Flip Your Switch from War to Love and Change Your Life: Dr. Teri Baydar

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Dr.Teri Baydar, in her book Flip Your Switch, A User’s Guide to a Whole new Mind, explains why becoming a “love conscious human” is the key to changing your mindset for happiness and success in life and business. Switch from warring consciousness to love consciousness she says, sharing two examples of how her teaching and consulting radically shifted the perspectives (and bottom line) of two business executives.

She also tells us about a harrowing personal experience at a martial arts studio which revealed the nature of warring consciousness as a human desire to capture, contain and control.

Love consciousness is the polar opposite, a state of being where:

• You understand that we’re all connected
• You don’t seek to capture, contain, and control.
• You want to comprehend people
• You want to understand them
• You want to understand the greater situation.
• You want to find solutions that help people
• That help the planet
• That help yourself
• That are sustaining and healthy and balanced.
• You want to have these wonderful interactive relationships.

Having spent many years as a business leadership consultant, Dr Baydar’s book is for readers who want to elevate their lives to become what she calls  a “love conscious human.”

Dr. Teri Baydar: [00:00:00] She [the client] doubled her annual turnover in a couple of weeks. Once she shifted out of the war consciousness, thinking she had to win, had to beat something, thinking that she had to prove something. Oh, she went to the other side and said, I’m just going to embrace this process. This is who I am. This is what I do.

INTRO Hello, and welcome to the Write the Book Inside You Podcast. Tips, tools, and interviews for coaches and healers like you who want to write a nonfiction book to boost your visibility, clients, and cashflow while making a difference. I’m your host, Carol Westmore, a multi published author and energy psychology tapping book coach.

Now let’s jump into today’s episode.

Caryl: Dr. Teri Baydar is a groundbreaking thinker, [00:01:00] expert in the field of consciousness and personal growth. She has distilled her message of love consciousness into her book, Flip Your Switch, a user’s guide to a whole new mind. Welcome Dr. Baydar..

So Dr. Teri, tell me about Flip Your Switch and how it can benefit me as a reader.

Dr. Teri: So Flip Your Switch is a methodology. It’s a way to open yourself up to the switch from war consciousness to love consciousness. War consciousness is that feeling and state of perception where we think we are separate from each other, that we’re somehow alone or that you and I are different, somebody has to win, somebody has to lose, there’s a right, there’s a wrong, all of what we do in a transactional cap, capture, [00:02:00] contain and control mindset, all of that is war consciousness, and it serves to maintain the illusion of separateness and solitude. We want to be where we want to be happy, successful in our relationships, in our jobs, in our life, in our own inner journey, without the cognitive dissidence of war consciousness is in love consciousness, love consciousness is that state of being where you understand that we’re all connected.

You don’t seek to capture, contain, and control. You want to comprehend people. You want to understand them. You want to understand the greater situation. You want to find solutions that help people, that help the planet, that help yourself, that are sustaining and healthy and balanced. You want to have these wonderful interactive relationships.

And that’s love consciousness, which is a different state of [00:03:00] being. And there’s a process. That happens, and I have spent 35 years trying to boil it down into something that anybody and everybody can use and understand, and there are a lot of basic principles that can help you shift and create these synergies, and synchronicities in your life to support you because most of us don’t really learn until we get the proverbial two by four upside the head.

Caryl: I was just going to interrupt you to say, in my own life as well as many others, comes a life changing moment. I had a fire, lost my dog in the fire, my heart broke open and then I was, my work in the world began. Now other people have divorce, they get illness.

And are you’re saying it doesn’t have to be that way? Where in your own life have you actually experienced it? Because [00:04:00] you didn’t come out a complete Yoda, did you? Could you go back to a pivotal moment in your life, recent or from your childhood, which would explain how you discovered this/

There are many pivotal moments pertaining to the book. I started in my early 20s working with a research institute, studying the unconscious mind. Like what makes people tick and, and they were doing it with social engineering in mind. They wanted to tap into the unconscious mind so they could get certain demographic, certain populations to do certain things.

