Healing, Love, & Leadership with Sally Anderson

A Personal Note from Orion

What’s in the way of your dreams? In most cases, the blocks are internal. They are created by a self-sabotaging critical voice inside of you, one that’s holding you back.

In this week’s powerfully moving conversation, Sally Anderson shares her shocking life story and digs deep into why we sabotage ourselves, and how to stop. She believes it’s possible to achieve a sustainable transformation that empowers you to lead the life you want.

Sally become a renowned international leadership coach, inspirational speaker, and author after going through one of the most dehumanizing experiences imaginable. She has dedicated her life to helping others, and has created a new, bright ending to her own dark story to coach others to do the same.

In this Episode

[02:23] – Sally launches things off by telling us a bit about herself. She goes through her early life in chronological order, then talks about an incredibly shocking story. At just 15, she was abducted and gang-raped by members of New Zealand’s Mongrel Mob. She then recounts the inability of her family and society to acknowledge her trauma, and the resulting dysfunction.
[07:06] – We learn that Sally is at the forefront of leadership services providing a sustainability element of personal and professional transformation.
[09:20] – How did Sally’s experience impact her identity as a woman, as well as her interactions with men, women, and her own body?
[10:47] – Sally shares how her experience affected her voice. She then talks more about how her body image was impacted as well.
[13:33] – Being one’s word is integral to experiencing true transformation, Sally explains, then goes into depth about how this works. She then talks about the default identity, a disempowered self-image that we adopt and validate.
[16:10] – What happened to Sally emotionally when she became a bodybuilder? She then explores the problem with thinking that you’ll be happy once you achieve a certain goal.
[19:07] – Forgiving people isn’t the first step in healing, Sally says, then explains what the real first step is.
[19:55] – Sally discusses the difference between analytical forgiveness versus experiential forgiveness.
[21:10] – We hear about Sally’s experience on 60 Minutes.
[22:22] – How do you acknowledge that you are being your own worst perpetrator?
[25:50] – Sally talks about the next step, if you have awareness of what you’re doing and but keep sabotaging yourself anyway. Her answer revolves around choice.
[27:07] – We learn about Sally’s personal life with her husband and the fact that they haven’t had physical children.
[29:43] – Stopping people from hurting permanently is the essence of the education she provides, Sally explains.
[30:22] – What was the moment that Sally realized she was healed?
[33:33] – Sally shares her journey as it relates to her physicality and body. In the process, she talks about women’s dysfunction about weight.
[36:12] – We learn what Sally does in terms of mastering the inner critic.
[36:49] – Sally talks about her technique for dealing with the inner critic, which has a lot to do with her work around the default identity. She then explores why asking someone “are you a child abuser?” can help them overcome their own inner critic.
[40:07] – Despite having every reason on earth not to trust anything, Sally has managed to achieve and maintain a successful marriage. Here, she explains how she transformed her life and allowed that to happen.
[44:07] – Orion shares an overview of her own journey as it relates to healing and love.
[47:41] – In Sally’s perspective, what is a leader?
[51:19] – What are Sally’s three tips to leading a stellar life? 1. Beliefs run your life, so get disciplined in retraining your thought patterns. 2. Do whatever you can to form a new relationship with your spoken word. 3. Take responsibility, and don’t use excuses like not having enough time, money, or energy prevent you from reclaiming your power.

About Today’s Show

Hey Sally and welcome. I’m so happy to be talking to you today. I’m very excited.

‏‏Privileged to be on the show.

‏‏Thank you. Let’s start by you telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, what you do and how you help the world.

