Always Get Back Up With Danielle Serpico | Episode 48

Welcome to The Resonate Podcast with Aideen! In this episode, I had the pleasure of chatting with Danielle Serpico, author of “The Black Belt Mastermind,” who guides her clients to embrace their inner fighter and pursue their dreams fearlessly. We explored the profound impact of martial arts on Danielle’s life, especially during dark times, as she learned to persevere despite feeling like a failure. Her advice resonates deeply: always get back up and believe in yourself. Join us as we uncover the transformative power of resilience and self-belief on the journey to success.

Danielle Serpico is an NLP Master Trainer, radio broadcaster & CEO Founder of The BlackBelt MasterMind Academy. She is a Self Defence expert and European Martial Arts Champion. Danielle will help you rediscover your ‘fighter’ mind-set, overcome any obstacles or limiting beliefs and show you how to go after your dreams so that you can win in your life. Her book, ‘The BlackBelt MasterMind’ – The Ultimate Guide to a fighters mindset & winning in life gives practical exercises and techniques to develop your inner warrior.

Connect with Danielle

Courses:  theblackbeltmastermind.com
Facebook:  @theblackbeltmastermind
LinkedIn:  @danielle-serpico-53b71210
Instagram:  @danielleserpico
Twitter: @DanielleSerpico

00:03 Welcome to the Resonate podcast with Aideen. I’m here today with my guest, Danielle Serpico. Welcome, Danielle. Hi, I’m delighted to be here with you, Aideen. I’m so excited you’re here, Danielle. We’ve known each other for years. You’ve been a support to me in your role as a coach, but I need to tell people about where this all came from. Danielle is an NLP master trainer.

00:27 She’s a radio broadcaster and CEO founder of the Black Belt Mastermind Academy. She’s a self-defense expert and a European martial arts champion. Danielle helps you to rediscover your fighter mindset to overcome any obstacles or limiting beliefs. And she shows you how to go after your dreams so that you can win in your life. She has a book called the Black Belt Mastermind.

00:55 which is the ultimate guide to a fighter’s mindset. So Danielle, thank you so much for joining me today. I want to find out more about how martial arts has helped you to overcome the biggest obstacles in your life. Sure, wow, what a great question to start with. I guess we could start with a turning point in my life. We could go back about 14 years ago.

01:23 It was 2009. It was a beautiful summer, a really good summer for a lot of people, but not for me. I had three restaurants at the time and I was going through a terribly difficult time with the crash of the Celtic Tiger. And it came to the point where I had to basically close the doors and go home and reevaluate everything. Now, I was at a very low point in my life.

01:53 distinctly going home and even contemplating ending it all. However, there was a little niggling little voice in the back of my head. And I had been very luckily very, I’m very grateful for it now on a journey in life. And I think we’re always called to do what we most need. And I had taken up martial arts a number of years previously, many years previously. And I had been very good at it now.

02:21 I’m a lover, not a fighter, as I like to say. However, I do believe in us all having the innate right to defend ourselves. And I had taken to martial arts like a duck to water. I think because it was very, it wasn’t really about the fighting. It was more about the thinking about it and thinking about it. Martial arts is like any, a little bit like music.

02:51 which you would understand a lot better than me. It’s an art. It’s an art form. And I loved the study of motion and I got really absorbed and absorbed into it and I became the best student in the class and, you know, and became a black belt very quickly. And I was, you know, doing really, really well. And I remember.

03:12 the first time, I know it sounds a little bit graphic and I don’t believe that we all have to have this experience. However, I remember the first time I was kicked in the stomach. It really hurt and I was winded and I didn’t want to get back up, but I was, you know, screamed at to get back up. This was, I’m hoping in a competition setting or in a student, you know, this isn’t something in your everyday life. I’m just, you know, clarifying for everyone.

03:38 100% not, no. So this was in the dojo in training. And obviously this wasn’t also on my first day. This would be something that would be gradually have built up. You know, if I’d been kicked in the stomach on the first day, I would never have gone back. No, none of us would. No. So just to kind of clarify that. But this was much further along in my training when I was well able for it. And, you know, in fact, you kind of nearly get to, it sounds weird.

