Have you ever met someone who constantly has to be occupied? Who always has to be doing something else, meeting up with someone, on their phone texting, or watching a video on Facebook or YouTube? These people are so busy “doing” that they can’t seem to make time to just “be.” Maybe this is someone close to you or maybe you realize it’s YOU!
Our life is fast paced. You probably feel the constant pressure – to be there for others, to get things done, to take care of your children, to workout more, to move faster, to do more. This can leave us feeling anxious, confused, and angry. This can also impact our health and show up on our skin. After a while you may begin to forget who you are or why your life turned out exactly as it has. It’s time to come back to yourself and discover what you really need.
And this is exactly what my guest Elaine Glass is talking about today. Elaine Glass graduated from Northwestern University and chose a profession in dental hygiene. After 30 years, listening to challenging stories from thousands of clients and giving to others and neglecting her needs, she lost sight of her own purpose. Elaine Glass knew something had to change in order to reclaim her worth and honor her truest self. She was on a search for the answer outside herself and expected to find it there. But where she found true peace, solitude, calm, good health and ultimately her purpose was when she chose to listen to and trust her own voice. Elaine has switched gears and now runs a successful coaching practice where she focuses on showing people how to get quiet and listen to identify their truth. She has witnessed hundreds of people within professional and personal relationships thrive because of her methods.
So, for this interview, prepare to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Be ready to embrace your fear. You’re going to learn how to open up to inner wisdom you need to hear. Please enjoy this interview with Elaine…
I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Elaine Glass
To learn more about Elaine, go here.
Also, I invite you to join the The Spa Dr. community on my website or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss our upcoming shows.
If you have not done so already, I highly recommend that you get your customized skin profile here. It’s free – Based upon your answers, it will give you great tips for glowing skin and vibrant health.
Thank you and we’ll see you next time!
TRANSCRIPTION
| Trevor: | Hi there. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to The Spa Doctor Podcast. Have you ever met someone who constantly has to be occupied, who always has to be doing something? Meeting up with someone, on their phone texting or watching a video on facebook or youtube. These people are so busy doing that they can’t seem to make time to just be. Maybe this is someone close to you or maybe you just realized this is you. Our life is so fast paced, you probably feel the constant pressure to be there for others, to get things done, to take care of your children, to work out more, to move faster, to do more. These can leave you feeling anxious, confused and angry. This could also impact your health and can show up on your skin. |
| After a while you may begin to forget who you are, to why your life turned out exactly how it has. It’s time to come back to yourself and discover what you really need. This is exactly what my guest today Elaine Glass is talking about. Elaine graduate from Northwestern University and chose a profession in dental hygiene. After thirty years listening to challenging stories from thousands of clients and giving to others and neglecting her needs, she lost sight of her own purpose. Elaine knew something had to change in order to reclaim her worth and honor her truer self. She was on a search to find the answers, so she was looking outside of herself expecting to find it there, but where she found true peace, solitude, calm, good health and ultimately her purpose was when she choose to listen to and trust her own voice. | |
| Elaine has switched gears and now runs a successful coaching practice where she focuses on showing people how to get quiet and listen to identify their truth. She has witnessed hundreds of people within professional and personal relationships thrive because of her methods. For this interview, prepare to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Be ready to embrace your fears. You are going to learn how to open up to inner wisdom you need to hear. Please enjoy this interview with Elaine. Elaine, it’s great to have you on my podcast. | |
| Elaine: | Thank you so much for having me. It’s just a thrill to be here with you today. |
| Trevor: | I really want to share your story with everybody, your journey. I love hearing your story when you are telling me about it. I thought that my audience could really resonate a lot with what you’ve been through and inspire them to, for those people that are feeling kind of stuck where they are right now in life maybe or are at a point where they are not sure what to do next, I just think that your story really inspires people, might inspire people. Let’s start with that, what got you into what you are doing now? Lets really delve into that? |
