The other day I was reading a fascinating article about communicating. I think when women know how to really communicate who they are and what they want, they become unstoppable.
Unfortunately, many of you are not really well versed and comfortable in your delivery. To be honest, I’m still working on this myself. I wasn’t raised in an environment where I frequently talked about what I was thinking or feeling.
A tool that I’m using to help me is to be a better listener. You are naturally meant to listen more than to just talk non-stop. If you stay really present and practice compassionate or empathetic listening, you will become a better communicator. All the extra fluff words that women use in speaking that aren’t really necessary will start to be eliminated from your delivery. Women add a lot of emotional or descriptive words to what they say, while men are very direct and to the point.
Have you ever had a man say, what are you trying to say? Just get to the point! That’s why you have two ears and one mouth. You need to listen more before speaking. Compassionate listening can be a spiritual practice-really fine-tuning your attention to what someone else is expressing. When your attention is fully engaged, you speak with so much more authority and power.
Kim Von Berg, this week’s guest on the Awakening Divine Wildness podcast, talks about this in detail. Kim thinks the number one reason for crappy relationships is because you don’t know how to communicate. When you learn to speak the same language as your partner, you can connect at a deeper level. Through empathetic listening, you can learn how someone else is communicating with you. You literally “tune in” to them.
As an authority in empowered relationships, Kim is a sought-after speaker, trainer, and coach, who assists clients toward a life of positive communication and fulfilling relationships – incorporating her extensive training in emotional wellness, intimacy, attachment theory, multiple healing modalities, and healthy relationship skills. In this show, she gives the audience some powerful tips on how to create more loving relationships.
Points Covered in this episode
The culprit to women’s relationship dilemma – the feeling of unworthiness that leads them to tolerate every bad situation.
How men and women communicate differently and how these can both come to an understanding of the male/female communication perspective through empathetic listening looking after the “wounded child”.
How to solve communication problems that stem from the wounded child.
Key points from the ‘Calling in “The One”’ 8-week program by Katherine Woodward Thomas.
How people mirror their energy of self-love to attract events in their lives.
I think a lot of chaos, and conflict can be eliminated in our lives when we know how to communicate effectively.
Listen in or read the full transcript below!
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Read The Full Podcast Transcript
Mal Duane Interviews Kim Von Berg, Founder of Thriving Loving Relationships
[00:00:03]
Mal: I just love having relationship experts on the show because it is our most favorite topic. And I got a girl today coming out of Monterey, California and she has got it going on. She knows what she’s doing. You google her and the first thing you’re going to see is “Relationship Expert” and “Love Coach”. And this week’s guest is Kim Von Berg, and Kim specializes in healthy romantic partnership, and her business, “Thriving Loving Relationships” has been flourishing since 1997. You know, California’s all about love out there.
As an authority in empowered relationships, Kim is a sought-after speaker, trainer, and coach who assists clients towards a life of positive communication and fulfilling relationships, incorporating her extensive training in emotional wellness, intimacy, attachment theory, multiple healing modalities, and healthy relationship skills. She’s a communications specialist with a Master’s Degree in Humanistic Psychology as well as being certified by the International Coach Federation, and she’s also trained by one of my favorite ladies in the program called, ‘Calling in “The One”’.
She has been certified and trained by bestselling author, Katherine Woodward Thomas. And, in addition, she’s a California credential teacher and certified in Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Girl, you’ve got enough credentials here. This is going to be good!
[00:01:50]
Kim: Oh, wow! I am excited to be here. Wow, thank you. I feel very honored that you’ve invited me to join your fabulous podcast! Oh my gosh!
Mal: Thank you. You know I have fun with it. I love meeting all these women. Having them all bring this juicy content and lessons and healing modalities and their wisdom to the listeners.
You know, I have to keep reminding our listeners that all of the guests have gone through some kind of journey, a challenge… you know, fallen down into a deep dark hole and gotten back up. They all have a story, but that story has inspired them to do the work today and to serve the people they’re serving. So Kim, give us a little history. Dial us back a bit as to what inspired your work today.
Kim: Oh my gosh! Well, I have… I’m going to do, of course, the shortened version, but I’m going to share. It’s kind of a two-part thing why I actually work with both couples and singles. So there’s two parts to that.
When I got with my spouse many years ago, it was a rocky road and it looked like we weren’t going to make it. So we tried this and that.
