Understanding the Impact of Your Past with Ilona Cepelakova

To lead well, you must maintain some degree of emotional balance. Otherwise, people stop wanting to tell you the things you most need to know and they stop creatively solving problems just to name two consequences. Sometimes though what is causing stress is more about past events than about current circumstances. In those cases, it’s time to take a deeper look. 

One of the exciting new ways to understand and heal from past traumas (big and small) involves somatic therapy. We are going to explore what this approach is about and look at how leaders use it to boost their leadership and their team’s leadership.

⬇️ Connect with me!
► LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wanda-wallace-publicspeaker-author-podcasthost/
► Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wandatwallace/
► Main YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wandawallace/
► X: https://x.com/AskWanda
► Website: https://www.wandawallace.com/

💡 About the show:
There is no growth in comfort and no comfort in growth. Business today typically values and promotes leaders for their subject expertise. Leaders who have command of the details and execute based on knowledge and experience are highly respected. However, to grow as a leader you have to get out of your comfort zone – that means learning to lead without just being the expert. Learn to gain the trust and respect of a team that might know more than you do. Get comfortable with ambiguity and with not having all the information. Develop the skills and confidence to lead in a different way.

For female leaders, subject expertise is usually the source of their confidence. Learning to lead outside your comfort zone is one step for breaking through the glass ceiling. The show’s purpose is to give you tips on how can you develop the capability to lead – to get out of your comfort zone.

#WandaWallace #OutoftheComfortZone #Podcast

Transcript

There is no growth in comfort and no comfort in growth yet. The big leaps are how careers are made and how businesses excel. So how do you master not knowing at all or feeling like an imposter? How do you have the conversations that will lead to trust? And of course, excellence? How do you take charge of the things that you can control?

How do you thrive outside your comfort zone? That's what this podcast is about. I'm your host Wanda Wallace, and it's time to get out of the comfort zone. Welcome to the conversation. Okay, so today I wanna talk about one of the things that I talk about with absolutely every single leader, especially senior leaders that I work with, that is to lead well.

You have got to be able to maintain some degree of emotional balance. So that doesn't mean that you never get angry or you're never elated. Of course you are. But if you're a little bit out of balance in your emotion, then you're gonna overreact when somebody gives you bad news or when somebody doesn't do what you expected them to do.

And the net result of that is. People are gonna stop telling you all the things that you need to do. They're gonna stop offering ideas, they're gonna stop kind of really trying to solve problems. They're gonna come to you all the time and say, tell me boss, what it is you want me to do, and many, many more.

So this emotional balance is critical because if you don't, then you end up creating chaos. For your immediate direct reports, they create kiosk for their direct reports and the compounding effect is dramatic, and that is the seeds for creates a toxic distrusting culture. So the more senior you are, the more critical it is to get into patterns that allow you to maintain some semblance of emotional balance.

Essential. Okay. Now, one of the things that's interesting about how you maintain emotional balance is yes, of course, all the obvious healthcare well-being care that we know about sleeping well, eating well, exercising, et cetera. But there's another one we never talk about, and that's the events of the effect of past events on your current thinking.

Past events could be big traumas. If you happen to have experienced some major disaster or a war zone or something traumatic, but for most of us, they are smaller traumas, things like, feeling betrayed or, that you can't trust anyone. A whole range of those. And we wanna talk about those kinds of traumas that most all of us as human beings experience and talk about how you can begin to understand them.

Unpack them, and more importantly, heal from them so your leadership isn't held hostage to those experiences in the past. So my guest today is Ilona Cepelakova. I've worked hard at getting that name correct. She's a leadership wellbeing consultant, a trauma informed hypnotherapist, and she's worked with CEOs, high performing leaders and their teams to help them get over these traumas in order to be more effective leaders.

And she really understands the pressure behind success and the subconscious patterns that drive it. And her work goes beyond folk. coaching, focusing on subconscious re-patterning, patterning, and somatic therapy to rewire the patterns at their roots. Creating a release from internal blocks regulating the nervous system and expanding their capacity to lead with clarity, power, and authentic presence.

Ilona, sign me up. That sounds like a wonderful idea. Welcome to the conversation. 