‏‏Sure. I’m from New Zealand, one of the most amazing places on the planet. I was brought up in New Zealand and my father was a guidance counselor. He was somebody who’s very passionate about kids who weren’t academically minded and was very frustrated with the schooling system so he packed up four kids, I’m the youngest, and took us to Canada. We lived there for four years. The drug thing in Canada at the time was quite prolific so my father brought us all back to New Zealand. I ride back in New Zealand, I was a redhead, white freckles, Canadian accent, didn’t look the same, sound the same, think the same. My earliest memory was that I didn’t fit, but I had an ideal upbringing in New Zealand and I found a passion for skiing when I was younger. I loved skiing with the mountains so when I came back to New Zealand, I decided to join the local ski club. I’m now turning 52 this year. In the early ‘80s, a lot of people used to hitch hike. I’ll give you the chronological order. We were quite rebellious and I got my first job hiring out skis at National Park in New Zealand which is a local ski resort, hitchhiked into town with a girlfriend and myself and we were none the wiser. I was 15 years of age and we went to the local bar, hung out with the locals, I was a bit rebellious. What we didn’t realize at that time is that we’ve been cased out by a notorious gang here in New Zealand called the Mongrel Mob. Cutting a very long story short, I experienced something that nobody survives and was abducted over a two day period and gang raped by more than 100 Mongrel Mob members and actually died in that experience. However, I was conscious throughout the ordeal. Fast forward, when I was found, there was no support. My parents did not know how to deal with what had happened. I go back to school like it didn’t happen. To this day, my family has never acknowledged what happened. Nobody in the New Zealand society has acknowledged the severity of what occurred, so I lived a 25 year journey of auto dysfunction to the extreme and the level of severance and disassociation because life wasn’t safe. I have an integral understanding of every level of dysfunction having lived it real time now realizing that that was my apprenticeship for what I do today. I can now acknowledge the Mongrel Mob as my spiritual initiative and having come full circle to achieve a level of self-actualization and full reintegration that I had to experience the nuances of that 25 year, lost year journey, to be able to have an integral understanding of those that I sit in front of. The education that I have developed off the back of being a course junky for a good 30 years,, I’ve really listened to it and been to it because it wasn’t for me a two, three day event, it was a 30 year life sentence. I did that to myself. Self-loathing, self-hatred, addictions on a great level so it was like a PhD in dysfunction. I got a doctor in victim, doctor in sabotage and did it very, very well to the extreme. I corporately excelled as I did a number of years in hospitality game, I was very ambitious because it was all about control, not that I really needed it at the time. My last assignment was based in the middle in the Netherlands, Boston, and New York. I was in charge, I was on my background in belief behavior culture change. Culture change is really my genre going into large organizations. I understand people and culture and implementing culture change initiatives. That was 15 years ago, 3,000 projects at the height of the assignment accountable for Netherlands, Boston and New York locations. Loved what I did but I knew that the millions of dollars that they were spending, that they’d never get a return on their investment. I became fascinated about this elusive thing called sustainability, both at a corporate level as well as a personal level because I was a course junky, I became so hardly aware and highly trained but I was unable to sustain it. That short euphoria was short lived.

‏‏As a seminar junkie myself, I can identify.

‏‏The education that I’ve developed is, and we can claim being the first leadership service provider globally. It is focusing on the sustainability element of personal or professional transformation. That’s our focus and my teaching this year is really top profile. It’s been like a chess game, pieces need to be put in place before you can get checkmate. I’m very passionate about stopping people here in permanently and believe that the education that I’ve developed has that ability and obviously from a leadership perspective, it is a leader’s responsibility to leave a legacy. I believe that I survived what I did to be able to teach people to fulfill on the legacy of why they are here, and it is my sole purpose of why I’m alive and doing what I’m doing.

It is a leader’s responsibility to leave a legacy. Click To Tweet

‏‏That’s beautiful. When I first approached you to come on the show, I did not know anything about your backstory. And then like I do with all my guests, I researched you and I found out about that traumatic experience and I saw the documentary and I couldn’t sleep the whole night that night. I was thinking about you, what you experienced, it really affected me in an empowering way, not in like I’m so sorry for her because having being through some harsh times, not to compare to that. Everybody has their own thing and there’s nothing like I got, I never experienced anything like what you did but I understand the power of forgiveness and the power of healing that self-inflicting pain that we take our self through by healing the people that hurt us. But that was so powerful. I was thinking what something like this can do to a woman’s identity as a woman and what it did to you? How did you interact with men after that? How did you interact with yourself and your body after that?

‏‏Oh there’s a lot in that.

‏‏I know, I have so much to ask you.

‏‏Because I was so disgusted by what happened to my body, and to survive what I did, I had to separate out. There was like me and then my body. For many decades, I always struggled with weight, I just didn’t dislike myself, it was maggots wouldn’t come close to the level of revulsion that I felt, a lot of abuse. I became a sex addict for over two decades, always putting myself at risk, always validating that I wasn’t good enough. Because of the dip with my voice added to the revulsion. 99.9% of the time on the phone, I’m still taken as Mr. Anderson. For a good 10 years of my life, I would be asked whether I was a man or a woman, like what are you, like you’re some freak show.

‏‏What you’ve been through is what triggered your voice.

‏‏Yes. I received so much oral abuse that it damage my vocal cords. Every time I spoke, it was a reminder of my past and because of the level of masculine energy that I would portray because it just wasn’t safe to be a woman.

‏‏Absolutely, yes.

‏‏Just wearing a dress doesn’t really cut it. All of those experiences were in perfection for what I now teach, having understood it. Even to this day, my husband will get on the phone and they’ll think that it’s me. If you haven’t done the work, you’d know that they would hotkey you back into your self-belief. With reference to some relationships, I lived for many years saying that I was committed to being in a loving, intimate committed relationship and if that was the case, I lived always alone because I had to sabotage anything good because who would want a woman like me?

‏‏My God.

‏‏Body sculpting. I went years and years and years and years of weight complaint and then had Corinna Everson on my fridge for about eight years who was one of the forerunners on bodybuilding for women. I had never thought that I could ever achieve that. However, when I was in Boston actually, when Body For Life first came out, Bill Phillip’s program, having done every dietician, nutritionist plan, every fad diet, you name it, meanwhile tens of thousands of dollars later, because I had to validate that I could not lose weight. It was relative. It’s like even with my story, people say that I always do comparison and I’d say look, in 15 years specifically in this game, those that have experienced next to nothing are more dysfunctional than those that are warranted to, that psychologically fascinates the hell out of me. You can have somebody say that their cat died, there is somebody who said their parent’s were murdered, guess who’s more dysfunctional? It’s not about the happening, it’s what you do with the happening. I ended up doing body sculpting, I got down to 4%, 57kg.

