June 21, 2018
Virginia Muzquiz is known as the Referral Diva. She is an Executive Director with Business Network International, the Chief Connections Officer with Master Connectors, Inc and the host of the Passion+Purpose=IMPACT podcast. Well-known for her ability to connect the people she meets with people they need to know, Virginia is on a mission to help solo business owners connect to their purpose and their passion so they can build businesses that fund their dreams and have massive impact on the community where they live and serve.
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Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- I'm no longer a reactive slave to my emotions. I'm actually a casual observer.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Breathing is what ties the mind to clarity. I think breathing is what gives me clarity, focus and vision.
Suggested Resources
- Book: Anything by Dr. Wayne Dyer
- App: iTunes - Meditative music which I preview on Pandora and then purchase on iTunes
- Also search for Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. It's a Buddhist chant.
Bullying Story
- I'll tell you a story because it does have that 'if I had known how to deal with it different' slant because I actually had a similar situation. I was 12 years old, 11 or 12 and it was in fifth grade and I was invited to Dana Amoli's birthday party. I felt like, oh my God, I made it. Dana was going to have me over to her house. I was going to get to go to the party and everything.
- What I didn't know is I was the entertainment. Like if you've ever seen the movie mean girls, like I was the entertainment. So after all the parents went to bed, it probably was 11 or 12:00 at night.
- The girls, they were all doing that thing where you lay down and you do light as a feather, stiff as a board and lift with two fingers.
- Well, they got me to lay down, but instead of doing light as a feather stiff as a board, they held me down. They smeared me with green Jello and they shoved me in a closet and that's where I slept. I pounded on the door. I begged for them to let me out. And they didn't let me out until the morning.
- I can't even remember really what happened because I'm sure that Mrs Amoli was horrified and talked to my mother. I don't remember.
- That moment is like sticky and in the dark and laughing and, you know, that was just like, it's so wow. It's so present for me and how cruel and ucky that was.
June 18, 2018
Jen Molitor is a teacher who believes we should teach children, not curriculum. She’s on a mission to empower and unite teachers and parents all over the world. Her superpower is getting teachers to smile and enjoy teaching again. She brings a refreshing perspective that lifts you up when you want to walk out, reminding you of the real reason you became an educator.
We are all teachers. Let’s spread the message that powerful teaching is done through the heart. Start there, and as if by magic, the mind also opens to learning.
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Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- I'm more centered. I'm a better mom, a better wife, a better person.
Thoughts on Breathing
- It helps to slow me down, helps to connect me and get in touch with my body in a quicker way.
Suggested Resources
Bullying Story
- I think there are a lot of stories about people being bullied and picking on them and I have some. However, I don't want to share that. I want to share one from a teacher perspective and what I'm seeing in schools because I think it's really powerful.
- I think it's powerful as a parent too, to model these kinds of things. I think that parents and teachers in this authority type of responsibility, we're taking care of kids, we're in charge of them.
- We can tend to bully kids ... because I said so and this is how it's done and we have all these other things to get through. So just sit down and this is what you have to do and I don't care if you dropped your pencil, you know, like this kind of thing.
- And I think inadvertently we are really sending this message to kids that they're not as important. Right now I work as a gifted intervention specialist and instructional coach and so part of my time I work with kids in my room who are identified as gifted. It's a pullout type of atmosphere.
- So I have between eight and 20 kids in my room and when they come to my room I hear some of the grumbling that happens from what teachers told them in the hallway, like their whole class had to go back to the class and sit down because two kids were talking in the hallway or one kid got in trouble and everyone else had to get the brunt of it.
- So what I've come to discover is that we need to have more mindful conversations with kids and step out of our ego for a little bit. And if a kid is misbehaving, it's usually because they're discouraged.
- They don't wake up one day and say, who can I tick off today? I can't wait. It's more of, I'm feeling uncomfortable if something's going on, I'm discouraged. And, I need attention. I need this. I'm going to throw this or get in trouble there.
- I don't eat the teacher's lounge anymore. I stopped that and it's been helpful. So that kind of complaining and venting about kids and other people.
