#40: How to get over the visibility fear with Helen Hardware

Everything our soul has been through is part of our evolution and our growth, but we don't have to let stuff hold us back. We can utilize every little bit that we've learned and be able to use that to leverage ourselves forward.

Hey, Coach, my name is Lindsay, and I'm here to help heart-centered women like you build the money-making coaching business of their dreams. I've been coaching since 2019, and this pod is about So much more than building your business. It's about using your gifts to build a life and business you're 100% obsessed with. I went from working 50+ hours a week as a first grade teacher to building a sustainable business that replaced my job salary and gave me back 30+ hours a week of my time. Tune in to join the ride and learn from other coaches and experts along the way. Welcome everyone back to the Aligned Coach Podcast. This is your host, Lindsay. I'm honored to have you here. Welcome on our returning Morning listeners and any new listeners that are joining us today. I am super stoked for today's guest. We were just talking behind the scenes and I was like, ooh, we've got to hit record because it's already getting juicy. So welcome on, Ms. Helen Hardwear. I'm so excited to have you here.

Thank you. I'm really thrilled. So thank you for having me.

Yes, absolutely, Helen. So tell us a little bit about what you do, who it is that you help, what it is that you do in the online space. And how did you get here?

Yeah, so I'm the Soulful Confidence Coach. So I really—

that's my doorbell.

Um, yeah, so I'm the Soulful Confidence Coach and I help spiritual entrepreneurs to get past their visibility fears. So those worries about what are other people going to think, what if I try and I fail, what if I'm trying and rejected, and what if I'm not good enough to do it. So they're the core visibility fears that I see with my clients., and I help them to find the natural confidence, the self-esteem, really the authentic layer of confidence that's buried underneath all those fears and all those worries of not being good enough. And I help them clear blocks from this life and past lives so they can really tap into that authentic power and feel empowered to go out and take action and create that dream business.

I love it. Oh, that's so good.

I think that all of us have struggled with The confidence of being visible and the confidence and the certainty behind using our voice and like really showing up as who we are. And even like figuring out, well, like, who am I authentically? Like, what does that even mean? And how do I portray that to the outside world? And then especially in the online space, because we're bombarded with content and pictures and beautiful aesthetics and all of these things. So I just I want to say thank you for the work that you're putting in the world because it's so, so, so needed.

Oh, thank you. And I, that was me a few years ago. Um, as I, you know, I was telling you before, my first business venture was to teach yoga online. And that was long before it's the thing that it is today. I went through a burnout in my professional career and I was an amateur triathlete. I used to do Ironman triathlons and I hit total burnout. And as part of that, I had a spiritual awakening and yoga was critical for my recovery. So because I was a qualified yoga teacher, I thought, right, I'll bring it all together and teach yoga online. But the minute I came to actually put it out there, you know, I did a marketing course, I designed my program, I did all the things that my coach told me I was meant to do. And then I just felt like I was pushing up against a glass wall. I just couldn't get past that fear. What were other people going to think? You know, they knew me as an ex-lawyer and as somebody from banking. What are they going to think of me as being not only a yoga teacher, but a Kundalini yoga teacher, which, let's face it, has a perception of being the weird one.. And so there's that kind of fear. And then there was that fear of, well, what if I put it out there and people reject it and they don't want it and I fail? What are other people going to think if I do that? And then there was another fear layer as well that I remember coming across, which stunned me, which was, what if I'm successful and I have no time for myself anymore? And, you know, what if that means that I'm different to my loved ones and suddenly I'm wildly successful and that, that puts us out of alignment with each other, and how would I cope with that? And of course, all those fears are going through your mind, and I wasn't taking any actions, and none of it was going to happen. And in the end, I just slunk away, tail between my legs, and went, oh yeah, at least I've tried. And I really hadn't. Yeah. And then when I retrained as a hypnotherapist and as a coach a couple of years later, guess what? All the same rubbish came to the surface again, but This time I knew enough about the mind to say, okay, I have to do something about it. I'm an intelligent woman. I can't just let this get in my way. What's going on? So I started to peel away. I worked with healers and coaches and therapists, and I did a lot of shadow work and stripped away those layers of childhood stuff. You know, I, I had a happy childhood, but I was bullied a lot. And I had relatives that made me feel different and excluded. And they'd had big, big scars on my inner child who was just afraid to be seen.. And the more I dealt with that and healed that, then I started to see past lives. And then I was like, whoa, where's this coming from? And then my clients started to do the same. And that's when I started to realize that we've all got these multiple layers that are forming who we really are. And that authentic self is shaped by— I think of it as our soul DNA. It's the journey that we've been on to get where we are today.

