Inner Child Healing for Personal & Professional Growth with Alex Golodriga

This week on the show I have a special guest! She is my friend, client, and someone so amazing, Alex Golodriga! In this episode, we’re talking about all things inner child healing. If you’re a coach, a business owner, or a mom that wants to further and deepen your healing journey then inner child healing and this episode is where it’s at!

The Why to Alex’s Inner Child Healing Journey

Alex is a coach who helps burnt out women get energy by nourishing themselves with nutrition, movement, and self-care. Alex’s personal journey and the importance of it is what brought her to want to step into this line of work carrying out best practices to nourish oneself. She felt more emphasis on the importance of it when she had her son. Once he was born, she found that she was putting the care for herself off to the side which resulted in her feeling lost. She reflected a lot on how she could make time for herself without feeling the mom guilt that most moms tend to feel after having their baby. It was around 6 months postpartum where she realized that she had to figure something out in order to better herself. Once she understood the significant impact it has made on her life, to fully take charge of caring for yourself, she began recommending the importance of nourishing oneself to others.

How Inner Child Healing Has Helped Her Personal & Professional Growth

For Alex, having her son is what triggered her to begin her inner child healing journey. Alex has done some healing work prior to her son and a lot of the work she did was in anticipation of having a child. She was already conscious of family patterns and dynamics that she believed was not in alignment for what she wanted to foster in her own family. Because of this, she was able to do a lot of the work intentionally in preparation to become a mom. Of course with time and as her son grows older, she is finding more areas of opportunity to continue to do the work that she has well-established prior.

What do your personal life and professional life have in common? You. Inner child healing showed up a lot in Alex’s professional life. As she started looking in different areas of how she was showing up as wounded child in her business, she noticed how it affected how she viewed herself, how she viewed her worth, her expectations, the pressure she would create around her business, the guilt that she carried when she didn’t follow through with something or when she doesn’t show up in a way that she said she was going to, and lots of judgement. Through doing the inner child work, she was able to see where all of this stemmed from.

 She realized that a lot of this stemmed from a lot of the conversations she would have with her parents when she was younger. Self-doubt, financial opportunities and how she viewed making money, valuing herself and her time, preconceived notions of what success meant, and fear of being too successful all came from her experiences with speaking and seeing how her parents were when she was a child -- she developed such a scarcity mindset.

 Alex knew she was operating her business from her wounded inner child when she realized what type of conversations she had with her dad around money and success. Her dad defined success to her as making a living, providing for yourself and your family, and that success was not about doing what you love or what you’re passionate about. Success to her was this numerical value that defined how you lived. Because of this conditioning, it prompted Alex to change and shift a lot of her decisions in the framework of what her dad preached to her in the past. Overall, it came full circle for Alex when she became a teacher for the inner children her clients had. Things will always happen and unfold as they need to. 

How She Integrated the Healing Into Her Life

Integrating inner child healing into her life looked like identifying her triggers the moment they came up and acknowledging where she was at when and while she was experiencing it. Based on her response, she then prompts herself to ask what she can make better for herself to navigate the situation that is conducive to her and her growth. During these moments, she strives to meet herself and her son with compassion and love to continue to foster the type of patterns she works for in her family. Through her experience of having a mother who was reactive, she was able to identify how growing up with that type of dynamic affected her and how she showed up for herself as a child. Because of this, she works to foster a relationship with her son that allows him to speak up and share with her when and how he was comfortable to do so. She wants to make sure that her son does not need to adjust himself in order to please her. By doing this, she gets to ensure and provide a safe environment not only for her son but for herself as well; and this became apparent in all areas of her life. It all comes down to you. What do you need? How can you take care of yourself? 

After having the awareness, it’s not about how you do something but rather taking action on something that you already know how to do. You can think and ponder on the how, but it may often lead to not taking any action at all. Get organized and lay out all the things that you’re not confident in doing and figure out what you can do versus what you can delegate. Don’t get stuck in the how. With every small step of action you gain more clarity and confidence along the way.

Through healing her inner child, Alex was able to give herself more time. She is interested in building a business that is expected to be around for a long time, so she thought and wondered why she needed to do it all right now! This came from her experiences with her mom and how her mom was always a very late person. It was to the point where her gymnastics coaches would tell Alex to tell her mom that her actual start time was an hour earlier in which she was able to be on time then. Her mom was always rushing and stressing Alex around time that it’s affected how she shows up as a woman today. This is why she felt the need and urgency to rush all the time (i.e. her business!). By doing this work, she has been able to allow herself more time and more ease.

Some advice that Alex shared for new coaches or anyone who finds themselves having a higher purpose:

• DO THE WORK

  • Journaling

    • Bring awareness to your thoughts, awareness and behaviors

  • Hiring a coach

  • Seek outside help to create the awareness and have the support to hold space, lift you up and propel you forward