- Even as a mom, if there's another mom on the soccer field and all the moms are talking about that person, well that's, that's kind of bullying too.
- And I think we have to model for others, you know, like grace. I think we have to model grace. Like, no, she doesn't wear what I would wear and maybe she doesn't do what I would do or drive the car that I would, or treat her kid like I would.
- There's got to be a place for some grace for kids, for teachers, for adults.
June 14, 2018
Adam Schaeuble, aka The PHD (previously heavy dude), is the host of the top ranked fitness podcast 'The Million Pound Mission'. He reached a point in his life where he weighed 327 pounds and was already having weight related health issues in his late twenties. He decided to overhaul his lifestyle and his fitness and ended up losing over 100 pounds. Feeling inspired, he took what he learned from his own transformation journey and created a bootcamp program that produced over 35,000 pounds of results in his home town of Bloomington, Indianna. Now Adam has set his sights on inspiring over one million pounds of healthy results through his podcast, online academy, and online bootcamp program.
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Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- I think it's helped me really deal with anxiety a lot. I've been in the hospital a few times from entrepreneur itis, working too many hours and you know, anxiety attacks, and taking on too much. So being mindful, being present in the moment has allowed me to have like a filter to sort out what is actually happening and what do I actually need to be worrying about?
Thoughts on Breathing
- Breathing. I follow a meditation practice that's involved with breathing.
- Just being able to have control of whether it's box breathing or just doing kind of a silent meditative practice where I'm just focusing on the breath.
- I love just doing breathing where I breathe in, count one, breathe out, count to 10 and then cycle through that a few times. And it's just a nice little reset where I can actually do that in between tasks if I'm kind of switching modes from, okay, we do this interview and now I have to do some client calls. I'll do a little bit. I use that to kind of pause and breathe.
Suggested Resources
Bullying Story
- Well, I think there's a unique thing that happens when somebody loses a lot of weight and we kind of bully ourselves a little bit. Like there's a moment where we beat ourselves up.
- We lose that confidence. And like I said, we assume that other people are making fun of us so people will beat themselves up a lot along the journey about not being there yet.
- Maybe they've lost 60 or 70 pounds, but their goal is 80, 90 pounds and they beat themselves up about not being there yet. They're not being present. They're not realizing like, hey, I've accomplished something amazing and be proud of that.
- So it's probably not the traditional bullying answer that you get, but I feel like, let's start with us. Like don't beat our selves up. Don't be hard on our own self, especially when we're accomplishing amazing things, you know? Be Proud of yourself.
- There's a coach I've got named Dan Sullivan; he talks about something called the gap and the gain. He says you have to always measure from where you started. That's the gain. Don't measure the gap between where we are now to where we want to get to be because that's like the horizon line and getting there never happens because what happens when we hit our 50 pound goal. Okay, I want 60. Okay, I hit that. Okay. I want 70.
- If people don't take that moment to breathe and be present and realize that, you know what, that's pretty damn awesome. And like, we all do this, whether it's with weight loss, with anything.
- I do my affirmations, I still do my lifestyle rehabilitation. I still do it all and I just accomplished another major goal. I paid off my mortgage and I'm mortgage free.
- I'm 100 percent debt free and I took a few days. I just like, I just, I wasn't going to set the new goal, I wasn't going to set the next thing. I just sat down and just kind of walked around my house and I'm like, this is mine. I don't have to worry about that debt anymore. I can take that and invest in my retirement.
- I just really got into the moment, celebrated that with my kids, my family, and we talked about it. My son's seven. I talked to him, like I'm going to help, you know, put more money towards their college, he doesn't understand any of that, but I just communicated it to him, but just kind of being in that moment, being present, being mindful and being proud.
June 7, 2018
Sylvia Becker-Hill is an industry expert in the field of corporate leadership and international speaking. She is the author of '12 Leadership Powers for Successful Women'. Sylvia has experienced first-hand, the rise of women’s empowerment. Sylvia fuses her love of science and psychology to help people break through their un-serving dogmas of the past. Her mission is to raise the number of female leaders world-wide in all sections of society, economy and government by 30% in the next 30 years.
