Unlocking Mental Fitness: A Journey with Georgina Halabi

In this conversation, Sherisse Alexander and Georgina Halabi explore the concepts of mental fitness and hypnotherapy, discussing their personal journeys and the tools they use to help others. They delve into the definition of mental fitness, techniques for emotional regulation, the significance of archetypes and saboteurs, and the power of hypnotherapy. The discussion also touches on the integration of these practices in corporate settings and the future of mental fitness in society.

Chapters

• 4:40 Understanding Mental Fitness
• 7:45 Navigating Emotions in High-Stress Situations
• 15:43 The Role of Archetypes in Personal Development
• 21:55 Exploring Hypnotherapy and Its Effectiveness
• 27:43 The Power of Self-Hypnosis
• 31:06 Mindset Mastery and Neuro-Linguistic Programming
• 32:48 Understanding Trauma and Its Impact
• 39:53 Navigating Past Life Trauma
• 43:09 Integrating Mental Fitness in Coaching
• 46:08 Shifting Perspectives on Work and Time
• 47:39 Recommended Reads for Personal Growth

Transcript

Sherisse Alexander (00:00)
Thank you for joining. Why don't we start by you sharing a little bit about your journey and what led you to focus on mental fitness and hypnotherapy.

Georgina Halabi (00:09)
coaching. Yeah, my journey. How much time have you got, Sherisse

Sherisse Alexander (00:10)
And coaching, of course.

as much as you want to give me.

Georgina Halabi (00:17)
I'd say my journey started when I was 16 years old. I had a religious education lesson where we learned about all of the various faiths out there. And in it, they talked about meditation. And I thought, that sounds interesting. I'll give that a go. And I've never looked back. meditation has always been the cornerstone for me. Pretty quickly, I realized that you want the best answers. You want the best advice. Go within. Because it's almost like

I like the analogy of just sinking under the water. You can have all of the turbulence out there, but just underneath it's quiet and it's still and it's profound and it's safe and it's just like home. So that's been, I guess, the start of my journey. A lot of the stuff, I started hypnotizing people also when I was about 16, because I was like, whoa, let's give this a go. I was reading about it and I hypnotized people. It was actually quite easy.

And I probably hypnotized people for about five years and then I stopped because I thought I really, really want to do this professionally. I want to explore exactly how the mind works. I don't want to take this lightly when you're tinkering under the hood of other people's minds. And so I did. I got my hypnotherapy qualifications last year. But for the longest time, I've been quite driven. I was in corporate. So I worked in

sales teams in advertising and marketing agencies for a long time across England, across Asia. And then at the end, the last eight years in technology companies. And at one point I kind of just had a bit of an awakening. I'm in a meeting and I'm like, what on earth am I doing here? You know, I'm not helping people in any way, in any significant way. And I just kind of knew something had to shift. So that week I signed up for coaching and I did my degree. COVID hit.

And I knew that I didn't want to be selling to people. said to my company, I tell you what, you know, I'm happy to coach the team, but I'm not going to be doing this anymore. And so they said, okay. So I started coaching the team. And at the time when I probably should have veered towards safety, know, the safety of a paycheck, I just went, I'm doing this full time. So I just threw myself into coaching and loved it.

You know, I just, I treated it like a job. I went out there, I had a year of just saying yes to everything, pushing myself, stretching myself, you know, because the more you grow yourself, the more you can offer it to your clients, right? And it was brilliant. It was just such a high time of growth. My kids were really quite young as well. It was just, you know, COVID was probably one of the happiest times for me because I felt so fulfilled.

Sherisse Alexander (02:54)
Yeah, I love that. you know, when you're what really resonated and all that is when you said you switched from your your corporate job and you're you just dove right in. And sometimes that's absolutely how it has to be. You just got to be like, well, I'm doing it now. So I'm just going to go all in and and look at where you are now.

Georgina Halabi (03:14)
Yeah, and there was something that Tony Robbins once said, which was, the boats that I burn light the way. But the thing is, there were no boats that I burned. I stayed in a great relationship with all of the people I've worked with. And it's just there is a level of ease that just naturally translates when you are on the right path. I really believe often that when you're just butting your head against something, the universe is trying to tell you, try something else. Be somewhere else.

Sherisse Alexander (03:42)
or tweak your plan. There's something that just needs a little bit of an adjustment in that plan of yours.

Georgina Halabi (03:49)
Right, yeah, exactly. Something needs to shift.

Sherisse Alexander (03:52)
Yeah. So for those who might not know what mental fitness is, how would you define what mental fitness is and why do you think, I mean, there's, there's a lot of talk these days about mental health and mental wellbeing and so on and so forth, but what's the definition of mental, mental fitness?

