Trading emptiness for happiness

Sasha thought she had it all worked out. While she didn’t have a background in media, the bright and bubbly Melburnian worked hard with her friend Victoria Latu to create a television program called The V&S Show.

She was appearing in the social pages, rubbing shoulders with A-listers like Jennifer Hawkins and Lara Worthington, and edging closer to the ultimate vision she had set for herself when first embarking on this career path.

Then a relationship soured, a television network went bankrupt not long after showing interest in her talk show, and a feeling of “emptiness” flooded over her.

She left Melbourne to live in London, having to block out the disappointment of her “Soviet immigrant family” – like her grandmother, who wrote letters to Sasha asking what she’d done.

And after a period of revelling in her unhappiness, or “having so much fun being completely miserable”, she began to look for answers.

“You feel guilty because you’re not on the streets, you’re not living in a third world country, you have everything you need, so there’s nothing to feel ungrateful for, you just feel like, ‘Is this it?’” Sasha tells North Shore Living.

“It’s a lack of meaning. My goals were not from my true self, they were goals to prove myself. So, everything that I was doing, if I achieved it, it wasn’t really for me, it was just to prove myself. So, I’d feel empty afterwards.”

While in London, Sasha completed yoga teacher training, and was enlightened by “some wonderful mentors” with expertise across the fields of science and spirituality.

“After moving countries I kind of created a very similar life for myself in London, with very similar relationship dynamics,” she continues.

“I realised that it’s obviously not the outside world, this is something in me, because I’m the common denominator, and through mentoring and coaching I got a better understanding of the specifics.”

For no logical reason she then packed her bags after returning to Melbourne to head north to Sydney – because as she says, “The logical mind was always meant to be a servant to the intuitive master.”

Now, from her office in Kirribilli, she uses her experience to help high-achieving men (primarily) transform their minds to become more conscious, and better leaders and partners.

“A lot of men are in chronic, long-term stress, and they never pause. When they pause that’s when they feel that depression and anxiety and they don’t know why, because everything in their life is great on paper,” she explains.

“So, what happens is, they don’t see the symptoms of this damage straight away, they’re still making money, they have the relationship, the marriage, all these things… Then once the external stuff breaks down, it could be business related but it’s usually a relationship – the Pandora’s box to their emotions is unlocked. That’s when it really hits them.”

Through her coaching sessions, The Mindset Daily, Sasha takes her clients through “a program that combines modalities that help people understand themselves in just four weeks instead of four years”.

“It cuts you to the core, opens you up and then sews you back up again,” she says.

“When you’re asking the ‘Is this all there is?’ question, it’s like walking around in life with this foggy, lethargic feeling. Where I’ve got to now, my baseline of wellbeing is high, there’s no longer that fog.

“So, I help others work their way through it too.”

For more information on Sasha’s coaching, visit themindsetdaily.com.au.