We went to marriage and family therapies, and we were both headstrong people. And long story short, we found this amazing communication mentor and we ended up training with her and we were so inspired with how those particular skills completely transformed our relationship that we started our own business.
We co-began our own business, “Thriving Loving Relationships”. This was years ago.
And then my spouse got cancer and passed away in 2008. So since then, before, everything was focused on any relationship. It was couples. It was parent-teen. It was everything. We tried to help everybody that had challenges in their relationship, but after my spouse passed away, I had such an experience of really deep… I call it divine love. It was so amazing that experience of, you know, the dying process and all that.
I got inspired to focus on romance and I really wanted to focus on that. I also wanted to find a new beloved after the whole grieving process and I was having a hard time in my 50s, you know, early 50s. I was just like “wow this is… here I am, a relationship expert and I’m struggling with dating” and this is like tough… and I made all the wrong, you know, the mistakes, the classic mistakes. Getting involved too quickly, blah, blah, blah.
And I found Katherine Woodward Thomas, you know, at her work in ‘Calling in “The One”’. She also is famous for “Conscious Uncoupling”. Anyway, so I ended up getting to train with her personally in her private coaching. You need to be certified as a ‘Calling in “The One”’ coach.
[00:05:09] And so that’s kind of another avenue that’s been born of helping singles and I call it kind of the deep work. It isn’t so much dating per se, you know. I have a whole litany of people I’d refer for the dating apps, but it’s more of the internal work, which I needed.
You know, it completely transformed what I do even in my work with couples. So that’s the short story.
Mal: I think that we have to be the foundation for creating a loving, romantic relationship for somebody else, but it starts within us. We got to have our shit together. And if we don’t, then we get into the process of just repeating over and over and over the same mistake, you know, with failed relationships. I wrote about it in my book. There are love personalities, we all have them. We keep doing the same thing. We have the same perception every time we look at somebody, and we’re going to learn what those things are and get rid of them because it’s outdated data
Kim: Yes, absolutely! I so agree with you. It goes even… what you teach in your book, which I adore, it’s like I have a slight nuance that takes that even slightly deeper than that, which is that I’ve learned this. I had to learn this the hard way. It’s that not only do we have this love stories that keep repeating bad patterns but we also just go around believing that we’re unlovable.
We have these core beliefs about our own selves and it ends up creating a whole world of experience in love and even in our whole lives, not just our love lives. If we believe that we’re unlovable, we’re going to keep attracting people that reinforce that. Or if we believe that we’re always going to be alone, we’ll always attract the people that will definitely reinforce that we will be alone because they’re going to leave or they’re going to reject us, or whatever the deal is.
Mal: [00:07:25] And I think the big one is that women don’t feel worthy so they tolerate the worst behavior. They tolerate infidelities. They tolerate lies, you know, abusive verbal behavior because they don’t feel worthy. And there’s nothing further for them to lose.
Kim; Absolutely.
Mal: If we don’t call somebody on the carpet for this stuff, who will? We’ve got to say, “Look it!” And be very clear about what our needs are, how we expect to be treated and, you know, what’s okay and what’s not okay. But most women don’t do that.
Kim: Yes, you know, the way I see it is there are two things. I have this amazing program that kind of got borne out of all this called, “Three Steps to Create an Extraordinary Relationship”. And it’s like this duo thing where it’s both the internal, maybe the healing work we need to do, why we’ll settle for the kinds of things you’re describing. You know, why is that? And that’s like the internal healing work and then there’s also just relationship skills.
Most of us, we don’t know how to communicate our needs. We don’t know how to set boundaries in a loving way that doesn’t damage the relationship, you know. We don’t have those basic foundational skills so it’s a duo thing that I really embrace both, because you can’t just to and take a bunch of communication seminars but you don’t do your internal work, that’s just sort of like, you know… it’s not going to work. So you have to do both.
Mal: Oh, I’m a big, big proponent of internal work. I mean, that’s really how I transformed my life from addiction, depression, self-condemnation to surviving the failure of a marriage. It’s really the internal work that has been the guardian angel that’s kind of guided me to make the right choices and to really come back whole and strong.
Kim: [00:09:39] Yeah, you are a walking example of this. I’ve been watching you. You’re amazing. Yeah. If anyone wants to know that this stuff works, they just look at Mal.
