Starting Points...

In this episode, I walk you through my own starting point and the starting point of the Mona Lisa Soul project.

Both were not "ideal," but they were necessary to become the person I am today.

What you do with that starting point is up to you. The journey ahead is what matters, not where you started. So go out and make a difference.

Music: Through the woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Mona Lisa Soul Podcast.

From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you for being here.

My name is Carolina, and I will be your host in this space created for you and me to discover the principles of greatness together.

This podcast will be full of stories about mastery, determination, and resilience. Stories of people like you and me, which prove that we all have the power to unlock our full potential and go from ordinary to Masterpieces.

And my hope is that after listening to it, you will feel inspired and empowered to start creating the life of your dreams. 

The name of today's episode is starting points. And since we are just getting to know each other, I thought it would be a good idea to open my heart and walk you through my very own starting point and the starting point of the Mona Lisa Soul project.

So, without further due, I would like to invite you to close your eyes and travel with me back to the 90s. 

The story I am about to tell you started in a small town near Medellin, Colombia.

This town was full of kind people who lived relatively simple lives and almost always carried a smile, even when things were far from perfect. 

Now that I think about it, maybe the beautiful landscape around us is what helped keep the positive mood. And I wouldn't be surprised because the blue sky, the eternal spring weather, and the peaceful tall green mountains created an idyllic setting. A setting that was a far cry from all the action happening just 20 kilometers away in the big city of Medellin.

In the 90s, Medellin was considered the most dangerous place in the world. 

Just for you to have an idea of what that means, according to police figures, almost 5.000 people were murdered in Medellin in 1990.
 The year I was born. 

And to put things in perspective, this means that the city had a homicide rate of almost 400 murders per 100 thousand inhabitants.

Since our independence, Colombia had many internal conflicts involving different actors. But in all our years of violence, this was the first time war was taken directly to the cities.

I was too young back then to remember all the details. But I can recall that Medellin operated like an ordinary city. 
Even though things were difficult, people would attend school, have kids, get to work, and do the things humans usually do. 
But being a collateral victim of this nonsense conflict was as easy as being in the wrong place at the right time and vice versa.
Death didn't care if you were good or bad, if you were young or old, if you were on the way to work or just meeting a friend for coffee. 
Instead, death was all into setting new high records every day, and it didn't matter who would get in the way. 

One of the main responsible for these dark times was the man behind the Medellin drug cartel, Pablo Escobar. 
He became world popular thanks to Netflix and Hollywood movies. But the Colombians still remember him as the incarnation of evil.

And even though we don't like to talk about Pablo Escobar, it feels necessary to mention him so that I can set up the context in which I grew up. 

Because as much as I would like to tell a different story, my generation was a generation of human beings carrying deep wounds that became part of a collective trauma. A trauma we are not even fully aware of.

It is a generation that had to get used to crime and violence and accept it as part of the landscape. 

It is a generation that had to learn to survive and thrive despite the pain, the desolation, the lack of opportunities, and the culture of "easy money" that Pablo Escobar helped to propagate. 

Talking about money, the city was flooded with dollars coming from drug trafficking. These dollars had to be legalized, and real state was one of the best industries to do so. The city was full of new buildings that were beautiful but overvalued. This was vital for the money laundry schemes to be efficient. And created a real estate bubble that directly affected the low and middle classes.

At home, we had a lot of financial struggles. We were not poor, but we could only cover the basics. 
My mom always wanted to give us the best she could. But when it came to material things, her salary as a secretary was just not enough. So we had to rely a lot on our grandmother's and aunt's help.

So, hoping to provide a better future for my sister and me, my mom returned to university to finish her career when I was six. Looking back, it was a courageous decision. But it came with a high cost because she would have to leave home at 4:30 in the morning and return around 11 p.m.

I can only remember my feeling of frustration. On the one hand, I wanted and needed to spend more time with my mom. 
On the other hand,  I could feel her exhaustion and sadness for not being with us and missing out on her little children.

I was aware that it would take some years before I would be able to contribute to our household income. But already at that age, the desperation kept me thinking of what I could do to ease the pain and figure out a way to solve our problems, especially the financial ones, which seemed to be eternal.

Years later, I discovered this was the same for many other people in Medellin. Of course, I cannot say we all had the same motivation or starting point, but many of us shared the same goal: to figure out a way out of this.

It was already very challenging to do that in a city that was half destroyed. However, the real difficult thing was to canalize this restless energy and channel it into something positive.

At this point, Pablo Escobar had already become a reference point for many. At the end of the day, the guy walked the path out of poverty.

