Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Elena Perella. Elena, welcome.
Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do?
Yes. I’m a personal coach who helps high achievers who come from broken families to eliminate the pain that they inherited from their parents and previous generations so that they can drive in all areas of their lives and live their lives serenely. Thank you for the introduction. I am really interested in the topic. I think it’s a really fascinating conversation to have and you may not have perhaps thought of it this way, but the way I interpreted what we’re going to discuss, which is why we behave like we do and uncovering the root causes of unhealthy behaviours. There’s a lot of people in, let’s say business world, they achievement is I think an attempt to make up for or perhaps you know, in order to feel loved or feel worthy.
Business success is an attempt to do that and that’s why I think this is an interesting topic. What are your thoughts on that premise? Yes. Unhealthy, be absolutely angry and healthy behaviours. we developed them, but not because we choose to develop them. We are forced to do that and we are forced by our families toxic emotional inheritance to develop unhealthy behaviours and these behaviours affect all areas of our lives in a business tomb. So how would someone know whether they’re doing something because they actually want to versus something that’s been inherited. And let’s say that is not necessarily a healthy behaviour, you know, it because it stops you from thriving. If you do manage to thrive, you don’t enjoy the process. So these two things are signs that it’s something inherited toxic.
So, coming back to our example, if, say for example, someone was using business as a way to feel worthy or feel loved if they got that success and they actually didn’t enjoy it, that would meet the criteria of perhaps an unhealthy behaviour and it’s inherited from parents maybe. Absolutely. Because if you do that, if you do business to feel loved and accepted and recognised, then it means that you need something from the outside. So filling a gap a void inside and this this void is about the lack of self-love and we have a lack of self-love exclusively because we haven’t received that from our parents and because they never taught us how to love ourselves what self-love means. And so we do business in order to achieve success to be seen to be heard to be accepted to be validated.
Maybe we become very successful first. We haven’t enjoyed the process very much because there is also the anxiety you have to perform, you know, to achieve it at any cost. And the real reason is because you want to feel loved. I think also I would add in something else which is people want to be quite followed and popular on social media. Do you think that that is also a similar analogy? Well, it depends, you know, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are forced by a toxic element. It depends you know it whether it is whether the real reason the root cause is an additive toxic emotional elements or not, because there is nothing wrong to want to be famous and on social media in business.
But what drives your behaviour? Is it love? Or is it toxic element? Is it something that you inherited? Is it something yours? Because we have also toxic pain inside of our hearts. So if you can discern these, then you know the answer. If someone was to say to you, I’m not really too sure what drives my behaviour, what do you say to them? You can easily understand it actually because if you experience fatigue, if you experience anxiety often, if you experience an internal discomfort while you are in the process of achieving your goal, if you fail many times, then it it means it’s a sign that you have inside something toxic that is forcing you so to behave that way. And you can understand what it is by taking the time to reflect on yourself.
Just pause and stay with the feelings, stay with the emotion, and ask yourself am I doing this because it’s my depression, it’s my anxiety. It’s an internal discomfort that is making me that is driving me in this way that is choosing for me or is it me and then you can understand it. There’s another thing that I wanted to talk to you about which is the good, the bad and the ugly, how to understand our emotions and gain mastery over our behaviours and this ties into perhaps what the what the solution might be. So if someone was to say, I don’t I think that I might be doing this for the wrong reason, what do you say to them? Well, if you’re doing something for the wrong reason, you can reverse it, you can understand what is the real reason why you’re doing it and eliminate, eliminate it, can eliminate the root cause and then you have to question everything, that’s what you’re doing.
Is it what you really want or not? I would struggle I suppose in knowing whether or not I was doing something for the right reasons or not. Have you got anything to add there? Because once you start like root causes, I find personally quite difficult to dig out for lack of a better term. Have you got any thoughts around that? For example, I know many people especially here in Italy who attend college choosing a specialisation that is not what they really would like to do, but they do it because they want to please their parents. Especially in my time, it was like that, you know, you chose not because there was you were passionate about it, but because your family puts you on that path. And so they didn’t really enjoy, enjoy the process and they ended up doing something else.
