Founder of MPCS Inc. with The FACTOR OF, Maria Nebres is an international bestselling published author of Love and the Highly Engaged Team, a certified trainer of Jack Canfield’s Success Principles, and an authentic success coach, blending her expertise in human relations, human resources management and personal success development for motivated individuals to realize their true leadership for abundance in soulful business and life.
Maria has been assisting people and businesses (both profit and not-for-profit) transform their lives and their organizations for over 25 years. She has successfully led and facilitated many transformational programs for employee relations and engagement, performance/success management, business and personal transitions, leveraging her passion for helping people and organizations achieve authentic and lasting success through heart-centered leadership that taps into each individual’s true passions, purpose, core genius, and talents, no matter the vocation or field of work they are in.
It is in this way that she believes the essence of the working world will heal for lasting abundance in harmony with the larger world’s healing. She promotes the vision of ease and abundance through inspiring others by doing what inspires for better results that serve.Maria has served her clients across many industries including healthcare, financial services, pharmaceuticals, management consulting, technology, food and beverage, research and development, and the public sector.
To learn more about Maria and her services, check out her website at www.factorof.com or contact her at maria.nebres@factorof.com.
Shownotes:
Hello. Thank you so much. I'm here. I'm here with Maria and it's Nebres. Want to make sure that I say that right and welcome. And thank you so much for allowing me to interview you and share your gifts and your magic to the world.
Thank you for this time. I appreciate it.
No problem. So I just want to read your bio so people can get an idea of who you are and what you're all about. So Maria is the founder of MPCS, Inc. With the Factor of. She is an international best selling published author of Love and the Highly Engaged Team, which I love because as a previous corporate executive, I was all about team building, and it was all about I know that teams are the best way to really get anything done. So I love this. I make anxious to hear all about it.
Oh, that's fantastic.
That's great. She's a certified trainer of Jack Canfield Success Principles, and most of us know who Jack Canfield is. And she's an authentic success coach, blending her expertise in human relations, human resources, course management, and personal success development for motivated individuals to realize their true leadership for abundance. We love abundance and soulful business and life. Maria has been insisting on people and businesses, both profit and not for profit, transform their lives and their organizations for over 25 years. She looks way too young to be having done this for over 25 years. It's working well for her. She's in her zone. She has successfully led and facilitated many transformational programs for employee relations and engagement, performance, success management, business, and personal transitions. She's just got this passion and she leverages that for helping people and organizations achieve authentic and lasting success through heart centered leadership, tapping into everybody's true passion, purpose, core genius, and talent. No matter what the vocation, what work that they're in, this works across all venues.
It Is in this way that she believes the essence of the working world will heal for lasting abundance, which we all know that we need, especially now, and in harmony with the larger world's healing. So it's about the healing. And that works in the corporate and the personal. So she promotes a vision of ease and abundance through inspiring others by doing what inspires them for better results that serve. She has worked across all paths. We're talking health care, financial services, pharmaceuticals, management consulting, technology, food and beverage, research and development, and the public sector. So she has a wide variety of information here. So I'm really excited to learn more about that. And Maria, I'm going to put it when I post these videos, but her website is www. Factorof. Com. And so I'll make sure that I post that her contact information for you. So Maria, wow. You have a very accomplished life that I can see from just your bio. So tell me, how did you get started in this?
It's interesting because I got started from having moved to Canada as a young girl. At the age of six, my parents decided to relocate us from the Philippines, which is my native land, to Canada, the land of opportunity. And at an early age, I grew up learning that you focus on what it was to serve the world, to serve society. I certainly grew up learning and understanding the ethics of work. And there was a certain order in which you would achieve and attain certain certain thing. So I saw it from my dad who had five jobs at the time. I saw it in my mom and the role that she played in the household. And I certainly saw it in terms of the upbringing and the discipline that we were being taught. And then at a certain age, I grew to learn more and more within a new culture, which was the North American way that I had more opportunities. I had more opportunities than just being in the house. I witnessed my mom. She loved what she did, but I wanted more because I was one of four children, the only girl. And yet the thought was that my lot in life was going to be, and there's nothing wrong with it, but was going to be to take care of home.
