Meet Brenda Terry, a Confident Woman campaign participant
“The CONFIDENT WOMAN campaign” is a photography project aimed to boost confidence through self-acceptance and self-love, to create a platform to inspire and support women in achieving the life they want. It is limited to 25 participants. Reserve your spot now:
Today I would like to introduce Brenda Terry. Brenda is NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) master coach trainer; mindset and business coach and a mentor.
In our interview Brenda shares how she changed her career from being an owner of a real estate company to becoming NLP master trainer and mentor; how NLP saved and improved relationship with her partner; she gives tones of valuable hints on how to transform your lives and achieve desired outcomes.
Please take time to read the full interview below. Its a bit long but so worth it!
Short video recap is available below.
To lean more about what Brenda can do for you visit her website and contact her for a consultation.
Hello, Brenda. Thank you for being here today. Could you please introduce yourself?
My name is Brenda Terry and I am NLP master coach trainer. I'm a mindset and business coach and mentor as well. In my work I help primarily female entrepreneurs become the architects of their own life by mastering their mindset and then using the foundational principles of NLP and applying them to their business and how they manage that day to day experience so that they can create the lives and the businesses they absolutely love.
Just to clarify for the audience: NLP is a neural linguistic programing. That is a modality that has been modeled after several of the sciences whether it's in hypnosis, linguistics, engineering. And modality itself helps people become really aware of how it is that they communicate with themselves and others and how as a result of that they create outcomes.
“The work is all about being able to identify how it is that we are creating our own reality through our beliefs, through our thoughts, through our language, and then take intentional action to make changes that make a difference in business, relationships and life”
And so the work is all about being able to identify how it is that we are creating our own reality through our beliefs, through our thoughts, through our language, and then take intentional action to make changes that make a difference in business, relationships and life.
This is amazing and extremely interesting. But before we continue to talk about it in details I would like to ask why did you choose to participate in a CONFIDENT WOMAN campaign?
Well, I just think that we are at a special time in our history. I think that now women are more empowered to be able to take that action that's going to allow us to have what we want.
And I think that we are becoming more and more aware of our role in our own outcomes, of our role in our own results. And I think more so than ever before in history, we actually have the resources to be able to leverage all around us. There's so much around us in terms of mindset, in terms of healing of our bodies, in terms of having knowledge, resources, technology that will allow us to elevate our entire experience.
If I can contribute to something that helps other women become empowered, then I'm just happy to do that.
What is a confident woman like for you?
For me personally, as a confident person, it's been a journey. I think it’s very much like establishing any other relationship. It takes time. It has happened as a result of learning from the decisions that supported my growth and decisions that stifled it. It happened as a result of taking responsibility for my thinking, my behavior, my language, what I expected from the people in my life, what I expected from myself.
I think that my confidence now comes as a result of just taking full responsibility for myself, not expecting the people in my life to tend to my emotional needs. And that doesn't mean that I'm not emotionally supportive, but that certainly means that I don't put the work of that emotional currency on whether it's my partner shoulders, my children's shoulders, or where anybody else in my life. I am responsible for myself.
“To look at my world more as a mirror and learn from it, versus looking at my world and looking for someone to blame for my problems. That I can tell you has shifted everything.”
And I think that that has really allowed me to be confident in the decisions that I make. So I feel pretty darn confident. I just feel good. But I think the biggest decision that I made for myself is being committed. And it's really is because of my work. Being committed to minding how I feel, to learn to master my emotions and my emotional responses. Because of the work that I do it has taught me so much about the way that I create my reality. To look at my world more as a mirror and learn from it, versus looking at my world and looking for someone to blame for my problems. That I can tell you has shifted everything.
We can call it confidence. I mean, I feel confident, but I think more so it's that I'm just in this level of self trust now that I haven't been in before.
You mentioned that gaining confidence was a journey. Could you share an event in life that was particularly transformational?
So for me the life changing moment was when I went to my first NLP training and I understood that there was something to the idea that we create our own reality through our thoughts, through our focus, through our language, through our values, our memories. I understood that on a logical level. And at that point I had been in therapy for about nine years because there was definitely this kind of I mean, I can call it a void, but it was almost like this disconnect.
And that disconnect came as a result of being at effect which means looking at your environment and blaming situations, blaming people, blaming events for your problem, for your lack of emotional stability, desire for control or living in fear.
Those were probably my two biggest things. I say that fear was really a mechanism for me that bit my butt to success. I was very successful and also in fear all the time, which is really not healthy for your body. It doesn't work long term. Let me say that it worked for me short term.
It didn't work for me long term.
So what happened is that during this training, I worked with someone who was very young, who had never done this work before. She was learning along with me. I believe she was 21 years old. And we each learned separately as students how to release negative emotions.
And so she did the technique for me to release anger and sadness, and I felt this humongous weight and relief lifted off of me. I was really grateful for the release. I was really grateful for the awareness as I had as a result of the release, which were called the learnings.
But what I was most grateful for was being aware that I had the capacity to do that. It changed my life because then I took that information and I applied it to my daily living and I made it a point to do that consistently.
Can you give an example of how this technique and learnings helped you to improve your life?
I have so many examples. I'll give you a personal one. My partner and I have been together for almost 11 years. And at that point, he and I were about to break up.
I had taken the ring off. I left it on the nightstand. When I went to my training I thought it was going to be over. And then I learned how we process experience. So we have 11 million bits of information per second that are available to the nervous system. And we only process consciously 50 to 60 bits. And those 50 to 60 bits are going to be processed according to your belief system, to your expectations of yourself in the world, according to your past history, according to your limiting beliefs, according to whatever data is inside, traumatic events, good events, whatever it is.
