http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/celebrity_interviews/Nik+and+Eva+Speakman-44079.html
19th Nov 2007
Nik and Eva Speakman are life coaches who have fabulous lives and are helping the rest of the World be as happy as they are. The couple guide normal business people, to teens, to celebs in life decisions, help them conquer fears and even help them to get over things that have happened in peoples pasts that may be holding them back.
I spoke to the millionaires about what they do, and about a book they have wrote that is out today, (19Nov07).
Before I asked any questions the pair gave me a general idea of
what they do on a day-to-day basis:
Eva: "To give you a run down on what we do, because what we do is really varied, basically we change people's lives. I'll give you key examples along the way, we had a lady who came to see us who thought she smelt, and she thought she had really bad body odour and she was bathing in bleach twice a day and she came to see us and her life was completely miserable she was just totally taken over with this thing, in one afternoon we treated her and her lives just begun again.
We worked with people regarding confidence issues. We talk about confidence in the book and the great thing about the book is it is step 1, step 2, step 3 and this is what you do. We treat a lot of celebrities and a lot of soap stars and it's amazing because you would think that they'll be really confident and really proud of themselves, when in actual fact that they are In their character and really professional and confident at being actors but when it comes to being themselves they have got an issue.
Pretty much everybody who have come to see us who has a confidence issue it stems back from childhood, or youth or teenage years and relationships. We're just treating a lady who has been in three really violent relationships and felt that the fact she's managed to get into three violent relationships, it must have been her fault and she must have deserved it. That was were she was at and at an all time low, she thought her life was worthless and since we have started working with her she is doing fantastic. She now knows that it's not her at all. We believe that violent blokes look for the victims, the nice person and the sweet person, that will allow it to happen and that's basically it.
We also do something which is learning to love themselves and some people just don't they can't even bare to look in the mirror for longer than a few seconds. We did that in our second series with a lady called Belinda. We deal with phobia's that can be from rubber to foil to spiders to sex to body hair phobia's are huge we do all sorts of them. You would be amazed, paper clips, the most amazing things. We treated one lady who had a fear of unvarnished wood, which was another one in our series.
We have dealt with fears such as, flying, blood, cats. Addictions such as, shopping, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes chocolate, you name it - pretty much everybody's got some sort of an addiction. We help people to put their lives in balance so we deal with a lot of business people who feel there's just not enough time in the day to do their job and spend time with their family and to enjoy life so we do all that we do health, we help people to lose weight, help them to healthy eat, we blood test people to give them a blood group for their diet because we've read up about different foods affecting different blood groups.
We work in schools as well with young people and with underprivileged kids who we go and see them and we teach them about body language and positive terminology which again is in our book, and how the words we use can have a huge impact on how we feel and panic attacks which was something we treated Kim Ryder for in our second series and we also do something called perfect partner, basically a lot of people that work, business woman, woman that are in the public eye as well, celebrities they really struggle to find the right guy and a lot of that is just down to the fact that they don't really know what they're looking for, so we work on that and that's pretty much a run down on nearly everything that we do."
Nik: "One thing that is interesting about confidence though is, as Eva said is it starts from the school playground unfortunately where maybe you have a party and there's someone you don't want to invite in the playground and because you have not invited them to the playground they will call you; fat or ugly or horrible or just say something that has got no meaning in it or truth what so ever, they are just saying it to lash back because they weren't invited to the party that can then be lodged in your subconscious mind and you could end up believing that for the rest of your life which is ridiculous but that's how some things happen."
Eva: "Also is something that struck us quite a few years ago and we touched this is the book is that something might happen to you at age 8, I mean I was bullied at school and so was Nick I had no confidence when I first met Nick, now I've just got no problems what so ever. I remember at school that some girls called me fat so I just thought oh my god I must because why would anybody say that to me - that's just a horrible thing to say so I believed it. I went through my teenage years thinking I was really fat and ugly and carried that through to when I first met Nick and it dawned on me that this happened to me when I was about 11 or 12 and at the age of 21 as a young woman I was believing the advice of an 11 year old kid, which is what I was and these other children were and now, if you were ready to go out the last thing you would do was go to primary school to a 10 year old child and say 'how do I look?'."
What inspired you to write the book?
