My guest Kirsten Steno, is a Danish House Coach. She’s an interior designer and certified life coach that has worked with more than 1800 clients to help them make a home filled with love.
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Sherold: Hey, everybody. It’s Sherold Barr and I’m so excited to have my friend, Kirsten Steno here. She’s visiting us from Denmark and I’m just thrilled to have her here in my home. I wanted to share some of the work that she does with the world that’s so remarkable. I’ve known you for what, about 3 or 4 or 5 years?
Kirsten: Yes, something like that.
Sherold: Four or five, I’ve known you at least that long and one of the things that I love about Kirsten is that she’s a life coach and an interior designer. She’s combined both of these areas of expertise to focus on house coaching.
She also was hired a few years back by BoConcept to train their staff and hold public forums where anyone can come in and talk to you about house coaching. So she wrote a book called Come Home to Yourself.
Sherold: I wanted you to talk about that. So tell them a little bit about that book because we’ll include a link at the end.
Kirsten: Yes. Well, the book was written in collaboration with Bo Concept because they heard me talk about empathetic interior design, a new way of thinking about home.
Sherold: Empathetic interior design. Wow, I’ve never heard of that.
Kirsten: So that’s when you include the personality, the soul, and everything that is behind the home. So I wrote a book about it and then I went traveling around the world. I went to Japan, United States, Europe, and South America last year. And no matter where I came when I told my stories about being homesick in the room people started crying and what hit me the most is that men started crying silently.
Sherold: Wow, that’s pretty remarkable.
Kirsten: Yes.
Sherold: Why would somebody hire a house coach?
Kirsten: In opposition to just an interior designer. I used to be an interior designer for 25 years so it’s not that I don’t know how to do a home but I just realized that there’s so much more to the home that meets the eye, and what people are telling you about their home was in actuality they were describing their life.
So the limiting thoughts that you’re working with was the same limiting thoughts that I was working with. This house is too big, too small, I don’t have money, there’s not money enough, I don’t have time, all that limiting belief that makes you not want to do something about your home or just want to leave, or you don’t like part of it, or you don’t like part of it and don’t know why. Just don’t feel right, like you stand on a certain floor and you feel better then another floor and why is that
Sherold: That’s really interesting it’s like the energy of the place. I’m really excited about this tool that she talked to me about and so I want you to talk to them about it. Do you want me to go ahead and go to the photo?
Kirsten: Yes. So you and I, we talked about my path finder vision in previous recording.
Sherold: Yes, and I’ll put that link under here too. See the bottom of the post.
Kirsten: That’s beautiful because this is actually a home couple therapy thing.
So we’re still young at heart, and we still have a love story that we want to reinvent and reignite.
Sherold: This is you and Frank, right?
Kirsten: This is me and Frank. So he’s turning 60 and I’m 54 so we still feel young.
Sherold: Oh yeah, we’re young. It’s a matter of how you think.
Kirsten: It is. So I asked Frank, what is the good life to you? How do you want to live with me?
Frank, bring me some images, photos, or quotes. So we figured out what a good life really mean to both of us. And just by having a wall that’s facing your bed, this is the first thing you notice when you wake up. It’s the last thing you see before you go to bed.
Sherold: So this is your wall and these are your feet.
Kirsten: These are our happy feet. So we took a photograph of our feet because whenever something from that wall would happen, we can show our feet again in another photo.
Sherold: So here is the other photograph with your feet.
Kirsten: And I put up a photo of when we used to go to Israel when we were just newly engaged and it is one of the happiest memories that I have. I put that on the wall and 2 weeks later Frank told me that companies kept calling him from Israel. He said that it was time for him to go and I could join him. So we went to the beach 2 weeks later and this photo (of the feet) was taken from when we did the happy life wall.
There was also a photo of a puppy. That’s me sitting outside the garden shed with a puppy. It’s not me but it looks like me and that puppy is now 12 weeks old.