Georgina Halabi (04:12)
So mental fitness is a program that's a term that's been coined by Positive Intelligence and there are big organizations that have partnered with coaches worldwide to launch this idea of helping people with mental fitness and mental fitness is the ability to handle whatever life throws at you with resourcefulness, with positivity and without the stress and what I really love about this program is it combines all of these amazing disciplines.

you know, you've got cognitive behavioral therapy, neuroscience, positive psychology, you've got peak performance like sports, psychology, and they melded it into like this really cool program that they then went and tested. I mean, it's massive now, it's like 800,000 people have gone through it in 52 countries, you've got all of the top...

agencies and companies, CEOs, their exec teams, athletes, it's massive, right? And it's this idea that you can train your brain to, you can strengthen the part of your brain that serves you and quieten the part that sabotages you. So if you look at it from a neuroscience perspective, you know, are quietening those programs, patterns, and parts of your brain that tend to reside in your back brain and more of your left brain, the logic side.

and you're shifting to your front brain, your prefrontal cortex. And that's the part that starts developing when you're about 12 years old, doesn't finish till you're about 21. And that's when you're in your prefrontal cortex, they call it your sage brain. That's the part of your mind that allows you to have awareness of yourself, that allows you to be creative, to be resourceful. It's that part, you know, when you go on holiday and you suddenly have all your best ideas, right?

Because you're not in that fearful habit driven reactive part of your brain, instead, you're present, and you're alive, right? So this is the space of love, empathy, you know, fear cannot exist in that part of the brain. Just like in the back of your brain, love can't exist, it's just a different wiring.

Sherisse Alexander (06:12)
Okay.

So in summary, mental fitness is really resilience, the ability to navigate the small things and the big things that come up in a healthy and effective manner. Effective, essentially.

Georgina Halabi (06:27)
Yeah, it's not just resilience, it's also emotional intelligence. Being able to take stock of a certain situation without getting sucked into the narrative to stay objective and to make wise choices. Now those choices could involve things like empathy towards yourself or to others, right? It could be things like be creative or innovative, or it could be have a perspective that goes beyond

situation so resilience might call for you to just get back on that horse and do the same thing over and over again, whereas perspective might be knowing that this is the universe telling you to shift something right? True. Yeah.

Sherisse Alexander (07:08)
Right.

So let's talk through that then you're in a business meeting, a work meeting, whatever. It's getting heated as it sometimes does emotions start to flare. How do we in that instant go, okay, you're going to shift or turn off the back brain, move into the front.

You find some empathy dial the entire situation down become the observer in the movie versus the actor and how do we how do we go through the process of being in the height of emotion to okay now I'm I'm present.

Georgina Halabi (07:45)
That's a great question. And maybe I can show you because it's really about training three core muscles. The first one is the awareness that you're in the moment. You know, you're experiencing these strong negative feelings, frustration, anger, guilt, shame, whatever those are. So the idea is the first step is when you notice that, build awareness around that stop. That's the first muscle. Saboteur awareness, right?

The second one is the self command to shift from that part of your brain to your prefrontal cortex, your sage brain. And then the third muscle is what do I do from here? So easier said than done, actually not really. It's pretty easy to stop and to switch. And the premise behind that is we tend to be in our brain when we're overreacting and we're responding with thinking.

We're ruminating, we're listening to the inner judge, right? Or one of our saboteurs. Our saboteurs could be the victim or the pleaser or the avoider or the restless or the controller or whatever it is. And we're responding. We're pretty much a puppet just being, know, having our strings pulled, right? So our brain lives in one of three places most of the time. So a lot of the time it's forward thinking. It's thinking about, I have to, I should do, you know, I must do.

This hasn't happened yet. So it's fiction and anxiety is future facing. So a lot of the time when we're winding ourselves up, I don't know if you've ever thought of something that could happen and you're sort of painting the picture in your mind as really negative and it affects how you show up, right? Absolutely. hasn't happened yet. Well, the other one is your brain is in the past. You're rehashing something, right? A memory of a memory of a memory and it's highly subjective and it's not necessarily true.

Right. So it's just a photo of a photo of a photo. And a lot of the time, and I'm sure you'll relate to this. If you're human, you're replaying a story and you're getting really wound up in your posturing and your whole physiology changes. You're like, it's not happening. It's a fiction, but your body still gets wired. Right. The wired to threat future or past. But all of this is just happening in the, in the cinema of our heads. We're living it, but it's not happening. Right.

So the way the third muscle from moving you from that space of reactivity to that space of spaciousness is really getting back into your body and switching off the narrative. Because your body only exists in the now. Yep. You know, go kick a wall. You'll quickly know that you won't be thinking about, you know, the future or the past. You'll be very much in the moment.

So that's why all of the disciplines that people tend to use to sort of relax or get in the moment, things like yoga or running or meditation or walks in nature or all of these things, they're very embodied. And so we use our body as a way to switch off our narrative circuitry to just get into the present moment. And when you think of body, you've got what is your five senses, you've got your breath.

depending how spiritual you are or advanced, you've got your prana, your energy. But for most lay people, we just start talking about your five senses and your breath, right? So there's a technique that you can do. You pick one of the senses. So for example, touch is one. So I'm gonna invite everybody to do this little experiment with me. And you're gonna take your thumb and your forefinger and you are gonna rub them very gently, very gently.

against each other and what you're looking out for is the feeling of the fingertip ridges against each of your fingertip pads, right? Just explore what that feels like. Notice the texture.

temperature.