04:04 want it in a way because you want to know what it feels like to go through that rite of passage and be able to get back up. And I got back up and it taught me a lot and it taught me that you know as corny as it sounds we hear the quotes you know this too shall pass but it does the pain passes and I remember I sat on the floor it was it was June it was after the bank holiday weekend in June 2009 and I really did not want to get back up again.

04:31 And I felt such a failure, I felt such a fraud, I felt the mask had come off, I felt everybody could see me for what I was. But there was a little niggling little quote, and it was, a black belt is simply a white belt who never gave up. And thankfully I decided, you know what, I’m going to give it one more shot. I’m gonna get back up. And I did. And that was kind of the beginning. I think that’s what martial arts did for me most, was it gave me an ability to rise again.

04:59 to understand that pain passes and you can step up and go again. And I did. And that’s where my journey into the rest of the past 14 years began. It’s an amazing thing. And I’m so happy that you had that resource, that the martial arts had your inner voice was talking to you. It’s like, you know, there was wisdom that you had.

05:26 gleaned from the process of learning your martial arts. And I definitely associate martial arts is similar to yoga or any field where there’s a kind of a discipline. There’s a code of, there’s almost an ethical code. There’s so many layers to those forms. They’re called martial arts. Yeah, I believe because there is an art to them, but there’s also that philosophy underlying.

05:55 And that’s something that you took a little bit further after that, isn’t it? Absolutely, 100 percent. And it’s funny because a lot of people, when they start a martial arts journey, they kind of go, oh, I want to get to black belt. And it’s all this. And this is the philosophy, exactly what you’re talking about, Aideen, because most people come in and they’re all they’re also keen and eager to get to something, to reach that level, to say, I want to get to black belt.

06:21 No, I was a black belt at that point. The day that I crumbled, the day that my world fell apart, I was a black belt. Technically, you know, in theory, I had a black belt around my waist. But I decided, you know what? I’m really going to become a black belt. And that was the day. And it’s only through experience we can read this in books. We can hear these stuff, this stuff said. But when we really experience it, that’s when we really understand something. And I got it that this was.

06:49 the journey to black belt. This is what being a black belt was. Being a black belt isn’t getting to black belt. It’s when you are a black belt, what do you do with it now? So I realized, OK, now I’ve got to be a black belt, not just somebody who can go into a shop and buy a belt for two euro and fifty cents anywhere I want and just tie it around and say, I’m a black belt now. But someone that actually lives as a black belt. So am I going to?

07:16 Am I going to inspire people? Am I going to lead people? Am I going to lead myself? Am I going to get back up? Am I going to actually walk the talk, not just talk it? Am I actually going to aspire for more for myself? Am I going to respect myself? Am I going to treat myself right? Am I going to actually do this? So it really taught me a huge lesson and obviously in every aspect of life that when we look to aspire to something, what do you do when you get it?

07:46 What are you going to do now that you’ve got it? Are you going to live up to that standard? Because I remember the first day I got my black belt. From that day on, everybody looked at me different. When people walked into the dojo, the pressure was on. So you have to be careful of what you wish for because then it was kind of like, oh my God, now they see me as a black belt. Now I’ve got to actually, I’ve got to perform. Now I’ve got to really show them that I am it. I’ve got to be.

08:13 a leader, I’ve got to be good at the skill, I’ve got to be able to teach, I’ve got to be able to be confident. I’ve got to actually be able to do all the stuff that I say I’m supposed to be able to do because I have a black belt around my waist. So that was the true lesson, a really big lesson in me. And I brought that philosophy through life from that point onward about this is the journey now. This is the journey. Can you be the black belt in your heart, in your mind, in your soul, in every aspect of your life? Can you do that?

08:43 Yeah, so it’s an amazing way to look at it. And I loved that you were able to lean into those lessons when you had the biggest disappointment of your life, when all of your restaurants, abruptly, in the space of a few months, you realized this is not working. And I’m sure that took an emotional toll and affected how you were able to express yourself and what changed in you.

09:13 as a result of that occasion and how did the philosophy support you through that journey? Yeah, great question. So everything changed, you know, everything changed because in that moment now, obviously looking back, it’s easy to say it was a great thing to happen, but at the time it was horrific. I lost everything. I lost my home. I lost every penny in my bank account. I lost my car. I lost everything. I was literally had nothing.

