Episode 17 b: Overcoming Adversity: The Inspirational Story of Vivace Max Victor

A discussion on overcoming trauma by embracing self-love, taking small steps, seeking effective coaching, and relying on inner guidance.

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You had a lot of trauma and an online family-of-origin experience. You seem to be so loving.

How do you create that in yourself and your life after all? I mean, the war is a big part of it. The family's a big part of it. A lot of people would be bitter, angry, and not know how to cope in life.

I was really angry. I was very hurt. I was devastated. I was angry. I was overwhelmed. I felt insecure. I felt inadequate. I felt not good enough. I felt totally fucked in the head all the fucking time. You have to work it. You have to have self love. You have to fight for it. And it's a fight and you have to fight. So I thought, I think fundamentally we're born as loving people. We just get, as you said, bitter over time. So my core of who I am is love.

I was just on top of that beautiful amount of love that I had. I was extremely, very traumatized and very damaged and very broken. So once I, you know, addressed the layers of trauma and brokenness and damage and inferiority complex and feeling inadequate and all those horrible, horrible things that I felt for many, many years, there's a that once you heal that, then the love just is there.

I think the love is naturally there. I think we're just born with love. And then all these other layers overshadow the love. So the love is always there and your whoever is watching this has a lot of love within them. It just might be trapped. And I believe it's trapped underneath the layers of trauma.

Yes. You know, I watched the movie once and it explained the artist was explaining how he creates his art. And this reminds me of you. So he starts with a giant ball of clay and he chips away at everything until it becomes this beautiful thing on the inside. And we need to chip away a lot of stuff in your life, that's for sure. All right.

So, we have to do right. People have to help themselves people. And I was that I was that girl, too.

I was stuck and learning self helplessness where you think like you can't help yourself, but you can always be yourself. And all I ask people to do is literally just take the next logical step, just one more little step. Just the one thing you can do if it's just to clean out your one drawer, make one phone call, send one email, go for a walk around the block, do the next step to help yourself feel more empowered.

People are waiting for some magical pill or something. The magical pill is you have to confront your past. If you do not confront your past, you're going to be fucked in the present and there is no way around it. And so what people do is they take all these, you know, psychotropic drugs or they take pharmaceutical drugs or they do, you know, alcohol or a sex addiction or gaming or gambling or shopping or being on the Internet all day long or working out for too many hours. There are all these like compensatory mechanisms that are maladaptive coping mechanisms that actually leave you worse off.

You're not the same. You're actually worse off. So we think it's important to stop and say enough is enough, I'm going to get help and then get help. And the biggest thing is not all help is helpful. And when I was suicidal and I went from therapist to therapist to therapist, a therapist did, I've never gone to therapy before, but once they started to go, I'm like, These people are crazier than I am. Like, I couldn't find. I literally never did find one person. I found them in coaching. There was this one. Those with this one girl that I really liked, she did. This type of therapy was called Core Energetics. Like that girl was was great and I felt safe with her and I felt understood with her. But the rest of them to me were all fucking whack jobs and they were worse off than I was.

So I would work hard in medicine, make the money, and then use that money for rent therapy and student loans. And the therapy part sucked because I would spend so much money on it and I would go from person to person to person, the person trying like I tried my hardest. So I have so much compassion and empathy for people who are like, Therapy doesn't work for me. It doesn't work for you because you're going to the wrong person and so you have to find the person who gets you and you have to find the person who's already been down that path. The reason why the 12 steps work is because the person coaching you has gone through towards through the path and they've gone to the other side.

So I feel like a lot of therapists are called unhealed healers and unhealed healers or people who got an A on the test, but they never did their own work and then they're trying to tell you what to do, but it doesn't work. It never worked for me, and this is the reason I left my medical career to become a life coach.

Because once I got to the other side of the whole suicide thing, which took a little bit of time, Once they got to that side, I'm like, I'm going to dedicate my life to helping other people transform their trauma into power and profit, because the profit part, again, going back to your original question, is extremely important. If you don't have fiscal power, you just don't have power.

You have very limited power. So it's important to recognize you can transform trauma. And a lot of people know the concept of PTSD. Like everyone's heard that term. It's all over the Internet, it's all over the news. But the other term they have not heard is post-traumatic growth and post-traumatic growth means you're actually stronger after the trauma. And I'm a living example than you were before.