Mal: It really does work. You mentioned several times communication. It is so important because men and women communicate differently. How do you teach them to get on the same page?
Kim: I love that. Well, okay, so I’m not one of the experts that focuses on the male/female differences, which gosh, there’s so many beautiful experts out there. But really, what I focus on is the essence of commonality and that place where there is no male/female; it’s where we’re one and that comes with empathetic listening where we can recognize that.
So I usually start with that; it’s teaching that skill. Believe it or not, most of us don’t know how to listen very well. You know, we just don’t. So there’s a skillset to teach around that and slowing things down a lot of times because if there’s an argument, and believe me, I see this a lot in couples, they come to see me, everyone has their part that they want to be heard on and the other one wants theirs.
So if we slow it down, and I teach them how to stop their part of it and turn the focus on the other person, you would not believe the miracles I see. You know, people are ready to get divorced, but then when they learn that skill alone, how to be present with the other, it calms everything down to where each person can hear each other’s heart and have some empathy around it and then you can start shifting into problem-solving and how to get each other’s needs met and all the kinds of things, and maybe boundaries need to be set on both parts, or whatever else needs to be brought in to the picture.
Mal: [00:11:58] Don’t you think it’s a common complaint for women that they say, “He doesn’t hear me. He doesn’t listen to me”?
Kim: Yes.
Mal: Yeah, it’s a big one.
Kim: I hear that all the time.
Mal: Yeah. And you know, it’s true. We need to listen. And I also believe that we really need to know what we want. I see that women spend more time picking out a pair of shoes and a handbag than they do a man. You know, they research; they look; they shop for a pair of shoes than they do trying to find the right partner.
Kim: Yes that’s so true. I think what your point is about when women say, because I hear that a lot, “He doesn’t listen to me”, what I find… because I watch carefully because I also am trained in non-verbal body language because we speak… our words are only about 10% – people have their different percentages – 3% to 10% of our actual message. And the rest is our body language, our tone of voice, and so you learn to pay attention to that and I’ll watch a guy – a husband and wife – and that she’s trying to communicate her thing and you just see him starting to glaze over because women use too many words and they don’t know how to get to the point men know…
I said I’m not an expert but I’m just talking about my experience. Men tend to get right to the point and so they don’t understand when a woman’s like, “Well, then this happen and then…” you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then finally 20 sentences later, they get to the point of what they want, you know. And by then, he’s gone, you know, he’s checked out.
So I think it’s like if a woman really learns how to pay attention to her husband or beloved and really see what they’re… you can tell when they start to glaze over because she’s using too many words. So if she stopped and reflect it, “This is starting to get uninteresting for you.” “Yeah,” blah, blah, blah, “you’re talking too much”.
So meaning if there’s a real tuning in, then there’s going to start to be real communication with each other.
Mal: Do you teach your clients NLP as a form of understanding one another when they are communicating? Do you get them to dabble in that or just more empathetic listening?
Kim: Yeah, I do all kinds of… I have a huge tool basket, you know. So NLP, where I bring that in is usually more kind of the – what do you say it is – unconscious part of things. It’s sort of the part that you could sometimes call hypnotherapy, but it’s tapping into other parts that we’re not conscious of because we all have many parts to us. So that’s where I bring in NLP.
NLP has many applications, but that’s how I use it because sometimes there’s a part of us that’s operating that we’re not conscious of. And then I bring in also some of the work, which [00:15:27 dubs/adapts] really well with NLP. There’s a process that Katherine Woodward Thomas teaches in her work which is called, “True You Awakening”.
So a lot of times, when people are in a fight – let’s say they’re arguing – there’s usually a part coming out that’s really young and wounded and it’s starting to run the show and then suddenly you have two little… here you got people in their 50s but they’re at their 3-year-old level, suddenly you have 3-year-olds fighting. So there’s no adult on board.
So there’s a process to help people recognize that’s what’s going on and bring in their adult part and sort of be there for their 3-year-old because in relationships, we often expect our spouse or our beloved to take care of our little 3-year-old who’s having a temper tantrum or is horribly wounded about something and it’s really our responsibility, not our spouse’s or beloved’s, to take care of that wounded 3-year-old. I say 3-year-old, but it could be many ages.
Mal: [00:16:39] That’s a brilliant concept because I think ultimately, every time we get into an altercation, it is that wounded child that comes up and starts screeching.
