Decrease Negative Self Talk — this is a normal human experience that comes from our ego but it is also possible to become more aware of the Negative Nancy in your head and start giving her less airtime. I always say to my clients — turn up the volume on your goddess soundtrack!
Starting something new is scary. Learning to believe in yourself can be a critical precursor to starting a new initiative. Why is it so important to learn to believe in yourself? How can someone work on gaining these skills? In this interview series, we are talking to business leaders, authors, writers, coaches, medical professionals, teachers, to share empowering insights about “How To Learn To Believe In Yourself.” As a part of this series we had the pleasure of interviewing Nicole Rose Stillings.
Nicole Rose Stillings is a Manifestation Expert, TV Personality, and Creator of The Manifest Mindset™ — an app that rewires the subconscious brain to be a Law of Attraction machine. Nicole speaks regularly on the topics of energy, purpose and meditation, and was recently featured on MindValley & TEDx. The daughter of 2 brain doctors, she studied psychology and sociology at Emory University and is also trained in neuro-linguistic programming, meditation, breathwork, intuition and reiki. She was a 4th place contestant on the remake of the Apprentice — The Big Shot with Bethenny — on HBO Max. She hosts the Big Queen Energy podcast and serves on the board of UNICEF NextGen.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I grew up in a household full of doctors — even my little sister is now a doctor, but the idea of going into medicine always repelled me. I could barely get my blood drawn. No joke, I would have to zone out and almost “meditate” when I was younger. So how was I supposed to operate on someone else?! But deep down inside of me, this drive to serve and to do something impactful starting building basically while I was in the womb.
Both my mother and father were obsessed with the brain — and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. My mother is a neurologist — how the brain is hard wired — and my father was a psychiatrist — how thoughts make you feel. And in my field, in the space of Manifestation — how thoughts turn to things — I use concepts and research from both neuroscience and psychology today to explain how your thoughts generate your emotions, your emotions mold your energy and your energy impacts your 3D experiences.
It’s so wild that it all came full circle because I remember when I was a little kid, I had a best friend who was already destined for the family business. And I would daydream about that… about how amazing it would be to just know your path and follow it from a young age… and now I AM in the family business!
What or who inspired you to pursue your career? We’d love to hear the story.
Even at the age of 3 years old, my father would repeat to me like a broken record: “you can be anything you want to be.” Just like his mother, he was always an advocate for the empowerment of women. And it rubbed off on me in many ways.
By the age of 25, I was running a boutique social media agency in Soho with a team of 12 and major clients in the fashion space. At first, I thought it was my dream job but I quickly started to burn out within a year of working there. I was started to feel disconnected from the work and called in a new direction. So one Friday afternoon when I was particularly stressed, I went to the park to call my father for our weekly check in, and just blurted it out: “I want to quit my job & I want to be a DJ.” I was mortified. I had never told anyone about this dream to work for myself and build my own entertainment empire because I was so scared someone would squash it.
And his response was the same thing it always was: “You can be anything you want to be!” And we were off to the races planning my exit, writing my first business plan, learning the DJ business, hiring my first coach etc. He always believed in me and his belief drove me to take risks and soar to new heights because he was my net, I knew he’d always catch me. I quit my job a couple months later, was making money DJing, practicing every day and building my own brand online. And I started studying manifestation, the Law of Attraction, human optimization, meditation and more so that I could set myself up for success. This is when I built the first prototype of the Manifest Mindset™ — my tool that reprograms the subconscious to attract your goals & dreams.
Flash forward 2 years, it was the 3rd time he was diagnosed with cancer and he transitioned back into the spiritual realm. While I was happy that he was no longer suffering, I felt numb on the inside. I couldn’t go about my daily life business as usual. Things were majorly shifting inside of me — kicking off my spiritual awakening. I had to learn to be my own support system… my own hype girl and it took me years to fully embody this. And now this is what I’ve dedicated my life to teaching — helping other women be their own hype girl… helping them to unlock their true power and train their own brain to be a manifestation machine.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I used to think that I made a lot of mistakes but looking back — I’ve realized that they all lead me to exactly where I needed to be. It’s all part of my destiny and your mistakes are part of yours. It’s about the way our brain interprets the information that we’re receiving and the sooner we pivot to unravel the lesson to see the opportunity, the happier we are!