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Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- Mindfulness helps me to stay out of emotional drama and enjoy the beauty of real emotions.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Breathing is my most easiest, most powerful tool. By just taking a deep breath, I raise already my level of mindfulness.
Suggested Resources
Bullying Story
- For my own experience, let me say that I had. I had in the past quite a short fuse. Is that an expression which makes sense for English speakers, so when I watched something which was against my values, some injustice, unfairness, it's at school or in business, oh my gosh. That triggered me and being German, I'm straightforward in my communication.
- So I had the tendency in the past to explode and say what I think and be quite straight and intense and sometimes to a degree which was hurting the other person.
- It sometimes went over the top and was not appropriate for the situation. There's a difference between stepping up when you see injustice and mentioning it and addressing it or leaching out because you feel subconsciously attacked in your own value system.
- So there's these two layers of appropriate addressing. Plus because my ego was still attached to my values, being here to act and threaten where my ego was reacting. So mindfulness gave me the tool to be able to even distinguish what I just shared with you.
- That there are two layers that, that it's not about not saying anything, it's about having the clarity and the confidence to address things which are not okay, but in a way which are productive and not coming from an own hurt ego reaction pattern where I'm protecting more my own values or whatever I'm feeling attacked.
- Maybe it's an argument, maybe it's a belief system. So mindfulness helps me to distinguish that. I was able to discover that and mindfulness helped me to train, to let go of the ego hurt reaction where I'm defending where I'm attacking the other person because I feel threatened and focus really on the productive part of the interaction.
- So mindfulness I think makes me a better person where this short fuse; it's now a very long fuse, so it needs now much more to trigger me that I lose control.
- So mindfulness ultimately gave me more control about the animal parts of me, the ego part, the subconscious mind parts, the parts where in the past I might have gone out of control in a painful way for others and myself.
June 4, 2018
Anne Gordon de Barrigon is a whale and dolphin expert. She has been running Whale and Dolphin Wisdom Retreats since 2007 and has a Degree in Biology and Animal Behavior. She has worked as a zookeeper and has trained animals for over 20 years for movies and TV. Married into the indigenous Embera tribe in Panama. Owns and operates Embera Village Tours. Pioneered the whale watching industry in Panama.
Contact Info
- Website: www.WhaleWisdomRetreats.com
- Free Ebook: You can download 'Messages From the Sea', which is wisdom that I received direct from the dolphins and whales. I'm happy to share that with you. (Get it from her website)
Most Influential Person
- I think that would be the whales and dolphins. For me, they're, they're my gurus.
Effect on Emotions
- Mindfulness has given me a deep sense of peace, a deep peace and comfort.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Breathing is really important because dolphins and whales are conscious breathers. Dolphins and whales have to literally consciously think to breathe.
- That means, let's just say you're swimming underwater and you know you can't breathe until you come to the surface. Same with them. So when you are conscious breather for a whale and dolphin, they can't sleep like we can.
- We sleep because they they'd suffocate without breathing so they sleep with one half of their brain and the other half keeps them moving and breathing or you know, coming to the surface.
- So when you are fully conscious of your breathing, it also, that just expands to being more conscious and using more of your brain power or conscious of how your physical body moves, which also opens up your mind to being more aware and conscious of the world around you.
Suggested Resources
Bullying Story
- I'm not aware of being bullied or just didn't pay enough attention so that it affected me. I have an interesting story that I think you'll like.
- It was on a retreat here with the whales and I had these people on this trip who were all from the UK. This one young man, he was just 21 and he was so much fun, but he was hyper as all get out. He was just bouncing off the walls.
- This was not even a spiritual group. They were more of a whale-watching scientific group. Somebody in the group asked, can we do some meditation? I'm like, sure. Okay. So when we went to do the first meditation, this young man said, I don't know if I can do this meditation stuff. I can't sit still for anything.
- And I said, you know what? That's fine. It's up to you and if you want to just try it and if it doesn't work, just very quietly walk away so you don't disturb anybody. So he was like, okay. So I gave him permission to leave if he needed to.
