From Conformity to Authenticity: Finding Your True Path with Nathania Stambouli

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the make time for success podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Christine Li, and this is episode number 210. In this special episode, we get to talk to my special guest, Nathania Stambouli, who is simply one of the most vibrant and vivacious people I have ever met. Nathania is the founder and CEO of Yogi Flight School, an online yoga program that teaches aspiring yoga ninjas to slay their limiting beliefs and take their practice into their hands and upside down. Think ninja tricks. So they can finally flow into any pose with ease. She's also the founder and CEO of Soul Tribe Adventures, an international retreat company that aims to take people out of their comfort zone with transformational exercises, discussions, and excursions. Wherever she goes, Nathania's mission is to help people break through their limiting beliefs, slay their stories of I can't, and step fully into, yes, I can.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:05]:
This really is an episode where you will learn how to act more like yourself, think more like yourself, and be more like yourself. I can't wait to share it with you. Let's go listen to it now. Hi. I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped thousands of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they could begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn powerful strategies for getting your mind, body, and energy to work together so that you can focus on what's really important and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy and how you can create success on demand.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:59]:
Welcome to the Make Time For Success podcast. Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to get going today because my special guest is really special. Her name is Nathania Stambouli, and I have been fangirling her and her work for a while. She did not know that there was someone like me fangirling someone like her, but we did get the chance to meet about a week ago. And it's been a delight, and we've had so much fun, and we have a couple stories that we could share about that time. But we're also here to talk about everything motivation and fun for women in midlife. So welcome to the show, Nathania.

Dr. Christine Li [00:02:44]:
I'm so happy to see you here and to welcome

Nathania Stambouli [00:02:47]:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so very excited to chat with your community and to see what we can get into today.

Dr. Christine Li [00:02:53]:
Yes. Yes. Yes. Nathania is like a ball of energy and so dynamic on stage. We were just at a business conference, and I got to see Nathania in different elements, like in the audience and on the stage and teaching people just how to be themselves, how to be their raw, unfettered, kind of unchained self, I wanna say. So can you start there perhaps in terms of what is your own story about getting to that place in your own life personally and or professionally?

Nathania Stambouli [00:03:30]:
That's a good question. My story begins when I tried to conform to what everybody in society wanted me to be. So I come from a family of business people who told me, you get to go to college, and you get to have a business degree, and then you get to get a job and do the do the thing. Right? And I worked for 10 years as a marketing director in a wholesale company. I worked in an office in a warehouse with no windows for a decade and wanted to crawl out of my skin, quite frankly. And I I had all these stories about why I couldn't just pivot and do something else. Some of them were real limitations. I didn't have a green card.

Natania Stambouli [00:04:04]:
I'm a foreigner to the US, so there were actual limitations, but there's always a solution. Right? And so I I stayed stuck for a really long time. I kept myself stuck. And then in 2015, I pursued a yoga teacher training just for my own personal yoga practice. I wanted to enrich it and expand it. And within about a week of that training beginning, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is my calling. Like, I have just found what lights up my soul, which was so far from what my family would be okay with me doing. What? Leave a 6 figure career to go teach yoga? Are you mad? But I did.

Nathania Stambouli [00:04:41]:
I quit and I started teaching yoga. And as soon as I started teaching yoga, I immediately felt the need to conform there as well. I am an energetic person, kinda loud, kind of just to have a lot of energy. And in typical yoga classes, the yoga teacher is much calmer and much softer and much more home about it. And I tried to be that. I tried to be that for a really long time. And the more I tried to be that, the emptier my yoga classes were. And here I had left this career that was sucking my soul to do something that lit me up, but I felt like I put on, like, a suit, like, a performance suit every time I walked into the yoga studio, and it just wasn't me.

