Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hey Gorgeous. This is episode number 171 with the amazing Nina Cooke.

Nina Cooke [0:07]
Hi, this is Nina Cooke, you are listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy.

Christine Schlonski [0:14]
I’m very excited to bring you, Nina, as the last episode of this year and also to have her as the first episode of next year because we will go deep on mindset and mindset is basically your foundation to having a successful life and successful business. Nina is a business mindset coach and she has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs who are frustrated because, in spite of all their hard work, they are still not getting the results they want. Her superpower is showing them how they can release deep inner blocks to gain freedom, to grow their business, vision, passion and confidence. Nina also hosts a wonderful podcast called The Entrepreneur’s Inner Game Podcast, which I highly recommend you check out and where we have all the links in the show notes at https://christineschlonski.com/. So let’s dive right in with the wonderful, Nina. Well, I’m so excited to have you on the show today Nina, welcome.

Nina Cooke [1:19]
Thank you so much for inviting me along. I’m so excited to be here.

Christine Schlonski [1:22]
I know! We have so many things in common because you also talk about the mindset and how you can shift it so that not just life gets easier, but also those sales conversations and everything around selling. So I can’t wait to dive in to see what kind of approach you have to help our audience listening in, wanting to learn, how to heart sell, and having fun in the process. So you seem to be so confident and I have the honor to know you for quite a while now. Can you let us know, has this been always this way, or was there something that made you that confident?

Nina Cooke [2:09]
That’s a great question, Christine. And the answer is, I was not always like this. In fact, I was the opposite. And when I was a child, I was very, I lived in fear. I was very scared. I kept a low profile. I felt that the best way for me to be safe was to be as invisible as possible, especially around my family. When I was at school, I was okay, I had good friends, but inside the home, I felt I just needed to keep a very low profile. And the problem is when you behave like that, you don’t know what’s causing you to feel like that. You just have this fear, this lack of confidence, lack of self-belief, feeling you’re not good enough, you know, worthy, that you’re worth listening to. You have nothing to offer and the problem with that is that you grew up as an adult with those same feelings. And I was very good at hiding this and putting on a mask of competence. And people to say, “Oh, you’re so confident Nina.” And I think, “No, I’m not, I’m just faking it.” But I must be quite good at faking it. And when I had children that were very young, I used to look at them and think, “Oh, you just have this lovely, natural self-confidence. And you can go up to anyone and chat to them. And it’s just, it’s just this lovely, lovely way of being.” And I wanted to be a role model for them. And I knew that when they were very young, I had to sort this out once and for all. And because I wanted them to see me as as being in alignment with myself, not faking not pretending to be something that wasn’t, I felt it was really important for me to be true to who I was. And I started a long journey of personal development and I’ve been reading books about personal development probably since the 1990s. I always had a fascination. I remember the first time I walked into a bookshop, and I came across the personal development section. And I was blown away because there were all these amazing books that you could read about how to feel better about yourself, how to think differently. And the first two personal development books I bought were, I think it was Louise Hay, and Susan Jeffers, Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway. I can’t remember the name of the Louise Hay book, I think it was, Heal Your Life. And I read them and I saw this is amazing. So I’ve been reading and doing a little bit here and there. But nothing had really worked for me maybe I wasn’t consistent enough. And when I got to the point where I felt like seriously want to sort this out, there was a part of me that thought, “Nothing’s gonna work for me. This is just how I am and there are other people who are naturally self-confident who feel very comfortable in their skin, but I’m never going to be able to achieve that for myself, but let’s just see what happens.” I started training. I did the training. I did hypnotherapy training. And they were good. They did help me to some extent, but then the old feelings of unworthiness, not deserving to be happy, not deserving to have why what they kept coming back to me again and again. And eventually, I was, but you see things happen by accident, but they don’t everything’s always planned out in a particular way. And I received this email from a friend who said, “You’re into limiting beliefs, you might find this interesting”, and it led me to a trail to a guy called Morty Lefkoe, an American guy who had developed a system of locating, hidden, deeply hidden limiting beliefs and then eliminating them. And I did work with Morty Lefkoe and again, I was very skeptical. Nothing’s going to work for me. And lo and behold, things started changing. And there wasn’t a big moment I thought, “Oh, my goodness, I’ve had a big breakthrough.” It wasn’t like that. There were just things which I was doing that never been able to do before. For example, I had always wanted to create videos for my services, but never had the confidence to do that. And I remember one day thinking, “I’ll make a short video and it felt it felt good. I felt that’s different. I can make a video and it doesn’t matter if people don’t like it. I don’t feel I have to please everyone. I’m not worried about judgment or whether it’s good enough.” And I put my video out there and it got a few views and that was great that I started posting, I started interacting, I started reaching out to people. And the whole way that I saw myself completely changed. It was like I had 180 degrees turn of my dose facing one way and seeing a very limited way of being and then I turned to face the other way and suddenly, it became much more expansive and possible, and it’s like the blinkers have been taken with my eyes at a much bigger view of what was possible for me. And it was very exciting. And yeah, it was something that I never believed I could ever achieve. I still have moments when I feel down. I still have times when things go wrong. And I just say, “Oh, you know, what’s the point?” But I now know, I know, I can see the bigger picture. I can pull myself up much more quickly, any setbacks last for minutes or hours instead of days and weeks. And I know I now have the tools that helped me to be able to take much bigger action than ever took in my business and in my life, and just to enjoy everything much more than I ever did is that sense of enjoyment. Even when things aren’t working out that it’s okay, I know that I can get to the goals that I want to get to and it may not be the path that I’m seeing that it made me take down different paths. But it’s all good. It’s all okay.