He was killed in 1993, but he created a business model that survived his death. It was a business model with relatively low entry barriers, but that gave quick access to power and fortune. A business model that became an alternative for people who were desperate for options.

But I once heard that the best way to know what you want is to know what you don't want. And some of us were sick and tired of him and his legacy.

We could witness firsthand all the suffering, desolation, and emptiness that easy money brings.

We could see that in the drug business, things never end well. Going in was easy but going out, not so much.

The options in the mid-term were limited to death or jail in the best case.

And I honestly didn't want any of this for my family or me. And this led to losing all interest in anything that could bring such consequences to my life. Still, I wanted to figure out a way to help my family, so I had to look for other sources of inspiration. I am lucky to say that this search began early in life. 

I rememeber that one of my first deep questions was a comparative question. I wanted to know if other kids in school, Colombia, and the world had the same issues I had. I wanted to have a perspective on how normal (or not) our problems were.

My research led me to find plenty of examples of people with even deeper issues than me who had already managed to overcome them. So, I started to surround myself with these examples and decided to focus on the only thing a six-year-old kid could influence: school.

I realized this would help my mom relieve the pressure of not being home. My intuition told me that she would have fewer headaches if she didn't worry about me doing my homework. 

But little did I know that this would be the best decision I could have ever made.

I developed an identity around being a good student without even being aware of it. An identity that kept centered on my values and gave me the power to reject several things that came my way growing up... I knew I wanted to go to university and have a career. And my identity protected me from any temptation or distraction that could get in the way.

It may be difficult to believe, but in Colombia, attending university is a privilege that only a few people have. And I was everything but a privileged kid (financially speaking). When I finished high school, we still had no money to pay for university.

To be honest, I was sad and even mad at life. All these years, I had been a good student. "I had behaved", but at the end of the day, it seemed I had to give up on my dream. Then I understood this was just another challenge, just like the ones I had already managed to overcome. Inside of me I already had the resources to find a solution.

The story is long, but the universe heard my prayer, and a few months after graduation, I was able to find a scholarship that entirely covered my tuition fees. I graduated from a great university with a bachelor's in international business. And given that I was top of the class, I was able to find a scholarship to come to Europe and do my masters in France.

After I finished my Masters, I found a permanent job in Germany at a multinational company and moved here in 2015.

I would like to take a pause here to thank life, the universe, God, or whatever resonates with you for our starting points. As Steve Jobs said, we can only connect the dots backward, and today I can see that it was thanks to my early life challenges that I learned to dream and figure out a way to make my dreams happen. 

Coming to Europe alone took all my courage. And even though everything that has happened to me during these years was beyond my imagination, I came here convinced I already had all the resources inside of me to face whatever life wanted to throw.

What I didn't know was that life takes things so literally. Because in 2017 I was given a chance to prove that.

And that sounds like a perfect bridge for the second story of today. The story of Mona Lisa Soul.

This story begins at the end of 2017. Back then, everything in my life seemed like I had envisioned. I had a master's degree and a promising career path in a good company. I was living in Europe, and most importantly, I could finally support my family financially. 

As I mentioned, I came to Europe alone but didn't have many hobbies, friends, or money, so I spent most of my time working. Then, in 2018, I started to realize the implications of this on my physical and mental health. I was feeling quite lonely, totally exhausted, deeply unfulfilled, and purposeless.

And on top of it, I was coming out of a very toxic relationship that left me emotionally destroyed.

Finding social support is challenging when you are far from home. I was only starting to build my network in Europe, and even though I had a couple of incredibly supportive friends, I was always missing and needing the comfort of my family. 

Since it was not possible to just buy myself a ticket and fly home. I started looking for professional support in Germany to help me understand and navigate these feelings. But I struggled a lot with that.

On one side, there was a language barrier. Back then, I couldn't speak proper German, and the people I found couldn't speak proper English.
On the other hand, finding people who could relate to my pain and my reality as an immigrant wasn't easy. I felt there was a big distance and a lack of empathy. And also, I only had a little time back then, so It's not like I could have dedicated a lot of hours to do proper research. 

Since I couldn't find answers outside, I had to start looking inward, which took me on a journey of self-healing. 
Disclaimer: if you are going through something, please seek professional help. In my case, I was lucky to have found the right resources at the right time. However, it was incredibly hard to pull myself out of this place. I almost didn't manage. 
There are people who can help you, please you don't need to go through this alone.

So, coming back to the story, I started reading many books and listening to podcasts. Yet the real game changer was discovering the power of meditation. This connection I built with myself helped me realize that the reality I was experiencing reflected many of my inner narratives and beliefs.

