Interview With Kaelin Vu, Host Of Dear Lovely Universe

This week on Dear Lovely Universe is a really fun interview by Ericka Thomas from the WORK In Podcast asking me about how Dear Lovely Universe came to be, what the Energy Leadership Index Assessment is, my life experiences, and more. In next week’s Friday episode, the tables will be switched and I’ll be interviewing Ericka about shaking off stress, tension, and anxiety with trauma release and yoga.

Transcript

First and foremost,

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to every single Dearest Lovely.

This episode is possible because of you.

This week on Dear Lovely Universe is a really fun interview by Erica Thomas from the Work In podcast asking me about how Dear Lovely Universe came to be,

What the Energy Leadership Index Assessment is,

My life experiences,

And more.

In next week's Friday episode,

The tables will be switched and I'll be interviewing Erica about shaking off stress,

Tension,

And anxiety with trauma release and yoga.

Enjoy the episode.

Welcome back to the Work In,

Your guide off the battlefield of stress,

Tension,

And trauma through new and different perspectives on health and wellness.

I am your host,

Erica Thomas,

And today we are talking to Kaelin Vu.

Kaelin specializes in helping women reclaim their power after trauma.

She's a life coach,

Podcaster,

And life enthusiast.

Her journey to help others began with her own challenges,

And as a result of her life experiences,

She experienced very low self-worth and self-confidence.

Now she shares the wisdom that she learned along the way of healing herself with others.

Her mission with her podcast and life coaching service is to help as many women as possible feel unequivocally empowered to be their authentic selves by connecting with their own self-love.

Please welcome Kaelin Vu.

Hi,

Kaelin.

How are you?

Hi,

Erica.

Thank you so much for that intro.

It's so nice to be here with you today.

Well,

I'm so excited to talk to you again.

This is a part of a little bit of a collaboration between the two of us,

So I'm super excited to see where this conversation goes.

I'm really excited too.

I'm so excited because I've done so many interviews and also been interviewed,

But it's always fun being on the other end too.

Yes.

Well,

Let's get started.

Let's dive right in.

And I'm really curious about your journey,

Kaelin.

You have really embraced your life experience as wisdom,

And you've let it lead you into podcasting and to coaching others.

So I'd love to hear your story.

Can you share that with us now?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'll try to start from the beginning.

So well,

When I was three months old was when my mom first abandoned me.

And then growing up,

My dad is incredible,

And I love him so much.

He's a great person,

A great dad,

But he wasn't emotionally available in the ways that I needed him to be.

And then I had a nanny that was really my mom.

I called her my mom,

And she was really my caretaker 24-7,

Pretty much.

But she wasn't the most vigilant caretaker.

That led to me getting sexually abused for a period of time when I was about five years old.

And then just from those experiences alone were hugely traumatic in my life.

And those were the biggest things that happened to me when I was a kid,

But then there's other things.

And then growing up and got a little bit older,

I was really in so much pain.

I think I was just holding onto so much trauma and pain that I got addicted to drugs,

Alcohol,

And partying,

And I was not really on a good path.

I was not in a good path.

And then it took reaching such a far rock bottom.

Literally I knew if I kept going in the direction I was going,

I was going to die.

That's how bad it was.

That I realized I had to make a change.

And once I hit that rock bottom and I made the decision that I want to make a change,

I moved out.

I cut off all my friends.

I got clean off drugs,

Started focusing on school,

Got a new job,

Started reading,

Going to the beach,

And spending that alone time to go inward and heal myself and learn.

And that's when I started to actually get a lot better.

I was healing myself.

And from that is when I started getting the idea,

Maybe if I can help myself,

I can help other people too.

And so I started having this idea about having a blog.

My dad actually gave me this book full of passive income ideas.

And I flipped to a page that said blogging and podcasting.

And I guess it was just meant to be.

So I started doing research and development into having a blog.

And so I started my website with the $400 I had saved up in my bank account.

And it was really scary.

I was really nervous to share my wisdom.

I was doing research for like six months or so maybe.

And I was still nervous.

But there was one day in particular that I was sitting in my room on my bed.

And I thought to myself,

I don't want to die knowing that I never tried.

And so I started my blog.

And I was also posting podcast episodes on there.

But it wasn't really hosted or anything.

It was just on my website.

It wasn't for another eight more months that I started podcasting more full time and getting actually hosted and distributing it to other platforms.

But to move along,

I started coaching school.

I think everything kind of stemmed from helping myself and learning,

Like going to research to figure out how I could help other people too.

And I'm really big on self-love because that's what I had to learn so much.

First of all,

Thank you for sharing your story.

And what an amazing journey from beginning to end,

Right?

This is something that nobody reached in and pulled you out.

You found this path yourself and moved out of it on your own.

And it is really a powerful testament.

And what an amazing message from the universe that you came to that realization that you didn't want to die knowing that you hadn't tried.

And that is just such a powerful,

Powerful statement and motivation,

Which seems,

When I say motivation for doing something,

It doesn't seem strong enough in this case.

That's like the big reason that overcomes every excuse that you could possibly come up with for not doing whatever it is that you want to do.

And we all need that.

We need our big,

Deep why that outweighs everything else.

And I think that that is a beautiful thing.

But you led right up into my next question about self-love because this is really where all of your coaching stems from,

To reclaim self-love after trauma.

And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that because I'm curious about what the role that self-love and confidence play in healing trauma.