Well, I’ve always been on that journey of trying to figure out how the mind works, how the world works, what, how does all of this function? And, you know, we don’t spend enough time trying to figure out how it works. We just try to manipulate it. And I’m like. What’s going on? And then finally, my big break open moment [00:05:00] was a little over 10 years ago, where I had a horrific experience with martial arts teachers who treated me with contempt.

They used me. They abused me. They made me wrong. They kicked me out. They called me names. At one point, I had an instructor who was repeatedly telling me that I should just commit suicide because I was such a waste of space and a pathetic old woman that, you know, I should just end it and stop being a waste of space and I could not understand why anybody would act that way.

And I kept pushing it out. Oh, they’re immature. Oh, they don’t know anything. I’m fine. I’m fine. Pushing it off as if they’re just immature. You know, and come to find out, no, they were [00:06:00] not. It’s not that they’re immature. It’s that they were so fundamentally down the path of what I came to coin as a war consciousness, where it’s just fun to capture, contain and control and crush and abuse something or someone it gives them a rush.

And I’m like, it’s so ironic because, you know, it’s a martial arts studio, Mars. God of War. I came to understand this cruel, divisive way of thinking that I had never understood before. Was I heartbroken? Yes. Was I crushed? Yes. Did I commit suicide? Obviously not, but it was a very, very hard time for me. And it showed me like, you know, your heart breaks and something else comes in.

It made a lot of space for my higher self. What I call in the book, my diamond or my daemon, which is the Greek term for it to, to come in and take [00:07:00] up more space. So I was heartbroken, but that trauma and drama gave me the opportunity to understand love consciousness, one way of being that you can choose to be, or war consciousness, which you can also choose to be, which a lot of us choose unconsciously.

Caryl: Is that because of fear of threat or of how we’ve been brought up? Before you continue, I’m smiling to myself because out of the blue, when I wrote my book, The Inner Path of Writing came this, subtitle Make love, not war to the writer within, because there are certain gurus who teach you’ve got to fight your foe that resistance must be fought and I differ because of the energy psychology work I’ve learned to do, it’s a tender, small thing inside you that needs to be loved.

So that was a pivotal moment for you. The person at [00:08:00] minus 10 (in war consciousness) they’re not going to be able to hear you.

Dr. Teri: Firstly, we need to talk about it and we need to point it out. It’s like emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence has been around for a long time until somebody’s actually put a name on it. And then they created a structure.

So that our left brain can understand, Oh, there’s these four pillars. This is what you do. This is how you go about it. And that how empathy is not just implied, but necessary. And it must be conscious. Like you need some kind of methodology. You need some steps. Now these steps are not perfect. Just like when you’re teaching emotional intelligence, I do, you know, cause I’m a leadership coach, so I do this kind of stuff too.

And it’s like, none of this is perfect, but it is definitely something we need to be talking about. It’s really hard to do something if you can’t even talk about it. There will be people who are drawn to it, but people who never will be. [00:09:00] So who’s your target client in Flip Your Switch?

Dr. Teri: Well, there’s there’s a lot of them.

Now, obviously anybody who would like to have personal development and leadership coaching, but cannot afford it. Here’s 20 bucks that you can spend on yourself and get 10 year’s worth of work that I’ve done with different clients in a step by step process that if you just take and read a couple of pages a week for a year, you will be different.

You will think differently if you embrace the work. Now a lot of people can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars an hour for coaching twice a month. That’s not possible. And I can only coach so many people. So this is a way to get that information into the hands of anybody and everybody who wants it.

Caryl: Okay, so could you summarize the steps? I mean, or give us an idea of the steps we would be led through?

Dr Teri: Well, there’s three [00:10:00] sections. There’s not any particular step by step because everybody has a different emotional and mental landscape. Some things will speak more to one than to others. So the first part of the book is about understanding your mind.

