Rhonda Swan 0:11
Welcome back to the Rhonda Swan Show. Season 10 is lightening up, and this season we’re actually taking a bit of a journey into health, wellness, ways to identify what’s been going on in our life that may or not be ours. It may be our ancestors. However, we’re also digging deeper into what’s going on in our body. I don’t know about you, the audience that I watch, I’m or that are watching. I’m 52 years old, and I was a corporate executive, and I am a recovering corporate executive bitch, and that comes with a lot of costs. In fact, so much so that our nervous system and my nervous system was starting to break down when I was in corporate. Now, if you’re watching and you are a woman that is in that space that has either gotten burned out, you’re working overtime, or you’re just raising a family and you’re finding yourself not managing it very well. Well, guess what? You are in luck because my guest today is Kate Starr. She’s actually a nervous system coach. She helps support women regulate their nervous system and do a complete reset so that they can thrive not only in their life, in their business, in their relationships. So, what do you say? Let’s meet Kate Starr and dig in to what is going on with our nervous system. Kate, welcome to the show.
Kate Starr 1:32
Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here with you. I am
Rhonda Swan 1:35
so excited you’re here too. And you know, doing the introduction, it made I was like, well, let’s see. Probably every woman that watches my show is like, well, sister, yeah, I’ve been there. The nervous system is it’s it’s so big, and most of us, especially women,
Kate Starr 1:50
absolutely, we
Rhonda Swan 1:51
ignore it.
Kate Starr 1:51
Yeah,
Rhonda Swan 1:52
why do we do this?
Kate Starr 1:53
You know, we’re living in the society. I mean, especially today, that is just constantly driving demands and output, and really attributing our worth and value to that output, right? But I would say, especially, and why I love tailoring my work towards ambitious, driven women, and I really see ambitious and driven not defined by a capitalist lens, but like mothers are some of the most ambitious and driven women, right? Career women, other women who are passionate, is because there is this extra kind of demand pressure that comes on women, where we’re meant to be good through it all, smiling through it all, fine through it all, right?
Rhonda Swan 2:29
Multitasking perfectly, absolutely.
Kate Starr 2:31
And so, you know, a lot of the work that I end up doing is is around letting out some of that, you know, that rage, that anger, that frustration that comes with trying to keep it all together.
Rhonda Swan 2:43
Yeah, I mean, you had brought this up. Like women that are multitaskers, right? Whether you are in business or you’re a mom, these are the type of things that, unless we become aware of them, right? Unless we become aware, we just think it’s anxiety, right?
Kate Starr 3:01
Yeah.
Rhonda Swan 3:02
So how often and and how can women identify what’s what’s the pattern? Right. Why is this showing up? And then, of course, we’re going to learn how you can help them reduce that type of you know anxiety feelings or nervous system deregulation. So, how do you know when you’re deregulated or in its anxiety? I’m asking you a million questions. Why don’t you just answer them all? I’ll just try my best way to ram. I want you to know all of this. Going help,
Kate Starr 3:30
help. Yeah. Here’s the thing: we all experience dysregulation, so anxiety can be a form of dysregulation, right? And it’s not that the two have to be mutually exclusive. Where I’m really working with women is when they feel like they get in a stuck state of dysregulation. What’s really interesting is when we bring in polyvagal theory, which looks at the different stages of nervous system dysregulation. We often equate, you know, overwhelm, anxiety, these feelings of like irritability to dysregulation, and that’s almost kind of like that fight flights type of stage. We call it a sympathetic nervous system stage. But over time, when we live in that high level of stress for so long, that’s when we’re actually seeing women hit more of a burnout. So they’re actually feeling kind of numbed out, dissociated. Maybe even I don’t want to get out of bed. I don’t feel like I can do my tasks, or I’m on autopilot, right? And so we actually see it, you know, present itself across a range. And when we get to that point where we’ve gone from almost anxiety to just like apathy, right, is when it’s just a further along stage of dysregulation. It’s just a deeper form of protection. One of the ways I like to describe it is like if you put a dog in a cage, right? That dog is going to try and fight and bark and find its way out, etc. Right, but over time, it’s going to realize no one’s letting me out, no matter what I do. And so, the safest way to kind of protect self in that position, right, is to lay down, is to pretend it’s not happening, is to almost go into a kind of sleep state or numb state. So that you’re not experiencing that intensity of pain and anxiety all the time, right? We can’t live at that high of a level for an ongoing period of time.