Eva: "When we did our first series on U.K TV, which was called, 'A Life Coach Less Ordinary', we were absolutely overwhelmed and inundated with e-mails of people - and I'm talking on average 500 a day if not more. What everybody was saying was I saw your show, it had a really big impact on me, have you got a step by step guide of how I can do that for me. We had that many people coming to us that there wasn't enough time in the day or physically enough hours in our lifetime to treat the people that were asking for our help. So our mission is that we generally believe that everybody can be happy and deserves to be happy so our mission is to change the world and so we just thought; well there isn't enough hours in the day, we can't see all these people individually, we did reply to everybody eventually individually- which took a very long time. So the next thing was that; right we've got to get this in a book and the response has been tremendous, it really has! Every body has come back to us and said, 'I'm having it, I'm having it' so that was what inspired us to write the book. Plus I have got to be honest having been lacking in confidence myself when I was a young person and worried what other people thought and thinking 'would I ever make anything out of my life?' and 'what would people think if I try and do this?' and then having studied what we have studied, I realized just how easy it was and we both thought it's just so easy, yet people complicate being happy."
Nik: "But also there are a lot of books out there as I mentioned before on how to get confident, how to do this, how to do that, and I have never found one that gives you all the answers. This is something that we wanted to do and the book also tells you that Eva and I came from humble backgrounds, we are living the lives of our dreams back then, right now and if we can do it, other people can do it as well but some people don't know how and we would like to think that we have covered everything in the book- For someone to read it and think, right yes I can change my life and I can do whatever I want."
Can you give me any tips you have used in your book about how to get the
maximum happiness out of life?
Eva: "The first thing is to write a list of what you actually want and make them your goals. This is in the book on page 58. Basically if you don't have a list of what you want out of life then how will you ever know what you want and then when you do get what you want how do you know when you have achieved it? If that makes sense. You need a clear list of; this is what I want to do, this is what I love, this is what I want to do in my career, this is what I want to do about me, I want to sky dive I want to lose weight, I want to see the world, I want to be the editor of Femalefirst and you write a full list of exactly what you want. You don't hold back at all because anything in life is possible and the first step is to write it down. So that's the first tip. The other thing I would say is something that we do - is a 'WOW list' - again in the book. What the 'WOW list' is for example people with no confidence, If they were to do a 'WOW list' that would really help, it's just a list of things you have achieved through out your life. For example; your mum or who ever loves you is 'WOW' or a job that you love, a list of between 5 and 10 things it could be that you were in a play at school or you won a certificate for something. You a write down things that at the time you thought 'WOW' and that's your 'WOW list', and you read that every night before you go to bed and by doing that your setting yourself up with the right frame of mind before you go to bed so your thinking on a positive note."
Nik: "The reason why that is important is because of one thing we forget which is how far we've come and the things that we have achieved, and like Eva said there, if your mum loves you and you have got a good job, that is not something you would think about on a regular basis and your brain tends to be guided by the people in your circle. So if you're surrounding be a lot of people who are negative and think something is going, you will tend to be on a similar wave length and think that 'oh things are going wrong'. You want to think about the things that have gone right and although your still going to do the euphoria of getting these great things and enjoying them that like in two years time or in less time you will start taking it for granted."
Eva: "That's another point actually what Nick has just said, which is the next thing which is to chose your friends carefully because you will become like the people you hang around with basically, if you have friends who are miserable and talk about doom and gloom all the time it has a knock on effect - so that's another point. Also to put yourself first and people think 'god that's really selfish' but absolutely no it's not - It's selfish not to put yourself first, because if you do things for yourself and make yourself happy then its like a stone in water - it has a ripple effect, it touches far more people. So you have got to make yourself happy first before you can even think about trying to touch anybody else with happiness."
Will you be bringing any more books out in the near future?
Eva: "I am sure that we will because as soon as we finished the book we realized there are loads more things that we could have discussed and talked about. Nik: Another thing that we were talking about is; 'have we put this in?, have we put that in?' because obviously we deal with life changing things all the time because our lives are so open that we think 'Oh we can use that, or we can use this and that's great to work with people' and they are things that happen everyday and that's life - general changes for people and if you think of like computers for example, things that we have got today and like mobile phones we didn't have five years ago, so you have got to move with the times. As new technology has come out and as we get new discoveries, scientific discovery's then we can there for adapt new treatments if we want to get them out to people, so they can use them and change, Because life is fantastic as the book's called 'Your Life Can Be Fantastic Too' and though I have a fantastic life, it's the life that we have designed for ourselves and basically anyone can do that out there. You have just really got to know what you want."
Femalefirst - Heather Cowley