Hi Wanda and everyone, thank you so much for having me and I really appreciate this amazing introduction to my work. Thank you. 

I love it. I love it. And I should say we met, I just have to give a shout out. We met in Italy at an event ho hosted by the Harvard Business School of Italy.

So what a great treat. Welcome to international travel. Alright. Somatic therapy is something I never heard about. Until recent year and I am hearing it pop up everywhere. In fact, this week there was a New York Times article about somatic therapy. So could you just start at the top and tell me what the heck is this thing called somatic therapy?

Absolutely. Thanks for asking. So somatic therapy is a body-based approach to healing that actually works with the nervous system and not just the mind. And so why this is important is because a lot of our unprocessed emotions are stored in the body and thinking alone and talking about it doesn't.

Often reach that it actually cannot. And so this is a form of therapy and approach that allows us to work with these deep seated patterns that are stored in the body and the subconscious, because Soma is the body. So that's where the name comes from. 

All right, so help me with this subconscious notion. I don't wanna take a whole course in neuroscience, but we are talking a lot more about the subconscious and the impact of the subconscious on our.

Experience in the world. So gi just gimme a little tutorial on how that all works. 

Right. Thank you. So basically, our mind in a simplified way has two parts, and that's the conscious and the subconscious. And the subconscious actually consists of up to 90%. So in other words, our behavior, the way we think, the way we feel and decide and act is influenced by the subconscious.

And the subconscious is basically a collection of patterns and beliefs that we. Created and adopt it not in a conscious way. It means we basically adopted them as ours without having any critical filter or capacity to choose. And it happens in the early childhood, up to the age of six or seven. and it's influenced.

By the trauma we experience, whether small or big, by the environment, the family dynamics, the culture, the religion. So it's very much influenced by the environment and our experiences. 

Okay. Alright. So as much as 90% is in the subconscious, tell me a little more about that. 

Mm-hmm. So, you know. We are not aware of this.

Actually a lot of my clients that they come, they can understand the problem in the present moment, but they hardly ever can identify where it comes from and they just know the symptom. You know, I feel burnout, or I'm too stressed, or I feel fear of failure. And some of them can recognize that it's not really aligned with the experience that they're having.

It's kind of way much more intense than it should be, and that is because. You're in something in their childhood or earlier life that got stored in the subconscious as an experience, and it's influencing them now. In other words, when we experience trauma, what basically happens is that all the emotions that came up through that moment and the nervous.

nervous system activation, they didn't get completed. We couldn't fully let that, process through our system and it gets stuck in the nervous system and subconscious and the body. And so this is why we come back to it because by processing it, we're helping the system to get released to, to come back to harmony, to the regulated state.

And then the clients no longer get influenced by these past experiences in their present time. 

That's right. That's right. All right. I have two stories for everybody just to connect to this. One is a personal story, something I don't often share, but there was an a thing happening in my life at the, you know, closing of my mother's estate that I was just having a really difficult emotional time and rationally.

Made zero sense to me. Like I could go through the logic. 1, 2, 3, 4, why am I struggling with this? And it's not about my mother's death and the emotion of grieving her. It was something completely unrelated that made no sense whatsoever. So shout out to my nephew, Ricky Wallace, who runs a wonderful hypnotherapy coaching practice.

Ricky volunteered to help me with a hypnotherapy or somatic session, and in one session I unlocked what the source of that was about. And it's this incredible release. I couldn't get to it logically with my words. It wasn't necessarily pre, you know, six years old. It was just something else related to an emotion related to my father who died in the eighties.

So it was old and still sort of sitting there. And I, until I could identify what that was about, I couldn't let it go and then make a good decision on what we were gonna do with the estate. So that is one. But I also see this in my work. So I'm thinking about a particular client that I work with who was struggling, senior leader, struggling with a guy that worked for her, and it made no sense.

Like you deal with this personality all day long with zero impact, including by the way, your boss is not all that different from this personality. So what is it about this person that's getting under your skin? And she kept saying, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Who does that remind you of? Oh, that's just like blank in my life.