Oh, I love it.

Yes.

And it does, it gets us exactly where we are, where we are today, you know, and you starting out as a lawyer and then going into yoga and then coaching and hypnotherapy, each of those steps has gotten you to this exact place, this exact moment right here on this, on this interview with me, you know. So it's so funny to like look at our journey because I'm an ex-teacher and I'm like, who would have thought that I would be utilizing my college degree to like record podcasts and dance on Instagram sometimes, you know, like, who would have thought?

I mean, I have a music degree, so, you know, I never thought that would be relevant, but actually it's surprising the things that I learned as a musician about how to present, how to project, and, you know, those little things have made a big difference actually in my business.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You use all of that knowledge, you know, all of the experience, everything, even, even the experiences from your childhood and from adolescence, like those things come forward and you use them and you help your clients through those same things as well. You know, now you have all of these, um, stories to speak from. You have almost like notches on your belt, and you can say, okay, well, I've been through this, so now I have some experience to, to support my clients through that as well, you know. And, um, you know, speak through—

speak from that perspective.

Yeah, totally.

And I was having that conversation with my client this morning because we took her back through some past life scenes, and she went to two very, very vivid past lives. One where she was, um, I suppose for want of a better word, a frontier woman in America in the 1800s. And that feeling of, um, she wanted to be accepted for who she was, and she married somebody very powerful and suddenly became very visible and loved it and really enjoyed being in the limelight. But when her husband in that life died, she lost that power, in effect, and she'd formed a belief that it's not safe to be visible, it's not safe to be in the limelight because it's temporary. And it's not real, and there's no benefit to it. And obviously that's holding her back with her business today. She wants to get visible, but there's that conflicting belief underneath it that's stopping her from doing that. And it's amazing how, you know, it's those childhood experiences do shape us. Everything we go through, every experience on this life, in past lives, whether it's this planet, other planets, wherever it is, Everything our soul has been through is part of our evolution and our growth, but we don't have to let stuff hold us back. We can utilize every little bit that we've learned and be able to use that to leverage ourselves forward.

Yeah, yeah. Tell me, tell me what, what is that past life like? I, I know what it means, but like, tell me how that work works. Like, how do you— how does she know that that's what her past life was? Like, How— just tell me, how do you walk her through that process?

So if you think hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness, now if you think of a shaman, um, shaman have been using altered state of consciousness and what they would call trance for millennia to tap into other vibrations, other dimensions, whatever it is, spiritual frequencies. And hypnosis really is a modern version of doing that. It's almost a kind of a 21st century scientific approach to it. So we use hypnosis to slow down the brainwaves and put us into an altered state of consciousness. And just like when you have hypnosis on a childhood issue or block, where we may regress back to, you know, the root cause of a fear in this life— so if we were to use an example of fear of spiders, if somebody was to regress back to where their fear of spiders come from— and big newsflash, it's not always spiders, it can be related to something completely different. We can also regress back to lives before this, and some people will spontaneously do that. When you go back to the root cause of an issue, they will spontaneously just suddenly start talking about a description, and you realize that it's not this lifetime. You know, the things they're describing, the environment, the situation, is often historical in context. And sometimes that comes out because they'll describe what they're seeing or what they're wearing. But quite often they, you know, they will tell you their name and all sorts of details around that. So when I work with clients with past lives, it's generally directed. So we use hypnosis to get them used to going back to child— visiting some childhood happy memories. Then we use that experience of regression to go back to being in the womb. We can regress back to between lives, and we can even regress back to the planning stage when we were with our soul group planning this lifetime and what we were going to come into this world to learn. And then we can regress back to past lives when we've been in incarnations on Earth before. And some people will even regress back to incarnations in other worlds, on other planets. I've had clients who are galactics that will regress to being on a spaceship in another universe. So it's really quite amazing what we can, what we can experience. And the mind goes wherever it needs to go with, with hypnosis. Wow.

