October 15, 2020: Topics of discussion: Self Love, Consciousness and Mental Health with Published Author of “Unapologetic, a generation that can’t even” and Certified Life Coach Traci Propst. In this episode we go deep into the relationship that each of us have with our thoughts and how we can be more aware of our emotions, feelings and nourish our self love to step into the best life we could have even imagined. Abundance and infinite possibilities are always right around the corner!!!
ZACH: Hey Tracy, how are you doing?
TRACI: Hey I’m good Zach. How are you?
ZACH: I’m doing really well thanks for asking and welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?
TRACI: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
ZACH: I’m so happy to have you. For all the audience and people that are listening, Tracy Propst is a Certified Life Coach and published author of the book “Unapologetic” she loves to speak a lot on self-love, finding your beauty inside and out. So tell us more about yourself and your business.
TRACI: Yes, so I am a Certified Life Coach I’ve been in the business now for about 5 years give or take, I got certified out in San Diego, California but I work with clients from coast to coast all the way from New York to Los Angeles, so it’s been a very rewarding experience so far.
ZACH: Very cool and I’m a Certified Life Coach as well, I’m not sure if you know that or not.
TRACI: I did, yes.
ZACH: So tell me more about your business and what you specialize in and how you can help the audience the most.
TRACI: So my business specifically I love to help my clients that are struggling with self-confidence, self-love and really that means just loving yourself inside and out like I think every single person is so beautiful and is so unique and it’s about really discovering what makes you so unique that helps you on your journey to self love.
ZACH: That’s so great, how can someone discover what makes them so unique?
TRACI: That’s a great question Zach. We care so much about what other people have to say about us, you know, I think we’re all guilty of reading into other people’s perceptions. I think when you’re able to kind of step out of what other people are thinking about you and really just sit with yourself, think about things that you’re good, think about things that you enjoy doing and I think by doing that self Journey you find what makes you very unique as a person and then you can come to start loving and nourishing that.
ZACH: Yeah, that was such a good answer. The first step is really about not caring what other people think and that starts, which is ironic, but you know this starts with yourself, by not caring what other people think. One of the first things that stood out to me when you answered was my experience reading Eckhart Tolle “The Power of Now” and “A New Earth”.
TRACI: Great one, yes!
ZACH: That book was really a pivotal moment in my life that shifted my mind set on how I live and how I interacted with myself. The relationship I have with my thoughts, how my thoughts are just thoughts, Zach is Zach, Zach is not his thoughts and being able to dis-identify from my thoughts allowed me so much… It was like I was liberated from what everyone else thinks. I don’t care what my Mom thinks. I didn’t care what my friends think. I didn’t care what my Mentor thinks or anybody else thinks. And that is the first step in discovering your unique talents and who you are as a person so you can begin to cultivate that self love like you mentioned.
TRACI: Absolutely Zach, you hit the nail on the head. When people start to realize that they are not their thoughts that their thoughts and their feelings are fleeting and not permanent, they are all temporary, that’s when they can rise to a higher power. And you’re right, you just don’t care what other people think about you cause that’s just not who you are.
ZACH: My gosh, I”m so excited that the conversation went in this direction because consciousness, which I think is the word that describes.. And there’s no word that describes our ideas in our head right now cause they are just letters on a paper and it’s just post signs. But at the end of the day, consciousness is the best word that describes everything that we’re kind of talking about, is that awareness that you’re aware of. We’re not just living, you need to be that awareness that you’re aware of what’s going on. All that comes full circle with mindfulness and meditation. And then you get deeper and it turns into spirituality, and then when you get to that peak of transcending consciousness into full blow spirituality you start to really love yourself.
TRACI: Yes, absolutely, 100%. I think when you hit your spiritual awareness, it’s so hard to explain it for someone who hasn’t been there, but you are really rising about yourself, and realizing that you are not your shell. So many people live in their shell in their day to day life and I feel like that’s why people find it so hard to love themselves or express themselves, because they are just this shell of a person. That’s when I think, you’re right, when you hit your spiritual peak and awareness is when you really thrive.
ZACH: Someone like me who’s taken consciousness 101, spirituality 101, self love 101, how do I continue to get deeper into self love and becoming more unapologetic?