Rhonda Swan 5:10
Okay, this is fascinating. In in, I see this happen often, right? Where then women or men they’ll use it. I’m going to go meditate,
Kate Starr 5:19
right?
Rhonda Swan 5:20
Right. I need to meditate.
Kate Starr 5:21
Right,
Rhonda Swan 5:23
how do you identify what what’s the true factor? Is it because it’s long going and it continues? Like, like I’ll just use the example. Like my husband often he’ll get so overwhelmed. He said, “I have to meditate, right? Because and I say your nervous system is whacked out right now. Right, right. He’s like super buff guy. He’s working out like so. He’s he’s doing the the exercise or the extreme movement with his body, which can also cause burnout, right? But for women, is it different?
Kate Starr 5:52
So a lot of this stuff does overlap. But what I’ll tell you is important: is to look at prescriptive versus preventative regulation work, right? So in society, we’re always looking for quick fixes. Quick fixes, yeah. And so we’re thinking, okay, I’m super stressed now, therefore I have to go do X, right? Yep. Or I have to go do a super hard workout. Now, with something like a hard workout, you are spiking your adrenaline. You might feel good for a second or like a cold plunge or whatever, but then a couple days later, you’ll probably experience a crash because you’ve just shocked your system even more, you built up that cortisol even more. But when we take more of a preventative or a root cause approach to regulation work, it means that we’re not running to the thing to fix the fact that we’re already panicked, that we’re already stressed. But instead, we’re actually expanding our capacity for stress so that it takes much more to get us to that state, and what I also like to think about it as is kind of like our pain tolerance goes down. We start to notice our bodies more. We start to notice the signs more, and so then we don’t drive ourselves so far to the point where we’re like, “Oh my god, I literally need to go do this right now.
Rhonda Swan 6:55
Wow. Okay. So is this where your soma neuro alignment has come from? This is the process, right? Yeah.
Kate Starr 7:01
So soma neuroalignment is built out of a lot in my research. So you brought up meditation, right? And almost every woman that I work with says, “I hate meditation. I can’t do it. I sit there. I’m a perfectionist. Like I can’t clear my head, and I like want to listening to my mind right now. Exactly. And my mind too. And everyone was like, meditation is the key. Meditation is the key, right? And so I felt like I was doing healing wrong. And I think a lot of my work is undoing the stigma around this idea that these gold standards that we’ve often heard about are are still the gold standard, and they’re no longer so. Soma of the body, neuro of the mind. What I found was that I was using subconscious tools like visualizations, hypnoses, you know, different types of even parts work or inner child work visualizations, and I could get into them in like the last 10 minutes. But the first like 40 minutes, I’m there. I’m like, oh, I want to scratch my arm, and like I’m feeling so kind of like itchy, and I’m trying to relax, and I’m thinking about my to do list, right? And so deactivating the body first through somatic movement, right? Movements that are slow that bring online the parasympathetic, our rest and digest versus our sympathetic, our fight, flight, freeze kind of arm of the nervous system helps us to reach a reduced brainwave frequency, that kind of more unconscious state, and from there we move women into subconscious work, and that subconscious work in my work, right? It’s around resourcing. It’s around regulation. So it’s actually about experiencing deep sensations of joy, of connection to self, of self love. It is not about going back into activating memories or states of trauma that can actually send us further into exactly further into dysregulation. Okay, so
Rhonda Swan 8:46
that brings something up. Yeah, if we’re bringing on new joy and we’re looking to create new experiences and new ways to be fulfilled, what do we do with all this back patterning?
Kate Starr 8:56
Right. Great question. So the kind of again gold standard or the traditional approach with talk therapy and trauma therapy was this idea of if we go back and we process through all our triggers and we understand all of our triggers and what’s coming up, then we’ll be able to move forward with an understanding. So I always say the women I work with could write a thesis on their minds. I don’t need to tell them anything more about their minds. They’ve all been in therapy for years. Like they’re very smart women, but they still feel this dysregulation, right? Why is that? Well, what we’re learning now through neuroscience is that you know everything in the mind is essentially kind of like a habit loop, and so habit loops form because there’s a reward, and when we are wired towards survival, that reward is often some type of protection, some type of benefit to us, and so we used to see. Okay, let’s go back to the trigger to change the behavior, and then what we would see was people willing their way out of doing a behavior using their conscious mind. I’m going to lock the phone in a safe. I’m going to hide the cookies. I’m going to you know whatever, and eventually it would just you know come back and sometimes come back. Tenfold. Yeah. So instead, shifting the focus onto the reward, right? So you do the behavior of something like a somatic practice or something like a subconscious practice, and you reward it with helping that individual to connect into like how good their body feels right now, like how beautiful they feel in this moment. So that they want to keep going, and that is also bringing again online that parasympathetic. It’s calming the system, and instead of having to go back and process everything in the past, which could take us forever, and we still wouldn’t know all of our triggers. You know, we’re starting to learn more information about how many of our memories are actually false, or you know, just misconstrued based on a kind of childlike mind, right? That instead we can hardwire deeply felt emotional safety in the present, so our present selves can understand that our past is truly in our past, and it’s no longer occurring in our present.
