Irina Costea is a Transformational & NeuroMindfulness Coach® and a former HR Professional. After a severe postpartum depression scattered with suicidal thoughts, Irina discovered Positive Psychology and the power of coaching. Once enrolled in the coaching school, she soon realized that her personal mission is to help other people unlock their true potential through practices of neuroscience and mindfulness. She believes that only by mapping and following your fears and blockages you can live authentically. Because only when you use them as your stepping stones you can connect to yourself again.
Costea has been trained as a Coach at CoachVille, one of the first coaching schools in the world, and as a NeuroMindfulness® Practitioner at the NeuroMindfulness® Institute. She also worked as a Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist for one of the biggest travel platforms in the world.
Who is Irina?
Irina is a dreamer, a neuroscience passionate, who lives and breathes coaching.
I am a Transformational & NeuroMindfulness Coach, and PCC ICF accredited (just passed all the exams, I am waiting for the official papers).
My studies and professional experience cover also a part of HR, meaning that I have bachelors & masters degree in Human Resources Management, and I was an IT Recruiter for one of the top travel booking platforms in the world,
I am the proud mother of a 3 years old, and the wife of an amazing man. We are living together in Germany, in a small and peaceful town, close to the nature.
What’s the story behind the coach?
My story with coaching started 2 years ago when I was deep in a suicidal postpartum depression. I was on the edge, in the hospital with my son who suffered a head injury after a fall in our home, I felt suffocated, hopeless, and powerless. I realized that my son will be ok after the hit, but for sure I was not.
The moment in which for a split second I believed that my son was going to die, it was my wake-up call. I had to do something, and this was my starting point.
I started by searching for a meaning, and I discovered Martin Seligman and Positive Psychology. I graduated from a 20-week course on Foundations of Positive Psychology, and I became fascinated with emotional resilience.
After a life with chronic anxiety, I discovered that the power was in my hands.
Hiring a coach was my next step, and after 2 sessions I decided that I wanted to enroll in a coaching school.
I got a 7500$ scholarship at CoachVille, one of the first coaching schools in the world, and this is where everything changed. It changed my mindset, my approach around fears, opportunities, and life itself. It basically saved my life.
In the last 18 months, I have over 530 hours of 1:1 coaching sessions, I built this thriving coaching business, and I am preparing to launch a coaching school (part of the CoachVille family) in my home country, Romania.
What is it that you do for your clients?
I guide people to discover their authenticity in order to become whoever they desire to, in any kind of game: career, business, personal life.
In this coaching process, we go back to the roots. We discover patterns, we expand awareness, we map fears and belief systems, we discover the self-defense mechanisms that hold you back.
We use neuroscience coaching tools in order to rewire your brain to work FOR you, not on survival mode (body scan visualizations, playing with fears, role plays, environmental design, and so much more).
When we are driven by unknown processes, we cannot influence them. By revealing them to you, you gain back your influence (it was ALWAYS with you), and you will act from a place of consciousness, not only from a place of reaction.
For those who want a career shift also, I guide them and help them with the HR consulting part. I rewrite their CVs from scratch (with a design also built from scratch), we practice mock interviews and they get insights about how they can modify their CV in the future.
Why are you so passionate about neuroscience?
This is what I like most about neuroscience: it brings the power back into the hands of the people. When you are driven by unknown processes, you don’t have influence over them.
When you understand the neuroscience behind your behaviors, triggers, and self-defense mechanisms, you have to power to act upon them.
In a way, neuroscience brought me (and I saw this in ALL my clients also) what I needed most: self-compassion. Because I understood that nothing is wrong with me. My patterns are the way in which my brain is trying to protect me. My triggers are my allies because they show me where to look for growth opportunities. My behaviors point me to the road that I need to follow in order to heal. You know that phrase in actions movies: “follow the money?”.
In transformational coaching is “follow the fears”. The ideas of “power through the fear” and “get rid of your fears” are myths, and not exactly something you would like to do. Why? Because fear is there to protect you. Fear’s role is a noble one, not a bad one. Fear is what helped us survive as a species.