‏‏That’s insane.

‏‏Unbelievable.

‏‏That’s insane. 4% body fat. What? What did you eat, air?

‏‏In that game, you’re eating about six meals a day, it’s crazy. But that whole journey, what I learned was my relationship with my spoken word because transformation, most people complicate the hell out of it. It is very simplistic. A lot of it has to do with your integrity with your word and most people’s relationship with their spoken word is lousy.

‏‏That’s a big point. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

‏‏Being one’s word is integral to experiencing a level of transformation that you want. Most people are so disassociated, disconnected from their core. I coach the cause, not symptom. Most people are focusing on the symptoms which is why they keep re-occurring versus when you’re looking at something from a sustainability standpoint, you’re wanting to understand what’s actually causing these symptoms to be so cyclical. I talk about want versus commitment a lot. There’s four areas that most people want to transform as a generalization, one is money, one is love, one is vocation, calling, purpose, legacy, that type of area. The fourth is weight and wellbeing. From a reality check standpoint, when I’m in a room full of people, I’ll say who in the room is still wanting to lose weight? Or who is wanting to transform their finances? And then I’ll ask the question in the last 2, 5 or 10 years, how many of you have achieved either weight loss sustainably or transforming your financial arena? Hands go up. You probably live in a conversation that you hate it, you dislike it, you feel frustrated there and I’m here to tell you today, you actually love it. You love being fat and you love your finances being in the state that they’re in because that validates your default identity about yourself. What I specialize in is this thing called The Default Identity, this disempowered aspect of ourselves that we adopted at a young age and we then found evidence for decades to validate it but it was never the truth, it was just what the child decided. Getting back to the original question around want versus commitment, people go course to course to course, book to book to book, CD to CD to CD, they’re looking outside of themselves for elusive answers versus anything at a causal level. What is it that is having me pretty much, because most human beings are saboteurs, having me ongoingly sabotage because of the scenario of your life that’s not what you want it to be, it’s exactly where you want it to be from the default perspective because it’s validating that level of positioning.

There’s four areas that most people want to transform as a generalization, one is money, one is love, one is vocation, calling, purpose, legacy, that type of area. The fourth is weight and wellbeing.

‏‏Super powerful. What happened to you emotionally when you were on the stages competing in bodybuilding, getting to 4% body fat, having the shield of muscles to protect you or show the world or whatever the reason was? What did it do to you internally? Why wasn’t this sustainable for you?

‏‏I spent so much time because beliefs run everything. First, I never believed that I could achieve it. So even when I achieved it, I looked back at the photography, I was really sad because I was in a 10 body, I looked the best I’ve ever looked my entire life. I was still running a very hard core tape around self-revulsion, self-loathing. I never, ever achieved the level of satisfaction even though the physical manifestation was there. I work with a lot of millionaires and billionaires who are dissatisfied. I believe the biggest addiction on the planet is dissatisfaction.

‏‏Wow, powerful.

‏‏People who’ve got everything are still dissatisfied, people who want what they think that they want thinking that when they get it, they are going to be happier, they too were dissatisfied. There’s something in the human psyche that I believe people are not addressing around achievement or attaining a goal thinking that that is the thing that’s then going to make you happier. We live in a world of this isn’t it, there’s somewhere else to get, when I get there, I’m going to be happy then. That place called there, how are you going, I’m getting there. Where is that place called there? There’s only the now moment, you are never here. The body sculpting is a really great example for me. I thought that if I transformed my body and that I had it looking like a 10, then it would deal with everything, it didn’t because I hadn’t healed. Forgiving one’s past and the healing side of things, I’ve done every modality known to man, I have searched the planet for the best of the best and pleased to say that I have years and years and years of experiencing a cross section on modalities. The reason why I did that wasn’t so much, I was a soul subtle maniac for over two decades so I would do anything as people were getting married, having mortgages, having kids, doing the normal thing, I was dealing with my psychological state 24/7, living out 24/7 anxiety attacks. I understand fear, I understand that dysfunction, yet the irony. My first book, Freefall: Living Life Beyond The Edge. One of the chapters on the book is that I don’t believe in depression and that whole are for me and my stand for wanting to transform counseling and psychotherapy, that as we evolve, which is part of leadership philosophy, there is a need to introduce new ways of people being able to achieve the end result without it being drug related.

‏‏If you keep doing what you’ve done, you keep getting what you got. My question is do you think that forgiveness is the first step? Do you think forgiving yourself and others is the first step to healing?

‏‏No. Getting present to the cause of the carnage you’re creating would probably be the first step because to associate would mean you would have to take responsibility for the hell you’re putting yourself through. I have a very unique take on forgiveness, I believe and I’ve done a lot of research in this area where a lot of people are focused on the happening or the perpetrator which is why they genuinely cannot experience the level of forgiveness to give them the freedom that they need. There’s a difference between analytical forgiveness versus experiential forgiveness where you can talk that you’ve forgiven and talk that you’ve overcome it but it’s not genuine. This is experientially is where you know that you done the work because it doesn’t impact you anymore.