- So I started the meditation and when I oftentimes lead meditations, I have an idea of where it's going, but the whales and dolphins enter and they guide me and I just go wherever they want to take us. So on that particular evening they wanted to take us to forgiveness.
- So okay. We went there and what they asked me to show was to have everybody imagine a dolphin hunter from Japan standing in front of them and then feel what they feel about a dolphin hunter, but then see that this man, this hunter has a family and he has his culture and he has his history and he's just trying to do what we're all trying to do and that's feed his family and live a good life, good healthy, happy life.
- And that's all he knows how to do; to connect with him on a heart to heart level and a soul to soul level. And then I guided them to hug this man once they connected heart to heart, soul to soul. So afterwards, I was asking for anybody to share and this young man said that was amazing. He said, I saw that Japanese hunter and I punched him.
- But then when you asked me to look at his heart and his soul and see that he was just trying to get by. I hugged him and I apologized. I'm so sorry that I hit him. And so for me, bullying is about like he was trying to bully this Japanese hunter.
- If we just open our hearts and our, our souls to connect on that level because the people doing the bullying are doing so out of pain that they're feeling. And so they don't know how else to act out. So we need to open our hearts and move to understand them and give them the love they're so desperately seeking.
May 31, 2018
Valorie Hubbard is an actor and an expert at empowering other actors. She owns the company, Actor’s Fast Track, where she consults with working actors about their career paths. In her newest book, 'Rule Breakers - Changing The Way Actors Do Business', she shows professional actors how to create and operate their acting career as a successful business – and how to move from being “stuck” into the limelight. Some of her credits include: Castle, Agent’s of S.H.I.E.L.D; How I Met Your Mother; Glee; American Horror Story; Workaholics; True Blood, Resident Evil: Extinction and every Disney show. Valorie lives in Los Angeles with her husband Chef Gill Boyd and dog Gracie.
Contact Info
- Company: Actors Fast Track
- Website: www.ActorsFastTrack.com
- Contact: Sara@actorsfasttrack.com will arrange a conversation for you with the right person.
- Free Book: Text the word 'Rulebreakers' to 38470 to get a free digital download of the book, Rulebreakers by Valorie Hubbard.
Most Influential Person
- Melissa McFarland, who was my original coach in Actor's Fast Track. She was my coach for 10 years.
Effect on Emotions
- Mindfulness has calmed my rage down. If I take that five seconds before I make a decision; discernment.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Breathing is everything. I mean, you learn that as an actor and so breathing is everything. Everything. It's life, so huge. It's a huge impact.
Suggested Resources
Bullying Story
- Well, that's hilarious because really my tagline as an actor, is the adorable bully. Marcy Lewis is the bully. You know, like I've always played the bully. So it's so funny. I've always played that person.
- When I was little I was teased a lot for being fat. And one of the things that I didn't know and I wasn't taught is, I think breath would have been a very big help. I mean, that's something they didn't know when I was a child, about breathing in and breathing out and breathing in and breathing out. And that time out and that five second rule, that discernment thing, you know, is really big.
- What happened is, the kid started teasing my friend one day and because it was my friend, all of a sudden I just lost it. Like I snapped and I've had a few of those where I beat him up. He never came back to school. The girl beat him up. The fat girl beat him up.
- I socked him hard in his face, you know. The lesson always is if you don't say something, if you don't have the conversation, if you don't face and say the truth of what you're feeling regardless of how they take it or whatever, it's like it'll build up to where you explode and possibly injure someone.
- I mean there were times in my adult life where I, you know, early adult life where I experienced that and I was like, I do not want to experience that again.
May 28, 2018
Devin Galaudet is editor-in-chief of 'In The Know Traveler' and he's visited 85 coutries around the world. He's in the process of marrying his wife 100 times in 100 countries. He's accomplished 20 times in 15 countries so far. He's appeared on Fox, NBC, ReInvention Radio among others. His writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, TravelAge West, Citron Review, Skylight Magazine. Devin has written a memoir called, Ten Thousand Miles With My Dead Father's Ashes, available in bookstore in September, 2018. It answers the question, what do you do when you lose your father's ashes?
