Women In Wellness: Agnieszka Burban on the Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
Being “selfish” in a good way, is actually putting ourselves first and a huge part of self-love. If you can’t put yourself first — why would you expect anybody else to do that for you? When I moved into my ex boyfriend’s house I lost my basic needs- the need for being in a quiet home environment. Remind yourself that your needs matter. If you cannot meet your needs; neither will your partner.
As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Agnieszka Burban.
Agnieszka is a psychotherapist trained at the prestigious Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience in London. She is the ‘Lasting Love Expert’ for women and an author. She created her first happy relationship in her early 40´s, a story she described in her recently released book, “Wild Wise Women” which received 40+ straight 5-star reviews and became #1 bestseller in multiple categories on Amazon.
With over 10 years of experience, she has helped hundreds of clients create happy, lasting and safe relationships. Her teachings and programmes comprise cutting-edge relationship psychology with a unique energy system designed for those who want to experience a radical breakthrough in their love life.
Agnieszka has an international clientele, working with women over 30 in order to help them tap into their inner power to create the exact relationship they desire regardless of their age, parental or financial status, or previous experiences in love. She shatters the common misconceptions around the challenges in online dating, and helps clients reverse the life-long patterns in love so they start to attract emotionally available, conscious partners “for life”.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
With pleasure! I have always been an ambitious and determined woman who has done very well academically and professionally. I have travelled the world and had the most satisfying social life. Yet, despite all the “external” success, and I guess not the worst looks, I always ended up in relationships which were making me feel anxious, unfulfilled and … very, very lonely. I was attracting men who refused to put me first, (often not even second, or third!). All of my relationships would start with a big spark, and end up with me crying on the kitchen floor, feeling extremely anxious, lonely, and hopeless about love. I used to dream about the simplest things: to come back home and feel safe knowing that my man is there and is happy to see me again. I wanted to have “movie nights in” with him and share meals talking about our days. I wanted to have someone who would be my…rock, my cheerleader, my biggest supporter.
My reality? I felt trapped, walking on eggshells in my own home. Every time I would go through a challenge in my life — say, low mood, or a stressful time at work, my partners would pull away from me. I recall a period of time whilst living in London when I was very unwell. I could not walk up and down the street as my energy levels were that low. I was tied to the sofa during the day, and to my bed at night. I had to cancel our holiday. His response? Devastation. He turned to alcohol for comfort. I was … spoiling his time off. This became a recurring pattern not only in this relationship, but ones to come.
At 40, I found a man who seemed just perfect. After one year of flying between London and Sweden, I eventually left the UK and moved in with him. Here, I hit a crossroads. My heart was broken, when my “soulmate” broke up with me right after New Year’s Eve, 8 months after my move to Sweden. I ended up being practically job-less, in a foreign country with hardly any social support network. I was depressed and had trauma symptoms after the break-up; images from the relationship kept replaying themselves in my mind and I remember having a constant heaviness on my heart.
A few months into this post-breakup stage, I attended a live event in London hosted by the famous relationship guru Katherine Woodward Thomas. Shortly afterwards, I signed up to become trained as a relationship expert with her and her team. Across time, I could see my life shifting — changing from inside out. My intention back then was to meet “the one” by the 30th December. I was so anxious, I didn’t sign up on a dating app until the 28th! I still remember sitting in a café holding my phone in my shaking hands and uploading my profile on Tinder. The “one” crossed my path exactly 6 weeks from that day, and we have been together ever since. One thing I know for sure is that it wasn´t a “coincidence” or “chance” or “luck”. I attracted a loving and conscious man for whom I am a priority, as he was a direct reflection of the internal changes within me.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
Whilst I was in my intense training to become a Love Expert, I had a trainee client called Doreen. Doreen was a beautiful women in her 50´s who had never experienced a happy, lasting relationship. Her previous partner was a narcissist, therefore her self-esteem had been flattened.
She found herself attracting avoidant men, who distanced themselves as soon as it became clear she was looking for a secure and long-term relationship. I confess I thought,“how would she ever break through her blocks in love if she is making such basic mistakes in dating?”
