There was a time in my life when I felt a lot of shame about how I lived day-to-day and had many judgments about what was supposed to be, instead of examining why it was this way.

Oftentimes, we have an all-or-nothing mindset that makes us believe that if we can't make a full change right now, then we should just let it go. This week, I discuss how to become self-aware of your being – an ongoing practice and not something that changes overnight.  

I explore two questions and skill sets that helped me make a significant change in my life and continue to assist me in creating a space for myself.

My invitation for you is to observe your way of being and try to identify where you learned it. Ask yourself if this way of being aligns with what you want and how you want to be.

Join me this week to discover which small steps you can start incorporating in your life to make the changes you want to see, allowing you to become self-aware of your being, and I'm sharing tools with you to help you make a space for yourself.

LISTEN HERE

Music (00:00:01) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. 2024. Hello 2024 goodbye 2023. Here we are. Well, this year I’m planning on talking a lot about this concept of self-awareness, and I’m going to break it down over the next series of podcasts to go into a little bit more granular details about it. So today I’m going to talk about self-awareness and our mindset. And one thing I want to remind you is that as we learn, it’s really easy to get into a shame spiral and beat ourselves up and think, oh no, you know, it’s too late and it’s not possible for me. And I have really fantastic news for you. We can learn as well as unlearn old ways of being. We can learn new ways, and we can unlearn old ways that may have gotten in our own way.

Koren (00:01:24) – Because we are here to evolve in this beautiful thing that we call life. Many of us have spent much of life doing what we’re supposed to do versus doing what we want to do. I’ve had a whole bunch of guests over the last 17 years who’ve talked about their journey, and they came to this moment where the life they were living were the shackles, those shackles on, as Martha Beck would call it, the shackles, or I call it the golden handcuffs to really the life that they really desired internally. So my example is my own story that I’ve talked about here on the show. And maybe you’re new, but my own story was I had the golden handcuffs, right? I had this job in my 20s, in my early 30s that so many people wanted. It was really, really hard to get. And I had it. I was tenured at 29. I was a college professor, and I was a head coach of both the men’s and women’s team. I had a great salary and benefits.

Koren (00:02:24) – I had a pension. And let’s not forget about tenure. When a kid like me, who grew up with a lot of financial hardship and difficulties and having security, financial security, that was everything. At least what I thought back then for me, that job security. But here’s the thing I was doing what I was supposed to do versus doing what I really, really, really wanted to do. And everybody’s version of what they really, really, really want to do is going to be different. But so often the patterns are the same. We grow up being told what is safe, figuring out what we’re supposed to do to be safe. Right. So there’s two components. Some of us are told, like, you know, look both ways before you cross the street. I’m not saying that’s not a bad thing to do, but we get told a lot of the rules of how we’re supposed to live, get a really good job, get a safe job that you can’t get fired from. Become a doctor because people need doctors, do STEM majors because science is going to be more valuable than a liberal arts major.

Koren (00:03:22) – There’s a lot of different social conditioning, right? Go be an engineer because, you know, you can always be employed. Whatever the belief system of our family of origin, our cultural programming, some of us, like when I was 11 years old and my parents were fighting about money and I was, you know, so afraid in my bed at that night at 10:00 at night. My solution to not being poor was to become a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer, never been a lawyer, coached a lot of lawyers. Some of my clients really love being lawyers. But that was what I figured out what I needed to do to be safe. Right? And this, my friend, is what we call great survival skills. So either following the rules that we’ve been told or figuring out what we think is the way to keep us safe. Many of the rules that we are told growing up is, you know, get good grades. If you get really good grades, you’re going to be safe.

Koren (00:04:16) – Is that really true? You know, so they take enduring classes, right, that are gruesome and overwhelming and do it perfectly and get those straight A’s. Right. I think I asked a client recently like did anyone ever look at your transcripts? And there’s a difference between striving for excellence and learning and really applying yourself and developing that skill set versus outcome oriented. Right. There’s always context to things. But what happens is that when we play this game of getting good grades and during classes and stuff, what starts to happen is that we really learn how to do it perfectly. And the thing about perfection is that perfection becomes armor on ourselves. It’s armor. It weighs us down. It’s heavy, it creates disconnection from our souls. And then one day we buckle from that weight, from that pressure, from that disconnection, and we wake up, possibly hating our life, wanting to run away. Are quitting the very thing we’ve worked so hard to attain. And this, my friend, is where I’m going to interject.

Koren (00:05:17) – This leads us potentially to the path to self-awareness.

Koren (00:05:23) – You’re like, wait, Koren, I’m gonna do everything I’m not supposed to that I don’t want to do. And then I become self-aware.

Koren (00:05:28) – We have self-awareness by oftentimes our falling down moments. Okay. And so that is one of the pathways to self-awareness. And that’s also one of the reasons that people come to work with me the way that they’ve been living, that has worked and brought them great success, is no longer working internally. Right. And so we get to working on self-awareness, and there are many layers of self-awareness, and we all have blind spots. I have them, we all have them. In the other part of self-awareness, not just the cultural programming. Right. So those often we’re not even aware that we can question that programming, whether it’s from our culture or whether it’s from our family of origin, or whether it’s a rule from a friend of ours that we’ve chosen to live by. And that’s where I want to talk about self-awareness and mindset, because self-awareness looks like the stories you tell yourself in realizing what you’re really saying about yourself, right? Like really paying attention.

Koren (00:06:32) – So often we may not be aware of what it is we believe or what it is that is guiding us. For instance, an example of this is when I was raising when I had four kids at home and I had a blended family. I didn’t ever want to be a stepmom because, you know, Disney and lots of places. And it’s always the evil stepmother, right? Lots of cultural programming around that. So I knew I didn’t like that title, but I didn’t know what title. But then I would judge myself all the time and beat myself up because there were socks on the floor just in the middle of the floor. They weren’t mine, of course. They were one of four children’s. There was these crazy schedules. There was chaos, right? When you have four children, there often is. And I would judge my life compared to Carol Brady. For those of you who don’t know Carol Brady, there was a show, I think it was in the 70s. I watched it in the 70s, may have started in the 60s, called The Brady Bunch, and it was the blended family.

Koren (00:07:31) – The wife had three kids, the husband had three kids. They merged together and became the Brady Bunch. There was no talk of step. They were all happy and joyful. When I recall, the biggest problem was when Marcia got hit in the face with the football and couldn’t go into this dance because of her nose being a bit disfigured. But I would compare myself internally to Carol Brady, who was somebody I never aspired to be, except that was my measuring stick about how I wasn’t good enough and I would feel bad and feel bad and feel bad. And it wasn’t until one day that I became aware of this story that I had in my head from the cultural programming and went, wait a second, let me think about this. There’s six kids, there are knee socks on the ground. Her husband seems to always be home. My husband was never home. She has an Alice.

Koren (00:08:20) – I want an Alice. Right. Like I was doing all of this.

Koren (00:08:24) – Yes, I had two less kids.

Koren (00:08:26) – There weren’t any exes involved, right? There wasn’t any child custody issues. Or when were the kids going to go back and forth and negotiations and all of that stuff? There wasn’t any of that stuff. And here I was comparing my reality with the fictional make believe TV show. So by that mindset and becoming aware of that story, what was driving my own unhappiness is what actually let me be free of that mindset of those rules. Realizing I didn’t have an Alice who cooked and went grocery shopping. You know, there wasn’t a Sam the Butcher. And my kids are humans, and there are socks on the ground, and we work on cleaning that up. But it doesn’t have to look like the Bradys house, right? That was not the reality that was a TV show. And reminding myself over and over that was a TV show and was never my aspiration to be Carol Brady. My aspiration was really to be Marcia Brady, but then I wouldn’t even be a mom. So paying attention to the stories we tell ourselves is so important to become aware of them.

Koren (00:09:30) – And what happens is, as we go through life, we may not be aware that these are the stories, right? Like I thought, oh well, I don’t cook. And so then I’m not going to fall into this like patriarchal order in my in my house, in my marriage, there was a lot of other invisible labor that I did, and there was a period of time where I did learn how to cook, not because I thought I needed to do it for my motherly duty. I needed to do it because I was so in so much fear around cooking that I was parenting really poorly with my daughter when she would cook, and I’ve talked about that as well. So it’s really important that we become aware of the stories again, whether they’re just something that seeps in from a television show, something that maybe your parents have told you. Family. Of origin and on to grandmother, a best friend, something that she picked up culturally. Something that maybe you are on a sports team. You know, another story I was told.

Koren (00:10:19) – I remember I was a senior in high school, and I had a coach who I really, really is become a friend and I, you know, really care about him. But I remember when I was 17, he said, well, you know, girls in college don’t get faster. And I remember walking away and going, screw that.

Koren (00:10:34) – You may think that, but.

Koren (00:10:35) – Let me prove you wrong. And that became a driving force. It wasn’t a limiting belief. It was a bit of a fire belief, or it was an accelerator for me when I would have doubt. I would definitely lean on that, like, let me show him. And I did. It did kind of help motivate me and in a healthy way. Right. But that was his limiting belief. And now we look at the world of sports and how women swimmers and how much faster they go in their in their 20s. It’s mind blowing. But what we thought in like 1989 and 90 was very different. And he had his own limiting belief.

Koren (00:11:04) – So one of the things as a coach, you know, I partner with my clients and I’m on their team and they know that. And I am very honored and privileged to be able to have this trustworthy seat in their support sections, where they come to me and they can vent and they can share with me some of the stuff that’s so deep inside. And sometimes they’re not even aware of what their beliefs are. And I have the privilege of knowing so many parts of themselves, right? They’re beautiful, amazing and flawed clients. And when I say flawed, it’s not a judgment like we are all flawed. And that’s the beauty of us. And much like an athletic coach that can see so much of their athletes who are in that competition, who may not may have blind spots because of what their perspective is from where, whether they’re on the field or in the pool. But as a coach, we’re on the sidelines. And so there’s so much more that we can see and we can decipher.

Koren (00:11:58) – Is it physical training? Is that mindset? Is it technical feedback? Is it tactical strategy? I do the same thing with my clients. And so one of the areas I’m talking about today is about mindset. So my clients may start to verbally process or verbally vomit with me because they need to vent. I’m a safe place. They can get it out with me because I’ve earned the right to hear their story, and it helps them process what’s going on versus then dumping them in a workplace that could actually create a big problem because they haven’t flushed out their ideas yet. And it can be really hurtful, right, to somebody else. So here’s some of the stories that I’ve collected in the last few weeks. I’ve had clients say I’m weird, or this would be more impactful if I were to have kids. I’m not going to make my goal. My sales will go down lower if I’m not working 10 to 12 hours a day. Now here’s the thing. These are little rocks in a sentence or in many sentences that my clients start to say.

Koren (00:12:57) – And then I pull them out and I start to notice what is their pattern, what is the story they keep telling themselves? They may not even hear it. Or maybe they may say, oh yeah, it’s fine that I know I don’t have kids and I’m fine with that. But then later on they’re bringing that same story back in. So becoming self-aware of our mindsets, the stories we tell ourselves is one of the keys to becoming more self-aware. Okay. And this is the one I’m talking about today. I’m going to talk about it in other days. The other ones. Now, for me, I remember before I became a coach, I didn’t realize I had this limiting belief of I’m a loser, and I’ve had that most of my life. Right there was, you know, there’s a lot of hardship my family faced, and they were really doing the best that they could. And I understand that now I am a 51 year old woman. But when I was young, I didn’t understand. And so I came up with a solution of like, oh, we, we have these things because we’re just losers, right? I didn’t even have that sentence very clear.

Koren (00:13:56) – But it was so a part of my way of being. And it would show up. It could show up in athletics, it could show up socially, right? It could show up in lots of different places from time and again. And sometimes it wasn’t even there. But that was a very big, limiting belief. When I became aware of this limiting belief, that’s when things started to change. Prior to that, I tried to outrun it by proving to myself that was not the case. Right. And that’s where it became this achieving and over achieving a great deal. But I wasn’t letting go of this limiting belief. And in fact, I worked even harder to try to prove to myself. So the first step to becoming aware of those four words is that I am a loser. And then sometimes I have that other story. I’m a loser from Loser Street. The first step to becoming aware of those words that were deeply inside of me and that I unconsciously believed was to write about it, was to recognize it and own that story with myself, even in my own head, like, oh, I have this belief.

Koren (00:15:04) – And then at some point have the courage, like I did, to share it with somebody who’d earned the right to hear. Of my story. Who could hold that space? And at first they’d say, like, I don’t understand Korean. You win in everything. Why is this an issue? That didn’t help me feel like I was a loser from Loser Street. And remember what I said was that I tried to outrun it. I tried to prove it. And when I became aware of it, I was like, oh, well, I’m just going to work really, really hard to overcome that belief. And then I’ll prove to myself, see, I can work really hard.

Koren (00:15:32) – I can do things, I can just work harder. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. That just made me more exhausted.

Koren (00:15:38) – So learning about limiting beliefs is really important. Learning what your limiting beliefs are and how we do that is when we start listening to our stuff. And that’s a step of the self awareness that I’m talking about today.

Koren (00:15:50) – Hearing the stories in our head, like just start noticing, listening. What is it that you say about yourself? What is it that you say? What are the patterns of things that you say over and over? Writing things down is really helpful as well, right? Writing it down and reflecting, noticing like, oh, here’s this thing that keeps popping up again. Byron Katie talks about questioning our stories by asking, is it really true? You know, so for example, is it really true I’m a loser from Loser Street? No. My family had hardships. Yes to my family. Have limited skill sets. Absolutely. But I wasn’t a loser from Loser Street. But that’s what I did do. So as a young kid or maybe asking yourself, like, is it really true? You are weird? Like, I have a client that likes to self-identify as I know it’s really weird and I know I’m weird. And then she says this over and over, right? So we’re working on overcoming that identity, and it’s, is it really true that you’re weird and something’s wrong with you? You know, sometimes I’ve said like, hey, let’s fly our freak flag high.

Koren (00:16:52) – Like, let’s own our own individuality. This is what works for you. That’s okay. Right? And it’s always about context too. Like, as long as that if works for you and it’s not hurting other people, that’s okay. And then you can also ask, is it really true that you can’t have a good life if you don’t have kids? So whether I have clients that don’t have kids, I have clients that do have kids, and having kids isn’t the happily ever after. Not having kids as the happily ever after, right? But we have our chosen pathways, and sometimes our chosen pathways may be a bit determined for us by different life situations. Or maybe you have the story that you’re too much or that you’re difficult. Whatever the beliefs are, one thing that’s really important is to unpack what is swirling in your head. And this is the step of self-awareness. What is being said in your brain? What are you then eventually saying out loud yourself? Pay attention to that. What do you believe about yourself? And remember, our brains are designed to make up stories.

Koren (00:18:00) – That’s what they do. In the absence of data, our brains fill in a story. When we don’t know a story, our brains look for information that has already been given to us. Again, cultural programming. Right? That’s how my brain went to Carol Brady. It looks for what it can fill in to help make sense of this uncomfortableness that we’re going through. And my question for you is, isn’t it time to listen to your stories and unpack what is true and what is not, what is learned via cultural programming, or from our family of origin, or just plain old surviving? Back in college, I realized I had a limiting belief about money, and I had this belief that money didn’t happen to people like us, and us was meaning myself and my family, and that was the only way that I could make sense of our financial struggles. So then.

Koren (00:18:54) – I decided gladly towards money and to people that had money and I villainized money and the people with money.

Koren (00:19:00) – Because that makes sense, right? You’re in shame. Money doesn’t happen to people like that. Well screw you, you guys are all evil. Money is evil. That’s the pattern, people. And then I learned that money doesn’t care if you’re good or bad person. Take a look. There are people that are amazing, people that have a lot of money in their people that are horrible, people that have a lot of money. Money is just money and money. There’s tools to help us make money and frameworks to make money, as well as systems that can really hurt you when it comes to money. Think credit cards, debt, college student debt. Which one day will be a whole show that I can talk about, right? So money is a thing. It’s a circumstance. It’s very neutral. It’s like what I say about swimming in a in a pace clock. The clock doesn’t care if you’re a good person, bad person. If you had a justified reason for not making practice or not.

Koren (00:19:51) – It’s very objective. You put your hand on the wall, it gives you time. Money is objective. It’s maybe the handlers of the money that may not be objective. So becoming aware of what your limiting beliefs are is really, really important. For me, breaking free from my limiting belief about money was life changing. I went from a person who believed money doesn’t happen to people like me to I am really good with money. And in today’s step of self-awareness, it comes down to what do you say to yourself? What do you believe? What’s so ingrained inside of you that you’ve collected? Become aware of this again without judging yourself. Self-compassion is so important, and one of the tools that I talk about with my clients is being a compassionate observer. It doesn’t mean like, oh, it’s fine, it’ll be okay. And being really dismissive, it’s about really looking at the whole context of it and understanding and realizing how it may have limited you. Because maybe you didn’t have skill sets, maybe you didn’t have awareness and what you can learn from it too.

Koren (00:20:59) – Then what can you do to help change the trajectory of that situation? Again, with money, I realized that there were tools and it was objective. One day, with my self-awareness of the Carol Brady story, I realized I was comparing myself to Carol Brady and The Brady Bunch, and I realized that it was fiction and I was living a real life, a nonfiction life that was really messy and that helped me break free from my own limiting belief. It was that self-awareness that helped me transform. And going back to what I said earlier, it was through those falling down moments, right? It was through judging myself. But then it was when I finally looked at, okay, why am I judging myself? Right? The falling down moment was me judging. I want to be clear about that. Me judging me. And then it wasn’t until I became compassionate and had empathy and I could look at why am I judging myself? What is that about? And realizing where it stemmed from. That’s where freedom came.

Koren (00:21:56) – Another way to think about it is being self-aware is like walking through life with your eyes wide open, and we’re still going to have blind spots because there are areas that we can’t see. And that’s why it’s important that we don’t go through life alone. Right? We have people to go through with. We are in teams. And next week’s episode, I’ll discuss more about the next step in self-awareness, which is emotional intelligence. Today I’m going to wrap up about mindset. So the evolution of our life is following the rules generally, right? Because we need to survive. We need to be safe. We need to follow the rules. We’re part of this system, the order. Right? Our parents want to make sure we fit in. And then here I talk about we want to belong and then who are our people, right. And the evolution of our lives, in addition to following the rules, is there’s guidelines and there’s frameworks of those in charge. And they could be our parents, teachers, bosses, cultural programming.