Contact Info
Most Influential Person
- Anna Korea King (A woman I studied the Western Mysteries with)
Effect on Emotions
- I can't begin to tell you how important mindfulness is towards my day to day life and I think it comes in a variety of forms in religion and spirituality and philosophy and all kinds of different doctrines and things like that.
- I think what it's given me is to kind of look beyond how I might be feeling in any given moment to understand that I am part of this great fantastic thing called life and I get to appreciate that thing.
- Again, some moments and some days are more difficult than others. But overall I'm, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I think getting started, it is very challenging because we want to fall back on old ideas.
- I was raised in a certain way so I keep thinking, well I'm that guy and the truth of the matter is I'm not that guy anymore and I haven't been that guy for many years.
- So having that gratitude, you stay on the wheel, so to speak.
- You keep working on yourself and remaining conscious. The more that happens, all these other doors start opening up. I started developing more gratitude and more compassion for other people.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Well, I think there's a physiological thing that goes on when we get bad news or we're agitated and that becomes more shallow breaths. That becomes less awareness.
- I think there are just things that go on. And the first thing that I do is try to almost automatically go into a slower breath. I want to fill my lungs up just to either breathe in this good news or just acknowledge it.
- Okay, here's this thing that's going on, but I don't need to be flipped out by it. So why don't I just take long, slow breaths?
Suggested Resources
Bullying Story
- Yes, I was bullied when I was six or seven years old. And you know, it's hard to describe. Again, this is something that comes from the book.
- My mother thought that I was a Barbie doll and so she would quite literally dress me in pantaloons and ruffled shirts and buckled shoes and I grew up in like nineteen seventies, Los Angeles. And that is a recipe for getting picked on.
- As I recall, every boy was wearing like sears, tough skin jeans and everybody was wearing work boots and you know, I mean that's the way my father dressed and that's what I wanted. And so I would get dressed up in these costumes that were, it was, I mean, again, you can look back and you smile at it, but at the time it was just demoralizing.
- I would go, who wears velvet knickers, like other than like somebody from a French Dandy from the seventeen hundreds. But I was. I don't even know where my mother found culottes for boys, but that's how I was sent to school.
- And so that without question separated me from most kids and I took some lumps over that and you know, again, I don't know if it's ironic, but once my father got wind of it and my father was a pretty prideful guy and I was kind of a slight built guy and my father was just a wide shoulder, big forearms, the whole thing.
- And he was very much like, you know, I want to transmit my father and use his language, but that would probably be inappropriate for a family audience. But he made it essentially very clear that you are going to stand up for yourself, you are getting into fistfights wherever necessary.
- And he took me in the backyard and taught me to do things that really were probably on the edge of right and wrong. But looking back at it, it was something that I think for me as a young man, certainly considering the time, that was just part of what needed to take place.
May 24, 2018
Dr. Rhoberta Shaler is the 'Relationship Help Doctor'. She provides urgent and on-going care for relationships in crisis. She particularly helps the partners, the exes, adult children, and co-workers of the crazy-making, relentlessly difficult people that she calls, 'Hijackals'. She helps them save their sanity and stop the crazy-making. Even the United States Marines have called on Doctor Shaler for help. She's a relationship expert and speaker and author of 16 books. She consults with clents world-wide through the internet and she's host of two podcasts. One is called 'Emotional Savvy: The Relationship Help Show' and the other podcast is called 'Save Your Sanity: Help For Handling Hijackals'.
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Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- I think mindfulness levels your emotions. It doesn't take out the peaks and valleys, but you understand that you choose the state that you stay in.
Thoughts on Breathing
- Well, I think it's key to everything. When you stop and you allow yourself to let your shoulders down from your ear lobes, you take a deep breath and you open your chest and you open your heart at the same time.
- Then when you allow yourself to take a deep breath, it takes 20 seconds for the oxygen and a deep breath to go all the way around your blood system.
