Transcript

Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somata Coaching Academy podcast. Hey there, Brian.

Brian
Hey, Ani.

Ani
We are joined with our friend, Gabes in the faculty lounge today. Again. I love it. Hey, Gabes.

Gabes
Hi.

Ani
Hi. Thanks so much for joining us, Gabes. We’re talking today about a topic I really love to talk about, getting your soul back. And Gabes has a really powerful story to share in our faculty lounge. The faculty lounge is a great opportunity for us to highlight our graduates and our students to be able to share meaningful stories that inspire. And today we’re joined by Gabes Copeland. And Gabes is a graduate of our Somatic Coach Professional program. So you are out there doing the somatic coaching work, Gabes. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your practice?

Gabes
Yeah. So I am an SBMC graduate, so I practice sensation-based motivational coaching. And who I focus on is I have a place in my practice for men. I work with a lot of men in high tech, as well as I do pro bono work with young women who are making that transition from college into the workforce, or they’re in their first job, and they’re now looking for what’s next for them. Those are the places that I like to focus my energy on. It’s really great.

Ani
That’s awesome. I love to hear that you’re working with leaders and you’re working with people who are in organizations, you’re with people who are out of organizations. Personally, your work with the girls touches my heart as we have kids who are in college and transitioning. That’s such a big deal, Gabe. That’s such cool work.

Brian
Yeah. I also have to say, Gabes, too, you are on our faculty, right? I mean, so that’s another part of you with our Living with the Laws program, a year-long mastermind program that we do to help entrepreneurs, and business owners, embody the natural laws of the universe and help them become very practical in their decision-making and their functioning. The course of that program has been amazing, and you’ve been an incredible part of it. That’s the one thing I really appreciate about you, Gabes, is you’ve got this tech mind. You’ve got this practical, tangible aspect to the work that you do, but you also are able to go into these more wider thinking platforms, really start to open up your awareness a little bit more in terms of the creativity in your creative mind. I think that’s something that really makes you so special. You’re able to see things from multiple angles, not just get stuck in the algorithm of solutions. I think that is really what makes you really unique and really amazing and really powerful in the work that you do with your clients. Yeah, I agree.

Gabes
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I’m a squirrel.

Brian
And you’re a squirrel. Yeah, exactly. We love the info. Yeah.

Ani
She just likes to collect those nuts as well. Well, there’s also an associate coach here at the academy, and we love having you help us to serve our clients in those ways. And so I want to hop back before all of this stuff, before we knew you. I joke with Gabes that I remember the first time I talked to her, I was at my son’s soccer game, and I remember our conversation. But let’s let the listeners in on a little bit of your background. Did you know that you wanted to be a somatic coach? Is that why we were having a conversation? What was going on for you at that time?

Gabes
Yeah, no. The answer is no. I did not know I wanted to be a somatic coach. After 21 years working in high tech, I took a layoff, took a layoff package. I knew a couple of years before that, that the company was going in a different direction. It was profit over people. It wasn’t aligning with my values, and I had responsibilities. I had a family. This is what I knew. I had grown up at the company, very proud of the work I did. In June of ’21, I took a package in that summer, not really thinking it through what was next for me, but yet knowing that I needed to move on. What happened was, is I experienced a tremendous amount of grief and feeling lost. I spent that summer doing things for self-care. I had a therapist, I had a coach, and yet I was still stuck. I could not figure out what was next for me. A colleague of mine who Ani knows very well said to me, “I met this incredible woman. I just talked to her. I think you should call her. I think there’s something there.” And that is how I ended up talking to Ani.

Gabes
It was a weekend, wasn’t it? Or something like that? I think so, yeah. I just told you my story. I told you where I was. And you said, “We’ve started our cross-mapping class. We’re about two weeks into it. Are you interested?” I said, Yes.

Ani
We had already started.

Brian
That’s right. I remember that now.

Ani
We had just started the class. It was an immediate thing.

Gabes
I spent the weekend reviewing the videos and all the paperwork that you guys had already started and everything. I threw myself into it. In my first class, here I am, I show up with… They’re all physical therapists at that point, because a lot of your clientele at that point was physical therapists. It’s changed a lot and it’s really expanded. It was me. Yet in that moment, it was really about me healing myself. Here I am surrounded with this community who just opened their arms to me. It was at that moment what I needed. I was so broken and so I had so much other things going on in my life as well. It wasn’t just the job, and it changed my life.

Brian
Oh, gosh. Yeah. Thanks, Gabes. You’re bringing me back.

