361 Cara Wilde ~ How to Take the Brakes Off Your Personal Growth

Holly:  Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 361. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another conversation with the fantastic Cara Wilde. I think you are really going to like this episode. Cara has been a guest on this show several times before and today we talk about what is really driving us and what is really keeping us stuck? And you may be surprised to know that the answer is our values. Cara has a totally different way of working with values than I have ever seen before. I had a couple of sessions with her about two weeks ago and I found it to be totally life-changing, in just the two weeks since we worked on this I feel like I have shifted into a whole new identity, just naturally and smoothly and I have started making completely different decisions in life.

If you don’t know Cara, Cara is a mystic, shaman and healer whose business Wild Bliss focuses on creating a more sacred planet one person at a time. Cara supports professional women who want to remember who they truly are, why they are here, who want to express that as a body of work in the world. Cara left her counselling and more mainstream work behind her, when she couldn’t use her psychic abilities or work with guides and began to feel as though she was working blind. She set up her own business as an EFT practitioner and then started to use her channeling and intuitive abilities and felt like she got the team on board and helped her clients in making more significant and longer lasting changes in their lives. As part of her work Cara channels a collective called ‘the Ancients’, and offers practical advice and guidance and support specific to the needs and concerns of those of use who are deeply sensitive and passionate about creating real change in the world. Cara passionately believes that those of us who are considered misfits are truly here to create a new way in the world and are part of the divine’s blue print for a heaven on earth. Cara lives in Cornwall surrounded by the ocean and stone circles, when she isn’t working you can find her running the trails or curled up under a heavy blanket with a good book. You can find her at her website: CaraWilde.com and on Instagram: WildeCara.

So what are you going to learn today?

What values really are—and why you can’t just pick them off a list, like most of us have done before. Why are values so important? And why is it so important for us to know what our values are at a conscious level? We talk about how knowing our true values can help us break through our stuck-ness. We discuss why values work can be like taking the breaks off our personal growth and really letting things flow. Cara poses the questions that you really need to ask so that you can solicit your true values. And finally, we talk about what values have to do with our identity.

So I hope you enjoy this episode, I think it is super-super juicy and without further ado let’s get into the content.

Holly: Hi Cara

Cara: Hi Holly, how are you doing?

Holly: Good, how are you doing today?

Cara: I am good, I am good, I am glad to be here.

Holly: I am very excited to be talking about this with you. So, I had a couple of sessions with Cara, a break-through session with Cara, when was that? The 28th and the 29th, so that was about what two weeks ago? 

Cara: You are so good with dates!

Holly: I have got my journal in front of me where I took notes. {laughing} I am good because I write them down! And it was hugely perspective-changing and kind of life-changing for me. So I really wanted to talk with you about this, so we can share this method of working, because ever since I trained as a life coach ten years ago, you learn how to work with values, you get the list and you pick the stuff out of the list and you narrow it down. Everyone seems to work with values in the same way and the way you work is totally different and I think so much more powerful. Why don’t we start out talking about: what are values?

Cara: First of all, I want to say as well, and I think we will get into it a little it, that way of working with values, picking it from a sheet, never worked for me and I always thought there was something wrong with me. And then, even though I have had, you were saying about training as a coach and you will know my initial training was as a counsellor and we are taught about values there, we are taught to leave our values to one side, when we go into the counselling room, so that we can be present to the values of the client and support them to believe in their values. So values are like this really important thing but I couldn’t grasp hold properly of what they were and what they actually did and why they were important, it felt like this big missing piece. So for any listeners, if they are feeling like: really, shouldn’t we know what values are? But this vague sense that maybe there is something that we don’t know, it is because there is something deeper than what we are normally taught about values, values are, the initial point of values is how we decide what things are important to us. I don’t know about us but that is kind of about as far as I got?

Holly: Yeah it is so vague and yet I remember when I did my coaching training and I first approached working with values that way, I found it really useful. However, it didn’t go anywhere as deep as what we did, but I did find it useful because I had never thought about what values were, I never thought about what was important for me, I never thought about the themes that drive my decisions. So just getting started thinking about that I think was really big for me, however, it was much more superficial level, kind of picking stuff off a list.

Cara: Yeah so, kind of the way I used to think about it, that values are the building blocks of what makes a person unique, in some way? You say, “they drive your decision making”, and so, then I came across Tony Robbins and it was about you need to actively choose your values, because if you don’t choose the values, obviously Tony Robbins has got some NLP, just a little bit, and I remember reading his book, what is it? A letter to a friend, or a note to a friend, or something, his first ever books and this is when I started to get into the idea of shifting from counselling to kind of intuitive coaching, at the same time I was doing channeling. So I remember reading one of his books and [it said]: you declare and decide your values, depending on what kind of person you want to be. So that to me was, I want to achieve this in my life, what kind of values do I need to be living up to, in order to achieve that, or in order to achieve those states? He was saying if you want to run a business and yet your top value is safety…

Holly: {laughing} you might have a conflict there!