- So you refresh yourself completely. So when you are using your breath, you are actually regenerating yourself and when you do that it calms you and helps you think more clearly.
Suggested Resources
Bullying Story
- I was in the education world for a long time as a teacher and then I became a school administrator and it was at a time that really stands out for me.
- When I had the opportunity, I was given an entire extra classroom to do what I wanted. So every morning I would have all the children including all the special needs children sit in a big circle and I invited their parents to come and spend that first 20 minutes of the day with us.
- And why I did that was there was a lot of unrest. There was a lot of children who were difficult and a lot of special needs children. And there were of course bullies in the mix.
- And so if we're all participating in something, it became something that everybody then said, okay, to. There were not any people who were not doing it.
- And what we saw during that time where we would just sit quietly, maybe we'd play with energy a little bit, you know, we'd rub our hands together and make energy, go round the circle or we'd do a visualization or whatever.
- We saw a real change and then I had an opportunity to be the administrator of a school for at risk teenagers. And of course there was a lot of this going on, you know, make them do this and all that when I got there.
- And I know that's not the way it's going to work, we're going to feed them.
- And so, we made a huge change. These kids who were going out and stealing cars and doing home invasions on the weekends; through love and sitting quietly, they changed.
- From the time that I went there to work, Bruce, the average length of time a child was staying in the school was three months.
- By the time I left five years later, we had not had a vacancy for 18 months.
May 21, 2018
Jeff Jones is a therapist, addiction counsellor, interventionist, and now, family recovery coach working online with families with addiction. He’s expanded the context of addiction and created a three-phase program that empowers families to safeguard their loved one in an addictive cycle or recovery, while they engage in a process to stop the addiction cycle in this generation. After putting it online and wrapping a user-friendly online community around it, Jeff is moving towards his goal of empowering families to connect with like-minded others, family-specific resources and expertise when they are ready.
Contact Info
Most Influential Person
Effect on Emotions
- So what I'm aware of is that my emotions can like go to extremes, whether it's spiraled downwards or climb upwards kind of thing.
- And mindfulness for me has been a very helpful antidote to ground me in reality as opposed to right away believe any extreme, whether it's down or up. So I want to reality check it with mindfulness.
Thoughts on Breathing
- When I take slow, deep breaths into my belly and actually push my belly out, it engages my parasympathetic nervous system which slows the body down, which slows the nervous system down, calms the nervous system.
- I have been using that in meditation. A natural thing that I do is, right away, take a big breath even sometimes before thinking. It has taken a long time to get there.
- The slow deep breath is always there. It's a resource that will never leave me.
Suggested Resources
Bullying Story
- The story that I'm thinking of happened really not that long ago, just a couple months ago. It is interesting how it started out because I have a number of different, addiction mentors.
- There was one in particular that I had just sent her an email kind of with a compliment of what I learned from her and I was just at a place where I was looking at what I was doing and having appreciation for the different people who I have learned from whose shoulders I'm standing on kind of thing.
- So I wrote her an email and what I got back from her was a letter from her attorney. So it was confusing to me and I felt bullied by that. It was a great opportunity for me to be aware of what was going on in my own thinking process.
- I just couldn't really make sense of my giving her a compliment about something I had learned from her and then getting this letter from her attorney.
- It was kind of like letting me know how to cite her reference properly, like I was stealing some of her information or something.
- I called her and I sent an email and I said, hey, I got this email from your attorney and like, can we just have a conversation?
- Which you know, I got another letter from her attorney and just a couple of weeks ago I was at a conference and I saw her and she was sweet as pie to me. Nothing was said about it. So in that situation I felt like I was being bullied.
- I was aware of what was going on in my mind and painting all these pictures like I'm being bullied here, and then to see her and get no message of that, it was confusing to me, but what I really learned from that from a mindfulness perspective is how I really need to check out my own thinking.
- Like I can't always believe my own thinking. And if I don't check it out with the other person, it's not really going to be helpful for me to believe everything that my mind says. Now the other side of it is I do feel that I was being bullied.