Sherold: Tell them the name, it’s a great name.
Kirsten: It’s Brunello it’s a chocolate Labrador, it’s brown.
Sherold: It’s fine wine.
Kirsten: Yes, and brown and in Danish brunello means brown.
So it all fits together and one of my favorite wines in wine districts. So that little puppy just changed our lives. When we look at the board there’s also being together with family in our cottage. Now our kids are coming from Copenhagen to stay with us in the cottage. They are asking us to stay with us in the cottage.
Kirsten: Here we go this is going to United States again. Here we are right now. We put some images from when we have been to United States and then in the middle we have the center of our love story. This is a photo taken from just when we met.
Kirsten: So that’s the Spanish staircase I think it’s called Espana in Italian and that’s where we photographed the first travel we ever had. Then we went to Paris and we went to Global Leadership Summit in Chicago. So I put that up again and we just had been to that church on this trip.
Sherold: So would you say that you’ve already accomplished 50% of the board?
Kirsten: Yes, fifty percent.
Sherold: Okay, and this has been up for 6 months?
Kirsten: No, 4 months.
Sherold: Wow, that’s fast.
Kirsten: We’re still looking for the new home, which is in the center. We’re going to buy another home when we find it. Those are the images on the first row that Frank brought to me.
Frank would like to see the sunset and have a big terrace. And there’s a quote from Steve Jobs.
Kirsten: Yes. If you hadn’t found it yet keep looking. I love that. We keep looking. We’ve been looking for a house for a couple of years.
There are two Labradors in the corner, a dark one and a lighter one and then leaning against the sofa. And it says on the card, “If I could do anything or nothing, I’d rather do it with you.” And that’s so cute. So we like to watch a movie once in a while and just have a TV dinner so it’s on there as well. And there’s a ticket from a Bonnie Raitt concert.
Sherold: Bonnie Raitt. Yay!
Kirsten: So we went to a concert in Denmark. So it’s the life that we want to lead together in honoring the love story.
Sherold: And you call it, the good life wall.
Kirsten: Yes.
Sherold: I think that’s beautiful. It’s like a vision board but it’s just another way you’ve done it and these are things that you want to manifest. I love that because this is very intentional. I believe that when we put our attention on our intentions like this, they come. And they come sometimes faster than we want them to come, that has been my experience, or slower depending on your attachment to it.
Kirsten: I have a feeling that somewhere a house is getting ready for us. It’s out there and the people may be getting ready to move they’re not ready yet. So it’s kind of synchrodestiny thing. I put it up there and said, I’m ready when the house is ready.
Sherold: I love that.
Kirsten: I love that, too, and it gives me so much hope when I look at it because I know it’s not about if — it’s only when.
More often when people see a home, they fall in love with the home’s potential. We fall in love with the human beings’ potential and that’s what we need to realize again when we do this wall.
It’s about our own potential and our potential as a couple — to live our best life and be all that we can be no matter the age.
Sherold: I love that Frank participated in this with you.
Kirsten: Yes.
Sherold: I’m going to do this with John because I just love the idea. So I like how you’ve strung it up but you could do it on a board or you could to it…
Kirsten: You can do it on a board or you can do it with beautiful photographs of travels that you really enjoyed. What do you want to do together?
Sherold: Actually we’re going back to Baja, Mexico in the winter. Whale watching is my favorite experience in the world. I will definitely print some photos of that. I almost can’t wait to do this.
Kirsten: It’s kind of private but when we have guests coming over and family, everybody’s looking to my house. What’s she up with now?
And they’ll say, can we see the new, good life wall we’ve heard about?
I take them in and tell them what this is all about. Usually men are not attuned to do this but if they know the wife….
So they look at Frank, and ask him why did he do that? That’s intimate or was she manipulating you in some way? He said, I know my wife I want to be happy. I want to be happy with her and that’s why we’re going to the same way.
