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The Transition from Broken to Self-Sufficient

May 16, 2012

From Broken to Self-sufficient

What do you do when someone you love call it quits? What do you make of it? Something very similar happened to Patty Contenta, who has been a ballroom dancer for 20 years and helps women get in touch with their playful, sensual side.

Ishita Gupta: You took lesson from heartbreak and channelized your anger and sadness toward making a conscious choice, starting an online business, writing a book and building a life from scratch.

Patty Contenta: I basically started with, and still am in, the ballroom dance business. I am a dance consultant for the worldwide franchise, Arthur Marie. I also have my own Arthur Marie dance studio. Years ago, in my competitive career, I spent many hours on being the most feminine dancer on the ballroom floor. You needed to really show yourself and come off like a woman that is sensual, subtle and alluring and not sexual because the judges didn’t like that. I was married at the time and trying to balance both. My dance career very much part time because I really felt that at that time in my life, being married was my main concern and my work came second. It was a conscious choice at the time.

Fast forward a few years, one day I found out that my husband of five years had been cheating on me for probably a year and a half with this woman. I found out through a phone call. She actually called me and said, ‘I want you to know your husband’s not traveling. He’s with me.’ That morning, I was about to leave for a dance coaching session in five minutes. The news of my husband’s cheating devastated me and I had burning questions: ‘How can this happen? Where did I miss the clues?’ We finally did end up separating, and my main mission was to do some soul-searching. I went on this journey of self-exploration and tried to figure things out through reading a lot of books and going to seminars and talking to friends when I started to understand more of who I was as a woman and a dancer. I mean when I walked on that floor, all insecurities slowly started to melt away because I was able to become this woman who had to kind of fake it at first. But then the music would take me over and I became this goddess, this woman who understood her body and how to make it move to make it become feminine and sensual and enjoy the attention she was getting from the audience.

IG: So, you had no clue that he was cheating.

PC: Well, I was less content for the last year of the marriage. I felt we were distant and have not been intimate for the longest time. And I tried to speak to him about it. One day, tired and frustrated of the situation, I wrote my husband a long, heart-felt letter. I told him I didn’t sign up for this, that this was not what I thought marriage was about. Sensing my feelings, he tried to break up with the woman but she wasn’t happy about it and brought everything in the open.

IG: What happened then?

PC: Being an Italian, I had my culture tell me to “get over it”. But I needed a channel. And I found it in the ballroom floor. That was my saving grace and I thank God for it. I loved my work and delved deeper. I wrote a book, opened a studio and won a Canadian Championship. I wanted to prove that I was much more than I thought.

Through my journey I realized that I wanted to merge the woman who was on the dance floor with the woman that was off the dance floor. I thought what if I could use these techniques on the dance floor and merge them in everyday life. I began to consciously be aware of how I walked, how I stood, how I touched myself, how I moved. I adapted into the woman on the dance floor as soon as I stepped out of the house. The attention from men was crazy!

IG: How did you transition from being a ballroom dancer, to going through a divorce to an entrepreneur and a coach today?

PC: It started with a book called The One Minute Millionaire. I wanted to be that woman. And when I read it I was to tears with the leverage that she had and the change that she had created in her life. I mean, it’s written in two sides, the emotional way of becoming a millionaire and the logical way. I couldn’t care less about the logical way. I was all in the emotional change that she was creating. And I had signed up for Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen’s newsletters from the book. One day, I got a newsletter in my inbox saying, ‘If you want to be a millionaire, come to LA.’

Surprisingly, I took the offer and left for LA. I remember feeling scared because it was my first flight alone across the country, doing something. I cried on the flight and hid myself behind my hair.

IG: That flight was symbolic of your independence.

PC: Absolutely. Just being in that room with people who are looking for the same thing is like a great drug. When you’re surrounded by people who want to create a change in their life and they’re open and positive, it’s great.

The last speaker of the entire event was John Childress and he spoke up that the highest paid profession is public speaking. So I thought, ‘Oh my god! I can do that!’ So, I signed up for his program and I’ll tell you something, that was another scary moment because it was going to cost me 6,000 US dollars, which I, at a ballroom dance salary, did not have. But I had a credit card and I was looking at my credit card and I was going, ‘Do I do this? I don’t know.’

