IE098 Virginia Salas Kastilio: Trust as Social Capital: A Blueprint for a Conscious Future

Our guest for this week is Virginia Salas Kastilio, a serial entrepreneur and founder & CEO of the organization ‘I Trust You’.About VirginiaVirginia is on a mission to reconnect humanity and bring consciousness into the mainstream. Her journey so far has been an incredibly rich adventure filled with all sorts of stories of entrepreneurial success.In 2015, she founded a media agency ‘Gini.TV’ that helps businesses build influence and online awareness. Because of her contributions to social media marketing, she was named #1 female Snapchat influencer by Inc. Magazine. In 2017, she was ranked as one of the top 27 female entrepreneurs to change the world by the same magazine.She is currently scaling her latest organization called ‘I Trust You’ with a goal to contribute to co-creating a regenerative and happy planet Earth. Inspired by the announcement that the UN made in 2018 about how we have 12 years to limit a catastrophe caused by climate change, Virginia decided to contribute to the cause by creating a platform that will allow people to connect around the idea of planet conservation and do amazing things together!The latest addition to her efforts to save the world is ‘I Trust University’ with the idea of introducing the future of education by presenting ancient wisdom for futuristic thinkers. They already offer a bunch of amazing courses from prominent educators, along with a free masterclass called “How to Build Your Legacy” and you can get it here!Connect with Virginia:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/virginia.salaskastilioInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ginicanbreathe/?hl=enLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/virginiasalaskastilio/Website: https://www.itrustyou.love/In This Episode We CanvasWhat Inspired Her to Create ‘I Trust You’Even though she was a rising talent in the corporate world, having worked for companies such as Apple and Oracle, managing billions of dollars in the process. However, she knew her true passion lied somewhere else and on her one-year travel around the world, Virginia started noticing a pattern while trying to answer the question “What does it mean to be happy?”“I traveled the world for a year as a ‘happiness researcher’... I just traveled around and interviewed people on what meant to be happy… So in that whole journey of traveling that’s when the insight, the download came to me… Is that, we are becoming more and more disconnected as a humanity.” - Virginia Salas KastilioThe Relationship Between Trust and LoveWe dive deep into what trust means for Virginia and why she puts it at the very core of her message and mission.“Trust is everything. Trust is the baseline for love. And there is only love or fear. And so I believe that when making that transition from fear to trust and love we need courage.” - Virginia Salas KastilioPraying Through Expressing GratitudePraying can be useful practice even for those who are approaching it in a more non-religious way. For Virginia, the act of praying is more or less a thoughtful recapitulation of all the things that you are grateful for. Expressing gratitude is a well-known and effective approach for achieving personal growth, preserving mental health and overall having a better quality of life.“If you really sit with yourself long enough and just start appreciating every little thing… appreciate your relationships, appreciate just the fact that you’re alive just now and you just start praying on that and coming into that gratitude, you’re going to start feeling that courage really bubble up inside you and you’re going to remember who you are - the infinite being that is capable of doing anything in this world.” - Virginia Salas KastilioThe ‘I Trust You’ ExperimentVirginia shares her experiences with the ‘I Trust You’ experiment where she would put on a blindfold, an ‘I Trust You’ T-shirt and hold a sign that says “I trust you, do you trust me? Give me a hug!” It is an incredible way to step into the unknown, be extremely vulnerable while also being an outside-the-box approach to facing fears of intimacy and social anxiety. The hug also plays a key component because, as Virginia puts it herself, “one of the greatest medicines that we have is physical touch.”“If you want a full-blown transformation of what it feels like when the universe is just loving you and when you are afraid to put yourself out there and be blindfolded and vulnerable to the world and to receive so much love - do the ‘I Trust You’ experiment.” - Virginia Salas KastilioEarth Regeneration Instead of SustainabilityVirginia’s mission of preserving the Earth for the future of humanity is revolved around the notion of regeneration rather than sustainability, giving the entire movement a unique and profoundly uplifting feel. The concept of sustainability is strong but its nature is limited - the focus is put on our own survival rather than the one of our planet. By placing regeneration in the center of our goals, we aim beyond pure existence, into the realm of ecological prosperity. “We don’t want to sustain this. We don’t want to sustain an island of garbage floating around the ocean and polluted rivers… We’re past sustainable… We want to regenerate it. We want to replant, regrow, nourish, clean...” - Virginia Salas KastilioLetting Fear Guide You to Your PurposeWe sign off by discussing one of the most popular concepts in our podcasts which is “purpose”. Virginia’s approach to it is quite interesting because it’s somewhat counter-intuitive and yet still thoroughly effective. When striving for our purpose we tend to focus on the things that make us happy and that we enjoy doing. But Virginia argues that this is not an optimal approach for achieving personal growth.“Let fear actually guide you, guide your path of where you need to go and ask yourself ‘What is the thing that would scare me the most and where I’m moving towards?”, that you know that when you get there - it will be the biggest reward. The most exciting thing… Orientating yourself with happiness and joy or what makes you feel good is actually a mistake that a lot of people make.” - Virginia Salas KastilioVirginia’s Message of Inspired EvolutionThis has been a truly, mesmerizingly, inspiring conversation about a whole specter of different topics, each and every single one completely relevant to the struggles that we’re experiencing in today’s world. Both as a society and individuals. Even though a single highlight doesn’t really do this conversation justice, it’s always a good idea to end on a call to action. Stay Inspired! To Evolve! YEW!!! “What do you care about?… What are you excited about creating in the world and what is the craziest, scariest thing you can think of? Go and do that!” - Virginia Salas KastilioSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/inspiredevolution. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.