Nathania Stambouli [00:05:17]:
And it was I was seeing the results of that in front of me. At that point, I I became the owner of a yoga studio, and I owned it for 5 years. And in those 5 years, I never managed to make it feel like mine. I never managed to make it feel like a community of my people. Why? Because I kept trying to be somebody else. I kept trying to be what I thought people wanted from me. And then COVID happened and shut my business down overnight, shut everything down overnight, and I pivoted online. And very quickly, I saw that teaching just my yoga studio people online was not gonna sustain the I still had to pay for the building that was shut down.

Nathania Stambouli [00:05:56]:
It wasn't gonna sustain that. So I I thought, why don't I go bigger with this? Why don't I try and teach people that I don't know, strangers from the Internet? And in doing that, because they were strangers from the Internet, because I was starting something essentially starting brand new, there were no preconceived notions. I could be anybody that I wanted to be. And because it was on the Internet, and I couldn't even see the people who were watching me, I was like, I don't even know if they hate me, and they turn off the video feed, and they disappear. I won't even know. So I said, let me just be who I am, and let's see how it goes. And the feedback I got instantly was a complete night and day from what had been up until then. And I started to see that people crave role models who are authentic and who show up imperfect without their stuff together.

Nathania Stambouli [00:06:47]:
Can I curse on hair? I don't know.

Dr. Christine Li [00:06:49]:
Kind of

Nathania Stambouli [00:06:49]:
without their

Dr. Christine Li [00:06:50]:
s. Right. Exactly. It's kind of a kind of. Yeah. Yes. Go ahead. No worries.

Nathania Stambouli [00:06:54]:
And I saw that the more imperfect I was, the more relatable I was and that all the shiny yoga teachers who have it all figured out, that that was that was just never gonna be me. And and it turns out that it's liberating for people to have somewhere to go where they can be imperfect too. And they can go, oh my gosh. This person gets me because, look, she just messed up. And, look, she just said the f word in the middle of a yoga class, and, wow, how liberating is that? So seeing the results of me pretending were just not getting me to where I wanted to be. I was miserable even though I had changed careers. And what what actually gave me the courage was knowing that no one was watching or knowing that if they were watching and they didn't like it, I wouldn't know. And and I just said, let me try and see what happens.

Nathania Stambouli [00:07:40]:
And from that point forward, I just got more and more and more authentic and just more raw with my audience, and it it ended up being completely liberating for me personally. And it set the course for me to create a business that's, like, 1,000 percent aligned with who I am.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:57]:
Which is fantastic. Yeah.

Nathania Stambouli [00:07:58]:
So thanks to COVID, really.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:00]:
Yeah. I think COVID did a lot for a lot of business owners, forcing different decisions and also creativity and expansion online, certainly, but also just from the heart in terms of figuring out what to do when there's no direct path or directed path. Right? There was we all were just creating what we needed to do, right, and how we needed to serve during that time. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that backstory. I did not know basically all of that backstory, so thank you for that. I found myself wanting to tear up as soon as you started talking, and Mhmm. I just wanted to share that because of the conforming.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:40]:
I think once you started talking about the conforming, for whatever reason, that made me feel emotionally connected and also a bit sad. And I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about that super early part, like, the first 10 years, if you don't mind, in terms of how you knew this wasn't your thing even though you didn't know what your thing was and kind of maybe what symptoms? I am a psychologist over

Nathania Stambouli [00:09:07]:
this. Yeah.

Dr. Christine Li [00:09:08]:
These things kind of like what were you going through during those years?

Nathania Stambouli [00:09:11]:
Such an amazing question. I recently also broke up with my partner of 8 years, and the symptoms were the same. And I'm increasingly connected to my my body. It's my body that tells me when something's off. So for me, it feels like this ball of anxiety in my stomach. It feels like a retraction within myself rather than an expansion. It feels like I want to move away from I want to get smaller. I want to, like, round my shoulders.

Nathania Stambouli [00:09:43]:
Like, my whole being just kind of shrivels up. It's subtle, but I feel it all the time versus when I know that I'm on the right path. I feel free. I I feel expanded. I get more ideas. I'm more excited. I wake up in the morning genuinely. I'm a morning person, but when I hate my life, I cannot get out of bed.