09:42 nothing left. And I was distraught. I was desperate. I was lost. And I felt complete fraud. I was 36 years of age. I felt like, you know, I had I just felt completely false. I felt like the mask had come off. And in that moment, I realized something huge, which obviously I went on and learned more deeply. But in the moment, I realized that I had been hiding. I had been

10:12 I would have appeared in all senses of the word, I would have appeared confident to people. In fact, I used to be called Smiley as my nickname as a young girl growing up. And everybody who I’d met would have thought, oh, Danielle is a confident, bubbly, happy girl. But inside, I was I was cut off from the neck down. I was all in my head.

10:36 And I was living completely in my head without ever, ever, ever addressing any emotion that I would have been wise to have addressed. So when everything hits, you know, rock bottom, when that moment came, when I lost everything and went bankrupt in that moment, it was like a valve opened up in my neck, it’s the only way I can explain it. It was like something. Repeat that again.

11:04 It was a little bit like a valve opened up in my neck. It was a little bit like all of a sudden, I had everything inside started to flow out, all the emotion, all the hurt, all the pain from my childhood, from stuff that had happened in my past, from my relationship with my father, from my upbringing, from going back and forth, from never feeling like I belonged, from not knowing who I was. All of this stuff came flooding up, stuff that I’d never dealt with. So…

1:34 While I had a superficial outward voice and even to myself, I did not even know this. While I could speak confidently about things, about business, about getting on with things, about doing things, I wasn’t able to speak about my feelings because I didn’t even know my feelings. I’d learned to cut them off. That was how I had survived. That’s how I dealt with

12:03 my childhood trauma, childhood issues by not going there, by just simply not going there, getting on with it. And a lot of us do that. So I had no voice when it came to expressing myself as to how I really truly felt. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t know how to be vulnerable. I didn’t know how to say I was hurting. I didn’t know how to say I was scared. And I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified is

12:33 I can’t even put words on how afraid I was. I felt like and I remember speaking to a psychologist at the time. I said, I remember feeling like I was a child lost in the woods and I’d been abandoned by my parents. I was the fear was overwhelming. So that is when I actually started to truly speak.

12:56 Yes. And what was it like? Who did you reach out to then? How did you figure that out? So this is kind of maybe a little bit of a weird thing, I’m going to say. But I nearly feel and, you know, I’m very practical. I had three restaurants and, you know, I had a gift shop as well. I’m very practical. However, this is where a little bit of the woo starts to come in because I literally felt like

13:24 the universe sent me certain things in a particular order, because that was the way that it was meant to happen so that I could, it was all I could take step by step. So I picked up a book one day in a store and it was called The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Well, I have to tell you, The Power of Now was one of the most transformative books that I ever read. So I am so glad that we have that in common. Tell me more about what happened from that book.

13:54 Yeah. So as I said, I’m practical. I’m a real practical. I had never believed in the power of maybe, you know, even the mind or the subconscious, never mind anything more ethereal as, you know, quantum physics or manifestation or anything else spiritual like that. I, you know, I was very feet grounded firmly on the ground. It was kind of get on with it. Danielle. I was always in that mode. But the power of what I was really good at.

14:24 And what I am good at is really simplifying things. And it was like the words popped out of the page. And I got the message. It was like the universe saying, Danielle, stop before you do anything else. You’ve got to be able to stay still. You’ve got to be able to just be in the now. And I learned from that book that if I’m not thinking about the past and I’m not thinking about the future.

14:53 and I’m able to just sit even for a moment. I could actually breathe again. I could actually be in the present. I could actually not feel bad. Maybe I wasn’t quite feeling good yet, but I could actually feel just OK, neutral. And that was the stepping stone. That was the first step. And if I had learned if I’d been given a different book first, it probably would have been too much. But the sequence that had happened in and I kind of relate to it a little bit.

15:21 as martial arts, the first step in martial arts is establishing a base, establishing a base. Everybody wants to go ahead and learn how to get out of this hold or do that kick or do all this fancy stuff. But if we don’t know how to establish a base, we can’t do anything. And I needed to establish a base because my base had been taken out from me. And I learned from the power of now how to be present, how to sit for a moment in the present. And that gave me breathing space and ability to just.