So that’s kind of a map. It’s a new way of thinking about your mind, about your brain. It’s a simplified version. It goes above and beyond psychology. It’s non academic. I’m not trying to prove how smart I am. I know I’m smart. I don’t need to do that. I’m not trying to prove to the scientific world, anything. I’m giving a guide to normal people who have not been taught how to manage, how to understand and manage their own mental, emotional landscape, and therefore are stuck in lots of different ways in life.

So the first part is. [00:11:00] This is, this is how it works. Understand the basics of mind. Number two thing. Then the second part is the shift, like things you can do in your life and in your mindset, how you can shift the way you think and, and just. Learn more and educate yourself so that you, you start to shift your emotion, your emotional and mental landscape to be more healthy, more whole, and how you can get rid of certain debunks, certain myths and mythologies that are holding you back about yourself.

Caryl: Could I stop you there before we move on to the next part of the book? Could you give us an example of a client that this worked for?

Dr Teri: What do you want to know about? The one that got lots of money or the one that saved his marriage? Okay. Let’s do both those. So one CEO came in deeply insecure, [00:12:00]  lacking of confidence, worried about objectives overly attached to objectives, not embracing the process, not being in a state of gratitude, shifted the mindset went into a series of negotiations with very high level, big-wig clients.

To pitch, she went in embracing it as a growth process for the sake of growth, for the sake of understanding, for the sake of elevating herself. And in that process, she doubled her annual turnover in a couple of weeks. Once she shifted out of the war consciousness, thinking she had to win, had to beat something, thinking that she had to prove something.

She went to the other side and said, okay, I’m just going to embrace this process. This is who I am. This is what I do. I’m grateful for [00:13:00] what I do. I love myself. I love my company. I love my team and I am here to show you what I can do and she said that’s the love consciousness, right? Okay. And I’m trying to win at that point.

Caryl: Can you mention one of the practices that she might’ve found useful? You mentioned gratitude. Would that be one?

Dr. Teri: That’s definitely one, but there’s also, there’s also a couple of things of understanding the, the falsity of “if… then” formulas. If you do this, then you’ll get that. She understood that there was no thing that she could do in order to provoke a certain outcome; that these are myths about how things work and I work.

A lot of people have what I call MBA myopia, which is where you get locked into these “if then” formulas, where you think “well, I’ll do this and then this will happen.” All of this formulating [00:14:00] postulating “if then” formulas doesn’t work.

Caryl: Instead they should what drop into their hearts into their love consciousness?

Dr Teri: Yes, it is more about dropping into their hearts, but also dropping into your calling, understanding what you came here to do, understanding why it matters to you.

And being on track with yourself, with your own journey and accepting yourself, having compassion and love and care from, that higher self perspective, love consciousness lives in the higher self. Consciousness lives in the petty self, the little self.

Caryl: I’m going to just bring it back to writers and authors, you know, my podcast has been Write the Book inside You, people who have a message or a memoir or something that they want to share with the world. How would you approach that?

Dr. Teri: To get in touch with why you’re doing this. I think that most people who [00:15:00] are writing a book, fundamentally have something to say to the world that is meaningful.. to help someone else. I wrote this book so that people don’t have to get this proverbial two by four upside the head.

They don’t have to be crushed, used and abused. They don’t have to have a crisis. You can move through the process. That’s what I do with my clients, but I can only do so many people. So you can elevate yourself. You can progress without having to go through so much suffering.

And I think that’s what a lot of writers are doing. Anyway, they want to tell a story. They want to write nonfiction. They, want to give guides about how to do something or what to do. Most people don’t set out thinking, Oh, I’m going to crush it. And I’m going to, you know, I’m going to get lots of money for this. I’m going to get AI to write my book for me. Just pump out lots of books and make lots of money ‘cos I don’t care if I [00:16:00] help anybody. That’s not it. That’s not what most writers are doing.