The culture of North America was totally different from the culture that was being instilled in me in my childhood, which was, it's okay for you to stay at home and take care of family. I wanted something a little bit more. So I ended up going through my education and then finding that I had this natural extra love for being with people. I'm not much of an extrovert, but I certainly love people. And so I fell into sociology, which I ended up really loving, landed in human resources, and then the story began of my life. I love to help individuals really around. The reason why I like sociology is it is the study of the psychology of what motivates people to do what they do in relation with other people. That fascinated me. Human Resources at the time presented for me that right training ground. I naturally fell into it, manifested it, I suppose you would say. I haven't looked back since, except that it grew my interest more and more for how could I serve more in a larger capacity? And that landed me into the work that I did with Jack Canfield. I experienced in the corporate world this thing that I believe a lot of people go through, which is burnout and not quite knowing how to perform and still be highly engaged.
So when I talk about leadership issues around engagement, which fascinates me, it isn't leadership from a role function standpoint so much as it is leadership from a universal standpoint. And who actually owns it is every single individual. So I have that passion to want to share that message. And with whatever truth that I have from the experiences that I gained, I dealt with my burnout from having transformed myself from personal development. And I swear by personal transformation work, when you do your inner work, everything external to you starts to make a lot more sense and a lot easier. Because really, the challenges that we face is really around the relationships between individuals. So that's part of why I felt that I was in a position to be able to pivot myself after having earned my stripes of really understanding process and structure, the structures we create. And then how do we play within that structure? And how do we allow for the malleability that really life is all about? So would it really matter if we were talking about the workplace? Not necessarily. It's really about you, the common denominator and the environment you choose to enter.
So that brought me to this big aha moment after having done my transformation work and deciding that I was going to go through. My first big breakthrough was opening up my own practice at a very young age and deciding, no matter what anybody told me, no, you still need more years. Well, that was 17 years ago. I took that leap of faith and I trusted myself. 17 years later, I went through major milestones of wanting to achieve one breakthrough after another. And I called the shots on it. And I'm so proud of it that I really want to share with individuals who have the same spark and spirit to really understand what it is and what it takes that's inherent in all of us. So I had to obviously prove that point. And that's what inspired me deeply to write my first book. Wow.
Just just amazing. And you just shine. I'm just watching you. And you're just, you know, this light and this passion is just shining out on the screen and everything. And you resonate for me because as I said, I spent 25 years. I'm a registered nurse by background, but I spent 25 years in the corporate environment. The last many years, probably half of my career in executive roles.
Right.
So when you talk about the leadership and all of that, it was. I was getting to that point that, Gosh, this just isn't doing it for me. And so I had to go deep. I had to go deep and really decide what's my next journey in life. And that actually led me to becoming a life coach. But I would really like to hear, I'm assuming that you have some steps or something. How do you know when you're working with individuals and organizations, what are the key components of starting to do that inner work?
Yeah. So my book is really centered around because everyone seems to want a system and everyone seems to want a process. And certainly it does help in terms of knowing that it could be as simple as really the reason why we have process and frameworks is so that we can do something repetitively. And there is value to the repetition because it creates a sense of discipline. It's a sense of habit. So in a lot of the work that I've done, both in personal transformation and within the corporate structures and platforms, I blended it together to indicate that at base, you have to have some fundamental mental habits. And they have designed my eight-step process. I say that with the caveat that it isn't so sequential and so linear as what people think, because the nature of inner work is that it is messy and has to necessarily be messy. More like a matrix versus something that is so start, finish, start, finish. And if you're going to take a look at it from that process standpoint, it's going to be start, finish, back, moving iteratively. So this eight step process I have, which is really what designed my whole program or my book, the framework, and my organization.
I actually called my organization the Factor Of, because Factor of is really the acronym for some of the fundamental core bucket steps that an individual would have to have to apply in order for them to really have a good, great framework and foundation. And the entrance to that, I believe, in some of the learnings that I had from corporate organizational structure is it really requires your holistic approach, the whole entire you. And the whole entire you, many people tend to think it just as here. And then all of a sudden it turns translates into your body, into your physical hands. But somewhere in between there is going to be the cohesion with your heart. And the heart is representative beyond the physicality. It's so representative of something so much larger, which is really the foundation for what your purpose, your core purpose really, truly stands for. I call that everyone has a spirit of service. When you connect with your spirit of service, which is something that is beyond and much, much larger, almost it's on the divine side. When you get that clarity and you connect it and you reconcile it with your physicality, which is the material form, then you can do magic.
You can do magic.
