you said. If it’s possible to sum up this conversation, how would you do it?

 Have you got any final words of wisdom for the audience? What’s the main takeaway from all this stuff that I’ve just rambled about and that you’ve, shared your insight around?

Nikki: I think exactly what you just said, actually – I really got goosebumps when you said it was instead of waiting until there’s something to fix, why don’t we start and go the other way around and actually start doing the meditation and all that stuff?

Certainly when we’re younger, we live a party kind of lifestyle, and lots of young people are not doing that. Now, since COVID there’s a lot of kids now who don’t want to drink, don’t want to smoke, all the stuff that we did, probably. I don’t know how old you are, but certainly I did…and so there’s a lot of kids now who are kind of taking that healthy lifestyle.

Well, if you’re doing that or even if you’re not, perhaps you could start to look at trying a bit of meditation. There’s, like, a million videos on YouTube that do guided meditations, and some of them are amazing.

So I would say, yeah, absolutely. Starting from, when things are okay, actually creating that relationship with yourself, it just gives you the resilience. It just helps you. I think my key takeaway to date, generally in life, is we’re always trying to get the next thing, aren’t we?

You get a good job, and it’s like, right, I want to get to the pay rise. I want to get to this; I want to get to that. I want the bigger house, the nicer car. I need to find a partner, I need to have a family, blah, blah, blah, all the way through. And I think it’s very easy to always be focused on the thing you’re trying to work towards.

But coming from a quite old, now – 41 – try and enjoy the journey a bit. Have those goals, try and work towards them. And I would never discourage somebody from that. But actually, rather than stressing about that all the time, just try and be a bit present and enjoy the journey on the way. And the meditation and the yoga and everything else would help with that.

Oli: Yeah, start with the being and then put that into your doing, basically, not the doing to hide from a disconnection from your being or something.

And for, the record, I’m 41 as well, so we’re not that old. I think there’s a few more years left in us, hopefully – where can people find you if they want to work with you or have a conversation or something? Have you got a website or something?

Nikki: I do, yeah. My website is nikkisenior.co.uk and I’m on Instagram and Facebook as NSPerformanceCoach.

Oli: Brilliant. So I’ll share that in the show notes. But, Nikki, thank you so much for this. I’m going to go ring out that towel and, I just appreciate everything you’ve shared. So thanks a bunch.

Nikki: Thank you so much for having me, Oli I’ve really loved it.

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