Nathania Stambouli [00:10:02]:
And I know I'm on the right path when I blink my eyes open, and I'm ready to go. My body is like, yep. We're on it. Let's do it. Versus the 10 years I had to, like I had I had 5 snooze alarms every 10 minutes, and I would snooze them over and over and over because I just could not get myself to start my day because I was like, this is so not I'm living somebody else's life. So, for me, the symptoms are physical. It's restriction rather than expansion. And it's hard because sometimes you can't put your finger on that.

Nathania Stambouli [00:10:31]:
Like, what is that feeling? What is it trying to tell me? And to me, I've just landed on not aligned versus aligned. It doesn't need to tell me anything more than that.

Dr. Christine Li [00:10:42]:
Okay. Did you know during those years that your body was being so good to you in that way, that you had such a great register of what was right and what was not right for you?

Nathania Stambouli [00:10:56]:
I was very conscious of how I felt, but I tried to mind manipulate my way out of it because I was like, look. I I was working for my family business at the time. So I was like, you work for your family business. You have insane perks. You have unlimited time off. You make a 6 figure salary. What more do you want? Right? So I tried to tell myself that I was wrong, and I've done that in several parts of my life when my intuition is screaming. And I'm like, but look, on paper, it's perfect.

Nathania Stambouli [00:11:26]:
What's wrong with you? And I would silence it. So I was present to the fact that I was feeling off, but the first few years, I was like, no. This is great. This is the best situation you could possibly have. You're just gonna be happy. Be happy. Force yourself to be happy. And then I did my master's degree in psychology about halfway through that experience, and I was like, oh, no.

Nathania Stambouli [00:11:48]:
No. No. No. I am I'm gaslighting myself. I get to listen. Yeah.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:53]:
Yeah. I love that you took all these steps and just found your way even with the constraints and even with the life circumstances that were causing you not to even wanna get out of bed. So I'm really grateful that you were able to do these things and these options were available to you. How exciting. So now conformity as a concept, if we can talk about that. It's not a topic that I talk about so much on this show, but I do think it's really, as you say, a very powerful constricting force, and it's very widespread. And, basically, all of us are subjected to it at one point or another and oftentimes for years just through formal schooling, regular schooling. You don't have to have a fancy school to be subjected to this kind of stuff.

Dr. Christine Li [00:12:42]:
What do you say to, let's say, maybe the midlife woman who has gone through maybe decades of the pressure of conformity as a student than as someone in the workforce than potentially as a family or homemaker creator, career person, single woman, whatever it is, whatever form it took, there's some version of conformity there. So what are the thoughts that come to mind? I'm just opening up the topic

Nathania Stambouli [00:13:15]:
for you. The thoughts that come to mind are, are you are you done yet? Are you done conforming? Are you bored yet? You know, we could we can spend my my biggest fear is being on my deathbed looking back and going, I should have. I should have. What whatever's on the other side of the should have. Right? I wish I had done or said or been or experienced. So I like to tell people, like, start with the end in mind. Stephen Covey, that's not mine, but 7 7 Haggins of Highly Effective People. I love that book.

Nathania Stambouli [00:13:47]:
But start with the end in mind. What do you wanna be proud of? You know, and some of us I don't have children, but I know, you know, people who have raised children, you're going to be proud of your kids. You're going to be proud of the family that you created, and you are not your kids. You are more and beyond. And what do you want to be proud of for yourself at the end? And then work backwards from there. And conforming is something that in our society, I think, will always exist, and slowly, slowly, people are starting to wake up to the fact that you can live the life that you want. You don't have to live the life that we've been told you should want. And the question is, what do I want? And some of us haven't ever asked ourselves that.

Nathania Stambouli [00:14:26]:
We've been told, you're gonna go to school. You're gonna get a degree or maybe not. You're going to find someone. You're gonna get married. You're gonna have kids. You're gonna raise your kids. You're gonna put your kids through college, and then you're gonna do retirement things. And that's, like, the trajectory that is indoctrinated from a very young age for most of us, and we don't ever ask, what do I actually want? And so my big thing is just go sit in the sun out with a cup of tea and a journal and ask yourself, what do I want? And just write it down even if it's stupid stuff.

