Making It – Episode 165
From Hiding to Thriving: Rewriting Your Inner Story (Nina Cooke)
Nina Cooke: I’m Nina Cooke and you’re listening to Making It. I run a mindset business, which helps entrepreneurs to create more wealth, but also a sense of purpose and a sense of fulfillment. My childhood was shaped by my family. The people who were the closest to me, the way they interacted with each other, the way they interacted with me. I’m one of three children. I’m the youngest. I had a bit of a strange experience.
My parents are Indian. They came over from India in 1962. They came separately. I was born in London. When I was 18 months old, my mum and dad made the very difficult decision to send me back to India to live with my mum’s extended family. I was separated from my family for three and a half, very formative years from the age of 18 months to the age of five. When I returned back to England, I was lifted out of my family in India and lifted into a family in England. I had an older brother and sister I didn’t know, a mum and dad I didn’t know. And that was very, very unfortunate because I hadn’t formed any bonds with them.
To cut a long story short, my parents were quite cold and unloving. I had an older sister who was a narcissist. And her chief pleasure, from what I can gather, was to put me down and make me feel that I wasn’t good enough. Because every time she did that, she somehow made herself feel better. So I had this constantly, day in, day out, the feeling of danger growing up. And my utmost priority was to keep myself safe.
So I decided early on in life that the best way to stay safe was to hide and not be seen. And that’s what I did. I stayed silent. I never mentioned my opinion. My opinion was never asked. I didn’t have any advice from my parents growing up, so I had to figure everything out on my own. But the biggest thing that I took away as a child was I’m not good enough. There’s something wrong with me. I’m missing something, a vital piece that everyone else has. I can’t let people find out the truth about me. Therefore, I created a facade around myself. A big wall that no one could ever penetrate to keep myself safe.
I decided to start a business because I’d left corporate world after having children. I left Time Life Books where I’d been a product manager. Very happy there for a number of years. I was pregnant with my first child. There was no part time opportunities in those days. They all came just after I left. And I decided I want to stay at home and look after her. I had three more children after that, so I was just doing that for 10 years throughout my 30s. Then, as the children were just getting to the age where I could come up for air, I started thinking about what I could do. I started looking for opportunities.
And someone told me about this lady who was a TV personality who ran a personal shopping business, and she was looking for someone to run her business for her while she pursued her TV career. I worked for her for three months. She was a very challenging employer. She’d accused me of doing all sorts of things behind her back, which I’d never done. And I realized now that was her mindset, that people were going to rip her off. And she thought I was doing the same thing, and I wasn’t. And I thought, I’m not going to stay here because this isn’t good for me.
And I remember saying to my husband, I don’t know what I should do next. And he said, well, why don’t you do what you were doing for that lady? Why don’t you just do it for yourself? And I thought, oh, that’s interesting. And because I didn’t know what it entailed to start a business. So I hired a guy to help me to create an online business. Followed all the steps he gave me, and lo and behold, I started getting clients. I was very lucky because I’d learned the inside mechanisms of running a personal shopping business, having worked for three months with this other lady, and I was able to do it.
There was a bridge that took me from what I was doing to in my personal shopping business to what I do now. It came down to one particular moment. I was able to get some nice bookings, online bookings, just by being on the phone with people. But I didn’t market myself online because I was always hiding away. I didn’t like to put myself out there because it was still dangerous to me, even though I was now an adult and my mom and my sister weren’t around to cause me any fear. But I still carried those childhood beliefs as if they were true about me.
So I didn’t put my photo out there. I didn’t even have my name on my website. One day, I got a nice corporate booking, and it was a big accountancy firm in London. We were going to do an evening pampering session for their senior female staff and their senior female clients. So we went to set up in the evening. I took a team of 20 personal stylists, makeup artists, manicurists. They all set up their stations. We were in beautiful, swanky offices. They had champagne flowing, wonderful buffet. They all set up their stations and make sure they were ready to take on the clients.
Once I realized that everything was set up, it was all good to go. I thought, okay, now what I can do is talk to some of the senior staff and try and get another booking. There were two very, very smartly dressed suited women chatting. I thought, I’ll go up to them and, you know, strike up a conversation. And I started walking towards them. And then this voice in my head said, don’t go and talk to them because they’ll realize you’re not very good at what you do.They’ll see you’re not good enough.
So I did a sharp left turn, and lucky for me, I found some dark, empty offices. So I went inside there and I stayed there for the rest of the evening. I didn’t dare to come out until the end when I knew that the guests and the senior staff had left. And then I came out and helped my team to pack everything up. And I remember it was a November evening. I sat on the train and I could see my reflection in the window. And I thought, you’ve done it again. You’ve messed up again. You keep doing this again and again. You cannot take advantage of these opportunities as they show up.
And this is going to be the pattern for the rest of your life. At that moment, I thought, something has to change. There were two big things going on in my head. One was that I wouldn’t be able to progress in my life by doing this to myself and hiding away and sabotaging all of these great opportunities that came up for me in life. And the other thing that was playing in my mind was my children. I wanted to be an authentic role model for them. I wanted to be someone who showed up confidently in life, who took risks, who put myself out there, who spoke to people, you know, created relationships. And I wanted my children to be able to see that authentically.
