Tina 00:00:00 I am very excited today to have special guest Tiffany Toombs on the podcast. Tiffany is a globally recognized expert and sought after international speaker on the subject of rewiring the unconscious mind for success and tapping into personal potential. With over 20 years of transformative experience, she has brought about meaningful change in the lives of individuals worldwide. Tiffany's unique approach is geared towards helping people remove the barriers that hinder success at all levels of life. So let's get into it. You're listening to the Soul Aligned Self-care podcast. I'm your host, Tina Stinson, and I had a stroke at the age of 39 from stress and burnout that shook my world. Now I'm laying it all out. The deep level self-care practices and mindset shifts that I needed that kept me healthy, balanced and thriving. Join me in this intimate space as we explore healing, resilience, and the soul's journey to alignment. This is where real conversations about deep level self-care happen. Let's get into it. Hey Tiffany, welcome to the Soul Aligned Self-care podcast. I'm very excited to talk with you today and get to know you.
Tiffany 00:01:29 Thanks, Tina. I'm excited to be here.
Tina 00:01:31 Where are you in the world, by the way?
Tiffany 00:01:33 I am just south of Knoxville, Tennessee, but originally from Canada.
Tina 00:01:38 Okay. All right. Cool. So it's hot there too, I'm betting. Right?
Tiffany 00:01:42 That's crazy hot.
Tina 00:01:43 Yeah, yeah. Well, to get started, if you could just tell the audience a little bit about yourself and how you started to do what you do for in your business.
Tiffany 00:01:54 Absolutely. So I am a trauma hypnotist and high performance mindset coach, And I never really planned on moving into this space. in fact, I had tried life coaching one time before I really moved into it and decided that it just wasn't for me. but it was really my own journey of healing trauma. So long story short, I was abused by my stepmom growing up between the ages of three and seven. She would lock me in closets, burn me with curling irons. tell me that strangers hated blonde haired, blue eyed girls. And so every time I acted up or was, you know, being too loud or whatever, she would drive me to the outskirts of the city I was from.
Tiffany 00:02:37 For a stranger to to come and get and kill. and she would threaten to kidnap me multiple times so that I'd never see my, my mom, my stepdad, my brothers again. And so all of that I didn't realize had until my late 20s. I didn't realize, that that was abuse. you know, there was always a justification like, well, somebody else has it worse, or it was only until I was seven. It was only every other weekend, so I had all these ways of justifying it in my mind. And then I realized that it had led to me creating all sorts of unhealthy beliefs that were keeping me stuck and really stopping me from living up to my potential. So, you know, beliefs around my worthiness and my love ability and what I tolerated in the world, it led to me becoming an overachieving, people pleasing perfectionist who, you know, was burnt, was just chronically burnt out because nothing I did was ever enough in my own mind. And so that all kind of came to a head.
Tiffany 00:03:36 I lived in Australia for eight years, and when I was there, I had been dating somebody for three years. the day I found out I was pregnant, I found out that he had a girlfriend in another state, and my entire life collapsed. that led to. I ended up finding out that he was actually a compulsive liar. So most of what I thought was true over three years was not. Then I ended up miscarrying the baby, and that brought me to a darkness that I never knew was possible. And I had suicidal ideation at that point. and I realized one day I was standing on the corner in downtown Melbourne, and I seen this taxi coming, and I thought, you know, one well-timed step and all my pain goes away. But nobody else thinks that I'm, like, selfish for ending it. And so mentally, I committed to taking this step. But when I went to take the step physically, my feet were rooted to the ground. I could not move. And, yeah.
Tiffany 00:04:39 So it was, it was that very intense. It was very intense. And I realized in that moment, if I didn't start healing, then I wasn't going to survive much longer. And so I started with all of the things that didn't really work. I mean, I did talk therapy. That really helped me understand that I had been abused, But it didn't go any deeper than that. I did the raw, raw events, you know, where you hug people and loud music and all of that. And then I would leave feeling great and I'd get back into my life and I'd be like, I have no tools to still navigate the world. And so, ultimately that led me to hypnosis and to NLP and then to somatic practices, which completely transformed my life. I realized that I had a gift for it as well, and so I started sharing that with the world.
Tina 00:05:34 I what a beautiful story. I thank you for sharing that with me. That's, pretty intense and I'm sorry that you had to go through that, but, I'm glad that you turned it into something positive for yourself.