Nathania Stambouli [00:14:56]:
I want a new pair of jeans. I want shoes. I want and just write, write, write. And all of a sudden you're gonna start to feel things come out of you that you didn't even know were in there. And when I asked myself, what do I want? My answer was, I want to help people. I want to feel free. I want to feel powerful, and I want every single day to feel like I'm playing. I want joy in my life.

Nathania Stambouli [00:15:17]:
And I designed my life and my business to give me those things. But I had never asked myself that because I was too busy getting a degree and getting a job and doing the 9 to 5 and collecting my paycheck. I never asked myself, what do I actually want? And so that's the first thing is if you've never asked yourself that question, sit with it, journal on it, see what comes up. And you might not have, like, a thing that you want, but you might have a feeling that you want to experience in your life. That gets to be enough. And then it becomes a question of, okay, what am I not doing to give myself that feeling? Or what what is an opportunity? What's an experience that I've wanted to have that I've been holding back from because conformity or because time or because money? And then how can I start to create that?

Dr. Christine Li [00:16:02]:
I love it. Thank you. I'm thinking about so many different things, including one of the things that you said before we pressed record, which was not only should it be fun, your idea of your vision for yourself, big or small, It should be exciting. Could you talk about what that means for you and how people who might be just, like, stuck, right, stuck in a very nonexciting, routine based, constrained way, sedentary, perhaps, sedentary in mind and in body, perhaps, how to generate that kind of flow of ideas even to start being brave enough to say, well, what would I like to feel? Any ideas for that?

Nathania Stambouli [00:16:49]:
Yeah. So, you know, when we are children, we are uninhibited, and we are the most free and expressed version of ourselves until somebody tells us to sit down and be quiet, which happens to all of us at some point. And going back to who you were before someone told you to sit down and be quiet is a really good place to start digging. For me, I used to love my parents, and I don't have memories of this. But my parents used to tell me we would go on vacation, and at 2 years old, anytime I saw a boulder, I had to go and climb it. And both of my parents were behind me going, be careful. Don't hurt yourself. Be careful.

Nathania Stambouli [00:17:24]:
Don't hurt yourself. And when he told me those stories, I just filed it in the back of my filing cabinet. And I'm like, when I sat and did this with myself, like, what do I want? What would motivate me to actually get out of bed? Climbing things, being a monkey, using my body in ways that are unconventional was always something that lit me up as a small child. I was also a performer. Musical theater lit me up until my dad told me that's not a real job. You can't do musical theater. So, sit and go, who was I before the world got its hands on me? What lit me up when I was a kid? Did I like to draw? Did I like to put on my pink sparkly shoes and dance in circles in front of the mirror? Did I like to, collect bugs outside and observe them? What you did before you were told what to do holds the keys to your inner freedom and your inner joy. And it's hard because some of us don't remember we don't remember how we were before the world got its hands on us, but your insides know.

Nathania Stambouli [00:18:25]:
And I think that in order to change your life, in order to start creating something new, you need to have a vision. And when we say the word vision, sometimes it can feel overwhelming. Like, oh my god. A vision. I don't have a vision. I don't know. It doesn't have to be that big. It can be as simple as how do I wanna feel every day, but the vision gets to be compelling enough that it pulls you towards it.

Nathania Stambouli [00:18:49]:
I've had the experience in my life where I felt like I needed to push myself to do something, Get out of bed, write this paper, put this thing out on the Internet for all to see. And I've had times where I'm like, I have something to say, and I have to say it where I'm pulled. Right? And finding those things that pull you will motivate you without even needing to think about it. And it might not be what you think it is. Right? It might be as simple as, you know, the other day I started knitting, fingering knitting. I didn't knit, but what I did was I always used to love working with my hands. And now that I'm in a computer all day, type, type, type, type, type, I I don't really work with my hands in that way. The other day, I said, I'm gonna go to the craft store.