Rhonda Swan 10:55
My goodness, I feel like the world is ready to shift right now.
Kate Starr 10:58
It’s a movement. It is mostly a movement. Yeah, I mean,
Rhonda Swan 11:01
imagine women going. Okay, I have the tools now, right? We talked about you know Lisa Thomas was here. She talked about the epigenetics and the DNA. Now you’re talking about being able to look at where I’ve where I’m at and identify the nervous system and say, okay, that’s no longer going to trick me up because now I know how to bring more joy into myself and I into my day to day. How do you then work with clients? You know, how do you? Is it group? Is it one on one? Like, how do you then work with someone that’s listening? Going, okay, I need this because I feel like we could literally shift women if we all stood up together and said we’re doing this work. What’s going to happen in your household?
Kate Starr 11:40
I know, and I think about that. I’m like, oh my god, if we could all just channel our like nervous system regularly, it’s just it’s insane, right? And and it’s just incredible to see how many women I work with who do start their own businesses now because they aren’t afraid of those risks, who do decide to bring that impact out in the ripple, who model it for their children, right? Yeah.
Kate Starr 11:58
And so you know what I have seen is that what we’re really trying to create? Yes, joy is an important piece of that, but is safety, and safety, right? If we are biologically wired towards survival, we don’t get creativity, thriving like boss babe, CEO until our safety need is first met, right? Yes. And so when we’re talking about how I work with a woman, we do in my program. We offer group, we offer one on one, and we offer one on one with me or one of with my assistant coaches. But we always incorporate that one on one, and here’s why: I don’t believe it’s my role to ever determine a woman’s timeline to determine that this exact step in this exact process is 100% what’s going to get her there. The number one way to heal, like eight weeks and you’re done, like that is not my place because you have your own story and you have your own journey. Your approach might have to be different. Now, the tools that we use, the somatics, the vagal toning, the different types of subconscious work, those are rooted in science, even gut hypnosis for the gut brain axis, but the way in which they need to be introduced and titrated or built slowly towards an individual to make sure that they’re safely practiced is what’s key. So in my work, it’s super hands-on, and then depending on where a woman is, she has the decision: Do I want to do more of a fully one-on-one intensive and like work with Kate and really almost have this kind of like coach in my pocket, right? Like they have them on text, and we’re like calling, and like we really do become great friends. Yeah. Or is a community setting a lot more supportive for me, where I can hear other women who have gone through the same? Now, in our community settings as well, we do those rolling, so we don’t do a. We’re all starting on may 1, and we all end on whatever, because we find that women who have been in the program for longer are some of the best advocates and celebrators for those women who are starting out. It also gives women the flexibility to say, “I’m not ready to actually jump into some of this work right away. I need to get safe enough in this space before I can even get there. And we work with them, right? Wow, I love that. So there’s a lot of opportunities, and and most of your work is done here physically in LA, but also then globally because you also work virtually. Yeah, exactly. So we work internationally. We have clients all over the world. We have a portal and platform online, and it’s really great because it. I always joke it almost looks like Facebook. It’s not, but you know you have like your chat features, you have your wall. You have your video modules, resources, all of that. But then we also have all of our calls, and we, you know, divide calls into two different groups. And I think that this is really important when we speak to building up capacity slowly. Is that you don’t want to just jump into something like soma neuro alignment right away. That’s a very deep practice. You’re going into deeper somatics for a longer time, and then deeper subconscious work. So a lot of it is understanding the tools first. You even feel safe about them. So you even feel like you want to do them, and not like you have to. Yeah. But the point of that soma neuro alignment and the point of the program overall is to actually move women off of this reliance on routines every day. If I have to do my 10 minutes of meditation, or I have to do my, you know, 10 minutes of somatics, because life just isn’t set up for that, right? Yeah,
Rhonda Swan 15:08
yeah. I, I’m, I’m, I’m very inspired by the work and the time that you put into others’ lives. And I want to ask you then, what, how do you? What do you put into your life, right? Because how do you fill your own cup? I guess is a better question. Yeah, when you’re filling others’ cups and you’re supporting it, like holding space, it really is holding space. You know, people like, oh, that’s very just holding space, like it’s air. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. It’s a lot bigger when you’re actually holding space for someone and supporting their transformation. Absolutely. How do you support yourself?