Tina 00:05:46 So that's really cool. And so you talked about hypnotherapy. Most people know what that is. And then NLP, and then somatic practices. So if you could tell us, what is NLP And and maybe also talk a little bit about the somatic practices.
Tiffany 00:06:05 Absolutely. So NLP is neuro linguistic programming. So the neuro is really understanding how our brain wires itself and how it's rewiring itself every day. Right. Like the brain that people had at the beginning of this episode will be completely different to the brain they had at the end. So how do we use that intentionally to change what we believe, to change what we think? Right. A lot of people in the self-help world talk about like change your thoughts, change your life, which is true, but it's not as simple as, oh, I just had a bad thought. I need to replace it. Right? That just creates like shame and more of a spiral. So we look at actual tools to help us reprogram based on how the brain already works.
Tiffany 00:06:51 The linguistics looks at the words that we use both in our head and when we're communicating. Because, you know, it's it's called spelling for a reason. When we we communicate, we create a spell. So how can we again use that to our advantage. And then the programming is the outcome. So the habits, the routines, the behaviors that we regularly engage in when we change how the brain is wired and we change the words we use, the end outcome is that we get different programming. We show up in the world in a different way. And then the somatic practices is incorporating the nervous system. So, you know, a lot of like in the medical world, for example, when I was a teenager, I was a runner and I had a bad knee pain and they only ever honed in on my knee. Then they didn't look at like, you know, what was my hip doing? Turned out I had weak glutes, but I didn't figure that out until I went to university and studied medicine.
Tiffany 00:07:45 Right. They didn't look at my foot. They just looked at what's wrong with the knee. And this happens in self-help as well. It's like, well, what's wrong with my brain? But it doesn't realize that the brain is part of a system that is connected to our body. So, the, the process that I've created to help people we call rise. So we start with the somatic practices, firstly regulating and healing the nervous system. Most people live their life in survival mode, which means you can only go so far. Right? And and I didn't have this in my practice when I first started. And people would get these massive transformations and there would be like a little bit of a slide back, not all the way back to where they started, but a little bit of regression. And so until we started incorporating the nervous system piece and it was like, oh, this is allowing people to feel safe enough to make that change. Right. And so we always start with those somatic practices.
Tiffany 00:08:43 the are is also reprogramming limiting beliefs. And then we do the inner child healing for the I with the hypnosis. With hypnosis we also do the s which is shift your identity. And then the e is about expanding your limitations. So now that we know how the brain works, how can we constantly Create, expansion in our life. And, you know, stepping outside of our comfort zone, pushing the boundaries of our potential by just simple lifestyle changes.
Tina 00:09:11 I love that. Now, I experienced the same thing with the somatic practices, and it's it's a necessary part. And I think that's why I talk. Therapy only goes so far with people because they're not integrating those somatic practices. So if you could tell the audience, some somatic practices that you use so they know what that is because a lot of people don't know what that is.
Tiffany 00:09:36 Yeah. So I mean, there's a range of, you know, you can have like yoga practices, breathing techniques. I typically start people with breathing techniques because it's the easiest, the fastest like the lowest barrier to entry.
Tiffany 00:09:49 So one that I typically start people with is box breathing. This is a very solid Navy Seals use it. So you know, if they can use it to regulate their anxiety and whatnot going into like major missions, then us everyday people can use it as well. But basically what you do is you breathe in for four counts, you hold for four counts, you breathe out for four counts, you hold for four counts, and you're going to do that a minimum of four times up to a couple minutes.
Tina 00:10:16 Yeah. box breathing is one of my favorite methods, and it helps me lower my blood pressure like it's it's helped me. Breathwork has helped me so much that I was able to go off my, you know, blood pressure medicine, which I wasn't. I was only on for a few months. And once I realized that there was nothing wrong with me, it was just, me having to control my stress and my anxiety levels. I tried everything, you know, and that's when I went into using somatic therapy in my practice also.
Tina 00:10:50 And I love how like exactly what you said at the beginning was like, until I started implementing that, people would have that slide back and you're like, what's going on? Right? You know, and then when you start integrating that, those semantic practices, it makes such a big difference. But it's never like a one size fits all kind of thing. I found, using different semantic practices, but I found I, I did a little research before I talked to you today, and I was on your website, and I found, I found I find your history like, very interesting because you went to school for kinesiology, right? Yeah. And and you do in the.