‏‏How do you experience that?

‏‏My take for myself, I have an event and then I then added a few decades of carnage. The focus needed to be on 10% the incident or the perpetrators and 90% for what you do for yourself. When you get present to, you become your own worst perpetrator. That is what you need to forgive because the only person who loses the inability to forgive is the person who can’t forgive. I’ve done two 60 Minute documentaries, the first one was the highest rated 60 Minute documentary in the History of 60 Minutes New Zealand. I won the humanitarian award that same year where I came face to face with one of my perpetrators.

‏‏Yes, I saw that. It was a super intense moment and you were sitting there and you looked at him and you smiled and you told him that you forgive him or them because you don’t really know who did and what did they do to you but he was just one of the gang members that were an active participant in those rapes and gang rapes and horrible act. And then you gave him a hug.

‏‏The 60 Minute interviewer was absolutely livid. When she was interviewing him, gang rapes, that type of world was his norm. It was like how many cups of coffee he had this week. She asked after the interview how can you forgive? I go I had a two, three day event and then I added a good 20, 30 years. That was my life sentence. I don’t even think about the Mongrel Mob. It’s got nothing to do with him. The reason why I’m forgiving is because I had to forgive myself to release myself. That’s to me the breakthrough in what I do is when you can have a breakthrough with forgiving yourself, for what you’ve done to yourself because the Mongrel Mob didn’t do that to me, I did that to myself. The carnage that I created, and I literally became worse than Mongrel Mob was to myself. The journey home, as it were with reference to healing, I believe that’s an end with getting present to the cause of being your own worst perpetrator.

The reason why I’m forgiving is because I had to forgive myself to release myself. Click To Tweet

‏‏How do you do that? How do you get present to that cause?

‏‏Part of the work that we do and also the healers that we align with, healing and isolation is not sustainable, coaching and isolation is not sustainable. My key focus is not just short term, shot of euphoria, feel great and then go back in the same old, same old. My aim from a planetary standpoint is being able to give back what I’ve learned around how do you sustain change personally and/or professionally and I believe that is a functional understanding integrally your default identity which is the work we specialize in. When you understand the nuances of that, why do you create carnage, why do you sabotage yourself, why do you have an ability to forgive, why, why, why, why? You can understand where it’s coming from. Just to give you a taste of that, in the study of anthology, the study of what it is to be human, they distinguished that there were incidences in childhood of a negative nature where you decided something and it pretty much is a life sentence. Most people are unconscious to a lot of that programming and then they live unconsciously creating and validating those stories and beliefs about themselves that have no validity but the validity towards the child gave. It’s the same thing with relationships, dysfunctionality and relationships. We have unhealed little boys, unhealed little girls in relationships. Same with running businesses, we have unhealed little girls, little boys running businesses because healing is not something that is widely endorsed and has bit of a negative connotation in the market. We as a leadership service provider champion saying that we are the leading advocates of healing and coaching together to get full reintegration. It’s very controversial in the leadership space to talk about healing and that’s part of my second book, The Co-Creative Age where I talk about love and faith as the only two things that matter with reference to the human condition, yet every single organization on the planet has human beings in it and the last thing in business that we talk about is love and faith.

‏‏It’s too much. It’s too much woo-woo.

‏‏And that’s where they get to educate responsibility, relinquish responsibility, it’s all part of the co-creative age of an ex revolutionary phase in leadership is they need to be the two primary strategies in your business. If you’re going to revolve to the next level as a human being, let alone a company, we need to be associated to the things that matter. No longer can we discard because it’s either I don’t believe it or I don’t trust it or it is too woo-woo or too esoteric. I specialize in being able to have conversations at a corporate level with leaders. If you listen to people that can handle a conversation, or handle it, if you listen to people, they can’t, they won’t. To me, I’m on a bit of a mission to get people connected because until I get connected, I can’t experience what it is to forgive or what it is to be able to reclaim the power in any area they like.

‏‏You started with awareness and finding your wounded inner child or in your case teenager and inner child, and you created an awareness that is big enough to change the course of your life, to change the way you relate to yourself, and to your body. Some people still have the awareness of why they do the things they do and they keep sabotaging. What’s the next step?

‏‏The power of a winner space training is that you’ve got a choice, you got a choice on how you feel, you got a choice on what you do, you got a choice on how you react, you’ve always got a choice. Most people enjoy being a victim and they can laugh over a long period of time. The people that our education attracts, they have done everything, they have done the Anthony Robbins, the landmarks, they’ve done every traditional leadership program but for whatever reason they haven’t experienced the transformation that they’ve wanted nor have they known how to sustain it. The danger of a winner space training is at least when you’re not aware, you can get away with your dysfunction. But when you become aware and then you still choose to play out that dysfunction, then that keeps validating the way your commitment lies.

‏‏Back to your word.

‏‏That’s where commitment equals results. Whatever the results are being produced as a function of your current commitment, even just that statement in itself can really rally people. They’ll be justifying and then you don’t know what I’ve tried and they produce the results.