So I would love to encourage your viewers, if you've gone to five therapists and they didn't work for you, don't give up on yourself and don't think the problem is you. For the love of God, your job is to go to person after person after person after person. And I know it's exhausting and I know it's maddening and I know it's expensive and I know it's inconvenient. Especially if you have kids and you've got child care, do it anyway. Do it anyway. The help that you want is out there. It is your personal responsibility to get that help.

I agree with you wholeheartedly and I know when I was in my my going through my own throes of life and having depression and all that, and I got into Alcoholics Anonymous and that that really set me on my experience to live a happier and healthier and better life. But, you know, had a wonderful sponsor. And he said to me.

That’s everything you had a wonderful sponsor, someone who had done the steps, who had gone to the other side, who is now from the other side helping you to come over. That is you have full sponsor is like the biggest gift someone could give you.

And I was very blessed. I was blessed with two absolutely wonderful sponsors. And you know, when I said I want to go a little bit deeper, I want to start therapy, he said, That's fine. That's great. And he says, What I want you to do, though, is you interview them. When you sit down, explain, This is what I have. This is my problem. Do you think you can help me? And not that it matters, but in in what type of time frame? And I had to go through at least five or six till I have a wonderful woman that'll be on the show eventually and until I found the right one. But yes, it's, it's work. And once you find it though, it's it's absolutely terrific.

Find the right person, hold onto them for dear life. And I have a question like I love, love, love. And I want to reinforce your idea that you said, hey, go and interview the therapist 100%. If you're going to work with a therapist or a life coach, please interview them.

Yes, you spend your life to ask them questions instead of the first session them asking you questions. So this is the one question I want everyone to write down. And please go ask your therapist or your life coach if you already have one, go ask them. And if you don't have one getting one, just make sure you ask them this one question.

And the question is ask them what is the greatest transformation that they have created in their own life and then shut up and then you want. Okay. Because some of them will be like, actually, this is a place where they'll create distance, right? They want to answer the question. They'll say, I'm the therapist. You're the fucked up person.

Let me ask you questions. Yes, I agree. It's like they'll try to throw it. I'm the therapist. You can't ask me questions, but yes, I can. And I insist doing so.

100%. So ask them what's the greatest transformation they created in their own life? Ask them, Who were you like before? What did you do? How did you get to the other side?

Now if they're like, Well, I didn't want to share it with you, well then they can go fuck themselves. Okay, go to someone else is going to have greater transparency and someone like so many people have come to me for coaching because at some point, somehow, somewhere, either they came from a referral from someone or they saw my story and they're like, okay, I believe you have the skill set because I saw your story.

You've been through it so you can help me. These people outside of putting a plaque on their wall, which any person who can parent data, in my opinion and I have three degrees. So I'm not knocking education, I'm just saying I have degrees in things I had no interest in. And I got great grades and I was an honor society and I skipped a grade and blah, blah, blah.

So if your heart's not in it, you can still get the degree. I got it. My heart wasn't in it. Did it mean that I was like the number one person to do that job? So I think the number one person to help you is a number one person who's helped themselves. So yes, do what Jay says. Please interview them. Please ask them this question if they give you anything other than a split second right answer, meaning their truth and a truthful story of what happened to them by piece out. That's what I would do.

And I love the question. You say that people need to ask that was just tremendous. What have you done for yourself and your what have you created for yourself?

The number one thing, just remember that as as the letter said, write it down. Now, I wanted to ask you this and it's well, it's going to be what you what you think, what you say, the inner voice, right? Like you, I guess I call it my God's spirit that I listen to. And I have to quiet my mind to get to the next place and do the next thing and make the right decision. Because you are saying there's a voice inside of us.

How do you get to it and how do we know that we can hear it? Listen to it and follow follow its instructions?

Well, you hear it by shutting down all the other fucking voices. And so that voice is definitely there. It's just the other voices. The noise is so loud that you can't hear the higher power. You can't hear God, you can't hear your instinct, you can't hear your intuition because all these other voices, your mother, your father, money, circumstances, boyfriend, girlfriend, grandmother, business partner, whoever did something fucked up to five years ago. All that stuff is cluttering this. I was actually just recently doing this with a coaching client of mine. She's like, But I don't hear God.

I'm like, It's not like a telephone. It's like I hear God. And I said, It's just like, whoosh, like, shut the fuck up and then be quiet and then see what is the voice that comes up. Now she's like, Well, how do I know if it's my higher power or if it's an alternate voice? Because a lot of times we have programing, right?

The programing voice comes out and the programing is stifling the higher power that's underneath that. So I said to her, You will know it's your higher power because it will bring you. And I guess believe that like when even if your higher power tells you something you don't want to hear and you're like like your higher power is like break up with that person and you're like, But I want to fucking break up with that person.

