Create a Joy & Flow list and your specific Back to Joy strategy. It will be very useful when in stress. This can include a specific Joy playlist, backpacking in a new place (like me), staying in a garden, talking to specific persons, going to a spa, petting an animal. Also, understand that joy and rest are part of your business strategy and give time to them as much as you need.
Growth is an essential part of life, both personally and professionally. Every day presents an opportunity to learn, evolve, and become better versions of ourselves. But how do we seize these opportunities? How do successful writers, leaders, and influencers ensure they are constantly growing and improving? What daily habits, practices, or mindsets contribute to their continual growth? In this interview series, we are talking to authors, leaders, influencers, and anyone who is an authority about “What We Can Do To Grow Every Day”. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anca Maria Banita.
Anca Maria Banita is a Personal Branding Strategist, Social Activist and Mental Fitness Coach based in Bucharest, Romania.
She is the co-founder of Let’s Do It, Romania!, the biggest social movement in the country, who managed to mobilize 2 millions of people to clean up the country in just one single day.
Today, she is creating empowering and joyful experiences for the hundreds of people who went through her courses and coaching and supports people to stop self-sabotage, open their hearts and train their minds to be in service for a life lived with authenticity and joy.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I was born in a beautiful mountain city in Transylvania, called Brasov, but I spent my first 18 years in another small city of Romania. I have a younger sister, who influenced my upbringing, because I had to share the love and find my own unique place in the family. I learned since childhood that, by being smart and hard working, I will be loved, so I was an excellent student, with first prize at the end of every year.
I also loved learning a lot — I am an avid reader and the stories of Jules Verne opened my deep passion for traveling, while the novels of Alexandre Dumas, Hector Malon and many others made me very curious about human nature.
Can you tell us a bit about what you do professionally, and what brought you to this specific career path?
When I was in highschool, I wanted to become a therapist and study psychology, but my parents did not see it as a career for my future and directed me to the Academy of Economic Studies. This is where I discovered the world of PR and advertising, while joining Advice Students, an NGO for students where I helped organize many conferences and workshops.
After that, I started working for the most awarded PR agency in Romania, for clients such as Stella Artois, IKEA or Avon and initiated the most beautiful project in my life — Let’s Do It, Romania! It was a volunteering project, where we mobilized millions of people for a common cause, unheard of until that point. We also wrote a book about our story and last weekend we celebrated 14 years for the organization.
Since getting to the University, my interest in personal development grew stronger every day — I consider myself an Explorer of Consciousness and, after more than 15 years of inner work and experiments, I developed my coaching business with 3 ICF Coaching Certifications. Today, I create Personal Branding and Mental Fitness programs for entrepreneurs and corporations, where I work with thousands of people, using technology and group coaching to help people surpass self-sabotage and create meaningful and joyful lives.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Personal Growth. To make sure that we are all on the same page, let’s begin with a simple definition. What does “Personal Growth” mean to you?
It means accepting myself as I am now, with strengths and limitations as any human, while working towards a more conscious, joyful and whole version of myself.
Why do you believe that it’s important to commit to growing every day?
If I hadn’t had access to personal growth, I would have been a very negative, scared and disempowered person, very limited in her choices and with no chance to live a beautiful life. You can see that in past generations — so I feel really lucky to be living in this period where the opportunity for discovering human potential is here.
For me, growth is about wholeness. It is a journey from scattered to whole. From not seeing to seeing. From victim to creator.
What are the key upsides for those who mindfully engage in a journey of personal evolution?
It was really important to understand why things were the way they were. So, it brought CLARITY.
I was raised in a family where verbal violence was present every day, feeling very unsafe and very lonely inside.
Doing therapy, coaching, meditation and many other practices, I could attach meaning to what had happened to me and stop blaming myself for my shortcomings. Also, I managed to rewrite very negative stories about how I looked or what I deserved. From “I am ugly” to “I am beautiful.” From “I am powerless” to “I have a lot of power to change things around me”. From “I need to be independent” to “I can be together with people and be happy”. From “I can’t make money from what I love” to “I can have meaningful, joyful work”.
Then, I managed to reconnect to hurt parts and bring them back to me. I cried a lot during many years in sessions and I managed to feel my emotions and to give them a voice. It brought HEALING and SAFETY. I became my safety.
Lastly, it helped me see my gifts and start living a life using them — authenticity, freedom and joy are my core values now. So, it brought JOY.
As a personal example, in my first professional years I was employed, because this was the framework I received from home and this was the only option at that time. But I was not happy there, I did not like the fixed hours, the cast glass building, the authority that was very diminishing and I craved freedom, flexibility and a lifestyle full of travel and working from everywhere.
So, at some point, I gave up my job and just took a “nothing” period — a period to just reconnect to my heart and joy. In the first weeks I just walked, wrote on my blog and read books. Then, I started giving a course for a foundation, because I liked that. From there, my freelancer life emerged.