Now, I was pretty good at faking stuff and pretending to be confident, but I wanted my children to really see who I could be. So I decided that evening that I was going to find a way to find that little missing piece that I believed I was lacking, that everyone else had. And I would do whatever it took to find it. And that’s what took me down the road to delving deep into personal development, to find something that could permanently change me.
There’s a lovely term that Napoleon Hill uses in his book, Outwitting the Devil. He says most people drift through life. They drift through life because they don’t know what they want. We are all working on autopilot from a set of beliefs that we created many of them in childhood, just as I was working on autopilot, believing I wasn’t safe and I had to hide away, even as an adult, where I was completely safe. And when I realized I was living by these rules, which I’d absorbed from other people and from the rules that they had about themselves, I took them on as to be true about my rules in life.
And now I can just have a clean slate and say, what rules do I want in my life? What am I going to live by that’s going to help me to have a happy life. That really threw me into a creative process in my thinking. And it changed everything for me. Making it for me is being happy in my skin and feeling confident that I know what I want in life and then doing whatever it takes to make that a reality for me. It’s knowing that I don’t have to incrementally increase my life by 5%, 10%. That it has to take a long time, that it has to be a big, rough, tough journey, that it has to be difficult.
It’s to know that when I can sort out my mind and get clarity and know what I want, that I can make quantum leaps to get there and to believe in myself and to believe in the whole process and know that I can have what I want, that I don’t have to sell myself short, I don’t have to settle for less in life, that we can all have what we want. But first, we have to become very, very clear, super clear about what we want. It’s been an ongoing process, and it’s still an ongoing process. My awareness has grown as I’ve been doing the personal development work for myself and my clients. What it actually means for me and how I can use that in my life.
And this journey is never going to end. And sometimes I would think to myself, I fall into the trap of thinking that the outer world is in control and forgetting that my thinking controls the outer world. And I just have to adjust for the time lag. And once I understood that, then my focus has become more on how I use my imagination to focus on what I want. And I get so much enjoyment out of that piece that my attention is not so much on the outer world now. The mistakes that I’ve made along the way is forgetting that I’m in charge and letting the outer world take control over me.
So, for example, when I started working in personal development, I would have goals. And my goals would be along the lines of, I want to work with this type of client, or, you know, I want to live in this sort of house or whatever it would be. And I would use my methods to try and make that happen. And when it didn’t happen as soon as I wanted it to happen, then I would think, it’s not working, I’m doing something wrong. Then I would try something different. And then I would keep getting thrown off course and going back into, why isn’t it happening?
So I would be wavering a lot. And now I’ve realized that my job is not to figure out the hows and the whens. My job is to focus on the end result. So often I wasn’t going to the end of the road, I was stopping part way and then getting involved in the processes. Well, how is this going to happen? Am I going to, you know, get enough clients next month? You know, what happens if I don’t? Now I focus on the end result and I’m very clean with that. So I always think, well, what would be the celebratory conversation I would have with someone once I have this goal? What would I be telling them that I’ve achieved?
Making it is an ongoing journey. I’m really, really happy where I am right now. And I haven’t always been able to say that. I feel a level of contentment that I haven’t felt for a very, very long time, if ever, because there’s this fact inside my head, a truth that I’m in control. And now I’ve got that. I’ve got that belief in place. I know that magical things are happening and will continue to happen in my life. It is all about the belief. Belief is believing that you have something that you cannot see in the physical world, but, you know, you just know in your bones you’re going to have it.
Relationships have improved. I’m showing up in a different way because my expectations are that, you know, everything’s great, people are wonderful. I receive much more of that back into my life. And the thing that I’ve discovered, which I didn’t think I would discover, is this is actually really good fun to play with my imagination, to have wonderful fantasies, to really focus on them and make them feel more real as time goes on. The thing that I’ve come to realize about the journey of making it, it is the very, very personal journey.
There are so many wonderful coaches, consultants, mentors, gurus out there who will say do it this way. And they’ll say it because their way works brilliantly for them, so they’re being absolutely authentic. However, you may find that if you follow their path and do everything they say, you may not get the same result as them. So find something that works for you and do it. Consistency is the key in anything. It’s not rocket science. Personal development to me, being happy is focusing on what you want rather than focusing on the challenges. Keep doing it day after day, get cumulative results. Then you get to a different level of understanding and awareness that gives you something new to play with. And so it keeps going on and on and on.
I’m Nina Cooke and you’ve been listening to Making It. You can find me at ninacooke.co.uk. I spell that for you. Ninacooke.co.uk. You’ll find the link in the show notes. I have a very valuable resource for you. It’s called Millionaire Mindset Mastery Scorecard. This scorecard will show you all your limiting beliefs that are stopping you from making more money and having more success.
Danny Iny: Making it is part of the Mirasee FM Podcast network, which also includes such shows as Just Between Coaches and Once Upon a Business. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on Making It, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It’s the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.