Ani
it’s one of my favorite things to hear people’s origin story with us because so often people are in a lot of transition. They have a lot of things that are going on in their world. And there’s this knowing or something. I don’t know, it might sound a crazy leap of faith sometimes, but there’s this knowing that I’m in the right place or this is the right place. What was that for you that you were able to surrender into, “Yeah, this is the right decision?”

Gabes
I think one of the things that I have always been an achiever, and I’ve always known what the next thing was for me. I always knew… You think about the programming that we get, be a good student, and then now it’s like, go to college, and then you meet someone, and you get married, and you have a family, and you buy a house, and all those things. I think where I was at in my life, and I’m a learner, I like trying things, I’m always looking for how do I continue to be the best version of myself? What happened for me is when I took the leap of faith, when you were talking to me, it was like, “That’s it. That’s the missing piece.” Because I had been, like I mentioned, I was doing therapy, I was doing coaching. I was so in my head, processing my pain, my grief, how I was feeling, felt a lot of shame. We talk a lot in SBMC when we’re working with our clients about shame and those core wounds. And yet when I talked to you at that moment, Ani, it was like, “That’s what I’m missing.”

Gabes
I’m so disconnected to how I feel, how I feel in my body, the sensations. I didn’t even know it until that moment. And so that was the leap of faith of, wow, “Talking to this person, I think she gets it, and I want to be a part of this.” I know this is the right thing for me. So the intuition of following what I needed at that moment. I think it was the first time in my life that I really listened to myself.

Ani
That’s so cool.

Brian
That’s very cool.

Ani
That’s so cool. A lot of people tell us that they feel like they’re in soul-sucking jobs, and it’s this cliché that I think we use. It’s not. Will you tell us a little bit about what… I want to put some new language or more language around what that felt like looked like to you to be in a soul-sucking… Then you’re having a different experience now. To put some language also around the contrast of what it could look like, I think would be really helpful.

Gabes
Yeah. It got to a place where you’re listening to the people around you, and people around you are feeling the same thing. You want to get to where the next stock options are going to be, your RSUs are going to be released. You’re thinking in terms of every six months or a year. Now it’s money. You’re feeling handcuffed. Okay, I got to provide. Yet, Okay, I got to finish this project and get to the next one. We talk a lot about rhythms. Natural laws. Our law course, we just talked about rhythms. But there’s a rhythm in particular, in my experience with high tech, where it was just like, what’s the next thing? What’s the next thing? I just got to get to the next thing. After a while, you just start to lose yourself. You don’t remember your values. In my case, I didn’t know my purpose anymore. I had a team of people, so I was managing a team of people who I cared deeply about. It got to be to the place where on the post-it note, it wasn’t just me, it was all these people. I was constantly playing chess.

Gabes
There’s politics. There’s an unconsciousness that you go into, and it just becomes soul-sucking where you dread going to work, logging in on Monday morning. It’s constant. You’re always connected. There is no downtime. I think the whole time that I worked there and I took a vacation, I was always checking my emails. I work with a lot of executives in tech, and they’ll tell me the same thing. Like, Oh, yeah, I got to check my emails, and then I can go and hang out with the family. It’s just you’re always on and you’re always operating at this incredibly high level, and you don’t even know what it looks like to just be. That’s when it becomes soul-sucking.

Ani
That being thing, it sounds soul-sucking. It sounds depleting, just listening about it.

Brian
I think what you’re really speaking about, what I’m hearing is that sense of being lost in the details of achievement. I’ve got to go to that. I’ve got to get that done. I’ve got to go to the next thing, go to the next thing. Somewhere in there, you just lose yourself, especially with the expectations of the organization where you need to be on demand and potentially the higher up you go in the organization, the more your time isn’t yours anymore. I am really hearing that sense of becoming lost, of losing yourself in that process. And sadly, from what you’re describing to us, Gabes, it doesn’t sound like that was a unique experience to you.

Gabes
No, it’s not. In fact, I work with people who… I hear that a lot. I just recently engaged with someone who was talking about the shackles of the work he’s doing and not sure what he should be doing next or the work that he’s been doing, does it even translate into something else? The beautiful thing is that I can give him hope that, yes, it absolutely does, and as long as he’s willing to do the work. But people, they don’t know what to do next. I think that’s what’s really powerful about what we do at the Somatic Coaching Academy is that we’re giving people those tools and resources, and it starts small. And yet for me, going through this process, it was a healing process for me. And a lot of stuff came up for me. It wasn’t just about the job. It was in my personal life or my past. It’s just incredibly powerful stuff.