15:49 be because the only place that we can create from is now. So we can’t create from the past, we can’t create from the future, we can only create from now. So that was the first book. And then it continued. The next book I picked up, and I don’t know, for me there’s no coincidences now. Now I see the signs. But the next book I picked up was Victor Frankel, Man’s Search for Meaning. And that was like the next stepping stone. It was literally like the steps of survival or of getting of

16:18 of reaching the next level of it was like the universe. And okay Danielle, you’re ready for this now. You’ve read the power of now. You know how to be present. Now here’s the next step. In the present, what are you going to do with it? And I learned from Victor Frankl that between thought and action, there’s a space. And in that space is choice. And that was huge because I had felt like a victim. I had felt I was against the world. I felt the word was against me. And I learned that, no, hang on a second. I have a choice of how I think, of how I feel.

16:48 of how I react, of how I behave and the results that I hence get. So that was the next book. The next book that I picked up, and this is true as God, these are the three books in this sequence. The next book that I picked up was, I mean, completely by chance. I don’t know coincidence or not, but this is the book. And I picked up a book by Paul McKenna and it was it was Change Your Life in Seven Days, I think it was called. And I started to read that and I loved that because it was very practical.

17:19 And it gave me techniques because, again, I wouldn’t have been ready for that at the start. I had to first get present. Then I had to learn how to empower myself with Victor Frankel. And then I learned, OK, now here’s some stuff that you can do with this. And then I started to actually redirect the course of my thought processes. So I loved what I learned in Paul McKenna’s book. And I learned I read up about him and I read that he had been taught by a guy called Richard Bandler.

17:48 who is the co-creator of NLP. And basically the rest is history. I went and studied with him and it just helped me. It did so much more than just help me to live. It just transformed my thinking and my life. So would you say that then you had your, the voices in your head now were more supportive? Yeah.

18:16 One of the first things when we talk about voices in our head, and this is quite a, you know, hopefully it’s not upsetting for anybody, but when I sat on the floor, I remember my last restaurant closed and it was it was it was a Tuesday or Wednesday after the bank holiday weekend in June. And I sat on the floor and I cried because my electricity was cut off and the guy had come in and I knew him and he was really embarrassed and he said, I have to cut you off because I couldn’t pay the bill. And he cut me off and I told the staff to take the food as wages.

18:46 because I couldn’t pay them their last week wages. And I said, take the food out of the freezers because we had thousands worth of food in the freezers and the fridges and they did. And they went home and I sat on the floor and the only words that I could hear in my head were these. It’s easier to think of you dead, Danielle. It’s easier to think of you dead. And that’s why I nearly went home and took my life because those words were in my head. And those words were actually, and let me just.

19:12 explained beforehand, I have a great relationship now thankfully with my father. But at the time those words came up because those were the words that my dad had said to me when I was 18 and I had gone back to Italy, I’m half Italian, my mum’s Irish, my father’s Italian, and I’d gone back to Italy to ask him why he hadn’t been in touch with me because basically I hadn’t seen him for eight or nine years since my parents had broken up.

19:39 and my mum had brought us to Ireland and he had no contact with me. Nothing, not even a postcard, not a letter, not a phone call. Definitely not having seen him. And I asked him why. And he said he had been going through his own troubles. And he said it was easier to think if you did. And at the time, obviously, that hit me hard. And I went back to Ireland and I basically said, right, you know, that’s the end of him. And I got on with it. And that’s when I closed off from feelings. And I went and lived in my head and said, that’s it. I’m going to.

20:09 go and get things done, be self-sufficient and not think about that anymore. So I basically cut him off as well. And it was only when I got into all of this stuff around our mindset and understanding feelings and thoughts that I realized that those words were there because I’d never addressed it. I’d never addressed that emotion. I’d never addressed that inner voice that was kind of putting myself down all the time.

20:39 And when and I learned that unless we look at it and acknowledge it, we can’t do anything about it. We can’t change it. So on that first week’s training, when I did my first NLP course, the voices were all there, but I changed them. I addressed them. I looked at them. I looked at them straight in the face and I listened to them. I said, you know what? These words aren’t serving me. These aren’t my words. And I changed them for more useful ones. And yeah, that’s kind of what happened.