I needed courage to start living doing what I loved — being a teacher and a public speaker, and the tools of personal growth I had at that time — therapy and meditation — really helped me to keep open and create something new.
When we stop evolving in intentional ways, what do you think are the biggest downsides?
A feeling of disempowerment and going back to the victim mentality. Which is a very hard life to be lived. I see investing in myself as a constant, because new challenges require new levels of consciousness and mental fitness.
What specific practices, if any, do you have in place to ensure that you don’t become stagnant in life?
My daily ritual has 3 steps:
- Journaling for 15 minutes, to take out on the paper all the negativity and have a clear mind
- A brain & heart coherence meditation or a mental fitness training, to align and hear my authentic voice
- A meditation for connecting to my Future Self and new potentials, where I open to possibility
Is there any particular area of your life where you are most committed to growth (e.g., spiritually, professionally, socially, internally, relationally)?
I am very committed to developing a deeper and deeper relationship with myself, because everything else is a reflection of that. When I am with my heart open, in a calm and connected state, I know the steps I need to take.
Here is the primary question of our discussion. If you could offer five tips to readers on how to stimulate and perpetuate self-growth, what would they be? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
1. You can minimize your self-sabotage voices and train your mind to be your ally. For this, you can do mental fitness exercises daily for 15 minutes by reconnecting to your body and senses.
Like your body, your mind also needs training to stay in the positive, especially as we have what it is called “negativity bias”. We weigh 3 times more the negative than the positive so, in order to have a supportive mind, you need to do conscious work and build strong mental muscles. In my work with clients, I use specific exercises and also a mobile app for this training.
2. For everyday life, ask yourself constantly: which of the 2 worlds am I operating in: Survival (based in fear) or Creation (based on love). If you feel negative emotions (fear, anger, sadness, worry, stress) you are in Survival. Especially after an emotional hijack, you will be there automatically.
When you are there, the entire perspective on the world changes — you become materialistic, you protect yourself, you feel separated and in lack, you feel you are not enough and don’t have enough, you see what is not working. If so, stop and reconnect to the body and then to your heart to do the switch.
3. Create a Joy & Flow list and your specific Back to Joy strategy. It will be very useful when in stress. This can include a specific Joy playlist, backpacking in a new place (like me), staying in a garden, talking to specific persons, going to a spa, petting an animal. Also, understand that joy and rest are part of your business strategy and give time to them as much as you need.
4. Do a Future Self exercise constantly. Firstly, set a powerful intention for you and then, establish what emotions you will feel when this will happen. Third, describe who is this person who lives this reality and connect to them every day, by feeling and living their life. Your brain does not make the difference between reality and imagination, so use this to your advantage. In some time, you will start feeling more and more like the Future Self.
5. Hire a coach or a therapist to provide the space in which you can flourish. Everybody needs to be seen, heard and felt and reminded of their qualities and dreams.. I see emotional hygiene as important as physical one. Record your sessions so that you can watch or listen to them after some time and see how much you have grown.
What advice would you give to someone who feels stuck and unsure of how to start their personal growth journey?
I started going to therapy when I was feeling stuck, realizing I was going around in a circle. I was, practically, hitting the walls of my own mind. I would say — ask for help from somebody you trust or start working with someone who resonates with you.
Also, a very good question to ask is: what do I really need now? Is it connection? Is it safety? Is it diversity? Is it unblocking a stuck emotion? Is it hearing yourself more?
Are there any books, podcasts, or other resources that have significantly contributed to your personal growth?
I am a fan of Dr Joe Dispenza’s work and I totally recommend his book Becoming Supernatural to understand the human potential and how we can create a new reality for ourselves. Also, Wayne Dyer, Neale Donald Walsch, Tony Robbins and Brene Brown have hugely contributed to my growth. “Conversations with God”, by Neale Donald Walsch, was a cornerstone in my twenties.
Also, because I am a Mental Fitness Coach, I recommend the model I am also bringing to my clients — Positive Intelligence, which uses neuroscience and mental exercises to stop self-sabotage and train the Sage (connected to positive emotions and resources such as creativity, empathy and fearless action). The results are amazing — only after 6 weeks of training, 15 min/day, studies have shown that the gray area present in the Sage part of the brain increases, while the part where saboteurs exist decreases. Isn’t it amazing, our brain?
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I actually want to start THE JOY MOVEMENT. So, if anyone wants to be part of it, they can write to me.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
They can find me at ancabanita.com/en and on instagram — ancabanita and Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ancabanita/
And here you can find a beautiful, free resource to stop self-sabotage — https://ancabanita.com/mental-fitness-free-resource-en/
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
Growing Every Day: Author Anca Maria Banita On What We Can Do To Grow Every Day was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.