Yeah. Oh, man, I hear you, sister. I hear you. The spirit of service. And I just want to share that for people who are tuning in and seeing my videos, there's a reason why I'm doing these videos. I am connected with Maria because we belong to a coaching group, which is a business coaching platform, but it is all for servant-hearted authors where we are writing books, but our books are really our platform to go out into the world and make a difference, a positive difference. And so we come from all different perspectives. But the core is, as you said, it goes right into the heart. You said that right into the heart. It's all about being heart-centered. And as a leader in big corporations, sometimes that may get lost a little bit because we're in our heads so much. We got to figure out the budget, follow the budget, figure out the strategy and the tactics and all of that. And going back into the heart is so deeply important to in that passion. And so the spirit of service. So tell me a little bit about how do you help organizations? Do you work with the individuals within the organizations?
Do you do bigger things within the organization? Organizations as groups? Tell me a little bit about your experience with that.
If I were to categorize the suite of services that I offer because that's basically what it is. I have served corporate leaders in the functions of leadership. So anywhere from a line manager to a mid manager to executive and also at the employee level, because human resources and the function of human resources touches all. In that nuance and dance, what I find is that leaders in organizations have a great opportunity and are the biggest influencers when it comes to setting the culture that you want to have so that there is unification when it comes to what this thing is that they call engagement. Statistics will show that many organizations that have employees in them, and that's really what an organization is, it's a group of people, so it doesn't even have to be corporate. If you've got a business, if you have a movement, if you have an organization, the purest definition of it is a group of people coming together for a common cause. Now, what does that take? It takes leadership, absolutely, and it takes engagement. So how do you engage beyond the inspiration of, Hey, I've got a great idea. It's how do you keep it gelled?
And so the work that I do is anywhere from there's the transactional. If an individual is looking for transactional solutions, my transactional solutions obviously would be in my core technical experience around anything thing involving the resources of humans for humans. So I challenge leaders in the work that I do with them with the language that they end up transposing in terms of how do they lead people. It starts first off with this term called human resources management. There is this misnomer that human resources management means that you're managing the people. And in this new paradigm that I'm trying to really move, it's let's move away from defining things that really limit high engagement. High engagement, the single biggest source for high engagement is love. And when you love and you are able to translate that down into an organizational across multiple people for a common cause. It isn't about managing them. It's about what you're managing are the resources that support humans. So a lot of the work that I do with leaders is really understanding that their intentionality or their intentional approach to the culture that they really are committed with. And part of that commitment has to start, in fact, all of the commitment must start to start from within.
So it must start from the leader. So I do a lot of work with the leader to make sure that their vibration and their ripple effect is that whole term in corporate, can you walk the top walk and can you talk and can you talk the walk? And that is directed at the leader. And then what are you modeling out so that you're also encouraging folks to do that? Certainly in this day and age and in these really uncertain times, which will become the norm, and the norm is really going to be business unusual. It's not going to go back to the business usual. Why? Because we've been gifted with so many lessons in just a mere three, four months now.
Yeah, things have changed dramatically. The face of organizations has changed dramatically. And I just love that love. I hang on to my little crystal here. But that love is the center of this because we don't think about that in organizations. But you're right. It doesn't have to be an organization. It's getting together and all being there for a common cause. And that's where we make a difference in the world. And everybody brings... I know for me, I always said I could walk away from my job and know that everything would just run so smoothly because the people that I worked with, yes, in the structure, they reported up to me, but they didn't. We were a team. And so everybody brought their strengths. And so it was just so fluid. And so I was able to exit gracefully. Everything still is just flowing just beautifully. And that's what it's all about. So I wanted to go to there was something that you had written in it. We had communicated a little bit back and forth, but talk to me a little bit about compassion fatigue. You had used that term and I thought, Oh, I just really love that term.
And I'd like to hear your perspective on that. And how do we bring that to people, not only into their homes and into their own hearts, but into the workplace? And what does that mean?
Right. So certainly I find that in many organizations, when you're faced with having to help other people in their own grieving or trauma, and that happens in the workplace as well, certainly I've had and I've experienced many leaders going through their burnout. Even in the health care sector, let's say, I'm reminded of some of the physicians and the nurses who have experienced that compassion fatigue because of the work, the work that they do. But certainly a leader goes through that as well when they're leading individuals who are facing mental health issues. Mental health issues, by the way, isn't necessarily just resorted, like reserved for people who are clinically diagnosed something. It's when something is something destructive at the personal level is affecting an individual and you still need them to perform. So how do you deal with the compassion fatigue is having that dance and that conflict where a leader doesn't know what to do. They're experiencing it and they're feeling the vibration of the individual's grief or trauma, the effects of those base emotions. So we do a lot of work in terms of understanding what is compassion, first off. But in the end, compassion requires to give it, it requires having a full supply for yourself.