Cara: That might not work in terms of taking risks and stuff. At that time I just thought, that is really interesting, but then I got really angry because one of my top values is authenticity, and so, I thought: well that’s just that stupid NLP stuff.

Holly: {laughing}

Cara: Where you program…I am not a program! There is something in me and in all human beings that was born to be something, to give the world something, as part of some inherent gift and who they truly are is really important, it is not just about deciding who you want to be. So at that time, I thought I would be throwing the baby out with the bath water, kind of thing, but there was something there, it became a more active choice and you could really shift your values. I don’t know, did you get taught any of that in your coaching, about actively choosing values?

Holly: No, I think I always saw them as once I started doing this work, I thought I saw it as digging out what was already in there, figuring out what my values already were. It was like I came, to use that word, programmed with certain values, like my soul has these values and I need to figure out what they were. Rather than choosing the values that I need to have to do the things that I want to do.

Cara: Yes, okay. And that is kind of where I was coming from I think and the idea of choosing something new felt quite alien. But, I don’t know how to answer, if I tell you the history of how I got to where I am with values, then I can probably say better about what I think values are now.

Holly: Yes.

Cara: So I went on a… years ago a really good friend of mine was doing a weekend workshop on weight loss, health and wellbeing. She is an NLP coach, she is called the body wizard, Jane Talbot, I don’t know if you have… she is all things body. I was quite happy with my weight, at that time, but I kind of just, she is just a genius anyway, so I wanted to see what else I could develop. So she started doing this hierarchy of values, piece and it just felt like magic in my body and all I know is that I came away from that workshop feeling so connected to my body; she had weaved this magic, but I wasn’t really sure what had been done. So I got in contact with her and asked her to show me this hierarchy of values and what it means and then I kept bouncing off it because it was NLP and I had been watching lots of Bandler interviews, you know the founder of NLP, and I do not resonate with him. I don’t particularly like the way that I see he views humanity. And so, I know, the way that my mind works is that a training is, if I am going to engage with a training module and put that much time and effort into it, or a training system, I look at who has created it because it just filters down. So I just kept bouncing off it and bouncing off it because I didn’t want to be involved in getting trained in this system when I had such a strong reaction to the person who had founded it.

Holly: Yes.

Cara: But then, Jane that I just told you about and another friend of mine, actually went and trained in a different branch of NLP, so it was sometimes that trained with Bandler but has a background in psychology and developed and more of a humanist approach. That is what my two friends have trained in and that is what made the difference. So the values hierarchy that we did together that I know is in the basic NLP training as far as I am aware. But, my ability to engage with it, is because I trained in this humanistic way. So the reason I am saying all this because if anyone is listening and they bounce off NLP for the same reason that I did, this stuff really is good, it really works.

Holly: It is, and honestly I don’t remember training in this kind of hierarchy when I did my NLP practitioner training, maybe it is a master practitioner.

Cara: It is a master practitioner’s.

Holly: Ok, all right, that’s why.

Cara: So now, the way that I see values are they are a blueprint to how you are going to make decisions in the moment, unconsciously… unconsciously. So they are the basis of our motivation and then they are also how we evaluate our judgements and our actions: was that authentic? When I am looking at something, is this authentic for me? Is there integrity there? That is another one of my high values. So there are a lot and they are all contained within this strategy for change. So we have got our strategy for change is that we identify a need or a want, and then we have a trigger of how we think we are going to get that need or want made and we use our values to inform how we are going to do that. So in that split moment where you are: shall I do this or that? When you pause and you are not sure and then you make a decision, that is an unconscious value that you have used. So the idea that I had values that I was unconscious of, that were driving my decision making process really made me pay attention because the big thing that I learnt from was John Overdurf in America, I will give you a link to his website who did this version of NLP. The biggest thing that I ever got from him that came through a friend of mine, Kate Trafford, was that values can either be away from, or towards. And so, you can have a value because you are trying to move away from something that happened to you in the past and that is not an authentic choice, that is not a soul choice. That’s a reaction to pain. So our value are constructed, consciously and unconsciously, through conditioning. So some of them will be authentic values, they will be values that where we are aligned with where we are wanting to go in our goals some of them will be, but some of them will be conditioned so they are like other people’s values.

Holly: And the values are based on fear, I am trying to move away from something based on a trauma of something I had in the past then that’s… it is helpful because it is going to help me move away from the thing but it is not quite the energy that I want to be functioning with in the world.