‏‏You don’t know what I’ve been through.

‏‏Yeah. If there’s an area of your life that you are not satisfied with, it’s exactly that way you want it to be because you’re the designer of your life. People often ask me now that I’m married and been married seven years, we’ve been together eight years. I never had physical children because I was just an auto dysfunction for those two decades, period, but I birth things on a regular basis and my husband calls me the mother of birthing things with people.

‏‏He looks like a very sweet person. He adores you.

‏‏He is an extraordinary man, but he chose me from the 60 Minute documentary. It’s a bit weird when people ask me how did you meet you partner? He chose me. He watched the documentary and that whole story could probably easily fill an hour in itself. My point is he too has a very dysfunctional background, I believe that the universe puts people together for a reason and he of his own admission knows that he’d either be in prison or dead had he not have met me. I’ve never met such a strong man for a very strong woman because that’s the one thing about surviving, and that’s relative for people. Earlier, I was speaking about those that have experienced trauma are unable to reconcile what happen when nobody in society really wants to hear it, who really wants to listen to rape, or incest, or wife beatings, or whatever. That aspect of our society, people don’t want to hear yet the irony is we have a drug related industry globally that we put a label on it and then we’ll drug it and then that’s our way of being able to deal with. At a level, I believe that it’s like the weight loss industry, it’s a trillion dollar industry, it is not interested in sustainable solutions. I do feel a bit more with reference to wanting this education to be in the hands of anybody working with the human condition. If you take a psychiatrist or a counselor as an example who have had years and years of formalized training, and the controversy in the work that I do is to me, to be able to shift somebody out of the state where they’re operating, you need to go toe to toe with that person, you need to bring up your own personal life experiences. Whereas in counseling and psychotherapy, you’re not allowed to share anything of a personal nature. Until you, the practitioner, have an integral understanding of your own default identity to be able to facilitate somebody else’s default identity, you have to have done the work on yourself to that degree. In my observation, there are a lot unhealed people trying to heal unhealed people.

‏‏That’s a big problem.

‏‏Yeah. Stopping people from bleeding permanently is the essence of the education and wanting anybody working with the human condition, if they were to do the work on themselves to be able to have this as a tool kit and as an edge jump over and above their formal training would be able to reach more people with being able to heal a planet.

‏‏For you Sally, you created the awareness. What was the moment where you knew that you are healed and you started to build a different relationships to your body?

‏‏I often get asked to do a lot of professional keynote speaking and people often ask what was the point of change? What changed everything? My brother died when he was 23 years of age, I was 18. When I witnessed what my parents went through, having lost a son, the only reason in my 20, 30 years of carnage, reason why I didn’t commit suicide was because of my brother. The irony was he was actually my savior, as much as I cursed him. The journey to what changed, I was in a course, I was suicidal, I’d had enough, I was highly freaking trained in God knows how many people’s curriculum but I was still dying inside. The course lady got me up on stage in front of 300 people and I was the queen of drama in those days and he called me a victim. In my world, victim meant weakness. Out of all of the things that I thought about myself, one thing I knew was that I wasn’t weak. That didn’t compute. But when he made the distinction that victim is being powerless to change the situation, it was like a tick of tape parade throughout my entire life that I was completely and utterly powerless in every area of my life because I thought life was doing it to me. And then I landed the distinction choice and in that moment my life changed. That was when I was 30, I’m now going on 52. I never realized I had a choice, I didn’t realize that I had a choice on how I felt, a choice on how I reacted, a choice on what I did, a choice on what I thought. That was a new concept for me and pretty much became a vigilante from that moment but it was a defining moment where everything changed because if I had a choice, then I never realized – how many books do you need to read that say be careful what you think, your thoughts create your reality. But we are not disciplined in where our thoughts are focused. If you’re spending time worrying, you will attract what you’re worried about. If you’re spending time fearful, you will attract what you’re fearful of. We are so powerful. We can read it, we can listen to it, but in the application piece, which is where the default comes in, the default being the disempowered aspect of self that needs to keep you safe, albeit how dysfunctional it is, the default identity is about safety. Because when I walk down the street, I see people shut off at a heart level and at a connectedness level. Part of what I teach people is regardless of what you call a high pile universe of force collective consciousness guard, if you ever tried to vacuum, have you tried to vacuum when you haven’t plugged it in? It’s a bit tricky.

If you’re spending time worrying, you will attract what you’re worried about. If you’re spending time fearful, you will attract what you’re fearful of.

‏‏It’s a good metaphor.

‏‏Who we are in our human form is limited but who we are in our co-creative form is limitless. Teaching people to tap in, teach me, show me, guide me. If you have your faith, you have everything, whatever that is for you.

‏‏Yup, for sure. What did you do, what actions did you take? What new thoughts did you think to relate differently to your body and fall in love with her?