Koren (00:22:49) – Right. And as we evolve, we start to develop our own agency in life. And this evolution happens with self-awareness. And it’s a process. And as you do this, my invitation for you is to be self compassionate. Be kind to yourself. Let go of judgment to yourself or others. Right? We may start out judging because that’s what we do, but then when we can look at that falling down moment of judgment and understand and gather insight, letting go of our judgment of ourselves or others, being curious, focusing on learning and growing versus judging, which is armor and self-protection. And it gets us in our way. As you become self-aware, it will be messy. And yes, it does become so incredibly beautiful and freeing. I’m still a mom of four. Bonus mom of two. Birth mom of two. I’ve raised four kids, right? And I no longer have that judgment of I need to be Carol Brady because I realized that is fiction and I live in non-fiction life. Start listening to what is going on inside your brain.

Koren (00:23:59) – And one great way to do this, not the only way, but is to write. Just declutter it and get it down. Write down these thoughts and just start to notice what are the patterns? What’s the message that keeps coming up and up? And then you’ll start to see what that limiting belief is. Declutter that magnificent brain of yours. Treat it like a boutique, right? Whatever. If you like fancy purses or you like, you know, these high end stores treat it that way instead. Most of us treat it like Walmart, where it’s just crammed in with a whole bunch of stuff. We need to let that stuff out, so write it. The other is hire a coach who will be your trusted partner and help you with your blind spots, as well as help you create this self-awareness and live your life proactively as a deliberate creator versus surviving, fighting, reacting, and leading yourself to burnout. All right, my friend, until next time when we talk more about self-awareness. I’m smiling big for you.

Koren (00:25:01) – Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you’ll love my weekly emails. I know you’re thinking, Karen, really? Do I want another email in my overflowing inbox? Yes you do. Yippee skippy you do. These are short. They’re sweet. On Fridays, I send out the Friday podcast. It’s a great reminder that there’s a new show and it comes straight into your inbox of the latest episode. Awesome. You click on it, you go straight. Because we all need reminders. We have busy, full lives. And then on Sundays I have my Sunday Love column and these are emails I write from the heart. They’re filled with love. We need more love. We all do, myself included. These are short emails where you get a quick takeaway so you can incorporate this into your life, because people often want to know what to do and how to do it. And maybe sometimes it’s a story that you get or there’s like one time I wrote about the ten ways to practice gratitude, and that became such a great tool when one of the readers was struggling and the middle of the night, because it can be a scary place in our brains in the middle of the night.

Koren (00:26:15) – And she remembered the email that I sent about ten ways to practice gratitude. And she was able to practice gratitude and fall back asleep. That was an awesome lesson for her to incorporate into her life. Go to the show notes and there’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up and get these emails in your inbox.

Music (00:26:33) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

The post Grow Your Self-Awareness: Being appeared first on howshereallydoesit.com.

Last week, I discussed how to grow self-awareness through mindset. On today's episode, we look at emotions. While we are all emotional beings, some of us don't have a language for emotions or maybe we've been told that emotions are weak.

One thing you can do to grow your self-awareness is to learn the language of emotions.

Emotions are not a weakness. They communicate what is going on inside yourself when you are too busy to notice. They give you a signal, but it's your job to feel, identify and give yourself the space to move through it.

My friend, I invite you to feel the emotions deeply. Just like learning a new language, learning the emotional language is challenging, but it is important to discover how to feel your feelings so you can understand what they are telling you. 

Tune in this week to learn how to move through the emotions and identify what they are trying to tell you. 

LISTEN HERE

Music (00:00:01) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. 2024. Hello 2024 goodbye 2023. Here we are. Well, this year I’m planning on talking a lot about this concept of self-awareness, and I’m going to break it down over the next series of podcasts to go into a little bit more granular details about it. So today I’m going to talk about self-awareness and our mindset. And one thing I want to remind you is that as we learn, it’s really easy to get into a shame spiral and beat ourselves up and think, oh no, you know, it’s too late and it’s not possible for me. And I have really fantastic news for you. We can learn as well as unlearn old ways of being. We can learn new ways, and we can unlearn old ways that may have gotten in our own way.

Koren (00:01:24) – Because we are here to evolve in this beautiful thing that we call life. Many of us have spent much of life doing what we’re supposed to do versus doing what we want to do. I’ve had a whole bunch of guests over the last 17 years who’ve talked about their journey, and they came to this moment where the life they were living were the shackles, those shackles on, as Martha Beck would call it, the shackles, or I call it the golden handcuffs to really the life that they really desired internally. So my example is my own story that I’ve talked about here on the show. And maybe you’re new, but my own story was I had the golden handcuffs, right? I had this job in my 20s, in my early 30s that so many people wanted. It was really, really hard to get. And I had it. I was tenured at 29. I was a college professor, and I was a head coach of both the men’s and women’s team. I had a great salary and benefits.

Koren (00:02:24) – I had a pension. And let’s not forget about tenure. When a kid like me, who grew up with a lot of financial hardship and difficulties and having security, financial security, that was everything. At least what I thought back then for me, that job security. But here’s the thing I was doing what I was supposed to do versus doing what I really, really, really wanted to do. And everybody’s version of what they really, really, really want to do is going to be different. But so often the patterns are the same. We grow up being told what is safe, figuring out what we’re supposed to do to be safe. Right. So there’s two components. Some of us are told, like, you know, look both ways before you cross the street. I’m not saying that’s not a bad thing to do, but we get told a lot of the rules of how we’re supposed to live, get a really good job, get a safe job that you can’t get fired from. Become a doctor because people need doctors, do STEM majors because science is going to be more valuable than a liberal arts major.

Koren (00:03:22) – There’s a lot of different social conditioning, right? Go be an engineer because, you know, you can always be employed. Whatever the belief system of our family of origin, our cultural programming, some of us, like when I was 11 years old and my parents were fighting about money and I was, you know, so afraid in my bed at that night at 10:00 at night. My solution to not being poor was to become a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer, never been a lawyer, coached a lot of lawyers. Some of my clients really love being lawyers. But that was what I figured out what I needed to do to be safe. Right? And this, my friend, is what we call great survival skills. So either following the rules that we’ve been told or figuring out what we think is the way to keep us safe. Many of the rules that we are told growing up is, you know, get good grades. If you get really good grades, you’re going to be safe.

Koren (00:04:16) – Is that really true? You know, so they take enduring classes, right, that are gruesome and overwhelming and do it perfectly and get those straight A’s. Right. I think I asked a client recently like did anyone ever look at your transcripts? And there’s a difference between striving for excellence and learning and really applying yourself and developing that skill set versus outcome oriented. Right. There’s always context to things. But what happens is that when we play this game of getting good grades and during classes and stuff, what starts to happen is that we really learn how to do it perfectly. And the thing about perfection is that perfection becomes armor on ourselves. It’s armor. It weighs us down. It’s heavy, it creates disconnection from our souls. And then one day we buckle from that weight, from that pressure, from that disconnection, and we wake up, possibly hating our life, wanting to run away. Are quitting the very thing we’ve worked so hard to attain. And this, my friend, is where I’m going to interject.

Koren (00:05:17) – This leads us potentially to the path to self-awareness.

Koren (00:05:23) – You’re like, wait, Koren, I’m gonna do everything I’m not supposed to that I don’t want to do. And then I become self-aware.

Koren (00:05:28) – We have self-awareness by oftentimes our falling down moments. Okay. And so that is one of the pathways to self-awareness. And that’s also one of the reasons that people come to work with me the way that they’ve been living, that has worked and brought them great success, is no longer working internally. Right. And so we get to working on self-awareness, and there are many layers of self-awareness, and we all have blind spots. I have them, we all have them. In the other part of self-awareness, not just the cultural programming. Right. So those often we’re not even aware that we can question that programming, whether it’s from our culture or whether it’s from our family of origin, or whether it’s a rule from a friend of ours that we’ve chosen to live by. And that’s where I want to talk about self-awareness and mindset, because self-awareness looks like the stories you tell yourself in realizing what you’re really saying about yourself, right? Like really paying attention.

Koren (00:06:32) – So often we may not be aware of what it is we believe or what it is that is guiding us. For instance, an example of this is when I was raising when I had four kids at home and I had a blended family. I didn’t ever want to be a stepmom because, you know, Disney and lots of places. And it’s always the evil stepmother, right? Lots of cultural programming around that. So I knew I didn’t like that title, but I didn’t know what title. But then I would judge myself all the time and beat myself up because there were socks on the floor just in the middle of the floor. They weren’t mine, of course. They were one of four children’s. There was these crazy schedules. There was chaos, right? When you have four children, there often is. And I would judge my life compared to Carol Brady. For those of you who don’t know Carol Brady, there was a show, I think it was in the 70s. I watched it in the 70s, may have started in the 60s, called The Brady Bunch, and it was the blended family.

Koren (00:07:31) – The wife had three kids, the husband had three kids. They merged together and became the Brady Bunch. There was no talk of step. They were all happy and joyful. When I recall, the biggest problem was when Marcia got hit in the face with the football and couldn’t go into this dance because of her nose being a bit disfigured. But I would compare myself internally to Carol Brady, who was somebody I never aspired to be, except that was my measuring stick about how I wasn’t good enough and I would feel bad and feel bad and feel bad. And it wasn’t until one day that I became aware of this story that I had in my head from the cultural programming and went, wait a second, let me think about this. There’s six kids, there are knee socks on the ground. Her husband seems to always be home. My husband was never home. She has an Alice.

Koren (00:08:20) – I want an Alice. Right. Like I was doing all of this.

Koren (00:08:24) – Yes, I had two less kids.

Koren (00:08:26) – There weren’t any exes involved, right? There wasn’t any child custody issues. Or when were the kids going to go back and forth and negotiations and all of that stuff? There wasn’t any of that stuff. And here I was comparing my reality with the fictional make believe TV show. So by that mindset and becoming aware of that story, what was driving my own unhappiness is what actually let me be free of that mindset of those rules. Realizing I didn’t have an Alice who cooked and went grocery shopping. You know, there wasn’t a Sam the Butcher. And my kids are humans, and there are socks on the ground, and we work on cleaning that up. But it doesn’t have to look like the Bradys house, right? That was not the reality that was a TV show. And reminding myself over and over that was a TV show and was never my aspiration to be Carol Brady. My aspiration was really to be Marcia Brady, but then I wouldn’t even be a mom. So paying attention to the stories we tell ourselves is so important to become aware of them.

Koren (00:09:30) – And what happens is, as we go through life, we may not be aware that these are the stories, right? Like I thought, oh well, I don’t cook. And so then I’m not going to fall into this like patriarchal order in my in my house, in my marriage, there was a lot of other invisible labor that I did, and there was a period of time where I did learn how to cook, not because I thought I needed to do it for my motherly duty. I needed to do it because I was so in so much fear around cooking that I was parenting really poorly with my daughter when she would cook, and I’ve talked about that as well. So it’s really important that we become aware of the stories again, whether they’re just something that seeps in from a television show, something that maybe your parents have told you. Family. Of origin and on to grandmother, a best friend, something that she picked up culturally. Something that maybe you are on a sports team. You know, another story I was told.

Koren (00:10:19) – I remember I was a senior in high school, and I had a coach who I really, really is become a friend and I, you know, really care about him. But I remember when I was 17, he said, well, you know, girls in college don’t get faster. And I remember walking away and going, screw that.

Koren (00:10:34) – You may think that, but.

Koren (00:10:35) – Let me prove you wrong. And that became a driving force. It wasn’t a limiting belief. It was a bit of a fire belief, or it was an accelerator for me when I would have doubt. I would definitely lean on that, like, let me show him. And I did. It did kind of help motivate me and in a healthy way. Right. But that was his limiting belief. And now we look at the world of sports and how women swimmers and how much faster they go in their in their 20s. It’s mind blowing. But what we thought in like 1989 and 90 was very different. And he had his own limiting belief.

Koren (00:11:04) – So one of the things as a coach, you know, I partner with my clients and I’m on their team and they know that. And I am very honored and privileged to be able to have this trustworthy seat in their support sections, where they come to me and they can vent and they can share with me some of the stuff that’s so deep inside. And sometimes they’re not even aware of what their beliefs are. And I have the privilege of knowing so many parts of themselves, right? They’re beautiful, amazing and flawed clients. And when I say flawed, it’s not a judgment like we are all flawed. And that’s the beauty of us. And much like an athletic coach that can see so much of their athletes who are in that competition, who may not may have blind spots because of what their perspective is from where, whether they’re on the field or in the pool. But as a coach, we’re on the sidelines. And so there’s so much more that we can see and we can decipher.

Koren (00:11:58) – Is it physical training? Is that mindset? Is it technical feedback? Is it tactical strategy? I do the same thing with my clients. And so one of the areas I’m talking about today is about mindset. So my clients may start to verbally process or verbally vomit with me because they need to vent. I’m a safe place. They can get it out with me because I’ve earned the right to hear their story, and it helps them process what’s going on versus then dumping them in a workplace that could actually create a big problem because they haven’t flushed out their ideas yet. And it can be really hurtful, right, to somebody else. So here’s some of the stories that I’ve collected in the last few weeks. I’ve had clients say I’m weird, or this would be more impactful if I were to have kids. I’m not going to make my goal. My sales will go down lower if I’m not working 10 to 12 hours a day. Now here’s the thing. These are little rocks in a sentence or in many sentences that my clients start to say.

Koren (00:12:57) – And then I pull them out and I start to notice what is their pattern, what is the story they keep telling themselves? They may not even hear it. Or maybe they may say, oh yeah, it’s fine that I know I don’t have kids and I’m fine with that. But then later on they’re bringing that same story back in. So becoming self-aware of our mindsets, the stories we tell ourselves is one of the keys to becoming more self-aware. Okay. And this is the one I’m talking about today. I’m going to talk about it in other days. The other ones. Now, for me, I remember before I became a coach, I didn’t realize I had this limiting belief of I’m a loser, and I’ve had that most of my life. Right there was, you know, there’s a lot of hardship my family faced, and they were really doing the best that they could. And I understand that now I am a 51 year old woman. But when I was young, I didn’t understand. And so I came up with a solution of like, oh, we, we have these things because we’re just losers, right? I didn’t even have that sentence very clear.

Koren (00:13:56) – But it was so a part of my way of being. And it would show up. It could show up in athletics, it could show up socially, right? It could show up in lots of different places from time and again. And sometimes it wasn’t even there. But that was a very big, limiting belief. When I became aware of this limiting belief, that’s when things started to change. Prior to that, I tried to outrun it by proving to myself that was not the case. Right. And that’s where it became this achieving and over achieving a great deal. But I wasn’t letting go of this limiting belief. And in fact, I worked even harder to try to prove to myself. So the first step to becoming aware of those four words is that I am a loser. And then sometimes I have that other story. I’m a loser from Loser Street. The first step to becoming aware of those words that were deeply inside of me and that I unconsciously believed was to write about it, was to recognize it and own that story with myself, even in my own head, like, oh, I have this belief.

Koren (00:15:04) – And then at some point have the courage, like I did, to share it with somebody who’d earned the right to hear. Of my story. Who could hold that space? And at first they’d say, like, I don’t understand Korean. You win in everything. Why is this an issue? That didn’t help me feel like I was a loser from Loser Street. And remember what I said was that I tried to outrun it. I tried to prove it. And when I became aware of it, I was like, oh, well, I’m just going to work really, really hard to overcome that belief. And then I’ll prove to myself, see, I can work really hard.

Koren (00:15:32) – I can do things, I can just work harder. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. That just made me more exhausted.

Koren (00:15:38) – So learning about limiting beliefs is really important. Learning what your limiting beliefs are and how we do that is when we start listening to our stuff. And that’s a step of the self awareness that I’m talking about today.

Koren (00:15:50) – Hearing the stories in our head, like just start noticing, listening. What is it that you say about yourself? What is it that you say? What are the patterns of things that you say over and over? Writing things down is really helpful as well, right? Writing it down and reflecting, noticing like, oh, here’s this thing that keeps popping up again. Byron Katie talks about questioning our stories by asking, is it really true? You know, so for example, is it really true I’m a loser from Loser Street? No. My family had hardships. Yes to my family. Have limited skill sets. Absolutely. But I wasn’t a loser from Loser Street. But that’s what I did do. So as a young kid or maybe asking yourself, like, is it really true? You are weird? Like, I have a client that likes to self-identify as I know it’s really weird and I know I’m weird. And then she says this over and over, right? So we’re working on overcoming that identity, and it’s, is it really true that you’re weird and something’s wrong with you? You know, sometimes I’ve said like, hey, let’s fly our freak flag high.

Koren (00:16:52) – Like, let’s own our own individuality. This is what works for you. That’s okay. Right? And it’s always about context too. Like, as long as that if works for you and it’s not hurting other people, that’s okay. And then you can also ask, is it really true that you can’t have a good life if you don’t have kids? So whether I have clients that don’t have kids, I have clients that do have kids, and having kids isn’t the happily ever after. Not having kids as the happily ever after, right? But we have our chosen pathways, and sometimes our chosen pathways may be a bit determined for us by different life situations. Or maybe you have the story that you’re too much or that you’re difficult. Whatever the beliefs are, one thing that’s really important is to unpack what is swirling in your head. And this is the step of self-awareness. What is being said in your brain? What are you then eventually saying out loud yourself? Pay attention to that. What do you believe about yourself? And remember, our brains are designed to make up stories.

Koren (00:18:00) – That’s what they do. In the absence of data, our brains fill in a story. When we don’t know a story, our brains look for information that has already been given to us. Again, cultural programming. Right? That’s how my brain went to Carol Brady. It looks for what it can fill in to help make sense of this uncomfortableness that we’re going through. And my question for you is, isn’t it time to listen to your stories and unpack what is true and what is not, what is learned via cultural programming, or from our family of origin, or just plain old surviving? Back in college, I realized I had a limiting belief about money, and I had this belief that money didn’t happen to people like us, and us was meaning myself and my family, and that was the only way that I could make sense of our financial struggles. So then.

Koren (00:18:54) – I decided gladly towards money and to people that had money and I villainized money and the people with money.

Koren (00:19:00) – Because that makes sense, right? You’re in shame. Money doesn’t happen to people like that. Well screw you, you guys are all evil. Money is evil. That’s the pattern, people. And then I learned that money doesn’t care if you’re good or bad person. Take a look. There are people that are amazing, people that have a lot of money in their people that are horrible, people that have a lot of money. Money is just money and money. There’s tools to help us make money and frameworks to make money, as well as systems that can really hurt you when it comes to money. Think credit cards, debt, college student debt. Which one day will be a whole show that I can talk about, right? So money is a thing. It’s a circumstance. It’s very neutral. It’s like what I say about swimming in a in a pace clock. The clock doesn’t care if you’re a good person, bad person. If you had a justified reason for not making practice or not.