Kim: Absolutely.
Mal: It’s triggered something that’s maybe really doesn’t have anything to do with today, but an old wound that is now being recharged, reopened, and whoof! Yeah.
Kim: Yeah, and I think the point for me is that we never fully heal everything, 100%, so there’s always going to be… I think it gets less and less the more we do the kind of work you’re describing, but you’re always going to have a part that sometimes gets triggered but the idea is that you develop a loving adult part of you who can be there to comfort that part and recognize that that part is starting to take over.
You know, because a lot of us, unless we do this kind of work that you’re describing – this inner work – we’re not even conscious that suddenly the 3-year-old is the only one in charge. You know, and it’s like making a lot of mistakes and it could ruin a relationship or check out or, you know, completely give up our needs or all the things you were saying, but we need a loving adult on board to go, “You know that’s really not okay what you just did. You know, you need to speak up for yourself.”
Or, well, you’re just melting on the floor in a temper tantrum. You know, you might want to get some control, let me come comfort you, and then we’ll come back and take a time out and we come back and then I can talk, you know, civilly.
Mal: Another brilliant idea is take a time out when you’re in a heated situation with a loved one, a partner. Sometimes, as you just said, step back. Take five minutes. Process. Figure out “where is all the emotion coming from?” Is it anything that’s really happening at this very moment or is it an old wound that’s being opened up that that wounded child is kicking and screaming?
Someone pointed that out to me when I was going through all my own trauma and said, “You know Mal, there’s a lot of wounded child in what you’re talking about. You need to tell that little child that you’ve got this and you’re going to take care of her and you’re just so on top of this and there’s nothing to worry about.” And I didn’t realize it until she said it to me. Wow!
Kim: What a wonderful friend to tell you that!
Mal: One of my spiritual teachers, and she said, “A lot of this is a really wounded child here. Nurture that. Sit with it. Hug her. Reassure her that you’re going to protect her that nothing’s going to happen to her.” And boy, did it calm everything down! It was great advice.
Kim: I love that. And also a lot of times when that 3-year-old or that wounded part of us is reacting if we can step back, like you said, a time out or something, and go inside and really hear where she’s coming from, what you realize is sometimes she’s operating from some false beliefs. You know, like, “He said that so that must mean he doesn’t love me” and it may not even be true. So that part of us needs the loving part of us that says, “You know, sweetie, that’s not actually true. What’s really true is he said something not that nice but he’s in his own stuff. It has nothing to do with you.” Do you see what I mean?
It’s like bringing in… recognizing where there might be some false beliefs and letting her know what’s really true.
Mal: Yes. How do you get “partners”, a couple let’s say, or this even applies to singles, very clear about what they want in another person or what they want in that relationship because I see that most people don’t know what they want?
Kim: [00:20:58] Oh, that’s a great point you have there. Well, I mean, when I start working with singles, I do the ‘Calling in “The One”’. I love doing the ‘Calling in “The One”’ 8-week program.
Mal: Tell us more about that because I don’t know it in depth. I just know that Katherine Woodward Thomas created it. I’m very familiar with her “Conscious Uncoupling”. People are using that now. I mean, way beyond Gwyneth Paltrow.
Kim: Yes.
Mal: The founder of “Mind Valley”, Vishen, he just recently consciously uncoupled from his wife and talks about the process. So I love her work. So tell me about the ‘Calling in “The One”’. What are some of the pointers there that the audience can use?
Kim: Oh my gosh! Well, do we have an hour? No, I’m just kidding. But I’ll do my best to do a synopsis. So, you know, the work of probably both ‘Calling in “The One”’ and “Conscious Uncoupling” is she has some basic premises that it is born from and one of the main ones is that we are the source of what we are experiencing.
So if you really, really, really embrace that, you realize that even if you had something as horrible as what happened to you, like somebody betraying you or something, they could be 97% responsible for bad behavior but we look at our 3%. So a lot of times, it’s embracing that and you do it with tenderness and love. We’re not saying, “You caused this” or you know, it’s not about blame and shame. It’s about lovingly recognizing our 3% or whatever our percent is and then seeing how we can transform that. And like you said, as far as recognizing what do we really want? And a lot of people, like you said, they don’t even have a clue what a healthy relationship is. So that’s something from my 25 years of doing this so I sort of incorporate into the ‘Calling in “The One”’ as well, and part of ‘Calling in “The One”’ is visioning, but there’s a little education as far as, “What is a healthy relationship?”