Yet, I trusted my process, and following her completion of the programme, she emailed to say she had thought she found “the one”. Doreen confirmed that she had spent her Christmas with the man who truly was a reflection of the Love Fulfilled intention we set at the beginning. Her success made me realise the energetic process I took her through brought tangible results, and that we truly can reverse the old patterns in love regardless of our age. There is a huge difference between reading about it, and actually seeing it unfold right in front of you.
Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
As I was commencing my training as the ‘Lasting Love Expert’, I was dating a man who was completely misaligned with my intention. I was charmed by him and the natural flow of our conversations. However, I soon realised that I was not able to apply in practice what I was actually learning on my programme. I was looking for “the one”, which he saw as unnecessary pressure and ‘labeling’. It turned out he was yet another classic example of an ‘avoidant man’; someone who would feel uncomfortable with prolonged emotional closeness, would place blame on their partner for any misdemeanor, and as a result would distance himself. When the accusations became blatantly overwhelming, I woke up to the truth of what I needed to do, and why this man crossed my path. I understood that he was a blessing in disguise. I had to experience someone who was “pushing my buttons” to unblock my squashed voice, to learn how to say, “no, I do not agree with this, I do not want this, this does not feel right”. It created a key shift in my consciousness which later on contributed to finding the real “one” very quickly.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
There were many people who helped me get where I am now, but when it comes to overcoming all the blocks in love, I am most definitely grateful to my biggest teacher, Katherine Woodward Thomas. She helped me understand that all the experiences that come our way, are exactly the ones we need. Without knowing the principles of energetic, we don’t know how to use our challenges to our advantage.
This means that we often don’t know how to “decode” them in the right way, so they add to our growth rather than make our world “shrink”. It is thanks to Katherine that I understood why breakups happen, and how to completely transform the pain and disappointment from a breakup into source of our internal power. During my training with Katherine a lot of concepts became clear to me: I began to understand the huge correlation between our attachment pattern and why we get drawn to people who cannot give us what we want. It started to make a lot of sense to me why I, with my originally anxious attachment pattern, was attracting narcissists. I also discovered that some of my past behaviours belonged to the category of love addiction (to my even greater surprise most of our cohort discovered that too being as surprised as I was) and co-dependence, both being far more common that one might think. Without so much exposure to so many vital concepts about love, I wouldn’t be now in a happy, safe relationship.
Ok perfect. Now let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
I am lucky due to the fact that I chose to work online from the very beginning. This means I can reach many women from all over the world. My clients are scattered across the globe, yet they all have similar issues within their love life: disappointment, hurt and hopelessness. Many have nearly given up on the idea that one day they might have the relationship they have always wanted. What my work gives them is hope that every single person can have a happy, fulfilling relationship. I can say this with certainty, as we single-handedly create every single experience in our life. Once my women understand how they (unintentionally) created all the past painful relationships, they begin to understand how they can “reverse” the pattern and how much power to create what they want is actually in their hands. 100% of it.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
1.The consequences of this are absolutely devastating. It is not just “a way of thinking” or “seeing the world” — it is a way of being. The way we are, will translate directly into what comes into our life.
By example, following a breakup, people usually hold on to a lot of anger and resentment towards the ex-partner. This is completely understandable, and pain needs to be felt after a breakup. It is also perfectly natural to experience a sense of loss and grief. However, holding on to anger and resentment for months and years after the breakup is whole different story. It’s like having a hole in a roof, eventually the rain and cold will corrode the building from inside out.
2.Ask yourself the question “What is my part in it?”
In my last relationship, I suffered a lot of anxiety and eventually depression. What contributed to that was the fact that I lived in an environment which was completely unsuitable for my sound sensitivity. My ex-partner had a small, open-plan house where every single conversation would be echoing everywhere in the house. When I asked myself: “How did I contribute to the outcome of this relationship?”, the answers became very clear. I turned a blind eye to the fact that the house was unsuitable for me. Deep down I knew it was not the right place for me.