When you develop the ability of sitting down with your fear, understand it and the wisdom behind it, that’s when you will be able to put a space between trigger and response.
What role plays mindfulness in your coaching process?
The transformation process means that you start to get off the autopilot and you start being more present. This usually triggers a lot of anxieties, fears, and the client needs the proper tools in order to regulate oneself emotionally.
In order to be able to learn, transform, heal or change habits, you first need to be safe, and on the side of social engagement zone.
Our central nervous system is formed of sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system.
The sympathetic nervous system is the one responsible for fight/flight response. It gets activated whenever we feel in danger. Evolutionary speaking, whenever we were threatened by something, we either needed to fight or to run. So, when the sympathetic nervous system is activated, the blood supply is redirected towards our legs and arms, the heart rate goes up, the digestion shuts down (chronic stress leads to constipation, diarrhea, irritable bowel syndrome ), and the activity of the prefrontal cortex (responsible with regulating the emotional response) is reduced by 75%.
The parasympathetic nervous system, also called rest and digest, is responsible for calming our bodies. When activated, our heart rate gets back to normal, our digestion works just fine, we feel safe, and the prefrontal cortex is back on track.
Now, most of us live in a state of fight or flight without even realising. We react a lot to our environment, everything is personal and about us, our lives are emotional Montagne Russes (we get angry a lot, we have conflicts, it feels right everything happens TO us).
In order to be able to heal our wounds, to make a transformation happen, we need to learn how to handle our nervous systems, and that begins by learning how does our body feels when we feel that we are in danger, and how does it feel to feel safe.
Mindfulness practices are the tools that make this shift possible.
What’s the most difficult thing to handle as a coach?
To find your balance. To be connected to yourself enough, so you can see when you are triggered by clients when you give more than you can handle.
Because every client is different, and you will sometimes identify yourself with the client’s challenges. For me is really important to have a support system: I go to therapy constantly (for 6 years now), I have a personal coach, so I can be well with myself. It’s also important to have daily practices like breathing exercises, yoga practices (especially yin and hatha yoga, long postures that connect my mind with my body), meditation, and journaling. All of these allow me to be focused, connected and to have my cup full.
When I coach, I am there 100% with the client and inflow. My curiosity allows me to unlock powerful questions, to put pieces together and to mirror them back to the client in order to help them reframe.
If I get triggered and I am not aware of it, I can’t access my curiosity and creativity.
This is why therapy, coaching and mindfulness are so useful. Because I know who I am, what my triggers are, I work on them constantly, and I can spot a trigger a long way before it reaches me (meditation plays a crucial role here, by developing meta-awareness).
Also, I think this skill comes with time and trial and error.
What is your mission?
As a coach, my mission is to help people understand that they don’t need to be fixed, they are not broken. I want as many people to understand themselves better, to understand the processes that lie behind the transformation and to reconnect with their authenticity. When you know who you are, what got you here, what are your character strengths, what are your growth opportunities, you know what’s in your toolbox. Knowing who you are is like starting in life from pole position (thanks, Paul Olteanu for this great metaphor ).
I really think that the holistic view of transformation/personal development is much more helpful than looking at fragments of the process and trying to change certain behaviors/parts, without the “helicopter view”.
As a teacher, my mission is to train and build a community of coaches that pass this spirit of play further, that pass the wisdom of transformation. I feel like we need to move on from self-sabotage and other myths from the personal development industry. We are products of our environments, we are shaped since we are children by parents, school, society. We reach adulthood with these beliefs already installed, so it’s our job to cultivate kindness, love towards ourselves, in order to uncover those beliefs and defense mechanisms. It is of great help to be able to distinguish when defense mechanisms that once saved you emotionally, now are pulling you back.
During winter, when you are cold, you add clothes. In the summertime, at 45 degrees Celsius, those same clothes could mean death, suffocation, blockage. It’s the same with self-defense mechanisms. We need to honor them, to thank them for keeping us safe, but also we need to learn when to let go.
So my overall mission is to give people this freedom of choice, of knowledge and tools that one can use in order to reconnect with oneself.