21:07 But sometimes it is harder to be alive, but the rewards are great. And, you know, the path of ease isn’t always the path of learning. I feel sorry that your dad wasn’t able to love you the way he would have actually learned so much from being able to do that. But it’s hard. That’s so hard. I feel my heart is just going out to you, you know. And now, thankfully, we did.

21:36 We did, thankfully, rekindle our relationship. You know, it took a long time for me and to forgive him, we could say. But the older I get, the more I realize how we’re human. And he had so many struggles. And when I hear the story, I put a lot of blame on him. I heard my mum’s side. I heard his version of my mum’s side. And I realized that human beings make mistakes. We’re human. That’s what makes us human.

22:05 and he had so much pain himself that it wasn’t really about, you know, that he didn’t want me. It’s just that he couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t handle the pain and he wasn’t strong enough at the time. Now we have rekindled things and I go over and see him regularly and I’m just back from having spent time with him and, you know, we have a hugely stronger relationship and the past, you know, 10 years have been wonderful even during Covid.

22:33You know, I went over there and we hired, you know, places together and we spent weeks together. And it was very, very special to be able to spend that time with them. Yeah. Yeah. And my own my own dad and I hadn’t been very close. We’ve actually started to become closer in just the last few months, I would say. So there’s something there. I mean, it’s just our inner child, I would say, you know.

23:03 Deep down, we feel those hurts of our childhood. And we do need to, at some point, notice that those pains and those circumstances and experiences can actually be affecting us now. And you could hear that voice at a moment, it was a crunch point, and thankfully you’re able to move past it. But sometimes we can hear a voice that will…

23:32 stall our progress because it’s someone else’s voice and we need to be able to notice that. 100 percent. If we have learned and I would be making an assumption here, but I would kind of hazard a guess that most of us do live in a state of not truly acknowledging our feelings. We have learned

24:01 you know, through mechanisms and with no fault of anybody’s or a parents or whatever, because they’ve learned that too. But we’ve learned to avoid going there. We’ve learned to get on with things, to kind of say, OK, I don’t have time to wallow in self-pity. I don’t have the energy now to get emotional. I don’t want to go there. I don’t, you know, and we’ve learned to get on with it. And even the best meaning parents will say things to their kids like, oh, don’t think about that. Don’t.

24:30 feel that way. Don’t you know, they’ll say no, no, you shouldn’t be thinking that. So we’ve learned from a very early age to kind of dismiss our feelings. And if we dismiss them and continue to dismiss them and dismiss them, it’s like that pot, you know, that’s boiling up. And what happens is it explodes then when something happens that

24:59 childlike. We all have that. We all have the tendency to have the tantrums, to scream out and say things that we didn’t mean, to react in ways that are childlike, immature ways, like run away and hide, you know, avoid stuff or go into battle and fight, you know, like metaphorically kick our mother or father’s shins and say, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

25:27 because we’re acting out, that’s the child in us acting out, because we’ve never learned how to deal and handle with those feelings. So that’s a huge part of my own personal experience and also what I obviously now do with other people is to help people to learn how to reconnect and how to establish that connection between their head and their energy, their body, their emotions, their heart.

25:56 so that they can have better, I don’t really like using the word control, but a better way of dealing and handling with things when things come up. What would you say are the biggest benefits of having good awareness around your emotions and better communication skills around how you feel? Well, your relationships. Your relationships in business or personal will improve.

26:24 You know, and obviously your relationship with yourself, any relationship. You know, if we if we don’t know how to manage our emotions, how can we have healthy relationships? It’s it’s impossible. And, you know, a lot of us, most of us think we’re so together. A lot of us think we’re together and, you know, we’re mature. And but we don’t actually.

26:48 join the dots, we don’t we don’t actually stop and think, well, why did I say that stuff that I didn’t mean? Why did I lose my temper like that? You know, what made me become so paranoid or, you know, about what my partner might be doing or why was I so jealous or why was I so fearful or why was I so anxious? Because we’re not joining the dots and realizing it’s because we never did not again, no fault of our own or our parents necessarily, but we never did the work of.