‏‏Definitely the journey around the body side of things even though I maintain, sustained, post competition. I just did a video blog recently on it that when you think about, let’s talk about women’s dysfunction about weight just for a moment. Most women are in a resist, persist cycle of some level of hatred, fearing degrees and dissatisfaction around their bodies. Whereas I believe that weight, which isn’t a foreign concept, weight is all about protection, but if we do reverse psychology with it, when was the last time you got down on your knees and you actually thanked who may be your interpretation of your faith is, and in this particular conversation, we’ll call it universe, when was the last time you got down on your knees and you actually thanked the universe for protecting you? Thank you for putting the weight on. It’s complete reverse psychology. My breakthrough with my body was when I realized that there was a higher force at work in my life and that if we are to believe that weight is about protection and that the universe supported me by putting the weight on and then until I was ready to let go of the weight and reintegrate, reconcile, heal, come home, and then the weight could go because it’s no longer required. Because there’s not enough teaching around the empathetic aspect of weight, and then we have an industry that fuels the resist, persist cycle around it, it’s half the reason why people can’t sustain it. The falling in love with yourself is falling in love with yourself unconditionally. When I met my husband and I got married, most women lose weight when they get married, I put on 25kg. The irony was I was the happiest I’ve ever been because I was understanding what was going on, that I no longer needed an external mechanism to keep myself safe, that I’ve done the healing, I’ve done the work, I was able to no longer have that as a protective mechanism. As far as learning the self talk, part of my mission also is to have mastery of the inner critic in the schooling system. To be human is to have in an inner critic, that internal force that beats the crap out of you. The irony, to be human is to have one, it annihilates human potential but nobody’s talking about it. All of the research that I’ve done into the inner critic, there are many mechanisms on how to manage it, coordinate yourself around it, there’s even books out there that tells you to wear a rubber band and flick yourself every time you hear critics going off. If that is not an example of absolute sabotage, part of what we do was reference to mastering the inner critic is can you imagine that in a schooling system, I can talk to a 9 year old child who’s got the worst inner critic on the planet and then I can talk to somebody who’s 49 years of age who’s had their inner critic beat the crap out of them for four decades. Mastery of inner critic needs to be in the schooling system as much as math and science and all of the main stream subjects because it’s a thing that actually has people be so dysfunctional with themselves. It’s at the core of every human being on the planet, we don’t talk about it at a leadership level, and we need to.

‏‏What’s your take on dealing with the inner critic?

‏‏A lot of my practices are very unorthodox. Part of conversations that I facilitate with people around me and that critic has a lot to do with the unique work that we do around the default identity. I’ll tell you one angle. When I talk to somebody about the inner critic, again, I’m just framing it as unorthodox. I’ll ask them, “Are you a child abuser?” Not the average conversation that you’d have with a client. They obviously come back with no, I’ll go, “Okay good, if there was a 5 year old child standing beside you right now, would you berate that child the way you berate yourself most days?” “Oh god, no.” “I’m going to go back. Are you a child abuser? What on earth have you done? Think about yourself about the ages three to five. What have you done that has deserved decades of self beration? What did you do that warrants that?” To get somebody prisoned, to have somebody acknowledge that they actually are a child abuser to themselves, they have abused the shit out of their own inner child for decades unconsciously. I’m interested in results, I’ll do whatever I need to to get results and it’s really perfect. Most people spend a hell of a lot of money on change. I’ve done the course, I’ve done the books, and they just want change. It ain’t going to happen by me wussy wussing around the backyard. Intentionality, at a causal level, having people wake up to the damage that they’re doing to themselves. The irony of a winner space training, I had been an abuser of my own inner child for decades and until I’m unable to get present to the cause of that, I can’t take my power back. When your inner critic says who do you think you are, you’re own reaction to that, you’re disconnected. Why do you automatically believe it’s the truth? What processes that are able to collapse it because every single inner critic conversation is a function of being disconnected, feeding a projection. You’re either out there in the past, feeding a belief that you created, or you’re out in the future validating a belief that you have about yourself. Past and future based projections are the culmination of what your inner critic says to you. But you’re disconnected until you connect and reconnect to what motivates you, get present to the cause. You got a choice, you can either continue to sabotage or you can continue to retrain your thoughts structures. When people say to me “Sally Anderson brainwashes people”, goddamn right. I reprogram people at a cerebral level to have them reclaim, because your beliefs run everything. You believe you can, you can. You believe you can’t, you can’t.

‏‏Correct. You’ve been through the healing and you start finding self love and what about relationships? How did you learn to trust again and to open yourself in more of a feminine way rather than a masculine that was running you that said I don’t want to get hurt ever again.

‏‏I’ve got every right to not trust a thing on the planet considering my whole life apprenticeship has been betrayal from friends, betrayal from every business partner, betrayal from family, I understand betrayal. The irony, what you learn is what you teach. I’m here learning to trust, let go and surrender and that’s what I teach. Every single experience I’ve had that could’ve had me be bitter, resentful, and I could’ve easily been a statistic in a system, my trajectory either would have been a mental asylum, suicide, or a static in a system. The fact that I’ve completely transformed my life, have transcended tens of thousands of people’s lives, seem to be millions of lives.

‏‏Hooray, congratulations.