Brian
One question I love to ask people, Gabes, is when you were inside of the organization you’re working, and it sounds like, at some point in time, you knew that it was time to make a transition to shift, how long did you know or get an inkling that it was for you to move on before you actually made that decision? Yeah. Do you remember?

Gabes
I remember the actual moment. It was June of 2019. I was pulled into a meeting with my leader. I loved him dearly. He was a profound influence on my career. I had finally started working for him. It was awesome. I was pulled into a meeting with him and another leader. Within 30 seconds I knew. I am interviewing for my job. I am interviewing on behalf of my team. I’m interviewing on behalf of the budget that I managed, the programs I was doing, and I knew. Then two days later, my leader called me and he said, You’re going to be moving to this new person. That’s when my world changed. Within three weeks, I laid off three people from my team. Within a month, I had a new manager. It was all the pieces just very quickly. It took me two years from that time. It was two years of that transition and navigating my way through a very, very toxic environment, and yet knowing that I needed to be smart about it, that I needed to make sure that I not only was taking care of myself, but my family. And that’s oftentimes when I’m having conversations with people about this, it doesn’t have to be overnight.

Gabes
You can put the pieces in place. There are things you can do to have a plan if what you really want to do is exit out of that soul-sucking job. And so that’s part of the work that I do a lot with people as well.

Brian
Yeah, that’s a great point, Gabes. I imagine that you started looking for ways, maybe potentially ways out, and had to do two things, at least. One was keeping yourself as healthy as possible while you’re still in that environment, while at the same time, looking for off-ramps to be able to get yourself out of that environment? Is that an accurate way to think about that? Or the way I’m thinking about it?

Gabes
Well, that would be great. But in all honesty, I actually ended up going on a leave of absence. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, which I never had a diagnosis like that. I took a leave of absence. I became a cliché. I was meditating multiple times a day. I was doing yoga. I started running during that time. I am not a runner. To try to realize how can I get back to where I could get up in the morning and go to work? I ended up going back. I went back to the job. I’d like to say that to try to keep myself healthy, But I was not healthy. My mind, body, and spirit were not healthy. And that was when I knew, Okay, I got to figure out how to get out of this. It was also in the middle of COVID. You have that as well. It was just one of those things of every day telling myself, “Let me get up and have grace” in how I show up and to let people know that the people that I care about, that I love them, and that I am going to continue to move forward.

Gabes
I get even moved when I think about it, but it was a dark place in my life, and yet, probably one of the best things I went through.

Ani
It’s really interesting to hear that story because now, knowing you, you’re one of the healthiest, mentally healthy people I know. I’m always struck by how mentally well you are.

Gabes
Thank you, honey.

Brian
I agree.

Ani
And how did you get to this place?

Gabes
Well, I had these two people in my life that showed me the way.

Ani
Stop.

Gabes
No, I’m kidding. I’m going to put you on a pedestal for just a moment. Then I’ll take you back down and we’ll be together. Okay. No, I think what happened, as I mentioned, I had a coach, I had a therapist. I was taught – the fabulous coach- was not taking action. The therapist. I got to a place where I felt like I was talking about the same things over and over again. When I joined the first level, which was cross-mapping, and I’m being introduced to this tool, and suddenly it’s like, wow, I could take what’s going on that is really dark for me, and I don’t want to really look at, and I don’t want to feel, and yet I could find the opposite of that and in that same moment, work with both of them and have a choice. That is what was really powerful about my experience with the Somatic Coaching Academy is learning that I have a choice. And by the way, I could sit in the dark if I want to, and that’s okay. But I can also find my light. And it made a huge difference in seeing that being able to see the wholeness of me and that I don’t have to have shame or guilt or anger.

Gabes
It’s okay to have all those things, but I can also put them aside. And that when they show up, I can work with them. So what my experience with somatic coaching gave me was these tools that I can work with. Because it doesn’t I don’t have those moments or I don’t feel those things, but now I have the resources to move through them quicker, and the sting of things has really… I mean, Brian, I think you talk about taking the gas out of the soda bottle, right? Yeah. Slowly. I don’t have that sting anymore, and I think that’s made a huge difference.

Brian
Amazing.

Ani
It’s really interesting how much easier it is for us to be with our darkness when we know there’s other options, that’s not the only thing. That really profoundly hit me from listening to you share about cross mapping and finding your wholeness. Because we talk about how at the academy, it’s not like we’re going into the basement and dragging out the demons, but there is this deeply, profoundly healing and ability to look at our shadows and stuff. But really, when you were talking about it, it reminds me that one of the reasons why is because we help people to see there’s other options. It’s easier to confront things when we know it’s not just that thing. Yeah.