Cara: No and we perform better when we are moving towards something. I know that we share a love of physical activity and I know my running is a big towards, because it is not away from being unfit, it is not away from being fat, and you have to punish your body, it is not that, other things might have been but running wasn’t. Freedom to express, just be in the moment, discharge stress, and so it was a lot easier to just get into it.  

Holly: I think that is a really interesting example because when I first started running twenty some years ago it was because I gained a little bit of weight and I didn’t know what to do and I had never been an athletic person and I was trying to move away from that and lose 5lbs that I gained, it was nothing but that had never happened to me before and I was saying: what do I do? And very quickly, once I realised what running gave my body and how good I felt, it definitely, for many years it shifted towards because I wanted to feel that runner’s high.

Cara: And we do, your performance probably would have got better, it would have been easier. So those two things, that, for me, when I run through a values elicitation for myself, that’s the key point: where am I running away from? The other ones are values we are holding onto out of loyalty to our family systems, they are big ones, they can cause a lot of havoc and a lot of conflict in our lives as well.

Holly: And is that family of origin stuff or partners and immediately family, or both?

Cara: Well it could be both, but I would guess that if there was a values conflict that was going on in a relationship that you had now, it was probably from your family of origin. But the family of origin is the biggest influencer. I don’t know if I answered your question about what are values?

Holly: I think so, because I don’t think most people don’t look at values from such a multi-level perspective.

Cara: Because they are tied into a strategy, they are linked to beliefs, they are linked to everything, it is really tricky, I think that is why that: choose your values from a list, a 100 things, is so difficult because they are so much more than words on a page, they are so linked with our triggers and strategies and beliefs and who we are and how we want to show up in the world, they are very significant.

Holly: And they are very emotionally charged as well.

Cara: Oh yeah.

Holly: For better or for worse. So why are values so important?

Cara: I guess we have kind of covered some of that in terms of, the drivers for decision making and I think the other layer to that is an understanding that we can have conflicting values, that create conflicting parts, so when you feel torn in two: on the one hand I want this and on the other hand I want that, it is a parts conflict. And so one part of you wants to do this and the other part wants to do that and quite often that is because there are two values that are at play and you can have values that are still towards, so you want towards money and towards freedom, but you can have a conflict between those two if you have a belief that says: the more money I have the less freedom I have. Both of those values are important, we need to make sure that they are not in conflict and can actually work together and it is not the money that buys you the freedom, the freedom is that you are free to be who you are in any given moment and so money can expand or contract that. So they are important to see, we want your values to be kind of streamlined, so the process we did is your hierarchy of values, so we elicit what values you have been consciously and unconsciously living by up until now and then we do the work on those. And then it is like: okay, in order to get the state that you are wanting whether that is a success in your business, or whatever it is that you are wanting, what are the values that you need to be actively choosing? Once we have cleaned up all the conditions, or away forms, or conflicts in the values you have been using up to date, then it gets easier to choose more authentic values for the state that you are wanting to experience. Does that make sense?

Holly: Yeah, it does, it does and it was so shocking to me what a huge shift there was between one day and the next because we did the sessions kind of back-to-back and then the following day and it was just, some of them were the same but they were in different places, but it just felt different. Shifting the hierarchy around and shifting some of the values, it was like it all made sense, it kind of fell into place.

Cara: Yes, because I am really kinaesthetic as a practitioner, so when we were running through your values, and when I do it on myself and with other clients, some words just feel sticky, it is like they are weighted, they are heavy. You are quite kinaesthetic as well and without going to detail about what you covered, there was a sense of urgency: I can’t not do these! I have got to keep doing this and that is because our unconscious is such a faithful servant, it is trying so hard for us, it is nothing but positive intention but sometimes it just runs on old programs.

So we have things in our past that we are still trying to heal and the unconscious is saying: no, no, you need to pay attention to this, this is important to you and that is when we go in and we use EFT to clear up a past memory, sometimes I might do some PSYCH-K and sometimes it is just a case of dropping through the feelings to see what is on the other side. But, once you have cleaned up the past that is keeping back there, that is when you have that transformation: oh my God this is so different, on the other side.

Holly: It is, I look at some of the values from the first day and I am like: what is that? It doesn’t resonate with me at all, it is like: how did I come up with that?

Cara: It is because it wasn’t yours, well it was yours, it was the strategy that you had at the time, but you have outgrown it, but that part had not been integrated into the new growth. There was still something to pay attention to, there was some treasure there. Normally it is like forgiving ourselves for something we have done in the past, or forgiving other people for releasing and paying attention to hurt and pain that still needs to be witnessed to be seen, parts of ourselves that need to be integrated.

Holly: So we have kind of touched on this but I think it is important to be reminded, why it is so important that we know what our values are. Why is it so important that we make them conscious, because, as you have said, they are there in our unconscious.