‏‏Makes sense as to why I do what I do and why I survived what I survived. Being able to teach people, have an understanding of myself, I believe we all have a different life contract. It’s my only way of being able to understand why some people experience some things and others not, and that if we are to believe that we are here for a purpose and we are here for a reason, whether we learn those contractual lessons or not is another thing. I’m a true believer in psychosomatics that whatever you manifest on a physical is what you’re not dealing with on the emotional. The journey around love specifically is that I again had a choice, I can either remain bitter and resentful and endlessly ranting talks about the four hours where you experience rejection, you then feel repressed, you then feel resentful and then you become resigned. Most people go to the graves resigned. I learned early on through many, many years of healing and pretty aggressive work that I could either live a life where I learned from each experience and then was able to have it forward my game versus retract. My mantra in life is think, do, say, be, equals forwarding the game. Most people don’t even know what the game is. I’ve trained myself to a very high degree of integrity. Every single thing that I think, every single thing that I say, every single thing that I do, and everything that I’m being is congruent to forwarding my game because I understand what my game is. Now, think about it on a day to day basis, how often is what you’re thinking forwarding your game? Is what you’re saying forwarding your game? It really has you look at how undisciplined we are with where our focus is. Learning to be loved, learning to love, to me was a bit like returning to my faith because it fundamentally comes back to trust. If you don’t trust, you can’t have a relationship with yourself, let alone the universe or with another person. I also believe in timing. I had to experience two to three decades of being alone to a severe degree to understand that if I’m here to teach people to heal, to trust, what it means to come home, then I need to understand the severity of extremes. It’s almost like every adverse experience had to happen for me to learn the opposite. The same with love, I had to understand hatred to an extreme to understand the power of love which is to me the only thing that matters. The how really is a functional choice. It’s a bit like when you see a train track. You change the train track one millisecond, not one millimeter. The whole trajectory of where that train is going to hit is going to go into a different direction. We complicate transformation because if we were to make it easy, then we’d have to die to that default level of identity that gets us safe. I’m not finding how dysfunctional it’s been but it’s a safety mechanism that most people are running that they have no idea of.

We complicate transformation because if we were to make it easy, then we’d have to die to that default level of identity that gets us safe. Click To Tweet

‏‏I loved everything that you’re saying. Everything is very much aligned with what I have learned from myself and from being the seminar junky, from doing the healing work, traumatic work, whatever work I did. I kind of feel like there is no goal, there is no end to how much we can evolve and get better and smarter and more spiritual and more connected to a high power or the universal source, God, creator. For me, I understand that internal question that I had, my question was how can I not get hurt? I could not date people or have a relationship that lasted two, three months. Four years ago, I went to Date With Destiny with Tony Robbins and I learned that that was the question that was running my life and on that day I sat by a little waterfall outside of the resort and I had a breakdown, I started crying and laughing and laughing and crying, that was a breakdown and breakthrough and I was praying and was finally ready and willing to have faith and surrender and trust. After experiencing an abusive relationship, I got myself really hard and I studied martial arts and I got really strong and I became a kick ass and I was sabotaging every relationship that I was getting myself into. That night, it was [1:00]AM, I was singing to the stars, I started crying, crying and laughing. It was a full surrender, not in a weak way. It was a powerful surrender. Letting go of control is power and I was trying to control everything in my life at that point. I wrote down my relationship vision and 48 hours later I met my husband, he proposed on a hot air balloon nine days after we met and I said no, it was an awkward 20 minutes in the little basket in the sky, I had nowhere to go. But nine months later he proposed again at the same place I prayed for him and I said yes. Me too, I understand the power of forgiveness. I had to forgive my ex and I had to learn to forgive myself and journey into healing that wounded child. Even last Friday, I went to a thing called Inner Dance where it’s like a sound bath but the instructor comes and she zaps you with healing energy. I went on this astral travel into so many times in my life where I was in pain and I got hurt and I just saw myself, the mature version of me, the present version of me going there and telling her that I love her and everything’s going to be fine and just sending her love more and more, it was beautiful and overwhelming at the same time. It’s really nice.

‏‏Thank you for sharing, it’s profound.

‏‏It is. You talk a lot about leadership. What is a leader to you and how can we take a stand as a leader in this world?

‏‏One of the ways we described, I think it was a level of frustration with our leadership currently, where a lot of leaders are highly trained, they have been to most of the traditional leadership teaching providers. I would talk about the three legged stool. One legged stool is the traditional leadership, they’re highly trained in that area. Second leg of a stool is the subject matter expertise; most leaders have honed their skills to a high degree and are exemplary in that area. Third leg of the stool however is more your soft skills, mindset skills, behavior change that usually fits into the back. When we’ve got the time, when we’ve got the budget, which is hardly ever, is the most deficit within leadership. In my observation with the planet, it’s all very well to talk about what the issues are on the planet. However, if we don’t have leaders who are evolving in their ability to lead, then that is a concern. I said before when you’re in human form, it’s limited when you’re in your co-creative form, it’s limitless. There is a lack of teaching at a leadership level to teach leaders on how to tap into the unknown. The unknown dimension is what I believe needs to be part of the core training within traditional leadership. We have a responsibility to impact future generations that aren’t even born yet. I don’t know why others aren’t jumping up and down but I certainly am. If we are not evolving the psyche of those who’d lead, we are affecting future generations of those that haven’t even been born yet. I am on a bit of a mission to get my latest book out which is speaking into all of that. Because most leaders are trained in mainstream thinking and might entertain the odds but it’s not mainstream. I believe there’s a sense of urgency to deal with issues that are beyond the context of the human mind. We have to evolve the human mind. And that is not the acceptable norm but needs to be. My frustration, and even in my own experience of cultural change, Sally can you just come in and fix my people?