3.Saying,“selfish” here, I do not mean being selfish in a bad way. Being “selfish” in a good way, is actually putting ourselves first and a huge part of self-love. If you can’t put yourself first — why would you expect anybody else to do that for you? When I moved into my ex boyfriend’s house I lost my basic needs- the need for being in a quiet home environment. Remind yourself that your needs matter. If you cannot meet your needs; neither will your partner.
4.Often, you will not consciously realize that you are in control of your love life. You might not even feel reading the sentence “I don’t matter” that it has anything to do with you. In order to create a happy and lasting relationship, you must remove these pre-conceptions, not simply with hypnosis, meditation, affirmations, but with a true belief system. We need to clear the belief and the corresponding behaviours, then install a new belief and the new corresponding behaviours.
The best way I could describe the importance of this element is this: everything we experience in life is a direct reflection of our subconscious beliefs. You could compare those beliefs to the operating system in a computer. What you can get out of the computer depends on that system. Our subconscious beliefs are a bit like the strings on a marionette; the puppet will dance according to how the strings are pulled. Having said all that, this is actually good news, because it means that we do have the power to influence what experiences come into our life. And who comes into it too. Once I had cleared my own subconscious beliefs and installed beliefs on the new ways of being, it took me literally 6 weeks to attract my current partner (on Tinder!).
5. I often see screenshots made by women from their conversations with men on dating apps: “What did he mean by that?”, “Does it mean that he is a low-effort man?”, “How do I respond to that?”
I teach women how to use the ‘Connection Language’: communication that fosters connection with a man without compromising our true expression or concealing our feelings. For example, if a man invites you on the second date to his house for dinner, and you feel it is too early for that, then simply say: “I had such a wonderful time with you at our first date and I am really looking forward to getting to know you better, however I do not feel comfortable coming to your house yet. I would feel more at ease if we met somewhere in town. What do you think?”. This way, you have expressed your feelings, your boundaries, and your preferences in a way which is receptive to another person. Communication is also the Number 1 reason why we have such a high rate of divorces these days so I would say, ‘let’s all learn it!’
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I would call it probably the ”DOING ME” movement. A huge part of our human mind is still set in the tribal consciousness which fears rejection from others. Back in the day, it made sense as humans had to focus primarily on safety and being expelled from the tribe meant danger or even death. These days we do not have to be afraid of death if someone doesn’t like us or doesn’t agree with us, yet the fear or rejection or criticism is usually immense.
Are you talking to your friend for one hour twice a week when, in fact, you would much rather have some “me time” and rest after a long day? Or you say, “yes” to your date suggesting a dinner date in his house because you fear what he will think of you if you say, “no”? These are some common examples of how we mould our behaviours into other people’s expectations. It always backfires.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
Progress and expansion always come from getting out of your comfort zone and doing the things we fear most doing. I have recently had a client who turned from a doormat to a powerful Queen of a woman in a very short period of time. She was bullied by her manager at work, her sister was being obnoxious towards her, and the date she really liked was being flaky. We simply tapped her into her power and from that place she stood up to her boss, told the date what she really needed from him, and set up boundaries with her sister. She now has an assistant at work personally allocated to her by her manager (who is now very polite!), there are no more issues with her sister, and she is seeing a new man who is super consistent and attentive. Et voilà!
Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
Mental health.
Having worked as a psychotherapist for years I can see how a change in our mindset, and changes in the way we do things can literally change the course of our life. I have witnessed many people come out of their mental block and reach their greatest potential. When it comes to love, I think people often give up too fast without even reaching for support. There is no pattern that cannot be undone once we have decided, “I will do anything it takes to make it work”. There is a huge difference between wanting something, and deciding it will happen. Becoming an Olympic champion doesn’t happen from saying, “I want to be an Olympic champion” and doing no training every day or having a diet of fast-food meals. You have to pull all your mind power, will power, and all your efforts into becoming what you want to become.
What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?
My website is undergoing some new developments, so check out my Facebook for all the latest information from me.
https://www.facebook.com/agnieszka.burban
https://www.linkedin.com/in/agnieszka-burban-267179153/
Thank you for these fantastic insights!
Women In Wellness: Agnieszka Burban on the Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.