You know, it didn’t fulfil them. I suppose the flip side of that would be there’s that quote of if you do something you love, you never work a day in your life and in terms of how to understand your emotions and behaviours, would you like to elaborate there? It’s again about pausing and reflecting often we tried to escape our emotions and feelings and I’m talking about the feelings that make us feel bad. We don’t want to get in contact with them because we are scared and we don’t know how to manage them. But in this way we only postpone what can be a disaster because these emotions and feelings drive our behaviours. They make us experienced toxic relationships. For example, there are many people who are married with a partner who they don’t love and they have children.
So these children are born out of a marriage that is not based on love and then things go wrong when you marry for example, for these reasons while if you stay with your emotions and feelings, then you ask yourself, okay, is this really the thing that I want is this really the person who I want to be with for my entire life? Why am I doing this? Am I repeating something that is already my family and that is not that fortunate that is not fruitful. And then stay with those emotions and feelings and try to eliminate them. Let’s say you have this scenario where I feel like I’m doing something for the right reason, like in my profession or my business, but I am procrastinating over a particular task. Have you got any thoughts around that topic?
Yeah. If you procrastinate often and procrastination does not allow you to progress then I’m afraid it might be toxic. And then you have to look in the relationship with your father, the relationship with your mother and how things went when you were a child because it’s in their the answer. And let’s say you find something which perhaps might be classified as toxic. What do you do then next you have to do something to eliminate it. Yeah. And it can be, you know, what I can say is that when people get in contact with me and we have conversation, they begin to eliminate it. And it’s almost spontaneously. Sometimes you can help yourself with meditation, breathing exercises.
Unfortunately, those techniques work on the symptoms. So you really have to be willing to open your heart and let it go crying for example, can help got another one I wanted to ask you about and it’s I mean it’s along the same lines, but it’s what can you do to correct the effects that your parents, mistakes had on you.
I suppose in this context, mistakes might be habits that you’ve picked up from them. Do you have any thoughts there? Yeah, I can give you examples out of my personal life, personal experience. I inherited the troubled relationship, the tendency to have a troubled relationship with foods from my mother and I inherited her fears, her lack of self-love and self-esteem. And I developed eating disorders. And this is my eating disorders. We’re also fuelled by my mother’s poor parenting. What I did was I became aware of that that would cause Because when my father died, I opened my eyes and I began to see things for what they really are. And so I understood that my eating disorders were caused by those toxic inherited elements and the poor parenting of my mother and I began to eliminate all those toxic elements. I did a lot of self-reflection observation.
For example, I observed myself and I recognise many behaviours. Many attitudes that weren’t mine. They were my mother’s like for example, when there was a challenge, I would step back like my mother. But because I was aware I thought, mm hmm don’t step back, just go through that challenge. And I did it and doing that way, I eliminated the toxic inherited elements. And I did that this every day until my eating disorders faded away. I think the big thing that I wanted to highlight there was observing and questioning because often people are like autopilot, they go around doing things but they’re not necessarily observing themselves. And I suppose when you pick up on something which might be a habit and questioning it and then I suppose facing your fears, you mentioned fear and that’s a big one in in the topic of business.
Did you find you mentioned it and how you overcame that? Can you share that by challenging it? For example, I had and still have dreams and in that period I had also the toxic here inherited from both my parents and I challenged it. No, I had a dream. Okay, I thought Elena this is what you really want and I could feel it. For example attending college that was my dream and doing Latin American studies, I was passionate about it but I had this toxic fear of failure that I inherited from my mother and also toxic believed that I was a failure as a person because my parents made me believe that. So I thought but yeah, on one hand I had my dream and the other hand, those toxic elements. So I was determined to win and I thought okay just go through those fears and I did it and went through those fears and I eliminated them and I had my masters eventually.