Koren (00:19:51) – It’s very objective. You put your hand on the wall, it gives you time. Money is objective. It’s maybe the handlers of the money that may not be objective. So becoming aware of what your limiting beliefs are is really, really important. For me, breaking free from my limiting belief about money was life changing. I went from a person who believed money doesn’t happen to people like me to I am really good with money. And in today’s step of self-awareness, it comes down to what do you say to yourself? What do you believe? What’s so ingrained inside of you that you’ve collected? Become aware of this again without judging yourself. Self-compassion is so important, and one of the tools that I talk about with my clients is being a compassionate observer. It doesn’t mean like, oh, it’s fine, it’ll be okay. And being really dismissive, it’s about really looking at the whole context of it and understanding and realizing how it may have limited you. Because maybe you didn’t have skill sets, maybe you didn’t have awareness and what you can learn from it too.

Koren (00:20:59) – Then what can you do to help change the trajectory of that situation? Again, with money, I realized that there were tools and it was objective. One day, with my self-awareness of the Carol Brady story, I realized I was comparing myself to Carol Brady and The Brady Bunch, and I realized that it was fiction and I was living a real life, a nonfiction life that was really messy and that helped me break free from my own limiting belief. It was that self-awareness that helped me transform. And going back to what I said earlier, it was through those falling down moments, right? It was through judging myself. But then it was when I finally looked at, okay, why am I judging myself? Right? The falling down moment was me judging. I want to be clear about that. Me judging me. And then it wasn’t until I became compassionate and had empathy and I could look at why am I judging myself? What is that about? And realizing where it stemmed from. That’s where freedom came.

Koren (00:21:56) – Another way to think about it is being self-aware is like walking through life with your eyes wide open, and we’re still going to have blind spots because there are areas that we can’t see. And that’s why it’s important that we don’t go through life alone. Right? We have people to go through with. We are in teams. And next week’s episode, I’ll discuss more about the next step in self-awareness, which is emotional intelligence. Today I’m going to wrap up about mindset. So the evolution of our life is following the rules generally, right? Because we need to survive. We need to be safe. We need to follow the rules. We’re part of this system, the order. Right? Our parents want to make sure we fit in. And then here I talk about we want to belong and then who are our people, right. And the evolution of our lives, in addition to following the rules, is there’s guidelines and there’s frameworks of those in charge. And they could be our parents, teachers, bosses, cultural programming.

Koren (00:22:49) – Right. And as we evolve, we start to develop our own agency in life. And this evolution happens with self-awareness. And it’s a process. And as you do this, my invitation for you is to be self compassionate. Be kind to yourself. Let go of judgment to yourself or others. Right? We may start out judging because that’s what we do, but then when we can look at that falling down moment of judgment and understand and gather insight, letting go of our judgment of ourselves or others, being curious, focusing on learning and growing versus judging, which is armor and self-protection. And it gets us in our way. As you become self-aware, it will be messy. And yes, it does become so incredibly beautiful and freeing. I’m still a mom of four. Bonus mom of two. Birth mom of two. I’ve raised four kids, right? And I no longer have that judgment of I need to be Carol Brady because I realized that is fiction and I live in non-fiction life. Start listening to what is going on inside your brain.

Koren (00:23:59) – And one great way to do this, not the only way, but is to write. Just declutter it and get it down. Write down these thoughts and just start to notice what are the patterns? What’s the message that keeps coming up and up? And then you’ll start to see what that limiting belief is. Declutter that magnificent brain of yours. Treat it like a boutique, right? Whatever. If you like fancy purses or you like, you know, these high end stores treat it that way instead. Most of us treat it like Walmart, where it’s just crammed in with a whole bunch of stuff. We need to let that stuff out, so write it. The other is hire a coach who will be your trusted partner and help you with your blind spots, as well as help you create this self-awareness and live your life proactively as a deliberate creator versus surviving, fighting, reacting, and leading yourself to burnout. All right, my friend, until next time when we talk more about self-awareness. I’m smiling big for you.

Koren (00:25:01) – Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you’ll love my weekly emails. I know you’re thinking, Karen, really? Do I want another email in my overflowing inbox? Yes you do. Yippee skippy you do. These are short. They’re sweet. On Fridays, I send out the Friday podcast. It’s a great reminder that there’s a new show and it comes straight into your inbox of the latest episode. Awesome. You click on it, you go straight. Because we all need reminders. We have busy, full lives. And then on Sundays I have my Sunday Love column and these are emails I write from the heart. They’re filled with love. We need more love. We all do, myself included. These are short emails where you get a quick takeaway so you can incorporate this into your life, because people often want to know what to do and how to do it. And maybe sometimes it’s a story that you get or there’s like one time I wrote about the ten ways to practice gratitude, and that became such a great tool when one of the readers was struggling and the middle of the night, because it can be a scary place in our brains in the middle of the night.

Koren (00:26:15) – And she remembered the email that I sent about ten ways to practice gratitude. And she was able to practice gratitude and fall back asleep. That was an awesome lesson for her to incorporate into her life. Go to the show notes and there’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up and get these emails in your inbox.

Music (00:26:33) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

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Some of our beliefs are shaped by what our parents have told us, by our family origins, or by something we pick up culturally or in a television show. Our beliefs guide us into thinking in a way that is not necessarily aligned with our true mindset. They can also make us do what we think we're supposed to do, rather than what we truly want. 

For some, the way that once brought them success is no longer working internally. Those realizations can potentially lead to the path of self-awareness.

Self-awareness is listening to the stories you tell yourself and realizing what they actually mean. 

I invite you to listen to your stories and unpack what is true and what is not. If we don't pay attention to the thoughts we have, we might not be aware of the limiting beliefs that guide us.

Discover how to be aware of the things that you say to yourself and identify your limiting beliefs. Learn how things start to change when you listen to your stories and become aware of those beliefs. Unpacking the thoughts swirling in your head is the first step towards self-awareness.

LISTEN HERE

Music (00:00:01) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. 2024. Hello 2024 goodbye 2023. Here we are. Well, this year I’m planning on talking a lot about this concept of self-awareness, and I’m going to break it down over the next series of podcasts to go into a little bit more granular details about it. So today I’m going to talk about self-awareness and our mindset. And one thing I want to remind you is that as we learn, it’s really easy to get into a shame spiral and beat ourselves up and think, oh no, you know, it’s too late and it’s not possible for me. And I have really fantastic news for you. We can learn as well as unlearn old ways of being. We can learn new ways, and we can unlearn old ways that may have gotten in our own way.

Koren (00:01:24) – Because we are here to evolve in this beautiful thing that we call life. Many of us have spent much of life doing what we’re supposed to do versus doing what we want to do. I’ve had a whole bunch of guests over the last 17 years who’ve talked about their journey, and they came to this moment where the life they were living were the shackles, those shackles on, as Martha Beck would call it, the shackles, or I call it the golden handcuffs to really the life that they really desired internally. So my example is my own story that I’ve talked about here on the show. And maybe you’re new, but my own story was I had the golden handcuffs, right? I had this job in my 20s, in my early 30s that so many people wanted. It was really, really hard to get. And I had it. I was tenured at 29. I was a college professor, and I was a head coach of both the men’s and women’s team. I had a great salary and benefits.

Koren (00:02:24) – I had a pension. And let’s not forget about tenure. When a kid like me, who grew up with a lot of financial hardship and difficulties and having security, financial security, that was everything. At least what I thought back then for me, that job security. But here’s the thing I was doing what I was supposed to do versus doing what I really, really, really wanted to do. And everybody’s version of what they really, really, really want to do is going to be different. But so often the patterns are the same. We grow up being told what is safe, figuring out what we’re supposed to do to be safe. Right. So there’s two components. Some of us are told, like, you know, look both ways before you cross the street. I’m not saying that’s not a bad thing to do, but we get told a lot of the rules of how we’re supposed to live, get a really good job, get a safe job that you can’t get fired from. Become a doctor because people need doctors, do STEM majors because science is going to be more valuable than a liberal arts major.

Koren (00:03:22) – There’s a lot of different social conditioning, right? Go be an engineer because, you know, you can always be employed. Whatever the belief system of our family of origin, our cultural programming, some of us, like when I was 11 years old and my parents were fighting about money and I was, you know, so afraid in my bed at that night at 10:00 at night. My solution to not being poor was to become a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer, never been a lawyer, coached a lot of lawyers. Some of my clients really love being lawyers. But that was what I figured out what I needed to do to be safe. Right? And this, my friend, is what we call great survival skills. So either following the rules that we’ve been told or figuring out what we think is the way to keep us safe. Many of the rules that we are told growing up is, you know, get good grades. If you get really good grades, you’re going to be safe.

Koren (00:04:16) – Is that really true? You know, so they take enduring classes, right, that are gruesome and overwhelming and do it perfectly and get those straight A’s. Right. I think I asked a client recently like did anyone ever look at your transcripts? And there’s a difference between striving for excellence and learning and really applying yourself and developing that skill set versus outcome oriented. Right. There’s always context to things. But what happens is that when we play this game of getting good grades and during classes and stuff, what starts to happen is that we really learn how to do it perfectly. And the thing about perfection is that perfection becomes armor on ourselves. It’s armor. It weighs us down. It’s heavy, it creates disconnection from our souls. And then one day we buckle from that weight, from that pressure, from that disconnection, and we wake up, possibly hating our life, wanting to run away. Are quitting the very thing we’ve worked so hard to attain. And this, my friend, is where I’m going to interject.

Koren (00:05:17) – This leads us potentially to the path to self-awareness.

Koren (00:05:23) – You’re like, wait, Koren, I’m gonna do everything I’m not supposed to that I don’t want to do. And then I become self-aware.

Koren (00:05:28) – We have self-awareness by oftentimes our falling down moments. Okay. And so that is one of the pathways to self-awareness. And that’s also one of the reasons that people come to work with me the way that they’ve been living, that has worked and brought them great success, is no longer working internally. Right. And so we get to working on self-awareness, and there are many layers of self-awareness, and we all have blind spots. I have them, we all have them. In the other part of self-awareness, not just the cultural programming. Right. So those often we’re not even aware that we can question that programming, whether it’s from our culture or whether it’s from our family of origin, or whether it’s a rule from a friend of ours that we’ve chosen to live by. And that’s where I want to talk about self-awareness and mindset, because self-awareness looks like the stories you tell yourself in realizing what you’re really saying about yourself, right? Like really paying attention.

Koren (00:06:32) – So often we may not be aware of what it is we believe or what it is that is guiding us. For instance, an example of this is when I was raising when I had four kids at home and I had a blended family. I didn’t ever want to be a stepmom because, you know, Disney and lots of places. And it’s always the evil stepmother, right? Lots of cultural programming around that. So I knew I didn’t like that title, but I didn’t know what title. But then I would judge myself all the time and beat myself up because there were socks on the floor just in the middle of the floor. They weren’t mine, of course. They were one of four children’s. There was these crazy schedules. There was chaos, right? When you have four children, there often is. And I would judge my life compared to Carol Brady. For those of you who don’t know Carol Brady, there was a show, I think it was in the 70s. I watched it in the 70s, may have started in the 60s, called The Brady Bunch, and it was the blended family.

Koren (00:07:31) – The wife had three kids, the husband had three kids. They merged together and became the Brady Bunch. There was no talk of step. They were all happy and joyful. When I recall, the biggest problem was when Marcia got hit in the face with the football and couldn’t go into this dance because of her nose being a bit disfigured. But I would compare myself internally to Carol Brady, who was somebody I never aspired to be, except that was my measuring stick about how I wasn’t good enough and I would feel bad and feel bad and feel bad. And it wasn’t until one day that I became aware of this story that I had in my head from the cultural programming and went, wait a second, let me think about this. There’s six kids, there are knee socks on the ground. Her husband seems to always be home. My husband was never home. She has an Alice.

Koren (00:08:20) – I want an Alice. Right. Like I was doing all of this.

Koren (00:08:24) – Yes, I had two less kids.

Koren (00:08:26) – There weren’t any exes involved, right? There wasn’t any child custody issues. Or when were the kids going to go back and forth and negotiations and all of that stuff? There wasn’t any of that stuff. And here I was comparing my reality with the fictional make believe TV show. So by that mindset and becoming aware of that story, what was driving my own unhappiness is what actually let me be free of that mindset of those rules. Realizing I didn’t have an Alice who cooked and went grocery shopping. You know, there wasn’t a Sam the Butcher. And my kids are humans, and there are socks on the ground, and we work on cleaning that up. But it doesn’t have to look like the Bradys house, right? That was not the reality that was a TV show. And reminding myself over and over that was a TV show and was never my aspiration to be Carol Brady. My aspiration was really to be Marcia Brady, but then I wouldn’t even be a mom. So paying attention to the stories we tell ourselves is so important to become aware of them.

Koren (00:09:30) – And what happens is, as we go through life, we may not be aware that these are the stories, right? Like I thought, oh well, I don’t cook. And so then I’m not going to fall into this like patriarchal order in my in my house, in my marriage, there was a lot of other invisible labor that I did, and there was a period of time where I did learn how to cook, not because I thought I needed to do it for my motherly duty. I needed to do it because I was so in so much fear around cooking that I was parenting really poorly with my daughter when she would cook, and I’ve talked about that as well. So it’s really important that we become aware of the stories again, whether they’re just something that seeps in from a television show, something that maybe your parents have told you. Family. Of origin and on to grandmother, a best friend, something that she picked up culturally. Something that maybe you are on a sports team. You know, another story I was told.

Koren (00:10:19) – I remember I was a senior in high school, and I had a coach who I really, really is become a friend and I, you know, really care about him. But I remember when I was 17, he said, well, you know, girls in college don’t get faster. And I remember walking away and going, screw that.

Koren (00:10:34) – You may think that, but.

Koren (00:10:35) – Let me prove you wrong. And that became a driving force. It wasn’t a limiting belief. It was a bit of a fire belief, or it was an accelerator for me when I would have doubt. I would definitely lean on that, like, let me show him. And I did. It did kind of help motivate me and in a healthy way. Right. But that was his limiting belief. And now we look at the world of sports and how women swimmers and how much faster they go in their in their 20s. It’s mind blowing. But what we thought in like 1989 and 90 was very different. And he had his own limiting belief.

Koren (00:11:04) – So one of the things as a coach, you know, I partner with my clients and I’m on their team and they know that. And I am very honored and privileged to be able to have this trustworthy seat in their support sections, where they come to me and they can vent and they can share with me some of the stuff that’s so deep inside. And sometimes they’re not even aware of what their beliefs are. And I have the privilege of knowing so many parts of themselves, right? They’re beautiful, amazing and flawed clients. And when I say flawed, it’s not a judgment like we are all flawed. And that’s the beauty of us. And much like an athletic coach that can see so much of their athletes who are in that competition, who may not may have blind spots because of what their perspective is from where, whether they’re on the field or in the pool. But as a coach, we’re on the sidelines. And so there’s so much more that we can see and we can decipher.

Koren (00:11:58) – Is it physical training? Is that mindset? Is it technical feedback? Is it tactical strategy? I do the same thing with my clients. And so one of the areas I’m talking about today is about mindset. So my clients may start to verbally process or verbally vomit with me because they need to vent. I’m a safe place. They can get it out with me because I’ve earned the right to hear their story, and it helps them process what’s going on versus then dumping them in a workplace that could actually create a big problem because they haven’t flushed out their ideas yet. And it can be really hurtful, right, to somebody else. So here’s some of the stories that I’ve collected in the last few weeks. I’ve had clients say I’m weird, or this would be more impactful if I were to have kids. I’m not going to make my goal. My sales will go down lower if I’m not working 10 to 12 hours a day. Now here’s the thing. These are little rocks in a sentence or in many sentences that my clients start to say.

Koren (00:12:57) – And then I pull them out and I start to notice what is their pattern, what is the story they keep telling themselves? They may not even hear it. Or maybe they may say, oh yeah, it’s fine that I know I don’t have kids and I’m fine with that. But then later on they’re bringing that same story back in. So becoming self-aware of our mindsets, the stories we tell ourselves is one of the keys to becoming more self-aware. Okay. And this is the one I’m talking about today. I’m going to talk about it in other days. The other ones. Now, for me, I remember before I became a coach, I didn’t realize I had this limiting belief of I’m a loser, and I’ve had that most of my life. Right there was, you know, there’s a lot of hardship my family faced, and they were really doing the best that they could. And I understand that now I am a 51 year old woman. But when I was young, I didn’t understand. And so I came up with a solution of like, oh, we, we have these things because we’re just losers, right? I didn’t even have that sentence very clear.

Koren (00:13:56) – But it was so a part of my way of being. And it would show up. It could show up in athletics, it could show up socially, right? It could show up in lots of different places from time and again. And sometimes it wasn’t even there. But that was a very big, limiting belief. When I became aware of this limiting belief, that’s when things started to change. Prior to that, I tried to outrun it by proving to myself that was not the case. Right. And that’s where it became this achieving and over achieving a great deal. But I wasn’t letting go of this limiting belief. And in fact, I worked even harder to try to prove to myself. So the first step to becoming aware of those four words is that I am a loser. And then sometimes I have that other story. I’m a loser from Loser Street. The first step to becoming aware of those words that were deeply inside of me and that I unconsciously believed was to write about it, was to recognize it and own that story with myself, even in my own head, like, oh, I have this belief.

Koren (00:15:04) – And then at some point have the courage, like I did, to share it with somebody who’d earned the right to hear. Of my story. Who could hold that space? And at first they’d say, like, I don’t understand Korean. You win in everything. Why is this an issue? That didn’t help me feel like I was a loser from Loser Street. And remember what I said was that I tried to outrun it. I tried to prove it. And when I became aware of it, I was like, oh, well, I’m just going to work really, really hard to overcome that belief. And then I’ll prove to myself, see, I can work really hard.

Koren (00:15:32) – I can do things, I can just work harder. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. That just made me more exhausted.

Koren (00:15:38) – So learning about limiting beliefs is really important. Learning what your limiting beliefs are and how we do that is when we start listening to our stuff. And that’s a step of the self awareness that I’m talking about today.

Koren (00:15:50) – Hearing the stories in our head, like just start noticing, listening. What is it that you say about yourself? What is it that you say? What are the patterns of things that you say over and over? Writing things down is really helpful as well, right? Writing it down and reflecting, noticing like, oh, here’s this thing that keeps popping up again. Byron Katie talks about questioning our stories by asking, is it really true? You know, so for example, is it really true I’m a loser from Loser Street? No. My family had hardships. Yes to my family. Have limited skill sets. Absolutely. But I wasn’t a loser from Loser Street. But that’s what I did do. So as a young kid or maybe asking yourself, like, is it really true? You are weird? Like, I have a client that likes to self-identify as I know it’s really weird and I know I’m weird. And then she says this over and over, right? So we’re working on overcoming that identity, and it’s, is it really true that you’re weird and something’s wrong with you? You know, sometimes I’ve said like, hey, let’s fly our freak flag high.

