Okay, this one is more than a little different. We talked with bio-energetics therapist and self mastery coach, Ron Baker for the 126th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Let’s just say this upfront, this interview is way outside our experience as copywriters. But as human beings, maybe there’s something here that we can all learn from. Here’s what we covered with Ron:
• how he become a “bio-energetics therapist” and self mastery coach
• how to be present in the moment and get in touch with your “inner self”
• the place that breath plays in inspiration, intuition and passion
• an exercise or two to get in touch with your inner self
• how breath work and sound has changed Ron’s client’s life
• Ron’s experiences visiting sacred sites around the world
• what is possible for deeper personal potential and consciousness
• the one thing everyone should do when it comes to woo
• how woo applies to online marketing
Want to hear it all? Click the play button below or download this episode to your favorite podcast app. Or, if you prefer, you can scroll down for a full transcript.
The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
Ron’s website
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Intro: Content (for now)
Outro: Gravity
Full Transcript:
Rob: This podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Underground.
Kira: It's our new membership designed for you to help you attract more clients and hit 10K a month consistently.
Rob: For more information or to sign up, go to thecopywriterunderground.com.
Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That's what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.
Rob: You're invited to join the club for episode 126 as we chat with self-mastery coach, Ron Baker about self-mastery and what we can do to get better at it. The levels of consciousness, creating a better life, and what it all has to do with copywriting.
Kira: Welcome, Ron.
Ron: Thank you for having me here. I have been enjoying your podcast a lot. I was actually just laughing my ass off at the interview that Ry did with the two of you.
Kira: Oh, you listened to that one.
Ron: I love ... Well, I listened to many, but I love the humanity and-
Kira: Oh boy.
Ron: Putting yourselves in the hot seat. I thought it was very courageous. I'm really-
Rob: Let's not do that again, shall we?
Kira: No I think we should do that more often. That was fun. So thanks for jumping in here with us. We were just saying before we started recording that this conversation is a little bit different than our normal copywriting focus conversations but I feel like this would be really helpful for us to branch out and stretch and for other copywriters to stretch, as well. So let's kick it off with your story, Ron. How did you end up as a bio-energetics therapist and self-mastery coach?
Ron: Well, the simple version of that is how did I end up as a nurturer and a guide for people to get to know themselves more fully? Because as I share just a brief version of my story, it will end up with how I went through 20 years of school as well as home and nobody taught me anything about myself, about my inner self, about how to truly trust myself and be fulfilled as a self. So, all of that started out way back when in North Carolina, and I grew up in a home that had some very typical challenges and some difficult challenges, and basically we were five separate people on five separate islands who didn't know how to communicate and nurture. Though everybody was inherently a really good person, nobody had the skills to create connection, intimacy and communication. We ended up with alcoholism and divorce and all kinds of things to navigate.
At the same time, I was having these inner gut feelings that I couldn't explain. I said, ‘I feel like I am protected and I'm guided.’ And I feel like I'm being prepared for something and I had no idea what I was talking about. I was only like 10 and 11 years old when all that started to happen. I then moved through high school into college and out into the world and had a first career compensating for all of my self-doubt. All of the lack of education about self. All of the fear and shame that I carried and I had some really cool ways to do that. I had a first career where I got to be one of the lucky ones performing over 60 leading roles in Broadway shows and opera all over the world. I was in glamorous positions working with famous people, signing autographs and I was so unhappy on the inside. I didn't know how to fulfill my self and it was really confusing, because I was living some people's idea of the dream of success.
And so, I interrupted the whole thing and went on a journey of inner exploration and what I discovered over the years, there was some overlap, but over the years of studying with so many different teachers and perspectives, was that the inner is the whole point. Me expressing myself in performing, me experiencing being in it, is what was fulfilling. Me deepening my self and my connections with people is what mattered and so, to tie that together with copywriting, I love sharing this and all that I've learned with other people who want to express and have a voice and be creative and inspire other people. And so I put together the pieces of my journey and a ton of years of studying with different people interrupted that performing career and when the tools that I was developing for myself ended up helping my friends that I would share it with, I eventually, to make the story much shorter, transitioned to doing that full time and now 22 years later, I have been jammed full of clients all over the world who simply want to take their lives to the next level by getting to know and how to tap and how to express their most authentic selves.
Rob: So when you talk about experiencing this at a deeper level, it sounds to me a little bit like when we talked about being present in the moment. But maybe it's something deeper than that. We talk more about that and that experience and how we do that?
Ron: Absolutely. Being present in the moment is vital. Most people do their best every day to be present in the moment, but they don't even know what they don't know. Clients come to me and I say, ‘You'll be amazed three, six months from now, as you begin to work, how little you have been connected to yourself. Even your physical body.’ So, learning how to connect physically, how to connect emotionally, how to get in touch with the inner self in very simple, practical ways, begins to awaken and stimulate the inner self rather than I'm someone who does this and I'm my activities and I don't know anymore than to build the outer structures. So when we get in touch with the inner self, let's actually start with a practical exercise that everybody listening could do at this moment to see how in touch with your physical self you are in this moment.
I'm going to say a word and I would encourage you not to shift a thing but just bring your focus to this word. The word is breath. Just pay attention to what you're already doing. I have been teaching for 22 years and 99% of the time what people discover is they are doing a very shallow high in the chest, what I call ‘survival breath’. There are reasons for that. We have most of our physical, emotional, mental energy that was impacted in our early lives, held in our lower bodies and when we weren't nurtured and taught how to trust the connection to self and the value of self, then we hold a bunch of fear, shame and judgment there and what we learn to do is to make the breath shallower and shallower and shallower, trying to avoid shaking up our fear, shame and judgment.
So we focus on the outside. We breathe shallow. We go up in our heads living on what I call the ‘observation deck’ of life. Just observing everything like I was doing in my career performing. I was observing and there, but I wasn't present in the moment as an experience in myself. So what I teach people to do is recognize what has been habitual, like that shallow survival breath, and then I teach them to breathe like we did naturally as a baby. If you watch a baby lying on its back in a crib, the only thing that moves is the belly. It goes up and down. Well that's exactly where we hold a lot of our stuff. And so as a child, it was overwhelming but now that we are an adult, going back in to do it, it is completely safe. Not a big deal at all. So, I encourage people to take a deep breath that fills the lower belly and then to do a proactive out breath through the mouth. And it sounds a little like this.
I have never had a single person when I suggest that they take a full breath ever do an out breath like that. How does that apply to someone being a copywriter? Your breath determines how much you are in touch with your inner self and your out breath determines how free you feel to assert and express yourself. 99.99 of the people I have taught have a very tight, careful out breath. When people learn how safe they are to begin moving their energy and awakening themselves more fully on the inside, all of a sudden, they begin to tap a different level of creativity and inspiration and intuition, and the stuff that is in the guts all of us writers that want to express, develops a more relaxed, freer capacity to get that out and on the page.
So that's one way being more in the moment just connecting to the physical body, it can be practical and will change your life.
Kira: Okay. I love that because I often just stop breathing when I am working. I catch myself. Just, I think a lot of copywriters do that because you're on your laptop typing and you just don't breathe.