You know, congratulations. Okay. Yes. Indeed. Yeah. And it was awesome because I proved myself that I could make it those fear, toxic fear couldn’t stop me. Yeah. What your thoughts on it on intuition? Intuition is fundamental really. It’s a if you don’t live listening to your intuition, then you are missing because your intuition is your internal GPs. It prevents you from going through destructive experiences. It helps you to achieve your goals to make the right decisions. But you really have to huh to learn to listen to it and following. And I hear many people that say, yeah, I followed the voice inside. But the result was not what I wanted. Yeah.
Which toxic elements do you have inside that kind of distracted you from the right class from taking the right path. Because we don’t have only our intuition insight, Our intuition is there but it is clouded by those toxic elements. You know for example, I was a victim of domestic violence. And the first from the very beginning that I met this guy, it was the first day I remember as if it were yesterday we were in the car and suddenly I felt something, it was like a hand writing inside of me. He is not for you. And when I felt or saw that I mean it was almost visible. I froze and I thought what is it? And it was my intuition of course saying, okay you are going to be burned.
But he couldn’t follow me why? Because I had toxic inherited elements that forced me to go through that experience. And because I was aware during the period, I also could identify all those toxic elements and eliminate them. But it cost me 10.5 years of violence. I’m sorry you had to go through that. Yeah. I always find good question to ask in these scenarios is if someone is going through your experience right now, what advice do you give them? Would you tell them? Um, it’s good to understand that it’s not your fault and it’s not your choice. We really don’t choose two to hurt ourselves. We are forced by what the toxic elements that we inherit from our parents and that are fuelled by our parents for parenting and society of tax conditions.
So it’s not our choice. It’s not our fault. However, we have to take responsibility for that. You know, which means to respond in a constructive way because if we choose made a conscious choice to respond in a constructive way, then we can identify all those elements and eliminate them. And once you are free they cannot come back and only then you will be able to listen and follow your intuition. Would you say that you’re able to follow your intuition now, yes, absolutely. Any differences between how you act before and after. You went through the process of observation before and after. Yes, because now there are there are no discordant notes inside of me. Well, now I know that it’s purely my intuition that is talking to me that is saying to me what I have to do.
And this doesn’t mean that I don’t encounter problems because I think that there will always be problems. But at least now I know through this internal guidance what the result can be. For example, if it is really the thing that I have to do or not, and I can also make the conscious choice if my intuition says, hmm, watch out. I can make the conscious choice to do it. No, because there might be something that I need from that experience. But it’s a conscious choice. It’s not anymore. Something that I am forced. And I have also another good experience. Well, it’s not my personal but my father’s experience, for example, he was a very successful businessman, but he had so many unresolved childhood issues that eventually he lost everything. He was, for example, a people pleaser.
He was someone who I was very stressed, not very well organised, He couldn’t administrate very well his business. And so he surrounded himself by the wrong people and in this way, eventually it lost because he didn’t put love enough love into his business simply because he was full of these toxic elements and he was totally unaware of that and it was a disaster for the whole family. Of course when he died, you mentioned being a people pleaser. I think there’s some element of confidence in their do you have any approaches to dealing with that issue? Yes, it is if you please people often it means that it’s toxic. It means that you have an internal toxic need for approval.
You really want to be seen by people. And this is why you please them. It’s not because you love them is because you want to be loved and just reflect on yourself and try to observe the impulse that force you to please people. And once you can catch the impulse boss cause into what helped me a lot was to re parent myself also. So when you feel such impulses, try to think of yourself when you were a child and become the parents that you needed when you were little when you were kids. So what would you give and say to yourself when you feel the impulse that is coming from? The need to be seen. Try to see yourself instead to want it to be seen and try to understand what it means to be seen for you.