Koren (00:16:52) – Like, let’s own our own individuality. This is what works for you. That’s okay. Right? And it’s always about context too. Like, as long as that if works for you and it’s not hurting other people, that’s okay. And then you can also ask, is it really true that you can’t have a good life if you don’t have kids? So whether I have clients that don’t have kids, I have clients that do have kids, and having kids isn’t the happily ever after. Not having kids as the happily ever after, right? But we have our chosen pathways, and sometimes our chosen pathways may be a bit determined for us by different life situations. Or maybe you have the story that you’re too much or that you’re difficult. Whatever the beliefs are, one thing that’s really important is to unpack what is swirling in your head. And this is the step of self-awareness. What is being said in your brain? What are you then eventually saying out loud yourself? Pay attention to that. What do you believe about yourself? And remember, our brains are designed to make up stories.

Koren (00:18:00) – That’s what they do. In the absence of data, our brains fill in a story. When we don’t know a story, our brains look for information that has already been given to us. Again, cultural programming. Right? That’s how my brain went to Carol Brady. It looks for what it can fill in to help make sense of this uncomfortableness that we’re going through. And my question for you is, isn’t it time to listen to your stories and unpack what is true and what is not, what is learned via cultural programming, or from our family of origin, or just plain old surviving? Back in college, I realized I had a limiting belief about money, and I had this belief that money didn’t happen to people like us, and us was meaning myself and my family, and that was the only way that I could make sense of our financial struggles. So then.

Koren (00:18:54) – I decided gladly towards money and to people that had money and I villainized money and the people with money.

Koren (00:19:00) – Because that makes sense, right? You’re in shame. Money doesn’t happen to people like that. Well screw you, you guys are all evil. Money is evil. That’s the pattern, people. And then I learned that money doesn’t care if you’re good or bad person. Take a look. There are people that are amazing, people that have a lot of money in their people that are horrible, people that have a lot of money. Money is just money and money. There’s tools to help us make money and frameworks to make money, as well as systems that can really hurt you when it comes to money. Think credit cards, debt, college student debt. Which one day will be a whole show that I can talk about, right? So money is a thing. It’s a circumstance. It’s very neutral. It’s like what I say about swimming in a in a pace clock. The clock doesn’t care if you’re a good person, bad person. If you had a justified reason for not making practice or not.

Koren (00:19:51) – It’s very objective. You put your hand on the wall, it gives you time. Money is objective. It’s maybe the handlers of the money that may not be objective. So becoming aware of what your limiting beliefs are is really, really important. For me, breaking free from my limiting belief about money was life changing. I went from a person who believed money doesn’t happen to people like me to I am really good with money. And in today’s step of self-awareness, it comes down to what do you say to yourself? What do you believe? What’s so ingrained inside of you that you’ve collected? Become aware of this again without judging yourself. Self-compassion is so important, and one of the tools that I talk about with my clients is being a compassionate observer. It doesn’t mean like, oh, it’s fine, it’ll be okay. And being really dismissive, it’s about really looking at the whole context of it and understanding and realizing how it may have limited you. Because maybe you didn’t have skill sets, maybe you didn’t have awareness and what you can learn from it too.

Koren (00:20:59) – Then what can you do to help change the trajectory of that situation? Again, with money, I realized that there were tools and it was objective. One day, with my self-awareness of the Carol Brady story, I realized I was comparing myself to Carol Brady and The Brady Bunch, and I realized that it was fiction and I was living a real life, a nonfiction life that was really messy and that helped me break free from my own limiting belief. It was that self-awareness that helped me transform. And going back to what I said earlier, it was through those falling down moments, right? It was through judging myself. But then it was when I finally looked at, okay, why am I judging myself? Right? The falling down moment was me judging. I want to be clear about that. Me judging me. And then it wasn’t until I became compassionate and had empathy and I could look at why am I judging myself? What is that about? And realizing where it stemmed from. That’s where freedom came.

Koren (00:21:56) – Another way to think about it is being self-aware is like walking through life with your eyes wide open, and we’re still going to have blind spots because there are areas that we can’t see. And that’s why it’s important that we don’t go through life alone. Right? We have people to go through with. We are in teams. And next week’s episode, I’ll discuss more about the next step in self-awareness, which is emotional intelligence. Today I’m going to wrap up about mindset. So the evolution of our life is following the rules generally, right? Because we need to survive. We need to be safe. We need to follow the rules. We’re part of this system, the order. Right? Our parents want to make sure we fit in. And then here I talk about we want to belong and then who are our people, right. And the evolution of our lives, in addition to following the rules, is there’s guidelines and there’s frameworks of those in charge. And they could be our parents, teachers, bosses, cultural programming.

Koren (00:22:49) – Right. And as we evolve, we start to develop our own agency in life. And this evolution happens with self-awareness. And it’s a process. And as you do this, my invitation for you is to be self compassionate. Be kind to yourself. Let go of judgment to yourself or others. Right? We may start out judging because that’s what we do, but then when we can look at that falling down moment of judgment and understand and gather insight, letting go of our judgment of ourselves or others, being curious, focusing on learning and growing versus judging, which is armor and self-protection. And it gets us in our way. As you become self-aware, it will be messy. And yes, it does become so incredibly beautiful and freeing. I’m still a mom of four. Bonus mom of two. Birth mom of two. I’ve raised four kids, right? And I no longer have that judgment of I need to be Carol Brady because I realized that is fiction and I live in non-fiction life. Start listening to what is going on inside your brain.

Koren (00:23:59) – And one great way to do this, not the only way, but is to write. Just declutter it and get it down. Write down these thoughts and just start to notice what are the patterns? What’s the message that keeps coming up and up? And then you’ll start to see what that limiting belief is. Declutter that magnificent brain of yours. Treat it like a boutique, right? Whatever. If you like fancy purses or you like, you know, these high end stores treat it that way instead. Most of us treat it like Walmart, where it’s just crammed in with a whole bunch of stuff. We need to let that stuff out, so write it. The other is hire a coach who will be your trusted partner and help you with your blind spots, as well as help you create this self-awareness and live your life proactively as a deliberate creator versus surviving, fighting, reacting, and leading yourself to burnout. All right, my friend, until next time when we talk more about self-awareness. I’m smiling big for you.

Koren (00:25:01) – Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you’ll love my weekly emails. I know you’re thinking, Karen, really? Do I want another email in my overflowing inbox? Yes you do. Yippee skippy you do. These are short. They’re sweet. On Fridays, I send out the Friday podcast. It’s a great reminder that there’s a new show and it comes straight into your inbox of the latest episode. Awesome. You click on it, you go straight. Because we all need reminders. We have busy, full lives. And then on Sundays I have my Sunday Love column and these are emails I write from the heart. They’re filled with love. We need more love. We all do, myself included. These are short emails where you get a quick takeaway so you can incorporate this into your life, because people often want to know what to do and how to do it. And maybe sometimes it’s a story that you get or there’s like one time I wrote about the ten ways to practice gratitude, and that became such a great tool when one of the readers was struggling and the middle of the night, because it can be a scary place in our brains in the middle of the night.

Koren (00:26:15) – And she remembered the email that I sent about ten ways to practice gratitude. And she was able to practice gratitude and fall back asleep. That was an awesome lesson for her to incorporate into her life. Go to the show notes and there’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up and get these emails in your inbox.

Music (00:26:33) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

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As the new year approaches, there's a lot of talk about being your best self for 2024. 

While the definition varies from one person to another, something high achievers all have in common is setting unrealistic standards for what it means to be our best selves. 

This week, I discuss what being your best self every day looks like and why having unrealistic expectations leads to exhaustion rather than learning and growing. We'll explore different simple things you can do to have realistic standards of what is possible for you to do in one day.

Some days, your capacity may be lower, but learning to allow yourself grace for whatever your best self is, even if it's a B+ rather than an A, is key.

Discover what it means to be your best self by giving yourself space to rest and recover. Learn how to find satisfaction in your daily efforts and recognize them as being your best self.

LISTEN HERE

Music (00:00:01) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. As this show drops we're heading into the new year 2024. Holy moly, 2024. There’s going to be all this stuff about New Year, new you be your best self. And I want to talk about what being your best self every day looks like. Because oftentimes the standards that we place about what we think being our best self is really unrealistic. And I find my clients beating themselves up because they hold this very unrealistic standard. That must mean I must do it perfectly. It has to look this way and I have to exhaust myself to do it. But that’s not really what being your best self every day is. We can’t do it all perfectly right. Perfection is unrealistic.

Koren (00:01:21) – It’s not attainable. And it can also be really harmful for us. So being your best self is doing your best effort for what you have that day. Those of you who are athletes or former athletes, you may go out and do a workout in one day. You’re training and you’re like, wow! And you’re blowing your mind about how great you did. And then you may turn on the next day and the fact that you finished is your best effort, right? Like it’s not as good as it was the day before. It doesn’t mean you didn’t do your best effort, and it may have actually taken more resources within you to finish because it was so much harder. So one way I’d like to define it is some days doing your best effort is like B-plus work, and we forget B-plus is actually good with a plus on it, right? That’s how the grades work. But we think of B+ is not good because we now have this weird 5.0 academic grading policy in the states, at least.

Koren (00:02:16) – But B-plus work some days are B-plus work. It’s good on occasion. On small occasions, your best effort may be an A-minus, which for most people, my high achievers, that’s not acceptable because they want to be A or A+. Because A-minus is like 92%. On small occasions, we’ll have that where everything will align really well. We’ll be like, yes, and then tomorrow will be a shit show. And you’re also going to have a lot of days where it’s B minus work and B minus is like 78%. And we think about that 78%. We are so trained that 78% isn’t great, but it’s B minus work and that’s good minus. And here’s the reality is some days it may be C minus or even D work. And that’s okay to be your best self. That may be what it is. And D is still passing. I had a former college athlete who used to say D is for diplomas, and he did get D’s and he did get his diploma. And he is a fantastic father and husband and he is a great educator, like a great teacher, an amazing human, you know.

Koren (00:03:23) – And so for him, it did work out. For some people that wouldn’t be acceptable, but that was some of the capacity he had back then. So as I was saying, we have this unrealistic expectation that when we equate being our best self, it’s always doing A-plus work. And remember that is perfection. And we are setting ourselves up for failure. That’s how people beat themselves up. That’s when they start to go, I’m not good enough. There’s so much shame that comes in because perfection is the birthplace of shame. And that’s according to Brené Brown. And in swimming, this looks like this unrealistic expectation is that every time a swimmer does a race, they’re going to get a best time, right? That’s how they’re their best self. That’s not true. Oftentimes how they’re their best self is they get disappointed. They hit the wall. They get a time that they didn’t want, or maybe they get disqualified. And their best self can be is how did they move through from that point? How do they handle that disappointment? You know.

Koren (00:04:20) – And you know, what can they learn from it? How do they turn around and pivot from that? How do they rebound from that. That can be oftentimes their best self. But so often we want that fairytale ending. So we think that’s the best self of the best times. We do that also outside of swimming. Swimming was just the metaphor being your best self every day is about having realistic expectations of what you can and don’t have capacity to do. It’s about trusting that you will get the priorities done in a timeline that is realistic. I even struggle with those realistic timelines, right? Like I believe I can do way more than I can physically do

Koren (00:05:01) – Partly because I’m really effective and efficient and I have a this immense capacity to get stuff done. But guess what? I’m always adding more to my list. So instead, it’s about having this realistic expectation and really checking in with what is the best effort that we have capacity for, right? Best effort is something that Carol Dweck has talked about here on the show, and she’s the author of mindset and talks about growth mindset, fixed mindset.

Koren (00:05:29) – And sometimes our best effort is the C minus or D like I talked about, being your best self every day is being self-aware of what you can see and insights you can gain. And being your best self doesn’t mean you need to see all those insights in that moment, because sometimes we have to process it. We may be able to see certain things and we may process it after the fact. We often treat our lives as like an exam, like, oh, see, if I’m really good at this, I’m going to get the right answer on the exam. That’s not how our brains work. There’s so much information that we’re trying to process and figure out. So being your best self every day is about being self-aware, to which you can see in the insights you can gain. And it may not be in that moment. It may be afterwards which you reflect on and what insights you can gain is it’s about okay, understanding. Okay. What work do you need to do to grow. And as you build to see more and have greater self-awareness, the self-awareness is an ongoing evolution.

Koren (00:06:30) – Being your best self is about giving yourself grace to what your effort may be for the day. Being your best self is to focus on learning and growth. Key learnings. So what I talk about here a lot, being your best self is about giving yourself space to rest and recover. Being your best self so that you can go to bed at night filled with contentment. Being your best self every day is taking into account what is working well in your life, as well as what can be improved. We usually only focus on the improvements, but it’s also time that we focus on what’s working well and acknowledge it, at least internally. Like really owning hey, look at me, I did this, I made my bed this morning or look at me being organized for the day, whatever it may be. Or look at me using my planner, right? Those can be simple things that we can take in and say, look at me being my best self. And I want to circle back to contentment, right? Because I said, being your best self every day so you can go to bed feeling content.

Koren (00:07:38) – And this is my invitation for you to practice this. Because contentment is defined as the feeling of completeness, appreciation, and enoughness that we experience when our needs are satisfied. And this is based on the data and existing research that Brené Brown shared in Atlas of the Heart. Right. This is a really hard one. Oftentimes parents that have some are saying, oh, I just want my kid to be happy. I just want the right to be satisfied. It’s really, really hard for high performers to be satisfied, right? Because once we hit that goal, then we raise the bar for the next goal. And this is why it’s so important that I talked about earlier of recognizing, like, hey, this is what I did really well and own that. It doesn’t mean you stop and then you rest and you just sit there and do nothing but really recognizing, taking it in and being proud of ourselves, being content, practicing being content with ourselves. We’re so good at being mad at ourselves or shaming ourselves or judging ourselves.

Koren (00:08:38) – We need to practice being content. So as we wrap up today, my other invitation for you is to let go of this idea that your best self every day means perfection. Working hard, and then one day you can enjoy your life yourself. And instead it’s about being your best every day by what you have inside of you, and being content with yourself and being complete and trusting that you’re going to learn and grow, and being able to have a good night’s sleep because you are best self that day, and being satisfied and appreciating yourself and knowing that there’s going to be other struggles and you’re going to move through them and you’re going to learn and grow. All right, my friend, I’m smiling big for you. Hey there. Before we go, I have a question for you. Have you subscribed to the show yet? This is an awesome opportunity for you to preserve your brain juice. I love the fact that I can subscribe to podcasts and television shows, and they go straight to my iPhone, or they go straight to my DVR and then I don’t have to worry of oh no, especially with television shows.

Koren (00:09:48) – Did I hit record? Is it going to be there or now? Do I have to watch it on demand and go through all the commercials? So go and hit the subscribe button. There’s a link in the show notes, and that will ensure you that you never miss a show. And you can also save your brain juice for other things in your life. There’s way more important things, but you and I will still be connected because the show will be waiting for you in your phone. Go to the link in the show notes. Subscribe to the show so you can automatically get all the shows to your phone.

Music (00:10:21) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

The post Being your best self every day appeared first on howshereallydoesit.com.

At this point in the turn of the year, there is a lot of messaging about what we can do to live better in the new year to come. As high achievers, we have the expectation that we can continuously add to our list.

What we don’t consider is that if we add something, we need to figure out what to take away.

This week, we will explore what in our lives can be dropped, whether it's for the time being or completely. I give personal examples of things that were no longer relevant that I kept on doing because I'd always done them and what happened when I let go of them.

My friend, as we approach the new year, I encourage you to think about what elements can be dropped from your life to create a space for you, whether it's a space in your office or a space in your mind.

Discover how to recognize the things that you don't need to carry around anymore and why leaving them in 2023 can only be beneficial for you and your loved ones.

LISTEN HERE

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. When this show airs. It’s either going to be in the busiest times for you, or possibly in the emptiest of space, as the world tends to shut down during the Christmas holidays. And this show is scheduled to drop on December 22nd, 2023. And maybe you’re listening to the show after the holidays. And there’s that big empty space. The other holiday parties are done. Maybe you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah, you’re done with the New Year’s. And then there’s this void because all the gatherings of people, and then there’s that emptiness afterwards. And it can be that bit of white space, which again, feels very vulnerable to have that white space, even though so often we want that white space.

Koren (00:01:17) – But it can also be a lonely space. So at that time, if you’re listening to this between, you know, New Year’s, Christmas and New Year’s, or at some point in the turn of the new year, there’s going to be a lot of messaging about 2024. What can you do to live better, do more ra ra right. And as high achievers as we are, we’re like, yes, I can do more. We have this unrealized expectations of, I’m just going to do more. I’m going to keep adding more and more to my list. And we forget that when we add we also need to figure out what can we take away. It makes me think about Peter Walsh, who’s an organizer and who’s been on the show a bunch in the early years of the show, and he’s been on Oprah and had his own show on Oprah. But he’s a great clutter expert, and he gave me this great concept that I’m going to share with you that can be an example of what can be dropped.

Koren (00:02:12) – So 30 years ago, I remember I wanted to like, get our house organized and my husband was taking off some time for a vacation. And how I chose to spend that vacation was to work really hard because that’s what I knew how to do. And we were going to declutter our house. Right? We’re going to do kind of like when I would later see Peter Walsh do on TV, you know, in the early 2000, but we’re going to declutter our house and we would just go at it because, like, I was just full. We'd go 12 hour days and work really hard. And by like day two and a half, we’d be arguing, bickering, exhausted and eventually push everything back in and get rid of some stuff but not ever feel really complete. Well, Peter Walsh taught me this a long time ago on this show of instead of that whole like, all or nothing approach, when you have ten minutes and you can look in their space and say, what do I want from this space? And what can you do in ten minutes? Maybe it is you can clean out a drawer.

Koren (00:03:11) – And to celebrate that last night, I had a whole bunch of boxes, right, for all the holidays. And they were sitting in our entryway and I was pretty exhausted. I had some big travel, and I thought, you know what? What if I just unpacked them and took a look at them? And I did, and then I decided to wrap them there. All done. The presents that I currently have are under the tree. This is the earliest I’ve ever done that right. The boxes were taken care of. It took an hour and it was beautiful. Much better than when I used to wrap presents on Christmas Eve, which I hated. So one of the concepts here is that I learned from Peter Walsh is what can you do in a small amount of time? And then the other concept that he taught me is, if you’re going to bring in something new to your home, what are you going to remove? And as I talk about 2024, we have this idea of, oh, I need to do more.

Koren (00:04:12) – I need to work harder. I need to be better. Right. But before we go into that, what can be dropped, what can be removed, and how can it be in a small step like I shared with you, whether it’s a draw or taking out, you know, 30 minutes, 40 minutes and cleaning out a closet and do it simply instead of having to be the whole house. So today’s show, I’m going to be asking you what can be dropped and even what can be dropped completely. So here’s the thing. When we’re talking about dropped completely, it’s about something that’s no longer relevant. But you continue to do it because you’ve always done it. You know, right now I’m in that stage of my life where our youngest kid is now 22, and I was thinking about as we’re wrapping presents, like, it’s not really my favorite thing. And is this something that can be dropped? My kids still really like to get presents, but I made it a little bit better because I got it done well in ahead of time.