Christine Schlonski [8:10]
Yeah, I just love it and I’m sitting here with a big smile. Yeah, we all fail forward. So we all have those moments, just dear listener and you’re tuning in now just know we all have those days. Hopefully, it’s minutes or just hours. But you know, sometimes it takes a little bit longer depending on what it is. And it’s so funny that you said that because the very first book I remember buying in the self-development space was Louise Hay, Heal Your Life. It’s such an amazing book. I’m going to put it on the show notes page as well. So if you haven’t read it, you can check it out. And I just love this confidence journey because what I see often when coaching I have these amazing entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs to be, and they really don’t see the value they offer to the world. They cannot see their own gifts. And I totally get it because I didn’t see mine. It took other people to tell me to wrap it into my face that I really should do this sales confidence piece because that was what I was a rock star. And they asked me like, “Do you want to throw away all your experience that you learned over a decade in high ticket sales, like closing CEOs, general managers, you could potentially help so many entrepreneurs?”, and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t see it.” So I truly believe that when we step up, and we allow ourselves to shine, we make that decision that even though we might not be 100% sure if this is for us, we give it a try. We do what it takes. Because where we are, it’s just not acceptable anymore. We open up to possibilities, we open up to this new space. When you look back at what you just described, all the tools you’ve learned on the way you are helping your clients with today. They came out of that own journey. And I think it’s for so many entrepreneurs, that’s the same. So have a look at yourself. Where are you right now? And how were your journey and you got to realize how many amazing tools you have collected, or you started to collect. Maybe you’re in the middle of some training, but it’s just that so, so fascinating. So do you actually remember the very, very first thing you ever sold in your life?

Nina Cooke [11:01]
The first thing I ever sold in my life, the first thing I ever sold in my life was insurance.

Christine Schlonski [11:11]
And I think as a kid, or did you start like when you were 18?