What else can you notice?

Sherisse Alexander (11:46)
for me, it brings me right into my body because it focuses me on my body. So I'm paying attention to what else is going on in my body, like, you know, what else is coming up physically. So I love this technique.

Georgina Halabi (11:59)
So actually as you rub your fingers, let me just check what's going through your mind? What's the quality of your mind?

Sherisse Alexander (12:07)
It's calm. It's peaceful. It's very focused. It's right here, right now. It's fully in the present. I'm not thinking about what I have to do and I'm not thinking about what's happened. I'm fully engaged in right now because I'm rubbing my fingers together.

Georgina Halabi (12:22)
And it's so easy, isn't it? You can do that with these things. You could do that anywhere. know, I have my teenage daughters giving out to me and I can't say, I'm sorry, I'm just gonna get on the floor and meditate. I could do this though, and it will calm me down. I'm quite a kinesthetic person. So this to me is the one that works best, but maybe if you're more visual or auditory, there's different things that you can do. So you have a play around. Try looking at something in the far distance and just notice everything.

and then look at something really close up. Look at the steam coming off your cup of coffee. Look at something with beginner's eyes, right? Or similarly, what can you hear far away? Let's try this one.

You don't need to say anything because we'll get everyone to give it a go. What's the furthest away thing that you can hear?

And now what about up close? you hear your breath?

What about your heartbeat?

Sherisse Alexander (13:30)
I can actually hear my heartbeat.

Georgina Halabi (13:32)
amazing. It's a skill. It's not easy that one. Yeah. But you notice how the barometer just drops, you just go quiet, there's no narrative. It's just still, that's pretty much the definition of mindfulness. It's really about being in the present moment, without any stories, without narrative.

Sherisse Alexander (13:55)
this one the most because this one I'm just thinking about like from a work because you know if you're in a really heated meeting and you could sure close your eyes and start taking a breath but then people are gonna be like okay what should she she's closing her eyes and date and you're right I can't stop and be like hey I need five minutes to go and meditate so that I can calm down but this brings me right back here right now I love this one so

I know you all can't see, but rubbing your thumb and your forefinger together, that is the action that we are doing right now to be fully present in this moment. Thank you for that.

Georgina Halabi (14:28)
What I love about that one is, know, from a hypnotherapy perspective, we're creating an anchor. And an anchor is basically an association of peace and calm so that all you need to do is put your hands together and you're automatically transported because you keep building upon that, that mental connection.

Sherisse Alexander (14:46)
love that one. I'm going to use that one. Frequently I'm going to use I hope not frequently, but when needed, I'm going to pull that tool out.

Georgina Halabi (14:55)
And

if I can just also mention Sherisse it's an amazing thing for go and check out on the Positive Intelligence website. They've got this take a free saboteur test. And it's so insightful. It takes just a couple of minutes. You'll get emailed your results.

Sherisse Alexander (15:14)
That's where I was going next because I know you're talking about archetypes and for the sake of the audience who might not know what archetypes are, how do they show up in your life? What are some of them? And so when you talk about the saboteurs, we all have them. What are you talking about when you're talking about the archetypes?

Georgina Halabi (15:34)
So archetypes, they are pretty much anything that you can associate with anything. It's just another label. But we sometimes have names for ourselves or names for behaviors, wounded child, victim, hero, whatever that is. And it's what that means to us. And what that means to us is very individual for people. And so as coaches, we work with what other archetypes work best for people. When they talk to us in that language, we respond.

But when we're talking about the mental fitness and the positive intelligence program, what they did with all this research was they looked at all the different ways that people get in their own way. All the different ways that they sabotage themselves. And they condensed it down into just a few key archetypes, if you like. And if I name some of them, you're going to be going, I know that type. know, I either am, have that saboteur.

or I know people, right? And we all have, you know, more or less of these in all of us. So the first one, let's see if I can remember them alphabetical order. Here we go. You've got the avoider, the controller, the hyper rational, the hyper achiever, the hyper vigilant. You've got the stickler, the restless. This isn't alphabetical, is it?

Sherisse Alexander (16:55)
You're close!

Georgina Halabi (16:58)
The victim, I don't know if that's nine already, but the master saboteur is the judge. The judge is that constant negative self talk, right? It's how we judge ourselves, it's how we judge others, it's how we judge circumstance, right, which is often the most dangerous because it's so insidious, we just kind of take it for granted. And it really affects how we show up. But this is really all about the way we talk to ourselves. It's all about.

talk and that I would say it's probably the one thing that links all of the things that I do, the hypnotherapy, the coaching, the mental fitness, you know, because that's all come down to from the age of 16, starting to notice this really kind, compassionate part of me. And you come out of it and you listen to all the sort of surface level chatter and I'm like, Oh my God, I can't believe you're saying all these things. I gonna, am I gonna give you any oxygen? Yeah.