That’s great advice. I have heard you had a similar thing in the sense that like what advice would you give to like a close friend or something, but I can see how seeing yourself re parenting yourself as you said is going to be really beneficial and probably produce more consistent behaviour going forward. You’ve mentioned self-love a couple of times. How would how would someone go about practicing that first of all to rethink of love because understand that we think that we love ourselves but we don’t. And this is at least for me quite obvious. If I look around me in the world, it’s obvious that we don’t know ourselves. So think of love as an energy that fuels your will to help yourself and others grow and activate this energy inside of you and use it in order to help yourself grow.
This is cellblock. Have you found that it’s how has it affected yourself? What changed everything? Really? Because yeah, I mean I have become my own mother and my own father and it’s amazing because I’ve never huh. I will never know what it means to have parents in the traditional meaning of the words. So I really had to repair it myself and become my own parents. And that’s fantastic. And it gave me so much more support. Help. I know that no matter what I can always count on myself. This is really the most beautiful thing that we can do for ourselves. That no matter what you can count on yourself, you are the centre of everything in your life and when you live your life from this elevated position, Internal elevated position, but nothing is stopping even when you failed You accept it and move on.
Because it will be a failure. That is not driven by your family’s toxic emotional inheritance. And in this case it’s a failure that you can learn from. And then you move on. You don’t stay attached And learning to really love myself. Meant also that I am free from addictions. You know I was addicted to addicted to smoking shopping. It was a disaster. And now I am completely free. And I am not tempted by anything outside of me. If you really love yourself, it means also that you are not the things outside yourself won’t influence you anymore. For example, We are very influenced by tv newspaper. you know dogmas anything. It’s that it is outside of ourselves. Trying to make us feel think and behave in ways that are not aligned with who we really are.
While if you really learn to love yourself. You don’t have that anymore. You’re really, really free. And you choose how to feel what you think and how to behave things like going to the supermarket. There is nothing outside that is calling you to You know by me. Have me take me No. It’s you who feels from the inside. Okay, this is good for me. It’s not with everything. Is there anything that you still do require work on. require some repetition on if you like mm hmm for myself. Well, I am free from the domestic violence since three years. And it happened last year that I healed emotionally. And now I am on my way to relaunch my business. And so this is what I am now working. Yeah. Yeah. And what does that look like? What’s your business? My life coaching practice. It is growing. Yeah. It’s growing Now. I am attracting the right people.
The right situations I have again, the determination and the love that it was clouded by the violence that I was experiencing. And uh, it feels good. Finally. So, I would imagine your ideal client if you will. Your prospect is perhaps going through something similar to what you were and you helped them get through that. Is that right? It can be although I don’t cure even disorders or help people going through domestic violence throughout domestic violence. Because sometimes there are also psychiatric problems behind those situations. And I this is not what I specialise in. If they are ready and there is no such a problem behind those situations then Yes. But I focus on high achievers.
So, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going through those experiences can be people who suffer from anxiety who are not happy, feel discomfort, who are aware that they are that they are in a toxic relationship or the people who are not satisfied in their business leaders for example, that are insecure that have difficulties in uh, aligning with their team members. People who are aware who That they have inherited pain. And they don’t want to relive their parents’ lives, their parents’ pain although they love them very much. But they really would like to move forward without this, this weight on your shoulders. And they are my people my clients are high achievers. You know, people who are determined, Who are not afraid to question everything that was taught to them by family and society because questioning everything is one of the first step to freedom.
If you don’t question anything, I’m sorry, then you will be caged your own life. But if you begin to question to question everything, then you will discover that there are many, many things that you have believed in and that are not true. And are those things that are keeping you change in a life that is not your life. But it’s a repetition of someone that came before you in your family. Have you got any case studies that you’re particularly proud of? Shall we say? Well, there are yes. for example, now I’m coaching one of my current clients is a teenager and she inherited, she comes from a toxic environment and she inherited a lot of toxicity from both parents. Especially from our father. And she didn’t understand why she was feeling depressed. She didn’t want to go to school anymore. She almost blocks a year. Well officially she did it. But eventually the professor decided to support her and accepted her again.
