EP 9: Go From Overwhelmed to Empowered

Meet Pascale Cook-Fernandes: A Guide to Clarity and Healing

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Julie: It is my great pleasure today to welcome Pascale Cook-Fernandes to the Whole by Design podcast. You’re about to hear about how incredible she is and hear her amazing voice, which I treasure. My name is Dr. Julie Lopez. I am the owner and founder of the Viva Center and your podcast host for today. Before we jump in don’t forget to check out our website for free and low cost resources that can change your life.

Thank you so much for joining us, Pascal. I just want to say, first of all, Pascal has this incredible energy. It is so supportive. It is so soothing. And that, paired with all of her wisdom and her coaching skills and her, well, I found this out fairly recently, her past history as an early education teacher. It makes so much sense now because you’re always so soothing to me, especially when I’m going through hard stuff or going through struggles.

She is the founder and owner of Women Finding Clarity, which she helps people do all the time. And we’re going to learn a little bit more about her and some of the things that she might be able to offer to us as we explore our human system, the way it works, and specifically how to find clarity and what a valuable tool that is. I want to encourage you to stay until the end, where Pascal is going to be sharing her three secrets to step out of overwhelm.

Thanks so much for being here, Pascal. 

The Slippery Slope of Overwhelm

(2:29)

Pascal: Thank you for having me, Julie. I’m very excited to be here. I feel like we’ve talked about this for a while now, and we’re actually making it happen. So, thank you for this honor.

Julie: Of course. It’s great to have you. So, you know we’re focused here on the human experience and, very specifically, on stepping away from some of the damaging language and non-compassionate ways of understanding our struggles. And I’m sure with your focus on really helping women find clarity in their lives, you’ve seen some of these types of things play out, and I’d love your take on that.

Pascal: Oh, my goodness. I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it, right? I think to some degree, it’s a spectrum, and we’ve all experienced the damaging words, the hurtful feelings, all of it. Thankfully, I’m not on the deeper end of that spectrum, right? But so many people are. And when we get into that place of hurt, of maybe being degraded, maybe we fall into the less than, the unworthiness, and it’s such a slippery slope.

Think about it like a sliding board, right? If you put oil or grease on a sliding board, you can go down really fast, but it’s going to be super hard to climb back up again. And I feel like where we are in our humanity, in this place in the world, so many people now have taken that quick slippery slope down, but maybe don’t know how to get back up again. 

Rebuilding Confidence & Worthiness Through Energy Healing

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Julie: Yeah. And so when you talk about that slippery slope down, I’m thinking about how overwhelming and confusing it can feel, especially, right, we’re post-COVID era, there’s a lot more reclusiveness, people kind of working from home on their screens a lot. And what are the types of things you see when you’re working with your clients that you help them kind of work their way out of?

Pascal: One of the biggest things that I see right now is worthiness and confidence issues, where I think, first of all, I call COVID the C word.

Julie: Oh, I get that. I get that.

Pascal: Yeah. Because it brings up so much just, ugh, right? And there are a lot of people who really enjoyed the break, the shutdown down and the, the just going in and pulling in and becoming reclusive and where that might’ve felt good for a little bit, it was a respite. If you get too comfortable there, once you’re there, you start to detach from society. You start to, again, the reclusiveness, you stop being able to interact comfortably with people, we’ll say on the outside. And so your confidence takes a hit, your worthiness takes a hit. Who am I to show up? I don’t have anything important to say, the world is going on and I’m in these four walls. So whether it’s, you know, the layperson, the entrepreneur, anybody who really has taken that journey in and hasn’t come back out quick enough are finding it harder and harder to come back out.

Julie: Yeah. So I’m thinking about our mental health world, and I’m imagining there are things like depression or maybe even anxiety about what that looks like when the walls kind of close in. And I’m wondering when you see this type of a situation. And of course, as an entrepreneur myself, I really identify with, you know, what happens energetically and what happened. I mean, I hadn’t heard COVID called the C word, but I get it. I totally get it because there was so much loss and there was so much struggle that has happened as a direct and indirect result of that big time period of shift and change. And I’m wondering if you have any specific stories of clients you’ve worked with or themes that you’ve seen where your program around helping people get clarity within themselves has really had an impact.

Pascal: Yes. Thank you. That’s such a great question. I love pointing our focus to other people and how they’ve come out and how they’ve, you know, become more successful. And I would say that with every single client in the work that I do, it’s always going within; it’s always turning the lens in. We want a quick fix. We want the magic wand to say, Oh, here you go. And now it’s better. We live in a society of our attention span is just so short now. And so we want instant gratification. That’s all looking outwardly, right? And it’s so important to look inwardly, and every client goes through the same thing. They have to turn in, they have to identify where they’re feeling these feelings in their body as an energy worker. That tells me so much. And oftentimes, when we’re sitting in conversation about their struggle, about their stress, about their overwhelm, their anxiety, I’m intuitively picking up where it is in their body, in their energetic body, maybe even before they realize where it is themselves. Right.

And so depending on where they’re feeling, their feels will depend on what we talk about that will determine what we look at that will determine how they change their thinking, how they change their behavior.