Sherisse Alexander (17:57)
I'm curious though, I remember when I started reading about archetypes and I think what fascinated me with the archetypes is I could see the different archetypes at play in my own life for myself as an individual. I found it very helpful when having conversations or dealing with situations with other people because I would be like, okay, that archetype is coming out to play right now.

Do you think there's value in understanding the archetypes and how they apply to you as an individual and in the relationships that you have or is it not really that significant?

Georgina Halabi (18:35)
I think they're tools. That's all they are. But they're very, very useful tools. Because if you think of what we are as humans, are meaning making machines. We make meaning out of everything. And this is, you know, this uses your right brain, it uses your left brain. And it's almost easy to understand that behavior through an external archetype that you can relate to go, okay, I understand. It's not just me.

Yeah. So for example, we might be talking to somebody who has a high pleasance avatar and they might feel like they are completely on their own. But when you turn around and you say, I understand that you're constantly giving because you're trying to buy affection or love. And often it's unasked for and you give and you give and you give.

And when it's not reciprocated, when there isn't a fair energy exchange, you feel resentment, right? That's only natural. And that will grow and grow until you explode. And then they will go, my God, that's so true. Because these are certain ways of behaving. You've put a label on it. But often, you know, these behaviors are rooted in the same beliefs. I'm not lovable enough. I'm not worthy. If I don't please people, you know, they won't love me. These are just...

Beliefs stemming from, or behaviors stemming from beliefs. You know, when we look at cognitive behavioral therapy, or very similar to applied meditation that I studied in terms of Buddhist training, we didn't need to have all of those because they were labels. It's like, why have another label, right? Instead, just notice what those thoughts are. Notice how it affects your emotional response, and then notice how that affects your behavior.

And then take a step back. You know, when you're able to be disassociated from it, you could be more objective, right? And you could say, is this behavior serving me? Yes, well, let's reinforce it. If not, let's reframe it, right? Because you have choice. You could rewire your brain. So you don't need to have an archetype. Some people find it useful. So whatever is of most use to my client at the time.

Sherisse Alexander (20:43)
Right, is kind of the tool or resource that you will utilize with them. So let's talk a little bit about some of the other tools that folks can use or that you utilize in your work when trying to work out that mental fitness. There's also hypnotherapy. Can we talk a little bit about

hypnotherapy, cause you know, depending on your experience with it, your first experience with it, you either see the value in it and you think like, yes, there is something to this or it could be more like, know for sure my first experience with hypnotherapy was at a Christmas party. And so it was about entertainment. so I think people fall into one category, well, maybe not one or the other, but for me it's either, you know, you've had a really positive experience with it you know that it works or, know,

the ladders. So can you share with us a little bit more about hypnotherapy and its effectiveness?

Georgina Halabi (21:42)
I would love to. And I'm curious what happened at the Christmas party.

Sherisse Alexander (21:47)
So they had this, I mean, was, it was like so long ago. So let's see if I can remember the details, but it was just, it was a Christmas party. They brought a hypnotherapist. He brought like, I don't know, maybe six people out of the audience or the group had them on the stage and then went through this whole process of hypnotherapy. Now I was definitely one of the folks who was participating in this hypnotherapy.

but I've also gone through hypnotherapy in like, not like that, like in a very private environment. So I think the question that people always pose is like, is it real? Like, are people really highly suggestible in that moment? And I think that for myself, what I would probably say is I think it would be very difficult for me to be highly suggestible in such a public environment. so I would think that for me anyways, I think that.

the hypnotherapy was definitely more effective in a private, you know, kind of setting and environment. Cause I, to be honest, I'm not really sure if I was actually being suggested to, or if I felt like I was actually under hypnosis.

Georgina Halabi (23:00)
Right. Yeah. So what I'm hearing Sherisse is you talking about deep trance. Yeah. Whereas really we experience hypnotherapy every day. Okay. All the time to ourselves. The language that we use, way that we experience things visually, we paint pictures in our minds or we talk it out through our head, right? Auditarily. We use, you know, imagine... So let's...

Sherisse Alexander (23:27)
Let's start with a definition then, because you're right, that's an important distinction. Let's start with what the actual true definition of hypnotherapy is.

Georgina Halabi (23:37)
I don't know what the dictionary definition of it, but the way that they talk about it is a very, very sort of scientific, long-fangled way of basically saying deep, single-pointed concentration to the exclusion of everything else. That's when you're in a trance, that's proper hypnotherapy, where you are at your most suggestible, where you can actually go in where your brain is at a certain frequency, where you can access all of the information rather than the small, tiny amount that's contained in your conscious awareness.