| Elaine: | Even at the earliest of age, I knew that I wanted to help people. I just remember even being a kid on the playground and people would come up to me and tell me their problems and what was going on. I think it was just this natural thing that I was born with to be a very intense and deep listener, and hold that space, and safe place for people. That translated into me becoming a dental hygienist later in years and going into the healthcare field. Again, I loved taking care of people and listening to their stories, and hearing their vulnerabilities, their fears and their joys. It was a great thirty year experience, but something was rumbling inside of me. |
| At the time I had been going through a very difficult divorce, I had two small children. I had gone through years of infertility. I think my body was just completely out of work, mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, everything. I began to hear the rumblings of let’s get healthier and how can I do that for myself? It really started out as a journey to have more meaning in my life, and how was I going to also be the best mom that I could be to my boys? Those are my priorities. I began to get quiet. That really meant being a part of a place where there was no ways of stimuli, where I could really hear my soul’s voice for the first time again. | |
| Trevor: | That’s great. I think it’s so important when you get so busy in life and caught up in our day to day life. I think that often times when we are suffering in some aspects of our life, maybe it’s our marriage or relationships or work or whatever it is, we get busier to cover that up. I can see that maybe you were doing some of that too and then having that time to get quiet, opens up some doors, right? Then what happened? |
| Elaine: | You are exactly right. You do get busier, you get more active. I was exercising more, I was just trying to stay as busy as I could because I felt like if I filled myself up with stuff to do I’d feel like I was enough. That was actually the complete opposite of what I was feeling. I was feeling very unfulfilled, very tired, resulting really in my thyroid going kaput. My adrenals incompletely fatigued, my skin feeling, I just didn’t feel like I was even comfortable in my skin. It just was very dull and lifeless, and even the best makeup couldn’t help it. |
| It was bad, and that’s what happens when you are just feeling tired, and overwhelmed and sad and lonely. A life just without inner peace. That was really what I was in search of. Again, because I knew what it felt like to have peace, I’d had it for my entire childhood and my early twenties, but when I began to really enter life, and a marriage and a family and all the responsibilities of work, that slowly went away. | |
| Trevor: | What did you decide to do then, what came to? What did you realize that was going to help you with your life purpose that fully aligned more with that? |
| Elaine: | Things happened, people came into my life, the minute I sort of declared that I wanted more meaning, more impact. That I wanted to play a bigger game in life. That mediocrity wasn’t going to surface anymore. That I wanted my children to see me thrive, and I wanted to give them tools for them to thrive. Those were my motivating factors. Once I declared that for myself, those were the beginnings of people coming into my life that I never would have ever have had happen otherwise. Books fall off shelves, those types of things and me just awakening. Awakening to who I was again, because I had lost who I was. It’s a very sad, frustrating thing to witness for ourselves, to not see our souls thrive and be who we are meant to be in our fullest expression. |
| I began to read. I think that’s always the first thing that people do. I began to just bring in new thoughts and ideas to myself, have new awarenesses around me. I brought that into my dental hygiene office, because I was getting really burned out. I thought, “I need to look at my environment differently. Maybe it’s just me that I’m needing to just see things differently and get a fresh set of eyes.” That helped a lot until it didn’t anymore. I just knew that that little dental hygiene room was actually suffocating me now. | |
| Trevor: | You and I have talked about this before when I was talking about coming on my podcast is that I’ve realized that sometimes when I see patients, I talked about the root cause. What’s the underlying cause of what is holding you back? Sometimes it’s actually, the root cause is sometimes a life situation, a relationship, a job. Some sort of situation that they are in that’s holding them back. Until they address that, doesn’t necessarily mean leaving it but address what’s going on, then you are not going to get better. Sometimes that’s all it is. I don’t mean to make it sound overly simple, because that’s not always an easy thing to address, but I think I told you the story about how I had a patient that said that she couldn’t sleep, she was tired during the day, and that’s why she came in to see me. |