Cara: Yes, yes, alright, so let’s use the business one and if you had safety really high up in your hierarchy but you didn’t know. So your self-sabotage in terms of your business would probably be off the roof. {laughing} So if I had safety as high on my hierarchy in my business, which I have, I would not show up for podcasts, I would maybe even become ill and not be able to do things, I would be making decisions based on hoarding money rather than investing money. That’s another thing that I could think of.

Holly: Just not doing things, you would be sabotaging so many things.

Cara: Anything to do with safety is going to trump any other value until you clean it up. So I guess the big ah ha for me was that awareness that we are going through a day making decision after decision, so many decisions, in so many areas of our lives, and so many of them are unconscious, and they need to be. We cannot be consciously, actively, deciding every single thing, do you know what I mean? We can’t take the time to do that, so we are designed to be automated in that way. So if I am running on these automated patterns and if I make an important decision as to whether to say yes to this interview, what to do with my money, how to parent, if I am making those kinds of decisions quickly and automatically, I want to know what the driver in my decision making process is, and if it is going to be my values, that drive my unconscious decisions, that split second.

When I did my cognitive behavioural training, one of the things that we were taught really early on when it comes to training is the behaviour that you do at the end of the day, the decision for that was made at 10, 11 o’clock in the morning. You have a picture, I think it is called antecedent, but I can’t remember the CBT training was like 20 years ago {laughing} but you have a picture which is a trigger but you will probably not even catch it, because it is so ingrained, it is so ingrained. You will have already made the decision and you will have run the program, run the strategy, to the end of the day and you will have seen yourself acting that behaviour at the end of the day, whatever it is.

So when I was working with alcohol clients it would be a glass of wine at night, they would have made a decision to have that really early on. And then the strategy runs of what you are going to do and you will end up with a picture, a bottle of wine and then everything that you think is going to come from that, because that is where the strategy ends and a lot of that is driven by a value.

Holly: Okay.

Cara: So you want to make that stuff as conscious as possible when you are want to effect change. So if you are stuck in your life, and you are feeling you just can’t get going on something, on a change that you want to make or you do seem to be sabotaging yourself, or you can get so far and then it runs out and you are drained, or you end up completely stuck, it is useful to look at your values, there is probably a part conflict going on.

Holly: Right.

Cara: And the other times, like now, where we are now, in June 2020, with COVID, and the rioting, everything that is going on in our world, that kind of external situation is enough to create big shifts in us, questioning what is important in our lives, why am I here? How am I going to respond to that? This is a really good time to be looking at your values, we will be questioning our values: what is important to me? Things like this make you think about what is important to you.

Holly: Yes because it is a massive disruptor, this year has not gone how any of us thought it would go, because none of us could have predicted this, well scientist probably could have, but the average person. So how has your life changed, once you made your values conscious?

Cara: Well, what I want to say as well is, we tend to think of values as nouns, as things, they are really verbs. So we are doing our values al the time.

Holly: Ah that makes sense.

Cara: So the reason I mentioned how important it is now is because I want people to kind of hear that if they feel scattered and all over the place it is because at some level they are questioning their values, and what is important to them. So it is kind of like a natural reaction, it is a really, really, good thing, but it feels shit. It feels like our values make up our identity, or should I say, our identity informs our values, whatever identity we have.

Right now, at this level of shake up and change we are going to be questioning our identity. When we start to question our identity we are running around in this: what the hell is going on, I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what I am doing? We don’t kind of walk around going who am I? We tend to have this I don’t know what is happening…

Holly: Like an unsettled feeling, I always call it the murky middle, I feel like I don’t know where I am anyway… very unsettling.

Cara: That can come through an external trauma, like what we are going through now, a global trauma, or it could be a personal loss, a loss of job, people are experiencing that right now, transitioning careers, so there are lots of different opportunities, so people’s identities are really being challenged at the moment which is when our values are… Also, we can have it internally from that double bind discontent so, I am kind of, my career has been going alright but it is jut not doing it for me anymore and I don’t know why. Oh my god no, we don’t want change, we want structures to hang onto.

Holly: Stability.

Cara: Yes, stability, perfect word. So it is natural to be wanting a resolution to it, but the reason that we feel chaotic, I think that middle ground is a really good way of describing it, different parts coming up for attention, represented by different values and shifting values. So in terms of values being a verb, what I want to say is, they will change through your life, I don’t think they are constant.

We might have a top three values, because you can look at values in terms of your overall life, and then you can look at values in terms of your health, your career, your parenting, your relationships, so you can see you will have different values for different areas of our lives. If you look at life in general, one of my top values in life in general is love and that was really important to me to know that in terms of my health, different circumstances will trigger me needing to access different values. Does that make sense?

Holly: Yes it does.