But you do what your Higher Power was saying. Like, there's a piece, like there's a truth, there's a knowingness, there's a relaxation of like, that is the truth and you know, the truth because it will bring you peace. So I think it's down all the other noises. And if you need help, get help to quiet those down. Like Jay got a sponsor, get someone to help you, because it's like I had to do a lot of this by myself.

It was very painful. This is why I would go to Jay’s store. I would buy all these books and I would read them and I would underline them. I'm not a Kindle type of girl. So I would get like real books. I have hundreds of books in my apartment, like literally hundreds. I moved into this apartment during COVID, so whatever.

Three and a half years ago, I moved in here and the movers were mind blowing and how many books I had. And they're like, How many books? Like there were boxes and boxes and boxes of books because I couldn't find a person and I could find a $10 book or $15 book. And I would read it again and again and again and again, and I would underline and write things in the margins.

And so if you want to get rid of the noise and you don't know how many, you don't have money. A There is YouTube, so you can find amazing speakers there and do what I did take notes. But the other thing is go buy a book and if you find a good $10 book, you can read that book 50 times and that book can help you navigate all the noises in your head.

So you take care of them and you don't want to put them to the side, but you address them powerfully so that your higher power and your instinct are not marred by all the other programing and the old voices that typically drive us fucking insane.

I hear you. I hear you. It you know, I was very blessed when I was a little kid. I was very squirrely. And I have a brother that's five years older than me and he has 15. He took me to transcendental meditation, so I meditating for all these years and what it's given me, I can't I do it every morning. I say my prayers and then I meditate and it just means so much to me and that helps me and that, that meditation is for that. But it helps quiet my mind. And I know, I know without uncertainty that what's been told to me is my truth. And I need to it the moment I go against it. Something wrong or different happens that what was supposed to happen. So even as you said, even if you break up with this guy and you don't want to codependent all of that, but if you listen to it you'll find that is what was exactly supposed to happen.

So and that's another thing that doesn't cost money. You know, meditation, you can go on there. They have so many programs today online and all that. Learn how to meditate. It will change your life. right.

Yeah. That's really great feedback to give to people. Also, there's a Gloria Steinem I love it says the truth will set you free, but it will just piss you off first. So what do you do? Your higher power. It may piss you off first, but it's going to set you free. And it's a beautiful, magical thing that all the answers are within us and all my clients who have helped like multiply their incomes or transform their lives and transform that pain into power. All of it is by listening to their higher power.

Basically, my job is to help them access their higher power, and so they'll say incredible things On a coaching call. And I'll literally repeat back what they just told me. I won't repeat it. And then they're like, That is amazing. I'm like, I'm repeating what you just told me. Write it down. That's your higher power. And in every person I've coach with will say the same thing.

In the beginning when I started coaching, you know, I've done 9000 calls and a lot coaching calls in the last 12 years. In the beginning, like, I didn't want to say God and I didn't want to say Higher Power and I didn't want to say fuck, right? Like, I just kept trying to like, limit myself and be polite and be like, not be polarizing.

Once they embraced that, I do say fuck and I do say God and I like to use both. And that this was my truth. I got so many people who are also like, you know, I've gotten, I think, two people in the 12 years who have said, we don't believe in God, like don't bring up that word. We don't want to talk about it. So with them, we use the word energy and they like the word energy or the like the witch universe. So it's whatever word you like, find that word, but definitely do not shut down the whole category, because if you shut down your higher power, you shut down your higher power, you shut down your actual power.

 1000%. Absolutely.  Sometimes I like to call it just the force The force. The force is with you. So let me see what else we have here. I'm enjoying this so much. Thank you. I am too

So Lisa's question to you, is today your life today? Are you exceptionally busy? Do you have time for yourself?

It's very hard. First of all, I have a lot of clients and also I want to simultaneously grow my business. So I'm extremely driven and I'm extremely ambitious. You know, I've been doing like this was the third podcast for this week, although yesterday I got canceled right before. So I was like, But yesterday I had a live TV segment and on Monday I was supposed to have another TV segment. Thankfully, that got canceled last minute. So on top of the coaching calls, it's like TV podcast.

There is so many different things. It's very overwhelming. And also what since October 7th, I've been spending a tremendous amount of time advocating for the release of the hostages. We do have us hostages that have been in captivity. Today is 146 days. I think it's important for us, especially like to me, one of the greatest gifts of my life was becoming a U.S. citizen.