| I looked at all of her labs, we did a physical exam, we looked at all these different things. The only thing that I could see wrong with her was that she did not like her job, and that she was not feeling fulfilled in her life because of the work she was doing. I couldn’t find anything physically wrong with her, other than that being the biggest underlying factor. I told her, and I thought, “She’s never going to come back to see me. She’s not going to like what I’m about to tell her.” I told her, I said, “I’m always looking into the root cause. I really feel like, you’ve mentioned, you’ve said to me you don’t like your job. I think that if there is an opportunity for you to change the way you look at your job, or change your job, that’s really going to be the biggest thing for you.” | |
| I didn’t, she didn’t come back to see me and I thought, “I don’t know if that really resonated with her or not,” but I ran into her about six months later at a social event. I live in a little town, so that happens, running into patients. She came up to me, she said, “Dr. Cates, I just want you to know, I have a new job, and my life is completely different. I have energy, I’m sleeping at night, and I want to thank you. I never contacted you because I did this and I felt better, so I didn’t need to come back, but I’ve been wanting to tell you.” Not that everybody that’s listening needs to go quit their job and get a new one, but if this is something that, I want people to hear that because sometimes that’s what we need to look at. It’s not always easy. How was it for you? | |
| Elaine: | No, and I love that story. Thank you for sharing that. That’s really important, a very important message because after thirty years of taking care of people, of knowing them, mind, body spirit, their health, I would go over their overall health with them every time they’d come in. I knew their personal lives. I began to connect the dots with people. What made people flourish in life, what made people happy and joyful and what made people come in time and time again just sad and always full of difficulty. The main common thread was not feeling like they had the ability to do what they really wanted to do. Not having the self esteem and the confidence. The always the dream, know that can’t be for me, that’s not for people like me. |
| It’s almost easier to stay in that space. Then I started to think, “My goodness, if the people who are living, they are at their fullest potential are the happiest,” because that’s what I saw, and the healthiest. They have the healthiest outlook, they have the healthiest mouths, gums and teeth and skin. They just looked bright and alive. If those are the people living out to their fullest potential, then I want to, I absolutely have to do that for myself. Because I saw it, it was like petri dish in my office, I really for thirty years saw and connected these dots. I said to myself, “I just, I’ve got to do what my heart is telling me to do.” That was to eventually leave dental hygiene and become a life coach. | |
| It was very scary, getting back to your question, very scary. The uncertainty of it all. I had, I was raising two small children by myself. I couldn’t just up and leave a job. I needed that. I had responsibilities. I went to life coaching school and I just begin. I just started. The funny thing, I just started calling myself a life coach. Strangers that I would meet off the street, or wherever I was, they’d say, “What do you do?” “I’m a life coach.” And I just started stepping into that more and more, and getting used to how that felt. It was a process of letting go away fear and knowing that I really had been life coaching my whole life. It’s just that I had instruments in my hand. What comes naturally to me is really what’s now the most fulfilling. I don’t have to pretend to be anything that I’m not. | |
| Trevor: | How do you feel that that’s impacted your life? |
| Elaine: | You are going to make me teary. I stayed inside a lot. I felt like I was just, didn’t want to go out a lot. I was just sad. I don’t know, you just sparked I think a question, that brought back that feeling. Now I know the happiness that I feel, and the joy that I feel when my feel hit the ground in the morning. I’m so excited to be doing amazing things like being here with you today and getting my message out and to inspire people who maybe are going through a tough time. Who want so much more for themselves in their lives and their children’s life. Who haven’t put themselves first. Who have felt guilt around that and who are allowing everyone else to take center stage and them just stay in the background. |
| It has changed my life entirely. It’s changed my children’s lives. They are rooting me on every time I do something different, and out of my comfort zone. They are just, they are right there encouraging me. It really has become a family affair in the best way. It’s elevating them as well. | |