Yeah. Right. And if you think about it, the amount of data that we've been receiving throughout our lives is pretty much stored away. It's pruned, but it's mostly there. I read this amazing article with Aldous Huxley, this brilliant American author, and he was being hypnotized by one of the greats, right? And he said, you've got a bookshelf behind you.

have you read all those books? And Aldous Huxley said, yeah, but not for about 25 years. And still under hypnosis, he asked him to imagine the top shelf, the fifth book from the left, for example, to open it up to page 25 and to read the top paragraph, which he did perfectly. And then it was fascinating because he was also planting different seeds that allowed a good hypnotherapy won't ever tell you what to do. They will allow you to create their own modalities.

Sherisse Alexander (24:48)
Wow.

Georgina Halabi (25:02)
to heal yourself in the best way possible, right? There is this great of trust that you have with your client. You trust them to find the answer that's best for them. Often you don't need to know the trauma. don't even need to do, to do, you don't even need, hold on, let me rewind that. Before you go in, you take a full briefing. You start to understand so you know exactly what needs to happen in the session.

Sherisse Alexander (25:05)
You are

Georgina Halabi (25:29)
but you can be very vague in your language and it could be effective. for example, and if you notice resistance is happening, just indicate, they will indicate with their hands for example, or not. And I want your unconscious mind to find the best way of resolving that issue in a way that is right for you. And your mind knows what to do, it's incredible. I'm constantly seeing things now that I'm setting little challenges for my mind. Show me a sign, give me this.

It's incredible, our minds are incredible. But just to give you this idea of how we hypnotize ourselves all the time or how we experience phenomena, hypnotic phenomena in our days, have you ever walked into a room and gone, that sofa doesn't belong there, it should go here and maybe we should change the colors of the curtains, that should be red and if you do that, what you're actually doing is positive hallucination. You are picturing something that's not there.

Similarly, where are my glasses? Where are my glasses? Where are the keys? Right in front of you. That's a negative hallucination or the idea that when you are so absorbed in something, time just melts. goes in a flash, right? Time is constantly distorted and in hypnotherapy, a minute can feel like hours. Yeah. Right. And so you experience time distortion. When we talk to ourselves, I'm a bad person. Nobody will like me. This is hypnotherapy.

It's self hypnosis. So my journey with self hypnosis was quite significant before I even trained to become a hypnotherapist. Because I, for example, I, I hipnobirth both my daughters, which meant, first of all, looking at all the beliefs I held around and the fears I held around giving birth, letting them go, and then just completely trusting my body. You know, you have people, women who give birth in comas, right? We don't even need to be there. We don't

I mean, we need to be there, but our mind doesn't need to be there. So I was almost watching myself giving birth, going, my God, that's so cool. Look at what I'm doing. I was really enjoying the gas and air as well, but there was no drugs, nothing. But if I needed them, or if I'd needed an intervention, I would have been calm and in control and able to have that conversation. So self-hypnosis is amazing. And I think that the time that I really realized this,

When I was like in my early twenties, I got invited to go skydiving and I said, no, no, no way. Yeah. are you thinking? And that I couldn't sleep. And I asked myself a question, which was, well, I wonder what it's like to skydive, but without the fear. And because it was quite late, my brain was just drifting. Before you knew it, I was tumbling out the airplane in my mind.

Sherisse Alexander (28:01)
Thank you, but no.

Georgina Halabi (28:21)
And I was floating down and it was beautiful. It was over a lake and it was quiet and it was peaceful. And there was no fear. And you could feel those little cheeks go a bit windy. And I was like, that's really fun. And so the next day at breakfast, my friend said, are you going to come? And I surprised myself because I went, Rest of the day was very, very calm. So calm all the way to the aeroplane. So calm all the way up.

Sherisse Alexander (28:42)
Wow.

Georgina Halabi (28:50)
And I was the last off that airplane. And by this time, everybody who was so brave before were freaking out. I just sat calmly and we dropped out. literally plopped and you fly off, literally. And it was colder than I thought. But apart from that, was bizarre. It was the same. It felt centered. The world was rushing by me, but I was still.

Sherisse Alexander (29:15)
That sounds so cool. You're practically talking me into skydiving.

Georgina Halabi (29:19)
The language that we use and the pictures that we picture and the sounds that we make and the feelings that we make. Right. This is how we show up in life.

Sherisse Alexander (29:30)
You'd already practiced for it really. And what a beautiful time to do it, right? Like right before you're going to sleep, like let's face it, you are highly suggestible right before you're going to sleep because you're going into, you're going to sleep. So it's like you had had an opportunity to practice the entire experience before in your dream state and it unfolded exactly the way that you had practiced it.

Georgina Halabi (29:54)
Yeah. And this is very close to neuro linguistic programming, right? Which is the twin sister, if you like, of hypnotherapy. This is what athletes use. They get into a state of in the zone in their mind, right? And then they just rehearse. They rehearse the shot. Like I rehearsed jumping out that plane. They rehearse the shot. rehearse the whatever it is that's their sport.

