As a lifelong creative, there are three things I now know for certain to be true. On my own personal journey, they have shown themselves to me in this order:
Coined by The Center for Emotional Education, learning how to ‘Speak Brain’ is like learning a new language for your nervous system. It allows you to understand your own unique neurochemistry and tap into the neurochemistry of others, enhancing emotional regulation, effective communication, team creativity, and leadership impact. That’s a hell yes from me!
I met Natalie Christensen, the co-founder of The Center for Emotional Education in 2017 via an online course. My son was three years old at the time, my startup business, Ubuntu Baba baby carriers, was flourishing, but mentally I was not doing well at all. The transition from living my best life as a care-free entrepreneur to becoming a new Mom with my world turned upside down, had left me broken and traumatised for various reasons.
I felt so completely paralysed by anxiety, doubt, guilt and fear, and my self esteem was at its lowest it had ever been.
After just a few coaching sessions with Natalie, I couldn’t believe how much more I understood about why I was feeling the way I was feeling, and I even had some simple tools that I could use during day-to-day life to help me cope. I found myself shouting, “Yes! Thank you!” multiple times during our sessions, because finally someone seemed to be able to see things from my point of view and understand why everything felt so hard for me. Where I was at mentally made sense, I wasn’t actually going crazy and I wasn’t actually useless. What a fucking relief.
For the first time in a very long time, I began to feel real hope. Not just the kind of hope that sticks around for a few minutes, but the kind that would be present even when my employees weren’t showing up the way I needed them to, even when my son was having a massive meltdown, or even when I found myself alone and depressed, crying on my bathroom floor. I felt like I had stumbled onto some kind of magic formula that should have been taught to me in school, and even though I was 35 years old, that I still had time to pull myself back up and make a beautiful life for myself. That cleaning up all the mess around me was actually possible and that living the life of my dreams was a reality worth chasing again. And how wild that all it came down to was understanding the three different brain states and simply learning the language of the brain.
That is why I do the work I do today. The value that NeuroEmotional Coaching brought into my own world, personal and professional, was enough to make me know that this work desperately needed more visibility. Especially when it came to conscious and creative leaders doing good work in the world, and even more especially in a country like South Africa, where most people are operating from their survival brains.
I started exploring this work for personal reasons, but the ripple effect was that I couldn’t help but engage with my employees and the whole world around me from a more neuroemotionally informed space. Having this skill on board seemed to create a glitch in the matrix – ideas flowed easily, unsolvable problems became opportunities and fields of choice opened up where there never were before, enabling me to become more effective in all areas of my life.
I started studying with The Center for Emotional Education in 2020 and now support incredible people all over the world, helping them learn how to operate from their highest potential, improve overall emotional intelligence and strengthen their personal and professional relationships.