Tiffany 00:11:31 Sports medicine sense. Not the energy work sense. Yeah, yeah.
Tina 00:11:35 And then you're, you work you work with fitness and nutrition and yoga. And then it said acro yoga and mindfulness. And another thing that was mentioned was ask. I'm not sure how to say this arch typical coaching or archetypal coaching. Can you say that.
Tina 00:11:53 How do you say that?
Tiffany 00:11:54 Archetypal coaching. So, yeah, one of my early mentors created a set of eight archetypes to just help us understand, like, how we show up in the world and we, we have like four main archetypes, for example. And then we have four challenge archetypes. So, you know, we have an order that we use our main archetypes in to have the most success and to get into flow. And then we have our four challenge archetypes where we have to learn those lessons to overcome self-sabotage patterns.
Tina 00:12:29 Well, that's very interesting. That could be probably a whole podcast episode.
Tiffany 00:12:33 That could be. Yes.
Tina 00:12:36 so when it comes to NLP, you talked about, how it's not as simple as just rewriting the thought or rewriting the programming. How how do how could you, like, explain to the audience, how it works, like on a deeper level to change those thought processes in your head?
Tiffany 00:12:58 Yeah. So we have two major parts of our mind. The first is, the first is the conscious mind, which is only 4% of the mind's capacity.
Tiffany 00:13:10 And then we have the unconscious mind, which is 96% of the mind's capacity. So logic, reason, willpower that all sits with the conscious mind, right? Our goals and dreams. That's the conscious mind. The unconscious mind. Its primary goal is to keep us safe. And it's actually wired to resist change. And this is why most people don't make change until the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change is, because we're not actually wired for it. and so, the unconscious mind is our belief systems, our experiences, our memories, the stories that we've told ourselves repeatedly. So if we if, let's say we kind of take mainstream self-help advice that says like, change your thoughts, right? So you have a negative thought, replace it with a positive and that's a great place to start. It's just not the whole work, right. When people take step one and then they're like, well, nothing is changing. And it's like, because you haven't done B, C, and D, right? You haven't done steps two, three, four.
Tiffany 00:14:16 So if we have if we're constantly if we're changing our thoughts, that's our conscious mind. So it requires some willpower to do that if we're not getting enough sleep, if we've made a lot of decisions in a day, if we haven't gotten enough to eat or to drink, our ability to tap into that willpower significantly decreases. Right? And so that's not a winning strategy. Like I say to people, relying just on willpower to change your thoughts is like going to Vegas and saying that you believe the 4% can overpower the 96% the majority of the time, and that's just not the case, right? If you're not going to bet your your life savings on that, why bet your life on that? Why bet your future. And so what we the other, the other piece of it is that our unconscious mind is playing things in the background on like almost an audio track that we may not consciously be aware of. And so when that's happening, when that's happening, we are we're not able to change those.
Tiffany 00:15:30 Right. Because it's like playing in the background and it's not something that's in our conscious awareness. So then we don't have the ability to change that. And this is why again, affirmations are a great place to start. But they're not the only piece to making change. Because if between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, we have this gatekeeper. What you need to know about the unconscious mind is that it is very suggestible. There is no logic and reason. There's no like autocorrect, right? Whatever gets into the unconscious mind is taken to be true. And then the unconscious mind seeks to create more evidence for it, and it will delete information from our environment. It'll distort information from our environment to match what has come into the unconscious mind. and so, you know, if we are in the background thinking that it's not safe to make more money, but then we're standing here saying these affirmations of, I'm, you know, I am wealthy and I'm abundant to money flows to me. And those are all great affirmations.
Tiffany 00:16:35 But if at the unconscious level, they don't align with your belief systems, they won't even make it past the gatekeeper. They'll just bounce off and they won't get in. And so one thing that we can do is to actually reframe it by asking a question instead of making a statement. Right. A statement can be rejected. But what a question does is it opens a loop to the unconscious mind. And the unconscious mind wants to solve problems. And I'd hate to open loops, because open loops mean we're sending energy to try and figure out that out. So it will try to close that loop as quickly as possible. So if I asked a question, how can I attract abundance to me daily? How can I, you know, feel safe with money? My unconscious mind will start finding the answers for us and that'll start coming up. So if we're just, you know, focused on. And then the last part is if we're just focused on changing our thoughts when we become aware of how many negative thoughts we have, and on an average day we have about 60,000 thoughts, and 80% of those are negative.