Caryl: And that’s why I called it Write the Book Inside You. It was during the pandemic, I thought there are a lot of healers and people who don’t know how to write a book.

And I can keep talking about what I know, but what if they each had a chance to put their pebble in the water? And the joy for me is meeting other writers and hearing their process as well, like you.

Dr. Teri: I just wanted to say something about the whole writing of the book. I spent 10 years writing and rewriting this book. Not because it wasn’t publishable or it wasn’t good enough for me. It’s because it needed to be good enough for the reader. I needed to love the reader. I need to do like, okay, I can’t use certain terminologies because that’s too intellectual. So I have a doctorate. I’m well studied, yada, yada. I have a certain language.

I’m like, no, I can’t do that because it needs to be inspiring enough, but it also needs to connect. And I wrote and rewrote it, and I [00:17:00] spent one year with a preferred reader going over every single word of this book, asking her, how does this resonate with you? She was like this person who was my perfect reader.

And so we went over everything together. I took my time because… now I have a book. I can open it up to any page and read two pages and be like, yes, the point is made. The point is made. The point is made. The point is made. And there’s 52 chapters, one for each week. And it’s a tiny little couple of pages to make a point.

You walk away with a point, you integrate it into your life. That’s it. It’s not a big workbook. You don’t have to do retreats. You don’t have to spend tons of money. No.

Caryl: Okay. But you do have a community: The Love Conscious Human, don’t you?

Dr. Teri: I’m starting a community. It’s a monthly Q and A. So anybody reading the book [00:18:00] can become a member at an incredibly reasonable price. As a member, you enter the monthly Q and A’s and you say, “Hey, Dr. Terry, part one, chapter seven, yada, yada. What do you mean? Can we delve into that?” So it just becomes that extra teaching moment that I normally give to a client, but then I can give it to whomever is reading the book and taking it seriously, and then I’m also going to have recordings and little videos and, and things up there, just material for people who want to be on this love conscious human journey to elevate themselves.

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Caryl: I asked Dr. Teri to give us another example of how she moved and shifted the consciousness of a top level CEO from a place of fear and war conscious, feeling that “everyone’s out to get me” to a place where the love [00:20:00] consciousness within him spilled over into his family.And you’ll love the touching story of what happened with him and his little son.

Dr. Teri: So he was a very successful executive, the chief scientific officer of a very successful startup in pharma. And they were going into an IPO and he’s been working on this for 10 years.

And so it’s been quite consuming. And stressful. And of course, in this environment, there’s a lot of war consciousness that you have to deal with. It’s all about winning. It’s all about making the next sale. It’s all about convincing the venture capitalists. And the equity people.

And if we do this IPO and, and the lawyers are coming at you, you can say this, but you can’t say that. And what about this? And don’t do that. And so it’s all very stressful. He’s been going through this for a long time. And so he’s developed this [00:21:00] belief that it’s the world is a horrible place to live and everybody’s out to get you.

Caryl: Right. Which is easy to understand. And which people always argue, but it is like that. That’s the reality.

Dr. Teri: That’s the perception–that’s a war conscious perception, which leads to a belief system, which leads to a way of thinking, which leads to a way of acting, which leads to the world responding to him in that way, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So we talked about that and dug into his beliefs and we picked it apart a little bit and he started to realize that most of it was in his head. It was narrative, this narrative and that narrative. And then we talk about the saboteur voice, the inner critic and how they actually don’t serve us most of the time.

And he started to see his own stories and narratives. He stopped believing them so much and gradually, incrementally, he started to see how cool his wife was. He had a son who was young and boisterous [00:22:00] and energetic and bouncing off the walls, you know, like young kids can be. It used to annoy him because he’d have to work from home and try to concentrate. And it got to the point where he started to shift his perception that actually his life was good and that only a few people were out to get him, which was true. We can acknowledge that because they are venture capitalist equity guys that just want to make money off of him and his company.