Cara: So I might pick one each year or something, I don’t want people to think that… I think it is useful to know that they are ongoing, and they change when big events take place.

Holly: That absolutely makes sense because if you are a parent and then you raised kids and then your kids go onto university and they get married, you don’t have to be a caretaker anymore because they are adults, so obviously your values are going to change because you don’t have to keep these small human beings alive.

Cara: yes, and your identity changes, and everything. So the blueprint that you want to be using, it is going to be a different blueprint which is what we said your values are. I know for mine with work, when I did mine, I did it at the beginning of this year and then I quickly did a new one when COVID hit. And I have got to the point now if I run through and I can see really quickly where I have got, parts conflict and I can see really quickly that is not going to work and I need to change some stuff. But one of my top… what organically came up when I was doing a values elicitation because I actually worked with a friend on mine so that I didn’t miss my blind spots, you know what it is like as a coach you can do so much on your own and then you get to: what am I not wanting to be seeing here? And my top value changed to expansion.

That has given me so much freedom in my business, you want your top value to be as abstract as possible so that it can encompass all the values that come below and that it can, I think success was my top value before in my business and that is okay, but it was more based on what other people’s definition of success whereas now, with expansion, as my top value, that makes… do I want to take this opportunity? Well is it an opportunity to expand? Yes. I’ll do that then, that’s the adventure, which is another one for me on my hierarchy. So my business hierarchy are: expansion, growth, adventure, authenticity kind of just… this is the other thing our values change once we have met those needs.

Holly: Ah.

Cara: So for a long time, authenticity was my top value and I still really value it, but it has kind of got integrated into bigger values.

Holly: It is a given now because you are living it.

Cara: Yes, whereas I didn’t think think I could live what I thought was my true authenticity so I had some conflicts around that: if I am authentic then I am going to lose people…I don’t trust myself to be authentic. Can I trust myself to really let go? [That] is what authenticity means for me. Or, am I going to turn into this crazy woman or something. But what I had met those needs that were inside that were authenticity it was like… then something else could take its place.

Holly: That really makes sense, that was one of the first things that came up on the first day on my list, the same thing. In my first company I was not living an authentic business or life at all but over the last ten years I really have stepped into that and so that makes sense why it wasn’t on the final list because it is something that I have integrated.

Cara: So can you remember, and do you want to share, what was the top value on your new…?

Holly: The new one or the old one?

Cara: The new one.

Holly: Joy.

Cara: And what was the old one?

Holly: Freedom. And the old list, freedom was first and joy was second. On the new list freedom is third, love is second and joy is first. And I find that really difficult with at first, because I always thought, from picking my values list, every time I do my values list, freedom was always at the top. But really now why do I want freedom because it gives me joy.

Cara: A lot of us put freedom, I think a lot of us that are entrepreneurs, spirit seekers, we value freedom so much but it can be a big away from, freedom from something… That was huge for me, a few years ago when I came across that, when I realised that it wasn’t a freedom to do things, which is different, it was a freedom from being trapped, controlled, manipulated.

Holly: Exactly me and my first business!

Cara: So they are not true choices, it is running away from something, rebelling against. I used to… rebellion has got its place, we need to do that, but I don’t know if I am going to be able to find the words for this, but when I looked at that freedom from that was so strong in my life and a rebellion against a lot of my family origin stuff, if you think of that: what I am rebelling against is a continuum, I am still part of that continuum of what I am rebelling against. Freedom from is not true freedom, rebellion is not true freedom, it is just against something.

Holly: It is a reaction to the thing that you have had, or you don’t want.

Cara: But you are still tied to it.

Holly: Yes.

Cara: So it will be showing up in some way in your life, you will be conforming to it, but you will be still attached to it in some way, or you will be demonstrating behaviour which shows that you are still attached to that. When I realised that I thought I am going to pay attention to that then!

Holly: Yes, it is huge.

Cara: And in terms of diets and the “away froms” in our diet culture are just horrific. They are just… there is no true freedom with food around diet culture at all or even lifestyle choices. They are big.

Holly: It is huge.

Cara: I guess what I am really wanting to help listeners understand is that if something in their life is not working in the way that they want it to, it is not like they are insufficient, or not good enough, or broken, or any of that, it is that they will have a parts conflict. There will be something going on but underneath it will be a positive intention. So my training in counselling included some Freudian psycho-analytical stuff which was not my friend, I didn’t get trained in that thankfully, but was exposed to it. It is like: there is something dangerous and dark lurking in your subconscious…

Holly: Deep within yourself.

Cara: [The idea being] if you go in there you are going to find a monster… But if we go within we are going to find something that is our friend.

Holly: It is trying to help us, it is like when people talk about self-sabotaging, it is not really, it is your subconscious, as you said earlier, running on old programs trying to keep you safe, trying things good, trying to keep the status quo.