And I did.

It was that energy that fed another energy and it still fed another energy and my career, whether it was in the dance studio or the online business, started to really rise evenly.

IG: How did you start your coaching with women?

PC: After my divorce, I started dating and had a boyfriend. He wasn’t the best guy for me but he was into personal development and introduced me to Tony Robbins and others. One of the things that he told me was, ‘Patty, you’re such a feminine woman. You should teach women how to be like that.’

He and I broke up after sometime but the idea remained with me. I got in touch with Alex Mendozian and he gave me his program for free in the name of a good cause. He loved my idea and suggested the name Sensuality Secrets for my business. So it’s thanks to him and his guidance, really. He was my first mentor.

IG: Much of fear is a part of our everyday relationships. How do you face it in your relationship?

PC: I was brought up in a certain way and it’s not my family’s fault. It is just that I was in a social environment, in a culture, which sort of made me believe that if I worked through my marriage in so and so manner, I will reach happiness. I considered my marriage as my top priority. It was a way of thinking.

Today, my mom, who I dearly love, feels for me. She’d say, ‘I’m sorry that happened’. She still feels I am not really happy because I don’t have a man in my life. She keeps checking in, ‘Are you OK?’ I tell her, ‘You have no idea how happy I am!’

I am thankful because I never thought I’d be where I am now and the places I’ve seen and the people I’ve met. I’ve come to realise I cannot settle for any less in relationships.

I think being fearful is about not believing in our own capacity and potential. But having all those fears is normal and human. It’s almost like that’s what makes us human, our emotions, right? So we just have to stay with it. Emotional intelligence means really understanding what our emotions are telling us, have the insight, then use that to learn something from it and move forward. Not to stay in that emotion to the point that it stops you, but to say, ‘This is an insight that I need to understand. What do I need to get from this and use that to bring me somewhere else? Do I need to speak with somebody to put me in a better place?’ It really is that simple.

A part of my coping came from staying away from my family. My family has a way of thinking, as if they are stuck in that pattern of thinking. It’s really who they are. Although they are dear to me, I consciously did things without them knowing. I made investments, opened my studio, won the Canadian Championship. They never knew about the studio until it was all set. They were not there when I won the championship. I didn’t want anyone putting fear in me and killing the little hope I had. I didn’t want anyone, even out of genuine love and care, telling me ‘What? Are you crazy? You can’t do that!’

IG: I think it’s very brave to admit that because there’s so much baggage or connotation that we bring to our family because they are so well intentioned. They don’t want us to fail or take risks that are going to hurt us. My friends and family are lovely. But sometimes I find the need to separate myself from them. I think it’s a tool that we should all think about like tending to our garden which has both flowers and weeds — not that people are weeds — but just in a sense of what’s nourishing and beautiful for you and giving you energy.

PC: Yes, and there’s a guilt associated with tending your own garden. Especially in Italian culture and in women, it somehow translates to ‘you don’t want to give back to others’. But first you have to be healthy from the inside to give something that’s nurturing to others.

IG: How does one start to work with themselves physically and mentally in this realm of attraction and dating?

PC: It’s very much about body language. It’s understanding where men come from and where women come from. But my way of instantly tapping into that confidence and that femininity is through the physical being just because it helps to instantly change my state. That’s when I need a break or I need to do something, I’m outside getting physical. I need to walk. I need to work out. And I need to be in my physical state to feel better. I can’t just think about it. It doesn’t work for me. For some people it does. I can’t sit there and think about that. It just puts me in a bigger slump.

I always talk about the non-verbal because it actually is more than 60% of what people see and pay attention to and even out of the other 40%, there’s only about 7% that is about the words. Everything else is about the tone and the rhythm in your voice. So they’re not really hearing what you’re saying if you have anything intelligent to say, but how you’re doing it in the end. So, I really work on that aspect when it comes to the attraction factor, if you will, and there’s a way to stand that makes you more feminine, that gives you a more hour glass appeal, creates angles with your body, creates an inviting tension and spirit instead of a confrontational one. We don’t realize this as women; we’re challenged today because in order to create the successes that we have, we had to be much more in our masculine energy, which is about goal orienting, strategizing, creating those systems, getting it done. But to be in that energy, physically, is to be in a more forward energy. It’s not a lean back, receive and take it in feminine energy.