For instance, I used to think doing TV was a mistake — it was very intense, time-consuming and almost stressful in moments (as reality TV is designed to be). But now, what I see is that my expectations were not aligned with what The Universe wanted to deliver to me. It didn’t catapult my podcast and business to new heights immediately but it did send my first coaching clients straight into my DM inbox. I was already hired and paid to coach before I had even completed my first program (teaching others how to make the tool I built 11 years ago). It was wild how well it all came together when I widened my perspective to see opportunities I never expected.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?
I’ve been coaching for a couple years but we just launched our first group program of The Manifest Mindset™ and I am so excited to be sharing this in a setting of like minded women and offering it at a price that feels friendly for people of all different career paths and backgrounds. My goal has always been to teach as many women as possible how to raise their vibration and reconnect to their own divine power through their purpose and we’re doing it!
OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the core focus of our interview. This will be intuitive to you but it will be helpful to spell this out directly. Can you help explain a few reasons why it is so important to believe in yourself? Can you share a story or give some examples?
This the basis of my entire business. You cannot manifest dreams that you don’t believe. You cannot achieve goals that you don’t believe. So what success boils down to is your belief. You want to believe in yourself, in your ability to manifest what you want, in your ability to love, in your ability to heal, in your ability to forgive because you came to Earth as a creator and as such, these powers are your birthright.
I teach in my workshops that the two main factors in manifestation are your belief and your desire — your intention. Once you have clarity on what you want, your belief is the energy that supercharges your intention in to the quantum field. And your day to day vibration is what magnetizes your intentions back to you.
So let’s give an example: everyone has had the experience of waking up on the wrong side of the bed. Maybe you stubbed your toe, you didn’t sleep well, you spilled your coffee and now you’re running late. There’s this moment where you say to yourself: “today is gonna suck.” And guess what? It always does. So next time you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, just try to catch your brain going there and fight back. Say: “today’s gonna be amazing.” And just watch how much better it flows.
What exactly does it mean to believe in yourself? Can I believe that I can be a great artist even though I’m not very talented? Can I believe I can be a gold medal Olympic even if I’m not athletic? Can you please explain what you mean?
Let’s start with the basics. Beliefs are just thoughts that you think on repeat. And you’ve programmed yourself to embody those beliefs and therefore, you start living your life like those beliefs are true.
So, I was terrified to become a DJ 11 years ago. It was a male dominated field and the rest of my family and friends (save my father) thought I was absolutely off my rocker. And, I had no skills, I didn’t know the first thing about DJing other than that I played piano when I was 6. But I started telling myself every morning that I was excited to become an incredible DJ and raise the vibrations of the people in the room. And over time, this thought became a belief that then propelled me forward. Because I believed that I would be a great DJ (that I had the ability to become great), I practiced more, I posted more and I networked more. I told more people about my services and all of this combined helped me grow my revenue. This business quickly grossed over 6 six figures each year and led me to incredible life experiences like Superbowl, Art Basel, Coachella and more.
Was there a time when you did not believe in yourself? How did this impact your choices?
Yes, I had black mold poisoning a couple of years ago, which was arguably the hardest time in my life except for when I lost my best friend and father. Black mold is a neurotoxin that interferes with optimal brain functioning in many ways but most notably, energy production and information retention aka memory. It’s almost like a TBI but the hardest part is that you look normal from the outside and your test results all come back normal until you find someone really, really specialized who’s seen mold before. For a year and a half, all my test results came back as healthy but I was struggling to wake up, struggling to go to work, struggling to eat but still gaining weight. It got to the point where my own family started to think I was crazy because several doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. It was the darkest moment in my entire life… so many intelligent people were questioning me that I almost stopped believing in myself and listening to my own intuition. Thankfully, I kept going a couple months longer, finally got some answers, and began my healing journey.
At what point did you realize that in order to get to the next level, it would be necessary to build up your belief in yourself? Can you share the story with us?
So many times — as I mentioned — I built an entire process to increase my belief in myself before starting my DJ business but I’ll give a new example. For many years, I was livin’ the dream as DJ Rosé but my health crisis led me down a new path. You could say it was a spiritual awakening of sorts that kept unraveling for the next half a decade. I started to crave more out of my career and really question if DJing was my divine purpose. I knew that I wanted to share more of my gifts with the world and serve in a deeper way and truly, coaching and teaching was in my heart for a long time before I made the jump.