Some of the worst qualities of that person in my life. Oh, that's why I am so upset when got it, know how to deal with it. And it's that surfacing of what's really inside that our body kind of holds onto. I think. now I've just done that in a non-therapeutic way, but it's those same kind of events that we're talking about.

And agree or disagree? 

Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. It's so important to know where it jumps from. 

Okay. Alright. So the notion is that we have these events. They sit in our subconscious often, sometimes their childhood, but not always. This being able to access them through the body or through hypnotherapy helps you be able to pull them out, look at them and reprogram.

Okay. Thank 

you 

so. You wanna add to that? 

Yeah, because, there's obviously somatic therapy and what I specialize in, as you just mentioned, is somatic hypnotherapy therapy. So it's another layer where I actually work in a state of deep relaxation and through the body to access these subconscious, events, which we call the root cause.

Let's say it's the, it's really your, this enables you to find where it all comes from. And I just want to give you examples so people can maybe, relate to that. And so, you know. As you spoke, there was, there's a big trauma, but there's also small trauma. And small trauma in a way are events where, where repeatedly don't have our needs met.

And these needs are needs for safety, love, respect, and, if that happens repeatedly, it can also be traumatic. But other things can be traumatic, which I see with a lot of CEOs or, top teams, is that they were, for example, given love only when they perform well. And it was very conditional. So they created this belief that in order to receive love, and in other words to be safe, I always have to perform and do something, which then results in them not being able to rest and often reaching burnout or if we don't feel.

Seen or heard as a child by our parent, and this event, again, is stored in our subconscious, then we will probably interrupt people and always try to be the loud one. And, it can impact the dynamic of any kind of team. And often when we're too criticized as kids, then again our self-worth is being impacted.

And so then we have coping mechanisms like, um. Performing and people pleasing into the level that we're actually abandoning our needs and putting the needs of others in front of ours. And so that's again, not very, healthy way of showing up in a work environment or relationships. 

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with making people generally happy.

There's a lock wrong with making everybody happy all the time, or even trying, there's just, it doesn't work that way. I also could imagine this is the seeds of perfectionism. 

Yeah, 

that desire that, unless I'm perfect, I am not good enough in some form, whether that's around safety, love, or respect, as you said at the beginning.

and yes, hypnotherapy, okay, everybody hears the word hypnotherapy and we have this idea from the movies that I can then manipulate you to do and say crazy things on the snap of a finger and that, you know, three days later when I snap my finger, you will do something like shoot somebody we see in the movies.

Okay. Is that real? 

It's not the best. Dr. For hypnotherapy, I must say. not really. So basically, why do I use the state of hypnosis? Is because what? it allows us to access the subconscious, but what does it mean? You know, we have brainwave states and that's basically the speed of our brainwaves. And hyp hypnosis is just a slower.

State. And so let's say now we're in the beta state where we're talking. If we go to meditation, for example, relaxation, we go to alpha, and then hypnosis is theta, which is one beneath, and the next one is delta, which is sleep. So I explain this because every person move through these states every single day, every time we wake up, fall asleep.

And so it's a natural state of the mind, and for the sake of the therapy, I just help people to go into this deep relaxation and they're never under control. They remember everything. They can interrupt the session anytime they would like. They remember everything. They're conscious. And actually the whole session is a dialogue because it's a.

Therapeutic process where we processing trauma, releasing emotions, rewiring the beliefs that we're holding them back for empowering ones. And so for that, of course, I need conscious, to a certain level the thing. What that's different is that the conscious, critical, logical part of the mind is a little more quiet here, and so the protective mechanisms that would normally protect the ego or these hard wounded parts, they kind of kind of go into more of a relaxed state and we can faster access the emotional body and the subconscious.

So this is why I use it. So for people that struggle with connecting to their emotions or their body, which is a very common thing, you know, we weren't really taught this as as kids or throughout the life, and if our childhood was difficult, we learned to live more in our mind as a coping mechanism. So going into this state of relaxation actually helps people to connect with it way much easier.

I know when I ask a lot of my coaching clients who are clearly feeling stressed about something or tense about something, if I ask them where do they experience it in their body, they have zero connection. 

Mm-hmm. 