| Trevor: | I really acknowledge you for making that change, making that shift and allowing that to happen, taking that risk because I know it was a big risk for you take that, and impacted not only you but it impacted your children. That’s a big thing. Sometimes it feels like a selfish choice to do that, and people are afraid like, “I can’t do this, because it’s just about me.” Now looking back at what you did, I think you can probably realize, it wasn’t really a selfish choice. It was a self-honoring choice, and that it had the ripple effect that you can show up as a better mom, and you could help more people. Then your health is important too. It helps all of us. It helps us and it helps other people around you. |
| Elaine: | Yes, you’ve brought up a very key word just now and that’s self-honoring. For many years I didn’t. Those are regrets that we have when we don’t honor ourselves. We think it’s someone else not honoring us and we say, “My husband didn’t honor me or my employer didn’t honor me.” Honoring really comes first within. That’s what I did, I was on a journey of honoring myself again. What that really meant for me was to be able to self express when I had kept quiet. Know, now I’m going to express my needs and my desires and my wants, and that’s okay. Thank you for mentioning that, because it really has been a journey of finding inner peace and honoring myself again, and it feels really wonderful and very empowering and bringing in more peace in my life, once I began to honor myself. Who wants to be a doormat anymore? Those days are over. Declare it, declare that for yourself and know that only good will come once you do. |
| Trevor: | I want to reiterate what you are talking about. When you make self honoring choices, that the people around you change. We talked a little bit about kids and how that can impact them in a positive way because you are setting a good example for them, which I think is so great. Especially as moms, that to be able to see that happen, it’s truly amazing. Also, the other relationships in our lives, and you were talking about being a doormat versus attracting other people. When you make self-honoring choices, did you find that the people that showed up around you were more appreciative of you and honored you more and that you tended to maybe attract other people that were doing what you were doing, rather than the people maybe that used to be in your life? |
| Elaine: | That exactly is what happened. It was painful at first, because best friends, they kind of drifted away. People that I thought I trusted in and knew well drifted away. It was sort of this emptying and falling away of things no longer serving m and people in my life that I still love and respect and wish them well. I was really breaking open to a new me. When I say breaking open it was really opening my hear to life again, to feeling again, to deeper meaningful conversations and showing up as me and not having a mask on anymore. |
| Yeah, people are going to fall way and the people that come into your life, it’s indescribable. It’s worth just that for the people that come into your life because community is everything. What we are talking about today, people can read in books and educate themselves and know these topics are important, but people are here with you on your podcast because of the community that you have for them. Because we know in community, we know that together with connection, that we are more powerful. I appreciate this platform that you have. | |
| Trevor: | Thank you. I absolutely agree and I love that idea, I know sometimes it can feel like we are so isolated in today’s world of being alone, probably people working from home, working remotely, maybe not even being in an office anywhere or somewhere there is any kind of community. It can feel very isolating, or even if you are in an office, everybody is working at their own computer, and there is no community, and you can feel so alone. Having that community can be a safe place to let some of that transformation occur and to feel like that’s a good place to start moving forward, right? |
| Elaine: | Absolutely. |
| Trevor: | I certainly hope I’m doing that with The Spa Doctor and that’s one of my biggest goals is to help people feel inspired and have a sense of community and place where they can come to get valuable information, they can hear from experts like yourself that have a lot to share and that can help motivate them. On that note, people are watching and listening to this and they are thinking, “I know I need to make a change but I don’t know where to start.” What would you recommend, where should people start to be able to start making these changes? |
| Elaine: | I always say get quiet. That’s what I did. I was guided to this beautiful labyrinth by my house. I live in Scottsdale Arizona. I don’t know why I was guided at the time but now I do. That was the first step in me finding really what I wanted and what moved me, because we can’t do that in this noisy world we live in. We really need to have a place where we can feel again. Not so much think, because we can overthink a lot, but where can we find a place to really begin to feel again? |
| A lot of times life shoots us blows that allow us unfortunately to put walls around our hearts. The first step that I took that I would encourage someone else to take is to find a place where you can really start to feel again and stop the busyness and begin to open your heart to those feelings that maybe you haven’t allowed in for a very long time. | |