I helped to navigate my clients to really remembering and putting in place their tools around self care. Because self care should really be translated into soul care. Because when you're doing self care, the essence of the spirit of service, the spirit of work, does not come from your hands. It's from your essence. And compassion happens to be one of them. So when an organization commits to putting at the business table the value of love, you get certain attributes and the demonstration of certain attributes that will deplete from your essence. And compassion just happens to be one of them. I'm not sure in the United States. I believe you guys have, and I'm using an example. In Canada, they instituted laws for protecting and providing support programs for violence in the workplace, which included domestic violence. And I think the reason for it was because an individual would enter a workplace and they had issues, suffering issues like domestic violence and the mental health issues that come across that and the obligation of an organization. So that is already pretty highly emotionally charged then you get an employee who's experiencing it and a leader who's needing to manage that whole process.
Compassion fatigue can occur. Self-care in general is really where would address certain fatigue at the emotional level that an individual would face. I used compassion as one example. Certainly, it wouldn't have to be something as specific and as traumatic as that. It could also be that the organization is going through so much high change, and how do they deal with the emotional charges and the varying degrees of emotional attachments that maybe themselves are going through and their employees. But that's with everyone as well. When someone wants to start off a business and they're an entrepreneur and they're looking for, I don't really know what I'm going to do or what I'm supposed to do, it's a highly emotional charge. And then you think this individual is probably going through their own fatigue because they're not managing their emotions. And it's okay to manage your emotions. Now, emotional management doesn't mean you repress. So we go through that in terms of explaining that emotional intelligence factor comes into play as well. So we do talk about strategies around managing your emotions as part of that compassion fatigue mitigation.
That's so beautiful. And as you're talking, I'm just thinking a couple of different things. With this whole idea of in the workplace, I remember at one point, one of my managers who reported to me was having some significant issues with her son. And it was very distracting for her, very challenging for her because of what he was going through. And so that's where we just needed to sit and to be the compassionate leader to understand what she was going through and knowing that her team and what she needed to provide there in the organization was still important to her. So I was telling my daughter-in-law that I remember her son needed to be transported to a treatment facility. And it was another one of these layers of her grief and her stuff that was going on in her life that was pretty constant. And I finally just said, I'm going to go get him and I'm going to transport him because you just just want you to sit here and just be able to just breathe. And I know just how tough this is for you because when you're in the middle of it and the codependency and all of that, so please, let me step in and help you with that.
You can stay here and just breathe. And she was so appreciative. And it didn't take much. I just got in my car and picked him up and took him. But it made such a difference for both of us because I felt like I was really serving in such a bigger way for her and him. And that she could just because she had this grief that was going on and this trauma and just couldn't even see throughout all of that. So it's so important in the workplace that.
It is.
Take a look at that. And I also appreciate that you're talking about entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, of which I'm one in my coaching business. This is why we have coaches. This is why we do what we do because Mary Ann Williamson, I'm in a group with her, and she'll say something like, You can't preach yourself. We as coaches even need coaches because we need to understand that there is some compassion fatigue even going on with us because we may not be uncertain. We're not the expert in everything. And so that's one thing that I really want to get across here for everybody who's listening. Now, this is important for people like Maria to bring into your organizations, even if you're a one person organization or if you're a large corporate organization, bringing in someone who really has an understanding of this bigger picture. And as executives and leaders in organizations, serving with your heart needs to come first. I mean, this is what's going on in the world right now. Absolutely. All this stuff that's happening.
We can say.
Oh, this is horrible. This is horrible. And I'm like, oh, I think this is just pretty amazing because the paradigms are totally going to be blown apart. What felt like an implosion of the world is actually opening up and creating this heart spaced life that we all can lead in. And it's just a beautiful thing.
Absolutely. And on I find that though we are renewing and changing, there is something that's really certain that we will always face. And that will be in a perfect world, we could have conversations like this where we pick out something and we solve it or we get the clarity around it. But in the real world, in the reality of life, everything happens. And for every single human being, there is a true leadership in them. And there must be. They must be able to tap into it. For all these things, how do you replenish your resilience? Your resilience is how you can bounce back whenever challenges come your way, because challenges are so inevitable if you're really truly living. The plus side of knowing about life in terms of committing that you want to thrive and you don't want to just survive. We must survive. Our bodies are in our brains and our whole being protects us all the time. But I believe that what's happened is that we have conditioned ourselves to believe that every single thing is a crisis. It's wearing out like this rubber band where you keep stretching it, stretching it, stretching it, and it's not going to have its resilience.
