Hi, my name is Cornelia and I live in the UK. I am originally from Germany, and I moved to the UK in 1997. Most people will ask Why?

It was not the plan to live abroad as I grew up during the cold war in East Germany. In those days, there was no way that I could have had those plans because it was simply unthinkable. In those days, it was something your mind could not even comprehend that it would be possible one day because in those days, I was trapped behind a wall.

A wall that was solid, sturdy, and unbreakable. It seemed solid, it seemed sturdy, it seemed unbreakable.

Germany was divided into two different countries and political systems. East Germany represented dictatorship and this meant that you were not supposed to think for yourself. You were expected to be a parrot living in a cage and only repeat what you were told to say. This is called conditioning. As my background was working class, I got conditioned to believe that there was a ceiling. A ceiling you could not break through. However, I had my fun when I played and pretended being a teacher every single day. Which I did after school in my own world.

A world where there was freedom.

Miracles do happen.

The wall came down and all changed.

The certainty became uncertainty and changes happened on a daily basis. And this was in 1989. What seemed to be unavailable became available and what once believed that freedom was only a dream became reality. In fact, lots of things weren’t available and this is my story.

I had a belief that success was just not for me. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. It was the conditioning that made me believe that. And yet, it all turned out differently. I was riddled with fears. I had anxiety. I had inner anger. The world seemed unfair.

We all have a price to pay when we don’t face our fears.

We stay stuck. My deepest unconscious belief was that success was not for me. That only failure was the programming.

My deepest desire was always becoming a teacher. It was a desire that the only word you can use to describe this desire is DREAM.

Foxy Lady, however, found a way and she upgraded herself by becoming a teacher. Foxy Lady is a woman who knows how to make dreams come true because she performed that miracle on herself.

So, my dream came true and that was my goal. I achieved my goal when I was in my early twenties. That was that.

What now?

So, what now? I worked as a teacher and because I started teaching English as a foreign language, I visited the UK for the first time in 1996. I studied diligently and for the first time in my life, the English language made sense to me. Whilst I learned English as a child but it seemed the most meaningless activity EVER. What was the point of learning a foreign language knowing at the time that you could never visit that country, could put a foot on British soil or even just speak with an English speaking person? And the English language did not make any sense to me.

How little did I know…  

It just shows that when something becomes meaningful, we get it. When there is a reason behind something, we get it. When we need something, we get it. Otherwise, it stays a dream. So, what is it YOU don’t get?

After that, my life would change without my knowledge and certainly, no plan! I moved to the UK in 1997. I started working as a teacher again in 1999. This time I taught German as a foreign language and I learned a lot about my own language. I learned that the German language is very concise and to the point. I learned that those long words are not as scary as they look when you know how to deal with them. When you understand that they are just compound nouns and very vivid because a desk is a Schreibtisch and schreiben means to write, so it is a table where you write at. Of course, you would call it a Schreibtisch. Handschuh is a glove. A shoe for your hand. Protection to keep your hands warm. A condom is a … Kondom though. Sorry. I like humour and it is part of me. This leads me to the next part.

In my years of living in the UK, I often heard… You cannot be German. You have a sense of humour! It showed me a xenophobic thinking and how I change perceptions of a German National. It never crossed my mind that people would think along those lines. WWII was often brought up and at some point I felt it was all my fault. I never thought that living in a different country would show me so many obstacles. I am grateful for all of them and it was painful in places but I always kept my head up high which was above water but people misread it. That was perceived as being arrogant and this would match another trait Germans were or still are seen as. Arrogant!

I kept my head above water! I was not going to be drowned.

A race of superiority. How ridiculous! I concluded after all these years that if people get triggered by you, they have an inner wound because I certainly never saw myself as superior because I was the exact opposite. I saw myself as a failure and that all my successes were coincidences and made up in my mind, that I pretended to be successful only to find that I was successful.  People wanted to see me as superior because they had a problem within themselves. Because I was successful as a foreigner. An attractive woman cannot be intelligent, so her successes must have come from … I’ll let you finish this sentence.

I suppose I was so naïve because I thought that being human was enough to be accepted. I know better now and I now know that I wasn’t naïve. I was ahead in my thinking, and this is enough because I am enough.

I left education in 2019 after 28 years due to burnout and at the time, I did not know that it was burnout. My own journey discovered and revealed this all. I was unable to make a cup of coffee and I certainly was unable to make any decisions. The menopause came and found me, too. I couldn’t even tick simple boxes without someone sitting next to me watching if I did it right. I was a broken woman. A woman with a broken heart, a woman who lost everything that was dear to her. Her humour. A woman whose life became meaningless.

My intuition though said that I needed a break from life and I went inward.

My own inner journey. A journey that allowed me to tidy up my inner world and I turned over every single stone and rocks and sometimes it felt like a huge mountain that was in my way. I examined everything.

Spirituality found me and I became more and more interested in energy and the subconscious mind.

I discovered traumas I did not know I had, and the final piece was that I discovered that my unconscious programming was the sabotage.

I believed that I made up Foxy Lady like wishful thinking only to find that Foxy Lady existed for real. It was the dream come true and I only viewed it as a dream. I lived that dream. It was a journey where I got to know myself. No second guessing anymore and it is so freeing.

When you then decide to step out of your comfort zone and you want to start your own business, you have to find your self-sabotages because otherwise, you will never get to the success.

We are masters in sabotaging ourselves. We want greater success and yet, we do something that keeps us stuck, glued to where we are right now. We don’t even know we are doing it. This is the sad thing.

We are so used to suffering that first we need to decide if we want to come out of the suffering. The suffering is the familiar.

What is unfamiliar?

Bliss, joy, fun – for many.

We learned to be happy when we have success in our professional lives, when we are in a relationship, when we have “stuff” to validate our own existence. I’m talking about the bliss, joy and fun without all that “stuff”. When we have no professional title, nor status.

And the only status that counts is being human. A human being with a heart.

RTT – Rapid Transformational Therapy has helped me to discover all my limiting beliefs and the greatest was … Success was never in the cards for me as it was simply not available only to find that I walked around with a mindset of 5-year-old one in a grownup body and this is how we sabotage ourselves. We want to be grownup but fear living as a grownup.

Why?

It is easier to say … it is simply not available and to dream when in fact, all is available, but we need to grow (up) in order to see what is on the table – a buffet full of choices. 

My dream seemed to have turned into a nightmare but there is a silver lining in everything.