| Trevor: | Some examples of that. For me I think, when you say that I think about going into nature, like going onto a trail, a woodsy trail or something along those lines, or a beach where it’s, you hear the sounds of the ocean. That’s the kind of thing I think I’ve been, for some people maybe that’s not an easy thing to do. I can’t go to the ocean obviously, I live in park city but I could go to a nice quiet trail and go for a walk and that is very rejuvenating for me, and having that quiet time. Maybe you are also talking about meditation. What are some examples of things that you have in mind? |
| Elaine: | People are afraid to go in this quiet place because in this quiet is a sort of unknowing. At the same time there is a very much of a knowing, but initially this quiet place really feels scary, uncertain, and like I said unknowing what’s going to happen, what’s going to come up for me, where am I going to have to remember, I may not be making the right decision right now. Those types of things will come up for people. I think that having places where you feel most alive, like I know you love to hike and you live in such a beautiful place. I go to the labyrinth. I also I’m very, I protect my inner peace as much as I would protect my child. It’s so important to protect it. |
| If you are out at a restaurant and the noise level is so high, because that’s what they do now, they just pipe in a really loud noise to get you chewing faster and let the next table in. There are things that you can do, to get into a quiet place where you may not have to actually go somewhere, but you can just be aware of your whole entire day and what’s going on around you, and what you allow in to cause your basically central nervous system to go crazy, and what you allow for it to feel calm and peaceful. It could be cooking, it could be a nice walk. It could be meditation, but when I talk about getting quiet, it’s really not so much about sitting in a cross-legged position. It’s really a lifestyle of the minute you wake up to the minute you go to sleep, how are you, what are you bringing into your life that’s peaceful, that’s calming, that’s making you feel alive? | |
| Trevor: | I love that. Are there specific, with your clients, there are specific exercises that you have them do, do you recommend journaling or any kinds of visualization exercises for people? |
| Elaine: | Yes, I first did, I’ve been doing meditation for about twenty five years. I really do help them with how to first get quiet and physically meditate on, in a sitting position. We do do that. We do journal quite a bit, because again, it’s expressing ourselves once again that will get new ideas and thoughts to begin to excite us, and to get them down is really important. You don’t have to have to journal, sometimes, I just put it in my phone, things and thoughts that come up, that I want for for my new life. |
| I just jot them down. Just to get them out of you is I think really important. How we speak in our families together is another thing that I make people aware, because sometimes we have, two, three, four, five, six children in the house at a time, and there is a lot of commotion and bickering possibly. How are we talking to each other in our homes, how can we make our homes the most peaceful places? Awarenesses like that to me are really important. | |
| Trevor: | In my family we have a special time together at dinner that seems to be a really important time for me to sit down with the kids and set intentions and talk about gratitude and things that kind of happened for the day. It’s really, I think it’s a great time to come together and create that sense of peace and coming together, that community in the home. I know I love that and I also know that there is that, but then I think what you are talking about too is just your sense of peace. When you come in and you enter the room with a sense of peace and calm, it can spread with the kids and the rest of the people in the family, in the home, right? |
| Elaine: | Absolutely, they feel it. Kids need it so desperately too. The busyness that goes on, it’s no longer like but we were in school, or we laughed and that was it. We didn’t see our friends, we had to call them on the phone to get in touch with them again. Now it’s like 24/7 for our children. How can we help them to stop the busyness, and to get quiet too and to focus on the family, and to put down their phones or computers? It’s really up to us to do that and help them, so that when they leave the nest they’ll have those tools of what I’m talking about right now and that’s getting quiet, so that they can hear their lives’ purpose clearly without the noise and know that they crave that and need that, and they ultimately give it to themselves. |
| Trevor: | Great. We’ve talked about how you’ve talked about creating that inner peace and finding a special place, meditation, journaling. These are all great tools for people. Is there anything else that you want to share with people about when they are looking, maybe they have stepped into this journey of change or they are thinking about making this change? Anything else that you think you want to share with people about that? |