Koren (00:05:07) – But what can be dropped completely? So here are some examples of what that looks like. Now that’s post-thanksgiving. You know, one is some people, including us, dropped turkey from Thanksgiving. And I get it. Some of you may say that’s ridiculous. And we had two Thanksgivings. One we had at a friend’s and they had a beautiful turkey and was fantastic. And then the next day when we had our family Thanksgiving, our small one, my husband and daughter, they roasted a chicken. Very delightful, much less time, you know, and we enjoyed it. A client of mine, they had ribs. They don’t even like turkey. They had ribs. So those are very specific examples of dropping what is supposed to be done. A different example in business is evaluating what can be dropped from your business. So back in the fall, earlier in the fall, I dropped a six figure line of income for my company. As I was focusing on what do we need to shift, what do we need to move forward? And I made a really deliberate decision about doing that.

Koren (00:06:07) – It wasn’t from a place of scarcity. It was a very deliberate, proactive decision. That was something that I dropped completely. Maybe for you personally, it’s about dropping, putting yourself last on your priority list. Or maybe like I have some clients that are dropping the travel that they do, or limiting putting restrictions about how they travel. Some of them are putting, dropping, working on weekends at clients who dropped doing laundry for their family, realizing their kids can do their own, or there could be other people that could do it. It could be dropping, making lunches for your kids and then having the skill sets to then make their own lunches and the empowerment. Maybe it’s dropping. Going grocery shopping. Here’s one that I my invitation for all of us is dropping doing the emotional regulation for fill in the blank. It could be your spouse, a boss, an aging parent, a colleague, right? Dropping doing the emotional regulation where you then help them regulate emotionally versus you be responsible for your energy that you bring into the space.

Koren (00:07:14) – And here’s an example that I did personally a couple of years ago. I dropped being the quote fixer for my then 22 year old daughter. She’s like, but mom, you’re really good at it. And I was like, the cost to you was really high to be your fixer, because it was about me then having to afterwards come in and handle a situation versus being proactive and not having to go through all the turmoil of fixing something after there’s been a fire, a metaphorical fire. Maybe it’s dropping, cleaning out the laundry room and saying, like, you know what? That’s okay. It works. It’s functioning like I’ve got some boxes in there and like I’m dropping that. It needs to look like something on Pinterest. My laundry room is the laundry room. It functions. There’s some boxes in there. And it’s really I mean, it’s not totally clutter free, but it works. And then here’s my new one that I decided. This morning because I saw the stack of these blue folders that you used, like in college.

Koren (00:08:13) – I remember like you would put like reports in them and then turn them in. They were then those folders that had like three holes and a clip. So I was cleaning out my office. I don’t even know when earlier this year, and I had like probably 15 folders and I took them out. Try to give them to family. Nobody wants them because I think my kids in college now submit everything electronically, but I’ve been holding on to them and I had to have this. I must find a good home for it that somebody else will use. Well, this morning I decided to drop completely finding that and I can just recycle them. I know it’s not green, but I can let it go. I can simplify, right? And I can create that space physically that it was sitting in the bookcase, which I’m not thrilled about, but I can create that space for myself. So as you move into the next year, it’s easy as high achievers to do more, add more. What if you drop something completely right and when you’re dropping something? I gave you some very specific examples, like the folders.

Koren (00:09:13) – It’s not hurting anybody, right? Like I mean, well, the fact that I used a resource or have a resource that I didn’t use and it’s wasteful. So there’s context. Is everything in this about what you can drop completely? There are certain things that I’m going to be there for my loved ones. I’m not going to drop that. But what are the things that I don’t need to carry around anymore with me getting clear on that? So what could that be for you to drop something? Maybe you decided to drop doing holiday cards. If I was on your list, I would be sad. And that’s okay for me to be sad. Just. I love cards, but that’s something that I even rumbled with and I did do them. What I dropped is finding the perfect picture. It’s so funny how my brain works, right? Like, oh, I have to have this. I found the pictures that worked and it was great. Got it done right. So what can you drop? Whether it’s completely or drop for the time being to create space for you.

Koren (00:10:16) – All right. I’m smiling big for you. Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you’ll love my weekly emails. I know you’re thinking, Koren, really? Do I want another email in my overflowing inbox? Yes you do. Yippee skippy you do. These are short. They’re sweet. On Fridays, I send out the Friday podcast. It’s a great reminder that there’s a new show, and it comes straight into your inbox of the latest episode. Awesome. You click on it, you go straight. Because we all need reminders. We have busy, full lives. And then on Sundays I have my Sunday Love column and these are emails I write from the heart. They’re filled with love. We need more love. We all do, myself included. These are short emails where you get a quick takeaway so you can incorporate this into your life, because people often want to know what to do and how to do it. And maybe sometimes it’s a story that you get. Or there’s like one time I wrote about the ten ways to practice gratitude, and that became such a great tool when one of the readers was struggling and the middle of the night, because it can be a scary place in our brains in the middle of the night.

Koren (00:11:32) – And she remembered the email that I sent about ten ways to practice gratitude. And she was able to practice gratitude and fall back asleep. And that was an awesome lesson for her to incorporate into her life. Go to the show notes, and there’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up and get these emails in your box.

Music (00:11:51) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

The post How to decide what can & can’t be dropped appeared first on howshereallydoesit.com.

During the holiday season, we try to do everything that is expected from us, but there is one important thing that we don't always take the time for: ourselves.

What it means to take care of yourself varies from person to person. For some of my clients, it involves scheduling every holiday preparation. For myself, it's by taking a break from social media.

This week, I give you examples of various ways you can take care of yourself during the holidays and discuss the importance of finding ways to show yourself love.

My friend, I encourage you to take some time for yourself and notice how you talk to yourself. Ask yourself what support you need to be the nurturing person you aspire to be this season.

Discover tips to understand what you need from this season, discern what makes you feel resourced, and identify what makes you feel depleted. Observe your own ways of taking care of yourself so you can carry them with you into 2024.

LISTEN HERE

Music (00:00:01) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. As the show drops, we’re in the midst of the holiday season. And regardless, if you listen to the show midyear in 2024 or many, many years later, the message here is vital and relevant. In fact, I’ve already done two shows about taking care of yourself through the years. One was with Jen Louden and the other was with Karen Waldron, and she’ll be coming back soon. We’ll link those shows in the show notes so that you can also go and listen to those. Today, I’m going to share with you concrete ideas of how my clients are taking care of themselves this holiday season. Taking care of yourself looks different for each person. And one thing I want to be really clear, because I do talk about my favorite fairy tale, Cinderella, is that this is not the Cinderella version of taking care of yourself, meaning you can take care of yourself after everything is done.

Koren (00:01:41) – Much like Cinderella getting to go to the ball once all her stepmother’s chores are done, we are often creating ourselves to be the evil stepmother and Cinderella all in one package. It’s like, well, I can do this. I can take care of myself once I’ve gotten all the presents, once I’ve done with the hosting, once this, once that, and then we go into the new year depleted and we continue on and we continue on. And then maybe it’s June of 2024 and you’re listening to this going, holy moly, this is me. I didn’t take care of myself. I kept waiting until it was my turn. And so one is that we’re not supposed to be the Cinderella version. We get to take care of ourselves now so that we are resourced to be present in nurturing during the holiday season, and that we can go into the new year replenished, not depleted and mad and resentful. So one example of taking care of yourself this holiday season is keeping the holiday simple, versus trying to do what is culturally programmed to do.

Koren (00:02:50) – Okay, so the granular what does that look like in real life? I have a client who hosted Thanksgiving and chose not to serve pumpkin pie. Let everybody know that wasn’t a problem. Nobody likes pumpkin pie except for one person. And he also really, really, really loves her apple pie that she specially makes. And so that was a switch out. And they had pumpkin bread instead of pumpkin pie, which so many people loved. She was clear ahead of time and let people know that this was her menu and her plan. I had another client who, for Thanksgiving, created a chart system of what to cook and what time. And so it’s all laid out and prepared. And she’d also done the grocery shopping the weekend before, so that all the ingredients were there so that they could do some of the prep on Wednesday and then Thursday they can cook and entertain and not have to be thinking, because all those decisions, all that plan was laid out, the checklist was there, and they can invite people and spend time connecting while enjoying cooking.

Koren (00:03:53) – Now, I would have to say enjoying cooking is not a part of my go to taking care of me. But for this client, it was right. We all have our differences of what taking care of ourselves looks like.

Koren (00:04:02) – Another example is holiday cards. Some people it’s about having it all done for you. Like everything done. Your list is loaded. You pick out the picture, it gets sent. Some of it may be like my family. We used to when our kids were little. We had this kind of like factory line of putting the Christmas cards together, and that was taking care of me. I really enjoyed cards, and this year it may be taking care of me as not doing them at all. It’s something I’m rumbling with right now as I think about it, because I’m recording the show obviously before the middle of December, but it’s something I’m rumbling with and I love, love, love holiday cards. They’re my favorite thing. I get so much joy out of doing them, and I love getting them every single day in the mail.

Koren (00:04:51) – It’s so delightful. I love to see the pictures. I love to see people growing up. I love to read the, you know, the Christmas letters for the holiday letters that those who write them. I love it all. And this year taking care of me, maybe not doing them. And I’m rumbling with that right now and that’s okay. Another client of mine made all their plans from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, and these plans allowed for the space to make other decisions as they’ve come up, as well as the constraints of what to do and not to do because decisions had already been made. It’s a beautiful thing, right? And it helps reduce the holiday overwhelm that so many people feel. So those are examples of keeping the holiday simple versus doing what is culturally programmed. Other examples about taking care of ourselves. One of the things that I continued the lesson I keep learning over and over again is the most important thing I can do. First thing in the morning is to take care of me.

Koren (00:05:59) – And I’m really good about getting a good practice and a routine about making sure I have nourishing food, and I have my coffee and all of that. And sometimes I still go into that illusion of, oh, I will do my workout later. That never happens in the stress throughout the day or doesn’t not never happen, but it’s much harder to do. It takes a lot more energy and attention to get that done than when I do it. First thing in the morning. I feel so accomplished, I feel good, I move my body, I filled myself up. So for me, the practice of taking care of me first thing in the morning, right? Moving, exercising is so, so important. You know, my melt exercise is one of my favorite things of taking care of me and doing the neuro strength and doing, you know, just nourishing my body and taking care of it in different ways has been huge. So I’ve learned that I must pour into me. So I have the resources to pour into others.

Koren (00:06:59) – And I do this by working out and doing my melt neuro strength, and nourishing my body with food that can sustain me and keep my brain clear, and my coffee that I love the ritual of that’s my day to day. The way that I take care of myself over a week is by reading. I love, you know, reading and having that input in having that time to myself other ways is making sure on a daily basis that I connect with myself and as well as connecting with family and friends. And let’s not forget one way I connect with myself as I lay on the carpet and I look at trees. This is my latest version of taking care of me. That the fall of 2023, I kept noticing that I was drawn to just lay on the carpet and look at the trees. It didn’t make any sense, but over time, as I evaluated it, I noticed that I felt replenished versus drained. One of my clients has turned off the noise of what everyone else is doing and not doing, because she’s found that to be really self destructive to her mindset.

Koren (00:08:04) – So allowing other people to do what they do, but allowing herself to turn off that noise and focus inward. Another really, really important concept about taking care of ourselves is having boundaries. This is really, really huge, and I love what Prentiss Hemphill has to say about boundaries. They say boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously. I’m going to say that again. This is from Prentiss Hemphill, and they say boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously. This is an example of the Venn diagram, right? What are the boundaries I need to have in place so that I can love you? What are the boundaries in place so that I can love me? And where do we meet in that Venn diagram? So often people think that taking care of ourselves is an either or instead of an and and boundaries are so important because what do you need so that you can. Love somebody else as well as love yourself. It’s not about being too difficult.

Koren (00:09:17) – Boundaries are actually supportive of us all. Something else that’s really, really important in this holiday season and just in life in general, is sleep, right? Some of us may have judgments about you’re a bad person because you need sleep or you’re lazy, right? Or that you’re not being productive. Sleep actually will help you be more productive versus going through life in a fog, which I’ve done right for some of my clients. Taking care of yourself looks like letting people know ahead of time that you’re going to be off, right? Getting clear about what the schedule is, what your availability is, which are companies availability is setting autoresponders so that people have it. If they send an email or a message, they’re really clear. And it’s so interesting. Even Apple Podcasts has a message out about delays and upload times over the holidays, like that’s the first time in 17 years of podcasting I’ve seen that, right? So even in this world of automation, we’re needing some downtime, people. So being clear and being ahead of it, being proactive, that’s a way of taking care of yourself.

Koren (00:10:27) – Another way of taking care of yourself is time off for nothing but to putter around. Just to putter around. It’s not wasted time. It’s space for actual replenishment and growth. There’s a difference between puttering around and scrolling on Instagram, or going through TikTok and sitting there and losing that time. And how do you know this? Because you check in with how do you feel afterwards? Do you feel replenished after being on social media? That’s something for you to identify with versus puttering around. Taking care of yourself is playing. This is something like sleep that I've been learning how to do.

Koren (00:11:12) – I used to have a story of I’m not a person who plays. I’m a busy person. I. I’ve got shit to do, right. Learning how to play is something that I’ve been really cultivating on, and I sometimes I do it well, sometimes not so well. I’m playing and maybe it’s sometimes playing is doing things that you don’t normally do. Maybe it’s going to a play with a friend, maybe it’s going to a sporting event with a friend or even by yourself.

Koren (00:11:39) – I recently went to a sporting event by myself. It’s the way it kind of worked out, and it was a gorgeous day and I got to watch a bunch of high performers, and it was so much fun, and all I had to do was be responsible for myself. I enjoyed it, I had a good time, I didn’t have to think about anybody else, and I got to entertain and I got to have some time with myself in the car, so I got to spend time with myself. It was a really fantastic day. Plus it was a glorious November day in California to be outdoors. I really, really enjoyed it playing. Another thing that’s really important when we take care of ourselves, is being mindful of what you say internally about yourself, as well as the stories you may tell others about yourself. So, for example, if you’re like, oh, I’m so confrontational, is it being confrontational? Or are you being clear and you’re not having pumpkin pie and you’re having apple pie at the Thanksgiving you’re hosting? I had this old limiting belief that I’ve shared with you, but I had this belief of I’m a loser from Loser Street, and I used to say that to myself.

Koren (00:12:41) – I was like, oh, of course that happens because I’m a loser from Loser Street. That, my friend, is not taking care of yourself, right? Because that’s a whole shame spiral that I would go down versus my saying, oh, this really sucks. This is what happened. What am I feeling? What do I need? What can I learn from this? All right. Which is a whole different way. So taking care of yourself is how do you talk to yourself internally as well as what are the stories you tell others about yourself? One really insidious thought that I’ve done a lot of coaching on recently is I should know the right thing to do, like, there’s one right thing way to do something. There’s not even one way to do Thanksgiving. So there’s not one way to do something or the right thing to do. And I should have is just judging yourself. So check in with these stories and how you take care of yourself. Are you talking to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend? Are you talking to yourself the way you would talk to somebody dearly love? Are you talking to yourself the way you would talk to your grocery store clerk? Think about that.

Koren (00:13:50) – Take care of yourself. Talk to yourself like you would talk to one of those people. Taking care of yourself can also mean it doesn’t make sense right now. And after a while, you may process it and see. Did it fill you up or deplete you? Earlier in the fall, when I would find myself laying on the carpet and staring out the window at the trees, it was spacious and it didn’t make any sense and I just was drawn to it. And I kept wondering like, why am I doing this? This is ridiculous. And I had to give myself permission that it was okay. Like, maybe what if this is a way of me taking care of myself? And I would check in and over time it was like, oh, I felt so much better versus me going on social media. And afterwards I’m feeling depleted, resentful, right? Numb. There’s a big difference. So that can only be figured out by you checking in with your own body, with your own sense of self.

Koren (00:15:02) – Okay, so what I’ve learned for me is what’s not taking care of myself as social media, mindless TV, which is very different than watching deliberate TV. I’m not saying don’t watch TV, I’m not saying don’t do social media. But one of the things that I noticed is that I really check in. Do I want to watch TV or what is it that I want right now? And it also depends on, you know, what other factors are going on. My family is around, my husband. Right. What is it that I want from this experience? What is it that we want from this experience and having that Venn diagram? So one of the ways to figure out what you need to take care of yourself is by asking yourself, what do you want from this experience? And you can replace that with what do you want from this holiday, this time of year, this event, right? Start to brainstorm those ideas. What do you want from that? And then what do you need to be able to support that experience, that holiday, that time of year? That event.

Koren (00:16:05) – Right. My client that didn’t have the pumpkin pie, right. She wanted to have delicious food connection with each other. Nobody likes pumpkin pie. So why create a pumpkin pie that maybe only one person won’t eat, or others will eat out of obligation? But getting clear about what she wanted from that experience, from that holiday, allowed her to figure out how to support that. I’ve had people tell me that one way they are taking care of themselves is by limiting or reducing social interactions, making their world smaller deliberately. And some of it just has to do with their own healing process of where they are at their own capacity. Right. And it really is about taking care of themselves. They’re not hiding away. They’re not they’re not running away, but they’re taking care of themselves. So there’s a lot of discernment there. Taking care of you looks like stopping your workday. I’m not saying cheating your workday and limiting it right. Fulfilling your obligations of what your scope of work is supposed to be and calling an end.

Koren (00:17:09) – So often our world of work bleeds into other parts of our life, because we’ve been taught that being a high performer, high achiever means we overdo, because that would be better. But we’re actually beyond what we’re supposed to be doing. Or maybe we’ve bled so much of the numbing stuff like social media, other things that we weren’t really focused, and so it bled into other parts of our lives. So stop being our workday. Having a clear end to your workday can be talking with a friend, and for some of you who have a blue brain, it could be sitting in the shower, right? There were examples of taking care of yourself. Another example of taking care of you is removing things from your schedule, not doing it because of a society justified reason. Right? And again, this takes discernment to figure out what you can remove from your to do list. And I want to be clear, I’m not saying like, oh, I’m going to remove pain. My taxes currently say that like, no, there’s context on this, right? You may not like the consequences of not paying your taxes.