For example, notice how many women stand with their legs apart. First and foremost, close your legs because opening is a wide, leadership stance and an invitation has to be a smaller stance which does not intimidate. I teach men to take up that leadership space because a woman wants to know that you’re there like a rock for her. That no matter what she does, you’re so solid and that you will not falter. And that’s attractive. So they have to stand that way. A woman is ‘oh, let me show you what life has to offer in the sense and all this wonderful stuff’. So our stance has to be different.

Just standing, for example, with our legs closed and then having one knee bent and the other knee straight creates a curve in the hip. Literally bending one leg and keeping one straight, there’s a hip action. And then it’s about having your shoulder and another angled differently and using your shoulder blades to lift your chest and tilting your head to create a more alluring air and invitation and stance, if you will. Now relax into it and breathe into it. It’s going to feel contrived and artificial and that’s okay. But every time you do it, you realize it’s really not a big deal. It’s really not.

IG: It’s a wonderful feeling. You just move your shoulder down. You push your shoulders down. Your chest lifts, automatically.

PC: Absolutely. Women are so conscious of coming across as sexual. It’s a huge fear. And I’m like, whoa I’d rather be in a position when I have 20 men coming up to me where I say ‘Not you, you!’ You have the power to say no. Most men are gallant enough and they get it. What I do is not about coming across as vulgar at all. On the contrary, it’s about grace and class.

I went out to happy hour with my girlfriends a few weeks ago and I was watching the dynamics of the men and the women. It was really interesting to see how we’re in a place right now that the men lean back and the women are going forward towards them. So no men are moving. No men are doing the flirting. They’re just sitting back and they’re standing there and the women are going up to them. And I thought, ‘We have all of this reversed.’ It should be the gallant man who says, ‘I think you’re an incredible woman.’ And has the guts to go up there and talk to her.

As women, we have to really feel comfortable in that leaning back and smiling. Be flirtatious, maintain an eye contact if you want him to get used to making that first move and stepping forward because you don’t want to be the chaser.

It was just interesting dynamic to notice that night. All you want to do is just be in your body and be in with your girlfriends and be in that moment. And if you’re not noticed that night, it’s all right. Tomorrow’s another day; really embellish yourself and you will get noticed. I mean, all you have to do is keep eye contact long enough and smile.

Sensuality Secrets

IG: Thank you Patty. You’ve got a ton of insight. For those who are interested, please visit Patty’s website www.sensualitysecrets.com, which has a collection of videos, articles and her new ebook too. It’s all there to help you create an awareness and to allow you to be gentle with yourself. It’s fun and wonderful.

Featured photo by kevin dooley.

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Choosing to Eliminate Pain Rather than Manage it

May 14, 2012

Eliminate pain

I grew up in Manhattan and had, from what I remember, a very happy childhood. My parents got divorced when I was 6, but I bounced back pretty quickly. But at 14, my dad passed away which gave me the first big blow and also the first opportunity to step back and ask myself, “What’s going on here?” I was coming to a realization that life isn’t always merry, that there are bumps in the road that can really surprise you.

My father’s death was unexpected – he was in perfect health and shape when he died of a heart attack, so I couldn’t quite grasp it. But the blows didn’t stop there. A few years after that, my little sister died in a car accident. Before I could come out of the grief, I had a couple friends die. When I look back in hindsight, I clearly see how I was suddenly being transformed through this period in high school. One event after another kept pushing me toward a cumulative shift and a quest. Questions I had started asking quietly after my dad’s death now grew louder and louder. I didn’t know what it meant to be resilient – I just needed answers: How do you deal with one crisis after another and eliminate pain?

I turned to books and ended up in the philosophy section of a bookstore. I guess in the early 80’s, they didn’t have a separate section for self-help. So I started looking wherever I could and after sifting through aisles, I found a book by Descartes and figured perhaps he could help me. He was famous, and surely had all the answers, right? I came home and sat in my bed with the book wide open. I started reading but, as a 14 year old, couldn’t quite grasp what was he said. It was dense, and went on and on. I didn’t understand much.