Cara: Yeah, I think my counselling teaching didn’t teach me that but this humanistic version of NLP, I think NLP probably does that but I probably didn’t get into it, that, the unconscious is your best friend, everything in there has got a positive intention, was a game changer for me. Examining and reflecting myself without giving birth to a new inner critic. {laughing}

Holly: Yeah, I think I got that from doing the PSCYH-K training, that was kind of when I really understood, it is just trying to help but…it needs some help sometimes to reprogram.

Cara: Well it is young, sometimes I have had some areas of my life nearly run by my [inner] four year old, it is not going to work, it is not going to work. And then my teenager was in charge of my life for quite a long time, the rebellious. If you never had a chance to rebel, it is such a natural stage of development that, it is going to come out somewhere and that is when you want to…it is helpful if your rebellion is linked up towards values, towards building a positive, healthy, ego, which is what that adolescent time is all about, separating from your family of origin.

Something that’s just coming to me now, which I am just starting to get really fascinated with is the evolution of values, you know we were talking about values as a verb, and that they are, they are morphing and changing when we have significant events in our lives, or significant internal shifts and I have just gone through, like a lot of people, a massive spiritual growth spurt, what I feel is a growth spurt.

So your values are also growing, so there are theories about values starting off based on survival, so we have survival hierarchy values; there are a few different stages, but the way that I remember it in my head now is that then it becomes about becoming an individual, and individualism and the American dream, and things like that. Then it goes towards more collective and collaborative values.

Holly: So it is like the maturity of the values?

Cara: Yes. And then it becomes existential, the place I am playing around with now, which is kind of like beyond ID. You might like this because this is where I think Prince got to, this is what I am playing with at the moment, is the reason that Prince chose a symbol, there might be lots of different reasons for that, but one of the things that I heard him say on an interview was that he didn’t want to be identified, it is like he is consciousness.

It is [also] like Deepak Chopra talks about, our consciousness choosing an identity in physical reality that we want to play with. And, what would that be like if we consciously choose the identity? That is where I was for a while and my channeled things were all about: what identity do you want to play with next, what is the next adventure? And helping clients integrate those new identities and now it is like but what if we lived without identity, that existential, “I am”, presence, just, “I am”. Then, how would that be? What values would you have then? Then that is love. That is where my edge is at the minute that I am playing with and I think that is where Prince was, I don’t know what you think about that because I know we have talked about that Prince energy before.   

Holly: Yeah, I think that is interesting, I haven’t actually worked with that energy for a while but you know my business coach, Lisa Wechtenhiser, works almost, probably exclusively, with him. Yeah, I think it resonates, but I haven’t connected with that energy for a long time.

Cara: I think ultimately, it is love and creativity and expansion and he was just creativity personified, well embodied, and didn’t want to be captured because as soon as you start labelling anything an identity, it becomes solidified in some way which is interesting for adventures in consciousness but yeah that is really abstract.

Holly: But it is fun to explore and fun to consider. So what would you say is one of the biggest things that you have gotten out of identifying your values in this way and living from them?

Cara: Life feels more like a choice. I feel more in charge without needing to be in charge. I built up a stronger trust in my unconscious and my relationship with it, I am still a work in progress with that as well. And, it has helped me, helps me disentangle or become consciously aware of where I am stuck in conditioning where I am externally referenced, rather than internally referenced. Internally referenced, that is still around doing the things that society tells me I should in order to be a decent human being, so it is approval but on that societal, cultural level. So I really like it where I can make more conscious where I am being culturally conditioned rather than internally referenced based on my values and what I think is important for my life and then working within the culture, that I happened to find myself. Does that make sense?

Holly: Yes it does. I am struck by, it was only two weeks ago that we did this work and I feel like I have slipped into a new identity that I wasn’t even aware that was my next level, or my next phase. And I have been making such different decisions for myself, it is like that I have totally, naturally up-levelled into this next phase of what I was meant to do.

Cara: Yes, so you have just changed your unconscious blueprint, that is the work that we did. So I remember you asking me about writing your values down and remembering them, and that can be useful reflection but really know when you have done this work. You are just changing your unconscious blueprint. So we changed the unconscious blueprint that was outdated but you still felt attached to. It was clear why, you know so we changed that and the next natural blueprint just takes it place, you are ready. Part of you knows what it is that you are trying to go towards and you have done a lot of work on deciding.

Holly: Yeah, but this was so different. When I was using PSYCH-K on a regular basis, it was like: what do I want to do? What do I need to believe? Program the beliefs. But this was so, I don’t know how to explain it, I didn’t even know where I was going but I got there.