A rubber band's resilience is that it goes back to its original form. But when we are not replenishing it, one of the things that can help to replenish it is to understand and to understand the kinds of supports, and that's through awareness. So awareness is a very big part of the coaching that we light workers and spiritual workers and any health and wellness practitioner would highly recommend. It starts with a level of awareness. What are you aware of and how are you going to be able to orchestrate your own levels of support because of the known. And the known is to thrive and to live in life in a thriving way. You have to understand that the demos will happen. The level of discernment is going to always happen where you're going to have to be pressured with choices to make because you can't move forward without making choices. And so therein lies the whole dichotomy of being blessed with the fact that we have the capability of creating, we have the capability and will of being able to choose whatever comes our way. So why not maximize on it? And there is a way to it.
And each of us in the work that we do, which is what I love about this community for a new paradigm of shifting for all of us, humanity, understanding what our source is for really healing the world. We all got that capability. Would require that understanding. And sometimes you would need absolutely you can't do it alone. And that's the whole thing I love about the collective. I must have spent in the last 2-3 years, I invested big time on my continued, ongoing transformation supports. And that's not something that anybody can determine for you, but they can offer it to you. And this is why I love these types of platforms. And I truly appreciate that you welcomed me for this chat. Yeah.
And I just want to say there's one thing that I just want to put out there in know? We talk about spirituality or going deep and into the spirit and the essence of who we are. And organizationally and in the in our jobs and whether it's corporate or whatever, this is all part of it. We all are these divine human beings. So if you're in a corporate environment and it's like, oh, you can't be talking about that, or you're voodoo, you're crazy because you've got this stuff, that isn't what belongs here. I call BS on that because the only way that we're really going to survive and heal humanity, which is every one of our responsibility ability is to tap into that wisdom that's within each of us, that heart centered space and allowing all of the people that we're in contact with to allow their hearts to shine and to share their beautiful wisdom. Because this is how we learn is through each other. Absolutely. It doesn't matter if it's the person working in the mail room. It doesn't matter if it's the CEO at the helm and everybody within that continuum. This is all about humanity and it is about heart.
So for the people that are watching, say, on my LinkedIn channel and you're going, Pat, what are you doing? It's like stepping up to do here. This is the that so of us that we're here to change the world, baby. We're here to change it in a great way, right?
That's right. I take this from my experience within the corporate world to run a business, I'm not suggesting that there is no value for structure because you definitely do need structure. You definitely need to have clarified roles of accountability and commitment. And when I say accountability, you need to understand the difference between responsibility and accountability as it pertains not just to rules, but individuals. And there are so many simple ways. It's just a matter of whether or not all of us are willing to let go of what it is that we need to let go of. And that is the part of the journey and adventure that is so enriching for an individual when they do work with coaches in the spaces that we are in, which is really transformational. If you're afraid, and I'm saying this to the audience, if you're afraid of the word and it just doesn't feel good with you because it's voodoo, as you would call it, words like soulful or spiritual, then call it what you want to call it. The individuals that will help you through it, there is an understanding that when you go and choose for the right coach, that they understand your space, first off.
Because we live in a time right now where it's both feet on two different paradigms. If you want to thrive, you have to understand that you're always both feet on two different platforms. There is the platform of what you know today, and there is the platform of what you want to have tomorrow. When you are doing Matt dance, there are basic things that you are saying heaven yes, or hell yes to committing. Make sure that you do the homework that you do. The homework that you do, and that I'm speaking of is that inner homework. The inner homework that if it resonates for you, if the person's dynamic resonates for you, then chances are, explore it because there is something to be said there because it is essence that is aligned in you both.
Well, thank you so much. We do need to get going here. But I just thank you so much, Maria, for sharing your essence.
Thank.
You. I wish I would have had you there many years ago when I was doing my thing in corporate America and that type of thing. But your essence is beautiful. I appreciate what you're bringing to the world. And I hope that everybody else has an opportunity to look at this. And I will have all Maria's information so that you can contact her. You can go to her website, you can check her out. And just thank you so much.
I appreciate this time. I really appreciate it. And you know what? Divine timing had it so that it was perfect that we were meeting today on this. Absolutely. I'm grateful. Take care. All right. Bye bye.
Take care. Peace out.
Contact us:
Cami Thelander: www.bearfootyogi.com
The Confident Grief Coach School: www.healingfamilygrief.com