Absolutely.

So a lot of people who have been through trauma have mindsets and beliefs that,

I'll just give an example that might make sense.

So let's say a woman was in foster care and she was abused by men all her life.

She might,

For example,

Go into relationships after relationships where she's becoming abused because she has maybe a mindset or belief that she deserves this kind of treatment.

And so what I would do is help her strengthen her self-love and confidence after trauma to help her reclaim her power back and embrace the love that she does deserve and not that kind of love.

So a lot of people who have been through trauma don't want to rock the boat.

They don't want to make people uncomfortable.

They can have really low self-esteem.

A lot of people can talk down to them.

They might not be able to stick up for themselves or set boundaries.

So I'm really,

Really good at helping them do that.

And also my job isn't necessarily to dig too deep in the past.

I'm not a therapist.

I don't focus on the past,

But we do talk about the past and how that has played a role in their lives immensely.

And we get through those,

We figure out how it's been showing up in their lives.

And then we find if there's any patterns,

Inner blocks or assumptions,

Interpretations that they're creating around it that is also still present in their lives.

And so we really dissect down the situations into really smaller digestible pieces that's easier to understand.

And then we figure out a way to move forward and create action plans.

And all of this is actually ideas.

I'm the thought partner,

But they're the ones that are really doing the work.

And I'll recommend things if I feel like,

You know,

It's super vital,

But most of the time my clients actually come up with the ideas themselves.

Yeah,

And that's so much more important for them as far as coaching.

I think sometimes people forget that as coaches,

We're really just there to be a sounding board and that the client really has to come up with the solution on their own.

Those are much more long lasting for people in the end,

If they come from your own inner wisdom than from somebody else telling you what to do.

Yeah,

I wholeheartedly believe that everyone already knows what they have to do.

They just have to go inside and listen to their intuition.

That's hard to do though,

Right?

Coming out of trauma because,

You know,

There's a lot of adaptation that happens,

Especially if the trauma has started at a very,

Very young age.

And we're all just humans and we're just trying to adapt to our environment.

And if that environment was difficult,

Those adaptations kind of become who we think we are.

And so it's not always who we really are,

Right?

It's about getting under there to kind of reintroduce yourself to your real authentic self.

People who absolutely,

People who have been through trauma,

It's so hard for them to just be still and be quiet because we're constantly trying to run away.

We don't want our minds to be quiet because we've been shoving away these painful memories,

These painful feelings and experiences that we don't want to confront.

But the second that we do confront it,

It's a release and we can move forward.

Nice,

Nice,

Nice.

So as part of your coaching service,

You use something that you call an Energy Leadership Index Assessment.

And I'm really curious about that because I hadn't heard of that before.

Can you explain a little bit about what that is and how you use it to help your clients?

Absolutely.

Thank you so much for asking this question.

I'm so excited about the ELI assessment.

It really is incredible.

So it's based on the seven levels of energy.

So everybody has seven levels of energy.

The first energy is victim.

That's someone who just bows down their head to life,

Doesn't want any part of it and feels like they're at mercy of everything and everybody.

Second is conflict.

That's someone who tends to not be able to work well with other people.

They will always butt their heads.

Third is we would categorize it as a mixed bag of anabolic and catabolic energy.

Catabolic is the energy that produces catabolic hormones,

Which break your body down.

Anabolic builds your body up.

And in this third level,

People are able to get along with each other and work with each other,

But it's not necessarily in the most constructive or positive way possible.

They're just able to get it done.

And then in the fourth level of energy,

That's where somebody is,

Let's say,

For example,

A helper,

A giver,

Someone who loves that.

It's a pretty good energy level to be at.

And then at fifth level of energy is someone who is a leader,

Someone who takes initiative.

Usually these people lead teams.

They're very innovative.

Six is synergy.

This is when everything moves together in perfect flow.

And seven is think of it as genius,

When someone has those incredible moments where they're like a flash of insight that is just pure genius.

So the seventh level of energy is not attainable at all times,

But we can tap into it.

And most people are actually in the first and second level of energy.

And this is why a lot of actually corporate places are not the most healthy places to work in.

One of the things that we do as coaches is work with companies to raise their overall energy levels.

So if a company is at,

Say,

At example level two,

Where there's always conflict everywhere,

So it's important to actually note that when the leader,

Let's say the CEO or some of the top executives,

Whoever is the biggest leader,

Once they start raising their level of energy,

The company starts to follow.

So when that company starts raising their level of energy,

They will notice a lot more increase in everything good,

Let's put it that way.

Better communication,

Better teamwork,

Better productivity.

And then the same goes for people.

Okay,

So let's go back to the assessment.

So the assessment is essentially,

Think of it like a short personality test.

It shouldn't take any longer than about five minutes.

You just answer whatever the answer comes to you first.

And it's amazingly accurate at telling you your energy level,

Energy resonating level on a good day,

A regular day,

And then your energetic stress response.

So it's important to know where our energy is on a good day because we can have that awareness as well.

But it's also important to know what our energetic stress response is because with that awareness,

Then we're able to make better decisions.

So for example,

For me,

I'm about a level four for most days.

And then on an energetic stress response,

I go down to like level one.

And that's not like something like that's every day,

But it's possible and it happens.

And so when you have that awareness,

You're able to better control yourself and figure out how to get out of it.

So in the energy level assessment,

First we'll talk about energy level assessment.