So I just watched a movie on Netflix this past weekend. I cannot remember the name of it. It's from the producers of, um, the movie Get Out. And I wish I could find the—

or I wish I could remember the name of it, but it was basically where they used—

there was a doctor that used hypnosis to transplant the consciousness of one person into the, into the body of another person. So this person had went brain dead um, so she took the consciousness out of her son and like put it in this other guy. Do you think that that's possible to transplant consciousness from, or like your soul, from one body to another?

Not as something within this lifetime to do as a kind of, um, and the word that's coming up is a little bit harsh, which is kind of Frankenstein-esque. Yeah, yeah. No, I don't think it's something that we can do as human beings to transplant a soul from one body to another. But it's something that what I see with my clients is that we, we do that on a spiritual level, or somebody does it that's, you know, beyond this human plane and experience. That the soul doesn't die. When we die, the soul continues, and then the soul comes back into another lifetime to learn something new, or maybe they didn't complete what they were learning in the past life. And we tend to reincarnate in patterns. The The Eastern traditions call it the wheel of samsara, where we go back into a loop of reincarnation to learn a lesson until we learn it. So from that sense, we will come back, but I don't think we as a human race, scientifically now, could transplant a soul from one body to another. Great for science fiction, and it sounds like a fascinating idea for a Netflix series, though.

Yes, it was, it was. What do you feel like your lesson is? Like, what is the lesson that you're learning in this lifetime?

Oh, I know it's love. I've had that message over and over and over. And when I first kept getting it, I kept saying, well, what does that mean? You know, it's so abstract. Love, everybody loves and, you know, gives and receives. What, what am I meant to do with that? And it took me a long time to realize that it's about self-love. It's about learning to accept your authentic self, learning to discover, uh, who you are, who you were born to be, and learning to love yourself and the power that comes with that. And it's not about an ego trip. It's not about, you know, bragging and saying I'm wonderful. It's about saying I'm wonderful from a place of love, because we're all wonderful. We're all soul beings. We're all spiritual beings having a human experience. And it's about compassion for yourself and for other people as well. I think part of my purpose with that is to teach other people how to access their own self-love.

Do you feel like in a past life you were— maybe you didn't give yourself that self-love, and maybe you were like super harsh on yourself? Or like, why do you think that that what is the lesson of this lifetime?

I'm so curious about this.

Um, so number one, spirit's told me that's my lesson. Um, I've heard that one repeatedly. Years and years and years ago, I read a book by Amy McLeod, and he talks about different purposes that we come into this life for. And there was a meditation in the book to discover your soul purpose, and he lists out some different, you know, purposes. Maybe you're here to be an adventurer, or a teacher or a healer or different things. And I looked through the description, I was like, well, I could be that and I could be that and I could be that. Just ignored love and carried on. And no, when I did the meditation, immediately the answer came up was love. So that's why I think that's my purpose. And I've meditated on it many times and the answer always comes about the same thing. But when you said, have I been harsh to myself in past lives? I've been harsh to myself in this life, never mind past lives. I used to be so harsh on myself, and I wore it like a badge of pride and honor. And it took a long time for me to drop those defenses. It was fear. It was covering up for my, you know, what I felt were my inadequacies and the fact that I didn't believe at a soul level I was good enough. And when I did, that's when those fears started to just drop away. And knowing that actually it's okay to love myself, it's not conceited, it's not an ego trip, it's not about gloating. But it's just a beautiful, compassionate, and it's a very spiritual gift to give to yourself.

Oh, I love it. I love it. How can someone who maybe is questioning their purpose or sort of what this life's purpose is, or like what their work is in this life, how do they figure that out? I mean, how would you— is there— would you recommend them doing some hypnosis? Or maybe like, what would you say to them if they're listening and they're like, well, you know, I, I'm not really sure what my purpose is. I know I want to help people, or I know that like I've been through these events or these traumatic events or whatever, um, what is my purpose though? Like, what would you say to them?