That’s true, but he stopped thinking those warring thoughts. I think the cumulative moment was when he reached a point where he would be in his attic with his son when he realized how much his son wanted to be like him. And he was very honored and felt that was pretty cool.

So they set up a little mini desk and a computer for him to do his homework on next to his dad in his dad’s office, so they would work side by side each on their computer and then they would [00:23:00] share a cup of tea or a hot beverage or some, some kind of something together and have a break and be two little business people up in their attic office.

So he lost all the resentment towards his family; he realized that a lot of his colleagues were there for him, and it was just a few people that were inappropriate or in some ways being overly aggressive and that the whole world wasn’t that way.

Caryl: So, that brings me to the point: how do we defend ourselves and boundaries? You mentioned you were in that martial arts situation, but you didn’t walk away. You thought, was it your narrative? You thought you deserved it or?

Dr. Terri: My narrative was, yeah, whatever, like, shake it off, it’s okay.

Caryl: How do we negotiate the, the boundaries between people with war consciousness and just being totally loving?

Dr. Teri: Well, that’s the point we get to in the third part of the book. Which is embracing your Daemon or your higher self and understanding that. So it’s not that there’s no conflict. It’s just that we don’t have to take the conflict personally. If your perspective is war consciousness, you know, like with this executive, everybody’s out to get you.

You’re under stress all the time. And it’s just like, Oh, like your life is just so stressful and suffering and horrible. Now, if you let go of the narrative that you’re feeding into and you recognize the objective truth is, oh yeah, actually, 80 percent of my life is fine. 20 percent is actually where I do have to pick up the sword and go out there and fight for it.

But then when I come home, or I know who my allies are, I know who my enemies are, I know who’s going to be in war consciousness. They’re never going to shift. I’m going to have to deal with that. It’s about knowing that it’s not one or the other. It’s both. So, [00:25:00] you take your center of command, your identity, who you are, and you take it out of that left brain lockdown, capture, contain, control place. And you take it into your right mind, which is love conscious naturally. It’s like looking for greater solutions. It’s not just a quick fix and not coming from a place of fear. It’s coming from a place of confidence and creation. So your command center just shifts from one place to the next, from petty self to higher self, or from what I call left brain to right mind.

By doing so, you live predominantly in a place of love consciousness. That’s what you emanate. That’s who you are. But you know what is or isn’t war consciousness. You can identify it. You’ve elevated yourself enough that you can recognize that as a lower state of consciousness. It doesn’t mean you’re now incapable of logistics… right [00:26:00] and wrong or separating what is or isn’t appropriate in a particular situation. On the contrary, obviously your higher self, you know, I call it the Daemon. And that is where, in the third part of the book, we, talk about the emergence or the connection to your Daemon and your higher self.

And that’s where you get to tap into other things. So it’s very common for my clients to develop precognition or ESP of some kind. All of these things happen. It’s actually normal thing for a whole human being to experience. It’s because we’re only being half of ourselves. In this war conscious state, in a reductionist mindset, in our petty self, we’re suffering, we’re afraid, we are sick, looking for a quick fix, we’re not very good at relieving stress.

Addictions. Yes, all of this stuff [00:27:00] is coming from this confusion of, this is all there is. This is not all there is. There’s a whole other thing over here, which is even greater than the petty self and all the things I just described and it from that whole place you can solve real problems.

You know, Einstein said a problem cannot be solved at the level of consciousness that it was created. And as I’m also a business strategist and I help people understand in their business, there are all these new industries that are screaming to be born, be born around regeneration of the planet.

And so much work to be done and people are stuck over it. But how do I do it? You have to elevate yourself. You cannot scale your company until you elevate yourself.

If we don’t do it with ourselves, that’s also the flip of the switch.

Caryl: Can you share with us [00:28:00] one practice that we could do in the direction of what you’ve been saying?