| Elaine: | My first thought is to have faith that we are all here for a purpose. That what is rumbling inside of you, what you are most drawn to, what books you normally are drawn to, what movies you are normally drawn to? These are all signs for you to know what interests you, what you are passionate about, also, what irritates you. What are things and topics that come up that kind of get you thinking like, “That’s not right.” All those types of things will guide you to your purpose. The way I found my purpose was sort of by accident. I was literally on my knees, crying in desperation of trying to have a happier, more meaningful healthy life. I found myself at the beach. This was ten years ago. |
| I just said, “God, what is my purpose?” All I could think of was love. The word love. That’s what my purpose is. Whatever you want to feel most in your life, maybe it’s joy, love, compassion, have more energy. Take that word and then try to figure out how you can feel that every day in helping people, in doing and showing up wherever you are in the world. That’s the word that guides me is love. That’s my purpose. I bring that into every place I go with every client, with family, everywhere. Really, ask yourself what is that feeling you most want to feel, what great feeling everyday do you want to feel? Then share, that’s the key to finding your purpose. | |
| Trevor: | I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. I know that you have chosen this path as a life coach because you want to help other people and I think that’s a beautiful path to be on. I think that that’s a beautiful path to be on. I do want to say though that, we are not trying to say here everybody needs to be a life coach. Because I think it almost seems like an ad to become a life coach, because it’s just such a great transformation and beautiful life that you have now. |
| I think it’s important for people to realize and I’m sure you’ll agree that it doesn’t, you don’t have to pick one career, one career is not better over another. It’s feeling a sense of purpose and enjoyment for whatever it is that you are doing. Sometimes it’s just a matter of looking what you do differently in a way that you can show up differently maybe it’s, even people that clean homes or pick up the garbage or delivering mail service, being a dental hygienist or something totally different, being a doctor. | |
| Whatever it is you are doing you feel called to do, to feel fulfilled in doing that, because I know there are people that do all these kinds of jobs, every kind of job out there, that are happy with and they love their life. We can be so much better at all of those different professions if we can show up in this way differently, right? | |
| Elaine: | Absolutely. I think back to a gentlemen that I ran into who was a service man and I couldn’t, it was so contagious, the joy in his face of the job that he did. He was just touching lives with every person he serviced in this restaurant. He was making being a serviceman the best thing since [inaudible 00:34:56]. He just made it so playful and the people around him loved him. Really, it’s like who you are you bringing to your job, who are you bringing, who are you showing up as in your family? That’s exactly true. You don’t have to be changing careers and maybe just show up in a much more, enlightened, awakened, powerful way. |
| Trevor: | Thank you Elaine, so much for coming on and talking to us today. Tell everybody how they can learn more about what you are doing and connect with you? |
| Elaine: | Sure. They can reach me via email. I love to get people’s questions. If they have any more questions regarding what we talked about today it’s [email protected]. My website is elaineglass.com. Yes, I would love to hear from people who have questions and support your community any way I possibly can. |
| Trevor: | Thank you. That’s so generous of you to give out your personal email address. We’ll also have the link to your website up on the podcast information. Thank you again so much for joining us today. |
| Elaine: | You are so welcome Trevor. Thanks for having me. |
| Trevor: | I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Elaine Glass. To learn about Elaine and to see her website, you can go to thespadoctor.com. Go to the podcast page with that interview, and you’ll see the information and links there. While you are there I invite you to join The Spa Doctor community on my website or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. |
| If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you get your own customized skin profile, at theskinquiz.com. It’s free and based upon the answers to just a few questions you’ll get your own customized skin profile. Just go to the skinquiz.com. Also, join me on social media. Get the latest tips for glowing skin and vibrant health. Join me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube and join the conversation. Thank you and I’ll see you next time on the spa doctor podcast. |
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