Brian
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. How are you, Ani?

Ani
I'm good.

Brian
How are you, Brian? Having a great day today, for sure.

Ani
Great. You're in my seat.

Brian
Yeah, and you're in my seat.

Ani
If you're watching us on YouTube, you can tell we always sit in the same spots, except for today, because we're talking about conscious change today.

Brian
Exactly. Exactly. So we're going to talk about the four steps to conscious change. So maybe we just talk a little bit about conscious and change first.

Ani
When I first met you, Brian, you told me that you were practicing changing what hand you were brushing your teeth with. I remember that because I thought, what a mess that would be if I tried to do it. We were recently at our Somatic Coach Professional retreat, and I noticed that you had forks in both of your hands. And you were eating with both hands. It was so funny to watch you. I don't know why or what the story is. You don't have to tell us.

Brian
I noticed that when I was doing that, too, and I was talking with someone at the time and I looked down and I had a spoon in one hand and a fork in the other hand. I was eating soup with my left hand and noodles with my right-hand, I think.

Ani
You couldn't get it in fast enough or something? 

Brian
I was going to be slamming it in there, which was funny. I just laughed when I noticed that we had a good laugh with the person I was eating lunch with.

Ani
I think about that toothbrush thing a lot when we talk about change, because change is not easy, and neither is brushing your teeth with your other hand.

Brian
I have to tell you my newest, latest conscious change thing I'm doing. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I recognized a couple of weeks ago that I always put my pants on with my left leg first. You're going right foot. So I've been I've consciously... I've only fallen over once. So I've consciously been going right foot first. For those of you who want a little challenge- That's what that bang was the other day. If you want a little challenge, try it. Notice you're probably putting your pants on the same foot first all the time not thinking about it, I challenge you to try and put the other foot on first.

Ani
It's pretty crazy if you think about how many things we probably do the same exact way like that all the time. And that's putting your pants on. We're approaching conversations in the same way and relationships in the same way and dynamics in the same way and everything.

Brian
It just forces me to slow down. I think it's really a good pattern interrupt. When we think about how we are going through the day, most of the time unconsciously, we're just walking from place to place, we're shoving food in our mouths, we're checking our phones. We know exactly where the right app is on the phone. I still don't know that, it is still stuck in folders I can't find.

Ani
I don't know where anything is on your phone.

Brian
Which isn't a bad thing because it makes me stop and think about it. I think that's a really important missing link for humans. When we start to really program, we're no different than our technology, right? A robot, really, that just does the same thing all of the time. It isn't really spending time changing.

Ani
I heard an interesting thing the other day that I think you're going to think is cool. You know how we talk about how the conscious mind is about 5% of our mind power and the subconscious mind is about 95% of the mind power? This thing I was listening to was talking about that, and it said, like we use 5% of our conscious mind power at the most. We're anywhere from 1% to 5% of our conscious mind during the day, which means that we're spending at the most 5% of our day consciously.

Brian
Interesting. Okay. Isn't that interesting? She's actually breaking it down to the day.

Ani
Isn't that interesting translation? It makes perfect sense. We're spending at maximum 5%, right? And at minimum 1% of our day, consciously.

Brian
So part of that day is me putting my pants on with the other leg.

Ani
Apparently, you're using your 5% to changing your pants.

Brian
I'm using it wisely, I think. It's really important. What if something happened and I couldn't put it on the other way. 

Ani
Well, you'll be ambidextrous with your legs. Bees and legs. Exactly. You are with your... Yeah, I don't know.

Brian
Yeah, exactly.

Ani
We're never going to be able to catch up with you when you're older. Exactly.

Brian
I'm always going to have my pants on. Okay. Thank you. So conscious change. We've talked a lot in the past on other podcasts about, if we keep getting a result in our life all of the time, a relationship result we don't like, boy, it's always that same thing that happens with my partner. It's always the same thing that happens with my boss. It's always the same thing that happens with my parents. Every Thanksgiving is the same. So that thing. Or it can be- The money. The money. I can never make more money. I can never make another. I always make the same money. Never save enough.