Even though they may be very athletic, they may be very health conscious, they may eating well, they may be sleeping well, they're just not tuned to where that tension is held in their body, and in some ways what you're doing is helping them get.

To the levels of tension, the levels of emotion, where it's, whether it's felt in their body or not. 

Right. That's amazing. It's actually. I bring parts work, which is IFS, into the hypnotherapy. And sometimes why this is, is because their subconscious mind created a block to protect them and in order to survive, because feeling emotions in their childhood was too overwhelming for them.

It was not possible for their nervous systems to process all that pain. And so this part of them gets created that blocks them from feeling either their body. And the sensations in the body or the actual emotions. And so we work with this part as well. And then after the session, they're not only able to connect to the body and feel their emotions, but they're actually, the purpose is to increase the capacity of their nervous system to feel and to not get dysregulated and stay regulated despite of feeling strong emotions than in their work environment or their relationships.

Great. 

Alright. I'm gonna ask about an example in a minute, but you know, when we think of kind of this sort of work, the deep processing, particularly processing of older memories like childhood memories or early life memories, that feels like something you would do in psychotherapy and we're now talking years of work.

How long does it take working with you in this way to actually begin to unpack and release some of these patterns? 

It's amazing 'cause today I actually got a feedback from a client who is in the top team. He is in the inner circle of the CEO of the company that I work with. And we have done one session and was on the topic of fear of failing and therefore always needing to prove himself.

It was at the level of nine out of 10 and after one session it's at level of three. And he told me that he does not really feel it anymore and he's actually. Not feeling this need to prove himself. It's actually he feels confident in his abilities, feels internally driven, and just feels way much more relaxed and confident.

So that was one session. It's very powerful because in psychotherapy, of course it has its place, but we're often ac accessing things from the beta state, from the very conscious state. So it's very difficult to feel it in the body and we can't really rewire the sub. Conscious as much as we can in the hypnotherapy.

So we're literally in hypnotherapy changing your operating system, the software from which you run. So that's why it's so efficient and effective. 

Okay, I can imagine when somebody has this needing to prove themselves, perfectionist. Over, and I mean overdoing each of these. Feeling inadequate. Mm-hmm. Lack of confidence in some ways.

Perfectionistic fear that they're gonna get fired, that they're not sure where their value is. Any one of those things sound to me like they would be a good clue in your daily life that there is something underneath that that is worthy of exploration. Absolutely. Okay. I wanna come to something you said to me, which is, and I love this quote, unprocessed emotion clouds our vision and our perception of reality.

Explain that. 

So basically, when we have unprocessed emotions, they act like a filter through which we perceive the situation that is happening. And so we are not seeing clearly. So when someone, for example. Doesn't answer us in time, and we suddenly have a sense of like being abandoned or disrespected, and it's a very strong reaction.

We're looking at this current situation through the lens of the past experience, and so when we go back and we release. These emotions from the body and the subconscious. Then when that same situation happens, there is no dysregulation. There's generally understanding, and we're just still feeling very calm, and it does not.

Provoke, let's say, such a strong reaction. we, you know, it. In other words, it also, we project our parents onto our bosses or our partners when we Yeah. You laughing. We all have an experience with this, right? So the more we clear this, and basically what we're doing is that we're helping the younger parts of ourselves.

That are in a place situation where their needs are not being met, where they're feeling like they're not good enough or they're not lovable, or they have to perform to be safe, to actually come to a place of safety love. And then we integrate 'em back into our subconscious in the session. And so then the person is actually.

Going into their life and living their life from this place of inner safety and being loved. And that, of course has different reactions onto, onto whatever they're experiencing. 

Right, right. I'm thinking about a, very, very senior leader that I have interacted with over time. I'm gonna keep this very circumspect so I don't give anybody away here.

Who initially I would've said was an amazingly inclusive, involving, enabling, kinda a role model in some ways for what I think is a great way of leading, but who involved into something I don't recognize as a leader. And I've ne, you know, trying to understand, I'm not coaching him now. I didn't coach him through that journey.

Just for the record. But I never could understand how did I, did I misperceive so badly, or did he transform? And my bet is that, my belief is that what happened is that he felt deeply betrayed. And I know enough of the events to suspect that that might have ha have been case, and that that betrayal tapped something from somewhere else in his life.