27:17 learning how to connect with our feelings, work that in the perfect world we would have done when we were young kids, you know, and we got to go back there for us to be have healthy relationships, for us to be able to not react like in the ways that we afterwards go, oh, no, what did I do? What did I say? Why did I do that? Even in subtle ways, avoiding relationships, you know.

27:46 or thinking, oh, you know, I’m too old for that. I won’t be able to be in love or I won’t be able to have the perfect relationship or I can’t be happy or I can’t have confidence in myself. I can’t believe in myself or I can’t have a successful business or I’m not good enough. All of these are relationships, whether it’s with you or with someone else. If you have. Not learned how to connect. And again, that’s probably.

28:12 a tricky one to understand, because if we haven’t learned to connect, we just don’t know what that feels like. And we’re living in our heads and we’ve actually got to start understanding there is a deeper feeling in there that we’ve been avoiding. We’re going to live in a superficial way and we’re going to be triggered continuously. We’re going to be triggered in life and we’re going to have problems. And if not least of them, we’re going to it’s going to cause disease. It’s going to cause burnout.

28:41 stress, overwhelm and probably physical disease, illnesses, because you’re pushing and repressing and deflecting. It’ll cause you to indulge in negative habits such as addiction, drugs, drink, overeating, overspending, any sort of addiction, because any way to deflect and avoid rather than sit, sit with yourself.

29:08 and your feelings and learn how to deal with them. Like a child going and eating the, raiding the cookie jar or, you know, eating all the sweets. We’ve got to learn how to sit with feelings rather than avoid them. And that will change your life. That means that you can actually have a healthy, happy relationship and a healthy, happy relationship with yourself. Is there a strategy that you lean into yourself when an emotion feels a little overwhelming? Because I’d love to give people

29:38 and some of your insight into like, you know, OK, it’s happening. It’s happening. There is there’s an emotional bubbling up right now. How would you suggest that they. Get themselves more in the present in the moment or become more aware. Yeah, fabulous. Well, the total opposite to what I used to do, which was avoid it, which was to say, no, not going there. Get on with it. That was my old pattern.

30:06 It was, okay, let’s distract, do something, keep busy. I mean, the busiest people are the people the most, I mean, some of the most effective, successful, you know, go-getters are probably the people that, you know, need this most because at some point it comes and bites them in the in the bum. Am I allowed to say bum? You just did. So yeah, you’re allowed. So, you know, because we’ll we’ll we don’t see it happening. We don’t we don’t see what’s happening. And

30:36 What I would suggest is, is like I do, I teach a lot of inner child work. And that really helped me really, really helped me. And it’s about learning how to sit with feelings, sit with feelings and acknowledge them. So the first stage, I’ll give you a very, very quick example of this for your listeners. And so. Let’s go back to when you were a child.

31:03 When you were a little child, your parents, and again, this is not a bad apportioning blame, but what happened is you had a feeling. You had a feeling. And as a little child, you didn’t know what to do with that feeling. So you probably went to your parents or your primary guardians or, you know, and you said something like, I have a funny feeling in my tummy. Now, your parents or whoever was looking after you, well, meaning or not, even the best meaning will probably have said or done something like this. Maybe they weren’t available. Maybe they weren’t there like my father wasn’t even there.

31:32 So what does a child who doesn’t know what to do with a feeling do? They’ll ignore it. They’ll push it under because they don’t know what to do with it. If even the parent is there, the parent might be distracted. The parent might say, I don’t have time for this now. You go, OK, you can learn from your parents. I don’t have time for this now. You push it under. Don’t deal with it. If, you know, maybe your parents says, leave me alone. OK, can’t talk about that stuff. Push it under. Don’t deal with it. Or even the best. Maybe your parent, maybe your worst parents, maybe turn around and slap you. Say, don’t be don’t be bothering me.

32:02 Oh my god, that was a really bad thing to do to talk about these feelings. I’ll push it under. Or even the best parents will turn around and they might say something like, Oh, no, you know, you’ve got a funny feeling. Yeah, Johnny said my nose was big and I’ve got a funny feeling in my tummy. Right. What do I do? Your parents might turn around and say, well, don’t think about it. Don’t be silly. You’re perfect as you are. You’re gorgeous. You’re beautiful. And you go, oh, OK, I was silly to think about that.