So when I learned that I realized that there is more data available in the conversations, but I'm not seeing it because of the way that I'm processing information. Then what could happen if I began to change it?
And so I didn't ask him to change the thing. I just simply applied the principles.
So basically for me what happened is I made the decision to live as if I was creating it all. I didn't say I was. I just said, I'm gonna pretend that I am. And then I started taking action accordingly. And as soon as I came back from my training with probably, I don't know, maybe a week or two max, the relationship completely turned around and it was all about the way that I was perceiving him and all the ways that I thought he just wasn't getting it as to what it takes to be in a healthy, happy relationship. But then I realized that I was really just trying to control him. I was trying to get him to do it my way, and I wasn't being respectful of the way that he was processing his data. And it just opened up the door to this healing in the relationship that gave me the freedom. Here we are eight years later and feeling really strong and connected and supported and supportive and in being really aware of the differences and in appreciating them and having being in self-responsibility. Like it's not his job to fix anything for me and it's not my job to fix anything for him. I the best thing that I can do for us is for me to be congruent, for me to be connected with who I am.
What would be the steps that women could take to change their lives for the better?
Well, I get that a lot from people that say, you know, it takes a lot to learn to implement. But what I say is, yes, it does. And it's hard to learn and implement techniques and a new way of looking at life and expanding your model of the world. That could take some time and that could be really hard. But you know, what's also hard? Is living in the same problem for decades. That's way harder in my perspective.
If you think of neuro linguistic programing - that is what hardwired inside. By hardwired I mean what are those deeply entrenched beliefs? What are those thoughts that you have about yourself that are that inner critic? What memories are there? What patterns are there? And then you have the linguistic part. It is going to be the language that you use to describe experience. But I know people say that it doesn't describe experience. Language determines experience. So the language that you use is going to determine the outcomes that you get. And the programing is really basically what do you do with your nervous system and the language together to either undo limiting programing, limiting things and get limiting things out of the nervous system?
And also how can you use your nervous system in your language to create new programing or to create new patterns and new beliefs that are going to support you?
When you think about making that impact in life, the biggest impact we can make is I think is going to be by living a good, fulfilling life. So what I tell my clients is that the sessions can be amazing. We can make huge changes. We can make massive shifts inside the session. But the work that we do in the session pales in comparison to the work that the client does between sessions. And that has to do with state management. It is about minding how you feel in your moment to moment experience. Because you feel bad about something, it doesn't mean that that thing you're feeling about it is even true. It just means that you pay enough attention to it that now it's grown legs, it's got momentum, and it really impacts how you feel, move forward. And so the advice that I have for people is, is really a two fold. One is going to be aware of how you're feeling and when you're feeling, your state or how you feel a state is basically, how do I feel right now?
That's it. If it feels like you are now at a place where you are uncomfortable, then the moment that you notice the discomfort it is important for you to do things.
And you can do it by visualizing things. You can do it with your language, you can do it with music, with dance. It really doesn't have to be hard. It's really is very simple. And if you do that, then you train your brain to stay in a better feeling state. The key is to do it consistently.
Our problem is that we allow the environment to dictate how we feel as opposed to allowing how you feel to dictate the environment. Two very different things. One gives you way more control over the other, right? Otherwise you're going to be getting knocked around by the wind versus you taking charge in. And so that is one of the things that I think is is critical to your outcomes, because when you can feel better you can make improved decisions and you are going to take action that's going to empower you in your life, in your business, in your relationships.
“when you can feel better you can make improved decisions you are going to take action that’s going to empower you in your life, in your business, in your relationships. ”
Now, the other thing is going to be to be aware of your language.
There's something called modal operators and modal operator is basically what is the meaning behind my language. It is a language operating in such a way that I'm speaking about what is needed or what I lack versus what I want and can have. So when you are saying I need to do this, but actually it's quite limiting to the nervous system versus I get to do this, I want to do this.
So even just watching language from that perspective is important. I have few more things. The second thing is be mindful of the media that you want. Be really mindful, especially before you go to bed, because your unconscious mind is open for business 24 hours a day. The things that you put in there right before you go to bed are going to stay in there and so you are training your unconscious mind, whether you are conscious of it or not, based on the things that you're reading. Unconscious mind is not really processing the negatives directly. It puts those things into focus and you can create outcomes that align with all of that.
And then for me, the third thing, what I want for every single woman in business and for every single human is to really to learn. Anything that empowers you to make decisions that are going to put you in control of your outcomes without necessarily relying on others as the source, I think I think that that can set you up so it doesn't have to be NLP, it can be anything.
I think that that can set you up for long term success.
What was your journey towards starting NLP coaching business?
I had a real estate company and it was doing really well. And the problem though was that I was stretched way too thin and I didn't have enough leadership ability to lead a big team. I think at that point we had maybe 60 to 70 people.
So when I learned NLP it really opened my mind to what could be possible. And I just went back to my company and I started doing teaching a little bit of what I had learned in then. And then I started sending my staff to get training, and then soon after I became a master practitioner of NLP.
And so I decided to have a one on one practice. It was alive and in person. And then from there I thought, Well, I'd like to really do more this online. And then I started an online business. And so now I'm, I think, one of the very few trainers in the world that has a digital with support NLP training and coaching certification program out there.
Could you share your feedback about our photo session?
It was really beautiful and lovely. It's very luxurious and glamorous. And think one of the things that you did is that everything was done in such a way to really connect with who I am as human. I think it is really empowering. I think pretty much everybody, but women specifically, we have a hard time seeing ourselves for who we really are. We don't see our beauty. We find the things here and there that we consider faults or imperfections. We really focus on them when in reality we are so much more. Being able to appreciate our own beauty and being able to embody it is a huge step.
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