Nina Cooke [11:15]
I never sold anything as a kid. No, and I had a job. I had a Saturday job when I was at school. And the job was working in a department store. And I used to serve teas and coffees, but that wasn’t selling anything, that wasn’t selling own thing. The first thing I ever sold was when I was 21. I left university, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I sort of fell into selling insurance. And boy was that hard. That was cold calling. That was the toughest thing I had to do. And I was very naive. I had very little life experience. I didn’t know what I was doing. And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t really enjoy selling insurance. My heart wasn’t in it. But looking back on it, it gave me some really, really great insights into selling. And I’ve always had great respect for the art of selling. Because it’s something that, there’s this the mindset, and having the confidence to pick up the phone and talk to people. But it’s also having a great process as well. And when the two things that combined then you have the greatest possible way of getting as many people to buy from you if it’s a good fit for them. I have a huge amount of respect for the whole selling process. And it’s something that I work with my clients a lot. So many of my clients have this fear of sales conversations, they hate having them and it comes down to the face that they have the fear of getting the know the fear of rejection is huge. Fear of taking a risk. Because if it doesn’t work out that sales conversation doesn’t work out, then they may feel like a loser is a fear of feeling like a fraud because they haven’t fully stepped into that expert status of who they truly are. And there’s also fear about what will people think What will they think when I asked that price? Will the thing come too expensive? And then they’ll say no, and then I’ll feel terrible. So there are so many fears wrapped up in selling and I didn’t understand this when I first started selling, but having worked with hundreds of clients over the years, now I really understand where these fears come from, and also how they can completely remove these fears. So they can, they can walk in more and more these conversations, as many as they can, and realize that getting nose is just part of the journey to getting the yeses and when you can experience that and look forward to getting the nose and be open to having a really great conversation with your prospect. That’s when that part of being an entrepreneur really slots in and you can start booking in more clients. We have to have sales conversations as entrepreneurs, we cannot escape this, you may be able to sell low price programs, through people taking, you know, and then going on to sales page. But if you want to sell high ticket items, more one to one high ticket items, we have to be able to sell well and feel really, really competent about ourselves and our services. And that’s all about standing in our value. The value piece is absolutely critical. Believing in your value, and then you can have that you can really open yourself up be in complete alignment and sales conversations and step into the expert that you truly are.

Christine Schlonski [14:53]
Yeah, what we have quite a few interviews around that rejection piece because it’s so important. So you just said something really interesting which I come across quite a lot when people know what they do and they know how to get to the success piece and they are not turned off by their own fear. So for example in Episode 119 it was a variety Friday where we kind of finished an experiment that Leo Quinn had, he called it the summer of 1000 nose. So he actually went for 1000 nose and if you want to know what came out of it, all the successes he had, you need to listen to Episode 119. But how did you get over the fear of rejection like what was your, maybe your secret sauce or the magic pill or whatever you want to call it, that kind of made it click where you knew. “Oh, I survived. And the more I know I get the more yeses I will get at the same time?”

Nina Cooke [16:02]
I got over the fear of rejection by stop taking things personally. And this was a critical piece to me. And it was a slow realization that when someone says no to me, they’re not rejecting me personally, they just say, “No, I don’t need your service right now. It’s not a good fit for me.” For whatever reason they have, and they have their opinion, they have their thinking about this sales call. And their opinion, if they’re thinking is absolutely fine, if that’s where they are. That’s absolutely good for me, because I have my own individual thinking we all have, and they’re not rejecting me and who I am and therefore, it’s absolutely fine. And when I separated those two things out of my service from me, I realized that no one could ever reject me. It’s impossible for anyone to ever reject me for who I am. This separation I think is key to stop taking things personally. And looking at it in a wider context. For example, if someone says something to me, that’s not very nice, or they say something critical in an unpleasant way. I just think, “That’s their thinking. And I don’t have to take their thinking on to be true about me.” If someone said to me, “You really suck at this. You’re terrible at this service. You’re terrible at mindset”, whatever it was, that’s their opinion. They may be low mood thinking at that point when they said it to me, and that’s fine. But I have to be careful not to take it on to be true about me. No one gets to decide anything about who I am, how I am, what I should do. That’s my job. And to put me to stay on that path of what I want to achieve, how I want to do it. Does it feel good to me? Does it feel hot offended to me? That is my job in life. So it’s not my job to do what my parents want me to do. It’s not my job for me to do what my friends or my partner want me to do. I will do it my own way. And I’ll make mistakes along the way. But those are my learnings. So I don’t take things personally anymore. And one of the things I really like doing is I’ve got a podcast, The Entrepreneur’s Inner Game Podcast. And sometimes I think, “Okay, who do I want to invite to my podcast?” And I look on the internet and I’ll find some names people I don’t know. But you know, people who are maybe quite well known in the entrepreneurial world, now send out a cold email to them or saying, “Hey, I’ve got this podcast, here’s a link to it. I’d love to interview you about your mindset.” And I just send out these emails to people I don’t know who was super successful, probably super busy. And I know most of them won’t reply. I know that some of them may reply and say, “Thank you, but I’m busy and the odd one will say, “Yes”. To me it’s just a game because I’m not taking it personally, I don’t hear back from them or they’re saying no. For me, it’s such a light-hearted, fun thing to do. For some people who will be their worst nightmare. But when you get over that, that huge worry about what will people think about me? Will they be offended? Am I interrupting them? They’re more successful than me. Therefore, they will be interested in me. When they can move all of that out of the way and just see they just people like me. They’re a unique thing, coaches just like me. We are all, I believe, we come from the same place. We’re all equal in this world. I don’t care how much money someone has. We are all equal. Therefore we have every right to ask nicely. The other thing about asking is always okay with a no. But ask someone for a favor. I always say it’s okay if you say no, I won’t be offended, it’s absolutely fine. And that’s what I do as well. Someone asked me something and I don’t want to do it. I’ll just say no nicely. So be happy with a no, it’s okay. If you don’t ask, you don’t get it. I really live by this mantra, “If you don’t ask you don’t get.” I say this to my children, “Ask nicely and be happy with a no.”