32:28 OK, so I’ll push that feeling under. Thank you very much, mum. Thank you very much, daddy. I’ll push that feeling under. I won’t think about it. I won’t address it. And I’ll just take your opinion. So we learn to never sit with feelings. So we always look for outside validation, always look for outside acknowledgement. So if someone else to tell us what to do, we never learn to think or feel for ourselves. So what we’ve got to do is exactly.

32:54 that we’ve got to do what the ideal situation would have been, which would have been this. Your mum or dad turning around to you and saying, okay, sweetheart, I hear you. I see you. You say you’ve got a funny feeling in your tummy. That’s acknowledgement. Acknowledge it. You acknowledge it. Okay. Oh my God, I exist. I’m real. I’m a real girl here in this world. You see me, you hear my voice because I didn’t know you could even hear that. As a child, we don’t even know that.

33:23 We don’t even know that we’re a separate entity. So, oh my God, I exist, I can speak and you hear. And you acknowledge the words that I’m saying, acknowledgement. Second stage is, yes, of course, sweetheart, I acknowledge you. I hear what you said. So, and what you said is perfectly OK. I understand you have a funny feeling in your tummy. It’s perfectly normal for you to have a funny feeling in your tummy after Johnny said your nose is big. It is. It’s OK for me to have that feeling. This is validation. OK, it’s normal for me to feel like that.

33:52 Of course, sweetheart, it’s perfectly normal for you to have that feeling. Oh, that’s so good to know. Thank you. I’m so glad to hear that because I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know if it was something wrong with me to have this feeling. It’s OK. Everyone has these feelings. Yes, sweetheart. Everyone has those feelings. That’s validation, acknowledgement, validation. Third step is reassurement. And it’s not advice. It’s reassurement. There’s a difference. So the third stage is, OK, sweetheart. So what would you like to do with that? You know,

34:20 You know, would you, would you, you know, I’m here for you. I love you. Would you like to have a chat about it? Would you like to have a hot chocolate, a cup of tea? Would you like to have a glass of milk and have a chat about this feeling and see what you would like to do with it? I can do something with it. I can change this? Me? Of course you can, sweetheart. It’s your feeling. This is reassurement. I would love to do that. Yes, let’s go have a glass of milk and let’s have a talk about this and see what we can do with this feeling. So acknowledgement, validation, and reassurement.

34:51 Now, that’s the first stage in the inner child work. And you can do it to yourself. You can sit there and you can simply imagine when you have a feeling, you can simply imagine that you’re talking to that inner child and you can say, hey, sweetheart, I acknowledge you have this feeling. I notice you have this feeling, whatever this feeling is, good or bad or indifferent. It might even be you don’t know what the feeling is. It might be, okay, hey, sweetheart, I noticed that you have a feeling but you don’t really know what that feeling is. It’s okay to have that feeling.

35:20 You validate it. It’s perfectly understandable. It’s OK. And I’m here for you. I love you. Let’s sit with this. Let’s see what you want to do about this. Acknowledgement, validation and reassurement. That’s the first three steps. And that’s a huge work, a step for you to learn how to sit with feelings. And it will it will transform your life because you will learn how to manage your feelings from that point on. Hallelujah. I feel like, well, that was.

35:49 Just amazing. And so I hope everybody who needs this is writing those things now, remembering what to do. Danielle, before we wind things up, is there anything you’d like to say to the listeners before we finish? Hmm. My God, we could say so much, couldn’t we? I would say believe in yourself, get back up. And, you know, when I said I started with a black belt is simply a white belt, I never gave up. It’s not about just getting up. It’s also realizing that a black belt underneath that colour.

36:19 The dye and the black belt is a white belt. So it means that always be ready to learn more, always be ready to be wrong. Because every time that you’re wrong, you grow, you expand and growing means living. So keep getting up and keep learning and keep discovering. And you’ll have a wonderful life. Danielle, thank you so much for being my guest today. I will have links to your book, your website, your coaching in the show notes. So I encourage everyone to.

36:48 connect with you if they are interested in finding out more. And thank you so much for being here today. That’s our episode of the Resonate podcast and we look forward to having you join us again soon. Bye.