And amazingly, it actually has a physical impact on their body in terms of their responsiveness, their muscle mass, all of this.

Sherisse Alexander (30:26)
Joe Dispenza talks a lot about this and I mean, this is absolutely his work, right? We're talking about how we are literally, instead of, because as you talked about, we're either living in the past or living in the future instead of being fully present. So how do we live fully in the present while living that experience that we want to have, aka skydiving and practice for it. And his work talks exactly about that, like how

People have convinced their bodies that they're 30 years younger or they've healed themselves. I mean, again, further to the point that you made initially, which is the mind is such a powerful tool. If we know how to really open it up and use it to work through these things that come up in life. I love it. It's exciting.

Georgina Halabi (31:17)
your mind doesn't know the difference between the reality or showing it as out. It hates that it hates that lack of congruence. Yeah, and it will do everything that it can to change what's out there. That's that's what manifestation is really, because if you think about what's out there, how do we receive that in our brain, we receive it through like signals through light.

Sherisse Alexander (31:21)
That's very true.

Georgina Halabi (31:39)
going to our eyes, sound waves going to our ears, and then it all gets assembled in the cinema of our mind and then our narrator comes in and it paints the picture. But how do we choose which of that actually gets presented into our conscious brain and shown and projected as opposed to sort of just shoved into the back of our memory banks, right?

Sherisse Alexander (32:00)
I think that's such an important point though and I don't want to cut you. I just want to say it one more time what you said. You said your mind doesn't know the difference between past, present and future. Correct? I heard that correctly.

Georgina Halabi (32:13)
Your mind doesn't know the difference between the reality that you're showing it, what you're imagining and what's out there.

Sherisse Alexander (32:16)
right.

I

I said it like that because you'd made the point about the past and how subjective it is. there's so many layers that come into that. So, and why is that important? I think it's important because sometimes if you're somebody who lives in the past and is stuck in the past and you can't move yourself out of that, you're literally creating, let's say past traumatic event, you're recreating the entire.

mental trauma, the physical trauma, the emotional trauma, the physiological trauma in this moment right now just by reliving it over and over and over again in your

Georgina Halabi (32:55)
Yeah. And what's interesting when we start to look at it from a hypnotherapy point of view is we go, how are you, how are you doing that? How are you reliving it? Where is that in relation to your body right now? And so people might go, it's, it's in front of my left eye.

right? Maybe this far away, maybe they might signal two feet or five feet, you know, and in fact, the more they're reliving it, the closer to their face it is, the bigger it is, the brighter it is, because they're almost embodying it is loud. It's in their face, right? So it's full glorious technicolor on top of them. So how can they stop being traumatized? So you start to recognize what they are doing, the behavior that they're doing that is keeping them stuck in trauma and you go,

You know, you're less focused on fixing it from like a therapy perspective. You're not trying to understand why necessarily. You're just going, this is how you're doing it. This is how you're repeating this trauma. So what you can do is, you know, take that picture, move it all the way back and shoot it into the distance, far away as you can possibly make it, like the size of a stamp, drain the color out, right? Make it quiet and then shoot it off.

Sherisse Alexander (34:08)
I literally put it on mute.

Georgina Halabi (34:10)
Put it on mute because this is the way that you're experiencing it. So experience it differently.

Sherisse Alexander (34:18)
which is an active choice. So then.

Georgina Halabi (34:21)
people don't really start to break down how they experience their thoughts, which is really it comes to us through a vision, image, sound, or feeling, right?

Sherisse Alexander (34:35)
So, know, and I say that, you know, that it's an active choice because it's like when you go through something traumatic, whatever it might be, and you're really trying to leave it exactly where it belongs in the past. And I say it's an active choice, but the thought comes up. So what is the tip then for people? I guess you just went through it. Thought comes up. It's here. It's in your face. Okay, let's take the life out of it. Move that movie.

out of your experience as far away as you possibly can, drain the color out of it and dismiss it. That's what you said, right?

Georgina Halabi (35:10)
That's one way. I've got so many other ways as well. And the thing is try what works for you. Right. So another training is to, the main thing is not to associate with it. Right. So when it's right up close, you're associating, you're embodying it. Right. When we talk about having choice, it assumes a level of objectivity. means that you've created distance that you can step away and see it for what it is. Is how the mental fitness works. Cause you go, this isn't me. This is a saboteur.

Right? You're disassociating. The Buddhist training that I received would have asked us to say something like, Anger is happening. Anxiety is happening. Whatever is happening. Because what you're not doing is associating it with yourself. I am angry. I am frustrated. I am whatever it is. It's just observing that feeling is happening. What you do is you just allow it to pass through. You don't indulge it. You don't tell stories around it. You don't repress it because what?

resist what you resist persists. You don't try and fix it because fixing it is like another way of you just holding onto it. It's just observe sadness is happening. And the idea is that you aren't your clouds, right? These are, these are temporary things that are passing across the screen of your mind. Instead, you are just as vast consciousness that's witnessing it. You're the blue sky.