And then the distrust, the cynicism, the vindictiveness in place starts to emerge. And you get a very different personality kind of coming out in later years. I think that happens more often than we recognize, than leaders recognize. 

Yeah, I agree and I see that as well. And I would now maybe bring in the lens of also the nervous system because when this happens, the past trauma was triggered and so his nervous system suddenly doesn't feel safe in that environment.

And so what does the nervous system do? The activate the survival response. And so the person goes into fight or flight or eventually freeze. And so. It's also fascinating when I discovered this like four years ago, that we perceive reality and feel about the world and ourselves. Totally differently in each of these states.

So if we're regulated, we have empathy, we are creative, there's, access to intuition. We're, you know, collaborating the amazing, our full capacity. But when we are in fight or flight. We go into, well fighting, so we're in anger. We're critical. We're, often not take responsibility. We blame matters. And so it looks like one person is suddenly somebody else, and that's because it's subconscious.

His nervous system thinks that he's under threat and it's, it's, it's activating this response and eventually what also happens because we stay in the same company and we can't often fight this away or run away from it over a period of time, a lot of leaders can go into functional freeze. So they actually are functioning, but they're totally disconnected.

They're almost like dissociated. They're numb. They can be depressive, they're lethargic. There's no access to energy. They're still doing things, but it's, it's very, very difficult. And so in my work, I also work with a nervous system through somatic exercises that help them to regulate that nervous system that responds.

So they can come back to a regulated state. So I would assume that one, there's a right activation of the nervous system, and two, it could also be activation of some protective parts 

and that becomes the new normal really quickly. All of a sudden everything is right there. We were do it that. So that's normal.

That's what I'm supposed to do. At least that's what I see in my clients. Just to close out this story, I have another person that I worked with that instead of going into the fight mode, went into the freeze or flight mode and you know, in a situation where her boss was not happy with her performance, okay?

For some legitimate reasons. Largely having to do with, she was not explaining to her boss exactly what she was doing and how she was doing it in a bo, the way the boss wanted to understand a very fixable solution, except that my client can't see it like. She's just in complete freeze mode and cannot see that what the boss is asking for is actually really rather straightforward.

We had to go back to an earlier event in her career where she felt set up by a boss and a parallel team, completely disenfranchised, almost lost her job completely, and she was back reliving that experience. And until we can name that experience and say, that's not today. There are two different events.

Move here. I could unblock her from at least being able to say to the boss, here's what we need to do. Super. I'm happy super fast. Now I'm not doing this. Through hypnotherapy. I could imagine hypnotherapy would get us much deeper, much faster, much quicker to a more permanent solution, which I think is a really critical piece.

Okay, so all of that together. Talk to me. I mean, I know you use this. We've talked about how we see it. We see it in emotional volatility. We see it in the cynicism. We see it in distrust. I see it in drama. So my perception of this other person is based on my subconscious lens and my current state of the nervous system.

If I'm in a fight mode, I'm gonna see that as the aggressive move, and therefore I'm gonna feel like a victim. And all sorts. I could, I could say, fine, I'm gonna retaliate and now I become a perpetrator and we just create this massive drama that's really driven out of my own internal state. Okay. So do you see that as well?

Absolutely. And it's, it's critical really to teach people. About the states of their nervous system and to process their emotions because otherwise, you know, we're not acting from the self, from the inner confidence, from this most evolved part of ourselves, we're victims to survival patterns that are sabotaging us and then of course, sabotaging, any efforts of the companies or our own, or our teams.

So. It is, I think I do workshops on this and of course do it in the individual sessions as well. And it, it, it's life changing for people to realize that yeah, the lens can be shifted, you know, just by doing a somatic exercise for two minutes and suddenly you understand and you have to solutions. Yeah.

And before it was, yeah. 

I can't tell you how central I believe this is to our performance in companies. So I wanna repeat two quotes that I think are really, really critical and tie it to yet a third reference. One your statement, unprocessed Emotion clouds our vision. Of what could be and how we could do it.