Brian
So, Gabes, you turned that corner and then kept doing some training. But what does life look like for you now? What does life look like for you now? And feel like, I guess, too.

Gabes
I discovered I have light, and I live in my light, my soul’s agenda. My purpose, I’m here on this planet to help others. I’m here on this planet to project and to educate and be with people. Because life for me at this point is when I’m working with people, they should not need me forever. To give them tools and help them. They already have their wisdom. I mean, that’s something that I really learned is I have wisdom. I have wisdom within me. To be able to help people tap into that and that they go off in and have that ripple, that’s what life is like for me. I’m constantly thinking about, how do I have a ripple? My relationship with my daughter is different, with my family, my friends, my tribe of people. My community has expanded so much. It’s so cool. I mean, it’s so cool how many different people I’m in contact with and have my back and believe in the work I’m doing. I have a great relationship. I have a new relationship with this amazing individual who every day feeds my spirit. And I co-parent with my ex, and it’s awesome.

Gabes
We have a great relationship. It’s just vibrating at a super high level all the time, and it’s awesome. It’s so awesome.

Brian
Sounds much different. It sounds much different than what life was like before.

Ani
Just a little. It’s this becoming someone new thing. Like you said, my vibrational frequency is different, and I have different results in my life in all areas because of that.

Gabes
I think also, too, it has been beautiful about my experience with all of you and the community that we have and what I would say to anybody who’s listening to this and ‘Okay’. It’s work. It’s work. We all do the work. We all do the work, and we continue to do the work. And yet we support each other through that process. To have that support, I used to feel I was lonely, and even in relationships I had, lonely. I’m not lonely anymore because I’ve always been there, so I found myself. She’s always been there, and yet surrounded by this community that’s just so full of love and belonging. When you don’t see your self-worth, there’s someone right there that’s like, No, you got this, as well as this safety. You’ve trained us to be trauma-sensitive coaches. I mean, that’s huge in this world and how much it’s needed. We walk the talk and we live it, and we continue to do our own work as well. That’s really important for people to know that.

Ani
Yeah, it is. Oh, my gosh. It is really important. Your loneliness, loneliness is an epidemic proportions in our societies, and your loneliness is different because you’re there and you were there all along. You just didn’t know it or couldn’t see it or couldn’t find her. So what advice would you give somebody who is in your position years ago or your younger self back then? What advice would you give now?

Gabes
There’s two things that come up for me. One is I recently learned from someone about when you’re going down the highway, and even if you have a direction, you might want to take the scenic route. I’ve been using that analogy a lot. I think the younger version of me or someone’s in that thing, go beyond just where you’re headed. Think, see, open your eyes. There might be a scenic route where there’s mountains, or there’s trees, or there’s oceans. There’s just something different. Take the scenic route because you never know where it might lead you. The second thing is another wise person told me recently to have 51% faith. Things will work out, and I hold on to that.

Ani
Fifty-one %, that’s all you need. That’s all you need. You don’t need 100%, you just need 51%. I love the idea of the scenic route I can hear that in the things that you share with our students is that there’s so much beauty around us all the time, and we can take the opportunity to take the scenic route, open our eyes, look around and soak it in. You’re an embodiment of somebody who can role model that for people. I’m so thrilled that you’re part of this community and faculty.

Brian
Yeah, that was exactly what my word that I was going to say, too, is you’re an embodiment of this, Gabes. The way that you demonstrate that in the community in terms of showing up the way that you felt like maybe people were able to show up for you. It’s like you are like the big sister in this community a lot of times, showing up for people, for new students, for older people that have graduated. Like I said, we’re all doing the work, and so we all can use support at any given time, and you’re always there for people. You really do embody and demonstrate all the values that you’re talking about as far as the Somatic Coaching Academy values. That is just so enriching and feels so fantastic for me, personally, I have to say, to have you as part of the community and really be holding such amazing space for people that are doing really big work.

Ani
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Gabes, thank you so much for sharing yourself, sharing your story, your vulnerability, and your practical examples of what your transformations look like. Thank you for being on the faculty lounge with us here.

Brian
Thanks, Gabes.

Gabes
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Ani
Having these faculty lounge conversations so warms my heart. I love highlighting the awesome community at the Somatic Coaching Academy and letting everybody else in and see it, too.

Brian
Yeah, right. So thanks so much for joining us for this week’s podcast episode, and we look forward to seeing you next week.

Ani
Bye-bye.