Kate Starr 15:43
I will tell you. If I had not gone through my own burnout, crash, year-long emergency medical leave, like my whole story, right? I and gone to gotten to a place where I had permanently expanded my window of tolerance, my capacity for stress, I would not be able to run this business, and I would not be able to hold space for my clients, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t fiercely set boundaries. That doesn’t mean that I don’t get on the floor in between each of my calls and do some somatics, rolling around and like supporting my system. But my ability to recognize and regulate through a more integrated form of regulation, I see somatic work almost becomes like a lifestyle, like you really are taking movement based on what your body is asking for and supporting that throughout. I’m always like swaying in calls and things like that, but what I’ll tell you is that I’m not perfect, right? And I absolutely mess up sometimes, and I have weeks where, and in these even last couple months, I’ve just had a couple of big life things come up, right? So I have this incredible team of women with me who are all behind this work, who have all had their own journeys, and so it really does come down to I think community and connection, and can you really be authentic and vulnerable to say, hey, I’m falling short a little bit right now. How can somebody help meet me with where I’m at? It’s so powerful, though, with especially women communities, but to have that within your your business environment, yes, it’s it’s such a powerful next level for women that are not only working together but are really in in desire for transformation. Absolutely, you know, coaches need coaches, practitioners need practitioners. Like we all need to find our support systems to make sure that we are taking care of ourselves because it’s really not ethical for me to show up for a client if I myself am in a state where I’m not able to hold that space for them, right?
Rhonda Swan 17:29
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing, Kate. I really appreciate it and for you sharing. What is next for you, though? What is the next iteration of? I called you Katie Lady. I was I was whoever she had like you know like where’s the what is the next
Kate Starr 17:46
yeah yeah oh my gosh we have so many things in the pipeline I have to say I mean we have our book together I’m sure we’ll talk about that right which I’m so excited for moving more into speaking events you know to me it’s really important that we touch a broader audience here and that we’re able to really break down this idea of nervous system regulation, which is kind of like, what is that, and why would I need that? And a lot of association with that is only being equated to trauma, and we see that it, you know, anyone can benefit from this work. Like, how do we allow it to be more accessible? For me, that looks like eventually building out a program later this year for therapists, practitioners to get trained in soma neuro alignment and also in some of the way that we approach our clients, right? And the ways that we build curiosity and move away from a willpower kind of mindset, and then down the line, building out a nonprofit. You know, I have my master in public health. I studied lots and and worked lots in health equity spaces, and so it’s really important to me that this work becomes something that can easily be integrated into all different types of communities.
Rhonda Swan 18:47
Wow, I love it! Amazing. Where can everyone find you?
Kate Starr 18:51
Yes, they can find me on alignedwithkate.com, and then our Instagram is also at aligned with Kate, and that’s primarily where we’re on right now. We’building out into a few other channels, we have a YouTube. It’s it’s on its way, so you know. But there’s a couple resources there as well.
Rhonda Swan 19:05
Amazing! Thank you for joining me, Kate, for sharing and the work that you’re doing for women. It is welcomed and is so needed.
Kate Starr 19:13
Thank you for saying yes. It is a pleasure.
Rhonda Swan 19:16
Yes. So, ladies, I mean, sit there and feel into yourself and say, “Wow, is this happening to me? Am I finding myself in that burnout moment, or times where I’m just, I’m just overcommitting to so many things, or maybe you wake up at times feeling quite numb and not really wanting to continue to move forward? That’s the time when we recognize, wow, my nervous system may be off. I might be facing burnout, and it’s okay because you have support with people like Kate Starr and the work that they do in supporting you and moving forward into that next level of your greatness. So I hope you learned so much today. Make sure you’re following Kate, and I am excited to not only see you in New York City or. In LA to hear and learn more about your story and what it is that you’re doing to change the world. So thanks for being here, and don’t forget to be unstoppable and stay wild. See you next time.