Because during the session she filmed. kind of shaped and was willing to return to school. So for me this was a very big achievement for her action. And the fact that she’s feeling better. She suffers from anxiety and it is becoming less every day. So she’s feeling alive again because she was sleeping almost the whole day. Another clients, years ago he had a bad relationship with his children. He’s also an achiever. And the he was very thankful because he said thanks to you. I could reunite with my children because I suggested he just go to them and say to them, forgive me, forgive me, I couldn’t be a good father, forgive me. And you know just by saying this to your children, it opens the door to a beautiful relationship.
So he did it. And yeah, now they are like friends. You know. So it’s fantastic. Another one. She was in a very toxic relationship and with no job. And she was in a very bad situation. And after a year she managed very spontaneously to create the circumstances for her partner to live without. She isn’t doing any effort. That was amazing. You know. And she found out that she also found a job. She wasn’t actually actively looking for it. But she was registered in some organisations And one day they called her offering a job and she was paid because she said, oh this is because of you. I said no it’s you. I just the only thing that I do, I conversating with you. I have a dialogue with you and I hold this pay is for you so that you can expand.
This is what creates the safeness, you know, it’s safe environment for the person to begin to eliminate and see and eliminate all those toxic elements and at the same time expands who you really are because you have to grow. You have to give yourself a space. Thank you for that. I got one more that I wanted to ask you but feel free if you’ve already covered it because you’ve covered a lot of good stuff. it’s how can we turn self-doubt into a power source of personal and professional growth thoughts there. Yeah. Self-doubt first understand if it is a toxic self-doubt or not. You know, if it is preventing you from driving, it might be it might be the least toxic self-doubt because you do it often and you are not moving forward. You’re not accomplishing with your goals. And in this case you have to eliminate the root cause again look inside and try to understand where it comes from solved out the healthy self-doubt.
You can turning into something positive because when you begin to have those thoughts self-doubt, then it helps you understand better what decision you have to make. It helps you reflect. So don’t be scared of self-doubt. Just embrace it. Sit down and reflect of what you have to do. And if it’s the right choice and try to understand the advantages and disadvantages, it’s something very healthy that it’s a tool that helps reflect you and take the right decision. Sounds very mindful. Would you say practice mindfulness? No. Because mindfulness is in my opinion, it does not help because everything comes from our hearts. Our hearts, our minds actually does what our heart says.
So if you think that you have to control your thoughts to guide your thoughts to know. It’s your heart. That’s the energy in your heart that you have to become aware of. And not. We are all heart centres. What you have to make sure if you wanted your mind respond in a constructive way so that your mind then gives the instruction for your body to act in a healthy way. Then make sure that your heart becomes pure by eliminating all those toxic elements. Once your heart is pure then it will send healthy messages to your mind and then your mind will send healthy messages to your body. And so you will the results will be positive. Yeah. What are your goals, Elena? My goals are well, help people become – well, I should say evolve into new human beings. Because we really need a new generation of people who can create a new party in their lives, in their own environment.
And these people are people who are free to choose how to feel, what to think and how to behave free from tax conditions. Whether they are families, tax conditioning for society of tax conditions. Well, for me, I really think that the principal around re parenting yourself is a really good one. I’m going to take that away and use that. So thank you for that. Have you got any closing thoughts?
What I thought I would say is we are going through a major transformation that it might be induced. So try to pay attention not only to what happens outside of you but especially of what happens inside of you and reflect on yourself. And if you want to understand yourself better now that you can just take the title. And if people would like some help from a life coach, where do they find you?
They can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook on YouTube, Clubhouse, and they can visit my website elena.com. Elena, thank you very much.
Thank you. It was a pleasure.