Nathania Stambouli [00:19:32]:
I'm getting a calling for crafts. And I stood there, and I said, oh, yarn. Thick yarn that I can knit with my fingers. And I have knitted 5, don't judge me, 5 entire blankets for no reason, but because there was something inside me that said, I wanna reconnect to this part of me that, like, messes around with my hands and creates something from nothing. Your insides know what lights you up. You just have covered it up with what you should be doing, what your friends are doing, what your peers are doing, and and reconnecting to that childhood version of you, even looking at a photo of yourself and asking, like, back from back then and going, what did you love to do? What lit you up? Will give you a spark of something to go off of.

Dr. Christine Li [00:20:17]:
Yeah. Beautiful. I love that. I love that you're doing finger knitting. I've never heard of that before.

Nathania Stambouli [00:20:23]:
And without without needles, you just go at it with your fingers. It's

Dr. Christine Li [00:20:26]:
so fun. Cool. And I love the idea that we we all know there is not necessarily a humongous life search involved. It can just be a reconnecting to something that has always been there. Yeah.

Nathania Stambouli [00:20:42]:
And for that, we have to withhold our judgment. For me, for a long time, when I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, which what I'm doing now is teaching people how to stand on their hands, that's literally my job because it's fun, and it lights me up, and it empowers people. But when I said, oh my gosh. I think this is what I wanna do with my life. I shut myself down. I judged myself. That's not what? You're that's not a career. Are you crazy? Until I had to get out of my own way and be like, wait.

Nathania Stambouli [00:21:08]:
Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. That's my dad on my shoulder telling me it's not a career. But is that fact? No. That's judgment. And so we get to also stop judging ourselves because you can judge yourself right out of your vision.

Nathania Stambouli [00:21:23]:
And and it's you gotta be mindful not to do that too and explore explore all the possibilities.

Dr. Christine Li [00:21:29]:
I love your leadership. I mean, I think you've developed as a leader as a result. Right? Just finding and sticking to what was right for you, I think, just naturally elevated all of your other natural skills as a leader. And, again, I'm just talking as a really remote observer and recent acquaintance of yours, but I really see you as such a powerful being, and I love that. And I think that's because of all the work you've done, the aligning and the changing and the difficult decisions and the pursuit of things like finger knitting and deciding that I'm gonna be a voice online for other people who might be struggling to find their finger knitting, to find their climbing love, to find their voice, and to find their community. Could you tell us about the community that you've created? Because I don't know much about the community that you've created inside Yogi Flight School, but I would love to know.

Nathania Stambouli [00:22:31]:
Yeah. You know, it's a community of people from all over the world that got together based on this one desire to be able to have complete mastery over their body and to do whatever they wanna do with their body. If it means a handstand while on a walk in the woods just because they can, that that that's really the vision that all the people in my community have. They just wanna feel capable, confident, and, like, they have control of their body. And, of course, that has ramifications for every other area of their life. But, initially, we come in for that, and it is a community of people of all ages and all walks of life. I don't even advertise my community or my program to anyone under 35 years old because I think it takes a certain level of maturity and commitment to learn how to stand on your hands. And I don't I didn't have that commitment or maturity when I was 22, so I just don't even put it in front of them.

Nathania Stambouli [00:23:21]:
And we have women up to the I think our oldest ninja is 82 standing on our hands. Like, what? And people from all walks of life and all ages and all medical histories having overcome all kinds of issues who are now sick and tired of their stories, that they're not capable, that they're too weak, that they're not strong enough, that they need to be younger to follow their dreams, that it's now the other half of life and we're just basically waiting for it to be over. No. These are people who are grabbing life by the horns at any age and saying, I've now put my kids through college. I've put my kids through school. This is time for me. And what do I wanna do? I wanna be a 68 year old woman doing handstands on the beach because I can. So it's people like that who I've attracted by being completely authentic and completely inappropriate.