So helping people really know what that is and go for it. Go for finding someone who has the capacity to create a beautiful, healthy relationship with. So ‘Calling in “The One”’ is sort of the premises and knowing what you really want, evolving that and doing some visioning work, which I guess you could sometimes call the love-attraction type, but it’s a little more sophisticated because it brings in psychology and healing as well.
And then from there, it’s really about recognizing that true you and where we’ve been operating from kind of a faults place if we’ve always believed we’re unlovable, like recognizing that that’s what we believed and that’s what we were creating. So there’s a process that… by the way, she’s writing a new book [00:24:14 inaudible] but she’ll announce that herself.
I’m in a pilot program of hers called “True You Awakening”, which is week 3 of ‘Calling in “The One”’ but it’s the whole idea of recognizing where have we been believing? What kind of beliefs have we been operating from that have been unconscious and that recreate unhappy experiences in love? And then we step into the true—the truth of who we are, which is beautiful.
We’re lovable. We’re magnificent beings and start to operate from that place and what would that look like? And sometimes people have no clue what that looks like. What does that look like if you’re lovable? What does that look like if you believe you’re intelligent and beautiful?
So then, it’s like helping the clients understand what that looked like and how they would live their lives that way because we need to be the person who we want to attract. We need to be that person first. And so, ‘Calling in “The One”’ is that process and then it’s becoming magnetic to love. So the last part of ‘Calling in “The One”’ is learning how do you become magnetic to love?
Mal: [00:25:36] I think we mirror out that energy when we have self-love, when we feel we’re worthy, when women really embrace that they’re just divine beings and they’re here to be loved. And when we put that energy out that’s what we get back. But again it goes back to the inner work of clearing the crap out. The old thinking. The old ways and key point that you said was taking ownership.
I talked about that in my new book. We are half of an equation. When you’re in a relationship, you’re half of an equation. There’s responsibility. You made your choices that put you in that relationship or marriage or whatever. You chose that person. We have to take responsibility and when we do, then we’re not a victim to anybody’s behavior, what anybody does. We own our part in it. That is the game-changer.
Kim: Absolutely.
Mal: Oh, I love it. I could talk about it all day. I love it, I love it.
Kim: Yes, when I started looking at your work, I was like, “Oh my god, it’s like she took ‘Calling in The One’”.
Mal: And I didn’t know what it was about, but you know, when you get older, you get wiser. And when you get hit on the head a lot, you start to pay attention. My wisdom comes from making the biggest mistakes.
Kim: Me too!
Mal: Life has been my greatest teacher. And my most painful experiences are where I’ve had the most profound lessons.
Kim: Very true. Me too. Well, I think that’s true for most people. Yeah.
Mal: [00:27:21] So, you have a wonderful free gift on your website for the audience and I would love you to tell them about it.
Kim: I actually have several but I have just put up one knowing I’m going to do this interview with you. So it’s right there when you go right to ThrivingLovingRelationships.com. It just pops… we have it like a pop-up so it’s like in your face. It’s a gift where you get to take a little bit of a test to… because this is one of the components that is part of ‘Calling in “The One”’. It is your self-love and it’s a bit of an educational, there’s a short talk and then there’s an assessment as far as “where’s your self-love at?” And then there’s points to recognize what you could actually improve upon. So it’s all about self-love.
Mal: I love it. I love it, girl! I love it. I’m all about self-love. That’s like yes!
Kim, thank you so much. You are a delight. Please tell the audience how they can get in touch with you.
Kim: Well, of course, you can go to my website, ThrivingLovingRelationships.com, and then check out, because I have quite a few free things, not just that one. If you go to the free page, but also Contact page, you could access me in many ways. And I usually create, if I have the time, I will create… you can sign up to have like a 20-minute to 30-minute talk with me to see if we would work together. So if I have the time in the month, I will create space to have a conversation with you and you’ll see a way to sign up for that in my website. Yeah.
Mal: Awesome! It’s been wonderful to spend this time with you today. Thank you for being with us.
Kim: I’ve really enjoyed it and I feel very honored to be here so thank you!
Mal: Thank you. I hope that we’ll be doing this again, girl.
Kim: Okay, thank you, Mal!
Mal: Bless you!
Kim: Bye-bye.