I knew that in order to coach others, I would need to receive more coaching, take more courses, read more books, wake up earlier, work out every day and live the life of a coach before I would ever be comfortable selling myself. And so I began transforming into this next level version of me — Nicole 3.0 — aka Coach Nicole. I also went back to the tool I built to reprogram my brain when I started my DJ career and edited it to reflect this new vision for my life. I would read it every day after meditation while my brain was in alpha wave and all these habits together had me up & running as a coach in a matter of months.
What are your top 5 strategies that will help someone learn to believe in themselves? Please share a story or example for each.
1 . Get Clear On Your Vision — who are you in process of becoming? How can you operate like them now? This is exactly the type of thinking that helped me shift from a DJ to a Coach in a matter of months.
2 . Set Achievable Goals — it’s important to have small wins to celebrate along the way so having a process for setting realistic, achievable goals that also stretch you is important. Every time you achieve one of your goals, your belief in yourself increases. For instance, we had our highest revenue generating month ever in April and it’s fueling me to go after even more in Q3.
3 . Decrease Negative Self Talk — this is a normal human experience that comes from our ego but it is also possible to become more aware of the Negative Nancy in your head and start giving her less airtime. I always say to my clients — turn up the volume on your goddess soundtrack!
4 . Reprogram Your Subconscious — if you know you trend toward negative thoughts and are struggling to make progress shifting them, there are deeper subconscious beliefs that need to be healed. This is the work my program, The Manifest Mindset™, does. We help people build their own custom mindset tuner to tune their thoughts and their vibration in the direction of their vision and their goals first thing in the morning. One of my clients recently said he feels a burst of energy after reading it — like he just chugged a red bull.
5 . Build A Morning Routine w/ Meditation — holding yourself accountable and seeing results is a great way to increase your belief in yourself and a morning routine is an easy way to feel like you’ve already won before you walk out the door to work. Meditation is also incredibly grounding and relaxing and with the right process, it can help people work through negative thoughts and emotions so they can get to the root belief and reframe it. I built my own process for meditation that helps people release these blocks before they start the day so that they bring their best energy with them everywhere they go but there are also plenty of free guided meditations online.
Conversely, how can one stop the negative stream of self-criticism that often accompanies us as we try to grow?
It’s just becoming more aware of when you’re hearing your ego or your higher self. If you are hearing negative feedback on a regular basis — your ego is working overtime. And, if you’ve practiced listening to your ego for years, it’s going to take some work to start hearing the voice of your higher self again. But let me set the record straight: your higher self always comes from love so when you start paying attention, it sounds pretty different. I tell my clients to picture the devil on one shoulder and their angel on the other and this helps them visualize the difference.
Are there any misconceptions about self-confidence and believing in oneself that you would like to dispel?
People always say to me “I’m just not confident like you.” And my response is always the same: you’re just not practicing self confidence. Confidence is not a trait you are gifted from God or innately born with. And one thing I’ve learned in coaching hundreds of people is that it has almost nothing to do with where they are from or what they do. It’s a trait that you build and nurture over time. The more you use it, the better you get at using it. And I always tell my clients that self-knowing builds confidence. When you know how you think, how your brain operates, how to manifest all your goals and dreams — then you feel untouchable — the highest level of confidence.
What advice would you give to someone who is struggling with imposter syndrome?
Imposter syndrome stems from fear — from deeply ingrained limiting beliefs usually held in the subconscious brain. Here’s a quick process to help you get started overcoming it:
-find the underlying belief or beliefs — go as deep as you can go. You can even meditate on this question.
-what is the evidence that this belief is false? Write down all the examples you can find.
-rewrite the story to be one that will serve you and post it somewhere you can read it every day.
-and lastly, normalize the feeling. Every woman I have ever coached goes through this at some point in her career. It just means you want to be the best you can be and it’s great to aspire to learn more but also important to recognize that you are enough right now — right where you are.
Ok, we are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I’m living it!!! The Manifest Mindset is my movement ;).
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them 🙂
Why is this the hardest question? Ha. Everyone who knows me knows I am obsessed with Joe Dispenza.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
instagram: @nicolerosestillings website: www.nicolerosestillings.com
Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success.