Ani
I always have debt, and it always come back.

Brian
Health thing. It's like, I never can seem to take the weight off. I can never seem to get into shape all the time. That's basically you're stuck, obviously, in a rut. Your subconscious is running the show, keeping those results. It's At some point in time, many people decide, I don't want that result anymore, and I want to change it. Now, this is really interesting because there's a billion-dollar industry on helping people to then change something. There's podcasts, there's books, there's coaches, there's experts, there's speakers, there's you name it on how to do something. There's all kinds of people on all kinds of things. It's interesting because most people actually don't change. There's a high demand for it. 95%. Isn't it interesting? We're still trying to find better and more sustainable ways, more effective ways to actually drive change. It turns out that if you look at conscious change models, if any successful conscious change model basically goes through the same steps all the time. Our sensation-based motivation coaching framework is based on a conscious change model. We have developed and worked with the tools specific to that model for many years.

Ani
Right, and those are unique to us.

Brian
But the model itself, I did a lot of research on conscious change models and tried a bunch of different things, and I realized, oh, my God, they're all actually going through the same four steps. If we wanted to create a successful model for change, let's just go ahead and use those four steps because in the research, they say that they work. So let's use those. And then we just started creating tools and methods specific to our somatic work that we do. But it's all the same framework. Super simple. Yeah, super simple. Here's the four steps. If you want to change anything in your life, these are the four basic steps in order to do it. The very first step is become aware of something. You really cannot change anything in your life that you have not become aware of first. That's straightforward, right? Does it make sense?

Ani
It makes sense, but we can't always see it or figure it out because we have to have the awareness to do so.

Brian
Exactly. For some people, it's always the first step. It's always the first step in any conscious change model. For some people, it's easier than others. For some people, it's the biggest hurdle.

Ani
For sure.

Brian
Because there's so many what we call scotomas or just blank spots in our awareness. We're just not seeing it. We're not feeling it. We're not hearing it. We don't realize that we're the common denominator in the last five jobs that we left for the same reason, that we are the common denominator in all of that. We keep thinking it's always the other person is the reason I'm leaving. But wait a second, you're the common denominator in all of that. When you finally realize that you become aware of that, that's a big awareness for a lot of people.

Ani
Yeah. The awareness always starts it off. You can't change anything you're not aware of.

Brian
Not aware of. From a somatic coaching perspective, one of the things that we help people become aware of is specifically the somatic sensory, the somatosensory pattern associated with whatever result they're currently getting that they don't like.

Ani
Which makes it a super tangible way to talk about awareness, because when we talk about awareness, it can be very etheric. I can't touch it, I can't feel it, I can't see it. But once we start to work with the body, it becomes more tangible and able to work with.

Brian
I just did a laser coaching session yesterday with an entrepreneur and asked her basically a couple of questions, and she became aware of something that totally shocked her, that was going on in her life that she was just not aware of. When it hit her, she's like, Oh, my God, that's why I keep getting the same result. It really just took a couple of minutes in order to help her get there. When you know the right questions to ask, you can help people very pinpointedly get to that point. The first step has always been become aware of something different. You ready for the second step? Let's go. Second step, what we call it is decode. What we mean by that is first you become aware of something, and then you have to be able to decode it or gather more information about it. What are we really decoding? We're decoding the somatic pattern that we identified in the first step of become aware.

Ani
Now we're taking this awareness and we're starting to flushing it out so that there's more information about it and identifying things we can latch onto when we look at how it's showing up as a pattern.

Brian
Correct. Yeah.

Ani
This is something that I think is really unique, actually. Well, the way that we do it from the sensation base is really unique. Also just out there, I don't see a lot of people talking about how to actually decode a pattern. People talk about patterns all the time, and they talk about how you have patterns, and you should change your patterns and all of that. But rarely do people talk about how to actually decode the pattern into parts so that you can do something. Bringing it down into parts and being able to see the different parts allows you to have so much more control over your change. It allows you to actually move into the change in a powerful way. Yeah.