How would you guide them? Um, so that's a really great question, and I've actually just launched an offer on that at the moment. Oh, tell us! Yeah, so yeah, absolutely. Using hypnosis, you can tap into that, um, the spiritual realms and get that guidance. And be able to get that clarity to engage with your guides, your spirits, your angels, or whoever it is that comes and works with you. And to be able to ask that question, you know, what did I decide to come into this life to learn? And we can regress back to the soul planning stage, as I said before, and also uncover, you know, what challenges were we planning to face and how are we meant to respond to them. And it's a— I always think of it a bit like spiritual chess, to be honest. We can kind of see how the game was meant to be played in advance. And then we can translate that and say, well, okay, yeah, you know, I went through that experience, but this is what I can learn from it. And this is how I can not let it hold me back, but I can help it shape my future and be able to utilize it in a really powerful way. So yeah, absolutely. Hypnosis is a brilliant way to connect in with your guides. And I personally find it quite hard to meditate, even though I'm a qualified yoga teacher. I'm a very left-brained person and my chitter chatter goes off. Nonstop. So I sit down on my meditation cushion and I think, must remember to defrost some food for dinner. Oh yeah, I must remember to send that email. Yeah, I've got to go and pick up that parcel from the post office. And, and, you know, my mind fires like that. So I find it really hard to slow my brain down for meditation, but I can put my brain into hypnosis a lot more easily. And I do think it's, it's a little bit of— and the word is cheat sometimes springs to mind— it's It's not a cheat because it's a perfectly valid form of altered consciousness, just like meditation or just like a shamanic trance. It's— but it is a great way of using the tools that we've learned about in the 20th century science to slow down the brainwaves. Because what happens when we go into hypnosis, when we're in a day-to-day situation like now, we're in a beta brainwave. So that's just the, the oscillations, the frequency that our brain is ticking over at. And when we're super stressed and we're really busy and it's all manic, we're in a high beta brainwave. But when we slow our brain down, we can get to an alpha brainwave, which is that point just before you fall asleep at night. And if you ever— if you're a creative person and you're crafting something or whatever, maybe it's, I don't know, writing slides or recording a podcast, or maybe it's painting or sewing or something else, If you ever get in that sort of, that zone, and you end up in a state of flow as you're creating, you're in an alpha brainwave at that point. And it's, you're naturally in it just before you fall asleep at night, which is why many creative people like writers and painters and poets say that they do their best work very late at night, because you can naturally access that brain frequency. And hypnosis helps slow us down from a beta brainwave into an alpha brainwave, which is a light hypnosis. And actually, you only need to be in a light hypnosis for change work to be effective. But then we can go into deeper levels of hypnosis and slow the brainwaves down to much longer frequencies as well. And we go through sort of different stages.

Wow. Do you incorporate breathwork with your hypnosis?

It's a great question. I don't at the moment. It's something I have considered doing. Um, I like to bring in more of kind of the yogic principles into what I do, but I don't actually do breathwork now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I find it very difficult to slow down for meditation as well. I find that it's just enough for me to like remember all the things that are on the list, you know, what I need to do, all those things. And so two things. One, oh, isn't that more reason to do the meditation? Right. Yeah, totally. And then the other thing is that is why I personally enjoy yoga so much. Um, I like to do Kundalini yoga or other types of just like a flow, you know, just regular yoga. Because I find— and I don't know if I'm like in an alpha brainwave or anything, but I definitely do feel like my brain quiets down and I become much more of like an observer of my thoughts during that time. So I don't know if that's considered like meditative or not, but it definitely feels like restorative to me after I do a session. So if you can't meditate, go do some yoga or hypnosis.

What I find really fascinating about Kundalini yoga, now I've trained as a hypnotherapist, is Kundalini yoga you do with your eyes closed. If people haven't done it, it's very spiritual. You do it with your eyes closed, but you focus your eyes at your third eye point, your brow point, unless obstructed otherwise. Now that actually puts a strain on the optic nerve, which is what slows our brainwaves down. So actually what we do with Kundalini, and why I personally I think we find it so easy to get into that state doing Kundalini yoga is because it does activate those brainwaves. So I really do think that hypnosis, trance, meditation, it's all related. It's a science is starting to look at it from a hypnotherapy perspective or hypnosis perspective, but it is just the same thing as meditation and trance. It's just another way of accessing an altered consciousness.