Sherisse Alexander (36:33)
So then with that in mind, that all made sense. Now my thought process is actually it's been evolving. So one of the things that I at one point thought is and might still think is that, okay, your feelings come up. I'm experiencing anger at this moment. My instinct is to do exactly what you said. Okay, I'm angry or this is creating anger in my world. But then I go to, why am I angry?

And then I go through that process of like, okay, is it this? And I try not to make it about anything external. Like what is the story that I am actually telling myself? Right? So I guess you could say that I actually associate with it because I'm saying, okay, this is my emotion. I'm owning it, but I want to understand why am I feeling this way? And then go back and figure out how to tell myself a different story that I can believe a true story.

Georgina Halabi (37:25)
Yeah, there's real value to that. You know, it's like, where is the origin in which this thought or this behavior started? And what did I decide at that moment? Right? And what other choice would I like to make now? And rewire that part of you. It's very, very powerful. I do know also that there's a time and place as coaches. My coaching teacher is very, very strict. And she would always say, never ask a why question.

Because a why question is really kind of about, kind of feels a bit like an interrogation, but why did you do that? It's all about allocating blame and responsibility. Whereas what is more constructive, right? What did you notice about that? What would be a more empowered choice? Which is a bit of a tension I've been exploring because I love that sort of whole part of going and understanding why I've got a curious mind.

Sherisse Alexander (38:21)
So do

Georgina Halabi (38:24)
so that I can take responsibility, right? And I think I've just worked that out now, talking to you, as opposed to going to sort of becoming a victim of it, right? So I can make more empowered choices. Whereas the tension is, do you go back and you're trying to sort of help people heal through understanding why versus the more of the hypnotherapy, which is you don't need to understand why, you just need to understand how.

And that's what you change. And the premise is, you know, if you've fallen down the stairs and broken your leg, and that's traumatic for you, don't keep repeating the trauma of reliving it over and over again.

Sherisse Alexander (39:05)
And I mean, and to your point, and that is the challenge with the why question is it could become a rabbit hole, right? Of, why did this happen? And it could be never ending, right? And the other, mean, and I want to touch on this a little bit because then the next question that comes up isn't like, okay, well, what if it's not even yours? It's like a past life trauma, right? And this is what you and I were talking about the other day. I said, do you even really need to know why? Because you might have something that

you're experiencing constantly over and over and over again, and it doesn't even belong to you. So the question of why isn't even, it's not even yours. So how do you, how do you now, now that we've talked about hypnotherapy a little bit, and if there's past life things that are now coming into play, how do you navigate all of that?

Georgina Halabi (39:56)
So I've not been trained to take people into past life regression. I've had it done to me on a few occasions actually. And the first time was early twenties again. And the lady was training as a hypnotherapist. She wanted to have a volunteer.

Sherisse Alexander (40:00)
Okay.

Georgina Halabi (40:14)
And it was really traumatic. was, I just felt this tunnel of energy just powering out my solar plexus, just anger, like rage. I've never felt anything like it before. But this woman, hadn't trained to integrate that. And so that just, just terrified me. It threw me into a space of fear of my own power for the longest time, for maybe about 18 years.

Sherisse Alexander (40:39)
wow. So that was not a great experience.

Georgina Halabi (40:43)
I created a gift out of it because being knocked out of my power center, being knocked out of my trust for so long, I had to find more cognitive ways to get back that intimacy, right? That connection with the universe that I was too frightened to step into. That's when I went and studied Buddhism. It's sort of the sharp edge of the mind, right? I tried to go through my critical faculties, my logical faculties, because my heart had just armored over to protect myself.

Sherisse Alexander (41:12)
you

Georgina Halabi (41:13)
And I can use that now to help clients who are more rational. I can use science to help explain to people the more spiritual aspects, right? Because I can now bridge logic and spirituality in a way that makes it sound sort of more palatable or less woo woo. So it's...

I'm not going to say it's a bad thing that it ever happened. I've created a gift out of it.

Sherisse Alexander (41:47)
making lemonade out of lemons.

Georgina Halabi (41:49)
Yum yum!

Sherisse Alexander (41:51)
Okay, so we've talked about a couple of tips that people can use to bring them fully back into the present moment. I just wanted, you know, explore a little bit where because you did talk about being part of the corporate world and then deciding that you were going to go into coaching and how do you maybe marry the two in your day-to-day practice of helping people with their mental fitness?

Georgina Halabi (42:22)
Yeah, so the way I describe myself is I'm a peak performance and wellbeing coach and I help people access peak performance and wellbeing, not one at the expense of the other. And mental fitness is just one of my tools. The Positive Intelligence Program is just one of my tools. So I work with sort of leaders, C-suite, executives to help them.

sort of connect inwards again, you know, to manage their energy, to manage their time, to make sure that their talent and gift are directed in a way for maximum impact. But ultimately, if you're looking to help somebody with peak performance and wellbeing, what does it boil down to, right?