The fact is that I wasn't loving myself. I was completely outsourcing my happiness and overly dependent on external validation to feel worthy of anything. I didn't know how to put boundaries and thought I had to say yes to everything in order to be loved and accepted. 

This moment was a big wake-up call. I realized it was time to listen to this pain and let it teach me whatever I  had to learn. 
Among other things, I discovered that pain had always been an important source of motivation in my life. As a kid, the pain of my family's situation led me to become a top performer in school. 

But I also started to think that maybe my pain didn't always have to be so loud for me to move forward. What if I could channel it? What If I could learn to thrive from a place of pleasure and possibilities?

I couldn't let go of this question. So, I fully immersed myself in stories of people who managed to achieve wonderful things while living fulfilling lives, which is my definition of success.

I started identifying a common thread in these stories, and it is the fact that in order to get where they got, they had managed to master their pain and use it as a guiding force. And by doing so, they learned to access their wisdom and gifted us with lessons and experiences that are just one click away from us. 

At this point, my very own story felt similar to the stories of the people that inspired me. So, I realized that if I could learn how to connect with my inner wisdom and let it guide me to build the life of my dreams, I could help others do the same. And this, ladies and gentlemen, was the starting point of Mona Lisa Soul,

You might be wondering why Mona Lisa. If not, I will answer my own question anyways.

It took almost 4 years to go from idea to project. And these years, I couldn't stop thinking of a story. A story whose protagonist is Da Vinci.

His name always gave me goosebumps. I have always been fascinated by everything he accomplished in a relatively short life. 

The guy was self-made and had a very bumpy start in life. He was a legitimate son of a notary, meaning he couldn't study or practice a traditional professional career. 

Instead, he will spend his time wandering around the forest and drawing all the things that fascinate him trees, flowers, etc.
He never received any instructions but developed an exceptional ability and an incredible eye for detail. A skill that we would later on see reflected in all of his artwork.

His progress was so impressive that his father decided to use his influence as a notary to find him a position in one of the art studios of Florence. Back then, working in arts was one of the few positions open to illegitimate children. So he leveraged that and joined the workshop of "El Verrochio" and the rest is history.

As you know, one of Da Vinci's most emblematic paintings is the Mona Lisa, and as you can imagine, it was top on my list of priorities to go and see her when I came to Europe. 

But as has happened to many people, my first impression was disappointing. I was expecting something bigger and more dramatic. 
But parallel to my disappointment, I started to wonder what made this painting so symbolic. 

So I spent some minutes looking at her, and I began to be completely hypnotized after a while. And it was only then that I realized that her celebrity status is a distraction from the masterpiece she is. 

It is pretentious to describe the Mona Lisa effect with words. 

So, all I can say is that she engages with you in a meditative way and makes you feel like everything is in a perfectly connected balance. Her body posture reflects confidence and self-assurance. But at the same time, she looks very relaxed. It's as if she is at peace.

Another thing that fascinates me is that she didn't need fancy clothes or accessories to stand out. We are looking at a completely ordinary woman that captivates us with her light with her smile, or not a smile, with her confidence. A woman who doesn't need any distractions to amplify her inner beauty and light. 

When you think about it, it's almost surreal that somebody managed to create such a powerful painting. Da Vinci took an ordinary woman and turned her into one of the most important masterpieces of all time. 

For this and more, Mona Lisa popped up immediately when thinking about a name for this project. 

I truly believe that we all have the potential to become our own versions of Mona Lisa. To go from ordinary to a masterpiece, to flourish and become the person of our dreams.

However, this will only happen if we're willing to walk the path to get there. If we are willing to work in ourselves and embrace what we are with that judgment, but with curiosity. If we can develop a connection with our wisdom and let it guide us into the life, we actually want to live.
If we can honor our journeys and accept that perhaps the worst things that happened to us might have been exactly what we needed in order to become who we are. 

Maybe if Da Vinci had not been the illegitimate son of a notary, we would not have become Da Vinci but a doctor or a lawyer. 

Perhaps without that crisis that almost broke me Mona Lisa Soul would have never been created.

Maybe Medellin, my city, had to go through everything it went through so that it could become today a worldwide reference for innovation and resilience. BTW, if you have been there, I totally recommend you to go.
The only risk is that you might want to stay.

And having said that,  I would like to close this podcast with an invitation to honor your journey. It is never about the destination but the journey you decide to take and the person you become in the process. 

Once again, thank you so much for listening. I hope that you found one thing that I said useful. And if you have any comments, suggestions, ideas feedback, don't hesitate to let me know. If you liked this episode, please make sure to subscribe. 

Until next time.