Dr. Teri: It’s hard to give one out that would work for everybody because everybody has a different configuration of mind and heart.

Caryl: I’ve written down four that I picked up  [from Flip Your Switch]:

• the mirror of love,
• the inner smile,
• gratitude,
• forgiveness, and
• random acts of kindness.

Dr. Teri: All of those work, but one of the things that’s really important is for most people, and I think for most of your listeners, it would be something along understanding the social constructs that regulate us and debunking them. Understanding what I call the happiness formula lie, which is: If you, in your life, you get this, and then you get this lined up, and you have the right kids, or the right spouse, or you get the right diploma, or the right job, or you drive the right car, live in [00:29:00] the right address, have the right dress size, or all of these things, then you’ll be happy. All of these formulas will equal happiness. That is fundamentally a lie. It’s a social construct that emanates from the group mind of our society and tells us we’re not good enough and that we need to accumulate these things out here in order to be happy. That needs to be debunked because it is crippling.

The underlying truth is that Happiness is something you do. It’s a state of being. It’s something you create from the inside out. And you have to get all of those narratives and storylines out of there. I equate this to cleaning up your fridge, getting all the dirty, rotten stuff out or like clearing the runway.

You know, people are surprised, like I’m on this island and there’s this runway and I’m waiting for wonderful things to happen, but there’s junk all over the runway. Nobody can land.

Caryl: I’m still curious to know how you drop the social [00:30:00] construct. Well, I mean, it takes work. It happens incrementally.

There’s no quick fix. Right? And part of the problem, what we’re doing right now is you’re asking me, how do I, how do they do this? How, how, how, how, how to do this, but first, before you can know how to do any of it, you’ve got to understand how to look at it, which is like the first part of the book, which is why I spent a lot of time on the first part.

Like this is actually how your mind works. You have these things, you have to first learn the structure of. The basics of mind. And then once you understand the structure, you can see in your own life, the constructs that are holding you back, the narratives that are getting in the way, the saboteur voice, you can identify them. But if you don’t have the structure you’re grasping in the dark for all the how tos.

Caryl: Okay, I like that. [00:31:00]

Dr. Teri: Where you don’t actually know what’s the layout. Nobody’s telling us how our mind and emotions actually work. And this is like next level emotional intelligence. This is full blown structure… it’s boiled down for anybody to understand. Beyond psychology, beyond religion, beyond everything. This is the basics. What your mind looks like, this is how it works, and if you accept certain basic models, you can then see your own mind, see your own structure of mind, and be at cause, like, oh, well, I see this, I see that narrative doesn’t work for me in this particular situation. I’m not going to use it anymore. It’s not in my best interest. So it’s a self-determining process. How tos happen in part two, but you can’t have part two without part one.

Caryl: Okay, well that sorts that out. But there is a promise in the book that there are how-tos that we can practice?

Dr. Teri: There are [00:32:00] lots of how-tos So what happens is once you start to get into the how toss, you start to find how-tos all over the place, the universe will has your back and it will give you what you need if you do some of the things to clear your runway. That’s a good point to end on. Where can people find you?

You can find my coaching, my leadership coaching is whitelilycoaching.com and then there’s loveconscioushuman.com where I’m setting up a platform, which is a lot more for people who don’t think they can afford the coaching. That’s fair. And where I’m giving it away around the book.

Caryl: Okay. I like that: loveconscioushuman.com. Okay. I’ll definitely put that in the show notes. So thank you for this time we’ve spent together. Thank you, Caryl. Thank you.

OUTRO Thanks for joining me on today’s podcast, want a free gift to inspire you further on your book Writing Adventure? My free checklist five book hook tips to kickstart your book [00:33:00] writing journey will help you get clarity on the key essential to make your book a winner, download it at www.writethebookinsideyou.com/freegift. The links are in the show notes. Until next time, a big virtual hug and keep writing.