Many Passions, One Path

Fast forward a few years, I went to John Hopkins to become a doctor. You know how self-help gurus go about combining your two or more passion into something lucrative? I tried doing that. So I wanted to study medicine and I loved writing too. My plan was to go to medical school, become a physician and then write novels. A writing doctor, if you may.

As per this plan, my immediate next step was to sign up for all classes heavy in English and writing. I clearly remember my first week – my premed advisor had called me and said, “What are you doing? There’s no way you can sign up for all this stuff together. Hopkins premed is a very defined program.” But I was persistent and convinced myself and him that I’d get through the program. It ultimately didn’t end up happening however because midway through, I was seduced by the English department. I loved thinking critically about things. I learned how to read Descartes and all other bunch of philosophers. I learned how to read literary theory and really think about, to take apart authors’ arguments and think logically about how things were structured. I loved it!

Life went on and things seemed to be going well. I went to grad school to get a PhD in literature and wanted to become a professor and still write, but things changed rapidly when my girlfriend at the time broke up with me. For some reason it affected me so much that I couldn’t care less about literature anymore.

Suddenly pain became a constant companion. I was on a quest to find where it originated. I worked fifty hours a week, went home each evening, tried to figure out how I am going to deal with my mortgage and rent, and asked myself lots of loaded questions about life. I lived with pain for a while before realizing that I was ready to let it go, but with no idea how to do so. Upon moving to Maine, I started writing a novel while simultaneously pursuing transformational and self-help processes to understand my pain and emotions. I was going through something really deep and painful and was trying to understand it all. I never ended up finishing the novel, but I had started what would become a long journey to self realization that now forms the basis of my work.

Where Does Pain Come from?

My goal was not to try and cope with pain, but to really understand how happiness and unhappiness and resiliency meet. How does that work? I wanted to eliminate pain. I was on a quest through my 20’s, applying all the critical skills I had learned to myself. There was so much written about coping strategies, but not much about how to create a real shift once and for all. It seemed as if most of us were living a life from one crisis to another, thinking it’s all normal to live that way.

Most of us are content with things as they are until we reach a certain critical mass and say, “That’s it. I need answers. I need to do something. Something has to change.” And it can be a rock bottom experience. It can be cumulative. Some people might have a nervous breakdown. But for me, it wasn’t so much the accumulation of small things – it was mainly few big ones. A thousand pounds of feathers weighs the same as a thousand pound stone. I think I had the stone, not the feathers. Between my dad passing, my little sister’s death, my friends dying and the demise of my relationship, I felt like I had weights around my neck that I had to get free of.

eliminate pain

I explored cognitive therapy, Buddhism, eastern religion and philosophy, Alvin Ellis and Aaron Beck. I kept thinking about these things, whether these explanations actually made sense to me and where they fell short compared to my own experience. I tried yoga, Reiki, energy work, psychotherapy. I looked at a whole range of alternative approaches and traditional ones too. A lot of understanding came out of that. In order to be free of pain, I needed to understand how it worked. You can’t just emotionally move through pain because it will come back. When you understand where it’s coming from, you eliminate pain instead of coping with it. Unless there is some sort of cognitive framework for me, I figured, the pain will keep returning.

Emotion versus Thought: What Are They?

Emotions are really an effect. They are a byproduct of thoughts. And this is where the cognitive therapists have been very clear. Some of this is present in Buddhism, Taoism and in certain eastern religions but in the West it gets translated differently. More people think that they should just embrace the experience of emotions. What we should realize is that emotions are just an after-effect and it’s better to search for their source.

This doesn’t mean we deny emotion. We acknowledge it and know it’s there. It’s the real deal. But we also know that it’s coming from somewhere else. It’s a byproduct of underlying thoughts and beliefs. So the goal isn’t just to embrace the emotions but to identify what’s underlying and create a shift there. After trying several approaches, I came to the conclusion that change is only temporary unless you’ve had a shift. Working along with Byron Katie and seeing her process helped me a lot to cause a rapid shift in my and others’ thought processes.