Christine Schlonski [20:21]
Yeah, such great advice, especially for me when I stopped taking it personally. And then sales, but so, so important. That is key. It was like a weight was lifted off of my shoulder. Because the funny thing is, you might be worried about what people think about you. And then at the end of the day, you figure out they didn’t even think about you. Don’t waste your energy and time and make sure you love yourself, you okay with yourself because the rest will kind of fall in place. The more you develop yourself, the more you grow, the bigger your dreams become, the more you will achieve. I remember having that one interview and I asked the candidate like what would you like to achieve with in the next year? Buying a new carpet is definitely not something that I would call a bold goal. So definitely the person didn’t have enough to go for, to desire, to get the job, because they were just at, not at the confidence level either. What could you give people that are struggling, that are still worried, “What’s my partner gonna say, my spouse, my parents, my friends”, and they hold themselves back, not just in their businesses because obviously they don’t shine they don’t serve enough and they don’t make enough to make their dreams come true but also like in their personal life? Because you said at the beginning that you were hiding when you were younger, and now you stepped out, you’re so confident. What could we give people at the end of this wonderful interview so they can take action, and do something so that their life becomes better?

Nina Cooke [22:20]
The one key piece of changing how we perceive ourselves and the world, I remember everything that the reality we are creating moment by moment is through our thinking. It has to be there’s no other way. You’re unique. Think I am there, around 7 billion unique thinkers in this world. We’re never going to change anyone’s opinion. We’re never going to change our partner’s thinking, our friends thinking, parents, colleagues, we are never going to be able to do that. So if we’re holding ourselves back from putting our true work out there, and we’re dumbing it down, we’re diluting it. So everyone’s pleased around us. That’s not being true to you and who you are. So you might be keeping everyone around you happy. But you’re not happy yourself. And at some point, that conflict is going to come out to the surface, and you’re going to have to deal with at some point because you’re suppressing something that’s so true about you. And I remember I had a client who was a shaman. And he said he wasn’t able to really put out his true message there. Because people might think, well, that’s a bit whoo, whoo. And that’s a bit odd. And you know, this type of healing what you’re talking about, and that doesn’t fit in with who we think you are. And you know, he may upset people. So you have to work on all of that, in order to get his true message and his marketing out there from the heart. When we’re trying to please other people think what do they want me to say? If I write a blog post, what do people want to hear from me? If I make a video, what do people want me to say? Then we’re doing it upside down. And we’re trying to we’re working from our head. We’re running our business and our lives from my head, and not from our heart. So how do you have that confidence and the courage to get your true message out there is to know that that’s the way you’re going to serve people. That’s what they need to hear from you. By holding yourself back and trying to please the people around you. You’re not only doing a disservice to yourself, but also to the people you can help. The other thing is that we are mind-reading all the time, we’re guessing what people are going to think. And so often, we get it wrong. So many times I’ve thought that someone would think this, and I’ve talked to them and they’re taught something completely different. So we’ve got to stop all this mind-reading and pretending we know how people are going to react around us. How they react is from their own pure thinking, and it is their business and it’s got nothing to do with us. The only thing we can focus on is our thinking being congruent and being aligned to our true message and getting it out there, and people will hear it, so not diluting it, but putting it out in this pure form. And I guarantee that all of your listeners will be surprised when they put their true marketing message out there. How many people put their hands up and said, “That’s exactly why I needed to hear.” I’ve never heard it that way before. This really resonated with me. And that’s what we’re here for. The other thing I’d say about this is that we’re not the victims of our thinking. And often we think we have this negative loop