Iva's Blog & Free Resources

One of the biggest transformative lessons on my journey was that everything that comes into my life is there for a reason. All the stuff in my life that makes me uncomfortable or angry or irritable or whatever… it’s all there so I can heal or transform something in myself.  

It’s a whole different way of looking at the world.

In this video I’ll point you towards some great resources and give you some important guidance on how to adopt a new context for your life...

You can learn all the new skills and tools you want, but to really find success you have to work on your leadership. And working on your leadership means working on yourself, doing the really hard work of digging through the layers that hide who you are.

Remember the video about getting clear on what your business will look like when it’s done? The same thing goes for yourself. What will YOU be like?

Here’s a video on step number one to elevating your leadership effectiveness, which...

We put a lot of work into improving our businesses, tracking how well we’re doing at reaching our goals and looking for ways to make things better.

In fact, I bet you spend WAY more time paying attention to your business than you do to yourself. Right?

If you want to grow your leadership and grow your consciousness, you have to pay that kind of attention to yourself and your thoughts and feelings.

You have to become the observer-witness.

How else will you know what you need to work...

When I was a teenager, it was easy for me to daydream. In a small town, without cell phones, video games, or distractions, and with plenty of boring downtime, I spent long hours dreaming and visualizing my bright future. As an adult, I am busy, always chasing, jumping from task to task, getting things done. We don't allow enough space and time to dive into our imagination. We have Hulu and Netflix, Facebook, and constant email checking to fill our down time. We don't take time to...

If I could choose just one tool that made my process of growing as a leader easy, it would be the power of visualization and mental rehearsal. It's that powerful. 

The basic concept is that your brain doesn't know the difference between what's real and what's imagined when it comes to learning. It can almost just as easily learn by visualizing a situation than actually performing a task or taking action. 

If that is true, to be a good public speaker for instance, wouldn't it be much...

We spend our lifetime telling ourselves that we shouldn't be the way we are. We should be more educated, smarter, prettier, taller, have straighter/curlier hair, be more accomplished, more successful, richer, and then we will be worthy. 

We believe that if we are all the things we made up at some point in the past, we will gain everyone’s collective approval and we will be okay. 

What's this all about? To find the answer, we must go to the era of our ancestors and look at how...

Journaling is great. 

When I started journaling and discovering what holds me back from being fully self-expressed and showing up in my full power, I saw that fear of judgment was the other side of the coin of looking for approval. We want to look good and we want to avoid being judged or criticized.

But why? What is it about judgment from others that has us doing mental gymnastics trying to figure out how to make people think positively of us? 
And more importantly, how might you...

As a child, I did fine at school. I always had straight A's. I was smart, had a good memory, and paid attention. But what I didn't lack in ability to learn things quickly, I lacked in ability to make friends, or worse, keep the giggling and laughter of other kids away. The classroom was my safe time. When class was in session, I didn't have to worry about my awkward interactions with others, trying to fit in, or making friends. 

I dreaded the bell that rang at the end of each class. Most...

Here are some of my thoughts about leadership: 

Despite what you might have been led to believe, leadership is not about padding on more tactics and strategies and becoming effective in manipulating people. Leadership is about discovering and shedding what is getting in the way of you being the powerful leader you really are. 

If you heard that sentence and immediately started talking to yourself about how you are not a leader, going through the evidence in your head of why that...

About Anger

When I did the Hoffman Process in 2015, my teacher said something about anger being authentic. “There’s nothing wrong with anger,” she said. Hmm, what a concept!

In today’s society, anger is made wrong. Anger is bad, wrong, and immoral. Expressing anger is inappropriate. We have learned to suppress and resist our anger, make others wrong for being the source of our anger, and most of us don’t realize there is a lot of useful driving force behind anger...