Wow, I feel like I've been doing it wrong now. I have not— like, I generally do yoga with my eyes closed anyways, but I didn't know that I was supposed to have them closed during that, and I didn't know that I was supposed to be directing it to my third eye. So thank you for that. Like, I've just started doing in-person yoga classes. It's been so long since I've done in-person classes. So now that the world in my area is starting to open up a bit, we're taking classes with precautions and safety, you know, safety precautions. But that is good to know. So I will definitely implement eyes closed, concentrate on my third eye, um, next week. I do know— this is what I know about it so far— is that it's like, it's very like, like immune, immune, immune boosting. Um, it's a lot of like core work. It's a lot of like kind of moving things out from my core. That's what I thought.

I feel like I have it all wrong now.

No, no, it's all— everybody's experience is their own experience, and that's whatever you need in that moment. And You can have two people that are doing the same asana or kriya right next to each other that are following the same postures, the same movements, and are going to have completely different experiences. And neither is wrong, it's just whatever they needed in that moment.

Yeah, yeah, that's good, that's good. Thank you for that. Yeah, I love it. I was in the gym this morning with my husband and we do weightlifting, and this morning I was like, oh, I'm so ready for a yoga class. Like, this is boring, I want to go really relax in yoga. And I'm like, and he's like, yoga's not exercise. And I said, well, I break a sweat. I break a sweat. And I also come out feeling so just like nourished and juicy and just like, you know, just like I've relaxed, you know, like better than sleep, but like just nourishing to my whole body, you know. So it's, it's a good practice.

Definitely. Yeah. And that's exactly what it's designed to do.

I love it, love it.

Amazing.

Okay, so tell us about your offer where you are helping women or helping people discover their purpose through past life work and hypnosis and all that good stuff. Tell us the offer that you're putting together right now.

Yeah, so I've actually just got a mini offer out for August at the moment, which is to find your soul purpose, just because so many people were saying to me, I don't know what, you know, I've got this feeling, this pull, this call that I'm meant to be here for a purpose, but I don't know what it is. And that can be really frustrating, you know. And I know before I found mine, I kept thinking, well, how am I meant to know? What am I meant to do? So I really just wanted to be able to put out there a little mini offer for people to have that experience, to really get the clarity as to what their soul came into this life to do. So that's very much on top of kind of the other work that I do around helping Spiritual Entrepreneurs Overcome Their Visibility Fears.

I love it.

Thank you for that. Thank you for sharing that with us. And if any of our listeners are interested in it, or if they just want to come soak up some of your work, where can they find you? Is there anything you want them to go do after listening to this, or where can they just come connect with you?

Yeah, absolutely.

So you can connect with me on Facebook. So it's facebook.com/helenhardware, and you're very welcome to join my Soulful Confidence Collective, which is my Facebook group, which is for spiritual entrepreneurs who want to get confident to make their unique impact in the world. And I would love to offer you guys a free download, a guided hypnosis to connect with your higher self. So if you go to helenhardware.com/higherself, um, you will be able to download that. And it's just a beautiful little 15-20 minute journey just to connect with your higher self, receive a message and a gift from them. And some wisdom, and then just be able to integrate that into who we are.

I love that. Thank you for sharing that. We will definitely put that link in this episode's show notes that you all can go and grab that. Thank you so much for coming on, Helen. I have thoroughly enjoyed this. I love these interviews. I love chatting with, with just new faces, and I love the perspective that you've brought today, um, to me around yoga and hypnosis and, and what it means to really dive back into your past life and to Discover Your Purpose. So thank you for that. Thank you for coming on, Helen.

Thank you for having me. It's been so much fun.

It's been lovely to connect. Yay!

Awesome, awesome. All right, everyone, you can go and connect with Helen. You can come and tell her what your favorite takeaway was. Please leave us a review if you just love today's episodes, or if you want to hear something different or something deeper on this topic, let us know in the reviews, and we will see you all on the next episode of the Aligned Good Podcast.

Bye-bye!