On this week’s Engaging Marketeer I am speaking with Vipoola Devani about consciousness and self-awareness, which I will confess is not really my thing because I am a complete luddite when it comes to emotional awareness and emotional intelligence. But I’m going to learn something on this and I am going to change the way I get up in the morning and the way I affect my mood thanks to speaking with Vipoola so let’s hear about this.
The full episode is out now on all platforms but here are some key talking points.
What it is that Vipoola does
Darren: Would you describe yourself as a relationship coach and if so, what exactly is that?
Vipoola: So my niche is in relationships but effectively it’s about self-awareness because that impacts every aspect of our life. Whether it’s careers, relationships or lifestyle, it’s all about the self-first and although I am a relationship coach, eventually the learnings come from the person themselves and that’s part of the awareness.
Darren: How important do you think that is for someone in order to be successful in their life or business?
Vipoola: Vital in everything. Particularly in what you do, in terms of marketing, it’s vital to know your values, what you stand for, what your brand is about. That all comes from a space of awareness and knowing what it is that you want to put out there and help people with. We’re just not aware we’re doing it unconsciously a lot of the time, we just don’t put the emphasis on the awareness of it.
Darren: How do you become aware that you are unaware, how do you find that you’ve got a need?
Vipoola: Just asking the questions is the start to it you know what am I about, what is my brand about, who is my niche market, who am I selling to, who is my ideal client. All that is part of becoming aware of what it is you’re then providing for them, you can actually relate to them on that level too. If I can’t relate to somebody, I’m not going to be able to provide a half decent coaching session for them.
Who this process is for?
Darren: Is this something that can work for anybody or just certain types of people?
Vipoola: Anybody, not everybody can sit down and meditate for 10 minutes or 40 minutes quietly, in which case doing anything repetitive like a walk or a cycle or something that’s repetitive. We have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind, doing something repetitive takes the conscious mind out of the way and then it allows for everything else to come through.
It’s similar to say driving a car. When you first learn you have to engage your coordination, you look in the mirror, you put the car in gear and there’s all those processes to consider. But after a while, it becomes automatic. I’ve found I have driven to places, that is a repetitive route, and I don’t know how I got there. There’s something under the ordinary happens and you come back into that space of engaging and your reflexes taking over.
A daily ride, say a school drop, for me was almost “How did I get here?” It was so natural and automatic but it wasn’t like that in the beginning and it’s that programming and the habitual programming that makes it easier, over a period of time. So it’s not always easy in the beginning but forming the habit of doing it is what will then make it automatic.
Vipoola on what answers she was looking for
Darren: You said you were going for a walk and you were looking for answers and you found the answers. What were they?
Vipoola: Sometimes it depended on the mood I was in on that day and I had gone through a period of depression and a period of soul searching for something more and something better. And sometimes it was simply that my troubles are so insignificant in the bigger context when I’m part of that nature. Because it’s so minute, my existence, compared to everything else that’s going on around me and sometimes it was simply “This is a great day and it’ll get better.”
But it was just part of learning that I was part of that nature, I am part of that existence and there is something much greater than what I was about that there is something much bigger than me out there.
That then started adding value to my purpose and doing something for myself that was going to be more than just about me. It was going to be something that was greater than just for me and that is something I picked up entirely from nature.
Darren: You said then that your troubles are insignificant. Doesn’t that ever make you think that you’re a bit too small in the world and almost like you don’t matter?
Isn’t that a side effect of that or am I reading too much into this?
Vipoola: No it does, I do matter but it’s the experience and the belief I attached to it that is not as relevant. So I don’t have to see it as a suffering or a point of pain, as a belief, it’s just happening and I’m experiencing it. In the way life happens and in the way a tree grows and ages or in the way flowers bloom and die, I’m part of that experience.
And that’s what I took back with me, I was just part of that experience. But I didn’t need to attach that belief of it’s got to be painful or it’s got to be sad or it’s got to be good or bad, it just is. A lot of it, for me, happens in nature, when I walk but that seems to give me a sense of calm and serenity.
Becoming a spiritual practitioner
Darren: What set you on this path, what got you to looking into it in the first place?
Vipoola: Looking for something more to life, there had to be more to life than just what I had been doing to that point. I was born into a traditional Indian family, born in Tanzania and then via India and all other places I eventually immigrated to England, started living in London. I followed the root of get married, have children, you know what was culturally expected of me. I was just following what was expected and then it gets to a point where there has to be something more than this, it didn’t feel fulfilling enough. I always had this tug that there was something more and so I started seeking, I started searching actively. I would go to events, I would go to spiritual modalities I tried out different forms of meditations, I tried out past life regressions. I became a Reiki master, I started learning about energies and how energy relates to our thoughts and our karma and I was doing all sorts at that time and simply because I was seeking answers.
One fine day, speaking to some friends I realised that I had learned quite a bit about myself through it and I was then helping them come along that journey. So there were those that mentors that were helping me and I was helping others and then realized that we were all seekers at some level, some just a few steps ahead, in some aspects of life and others in other aspects and that’s what then prompted me to go down the coaching route.
I found a mentor and a community that helped me tap into that aspect of my life, but what it did more than anything else was bring awareness to me. I was already doing all those things probably from the time I was a child, I’d already developed all those coping mechanisms without realising and it was only by having that learning and that awareness I was able to start labeling it as such, that that’s what was that’s what was part of my life, my learning that it was spiritual in that aspect.
Once I got past those labels of say being a psychic or being um Reiki master and all those boxes, that I had learned and I put myself into, I needed those for a while and then I went beyond that in that I don’t want those boxes. I’m just a spiritual being, having a human experience but as part of the human experience I do not want to restrict myself by being in a box.
But I needed that box in the beginning as a form of awareness and a form of knowing what I was about. Where I was going and what I was cultivating for myself, the identity that I was beginning to cultivate for myself.
About Vipoola:
Working as a Conscious Relationship Coach and Spiritual Practitioner, Vipoola provides assistance for individuals to discover their authentic self to lead a more fulfilled life and create better relationships.
Connect with Vipoola:
Website: https://www.vipoola.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vipoola-devani-3b62221a9/?originalSubdomain=uk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vipsdevani/
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