Nathania Stambouli [00:24:13]:
My authenticity is also inappropriate. I have the sense of humor of a 14 year old boy, and I have attracted an entire community of people who also have

Dr. Christine Li [00:24:24]:
Who are very similar to humor

Nathania Stambouli [00:24:25]:
of 14 year old boy. So, you know, it's an entire yoga class goes by where I don't make an inappropriate joke. You can be sure I'll get some DMs going, why didn't you say anything inappropriate today? I was waiting for it. So and I, you know, I used to be like, I can't say the things that I wanna say because how dare you be in a yoga class and say something like that? Well, not only can you, but it actually really resonates with people, with the right people. And, you know, sometimes I get emails from people saying, your language is appalling. I'm unsubscribing right now. And I say, okay. You are not my person, and that's okay.

Dr. Christine Li [00:25:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can only I'm just trying to imagine the group of people. Right? I'm thinking it's not just people with 14 year old humor. Right? And it's it's people who are just connecting to you and your energy and your mission and your leadership, and I love that. And I would love to share you with my audience in a deeper way. I'm wondering if you could tell us about what's next and what people can connect to you through your upcoming events.

Dr. Christine Li [00:25:31]:
Could you please tell us what's going on?

Nathania Stambouli [00:25:33]:
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So if you're listening to this and you're like, you know what? She just gave me an idea. Why don't I stand on my hands at whatever age I am? Because that might be the next thing for you on your journey. Right? So if anything that I said was interesting to you, I'm hosting. I always wanna serve 1st, and I want to help first before I ask for anything in return. So several times a year, we host a big week long training where I bring people together, some who have never done a day of yoga in their life, some who have been trying to hold a handstand for the last 5 years.

Nathania Stambouli [00:26:05]:
It doesn't matter. We bring them all together online, and I deliver 3 completely free classes, which secretly, yes, you're gonna learn how to stand on your hands, but you're gonna see how your fear, your fear of judgment, your fear of failure, your fear of not being good enough, your lack of self trust, how all of that shows up on your yoga mat, and how the practice of yoga gives you a playground to break through all of that and to build your courage and to build your belief in yourself and to see how strong you are. We know how strong we are, but it's quite another thing when you're like, wow, I'm holding up my entire body on my hands. Wow. And so if that sounds interesting to you, you are invited to join. You can find out about it at my website yogiflightschool.com or you can follow me on Instagram at yogi flight school. We're gonna start promoting the training at the end of the year, and the training happens the 1st week of January. So we're very excited.

Nathania Stambouli [00:27:01]:
And if nothing else, you will come out of there having played like a kid again, having explored new capabilities for your body, and having met amazing people from all over the world.

Dr. Christine Li [00:27:12]:
Which is terrific. Thank you. I'm gonna backtrack a little bit and ask a couple more questions because

Nathania Stambouli [00:27:17]:
Yeah. Did you pick handstand because

Dr. Christine Li [00:27:20]:
it really is the act of trying to do the handstand that brings up so much of this stuff, like, in a deeper way?

Nathania Stambouli [00:27:28]:
Yes. I picked handstands because that was the thing that got me hooked on yoga, and yoga changed my life. I walked into a yoga class in 2009, my very first yoga class ever, and I was like, what is this nonsense? This is for old ladies. I don't like this. This is boring. And I turn my head. Next to me, this woman goes from a downward dog position, which is, like, feet down, hands down, butt in the air. She jumps up into a handstand and then hangs her head over her her feet over her head into what is called a scorpion handstand, and my jaw just fell off my face.

Nathania Stambouli [00:27:59]:
The only time I had ever seen that before was, like, in a circus or, like, at a at a show, but not a normal person next to me in a a regular yoga class. Like, normal humans can do that? What? So I started to go to yoga to learn how to do that, and very quickly, I was met with, you're not strong enough. Your arms are too short. Oh, my core is too weak. Why can't I hold this handstand? I would get so frustrated with myself. I would quit as soon as it got hard. And then I had a teacher who shone a light on that, and he goes, how are you in the rest of your life when you're trying to do something out in your actual life and it's hard? Do you keep going or do you quit? And I was like, oh, snap. I totally quit.