TRACI: We are all human right? You are going to have bad days. That’s just innate, It’s just going to happen. I think it’s a constant work in progress and when you realize that that’s what it is and become okay with that and stop getting down on yourself when you’re having a bad day or a bad mental health day and just not feeling good and separating yourself from those feelings. I think that’s the most important thing is when we can sit there and say I feel like crap today and that’s okay, you know, like it’s just a feeling and I’m allowed to feel that way because I’m human. So I think really just being okay with who we are and how we feel and understanding that that’s kind of what makes us who we are it kind of helps with our journey along the way to being unapologetic. Because it is okay that you feel like crap, you know, it is okay that you’re happy the next day. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
ZACH: Such a good answer again, it’s like there’s so many things that you said in the last 45 seconds that I want to elaborate on from my opinion and the first thing I thought about was our emotions and our feelings and how you mentioned mental health sometimes you can have a bad mental health day and I think the most important piece to continuing to cultivate and nourish your mental health is being aware and watching your feelings and not identifying with your feelings. You’re not sad. You’re not jealous. You’re not angry. You’re Traci Propst. Your name is not sad and that’s not how you’re going to identify yourself and if you can watch those feelings and if you can watch those emotions and from watching them through your third eye as people call it and being The Watcher you’re able to dis-identify from the those feelings and eventually those feelings just evaporate into thin air, but it’s when we identify, I’m so sad and then because you’re sad like you don’t want to eat or you don’t want to spend time with your family and that really transcendence and comes with you into the next day and then the next day and then it becomes your temperament and then a week and a half goes by and you’re still sad.. No no you forgot that you’re Traci and I don’t mean to use you, but to use you as an example. I’m sure you’re familiar with dr. Joe dispenza, he goes into two-and-a-half 3 weeks go by now it becomes your personality and now you really are sad. You know, so it starts in the beginning when you do have these feelings and you do have these emotions that you watch them and you watch them so you can dis-identify from them and then you mentioned something also about that self-love and talking to yourself as if you’re talking to a friend. Why are you being hard on yourself? No talk to yourself as if you were talking to your little brother, talk to yourself as if you’re talking to your best friend, someone that you care about. Sometimes we get so caught up in our thoughts thinking this is who we are. We’re not able to be like, hey, like that’s how I’m feeling right now. But it’s okay to feel that way is what you would say to your sister or your friend. So I think that’s so great and so important when it comes to continuing to nurture and create more self-love for us is all those things are mentioned.
TRACI: Right? We are so hard on ourselves aren’t we? The meanest, the things we say to ourselves we would never say to another person. It’s true! It’s about when you’re feeling those emotions or instead of saying I AM sad I AM angry say I FEEL That’s what makes it a feeling and not a part of who you are and that’s how you’re able to keep your identity and separate the two. It’s a lot of work you know? I find myself slipping all the time and being like I’M so pissed off, I’M so you know, I’m not I’m Traci, just like you said, that’s who I am and I feel this way and this feelings going to go away and it might come back in five minutes it might come back in 3 days and that’s fine. But that’s not who I am. So I think you’re right just constantly talking to ourselves like you said, like it’s our little sister, like it’s our little brother, like having that gentle understanding voice for ourselves is what self-love is.
ZACH: Yes, that’s it. So let me ask you a question. Obviously the book Unapologetic, I have not read it yet, but I’m going to order it and read it. But tell me what was your favorite chapter in the book to write?
TRACI: Okay, so Unapologetic, you can get it on Amazon, type in my name, Traci Propst and it will pop up. My favorite chapter that I enjoyed writing the most… It’s about the millennial generation so it’s about how we’re handling different situations, so it’s called “Unapologetic, a generation that can’t even”. I love the last part because it just really, that’s us right? You know, we can’t even. We can’t even. The chapter I enjoyed writing the most was about quarter life crisis.
ZACH: I’m going through that right now.
TRACI: Aren’t we all? It’s a term that wasn’t even coined before the millennial generation. It wasn’t a thing, people didn’t talk about it, didn’t know what it was but I like to think of it as being proactive so that we don’t have a midlife crisis. I kind of use those juices in that chapter two kind of talk about how to deal with a quarter life crisis, what it means but you’ll have to read it to see what I have to say on it.
ZACH: What does “can’t even” mean to you?
TRACI: What it means to me is…. Can’t even fathom, can’t even deal. Like, I just love that it ends with “can’t even”. We’re all about acronyms and abbreviations and little yolo sayings for everything. That’s so millennial of us. But I think it’s how we express ourselves without getting into the nitty gritty. Right? I can’t even… I can’t even!
