Becoming Flawesome: A Chat with Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani about her new book!

Ever felt tangled up in the many roles you play in your life? Today’s conversation with Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani might just be the lifeline you need!

Join us as we unravel Kristina's journey from co-founding the global personal growth platform Mindvalley to stepping aside, consciously stepping away from her marriage, and walking her path towards being more honest with herself.

Kristina shares her insightful view on the constant strive for perfection and encourages us to embrace our flaws as pillars of strength.

We dive into her newly released book, Becoming Flawesome, a term that intricately combines 'flawed' and 'awesome', encapsulating the journey of loving oneself, imperfections included. How exciting is that?

Trust us, you'll be riveted as we navigate through a range of topics from happiness, success, to perfectionism, hustling culture, and so much more. So, strap in and get ready for a rewarding ride of self-discovery and authenticity!

Being described as “10 years worth of therapy in one book,” Becoming Flawesome by Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani is a celebration of our whole selves, warts and all, and the glory that is to be found in living in our truth.

Links:

Get a FREE copy of her book + bonuses here for a limited time.

Download a free chapter here. 

Follow her on IG: https://www.instagram.com/kristinamand/

Follow her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristina-mand-lakhiani-73168414/

Follow her on FB: https://www.facebook.com/kristinamand

Transcript

Angela: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the 5D CFO podcast. My name is Angela Marie Christian and my mission is to help entrepreneurs and thought leaders rise to the 5D, where we can find wealth in all dimensions, in all areas of life. Enjoy. I'm really excited to introduce you to Christina Mond Lockiani. She is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, philanthropist and mother. She has been in the personal transformation industry for over 20 years. You might know a little company called Mindvalley that she co-founded in 2003. But she actually started her career working for the government of Estonia, where she was born and raised, and then she worked for various nonprofits such as the United Nations, oxfam, etc.

Angela: 0:48

In 2009, christina launched Mindvalley Russian, taking Mindvalley's best authors and teachings to the Russian speaking market. This month, she is releasing her very first book with the help of Hay House Publishing, and it is called Becoming Flossom, and that's what we're going to talk about today. In her book, she shares her journey from being on top of a personal growth empire like Mindvalley to stepping aside conscious uncoupling from her husband and walking her path towards being more honest with herself. Enjoy, welcome to the show, christina. I'm really excited to chat about your new book, becoming Flossom. Before we begin, can you please share with us what Flossom means and how you came up with that term.

Kristina: 1:33

Well, first of all, thank you, angel, for having me on your show and for giving me a chance to talk about my book. Now, when it comes to the word Flossom, I do wish I had come up with that amazing word, but no, I didn't. I found it somewhere and I think it's a word which has been used a little bit not too much, but it's one of those words that doesn't belong to anyone. So I adopted it because I loved it.

Kristina: 2:02

And, yeah, the idea of Flossom in essence is reflected in the origin of the word. It's a combination of the words flawed and awesome. So it is, in a way, a self-explanatory that you attempt to stay awesome despite the fact that you are not flawless, that you're flawed and maybe imperfect. But of course, in my book I give it a little more deep meaning. In the essence, what I try to help my reader to achieve is to not just accept yourself with your flaws, or learn to accept and love yourself with your flaws, but actually go a step further and try to realize that those things that maybe you're ashamed of or maybe make you shrink are actually things that make you you and give you the value that you have to give to the world. So, in essence, I want people, I invite people to face their flaws and to see their flaws as a source of their strength.

Angela: 3:10

I love that I feel like so many of us are trying to be perfect all the time, and I love this idea of being flossom. So thank you for that and what inspired you to write this book. If you could just share a little bit with the listeners, that would be great.

Kristina: 3:28

I think big things happen through many different signs and many different paths. It's like the Amazon, the river Amazonia there are a lot of little rivers getting into it. So I guess it's similar with the book. On one side, I've been in personal growth and transformation for 20 years and worked with some of the best authors and speakers in the industry, so it was in a way a natural progression of things, like when you're born in a family which has certain expectations of how a life should be, what kind of profession a child should have or what kind of education, then you don't even question that, it just becomes your default. But then, on the other hand, of course, my life experience had inspired a lot of the content of the book and also my personality in a way. I like to ask questions, I like to find answers. I don't believe in a generalization. So when I started writing the book, there was a lot of research going on. So those those little streams coming together actually ended up in a pretty big project.

Angela: 4:41

I love that, and what are some of the issues that you address in the book? If people are looking to help with some issues they're having in their life, what are just some of the issues you address?

Kristina: 4:55

So my ultimate goal of that book is to help people to find the path back to themselves, the real selves. I do believe that a lot of people with time, with life's experience, lose sight of what it means to be you, real you. We play a lot of social roles in our life, which is normal, and sometimes we associate so much with a certain social role that we are forgetting who's the human being, who's playing that role. Just as a very pragmatic example, we all have different facets. Like I'm a woman. On one side I'm a teacher and a speaker and an author, and I'm an entrepreneur and I have children. I'm a parent and I have my parents, so I'm a child. So we have all those different social roles and it is absolutely healthy and good to change your masks and your scripts as you navigate social landscape. Like when you come to the office and you're in the professional environment, you obviously speak a little different than how you speak with your children. So it's a natural thing.

Kristina: 6:00

But the problem is that because we value certain social roles over others, we sometimes start merging with them. Like if you're a mother and then an entrepreneur, it's sometimes so hard to switch off one side. For example, you have to go home and you forget that you are actually a parent, a loving parent, not just a businesswoman. Or, let's say, if you're in a position where you are a colleague and a friend, sometimes there may be a conflict. So what happens is that we start forgetting who we are.