of thinking going round around in our head. We think this is how it is. This is the truth. That is a complete lie. We’re living under a false, we’re living under this falsehood that our thinking is the truth. So that critical voice in your head is not the truth about your actually been allowed to rule. It’s been allowed to run riot. And now is the time for you to realize that actually you are not your thoughts, you are the creator of your thoughts, you are so much more powerful than you ever believe possible. And it has to be true that there has to be something making these thoughts and that something is you, you are creating these thoughts moment by moment. What will that person’s say if I put my message out there, no one’s gonna accept my price. It’s really scary to have sales calls. I feel like a fraud. Who am I to you know, ask for that amount? All of these thoughts are creating moment by moment. So please don’t make the mistake of thinking you are the son’s creation of your thoughts. That is who you are. That’s your identity. That’s not your identity. You are the creator of your thoughts. You are the sculptor that created this sculpture, but you are the maker of that sculpture. So always bear in mind, “Okay, if I’m the creator of my thoughts, I get to choose my thoughts.” How much more powerful could we be than that? We are creating and choosing our thoughts that if you are not happy with your reality right now, is because your thoughts aren’t creating that reality. So to change that, you have to change your thinking, you have to change your thinking. And the easiest way to change your thinking that I’ve come across so fine. I’ve tried so many different things, is by finding all your limiting beliefs, limiting beliefs like this will never work. No ones gonna pay me that much. And what makes me good enough is people thinking well of me, thinking people approving of me, rejection is scary. Find all those limiting beliefs and then release them completely from your subconscious and replace them with new empowering beliefs about yourself about what’s true about you. Of course, I’m powerful. Of course, I offer amazing value for money. Of course, I’ve got something that people would love. And when that’s organic thinking inside of you, then imagine what you actually you can start taking in order to bring in more clients.

Christine Schlonski [28:22]
Yeah, that feels so good already just listening to you and your wisdom. So what we’re going to do, you brought an amazing gift that was called, Smash Your Income Glass Ceiling, which probably no matter where we are in the journey, we can always do some smashing. So I’m going to put the link in the resources, on the show notes page. And I would love to have that, to deepen that conversation, especially about the thoughts, about the mindset, how we create in our next interview, and I’m so excited that this will come up very, very shortly. So thank you, so much for having been on Heart Sells! Podcast and have an amazing day. Well, I just love this conversation. And it’s so true what Nina said, you can’t be rejected in who you are. If you are believing in yourself, which I really hope you do. And you know that there is room for improvement, there’s room for learning, it is a journey, but you are on the right path on your path and nobody else’s. Well, you can’t really be rejected by someone else, at only what you allow to understand as rejection. I think that is such a big truth. I really hope that this helps you move forward in any of your conversations, in any of your relationships, and in really building your business in a heart-centered way that allows you to have the impact the money and the freedom that you truly desire. Hop on over to https://christineschlonski.com/ for the show Notes, for the transcript and for everything around this wonderful episode, as well as go to https://christineschlonski.com/hclgs-registration/ and listen to over 40 amazing experts who are sharing their approach to lead generation, which means to where you can find your ideal clients. I have gathered 40 amazing experts in this venture of the heart-centered lead generation summit. We are getting started in January. No matter when you are listening to this, you will have the opportunity to tune into a replay. So either you sign up right now, heart-centered lead generation summit.com or when you watch the replay, still go to heart-centered lead generation.com and sign up for the replay. Thank you so much for listening for tuning in. Make sure you check out the next episode with Nina we going to talk about aligning your message and what you can do in your core so that your business really, really thrives. Have a wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world and I’m saying bye for now.