Cara: So that is part of the skill of the practitioner, as a practitioner I try to stay out of the way as much as possible and it is so tempting to think you know what is right for your client. {laughing} And I have an overall picture of where I want the client to go and what I want them to see and it is a more evolved picture of what they have come with. And we used EFT and that is the magic of EFT as well, it just shifts thing and you think: why was that even a problem in the first place? It is called the Apex issue in EFT, I don’t know if you have ever come across that? So Gary Craig started calling it the apex issue, because people were coming with significant things, he was doing EFT and they were saying afterwards: no, it wasn’t a problem, it was never a problem. And he was like: it was! And as a practitioner you have to [say]: we did some magic here together. It was an issue before which is why it is really useful to help someone see where they are and where they shifted to, because then they have that reaction that you are like. Almost like magic.

Holly: It was. Obviously I am aware that we did the work but it felt like magic.

Cara: Because you at that unconscious level already knew what you wanted to do and the behaviours ad actions, it is like you were just leashed by past conditioning and faulty ideas about what would get you towards your goals and as soon as we got rid of that chain, you are off. That is why [there are] breakthroughs. You do break through limitations.

Holly: That is really how it felt.

Cara: The other thing is working with another person.

Holly: Yes, and I always used to say this, when I would talk about doing mindset work, you can only get so far on your own.

Cara: Yes, I have had it myself. When you are really attached to a program, mine was freedom, it is like: that’s right, that’s right and I had a sense that something was in there, but it felt icky, with my stuff and with other clients, I am like: should we just have a look, but it feels like life or death: if I  possibly let go of this it feels like I will die and you will, that part.

Holly: The old identity is disintegrating, it is dying.

Cara: So that is hard to do on your own. Unless you have done years and years and years of it and you know what that feeling is like, you will just bounce off it.

Holly: Absolutely.

Cara: You will just [think]: no it is not that.

Holly: Over a year ago, when I told you I had that session with Fabeku, it was his superpower session when he helps you find your superpower that you are here to help people with, and he identified that as expansive joy and I was like: joy, no! Like that is not a word that I resonate with and he was like: it is very normal for you to bounce off what your thing is, because your smallness wants to keep you small. But I was like: joy, nooo, no that word. And here it is, number one value, I am getting chills as I say this to you. It has taken over a year since I had that session with him and then did the work with you, to really accept that yes, it is, it is my thing.

Cara: Yes, yes. I absolutely agree with him that our more expanded self we bounce off it because the small state we are in now, there is no resonance to it, it is when you are in the different state it is not accessible, joy is not accessible when you are not in that state. But, knowing the reasons for that, why you are there, what is trying to help you, what it is trying to give you and then deciding whether to let that go or not and how to let that go or not is the big piece.

Otherwise it is just, well if I can’t access this other state, because I am in my smallness I need to push through, take bigger action and make different decisions, but you are really working against a part of yourself that is like: I am not moving from here, it is far to important, we are not moving. So it is this complete internal battle all the time and there are just easier ways to do this.of doing it, there are just easier, efficient, ways of doing it.

Holly: Yes, I think the old style is the hustle, pushing against, making it happen…

Cara: And that marketing message includes so many away froms and pain points, so many away froms that feel so urgent, that is why they work, because it gets in touch with the part of yourself that is, it is so urgent that we need to pay attention to it now, it is vigilant, it is yes, yes, yes and when we collapse we think there is something wrong with us and it is not there are just the wrong parts in charge. That’s all.

Holly: So, tell us, how you are working with people on this. You have an offering which is based on the work that we did, tell us about that because I think it is really useful for people to see what the process is like because it is such a massive shift and yet it was achieved in two sessions.

Cara: Yes, there are two chunky sessions, in a breakthrough session, what I typically say to a client is that we can be working on one day – it is half day, three hour session, but don’t plan to do anything at the other side of the day, you might just want to sleep, it depends how you process, but a lot of people process through their sleep. The first time I did this values hierarchy elicitation and realignment I went and did a double cross training, which was such a shock for me but that was how my body needed to process.

Holly: Yes, because it gets the energy moving.

Cara: Yes, and I am very kinaesthetic, so. But another time I might have slept but I am more likely to move my body. So we have a half day one day and then either the next day, or at the maximum the day after that, we get back together for another two hours to check and see. We need an integration period, that is why we have a break.

Holly: The integration happens so fast!

Cara: {laughing}

Holly: You know me, I have done a ton of work with myself, and integration usually takes a long time. This was like, from one day to the next, it integrated and I felt that shift.

Cara: Oh that was because you had really changed. The process time for integration is going to happen overnight, if your process takes longer than that it is because change has not really occurred in my opinion. That’s fine, but it happened because you changed, that is the breakthrough of it. That is the key piece, we work, we drill down, so typically I always have a discovery call with someone when we want to do this anyway to make sure this piece of work is the best thing for them. You can come and it is just like something is going on and I don’t know what it is, or: I am stuck, I have been trying to attain this goal for a while and it is just not happening. No matter what I do it is just not happening kind of thing.