‏‏Sure. Let me just wave a magic wand and everything is going to be just cool.

‏‏First of all I don’t believe people need to be fixed, unless the leaders are willing to work what they’re advocating, you cannot expect your people to…

‏‏Yes, yes, yes. I’m being a little more excited about this concept.

‏‏I decided I would go nowhere near a company unless the CEO was willing to work it just as much as anybody else. Really specializing in high level leaders, CEOs, C-Suite, board level, that’s where I hang out because half of them are little boys, little girls who are running major, major businesses but they have not done enough work on their mindset. I believe there needs to be far more focus within the leadership realm of evolving the thinking of those who lead.

‏‏Amazing. I want to be respectful of your time. Before we say goodbye for now, what are your three quick tips to living a stellar life and where can people find you and learn from you and take your seminars and read your books?

‏‏Three things. Number one, it comes back to how many books have you read where it says be careful what you think, your thoughts create your reality. If you do not have a very disciplined approach to what you think about, then you are a self fulfilling prophecy on what it is that you achieve. Number one, numero uno is that beliefs run your life. Getting very disciplined in retraining your thought patterns is integral. Number two, do whatever you can to form a new relationship with your spoken word, it has everything to do with transformation. If you’re wanting to do anything in the area of transformation, absolutely transform your relationship with your spoken word because most people’s relationship with their spoken word is lousy. The third would be I talk about a ludicrously cycle where you are the producing result, ordinary results or same results. We keep cycling and then that then leaves us feeling in whatever operating state that is normally disempowering. It’s a ludicrously cycle because we are not understanding at a causal level what’s actually going on. I call them relinquishment buckets. I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough money, I don’t have enough energy. They’re all relinquishing buckets standard relaying by human being. How convenient you don’t have time, money, energy, etc. it’s never about that but it’s a convenient excuse. Confusion is always your education of taking responsibility. If you are using any of those throw away lines, then welcome to the world of being a professional saboteur. However, through the power of a winner space training, you can actually take your power back. Just have a look at what ludicrousy cycle that you’re in and know that you do have the ability to reclaim your power if you choose it. I could keep going but I’ll shut up.

‏‏I can keep listening forever.

‏‏I release a free video every week. There’s about 30 episodes on Evolve Leadership TV on the website. If your listeners are wanting to get a taste of the education, there’s blogs on the website, there’s a lot of free resource on the website. The website is www.evolvedleadership.com.au. We are in the process of major rebranding at the moment. The new website will be live in March, however the website has all the information on it. www.evolvedleadership.com.au

‏‏Perfect. Thank you so much Sally Anderson for being a lightworker and helping change the world and change the lives of millions of future leaders, and I love you. I appreciate this conversation, thank you so much.

‏‏Thank you for the privilege of being able to share today and thank you for trusting your intuition making the original approach. Thank you.

‏‏Bye.

Your Checklist Actions to Take

✓ First, take a moment to figure out what was the most traumatic event of your life. Next, write down at least five positive things that have resulted from it.

✓ Write down your desires in each of the four main areas of transformation: money, love, vocation, and well-being.

✓ In the last five years, what sustained changes have you made in each of those four areas? Write down a specific list for each area of transformation.

✓ Assess whether any lack of changes in any of those areas is because you have a deeprooted negative self-image that you keep finding reasons to validate.

✓ Acknowledge the cost of being your own worst perpetrator. Instead of dwelling in the past or future, focus on becoming aware of the ways you’re holding yourself back.

✓ Do you enjoy being a victim? Don’t accept your own knee-jerk reaction; take a step back and assess the possibility with an open and forgiving mind.

✓ What experiences and events continue to have a negative impact on your life? Remember that you have the choice to shape your life and reactions, and respond to these events accordingly.

✓ If you’re heavier than you’d like to be, get down on your knees and thank the Universe/ God/a greater force for giving you that protection (as counterintuitive as it sounds).

✓ To help master your inner critic, picture yourself at age 3 to 5. What did that child do to deserve decades of abuse and negativity? Nothing. Be gentle to your own inner child.

✓ Reclaim your power by retraining your thought patterns. You have choices, and you can stop telling yourself the stories that lead you to self-sabotage.

About Sally Anderson

Sally is at the forefront of sustainable human and organisational transformation. She is a world-renowned Leadership Coach, Leadership Advance Facilitator, Inspirational Keynote Speaker, Author and Master Coach Trainer. Her 20 years in the corporate world, together with lessons she has garnered through her amazing and unique life story, inspire and help others achieve sustainable transformation for professional and personal success.