I cherish that U.S. passport. I know a lot of foreigners like we love our blue American passport. We have so much reverence for it and for the freedoms and the privileges that it gives us. So to me, it's really shocking that I would have thought as a foreigner that the streets of New York would be littered with everyone standing outside with an American flag saying, bring them home to bring at least the American hostages home. So I'm spending a lot of time doing that. We went to event last night.

I'm going to multiple events. It's my schedule is a lot more active than it's ever been. But I'm also taking new clients because a lot more people are being traumatized by global events and so they need help. And so I want to show up for them too. But I'm not getting a lot of me time, so I'm not getting an A-plus in that category for sure.

All right. Well, you know, it's it's tough being successful. And Lisa just yelled out, you should write a book. my God. Lisa asked me this on the podcast. Like everybody's like, where's the book? I don't know about this book that you're all obsessed with, but maybe someone will grab all my interviews and create a book out of it.

I don't know. But yeah, yeah, the book thing seems like it's overwhelming at the moment. I can't handle it, but yes, I am busy. I think it's important to show up for other people, especially like I got the gift of life from grace. I almost took my own life. I was gifted that, so I took a stand for other people who don't have that power.

They don't have access to their own power right now. And when I'm talking about the hostages, you know, I lived in an environment of complete abuse for 12 years. So to imagine that these people are in it environment for 146 days today where they're being tortured, it's just inconceivable to me. So I think like at a time like this also, we have to step up, even if it's inconvenient and even if we're not getting our own like self-care quite in the way I advocate we should. So I'm not getting a good mark on that. But it's important to be busy and to contribute to others. If you have been given the gift to to heal yourself

And that's a blessing that you are advocating and I know my prayers are with them I can't even imagine what they're going through. And, you know, I just hope they're there. They are still alive and they can bring them back. So let's  keep up the good fight. Yes. All right. What can you say to all of us when we were in pain and depression? Okay. What I mean is like a first timer who's never helped themself before. They've never even looked into how they can change their life. They don't even know how. What would be a just a first step?

I've had clients, men, especially because I think us as women, we have girlfriends since we were little girls like, although we weren't, I wasn't allowed to have many friends because my dad was a lunatic. But like normal girls in a normal environment, typically you have girlfriends and typically you share your feelings.

Men are not encouraged to share their feelings with their guy friends, so all that stuff gets suppressed. So I have had multiple men or male clients tell me that, Hey, I've never had therapy, I've never had coaching. I'm terrified. And you don't get that response from women. They're like, Yo, let's talk about it a little bit more. So for those people, I mean, you have to meet a person where they're at. You can be 50 steps ahead of them. So for those people, I would just say if I could advocate one thing for you, people who've never asked for help, well, I'd advocate a few things.

Number one, know that it's healthy to ask for help. It's healthy to share your feelings. It's recommended to get incredible feedback from who has expertise. It is going to lighten your load. It is going to give you freedom and all You have to do one thing. You just have to tell them your truth, but you have to tell them the whole truth. Now, on day one, if you're so terrified because I have clients like that, they can't come in like, open everything. The kimono and be like, Here it is.

So let's start with one thing. So I've had so many clients because I get a lot of clients from, you know, the real estate companies that I worked with. And still they'll come from a business perspective. So we'll start to work on their finances and how they want to grow their business. And then I'll be like, Well, what's stopping you from making those extra phone calls? What's stopping you from asking for business? And then, like their personal drama and their personal trauma comes up, right?

So a lot of men will want to shut that down and be like, Let's go back and talk about business. I'm like, No, no, no, this is business. Your personal life is literally like constricting your life force and your business. So we need to address this for you to do this. So then they might share like a smaller morsel of that truth and then eventually come back to it. So my thing for people who've never done this, it's totally normal. It's fucking 2024, go get some fucking help. Okay, so number one, get some help. Forget about the stigma.

There's no stigma. I actually. I have a coaching client, man, I swear to you, she went out with these guys, and then she's like the watcher because I do coaching calls, right? Just watch it. The next guy, if he doesn't have a therapist, I'm not dating him. Right? Like now it's cool. Like, it is cool to have a therapist. It's good to have a therapist. She's like, I can't deal with this. People would never get feedback and they're in a loop in their head and they were driving her. Not so if you've never done this before, a go to someone that you resonate with that is so important. If you don't resonate with the therapist of the coach, don't go to them.