And then we need to choose which area of your life we are going to do hierarchies on and you can do one or two areas and that is pretty easy to spot straight away, there are lots of different clues in what people say. And then we will do the work that we did together, which is: as you have been living your life up until now, what has been important to you? What are the implicit values that are really driving your behaviour; or, in order to have the life that you are living, what would need to be important to you? That is the big difference, that is the big shift, because those questions elicit your conscious drives for the moment, that is the big piece and that is what tends to be missing.

Holly: Yeah I think it is a very different way of eliciting those values instead of: what is important to me?

Cara: Yes, no that never worked for me, because those are fantasy values, we have all got fantasy values, that we are trying to live up to, but that is not what we are really doing, we don’t really need to know what our fantasy values are because for change to be effective we need to know what we are doing now. So we will elicit that and then we clean them up, are they “away from”, if they are: what is in the past? What needs to be shifted? What do you need to let go of? What do you need to change from what’s not working anymore? What have you outgrown? And that is normally the first session and then you can start looking at the new ones. So the next day it is: so what is important to you now? Once a change has taken place, and this new part is kind of in charge, now what is important, and then we start anchoring that in and future pacing that. We did some techniques to help you see that in your future and I think I remember reflecting back in your session that it was really interesting because you were looking in a different space within a day and were constructing visually, whereas previously you were remembering.

And the client is always in charge, there are different offerings and different interventions that I can use, it is like both of us have kind of collected initials in the intervention bit, EFT or TAT or PSYCH-K these reframe depending on what works for the client, they are always in charge of the sessions because… that is what is so much fun about them because I know and trust your unconscious mind and that is all I am talking to, all of the time. That is why it felt like magic, because your conscious mind was out of the way, your conscious mind was out of the way and this other delicious stuff gets time to play and get energised and get creative. We are wired for growth and expansion and, is it Candace Pert that says we are hardwired for bliss? We always want to go in the direction of growth. So we are just taking the breaks off and that is where the magic happens.

Holly: And that is how it felt, taking the breaks off.

Cara: Yes.

Holly: So do you have any more on your website that talks about this, where people can learn more?

Cara: Yes I will give you a link on my website and people can feel free to email me if they have questions, but if someone is curious we will hook up and get on a call just to see if we resonate and see whether it is really right for them.

Holly: Yeah that makes sense. I never thought I could experience so much change from just two days, two sessions, I highly recommend it, it was absolutely unexpected.

Cara: Thank you and the thing is, when I have worked with coaches, or worked on my own, I have covered some heavy stuff, and yours weren’t loving, light and fairy dust, the stuff that came up, but it was fun, it is fun. You can do it.

Holly: You can clear the crap without it being painful.

Cara: And heavy and long…

Holly: Yes.

Cara: Change is good.

Holly: Change is good, I love change! So where can people find you online?

Cara: They can find me at: http://wildbliss.com. And I am also on Instagram and that is kind of where I am going to be hanging out more, I am coming off Facebook.    

Holly: Yeah, I just had a conversation with someone else about this today, Facebook seems to be…it is like the energy of Facebook is kind of dying or something, it is stagnant.

Cara: Yes, so they are the two main places. I am WildeCara I think, I will give you my link for my Instagram handle. And you can always email me. You see I have just switched over from CaraWilde.com to WildBliss.com and I need to do the emails as well, but if you go onto my website there is a contact there and you can email me. I am always happy to talk, you might know that after all these years {Both: laughing}, I love talking about process! I love it, love it, love it.

Holly: Well thank you so much for joining me today to talk about values, I just love your approach, I just think it is such a different way of working with values, that people need to know that there is another way other than picking stuff off a list.

Cara: Thank you, thank you for having me and thank you for your appetite for this stuff, I love it.

Holly: It is good!

Cara: I love how enthusiastic you are!

Holly: {laughing} Alright well thank you very much.

Cara: Bye for now.

Holly:  I hope you found that interesting and useful, let me know what you thought of this week’s episode  you can email me at: [email protected] or find me online and get in touch.

Thank you so much for listening. Next week, I will be back with Joanna Hennon, we have a really, really — I am really enjoying these conversations! — so we have a really juicy episode talking about discipline and how it is very different from how a lot of people see it. I see it as a super positive thing and we have a really good conversation about how to be more disciplined in life in a good way and how to use that to live a more joyful life and do the things that you want to do. So that’s next week’s episode, for this week’s episode’s notes remember to visit: https://hollyworton.com/361 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you so much for joining me.