I added that and their perception of what is real and what my options are today, right here and now. So unprocessed past emotion. Second, we are a victim to our survival patterns, things that we learned way back that are usually subconscious and we're held hostage by those patterns in ways we're not even aware.

Okay. Mm-hmm. I wanna connect that to dear friend John Ott, who I've done a couple of podcasts with. he runs a center called For Center for Collective Wisdom, and the notion is how do I bring people together so that collectively we can really create something that solves a problem we all deeply care about.

So, you know, a big change in effect, collective change. The work with John starts with helping each person understand that they have their own view of reality, often driven by their own subconscious patterns and survival mechanisms and past traumas. Like we can't get to collective solutioning if each of us as individuals aren't aware of this in our lives.

That's how powerful this is. 

Absolutely. 

Couldn't, like, I'm so excited about this work because it feels like it's available solution. I'm not going to go and start doing hypnotherapy. Mind you, I'm calling you and my nephew as, as the resources for this one. Okay. Now walk me through the sales pitch. Suppose somebody listening to this says, oh, I really could use that.

What does the process look like? How, what, what's your process look like? 

So I start with a consultation and mm-hmm. that's a complimentary and I get to know the client and their needs, their goals and what, but according to that, I can actually. You know, tell them what the best journey for them is.

But my signature program is the six months program where we meet monthly and I guide them through the somatic hypnotherapy sessions and also integration coaching sessions where we look at action steps and how to integrate all of the transformation into their everyday life. and it's online. And I also support them in between the sessions.

Great. And you do work with teams as well. What does that look like on a team? 

So for teams, I do workshops, for example, the inner architecture of leadership, and it's an experiential workshop. So I do explain the four layers, which, I work with the mind, the body, the emotions, and the self, and I teach them practical tools on how to rewire their limiting beliefs.

How to regulate or process their emotions, how to regulate the nervous system, which is what we talked about, and how to connect to the self so they are not, victims to that survival patterns, but they're actually acting from the most evolved part of themselves. 

Is that a day long, multiple days? Like what does that look like in practice in terms of 

Yeah, this is a day long, workshop.

It can also be a day. It depends, on, yeah, we can, we can adjust 

it on what the needs are. 

Mm-hmm. 

Alright. And then more importantly, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, how do they find you? 

So they can find me, through my website, which is called, this is soul sessions.com. or on Instagram, where I am as Elona Soul Sessions as well.

And that's probably the best ways of getting in touch. 

Okay, fantastic. Hey, Lorna, I just think this is such an exciting area and I think the work that I know that you are doing with leaders and with team is so, so powerful because I see it, I see it all the time, the ways in which these subconscious.

Patterns, experiences, survival mechanisms, nervous system dysregulation, past events, all of that coming together. That really makes it hard for us to see. Somebody else in a clean view, which makes it hard for me to think about how I want to lead them, how I want to collaborate with them. Where could we really unlock creativity and collab and new ideas.

All of that gets so crowded, let alone the conflict and the drama that comes up from that interpersonal dynamic. I see it every single day. And in fact, if I don't see it, I start to wonder what am I doing as a coach? Like, where do you need help as a coach? because it's there. It's just part of the human experience and having a tool set like yours as a way of unlocking this and reframing it, re-patterning it.

without taking the next five years seems to me to be a wonderful thing. And again, there's, yes, there's place for psychotherapy and all of those clinical therapy, all great, but I'm often looking at leaders with very limited time. So this is, mm-hmm. This is just super helpful. So thank you, Ilona, for being a guest today and for sharing your wisdom.

Thank you so much for inviting me. This has been an absolute pleasure and it's a great passion of mine, so thank you. 

It's a delight. If you want a retail elona, go to this is soul session.com or find her at Ilona. This is Soul on Instagram. I think I got those correct. And join us for our next, session next week on how to get out of your comfort zone.

If you wanna watch this conversation, please go to our YouTube channel at outta the Comfort pod. Send us a comment. We always love to hear from you out of the comfort zone.com. See you next week.

Thank you for joining us today. Tune in for another edition next week with Dr. Wanda Wallace on the Voice America Business Channel. Reach outside your comfort zone this week.