It's not going to work. So just Joe Schmo is not going to do it for you coaching. And I'm not a therapist. I can't speak to that, but I'll speak to coaching. Coaching is like dating someone you don't just go marry the first guy or first girl he's going to date with. You might go through ten dates with ten different people, 50 different people to find the right one.

I think it's important for new people to understand it's going to be a dating process to find the coach, therapist, whoever who's going to help you. So be open that you're going to be dating them. So don't get heartbroken when you go to the first three people and you feel like they don't have the answer for you or you don't relate to them or for whatever reason you just don't like.

Don't go to people you don't like. Spend your time, do your homework, find the right person to you. I tell people, go on YouTube and listen to the person. And if you resonate with them, like if you're watching their stuff and you're nodding, give them a call. And if you're lucky, if they're available and they can take you,

give them your money, give me your credit card, because it is so hard to find a good person and finding a bad person, in my opinion, is worse than not going anyone.

So I think sometimes you're better off not going to someone than going to the wrong person. So for these people, give yourself permission. Do your homework to find someone and then start small. You can set the boundaries with your clients like I have. Clients will say, I don't want to talk about this right now and I will honor them and I'll say, okay, but we need to talk about it at some point.

But I respect that you're creating a boundary that today you don't want to talk about this. Like if they have an important business meeting afterwards or they're getting on a plane or something, they don't want to talk about that thing. Right? So tell communicate with your therapist, coach, whoever your cousin, your mother, whoever, your priest, whoever is helping you, what the boundaries are. I think a lot of times people get into trouble because they don't set the boundaries and then they feel overwhelmed because a person asks what the client you might perceive as intrusive, and then you don't go back to the person. But you know, it is your responsibility to set the boundaries so something feels intrusive. You can let them know, and then also just tell them like, Hey, can we slow it down a little bit?

Can we focus on one topic today or go in with homework? Like when I go to my coach, I have a couple of coaches for different things business, personal, spiritual, different people. So I would go with my homework. I would say, Here's what I'm having trouble with. Like I've written it down, it's on a piece of paper and I want you to help me with this, this and this.

So guess what? They're not going to go left and talk about some other nonsense. And I'm not going to go left because we have an agenda for the conversation. Now, if you're like, Well, I don't want to do anything that sounds like too much homework. Just go to the person you liked and open your fucking mouth and tell the truth and ask for what you want and need. Tell them how you feel. Tell them what is hurting you. Tell them what is bothering you. Tell them why what you're disappointed about, even if you're disappointed in yourself. And then maybe tell them, you know, you guys have a great slogan and program where it's you're as sick as your secrets. You are going to be as sick as your secrets. So at some point in time, you got to tell somebody if you want to be safe. So start small. Start with someone And you trust set up the boundaries, and then like if you need like a little bit of processing time because you know, the therapist or coach said something and it really triggered you and you're overwhelmed, Don't stop going to them.

Communicate with them, say, Hey, you said this and this is how I feel, or I feel this way for whatever reason. Like maybe we can skip next week, but I'll be there the following week. Do not take a huge gap. Don't do that. Because what happens is you take a huge gap, you'll go back to your former ways. So that would be my recommendation for new people. Find a consistent schedule. It's like with most of my coaching clients, at least the ones who are actively working on something. Some of my clients from years ago will do like different intervals, but for like, let's say some of where you start with me now, we do every week, unless they're on vacation or I'm on vacation, it's got to be every week because during like I do a 16 week package with people, you want to change your life. You got to give me 16 sessions once a week, 16 times. And again, if you go away one time, that's okay. But if you I had a girl recently, she wanted to do coaching

and then she wanted to use her language, do it ad hoc. So kind of like whenever she felt like it, we ended up not working together because I wasn't going to do it that way, because that is to me not going to be a successful outcome for that person.

You can't just it's like having a personal trainer once a month. You're not going to get fit. So if you want emotional and mental fitness, find someone, start small, tell them what the rules are, tell them what the boundaries are. Show up, talk about what you're able to show, to talk about, do some homework, get some homework. I always I also give my clients homework.

Get homework. You're not going to go to the session mysteriously heal if you go and you get great feedback right. Let's say someone comes to me on Monday or goes through a great therapist on Monday and they get amazing feedback. Then the rest of the week they need to implement that feedback, right? So the following Monday, when they come back, they have new results.

It is important to do your homework. I think a lot of people will throw out the responsibility on the coach or the therapist and say they weren't good because my life didn't change. Your life is not going to change. If in between sessions you're not actually implementing what they told you to do. So please start small. Do your homework before, do your homework after, and then you will be successful if you have the right person.