Understanding Chakras, Energy, and Personal Growth

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Julie: Awesome. I love that. And, of course, I forgot to mention that you’re a Reiki master. So of course, you weave that into what you’re doing with your clients. That makes so much sense. And that’s really important. It sounds like really listening to the body and listening to the unique mapping of the body really is part of the secret sauce of what you do to help people come out on the side.

Pascal: Yeah. So, let’s think about it this way. As an energy worker, I frequently reference the seven major chakras in the body. And for anyone who doesn’t know, those are seven major energy centers within your body. Each one resonates at a different Hertz level. Each one is associated with a different color and, you know, side note from the bottom up, it’s the colors of the rainbow ‘ROYGBIV’, but each one deals with a different part of your life and the energy in which you show up.

So, let’s talk about your confidence for a moment. Your confidence relates to your solar plexus chakra, and your solar plexus chakra is yellow. And if you’re taking a hit to your confidence, either because someone, you know, put you down, you have feelings of unworthiness, you might have a little bit of a sick belly. You might have those pangs of anxiety or fear when you think about interacting with other people. And so, you know, when you think about, Oh, I have to go out in public today, and I have so much stress, you might be putting your hands on your upper belly. That’s your solar plexus chakra. So what we want to do is we want to look into that energy, and we want to think about, you know, why are you feeling a lack of confidence there? What has happened? How can we reset that confidence? How can we clear out that stuck energy, that unworthiness energy that’s there, ground you, and then fill that energy back up, give you more confidence to step out into the world more freely with less stress, with less anxiety. 

The Importance of Authenticity & Creativity

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Julie: I love that. I’m pretty much addicted to anything transformative. And I loved even the visual journey that you walked me down, not only with the chakras and the rainbow colors of them, I’ve seen some of those charts. They’re so beautiful. But also of what someone might come in with when they’re feeling less confident, less worthy, which of course we know impacts decision-making, impacts the way you look at strategy, the way you might execute on a plan or a project that you have before you. And so I love that visual of seeing someone more reclusive, maybe binge-watching Netflix or something like that, as opposed to actually digging in and doing the thing that’s more aligned with what they value and what, you know, they’re motivated to create out in the world. So I can see your work having a nice ripple out effect.

Pascal: Thank you. You know, I think one thing that’s super important to note is that however you’re showing up in the world is okay. Right. We, as humans, as a society, maybe it’s only our culture, I don’t know, but we have this feeling like we need to show up a certain way. We need to be a certain way to be enough, to be okay. And the reality is that we’re okay just as we are; everything in nature is okay just as it is. We’re a part of nature, and we need to step out of this feeling of falling into line of being like everyone else. The most amazing thing you can be is to be yourself, to be creative. Yeah. Right.Raising the roof. We are innately creative beings. We’re here to create. I mean, think of yourself, think of all the beauty that you’ve, don’t you make that face, all the beauty you’ve brought to the world, all the healing, all the creativeness that you help inspire in other people. That’s your sacral chakra. That is your orange chakra. And when that chakra is blocked, when you are not in your creativity, it’s a ripple effect that blocks you all the way up and down, and it affects every part of your life.

Julie: Yeah. Ouch. Yeah. I can feel that. I could feel that when you were saying that. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you like the best about your work?

Pascal: I think that is such a great question. And you just made me pause. I think what I like the best are these interactions, the conversations with people that I otherwise would not have met, and realizing that for all of our differences, we’re all so much the same. It doesn’t matter your social class. It doesn’t matter your weight. It doesn’t matter your size. It doesn’t matter your gender, your sexual affiliation, your religious affiliation. The more we’re different, the more we’re the same. 

Julie: Yeah. That’s pretty awesome. I love that. And it makes room for people to be themselves, unique the way that you were just talking about, because I do think there’s so many pressures in our culture and society to be a certain ideal. That’s externally based, and it’s soo damaging. So I really see your work as integral for that in terms of changing that conversation and helping people find the courage to actually be themselves authentically, which I imagine comes from clarity, doing that internal work and finding clarity. 

Pascal: Yeah. And, you know, again, going back to the idea of our attention span and wanting a quick fix, the work is never done, right? Because every time we – I’ll say it like a video game, we complete a level, a new level opens up. And that’s the beauty of the work is that, you know, at any point throughout our lives, not only are we up leveling, but we’re able to stop and turn around and look back at our PhD in life and say, wow, I didn’t realize how far I’ve come. It feels like magic. All of a sudden, I’m here. I never knew I could get here. 

Boundaries & The Power of Saying No

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Julie: Awesome. That’s really cool. I love that. Very cool. So tell me in your work, you know, are there certain things that you see as really pivotal in terms of what makes the difference around someone stepping out of that space that you talked about, that kind of lower space, less confidence, less sure, I guess we could say less clear about what’s going on for themselves.