Nathania Stambouli [00:28:42]:
And he helped me see that what happens on that little piece of rubber happens everywhere else because how you do one thing is how you do everything. And I was like, wow. Mind blown. And I started to use the handstand practice to change all those things about myself that weren't working in my life. Right? Because if you quit, when it gets hard, you never get to where you're going. So okay. Let's not quit on handstand, and let's watch how that translates to me not quitting on myself in other areas. So it was a 100% that it it just magnifies our fear.

Nathania Stambouli [00:29:14]:
It magnifies our lack of trust. It magnifies our lack of self worth, and we get to we get to just transform it right there and then. Yep.

Dr. Christine Li [00:29:24]:
Okay. I'm gonna ask the other question, which you've heard a 1000000 times plus, which is it's not having to do with your physical strength. Correct?

Nathania Stambouli [00:29:33]:
No. It doesn't.

Dr. Christine Li [00:29:34]:
Not at all.

Nathania Stambouli [00:29:35]:
It's physics. It's science. Anything that balances has what's called a fulcrum point where you have to get the heaviest part of the thing on top of the fulcrum point. If you can pick up a bag of groceries from your car and bring it into your house to put it in the fridge, you have enough strength. If you can't pick up a bag of groceries from the floor, we have a different conversation. We need to make you do that a couple of times first. But most people have enough strength. What we don't have is trust.

Nathania Stambouli [00:30:02]:
Because in order to arm balance, you must lean into yourself. You must lean forward to the place where you go, Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. I'm gonna fail. I'm gonna fall. I'm gonna hurt myself. The balance happens on the other side of that.

Nathania Stambouli [00:30:15]:
And all of us stop when we hit the I call it the the o point. I'm not gonna curse here, but it has a different name, but we'll call it the o point where you come up against yourself and you go, I can't go any further. Yes. You can. And your balance is when you let yourself go further. And how many places in our lives do we stop when things get hot, challenging, scary and we go, Never mind. Never mind. Never mind.

Nathania Stambouli [00:30:40]:
I'll just I'm good. I'm good right here. No, no, no, no, no. What you want is on the other side of that moment, and you have to go get it. That's the magic. So it's really not about strength. And the method that I have created builds your strength as you're preparing your body to do the pose. So you you will get stronger regardless, but it's not about that.

Nathania Stambouli [00:30:59]:
It's about physics, finding that fulcrum point, and then trusting yourself to lean in.

Dr. Christine Li [00:31:04]:
Yeah. Thank you so much. I love this. I love that I got to ask all the questions that I've been fangirling about and, that that I'm sure my audience is also wondering, like, oh my god. The handstand? Really? You know? And on your website, I love your humor is on your website as well. Right? And about the face planting and all the things that if you have been a mini yogi, you've faced a little bit. Right? And you've faced the difficulty of it, but I love how Nathania just is making this just like a life journey metaphor, which it is, and how she's really gonna bring us all into a stronger place. And I love your journey.

Dr. Christine Li [00:31:42]:
I love your mission. I love what you've done. I love that you're in alignment. I thank you so much for being with me on the show today and for bringing this really important conversation here. We all need to hear this every single day, I think. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for living in for really being true to yourself.

Dr. Christine Li [00:32:02]:
I'm I'm really excited.

Nathania Stambouli [00:32:05]:
So That means the world, and thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.

Dr. Christine Li [00:32:09]:
Thank you so much. Alright, everyone. If you love this episode as much as I did, please share it with your friends, send in a review, connect with Nathania on Instagram and at that free training, and we will both wish you so well. I'll see you next week, everyone. Take care. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time For Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you've heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website, maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com for past episodes, show notes, and all the resources we mentioned on the show.

Dr. Christine Li [00:32:48]:
Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to, And let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. Talk to you soon.