Sherold: And I think it’s just beautiful so I’m going to do it and I’ll show everybody mine when I get it done. So you put quotes or anything that represents what you wanted?
Kirsten: Yes with a quote, when I say I love you, I want it to mean more than just the words and then it comes what I want it to mean.
Sherold: Oh, that’s gorgeous, that’s beautiful. Let’s tell everybody where they can get this book that you’ve written. You’ve got something special for my people, and for anyone who watches this video.
You go to http://house-coach.com. You’re going to look on the home page her website and the free ebook is there. You just opt in and download the book. It’s a fabulous book.
Kirsten: It’s for free.
Sherold: You sent it to me because BoConcepts printed a whole bunch of them.
Kirsten: Yes they printed five thousand copies. That’s my first book.
Sherold: Wow. That’s fantastic. And so, what’s the other thing? You’ve got a new digital course — talk about that.
Kirsten: I have a new online course. Frank and I had so much fun doing that. We wanted to take back our home. We really wanted to move but then I said, okay, if we want to sell it we have to decorate it in a way that will help sell it because the only thing that a new soul wants to know is, can I live here?
Kirsten: Yes, so if everybody loves this house, the soul will say, “They love it then I can love it. But if you neglect the home and you put it up for sale the soul will say, they don’t like it why should I?”
Sherold: Interesting.
Kirsten: We redid our home room by room. We divided it all into rooms because we have busy lives. We wanted to take back our home and we gave ourselves a challenge that’s not in time but just to say one room at a time, one door at a time.
Some days we could do one cabinet, some other days just a shelf of a cabinet, some days we could do a whole room. So what we did was we imagined if we have the backpack of our lives, what do we want to carry? What do we want to choose out of love?
Because a home that is surrounded by handpicked items has an energy that is unbelievable. So we did it with the garage, we gave ourselves a 3-hour timeframe.
Sherold: There’s a video on YouTube.
Kirsten: Yes.
Sherold: And I have not watched it yet because our garage is a mess and we’re going to do it. So if they went to YouTube and put in your name.
Kirsten: Search YouTube for House Coach. There are free videos you can see and then on my webpage you can go in to watch the video course. If you buy it you get a 50% discount if you write Sherold in as the promotion code with a capital “S.”
Sherold: Well that sounds incredible because, did you just clean that whole garage out in a day?
Kirsten: In three hours. We had an alarm and then we put it up and said well were going to handpick and keep in the next 3 hours that’s all we need. And I called my son and I said, no matter how much I scream, or we scream, you take away the rest. No selling. No figuring out what is the potential cost of this.
We gave it away to charity, gave it away to neighbors. Just give it away and you’ll feel much better.
Sherold: And how do you feel after you’ve redone your entire house now?
Kirsten: Light as a feather. We love every room and people will come in our home and they just walk around like, they can’t describe what it is but it’s love.
Sherold: I think that’s great. Well, thank you so much. We’re going to go out and have dinner now and talk about this so that we can get John on board with going through it. John is a bit of a pack rat.
Kirsten: You are guardians of things.
Sherold: Yes.
Kirsten: There’s no shame attached to it.
Sherold: No. As we get older, one of the things I know for sure is that you don’t want to have your energy taking care of a lot of stuff. So there’s a freedom that comes from getting rid of 50 years of accumulated stuff, truly.
Kirsten: It’s also kind of sad that you can’t buy art pieces anymore because you already have so many pieces of art. When you give away and you adopt your home once a year you actually create space for new love to enter your life and your home.
Sherold: Yes, because I’m ready to let a lot of paintings go.
All right, thanks everybody.
To get a free copy of Kirsten’s book, Come Home to Yourself, go here.
You can get a 50% savings on Kirsten’s new digital course called Come Home to Yourself.
Use the gift code “Sherold” which grants you a 50% savings on the course. Make sure to uppercase the “S” in Sherold.
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