Pascal: Yeah. I think the pivotal point when someone really starts to have a breakthrough is when they understand that focusing on their self – their Self with a capital ‘S’ is not selfish, right? We have this idea that it’s selfish to say, “no”, I don’t want to show up for that event. I, you know, I, I can’t come. I’m not available. We have this idea that it’s selfish to say, I need time for me. I need to refill my own cup. I need to replenish my soul, and sure, that’s selfish, but in the best kind of way. Selfish with a capital ‘S’, it is replenishing its rediscovering yourself. It’s filling yourself up, but not in the way that we always think we think self-care for example, is going to a spa, but self-care can be saying no to that event because you don’t have the energy for it and saying no unapologetically, kindly, but unapologetically self-care might be really going within and saying, you know what? I want to explore my creativity because I know that when I do that, that energizes me. So yes, you might be feeling selfish, or someone might tell you that you’re selfish because you’re not showing up for an event, but are they selfish? Because they want you to show up even though you don’t want to. I would say, “yes”.

Julie: I love that reframe. I love that. I just created maybe in the past month a worksheet for people who are chronic “Yes” sayers that end up with their plates overfull. And it was a worksheet on how to strategically say “Yes” to your boundaries, like say yes to saying “No”, really. And it made me think about how important that is in terms of preserving energy and being able to honestly be yourself, right? Because if you’re saying yes to everyone, you’re just kind of diluting what really matters to you, which is, I imagine, some of the work that you’re working on, which is how do you get clarity about your priorities? How you get clarity about what matters to you the most so that it can actually guide what you commit to?

Pascal: Absolutely. And one of the things that I feel like is so important for people to understand is that boundaries are for you. They’re not for everyone else, right?

Julie: Like, you define them meaning, is that what you mean?

Pascal: You define them. You set them for yourself. You’re not setting them up for the other person in your life. It’s saying, okay, this line can move to this point. And then I’m at capacity, and that’s my boundary. Or maybe you want to put your line just before capacity, right? For that elusive self-care. But you’re setting that for yourself, for your own health, for your own well-being. It has nothing to do with the other person. And the work that I do is turning within, and we really look at what are my beliefs? What are my values? How do I set boundaries based on the beliefs and values that I want to carry with me moving forward? And not only setting those boundaries, but also how do I enforce my boundaries? What happens when someone breaks one of my boundaries? How do I handle that? Because it’s in knowing those things ahead of time, you’re able to actually maintain the boundary.

Julie: Yeah. I love that. I love that so much. And I’m picturing you with your groups of women where people end up supporting one another with that, right? Because it is a conditioning thing, and it is like strengthening a muscle, right? Once you get clarity, it’s also around implementing it out into the world and having the courage and the training and the practice to do that when the moment counts. So I love that, Pascal. And I love picturing you in your element doing that kind of thing.

Three Secrets to Stepping Out of Overwhelm

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Julie: So we’re at that time. So, before we wrap up, what you’ve all been waiting for, I’m going to turn it over to you to finally share those three secrets to step out of overwhelm, which, of course, is so important in this day and age.

Pascal: So important. I mean, hands up. We always feel like we’re overwhelmed, right? And the secrets, the three secrets, are not necessarily secrets or shouldn’t be.

The first secret is to just stop and notice. I’m feeling overwhelmed. Where am I feeling it in my body? What is coming up for me? Just stop and notice. That’s it.

The second secret is to do exactly what you just did, right? Yes. If you’re feeling tight in your chest, you notice that’s where you’re feeling it. Put your hands on your chest, both hands, close your eyes, and just take some deep breaths and breathe into that place that you’re feeling the stress and the overwhelm.

And then the third secret is just to reset. What do I need to do at this moment to maintain this feeling? This feeling of, I just eased the pain in my chest. What do I need to do to show up from this place? 

Julie: I love that. And I can see how each one of those things, there’s probably more to each one of them, techniques, strategies, even like your coaching and your experience around what those next steps could be, seem like they would be really, really valuable.

Pascal: Yeah. Thank you. It’s true, right? There are special strategies, special tips, and tricks. There are, you know, it’s this hive mind of creation of having conversations around all of it. And the secret really is you can just do those three things in the beginning. And the more you do them, the more you realize, wait, I feel like there’s more here. What else can I do? Because this is working in the short term, but when someone works with me, I go even deeper with them. That way, they can maintain that reset of getting out of overwhelm, of reduced stress and anxiety.

(23:41)

Julie: I love that. That’s amazing. I also happen to know that you have a free tool on your website. I think it was called the five-minute energy reset. So that’s another option for people to get really concrete, right? You gave us the three secrets, but here’s a way to actually implement something that can give you an energy boost during the day, anytime you feel overwhelmed. And I love that. So you can head on over to her website to get that.

(24:10)

Thank you so much, Pascal, for being here today. Thank you for joining me on this episode of Hole by Design. I hope it left you feeling inspired to toss out the labels, embrace new perspectives, and take one step closer to the joy and clarity you deserve. As always, visit us at www.vivapartnership.com to access our amazing free and low-cost resources that will empower you and your loved ones on health and healing. Let’s spread the message, subscribe, review, or share this episode with someone who could benefit from a stigma-dropping approach to mental fitness today.