Koren (00:18:11) – So it’s about following through on your work responsibilities or your home life or your responsibilities that you have personally or professionally. But really looking at what’s on your to do list that really needs to get done and what can be. Dropped. All right. I’m really discerning about errands. I don’t like to just run about doing errands on a daily basis or even weekly basis. I’m really, really discerning about when I go do errands and what that will look like. So as I wrap up today’s show, one of the concepts that I use with my clients is the metaphor of the mason jar. And I work with high achievers, high performers, right. And they have pretty big capacities. So we’ll just say that they have a 24 ounce mason jar, right? Where some people may have like an eight ounce mason jar. Not better or worse. It’s just how much it can hold. So my clients are like, I have a huge capacity. And they come to me.

Koren (00:19:05) – Because they're like, why can’t I do more?

Koren (00:19:07) – And they’re beating themselves up and they’re upset. And this, this time of the year, everybody’s pretty depleted. And I’m like, well, how many ounces do you have in that mason jar? There’s like a few drops. We’re not even talking about an ounce. There’s a few drops. So this is why it’s important that they take care of themselves. They need to fill that mason jar up so they can pour it into others instead of thinking, why aren’t these drops coming out? There’s nothing in the mason jar. As a leader in work, family, and life, it takes energy to lead others. We’re all leaders. Maybe you’re a leader at home. Maybe you’re a leader at work. Maybe you’re a leader in your community. Being a leader of your own life, right? One must be nourished. And that happens from taking care of ourselves. So as I close out today’s show. I have a question for you listening to the show. What are three ways for you to take care of yourself? And my hope for you today is that this podcast helped you remember your ways of taking care of yourself, and reminded you to give yourself permission to take care of yourself first.

Koren (00:20:15) – Don’t be Cinderella and the evil stepmother all in one. Or maybe even giving you some idea babies to test out as you learn what taking care of yourself looks like in this season of life. All right, my friend. I’m smiling big for you. Hey there. Before we go, I have a question for you. Have you subscribed to the show yet? This is an awesome opportunity for you to preserve your brain juice. I love the fact that I can subscribe to podcasts and television shows, and they go straight to my iPhone, or they go straight to my DVR, and then I don’t have to worry of oh no, especially with television shows. Did I hit record? Is it going to be there or not? Do I have to watch it on demand and go through all the commercials? So go and hit the subscribe button. There’s a link in the show notes, and that will ensure you that you never miss a show. And you can also save your brain juice for other things in your life. There’s way more important things, but you and I will still be connected because the show will be waiting for you on your phone.

Music (00:21:29) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

The post Taking care of yourself this holiday season appeared first on howshereallydoesit.com.

Our brains have the capacity to make up stories and to create tragedies in which we are the main character. While some stories are happy, the thoughts we entertain can also contribute directly to the pain in our lives.

Often, there is something underneath those stories worth exploring.

In this episode, we explore another action that can create unnecessary suffering in your life and the key to processing the thoughts you tell yourself.

I encourage you to notice the stories your mind conjures up. The pain they cause can lead you to make big decisions that will not necessarily ease the suffering.

Tune in to discover some ways to create awareness of the thoughts you're thinking, how to check in with them to see what is true, and how to react compassionately when your brain makes up stories.

LISTEN HERE

Music (00:00:00) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. A few weeks ago I did a podcast about unnecessary suffering in the choices we make. Today, I’m going to discuss unnecessary suffering in the thoughts we think. So last time. It’s about the choices and we’re going even further inside. It’s about what we’re thinking. And before I move any further into the show, I want to talk about some context around this, because here’s the thing. There’s a lot of suffering in the world and I feel it. My clients feel it. What I’m talking about here in this unnecessary suffering, it’s not the same suffering that we are seeing that’s happening in the world. And I want to provide that distinction. Because oftentimes we call it, oh, these are first world problems.

Koren (00:01:23) – And we become really dismissive and tell ourselves to suck it up. And this suffering is important because it depletes us in our ability to do meaningful work and be able to have the loving relationships that we want to have. So it’s important to address this as well as what’s going on in the world. It’s not an either or or one is better than the other. I mean, one is really harmful. And when we’re talking about the stuff here. There’s a different way of living that we’re talking about, and we have suffering. It’s a different context of suffering, and that’s what’s really important. So the suffering I’m going to talk about today in this distinction is really important, is it’s about how the ways that we think can create some of the pain in our lives, and by creating an awareness, we can reduce the pain. So today, I’m specifically talking about the thoughts that we’re thinking, right. What are we telling ourselves? So context is really key. Our brains are fascinating. They have a primary job to do to keep us alive.

Koren (00:02:34) – And our human brains have this ability to create stories we're story making creatures, we make meaning, we make stories. And because our brain is here to keep us alive, we have this negativity bias where we tell ourselves these stories that are really scary, very good at dress rehearsing tragedy. They’re very, very scary, right? So I want to share an example of a story that a client shared with me the other day of. Oh, I fly by the seat of my pants. I make things up. I was like, really? Tell me about that. Because I could tell and heard the tone of her voice. She was in a lot of pain, and she was in actually feeling a lot of shame, and she was feeling like an imposter, but leaving that and feeling rather hopeless. And there was a lot of context that she was missing. I know her well, and I know she’s not flying by the seat of her pants. She’s really, really busy and she’s figuring things out right, but she’s not flying by the seat of her pants.

Koren (00:03:38) – So one of the things that I did was I was really curious of what does she mean by that? And as we worked through these stories, that was causing unnecessary suffering. She, you know, owned the fact that in her position she has to be agile because she’s the one that’s braving the new paths. She’s creating the new paths, right? She can’t have a set way. Doesn’t work in the work that she does to have a set way. And this is what she follows, right? And she’s dismissing all the work that she’s done in the knowledge she walks into a room with. And this becomes really important because we must notice what our brains are telling us, what are the stories our brains are making up. And the key here is to not react or to take action. It’s to notice. And really, those two stories was her way of giving herself evidence that she can’t really have what she wants. That’s what’s really underneath that. And so then she was beating herself up and telling herself lies.

Koren (00:04:40) – That wasn’t true. So it’s really important when we have these stories, we notice them, we feel the feelings. And the other thing that’s really important is we don’t take action. We don’t try to offload it. We don’t make decisions that could be catastrophic later on, like quit our jobs because we’re so mad, right? We notice, we listen. If you can dial up curiosity, we are curious about it. Oftentimes it’s easier with somebody else. Hence why my clients have me. And we ask what else could be true? And that’s what I did with her. Now, when we go through this process, she has this realization right, of this isn’t really true, and she’s being really mean to herself. And it’s also not how she’s perceived in the workplace. It’s just the story that she was making up to beat herself up because she doesn’t believe, and she’s feeling really vulnerable about being able to create the results that she wants. So when we can have this approach of being aware, paying attention, asking ourselves and being curious of what is really true, noticing, listening, right? What will happen is it’s not that, oh, now I live happily ever after because I’ve now seen this light in this way.

Koren (00:05:52) – But what always happens with my clients is they feel a little better, maybe crappy, better, but a little better, and then they’re able to start to move through it. And that’s the shame resilience piece. And then they keep moving forward and they can see. And I say moving forward I mean just in their own brain. So instead of being stuck and shrunken in, they can kind of open up their brains and start to see how do they work on solving this problem. And they have less suffering in the context that I’m discussing here today, Martha Beck uses the term that I really like called clean pain versus dirty pain. So the clean pain is the vulnerability of walking into a business meeting and not knowing where it will go or what the solution will be, and will you be able to figure out the solution from those that hire you. Right. That can be that clean pain. That’s a lot. There’s a lot of vulnerability, right? Uncertainty, emotional exposure and risk in just about everything we do.

Koren (00:06:49) – It continues to show up when we want to do meaningful work. The fairy tale is we’re going to know this absolute and it’s going to work out this way, and we’re going to follow the plan. The reality is it’s vulnerable and messy and we don’t know. And the one thing I do know from doing this work with myself and so many clients, all my clients over all the years, is there will be something worthwhile from it. It may not be that the end result at this point that you want, but it’s on the path of where you want to go. The dirty pain is the things we make up. And that’s what my client was doing. She was in dirty pain and creating unnecessary suffering for herself by telling herself, I’m flying by the seat of my pants. That’s the death by a thousand cuts which can lead to numbing, poor work, productivity, hopelessness. Like the screw it. I’m going to quit the fantasizing of a better job someplace else, right? Versus really managing our brains and saying, I’m feeling really vulnerable because I’m not sure how this is going to transpire.

Koren (00:07:52) – What are the things that I have within my control, within my own agency? What are the things that we evaluate ourselves more on than this whipping that we do, instead of the unnecessary suffering from the thoughts our brains come up with. We need to be self compassionate and really own our story. Maybe it’s something like this. I’m feeling vulnerable as I walk into this client meeting, not knowing if we will be able to find a solution for them. Or maybe it’s not knowing if I will be able to find a solution for them. That’s clean pain and can be quite a reduction in suffering. And it can allow ourselves, especially as we become shame resilient, the space to lean in, be curious, and work towards finding solutions. So as you go through the end of this year, 2024, my invitation for you is to turn down the dial on the unnecessary suffering in the thoughts that you think. Be aware of them. Sometimes they’re collected. They’re just implanted right from cultural programming, from maybe grad school, the world of work.

Koren (00:09:06) – This is the way it’s supposed to be. And check in with them. What is really true? This is part of this beautiful journey of life that we have. So my invitation for you is to turn down the dial on the unnecessary suffering in the thoughts you think. All right. I’m smiling big for you. Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you’ll love my weekly emails. I know you’re thinking, Koren, really? Do I want another email in my overflowing inbox? Yes you do. Yippee skippy you do. These are short. They’re sweet. On Fridays, I send out the Friday podcast. It’s a great reminder that there’s a new show, and it comes straight into your inbox of the latest episode. Awesome. You click on it, you go straight. Because we all need reminders. We have busy, full lives. And then on Sundays I have my Sunday Love column and these are emails I write from the heart. They’re filled with love.

Koren (00:10:05) – We need more love. We all do, myself included. These are short emails where you get a quick take away so you can incorporate this into your life, because people often want to know what to do and how to do it. And maybe sometimes it’s a story that you get or there’s like one time I wrote about the ten ways to practice gratitude, and that became such a great tool when one of the readers was struggling and the middle of the night, because it can be a scary place in our brains in the middle of the night. And she remembered the email that I sent about ten ways to practice gratitude. And she was able to practice gratitude and fall back asleep. And that was an awesome lesson for her to incorporate into her life. Go to the show notes, and there’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up and get these emails in your box.

Music (00:10:59) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

The post Unnecessary suffering in the thoughts we think appeared first on howshereallydoesit.com.

Do you ever get home from work and find yourself dwelling on the one thing that went bad that day rather than celebrating the many good things you achieved?

It doesn't take long to acknowledge ourselves, yet it's something perfectionists rarely do. Focusing on thriving is a survival instinct, but let me tell you, you do not need to be surviving right now.

This week, I look at how perfectionism affects our lives by getting in the way of personal growth. I talk about how it affected a successful entrepreneur I had the chance to exchange with and see its impact on his life.

My friend, I invite you to acknowledge yourself and the good things happening in your life. Let go of this idea that you need to thrive and instead be compassionate to yourself.

Discover how to let go of the survival mode that is ingrained in your brain and embrace the good things in life in a way that will create positive change.

LISTEN HERE

Music (00:00:00) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. The other day I was talking with a successful entrepreneur. He’s in his late 30s, built a successful business, and is thriving both personally and professionally. Money’s flowing in. He’s married, has a good life. So, you know, it’s so cool, right? Now, here’s the thing. As we’re talking about it, it was really vulnerable for him to own it. And this is an example of, as Brené Brown says, joy is the most vulnerable feeling that we can have, right? We’re afraid if we really embrace it, the other shoe’s going to drop. Well, here’s the thing. The other shoe will drop. And it’s not because we embrace the joy.

Koren (00:01:12) – It’s because that is the truth about life. We’re going to go through life. There’s going to be periods of good things, and then there’s going to be periods of difficult things. And there can be good things in a day and a shit show also in the day. And that is why I came up with that concept of I live an amazing life and there are shit shows everywhere. That’s just part of life, the amazing life and the shit shows and even the boring and the dull. It’s all in there. It’s a continuum, right? And they’re not two places to be. It’s a continuum. So he was telling me, you know, on his way home, even though, like, 20 really good things happened at work, he still stuck with that one bad thing. And he was trying to justify it as like, well, you know, I’m such a perfectionist. And I said, well, how’s that working for you? And he goes, well, I beat myself up because of that one thing and I just can’t hold on to those 20 good things.

Koren (00:02:06) – And one of the reasons for this, just to give you a behind the scenes, is our brains have a negativity bias. It’s to keep us alive. It’s a survival instinct. Now here’s the thing. He doesn’t need to survive, right? He’s thriving. He’s got this business of success. Things are going really well. He doesn’t need to survive. And there may be shit shows or problems or things that happen that need to be worked on. Challenges to overcome, things that maybe weren’t seen before. Maybe it’s a new learning, right? Maybe there was a mistake. And when you have a lot of employees, right, there’s a lot to manage with that. When you have customers, there’s a lot to manage with that. So he would beat himself up, but he no longer needs to survive. And really it’s about thriving. And that’s something to when we get out of this old conditioning of I need to survive. But really, do we need to survive or do we need to work on thriving? And thriving doesn’t mean that we never have problems.

Koren (00:03:05) – That’s magical thinking, right? We think once I get established, once my career is going great, once I’m married, whatever the promised land is, once my kids go off to college, right, it’s going to be great. We’re going to be able to thrive. There aren’t going to be any more problems. There will always be shit shows, my friend.

Koren (00:03:24) – Right. There will always be. And we have to check in and be like, is this something I have to address right now? Is it that much of an emergency? Do I have the capacity for it? Is this something that can be handled in another day? Is this my problem to even solve? Right. We need to ask a lot of questions.

Koren (00:03:38) – So this beating yourself up is really it’s an old conditioning that we’ve had. It’s part of our cultural programming. Let’s beat ourselves up because that’s how we change stuff. That’s how we can be humble. That’s how we can not be too much. Because man, we’re really successful right now.

Koren (00:03:55) – And if I own that, then I’m going to get too big for my britches, right? Which is another way of I’m too much, which is the same as I’m not enough, which is all rooted in shame. Right? So that fear of like, oh, let me, let me put myself down, let me judge myself, let me beat myself up so that I don’t get too big for myself. Right? And I can be humble, but the beating ourselves up, that doesn’t work right. And it’s actually not the way that we create change, especially lasting change. The other thing that is part of the old condition is we have this magical thinking of, once I fixed this problem, then I won’t have any other problems and I can finally get time to appreciate my life and those 20 really good things. How many of you do that? Like, okay, once I get through this, then I’ll finally get there, right? And I have clients that say this to me all the time.

Koren (00:04:43) – It’s like, okay, I just have to get through this, you know? And it’s like, well, when are we going to celebrate? The good? And the celebration of the good doesn’t mean it has to be a big party. Doesn’t mean there has to be a big stop. It could be like, wow, isn’t this really cool? The ability to own my own business, to own my own company, and for it to be thriving and to have it running really well and be successful at it on the terms of my success, like, isn’t that really cool? What does that take, 20 seconds to say that acknowledge that, allow it to incorporate inside of you and it’s free and it can be a conversation you have with yourself, right? It can be something you can write down and acknowledge. It can be a story you share with a trusted confidant. Right? Not somebody who’s going to weaponize it with you or tell you you’re too much or you’re being too cocky. Right? But who is that person? And we don’t do that, and that’s what we need to do.

Koren (00:05:34) – Instead of the magical thinking of once you don’t have problems, you can have time to do that. There will always be problems. There are always be shit shows and there’s always stuff to deal with. Right? And the other aspect too that’s really important is like for him, the bird’s eye view, everybody else looking at him on the outside, they’re like, wow, he’s got this great life, right? And isn’t it easy and fantastic? And it could look like that. You know, his business operates without him because he has flexibility. He has freedom as a leader. But in the weeds of it, if you’re really to see what’s going on, there’s also a lot of responsibility. There’s the challenges. Every one of my clients, it doesn’t matter what industry, what salary point, what level of professionalism, whether it’s entry level to high level executives, one of the big challenges with every one of my clients and all these different industries across the world has to do with employees, right? There’s a lot of challenges with employees, and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but there’s difficulties, human behavior and what we bring in as leaders, what people bring in as employees can be challenges.

Koren (00:06:47) – So the bird’s eye view is like, wow, he lives this great life and he’s on easy street and he’s just making all this money. The living in the weeds is there’s a lot going on and there’s a lot of responsibility. And he can be grateful it’s not either or. It’s an and and he can. There’s a lot of awesomeness in his business as well. So letting go of this negativity bias, letting go of this beating ourselves up and this which is survival instinct, he doesn’t need to survive. In fact, it’s an opportunity to really thrive. And yes, when he was still first building his business, he worked a lot. There was a lot of risk. There was a lot of uncertainty. Didn’t you know, it could have financially been very detrimental for him, right. Because there was some money that was needed in the beginning of his business to be able to do it and building systems. And was this going to really work? So there was a lot of that. But he’s no longer in that position where he needs to survive.

Koren (00:07:47) – He can thrive. And sometimes people worry about like, oh, if I get into thriving, then I’m going to be soft. No, that’s not the case. As long as we’re aware and we practice and we and we can learn and challenge ourselves because there’s going to be challenges. Because most of my clients, we like to learn. It’s hardwired in us. Right? We’re not just like, oh, I’m going to be on easy street. So there is going to be growth that happens. It just it doesn’t have to be growth. Maybe every single day. We don’t have to have our backs up against the wall. So I want to talk about the cost of perfection. Right. Because he was like, oh, I’m such a perfectionist. And sometimes my clients will wear this as a badge of honor, like, oh, I’m a perfectionist, right? That’s a really good thing. I have this really high standard. Here’s the thing. Perfectionism is the birthplace of shame. And this was the breathtaking research from Brené Brown.

Koren (00:08:38) – You know, a long time ago, well over a decade ago, when she started talking about this, because until then, we all use, like, perfectionism as badges of honor, even though back in the day, Hannah Montana, the character from Miley Cyrus played in, had a song that said Nobody’s Perfect, right? So she was trying to teach us to unlearn this perfectionism thing that we had all grown accustomed to. But now that we know that perfectionism is the birthplace of shame, right? And when we’re rooted in shame, we can grow stuff and we can really work hard, but it’s going to be pretty toxic of what we’re growing. So here’s an example of how the cost of perfection like with this entrepreneur. Right. So one of the things is when he goes home at night and talks with his wife, he tells her this negative thing, right? And that’s what he’s bringing into that space. And remember I talk about Joe Taylor saying, be responsible for the energy you bring into a space.