Kristina: 6:33

We start associating the things which are valuable, which society considers valuable, we start prioritizing them over other things and eventually we lose sight of what it means to be me, because we want to be loved. Naturally, we want to be good as part of that desire to be loved. So at some point in my life I realized that I've lost the main character in my movie. I kind of make the motions of my life, but the main character is missing, and I think that's the ultimate goal of the book to help people find their path back to them, reel them, not just the many social roles that they play and along the way we go through a very picturesque terrain, through forests and mountains, and into the cave to face our dragons, but in more practical terms, we discuss a lot of topics in the book. I talk about happiness, success, about perfectionism, about hustling culture, about unpleasant emotions, about courage, honest kindness, and I naturally end up very philosophical, because that's just part of me. So this book has a lot to offer.

Angela: 7:54

No, that's great, and a lot of my listeners are like me. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a single mom of three just trying to juggle everything, so I totally know what you mean about. You know there's so many different roles, so I think that is a really important thing for us to be looking at, and I left my marriage about a year ago and I realized I had not been being my authentic self for a very long time. So I'm really excited to read your book and I love how you say authenticity and honesty are binary they're either there or they're not and I'm wondering if you could just give us an example of maybe like a technique that you talk about in your book that might help other women who are just now realizing as well that they haven't been being their authentic selves.

Kristina: 8:36

I wish it was such a simple thing. I once heard a very wonderful quote and I'm loosely quoting it. I don't even remember the source. I was interviewing someone, so I'm really sorry. If somebody owns the quote, please let me know.

Kristina: 8:51

But the guy said a powerful mind can create a bulletproof delusion. So very often, people who are smart and ambitious I believe a lot of people who listen to your show are smart and ambitious Well, this is the type of people who want to listen to shows. We are very often so smart that even the delusions that we build in our minds are so strong that you can't really break them very easily. And we are all a little delusional. And I know it is a bordering with being a little too philosophical, but life is actually just a succession of events that happens either to you, with you, through you or around you, and our experience of life is in essence, our experience of those events. And that also means that your mind creates the idea of reality, because there is an independent event which is usually quite objective and not a polarizing kind of thing. It just happens. Something happens, and how that affects you, how that affects your worldview, how that affects your opinion about yourself, your judgment of yourself depends so much on the kind of story, the kind of narrative that your brain is used to well suggesting to you. So it's interesting, you can actually observe it. For example, events which have touched everyone, like COVID, the different realities that people lived in through that time. Which event was objectively the same for everyone? And that is because our mind creates the version of reality. And if you realize that the biological function of your brain is to keep you safe, then naturally, when you face something, when you face an objective event which is considered dangerous to you, like it makes you feel uncomfortable and unsafe, your mind is going to distort the reality to make you feel safer.

Kristina: 11:15

So why I'm talking about all of that is because and it's so funny because you told me that I say that honesty and authenticity are binary. So you're either honest or not. Yeah, there's nothing absolute in the world. So why I'm talking about실선 GP�?

Kristina: 11:37

It is incredibly important to realize that, unfortunately, we are much more comfortable with distortions and with deception in our life than we would like to believe. Yet when it comes to authenticity, if you are compromising your essence or your values, even a little bit, even 5%, it's pretty much a deal breaker. You don't feel yourself authentic very often when you have to make that choice. You almost feel like you are trading your soul for something which you deem valuable enough for that. So, yes, on one side, I do think that honesty and authenticity are binary, but on the other hand, I also want to impress that honesty requires practice and awareness. And I'm not talking about honesty with the world, I'm talking about self-honesty, because authenticity, in essence, is your relationship with yourself. So it is about you being honest with yourself, and any conversation about honesty has to start with the fact that we are very often, unfortunately, not very honest with ourselves.

Angela: 12:53

Yep, that's very true and yes, I've struggled with authenticity for quite a while, but it's nice to start working on it and starting to see your true self. So if someone purchases your book and follows along with all of the techniques, what type of transformation do you hope they'll walk away with?

Kristina: 13:14

You see, transformation is not in my hands. Yeah, I hope that my book is a companion, but it is always in the hands of the reader to experience the book and I say that quite a few times. Of course, it is a book as a journey and I wrote it as a journey. But then in the process of editing, my editors asked me and helped me to give it the kind of structure that would help people to actually also use it as a tutorial or as a training, which it has become. So I've added a lot of exercises and reflection points and points for introspection after each chapter. But I impress it on my reader that I cannot give you the transformation. What I can give you is I can be your companion, I can give you the questions, I can suggest that you experience certain things or ask yourself certain things, or I can share some ideas. But the transformation is in the hands of the reader and it depends on several things.

Kristina: 14:20

Information definitely is an important component for transformation, but it's information alone is not enough. You have to have an experience, because information, while it stays information, it's like a book on the shelf it's good to have, but unless you take out the book and start reading it. It's not going to change your life. So the same with transformation, you can have a lot of ideas and get them, understand them cognitively. Unless you've experienced that idea in your personal life, it's not going to change the way you see the world. And that brings me back to that same explanation that I gave in the previous question, that life is in essence a sequence of events which we react to or we interact with, or these events make us see the world in a certain way or see ourselves in a certain way. So you have to have that experience for that narrative in your head to change.

Angela: 15:17

Yep, that's very true. I'm really excited about this book and I'm looking forward to it coming out in June of 2023. And, yeah, I think that covered everything. So thank you so much for your time and I can't wait to read it.

Kristina: 15:33

Thank you so much for having me on your show and, yes, I can't wait for it to be out.

Angela: 15:37

Thank you so much for listening to the 5D CFO podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it and tag me on social media. You can find me at Angela Marie Christian on Instagram, facebook and TikTok. If you haven't purchased my best selling book, manifestation Mastery, yet, it's priced at 99 cents on Amazon for the Kindle version.