Beliefs Under a Microscope

Beliefs are different from thoughts. A belief is a thought invested with truth value. So the more truth you have invested in a thought, the deeper the corresponding belief becomes for you. You will find it easy to disbelieve the thoughts you are not particularly invested in whereas you will find it impossible to let go of some thoughts as you have a higher truth value or zeal attached to them. They have become your beliefs.

So that’s part of the difference between thoughts and beliefs. You can tell yourself to think differently but if you still believe the same way, then underneath that layer of supposedly new thoughts, you still have the same beliefs. You can start with a belief like “I should be more successful” and add to it something like, “I am successful. I’m going to be successful. Success is coming to me now.” But underneath all of that and the reason that you’re engaging in those thoughts is because you still have the belief that you should be more successful. So it’s a little bit like sugar coating something distasteful. What we want to do is instead of adding sugar, finding the original belief and challenging it.

Every time someone experiences a negative emotion, it’s coming from a false belief. For example, I could believe that my girlfriend loves me more than anyone has ever loved anyone on earth, and that might not be true, but it brings me pleasure. Believing something is real, even if the thing isn’t real, isn’t necessarily painful. Pain starts when someone believes that some things should be different than they actually are.

Coming back to emotions, if you have to reduce all negative emotions to three statements, they would be:

- things shouldn’t be the way they are (present)

- things shouldn’t happen the way they did (past)

- I know things aren’t going to work out well (future)

These three are about the past being wrong, about the present being wrong and fear about the future. A part of the movement of eastern philosophy to be present now is an attempt to shift the mind out of those sorts of emotions.

Problems are Just Situations

I always like to distinguish between a problem and a situation. Situations are just logistical. You still have to take your car for repairs in order to navigate traffic. But problems are emotional. When you call it a problem, there’s a negative charge there. When you eliminate that charge, you still face a situation but now do it more intelligently.

By 2004, it had become rare for me to experience a “problem. I was doing the do, had tried several things and done the work with Byron Katie – by then I had figured out a lot about pain, emotions and beliefs in order to sustain myself above the average level. So my next interest became helping other people who wanted to work through their problems in a way that worked for them, who wanted to pursue that in a spiritual setting. I would point them to Katie, because I think she’s the best. The ones who wanted to pursue it in a clinical setting, I would point them to cognitive therapy because I think it’s the best. But what about people who were adverse to cognitive or spiritual approaches, which is most people.

Statistically, 75% of Americans are experiencing moderate or extreme amounts of stress. 4% will see a therapist, a very small slice. And let’s say 1 % are seekers, they identify themselves, will go to the bookstore and check out the self help section. It still leaves a lot of Americans who aren’t going to find solutions and who are looking for them, but they’re looking in a very different way. If there are 300 million Americans, several million people are still stressed out and not being served. So I started looking for the how.

I started exploring the different approaches that had been offered and trying to determine what common ground existed between them, what were the underpinnings that they shared and then from that deeper level, went back up and constructed a process that could be followed in a very mainstream, accessible way. In 2004, I began sharing my process, ActivInsight, with people in California. It’s been an evolution since then and I’ve really refined it and made it really simple.

I knew simplicity in a process is important. If you tell people, “Here’s a way to live without stress. It’s 486 steps and only takes 46 hours,” no one’s going to do it. But if you’ve got 7 steps and when you know how to do it in seven minutes, that sounds more approachable. I built ActivInsight which focuses on eliminating the stress rather than managing it. Exercises like breathing, time management and such are tools to manage stress, not eradicate it. The problem still remains when you use these tools as they provide temporary relief from stress.

You may often wonder why we fail at losing weight, gaining confidence, having better relationships and getting tasks from the to-do list done in time. The reason being will power and desire are not enough – you need something else, something extra which will provide the added push and help you hold it as a permanent state rather than a one-off temporary state. The missing ingredient is known as insight, which is the birth of a deeper understanding about everything that matters to you. That’s what I aim to provide people in those 7 steps.

About: Andrew Bernstein graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins University (’93). His first book, The Myth of Stress, was published by Simon & Schuster’s Free Press in 2010. He is currently finishing a new book on insight and change. He lives in New York City.