Koren (00:09:32) – And this gets complicated because we’ve also learned that we’re not supposed to go it alone. We’re supposed to be vulnerable with people in the right to hear the story. All of that is true. When we’re coming home at night. And our spouses also had a long day, and they’ve had their own great things and shit shows, and they have their own negativity bias and their old ways of like surviving versus thriving. And we talk about this, and then you talk about the cultural programming that women have being responsible for their spouses emotional well-being. This can lead to further shit shows, right? That can be the cost of the spouse being dumped on our only hearing this one aspect and not hearing the other 20 and going oh no, is this going to be something of concern? Like will we be able to last? Will this business continue on? These are all the stories, we're really good at making stories, right. And these are the stories that people create. So at some point what happens is it’s the death by a thousand cuts, whether it’s a death by a thousand cuts in the relationship or like with this entrepreneur, is yes, he’s in his late 30s now and it’s it’s going but at some point these small little cuts, this, this being hard on ourselves as beating ourselves up, this, you know, being such a perfectionist, it becomes a small cut.

Koren (00:10:46) – And then when they’re in their 50s, they’re like, screw this shit, I’m over it. I’m out. And they either self sabotage themselves or their business. They sell when they may not want to sell. Right. And cash out, which then can, you know, for some people it works, but sometimes it doesn’t work for people. I had a client a long time ago who, in his 30s, had made multiple millions of dollars and decided to retire early. Well, when he came to me in his 40s, the story in his head is, I don’t want to be the guy who made money in his 30s to lose it all. Later in my life, there was so much fear and shame around it. Even though he had enough money to last him the rest of his life, and he had the constraints and understanding of what could they spend and be okay, he went into a lot of scarcity around that. These are the examples of the death by a thousand cuts. It can happen to ourselves.

Koren (00:11:38) – It can happen to the people around us. And so it’s really important to know what the cost of this perfectionism is and how we can embrace it and be like holding it as like, this is a great look at me. It’s a great identity to have, but there’s a huge cost. So instead, it’s about getting comfortable, one with the vulnerability of embracing the good in our life. That’s really important for him to be able to say like, yeah, you know. And there was some perspective of he remembers when he first started out the business and how many people that they needed to have, right, how many customers and what that flow looked like and where they are now. I mean, it’s phenomenal, right where he’s gone from and where he’s gone to. And then questioning, does he want to open up another one right there? Yes, there could be more revenue. But he’s like, what would it be for? And that’s such a whole different concept for us, right. Because in America it is like, make more money, make more money, make more money.

Koren (00:12:31) – The question is, is that where you want to put more time and energy and attention to for making more money, or is it not? What is enough? Right. Those are really important questions to ask. So getting comfortable with the vulnerability of embracing the good in your life, that takes courage, right? Because we have this belief of if we embrace the good, typically the other shoe’s going to drop. Instead of realizing we can embrace the good so that we can resource ourself and fill ourselves up and be like, wow, look at this. I’ve got this thriving business. I get to do work that I care about. It’s aligned with my values. I have some great employees. Maybe I have some challenging employees. I have that I’m married, right? I have a great life partner. I’m doing really, really good. And there’s always going to be stuff on the horizon, right? Like we’re aging, we have aging parents. There’s going to be at some point loss, right? Especially when we have aging parents.

Koren (00:13:30) – There’s going to be some loss. There’s going to be difficult things. But to be able to really take it in and say, wow, life is really good right now. Look at what’s going on. We resource ourselves so that we have the capacity to be resilient when the hard things come. What we do culturally is we beat ourselves up and just make ourselves keep going. I’ve done this right, been a big survivor, you know, really embrace being tough and gritty, right? Grit has been such a huge buzzword over the last, I don’t know, 5 or 10 years being really gritty. And yes, I think that’s really important to be able to be gritty, but we don’t need to be gritty when it’s unnecessary suffering. And not resourcing ourselves so that we can have the ability to be greedy and by resourcing ourselves is really acknowledging what’s going well in our life. This is free. It doesn’t take much time. I did an example of it earlier in the show. You can speak it to yourself, you can speak it to a confidant, somebody who’s earned the right to hear your story, who’s not going to judge you or weaponize you, or throw it back in your face.

Koren (00:14:32) – You can write it down, right? It’s really important to embrace that so that you can be resilient when things become hard. Because here’s the thing. When we spend a life of beating ourselves up and keep going, when that difficult time comes in our life, we’re going to be pretty close to empty and have less ability to deal with the situation. And that is when you see the really, really bad behaviors, right? Maybe you remember your own. I have my own. I’ve been environments where people have done it and it’s like, Holy moly, right? So when people are not well resourced, they become not their best selves or their favorite selves. Not even saying perfect like we just become not good. And I think about back in my life when I was not well resourced and I was being more of a martyr, and I was trying to do it all and do it perfectly and all of that. And at some point it’s like a volcano that’s ready to go, right? That’s where the anger, the rage, the screw, this.

Koren (00:15:35) – I’m out of here. The quitting, leaving, right, happens. So a metaphor for this is our phones, our cell phones. Or if you have an electric car. Right. But we’ll go to the cell phones. We charge them. Typically, we charge our phones like we all have gotten into this habit or not all of us. But I’m in this habit of every night I put my phone on the charger. I charge it, make sure it’s full. If I have a day that’s going to be out and about, maybe I bring a battery pack with me because I know that my phone needs to be recharged. I’m still learning how to recharge myself, and I’m 51 years old and I’m a coach, and I’ve been doing this a long time. So if this is a new concept for you, and my invitation for you is to give yourself grace and to start learning that as well as unlearning that you can go without. We charge our phones, we charge our cars so we can keep going.

Koren (00:16:25) – Those are great metaphors for our own lives. Because here’s the thing. If you say, had a phone that wasn’t well charged and was like a 10% battery in, you’re in a city late at night, you’re realizing you’re walking in a part of town that’s not safe and you need to call an Uber, but you’re about to. Your phone’s battery is about to die. I guess it’d be less than 10% say it’s at 1%. You may or may not be able to call the Uber. This concept. Death by a thousand cuts. It’s such a great metaphor because it’s the small things that we think don’t matter and we can move on. So here’s the thing. Small things can be the death and small things can build to great success. Actually, it’s the small things that build a great success. We think it has to be these big hairy actions, right? But it’s the small steps that builds a success. So like I said earlier, we have people in our lives who are there to support us.

Koren (00:17:16) – Our spouses are high on that list. And right, there’s that learning about vulnerability and not going alone. Years ago, I had Jeff Opdyke on my show and oh my gosh, I loved Jeff Opdyke. He used to write a column in the Wall Street Journal. It’s called Love and Money, and I loved reading it every Sunday. I was in my 20s and stuff. And so when he got to be one of my first guests on the show, I was so excited. And I remember him telling the story because, you know, I think his wife was a nurse and he was a columnist, you know, personal finance columnist. And I remember he was sitting at the kitchen table and he I guess he balanced the checkbook and he said, oh, okay, we have $15,000 in our checking account. And this is like, you know, I think the late 90s, maybe early 2000. And his wife was washing the dishes and she got really mad and she, like, kind of grumbled and maybe threw down the sponge or something.

Koren (00:18:09) – And he’s like, what’s the matter? And she’s like, I keep working so hard. You’re working hard. And every time we turn around, all we have is $15,000 in our checking account. Why? Right? She felt defeated, she felt hopeless, and he realized she didn’t have the context of the whole situation. So that week he spent a couple of hours, got all their financial assets together and showed her their whole what their assets were and what their liabilities were and what their net worth was overall. And he sat down with her and it was about a 15 minute conversation. He walked her through it and she was like, oh, okay. And she was fine. And he goes, you’re okay. Go. She goes, well, now I know that it’s not just 15, like we’re working hard, but we’re always at the same. There’s actually growth. That’s an example of why it’s so important to share more than just the bad thing. Because what’s the story that your spouse or your confidant or your friend may be putting together for the other stories that they may not have, not only them, but ourselves? If we focus on just that one thing, the negative, we may be missing all these other aspects and not seeing the whole picture.

Koren (00:19:23) – And that’s really important. So those are examples of death by a thousand cuts, right? When we only talk about the one thing and over and over and like Jeff’s wife getting so mad thinking, well, you keep telling me we have 15,000 and in her brain is, why isn’t it growing? I guess we’re not doing enough, right? You may not know what the other person, how it’s impacting them, and that’s really important. The other side for this entrepreneur is how can he take care of himself in those small moments. We’ll also lead to the longevity career. Like he’s physically fit, he’s strong, he’s healthy, he does a lot of that stuff. So this is just a small area. It’s a small area because it’s the drive home where he’s beating himself up. But if he can work on cleaning that up because it’s not about doing it perfectly, it’s about learning, growing, nurturing ourselves so that we have the ability to make the sacrifices or go into surge when we need to. And instead of being perfect or being hard on ourselves, which is, again, that cultural programming.

Koren (00:20:27) – Of how we get to success, which isn’t true. It’s about working on thriving and being compassionate with ourselves. So how does this look on the right home? It looks like evaluating. Asking ourselves, hmm, what worked well today? What could be improved? And as you can see those two questions, there’s an accountability because it’s not oh, I’m just so fantastic. Everything was great without like missing the context of okay, there’s going to be areas of improvement, right. What can be improved. You know, most people think compassion means letting people get away with things or being soft. Remember, I have a client who used to be like current compassion as being soft. She was a C-suite exec. I’m like, compassion has boundaries. So what worked well today? What can be improved? And really being accountable to ourselves and the people we lead. Right? The people responsible for working towards that with a realistic time frame where sometimes we have so much magical thinking to overcome, right?

Koren (00:21:35) – And the world is set up because we’ve got Amazon and Google. I’ve used this example quite a bit this week with clients. Amazon has created magical thinking of how quickly something should be able to happen. Except there’s an infrastructure that I’m sure is like billions of dollars with incredible tech support that allows that to happen in a network of that where we can get something on our doorstep within a few hours. Right. And same thing with Google. We have a question. We go there, we may get an answer, but there’s a whole bunch of systems in place to create that answer. But that’s not how those timeframes really work in our real life. So when we can ask those questions, this leads to growth and learning, which is a growth mindset. And it does it without beating herself up and causing unnecessary suffering internally. And here’s the thing you may say, oh, but the people that I know that are really successful, they don’t show these things on the outside. You’re right. They probably don’t. They are armored up, and they may not be sharing this vulnerability with their friends, or sometimes even with their spouses or their family members.

Koren (00:22:41) – But here’s the thing I hear about it as their coach and in the work I do with people. Right? So I hear about it. I get the privilege of getting the unguarded information and people share this stuff with me. And on the outside how they may look and what’s going on the inside. Oftentimes there can be a disconnection and you wouldn’t know it. It’s oftentimes a big internal thing that’s going on. Being a perfectionist is a death by a thousand cuts. When my kids were little, they used to go around spouting Nobody’s Perfect from Hannah Montana. Let’s remember that nobody is perfect, and trying to be perfectionist doesn’t help you do the work you want to do, the meaningful work you want at the high level of being a high performer. Nor does it allow you to live the life of connected relationships that you desire and you deserve. All right, until next time. I’m smiling big for you. Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you’ll love my weekly emails. I know you’re thinking, Koren, really? Do I want another email in my overflowing inbox? Yes you do.

Koren (00:23:58) – Yippee skippy you do. These are short. They’re sweet. On Fridays, I send out the Friday podcast. It’s a great reminder that there’s a new show and it comes straight into your inbox of the latest episode. Awesome. You click on it, you go straight. Because we all need reminders. We have busy, full lives. And then on Sundays I have my Sunday Love column and these are emails I write from the heart. They’re filled with love. We need more love. We all do, myself included. These are short emails where you get a quick takeaway so you can incorporate this into your life, because people often want to know what to do and how to do it. And maybe sometimes it’s a story that you get. Or there’s like one time I wrote about the ten ways to practice gratitude, and that became such a great tool when one of the readers was struggling and the middle of the night, because it can be a scary place in our brains in the middle of the night.

Koren (00:24:58) – And she remembered the email that I sent about ten ways to practice gratitude. And she was able to practice gratitude and fall back asleep. And that was an awesome lesson for her to incorporate into her life. Go to the show notes, and there’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up and get these emails in your inbox.

Music (00:25:19) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

The post I'm such a perfectionist appeared first on howshereallydoesit.com.

Now that Thanksgiving has passed, paving the way for the holidays, it is normal to feel excitement as well as resentment. After all, we often look forward to an idealized notion of the holidays, rather than the reality of what we may experience at that time of the year.

It can bring us joy to meet with people we don't have a chance to see as much as we'd like to, but it can also make us feel lonely to be confronted with our lack of connections. Deciding what to wear to parties takes a lot of brain juice, but other activities fill us up with happiness.

Our idea of the perfect holiday season can be guided by our cultural surroundings or by the happiness of our family, our partners, or our spouses. We want to make things perfect for everyone, but how can you keep giving if you are exhausted?

My friend, I invite you to put yourself in the equation of a successful holiday experience. It is not selfish to take time for yourself, to ask yourself what you need and to set your boundaries.

Discover how to allow yourself to breathe, to fill yourself up in a way that will give you the ability to offer as much as you want this season. Let yourself dream of what you don't think is possible for you, and remember, we can't give what we don't have.

LISTEN HERE

Music (00:00:00) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. Halloween is over, and this show is dropping the day after Thanksgiving for those that live in the states. So we are well into the holiday season. There’s the idea of the season, and for so many, the reality which can often be quite different. Often this holiday season is about overwhelm and obligation. It’s about trying to fulfill these ideas without even the consciousness. Is this what we truly want? Is this what the people we love really want? It’s more about what we’re supposed to do. This is what we should do. This is what we must do. And there can also be beauty in the holidays as well. Time spent with people you care about, but maybe not seeing on a frequent basis.

Koren (00:01:25) – And the holiday season can create a consciousness of loneliness because of the space that you have in your life with lack of connections. So going into this holiday season, I do often spend quite a bit of time coaching my clients around this, whether it’s being grateful because there’s not an office party to attend to, or being upset because there is an office party, or being overwhelmed, right? Or how to deal with difficult family members at these dinners. So the holiday season, we have what the cultural programming says it’s supposed to look like. And then we often have the reality. And I just gave you some different examples and you can think about what is it you’re like, what is your idea and what is the reality? For me, this time of the year is also layered with end of year travel. And years ago I’ve gotten better at this because as we do this work, as we become more conscious of ourselves and of our lives and our environments, we get clearer about what do we want from this.

Koren (00:02:35) – But years ago, and I’ve talked about it on this show here, I would really want to be invited to the parties. Then as soon as I got it, I’d be resenting about the obligation of going, right? It’s like I couldn’t be happy either way. And that had to do with the brain juice of figuring out what to wear. I remember one night we’d been in such a drought for so long, I couldn’t even find my umbrellas on the night of this Christmas party that I chose to go to, I had to figure out this whole umbrella thing, and I couldn’t even find an umbrella nor buy an umbrella. And I wound up going to the party in a bit of rain. It was all fine in the end. The other part of the obligations is making small talk, right? And then coming home late and then being exhausted and further behind on sleep life holiday preparations. So I used to struggle with this, like, oh, I really want to be invited to these parties.

Koren (00:03:28) – And then if I was busy because of my work travel, then having resentment of that versus I chose these work choices to go to and understanding that I can’t miss make everything. And that’s okay. So maybe you host a Thanksgiving. You know, I like on Thanksgiving weekend to set up the Christmas tree. We go and get a tree. We set it up. I like to get the Christmas card sent out. I’ve even had to like, relax a bit because I used to like it to be sent out that weekend. So go out that first week and it’s gotten a bit later over the years, right? As I’ve had other priorities and I just give myself permission. It’s okay. And I love to do the Christmas cards, the holiday cards. I could have a whole story of resentment towards my family. We used to do it as a production. It was a team. And you know, it was great because my kids learned how to, like, stamp an envelope, write their home address.

Koren (00:04:21) – Right. We had this crew and it worked, and I really love it. I love that for me, it’s a part of play of when am I going to make my card? What pictures, what story am I going to tell? So it’s a creative process for me and it’s fun. And then I love, love, love getting holiday cards. It’s one of my favorite things. I get so excited and I still have last year’s. I put them up on our wall in the hallway and I need to take them down. My kids get over me with that, but I just love it. I love to see all the pictures. I love to see all these people that have been a part of our lives, and to see them grow and learn about their lives. And seen in a snippet, right. I just, I love it. There’s something about the physical. I’ve gotten email cards and, you know, and that’s okay. But I love holiday cards and I don’t want people to do it because it’s out of obligation.

Koren (00:05:10) – Right? For me, it’s something that’s really delightful and I’d actually rather spend time doing that than some of the other holiday things. So thinking about what is it for you? So as we think about these final weeks of 2023, holy moly, 2023, we’re going into 2024. What do these final weeks of the year look like for you? And yes, I’m asking for you, often my clients, my people, our community, it’s always worth thinking about. What do we need to do for others? What do you want from this time? What do you want from this holiday season? These are really important because you may get triggered and have resistance and think, oh, I’m being really selfish if it’s about me, but it’s about feeling you up so that you can pour out and give and so that you don’t end up in January resentful and exhausted and hating the holidays and thinking that you never want to do it again. I know that can be kind of dramatic, but that is some of the stuff that happens when we get so exhausted we will do that.

Koren (00:06:16) – We’ll say that at least not follow through on it. So what do you want from this time? What do you want from these last few weeks of 2023? What do you need? Maybe you need rest. I need a lot of rest this year. I’ve been resting a lot and really taking care of myself. And I need a lot of rest and really, really tired. I’m shutting down work early this year. I’m going to have some downtime. My family will be here. We don’t do travel during the winter. Holiday season, and that may change as my kids graduate from college and stuff. Right? But what do you want? What do you want for you? And my invitation for you is to put yourself in the equation. Often we have like partner or husband or spouse, kids, mom or dad. Right. All these people and it goes equals a successful holiday experience. And we forget to make sure that we’re part of that equation. Self, partner, spouse, right.

Koren (00:07:15) – Children, family, work all of those are part of the equation. We need to make sure and it’s not selfish. I was coaching somebody yesterday and she’s like, oh, maybe I’m selfish. Taking care of herself is not selfish. And you can sacrifice right now. But the other side is what’s the cost long term. And I see those ramifications long term. Look around in your life where you see somebody who’s really bitter and resentful and angry. What got them to there? My hunch is they didn’t put themselves in the equation. What do you dream of? But don’t think it’s possible for you? What do you dream of? Maybe your family always does this for the holidays, and you’re over it. And you can even hear your family’s over it. What’s another thing you can do? I remember years ago, the holidays when I was a kid. Growing up. They were really tumultuous. You know, there’s alcohol involved and non-emotional intelligence. And I remember my cousin, who’s quite a bit older than me when he decided to host.

