Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in personal development but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Helen Brenner, Founder of Helen Brenner Coaching, LLC., located in Gibsonton, FL, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
I’m a trauma healing coach and have a special interest in working with women who experienced sexual, physical, and psychological abuse in their childhood. I love helping people heal, especially people who have experienced great loss in their lives or feel abandoned in some way. Through my work, regardless of childhood trauma, I find that all of my clients share so much of the same challenges. We are human, and humans are flawed. Those flaws affect and mold who we become, and much of it remains until someone like me helps them to understand their brains and resolve those challenging emotions.
I do my change work through the conscious hypnosis area of the mind because 90-95% of our brain’s activity is out of our conscious awareness. All of that behind-the-scenes activity greatly determines how we respond and show up in our lives. “Fix” that, and life is completely different.
Tell us about yourself
I spent decades as a therapy client trying to resolve my own childhood sexual abuse and bullying traumas. I never seemed to find the way through. So I decided to earn a BS in Psychology and an MS in Mental Health Counseling to find out why it wasn’t working for me and the many childhood trauma survivors I knew. I kept feeling there was something deep going on; I could feel it in my core.
There was always a feeling of seeking answers, wanting to know more, and a drive to find release from the hard emotions and behaviors I was experiencing, like desperately needing someone in my life, feeling lonely and unloved, and feeling very unwanted by people who were good for me and attracting people who weren’t, oversleeping and being late or missing work, holding myself back in my work, not standing up for myself, and so on.
I had experienced hypnosis 20 years ago, which helped alleviate a few symptoms, but the deep uneasiness remained, which led me to search for training in it and subsequently discover NLP in Hypnosis™ and Eye Movement Emergence™ and experienced the deep changes I knew I wanted.
The transformation in me that came from my unyielding curiosity to find answers for myself was mind-blowing. It explained why therapy didn’t work for me and introduced me to a whole new level of understanding of the human brain and how it works. I threw myself into four years of training and gaining experience perfecting my skills and bringing them to clients across the US, Europe, Australia, and Japan.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
My biggest accomplishments happen every week when I show people a better way, a way that brings the changes they want with minimal discomfort and without re-experiencing what burdens them.
People think you need to talk about your problems to resolve them, but we know from brain science that this isn’t true. My clients are so incredibly relieved to not have to rehash everything they experienced in order to get better. From a personal perspective, I’m most proud of my efforts to find a better way! I found it, experienced it, and brought it to others.
The other thing I’m very proud of is my website and creating what I hope is a place where people feel understood, safe, and comfortable. Putting the words and images on my website was a huge vulnerability trigger, something that many of my clients also experienced. Add to that the struggle to describe what I do because our brain is just so complex, and there’s not a single word to explain how our mind keeps repeating certain behaviors in an effort to learn.
The effort that goes into an entrepreneurial website requires a personal understanding of who you are and how you want to show up in your world. This leads many entrepreneurs to stall in their actions to put themselves out there because of confusion and fear. Understanding the effort behind creating a website helps me know what to uncover in my clients so they can confidently move forward.
What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?
The hardest thing is describing what I do, just like it is hard to explain how our brain works. Scientifically, many neurons and chemicals are involved within our brain, and all these neurons are firing at different moments at different times, which results in emotional and behavioral responses. The goal is to eliminate or greatly minimize the responses people don’t want and create new, chosen responses they want!
What I do is very unique, cutting-edge work based on decades of brain science and already proven ways of creating behavioral change. The theory of conscious and unconscious mind has been around for a while and has been taught by many experts before me. But no one can truly explain in a tangible way what is consciousness and what is unconsciousness. It’s not something you can check out at a shop and measure to the precise measurement.
My message is simple – I will help you clear out what you don’t want and replace it with what you do want! It’s the how that makes me unique, makes this work unique, and that’s what I want people to know. I do it by taking you through a state of light, meditative trance and uncover the ways you unconsciously see, hear, feel, think, say, and do things. Explaining an experience that can only be experienced has been the hardest for me.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- I’d start with knowing why you want to do the business in the first place. What draws you to do this? What’s your passion? These are necessary to keep you focused on the bigger picture that takes time to develop. You’re more likely to burn out and quit if you're not invested in your core. This goes back to my earlier comment about vulnerability showing up on your website – knowing yourself and what you represent is paramount to developing a successful business.
- Keep learning, keep developing your craft, whatever it is that you do. Never stay stagnant in your own self-development. Reach out to others to gain perspectives, take courses, and volunteer at places where you’re learning more about yourself and what you can bring to the world!
- Trust the process. Change and growth are quite often very slow and can’t be seen on a day-to-day basis. It’s like sending a child to summer camp and being very surprised at how they grew while they were away. They would have grown anyway; we just don’t notice the growth when it’s happening in front of us.
Is there anything else you'd like to share?
I have a first-person experience of trauma and all the aftermath (fear, shame, guilt, etc.) that brings us so much pain. I have first-person experience and confirmation that the tools I have learned and brought to clients truly work and work fast!
I have a great deal of education and experience in mental health that gives me a deeper understanding of why things are the way they are in human behavior.
I’m different from most NLP, coaching, and mental health practitioners because my techniques are more advanced and specific to the changes people want.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://www.helenbrennercoaching.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HelenBrennerCoaching
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/helenbrennercoaching/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenbrenner/
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