Brian
Of course, we talk about the sensory base as being the raw data of our reality. The way we move through the world and the meaning we make about the world is mirrored in what we feel inside of our bodies. There's intimate connection between what we believe we're experiencing outside and what we feel we are experiencing inside. That's the basis of a somatic pattern. We run on patterns. That's what our subconscious does. It just keeps running patterns and patterns and patterns and patterns and patterns. Those patterns will just keep regenerating themselves and again, creating the results in your life that oftentimes you don't like.

Ani
They help us to stay efficient and effective. You don't have to think about how to put on your pants. You just do it. You're reminding me as we're talking about decode that people can get stalled in any part of the process when they don't have people who know how to work through the process and help them. So people can get stalled on awareness, and they can get stalled on decode. One of the things I see with people, especially when I'm reading social media posts, say, or emails and stuff, people will keep asking themselves, why? Why, why, Why? Why is this happening? Why me? What am I doing? That signals to me that that person has not had the right support to work through the decode or to realize they've already decoded it so that they can keep moving through the process and not get stalled. It's like a broken record thing.

Brian
Sometimes, I think when people get stalled in the decode, they actually have not spent enough time in the awareness phase. When we just want become aware, and then just try to jump into the decode. Sure. Oftentimes, we can get, like you say, stalled in the decode. It's like, fix it. It can be very why, and we can become very self-judgmental, can become self-recriminating, can create a lot of unsavory feelings in our bodies that we can start to just not feel so good about. And a lot of that's because we just have not become aware of enough yet.

Ani
And that keeps the pattern in place. So you don't change.

Brian
Yeah. So one of the things that we really advocate for when we work with our coaches is, hey, don't rush to become aware of. It's really important to gather all the information as much as possible because you're going to need that information when you move forward through the process.

Ani
Yeah. Take your awareness out to dinner, have an appetizer, maybe two dates, get to know it a little bit.

Brian
You might not like it on that first date, by the way. Might not like it so much. Might not like it on the second date either.

Ani
But then you have dessert on the third date, and you're like, Okay, there's really something to this.

Brian
Yeah, like how we met. You didn't like me on the first date. I didn't. Or the second date, but we had dessert at the third date, and you're like, You know what? Maybe I could live with it.

Ani
Yeah, I didn't like you when I first saw you.

Brian
All right. So become aware, step one. And then decode, you always got to decode, that's step two. All right, what's step three? So step three is we call it modify. You can call it transform, you can call it change, you can call it do something with the stuff. It's basically you've become aware of a somatic pattern in the first step. You've become aware that it's a pattern in the second step, and you become aware that you learn the pattern somewhere, and then you decide, Do I want to change the pattern? If the answer is, Yes, I want to change the pattern, then you resource some tools to then change the pattern because now you have enough information about it and you have some really nuanced secret information about it that goes underneath the subconscious's defenses to change. A lot of people just want to jump to that modify step without becoming aware of something different. Without decoding it. I think that's why there's millions and millions of books and podcasts, and only 5% of people change because they're not going through those first two steps.

Brian
They just want to change the thing. Just want to modify it. They just want to modify it. But you can't. Conscious change modeling does not show that that works. You don't have enough info. The modify, so we do things. We have all a bunch of tools. You've heard us talk about cross mapping before.

Ani
When we get out our toolbox.

Brian
Yeah, advanced cross mapping, pattern deconstruction, reconstruction, a lot of the muscular layer practices, natural law questions. All the stuff that we teach and train on really creates a powerful professional toolbox for somatic coaches to really dig into that Modify phase, help someone really begin to change something at a somatic cellular level. Yeah.