ZACH: I noticed that you love to travel and you travelled to over 30 countries. For someone like me who hasn’t really travelled a lot. I don’t know about you but I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection. I just turned 30 years old so I’m going through a quarter life crisis. So I’m like, okay you know I’m doing good in this area, I’m doing good in this area, I’m doing great in this area. This is where I’m weak. This is where you know I haven’t been the best and my number one goal and my number one passion now is to travel for the next five years. I need to experience and see places that are going to blow my mind because I know that that is going to get me closer to God. That is going to help me step into the greatest version of myself. I’ve lived in Palm Beach, Florida my whole life. I’m here and this is like a bubble. Everyone has Ferraris and Rolexes and I can’t keep up with that and I don’t want to keep up with that. But one thing I do want to do is I want to be the best person to live my best life and I think travelling is the one thing that I haven’t really explored. I had a great college experience. I built two businesses you know, I have great habits. I’m in a good financial spot, but it’s like what else is there for me to do and it’s travel. So tell me, what is your favorite country and what did you learn?
TRACI: Oh my goodness, that is such a hard question because I’ve loved so many. My favorite one I ever went to was New Zealand and I think it is just so underrated like people talk about going to Australia all the time, but New Zealand, we went to Queenstown and I felt so off the grid there. We were actually where they like film Game of Thrones so just like imagine that scenery and you’re like this is unreal. This is the world I live in and it makes me so upset that people don’t get to experience that. Don’t get to have that life experience with these places that you can become so in tune with yourself and get away from all the technology and just kind of get back to your roots. So Queenstown was my favorite honestly because I felt off the grid and it was completely different than any other city, place, fantastic beach, yacht, whatever I’d ever been to it was the opposite of that and for that reason I loved it. Yeah, you have to go there.
ZACH: Well yeah I’m definitely going to go. I’m doing an Ironman race. Right now I’m spending a lot of time training for an Ironman so my race is not until May 23rd in Oklahoma. I plan the next day a one-way flight to Hawaii. I’m going to live in Hawaii for a month and I’m going to bring four books and I’m just going to read and surf. Turn off my phone completely disconnect. And then from there I want to continue to go west whether that’s Japan or New Zealand or Thailand and I want to take a bunch of yoga classes in Southeast Asia and then work my way towards Europe and do all those things so if I have any questions about travelling, can I give you a call and ask you?
TRACI: Absolutely, just to touch on one point you made that I think is important to the audience, you talked about how you feel like every other part of your life feels like accomplished right? You’ve built two businesses, you’ve been very successful and I think that’s so important for people to recognize that whatever part of their life they’re watering that’s the part that’s going to flourish. So I think going forward with you watering this “travelling” and getting closer to God and getting more in tune to yourself you’re going to see that part of your life flourish because without actually doing it it’s hard to have that part of you become new, you know what I mean?
ZACH: Absolutely, I can only read so many books, it’s about applying wisdom and knowledge to my life. I can know every single personal growth self-development hack in the world but if I don’t apply them to my life every single day it’s just wasted information inside my brain so you’re right I just need a book that flight, get on a plane. Although I do have a little bit of a fear of flying. which is kind, yeah that’s what’s honestly, I don’t want to say the biggest reason, that’s not the biggest reason, I’ve just been spending so much time trying to make money over the past 5 years and just like working hard but that is a little bit of a speed bump that’s in my way. But that’s something that I’m looking forward to overcoming. Like I can’t wait to get on a plane and overcome my fears. I feel it’s going to be so empowering, it’s going to be so liberating. I’m going to feel so free that I overcame that so I’m really looking forward to my journey travelling but I’m definitely going to call you and ask you for any advice on ways I should travel.
TRACI: Please do, I was actually a flight attendant on private jets for 5 years so I travelled for a living, you’ll be fine. Planes are way safe. Way safer than cars at any point. So just keep that in mind. I guarantee you’ll be good, it’ll totally all be worth it.
ZACH: It will be so worth it. On that note, I need to take one minute to allow a word from our sponsor WHOOP. Whoop is your favorite fitness, sleep and activity tracker. Head on over to join.whoop.com/zachrance to get your free WHOOP strap and first month free. Or visit LifeCoachZach.com/Whoop.
ZACH: Traci, it’s been so great having you today. Everyone go to tracipropst.com so you can buy her book, schedule a call. Traci is there anything else you want to add today?
TRACI: No, guys have a great day, make the most of it and Zach thank you so much for having me on your Podcast, I really appreciate it.
ZACH: Traci it’s been a pleasure honestly this is probably the best episodes I’ve recorded in my short career as a Podcaster. Yeah, I feel like there was so much valuable information that the audience can get from it. It’s inspiring me to continue to do what I’m doing and continue to follow my passion or my soon to be passion for travel. And I’m looking forward to connecting again.
Have a wonderful day, enjoy the rest of your week.
Traci can be found online at:
Instagram: @tracipropst
Leave a Reply