It boils down into being that part of your brain that serves you. That is quiet, that is present, that's non-reactive, that is objective, that can weigh up what's best in any given situation. So a lot of it is mindset mastery. And that's where you have all of the hypnotherapy and NLP and the mental fitness and all those other things. So I marry the two worlds by working with executives, but bringing in all these various disciplines to help them.

Just go back to one, you know, connect in.

Sherisse Alexander (43:42)
I imagine, I mean that your clients find you because they're open to it because the mental picture I have in my mind of traditional C-suite executives are very in the masculine divine.

energy which is go, go, work 73 hours a week kind of thing. So is that the case that they come to you and they're ready to find like more balance within that or is there still some resistance within that?

Georgina Halabi (44:13)
So I've taken a lot of care to work out who my niche is and to craft my language. Obviously, know, NLP and stuff, it's all about the language. So my website is very intentional to attract the right sort of people and who will read it and resonate with it and go, she's talking about me, that's me, I get it. And so the people that I attract tend to be quite self-aware, senior level people who are just fed up with self-doubt and they're ready to take action.

You know, they're driven and they know they can be so much better. And a lot of what I do is all about confidence, Self-trust, self-connection, confidence.

Sherisse Alexander (44:55)
I love that. So for yourself, where can people find, actually before we go to where can people find you, what are your visions for the future? What changes do you hope to see in society around mental fitness and therapies such as hypnotherapy and the like? If any, if you think there are any.

Georgina Halabi (45:18)
Right.

I wish for people to realize that, you know, inside us all, each of us just has everything that we need. Right. It just takes a little bit of nudge. Your happiness doesn't exist out there. It exists in here. And so, you know, what I hope is for people to just try it, take that time, you know, reach out to coaches, go out on meditation course, do whatever feels right for you. There's no one's best fits all.

That's my hope for society and I also hope that from a business perspective people start changing their relationship with time.

Sherisse Alexander (45:58)
Okay, let's expand on that just a little more.

Georgina Halabi (46:01)
I think people, you know, I'm working so hard is almost a boast nowadays. You know, it's, it's, I want to challenge people about working smart, not, not hard.

Sherisse Alexander (46:15)
say that to my team all the time. I'm always about let's work smarter, not harder. You could work 12, 14 hours in a day and get zero things done. So how do we get everything that we need to get done in eight hours? you know, I'm always talking about balance as well. So it's a process. It's a journey.

Are there any books or tools or practices aside from what we've talked about here that you think are, let's focus maybe on books. Are there any books that you would recommend to the audience that might be a good place to start if they were interested?

Georgina Halabi (46:52)
my God, The Untethered Soul by Michael Cera.

Sherisse Alexander (46:54)
I definitely read it. Yeah, that is a great book.

Georgina Halabi (47:00)
All of his books are just beautiful and so helpful. So that's an amazing one. Another one that I recommend to a lot of my clients is nonviolent communication. Nonviolent communication. It's been around for a long, long time. The guy who wrote it has become, you know, he's influenced and trained a lot of the mediators around the world. So it's this premise of when we communicate with each other, we're really not

Sherisse Alexander (47:12)
Ready, action.

Georgina Halabi (47:27)
listening, projecting. And so how do we, how do we have honest conversations where we're really listening to the other person and aware of what it is that's happening inside us and we're able to communicate rather than pointing the finger and telling them what they're doing. We're acknowledging what's happening inside ourselves. And we're sharing that we're acknowledging our needs and their needs and coming from the space of both needs and how to honor both needs.

Sherisse Alexander (47:54)
I'm totally going download it. Yeah, I'm always looking for better ways to communicate. It's it's such a learned skill. And I'm always I mean, I consider myself to be a fairly decent communicator, but I am human. So I don't get it right all the time. So nonviolent communication. I'm going to go find it and start listening to it. I've got so many books on the go right now. So in.

In closing, where can people find you should they like to reach out to you?

Georgina Halabi (48:26)
So you can find me on my website Georgina Hallabi.com. Maybe I've got a pain in the neck name to spell but maybe you can put that in there somewhere, Sherisse. And you've got all my details and connections in there. I've got a link to a YouTube channel, my LinkedIn. If you want to have a session with me, you can book just a chat or you can book a discovery free coaching session or book a hypnotherapy.

Sherisse Alexander (48:35)
Hi, Sharla.

Georgina Halabi (48:53)
session with me it's all in there georginahallabi.com

Sherisse Alexander (48:56)
Beautiful. I will ensure that all those deets are in the show notes. Well, thank you again so much for carving out this time for me today and to the audience. I love the content that we chatted about here. I think it's extremely valuable and important. Thank you.

Georgina Halabi (49:15)
Always a pleasure, thanks, Sherisse .