Ani
It reminds me of the mushy phase of the caterpillar to the butterfly. It's like the chrysalis. I don't know what's going on in there, but there's stuff happening because the caterpillar goes in and the butterfly comes out. Yeah, exactly. That's one of the reasons why we call our level two that transformation is that somatic transformation fundamentals. It's really that caterpillar to butterfly. We really hone in on the modify stuff and teach people, sometimes for the first time, modification tools that is really like hatching butterflies.

Brian
Yeah, that's It's actually a pretty interesting image because what's coming to me, Ani, is level two is entering into the chrysalis, and end of level three is coming out as a butterfly thing. Let's talk about the last step. So far, I've become aware, decode. These are our names for them, but no matter what model you're looking at for conscious change, it's going to basically be these four steps. They're going to call them different things. Our last step, we call it Reframe, but you can also call it Rebuild. You can call it recreate. You can call it whatever. What's happening here is during that modify phase, we don't know what's going on inside of that chrysalis. Something's going on in there. Inside of a person's soma, in their bodies, we're working with these tools and something is changing. It's not just like you're trying to turn on some other switch or force yourself to do something different, like force a behavior change, that thing.

Ani
You mean a modification?

Brian
A lot of people just try to change their behavior.

Ani
To me, the modification phase feels like discovering something that was there all along that I wasn't aware of. I know it's not the aware of phase, but there's this, oh! Element, I think, to the modification phase for me.

Brian
Yeah. Really, the way we work, too, is whatever stuff we're bringing into that modification phase from the become of and the decode becomes a part of what we use to recreate something. That's the alchemy. Yeah, that's the alchemy. They say turning the dross into gold. It's like turning all the junk into something that's really valuable. That alchemy happens in that modify phase. You're not just picking something new. You're actually using what isn't working and create something that is working. That's the magic of it. The last phase, step four is reframe. Really, we call it reframe. What you're doing is you're taking the new thing, the new gold, you're putting it into action. Now, how can you take that new gold and bring it into your life, into the world in a way, when now you start to transform your results and circumstances and environments of your waking life.

Ani
It's like when you plant a seed and it starts to sprout and its roots start to grow, and then the rebuild phase is actually the roots start to take hold. A lot of times the somatic therapeutic work, which we talk about there's differences in somatic therapeutics and somatic coaching. A lot of the somatic therapeutic work actually doesn't involve this part, Brian. Yeah. And so you get to the modify, and you do the modify, and then the practitioner will say, "Well, that's time. Thank you very much. See you next week". I forgot about that, by the way. And I had been doing quite a bit of somatic coaching, and then I went back and had some somatic therapeutic work after quite a bit of time. And I got to the end of my session, and then they were like, "Well, that's it for today."

Brian
And I'm like, "wait, wait. How do I deal with this?"

Ani
And I just said goodbye, close the computer, and I did my own. But if you don't do that, you've left a part of the conscious change process out, which, again, people wonder why they don't change. If you're not doing that last step, you're not taking it into the world, and you're not actually going to have the change that you're looking for.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. Then, of course, a lot of the work we do around how we train our coaches is they're taking that stuff back out of the world. It's really important then to track the feedback associated with it because that wraps back into the conscious change process again. Because you're going to take that out of the world, you're going to become aware of something else, and then there we go. And then we're back into the cycle again. It's really those four steps. If you're really like, Hey, I really want to consciously change something in my life, these are the four steps. You become aware of, decode, modify, reframe. If you would love to be able to create conscious change and resource the infinite intelligence that is in your DNA, in your cells, in your physical soma, then you know what? Give us a call. That's what we do here. Send us an email, info@somaticcoachingacademy.com. Give us a call. We're enrolling for level 2, entering into the chrysalis right now, and also level 3, Somatic Coach Pro, where you turn into a butterfly, but we're enrolling in that stuff right now. So here we go.

Ani
Yeah. Reach out if you have any questions. We'd love to chat with you. And come to one of our info sessions where you can ask a grad, "What's it really like in the chrysalis?" And they'll tell you. So thanks for joining us today. We will see you next time. All right.

Brian
Bye-bye.