Tiffany 00:17:42 Then for 80% of your day, you're reframing your thoughts, which means you're not going to get a whole lot else done. And that's going to bring up feelings of like inadequacy and shame and doubt. Can I even do this? Or even overwhelm? Like, oh my gosh, I have so many negative thoughts because most people don't pay attention to it. Right. So that kind of sets you up for, for failure. If you're. If you're only strategy for changes. Well, every time I have a negative, I need to replace it with positive. Again, it's a great starting spot, but there's other pieces that will really accelerate that journey.
Tina 00:18:15 Yeah, I could see you explained that very well. So I really appreciate that because people hear about NLP all the time. And you know, we'll be talking about it on a podcast. And in the background I could just visualize people being like, what the heck is NLP and how does it work or what? What are somatic practices? What the heck is that? You know, so thank you for explaining all those things.
Tiffany 00:18:38 And I'll just say like, you know, if you Google NLP, or you know, you've heard of NLP before, it's commonly referred like linked to manipulation.
Tina 00:18:48 Yes. Yes, definitely.
Tiffany 00:18:50 A lot of people have I've had people come to my programs and they're like at the end of the weekend, they're like, I didn't know this was an NLP course at the beginning, and I'm glad I didn't because if I knew upfront that I was learning an LP, I wouldn't have joined because it had such a negative belief about it. And what people don't realize is in society, manipulation has a negative, connotation. But the word manipulate just means to mold. Right. So we don't look at an artist who's manipulating clay and say, oh, that person is a terrible person. Don't realize is that we manipulate ourself. We hypnotize ourself on a daily basis with our belief systems and most of these belief systems, 95% in fact, of the belief systems that we have as adults were planted in the mind between the ages of zero and seven.
Tiffany 00:19:43 And then we have sought out at an unconscious level, we've sought out evidence that that was correct. So if you created a belief, I created a belief when I was young that it wasn't safe to have money. How is that belief created? We would spend a lot of time with family, friends or with, you know, with members of our extended family, aunts, uncles, etc. and as soon as those people started making more money and I'm not even sure what that number was, because I didn't understand it that at that time. But as soon as they started making more money, my parents would stop talking to them and would start talking crap about them behind their back. And I would overhear it. So didn't even happen to me. But I did this belief that if you made too much money, you would be abandoned and you would be judged, right? And people would talk crap about you. And so for a long time, I held myself under this financial ceiling so that that wouldn't happen, right? To live paycheck to paycheck in order to be accepted by my family in my was my belief system.
Tiffany 00:20:48 But that didn't serve me right. But I constantly looked for evidence that that was the case. Every time I made more money, my parents would not talk to me for a while. Right now, was it a case of they weren't calling me because they were mad that I made more money, or was it that I unconsciously expected them to stop talking to me and so I wouldn't call them? Yeah, right. So our limiting beliefs become this self-fulfilling prophecy that we've manipulated ourselves or hypnotized our self to create. So all NLP is about is seeing that manipulation and hypnosis is part of a daily or it's part of our daily life. We're being hypnotized by the government, by the school system, by the medical system, by the media, by ourselves, by our friends and family, by what we see on social media. Like everything around you is a form of manipulation and hypnosis. Somebody wants you to see their point of view or understand them. They're trying to manipulate mold your beliefs and opinions to match theirs.
Tiffany 00:21:48 Right? And so when we understand that, we can take our power back and we can have more discernment around, what am I actually going to choose to believe?
Tina 00:21:59 Yes. And that's when you empower yourself. That's when you can learn to start curating the experience that you want to have in your life, because you do have control over these things. And, I love the how you explained that. So how can people connect with you and find you so that they could, you know, learn more about these, these, different practices?
Tiffany 00:22:22 Yeah, absolutely. So if you look up Tiffany tombs, you will find me on any social media platform, the least active on LinkedIn. But we're active everywhere. We also have a podcast called The Cycle Breaker Show. and you can connect with me on on any of those places.
Tina 00:22:42 Great. We'll put those links in the show notes. I want to thank you again for coming on, and I want to thank you for sharing your story, because I believe that when we share our stories, we just show people how much more connected we all are.
Tina 00:22:55 And it helps people move forward. It helps people heal. So I want to really thank you for doing that. I really appreciate you.
Tiffany 00:23:03 My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