Koren (00:08:19) – He’s like, we’re not doing a turkey. We’re going to do it on Saturday because there were a lot of firefighters in my family, because we’re going to do it on Saturday and sit on Thursday because we make Thanksgiving the day it is, and we’re having pesto pasta. And I was like, pesto pasta, what is what is this pesto pasta stuff? I think it was probably like in seventh or eighth grade. We did it and it was actually quite beautiful, like my cousins could work on the holidays, we could come on a Saturday. There wasn’t all the fiascos with the turkey and the oven and being starving and waiting until 830 at night. It was easy. It was fun. We got to connect. So that’s something to think about. Like sometimes we get so ingrained and this is the way we’ve always done it, without consciously saying, is this something we want to continue? What parts do we want to continue? What parts maybe we want to not do this year and we can always try it, bring it back next year.

Koren (00:09:10) – So what do you dream of but don’t think is possible for you? That’s the question. Allow yourself to explore that. And I get it. Part of adulting is taking care of our responsibilities, right? Our family, children, aging parents, spouses, partners, or jobs. We may have people that we lead at work and we have those responsibilities. There’s work colleagues. There’s responsibilities, right? The world doesn’t just shut down just because of the holidays. Things continue on. So it’s not about an either or. It’s about a what do you dream of and what are the other responsibilities and how do they fit together? What does it look like for you? And here’s the thing it doesn’t have to take that long. I was coaching a client yesterday and we are talking about tactile breathing or yoga breathing. Right. It’s a square breathing where you breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds. And you keep doing that and doing these squares and how that can help reduce stress.

Koren (00:10:14) – That may be what you need and maybe what you have capacity for taking up space as allowing yourself to breathe. Breathe. Instead of holding your breath and taking shallow breaths and being more stressed. It could be going outside for ten minutes to go on a walk. One of the things that I do after a pretty long day in the office is I do work on getting outside, because some days I could just stay in the office and realize I never leave. But going outside, going for a walk. And where I live, there’s these great green belts. The pool, is just around the corner. And so I walk over there. It’s in a park which has all these great trees. I’m outside. I’m connecting with people. It’s really refreshing going outside. It can be ten minutes. We think it has to be these big, elaborate things. But what could be easy that you can do that can fill you up? It doesn’t have to be long. It can be lying on the carpet and looking at the trees.

Koren (00:11:13) – This has been my latest thing. It didn’t make any sense. I’m always fascinated with myself. I’m like, oh, I just want to lay here and look at the trees. Why do I want to lay here and look at the trees? Right. I’ve been a part of hustle culture. I’ve been a part of work hard, you know, just keep going, grind it out, have grit, resilience. And I guess this 51 year old self is laying around looking at the trees. My brain is still pretty busy. There’s a lot of thinking and reflection that goes on, but there has been so much good healing this fall with staring out the window and looking at the trees. I highly recommend it and it’s free. It’s not a fixed time. We can all fit it in at some point. So one of the things that’s really important is to fill yourself up so that you have the ability to give the season notice. That’s why it’s not selfish. It’s not filling yourself up and being a taker and being like, I need to take and I need to be, you know, this is for me and to hell with you all.

Koren (00:12:11) – It’s about filling yourself up so that you can pour into others, because we can’t give what we don’t have. And we’ve been mistaken with all the cultural programming that we can do it all. And we’re supposed to. Right? I have unlearned that, and I continue to unlearn it and look for other areas of, oh, where am I still thinking I need to do it all? What do I need to do? What do I want to do and what can I get rid of and not do? And that means that we must stop living by other people’s rules and expectations, cultural programming, and make sure that we’re part of our own equation. Right. And it’s not throwing out the other things. It’s about taking up space. And that may mean saying no to some things. And then I ask you, would that be so bad to say no? You may say, oh, but my friend won’t invite me next year. What if you let your friend know? I really love being invited.

Koren (00:13:12) – Thank you so much. And this year I don’t have capacity and I would love to be included next year. Those are the things that we forget to say. We just say no. And then we let them make up stories. And if you do it for a few years, then they’re like, well, I guess they don’t want to come and they take you off the list. And it may be because of some armor of, I’m going to protect me and take you off the list. We need to be discerning and stop holding out the promise of the idea versus the reality for us. We hold on to the promise of this idea of like, oh, it’s going to be the holidays. It’s going to look like this. We’re all going to sit around the table. It’s going to be glorious, right? We have all this magical thinking when it comes to the holidays, and we forget about the shit shows and the difficulties and the difficult behaviors and the fact that we may be coming in with about 10% fuel in reserves.

Koren (00:14:03) – Right. And instead, if we can be discerning, we do this by being compassionate with ourselves and with others, knowing that there’s going to be shit shows, knowing that people are not maybe not going to be on their best behavior. People are going to be exhausted and allowing ourselves to be fascinated by the human experience. It’s way better to walk into a room being fascinated than being judgmental and rolling her eyes. And so by being compassionate with ourselves and having that self compassion, it’s about asking ourselves, what do we want? What do I want? What do others want? Where does it meet in the Venn diagram? And yes, it’s vulnerable and it takes some time, but it’s so worth it. And for you to be able to have the holiday experience you desire, instead of feeling all sorts of resentment and exhaustion in January, you get to be a part of this holiday season and a part of the equation of what you do. Make time and space for you this holiday season. Your loved ones will appreciate it in the long run.

Koren (00:15:09) – In the long run, they may not appreciate it right now because they may not be getting what they want, and you’ll be more fulfilled and less resentful come January. Happy holidays! I’m smiling big for you. Hey there. Before we go, I have a question for you. Have you subscribed to the show yet? This is an awesome opportunity for you to preserve your brain juice. I love the fact that I can subscribe to podcasts and television shows, and they go straight to my iPhone, or they go straight to my DVR, and then I don’t have to worry of oh no, especially with television shows. Did I hit record? Is it going to be there or not? Do I have to watch it on demand and go through all the commercials? So go and hit the subscribe button. There’s a link in the show notes, and that will ensure you that you never miss a show. And you can also save your brain juice for other things in your life. There’s way more important things, but you and I will still be connected because the show will be waiting for you in your phone.

Koren (00:16:11) – Go to the link in the show notes. Subscribe to the show so you can automatically get all the shows to your phone.

Music (00:16:20) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

The post The Holiday Season appeared first on howshereallydoesit.com.

I dislike the cold, and even though I live in California, I can say that I have never enjoyed cold weather. For a long time, I put myself in a situation that didn't make my life more enjoyable during that season: I didn't turn on the heat.

We sometimes make choices that cause us unnecessary suffering. Sometimes, our brains are set on old ways of thinking that are not beneficial to our growth but instead are a waste of energy, attention, or money.

Just like I did during those winters, sometimes we put ourselves in uncomfortable situations because we are fiscally conservative.

My friend, I invite you to look at the choices you've made and try to pinpoint what causes unnecessary suffering in your life.

Discover how to make a positive change and stop suffering when you don't need to. Tune in to find out how to unlearn a way of being that doesn't help you grow.

LISTEN HERE

Music (00:00:00) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. Winters. I hate the cold. And I realize for those of us in this hemisphere, we’re going into winter and our friends Down Under are going into summer. This may not relate in terms of weather. My hunch is that in terms of unnecessary suffering and the choices we make, this will be relatable. So winters, I really do hate the cold weather, and it’s something that has taken up a lot of more brain space over the last decade, more than a decade, because of some choices that I made that I’m going to share with you all. And I get it. Some of you are going to laugh at me because you’re going to say, Koren, you live in California, you don’t have snow.

Koren (00:01:21) – You may have a few ice days and many years you don’t even have rain. I get it, I live in California. I don’t live in Southern California, where the weather is much more mild throughout the year. But I still don’t like cold weather. I just don’t like cold weather. I like to be warm, but then not too hot. So I have like this range of temperature that I like to be. And here’s the thing. I’ve been suffering unnecessarily for a decade, and I’m going to use that word suffering when we talk about suffering, where there’s a context around it, right? It’s this discomfort, right? And within the context of being somebody that has a home and has jobs and has the money to do these things, it’s unnecessary suffering. And yet I’m not suffering, right? I’m not living on the streets in that sense. I’ve often said that there’s no such thing as a trauma Olympics. I’m not talking about the suffering Olympics of who is suffering more. And what does that look like in today’s show? It’s about the unnecessary suffering I was doing to myself that was a waste of energy, attention, brain juice, choices, and even money because of this unnecessary suffering that I was going through.

Koren (00:02:39) – So I’m going to share this with you so that you can think about in your own life, where you may be having unnecessary suffering. So back in 2010, I started to turn the heater off in our house and it was all to save money in the winter. And I remember our house was like 47 to 57°F is about 8 to 14°C. So depending on where you are in the world listening to this. So it was cold again, not that cold for a lot of people, but cold for me. I’m willing to own that part of my story. And I decided to save money. And because one I was the only one at home during the day, so it was fine. Right. I could handle it like I should sacrifice myself for my family. And as women and as moms, we often do that as well as this can happen when we have fear and shame showing up. And my brain can be really good at making up scary stories. I’ve learned how to unlearn that and relearn new ways.

Koren (00:03:43) – Right. But back then, I was really good at that, especially because there was a pretty traumatic event that had happened in our family. And so that was my solution. It was like, oh, I’m going to over function in this, and this is what I’m going to do, right? Suffer and save money. And here’s the thing. When you also have an environment that supports this behavior of suffering, right, do it for the common good. Make sure to save money at all costs, even if the cost is yourself. So here’s the thing. Not only did I make this decision and it was a rather conscious decision, it was like, oh, I’m going to save money this way. But my best friend also had this cost conscious belief about keeping the heat off and just were more close. So she would suffer in her house. We would suffer in my house. We spent a lot of time hanging out, drinking coffee together and we would do this and suffer. We are in this together.

Koren (00:04:37) – So when you look around and you go, well, my people are doing this too and see this is the quote, right thing to do. That’s kind of dangerous territory, the right thing, right? We can use common humanity to our disadvantage, right, to create more suffering. And then my husband, of course, for those that know my husband, you know, he’s a coach. And his mantra used to be, you know, rough, tough, hard to bluff and use the hardship and, you know, being tough. And it’s okay to suffer, especially for the personal good of others. Right? So it was like, well, it’s not cold. Why is it a problem? Because his perspective is he was outdoors in the cold coaching on pool decks. So it’s okay. Except I’m sitting and he’s moving as a coach. So all of this helped further reinforce the unnecessary suffering. And my question for you right now as I share this story, is where do you have unnecessary suffering in your life? Think about that.

Koren (00:05:32) – We don’t need to judge ourselves. Just think about that. So back then, as much as I hated to be cold, here’s something that else is interesting. So while I would suffer during the winter and not turn on the thermostat because I was going to save money and it was going to be better for the environment and so on and so forth. Right. Kind of martyr ish. In the summertime we have spring, summer, even fall. We have triple degree heat. We’re talking hundred and plus more. That’s 38°C. And it is hot in the valley where I live, and I do not like the heat. And there was no unnecessary sharing because I am known to turning on that thermostat and making sure it’s cool and it’s comfortable. But in the winter, I had this whole thing about I must like, struggle and not allow myself to be comfortable. It’s such an interesting thing. Look in your life where you may have that sort of cognitive dissonance. Again, this is an opportunity to own our stories and love ourselves and not be themselves up and say, oh my gosh, we’re such a dumbshit.

Koren (00:06:34) – We’re so stupid. That is not helpful. And it doesn’t change behavior. It may change. It’s short term but not lasting behavior. So there’s no mind drama. There were no rules. There’s no scarcity. There’s no fear. It’s on. I don’t worry about – I was like, of course it’s on. It wasn’t even like, is it going to be on? And what would the budget be? Right. It was on. And of course there’s constraints around it, but it was on. It was accepted, but not in the winter for myself. And these are all the rules that I just made up. These were decisions I made up. And then I looked for evidence to support this. So it wasn’t totally a climate change issue about not turning on the heat because I was blasting the AC in the summertime. It was just so deeply ingrained. Something had happened and I decided to over function and I created a solution, what I thought was a solution. But it was also unnecessary because really, was it a solution? And over the last decade, I’ve done a lot of small steps to unlearn that way of being right.

Koren (00:07:35) – And even this year I created a new step to support me. So as the colder days and the weather has just changed just recently because it’s actually quite hot. But in the morning I would wake up and be like, oh, I don’t want to get out, you know, when you’re in bed and it’s so nice and warm and toasty and you have to step out of it and you’re like, oh, it’s cold. And then I have to get going, and there’s already stuff you don’t want to do. So it wasn’t very inviting to leave my bed in the morning, and I thought, I go, why don’t I just turn on the heat? So before I wake up, it’s actually warm and I’m willing to. It’s one less obstacle to make it difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Right? This is the support I could use. For some of you, you may be like, this is so frivolous, and I get it. And I also know from the work I do with clients that sometimes we need to get so specific and granular so that it can help create an idea baby in another area of your life.

Koren (00:08:26) – So at this point in my life, being able to wake up in the morning with a warm room, it helps me get moving, get started in the day. It’s that little ingredient that helps me get going, right? That I don’t have to just do sheer like it’s all on me. That’s a small step that I’ve learned, right? There are other small steps that I’m not going to need to go into, but, you know, giving myself permission to turn on the heater, giving myself permission to get a fireplace insert. That’s what I did some years ago, right? There were different things, but getting clear and clear about that, you know, playing with at what temperature do we keep the house at and how does that work in our bills versus having it so cold and then going all the way to the other side and having to heat up the whole house? What if we keep a base level of heat? That was like a learning that I did, I don’t know, some years ago, realizing that maybe that would be better long term and financially to keep a certain base level instead of letting the house get to 47 degrees and freezing.

Koren (00:09:29) – So one of the things that when my clients are in this unnecessary suffering and they’re struggling with something and they don’t want to spend the money and they’re in this like fear and scarcity, and I know their financial situations that were closely with them. I often ask them, you know, what is your money for? What is it for? So, for instance, I had a client recently who went to Europe and they decided the spouse has a bad back and is quite tall, and they decided to and they’re very fiscally conservative, but they decided to buy business class tickets to travel and upon returning was like, that was the best decision. Now, for some of you, you may say, that’s ridiculous. That’s a waste of money. Right? And I’ve talked to people about is that a value for them or is that not a value for them? There’s not a right or wrong. It’s about understanding what support looks like for you. Right? For me, getting out of bed into a warm home.

Koren (00:10:27) – And when I’m saying warm, we’re talking 68°F. So it’s not like it’s, you know, sunshine and roses, but enough where I can get out of bed and not be freezing cold to the bone. So getting really clear about what is your money for? Is it here to support you? And then what are the responsibilities that you have that maybe the dollar is already earmarked for instead of just going into unnecessary suffering? Especially if it’s about saving money, asking yourself what is the money for? Right? That’s a really important question. For so many of us, we may have an old way of being deeply ingrained. You know, in my young adulthood, I learned how to be frugal. I would grew up really poor, and I didn’t want to be that way. I was a poor college student, and, you know, I had a Pell Grant and Stafford loans. And I also realized poor is relative, because I had the resources to go to university where some people may not have those resources.

Koren (00:11:23) – And then in my 20s, I learned about being frugal, and those lessons served me really well. But you may have heard me say this often on the show is that our strengths can become our weaknesses, especially when we’re rooted in fear or shame. Right. And shame is the scarcity. It’s there’s not enough. But here’s the thing. Like I was trying to save money because I was trying to offset a potential loss of money, which really there wasn’t the loss of money, but it was like, oh, no. And I had all this fear in the scarcity. So when I started this back in 2010 of turning off the heat, it was out of fear and shame. And then I kept that behavior with ever really looking at like, is this really saving me money? Is this really necessary or is it not necessary? Or we’re in between can be the right amount of heat with a bill that, you know, we have the resources for and letting go of the identity of I’m a poor college student, I wasn’t I mean, 2010, I was, what, 38 years old I was I was so far out of college in grad school.

Koren (00:12:31) – The other thing is, is that now. Right? I’ve survived a lot of ebbs and flows as an adult. I’ve gone through really difficult things, and now I’m much more resilient. So as I sit here in the, you know, the last couple of weeks going, huh, do I really need, want, to wake up and get out of bed into a cold house. What can I do differently? Right? Like I know what my resources are in terms of being able to pay for bills. How do I want this experience to be? What is my money for? What do I want to spend it on? Those are the choices that I have, right? I have the money to pay the utilities bill, and I can still care about the environment, but not suffer with being cold because I don’t suffer with being hot in the summer. Right. And you all, I get it. It can sound so ridiculous, but these are like the prison walls that we create for ourselves, right? And I remember my best friend and I, we, we would indulge in the story of like, oh, look at us.

Koren (00:13:30) – You know, we don’t turn on the heat. We struggle, we wear layers. We do all this stuff because and we had these fireplace inserts that we refused to turn on because, you know, that would cost money. But we also paid money to put them in, but then wouldn’t use it because we didn’t want to pay the money. Again, this is what happens in our brains, and this is why it’s so important to create self awareness so we can unpack how we contradict ourselves. And then here’s the other thing is my other friends would when they would come over to my house, they would bring blankets because my house was so cold. So like, not only was I suffering, but I had a reputation of being the host that allowed for suffering for others. You could see I was stuck in my old ways of being, and I get it because it was triggered at a scary time in my life that really dialed up fear and scarcity, right? And so I doubled down on one aspect of my life that was truly unnecessary.

Koren (00:14:28) – Because here’s the thing. When I look back, did I really save money on not turning on the heat? Right? Because at some points I did have to turn on the heat and did that temperature. Having to go from such a cold, cold to house, did that eat up some of the savings? The other aspect is I bought extra clothes liners like the undergarments to wear in my life. Like maybe this is what people wear, like in other parts of the country where there’s snow and it’s cold. But here I was in my house doing that. And here’s the thing. Talk about waste. This week I was in my closet and I noticed to the side there’s like 3 or 4 packages of undergarments that I still haven't opened because I bought a bunch again out of fear of like, oh no, what if I need it? So I bought way more than I did. So did I really save money? I highly doubt it. I think I created other exchanges, but I let it be part of my identity and it was the suffering and that I was like trying to use to justify like, oh, look at me.

Koren (00:15:28) – And it was being martyr ish, right? So all of this unnecessary suffering and we make these big sweeping motions like I did with the heat, attach it to our identity, and then we can have others who support this behavior. Right. And my best friend, my husband, without really looking into is this necessary? Am I really saving money in the end? Does this support me and the work I do? These are important questions. It’s not one. It’s not black and white. It’s not right or wrong. There’s a lot of context to get to what’s going on in that scenario. Now here’s the thing. One of the things I’ve evolved to over the years, too, is. The unlearning of being so fiscally conservative and frugal. And I really held that, you know, banned. And I’m still I’m fiscally conservative. I do believe in spending money on things that bring me value, and I’m still pretty ruthless on things that don’t. For instance, one of my favorite shares that I talk about often is I truly dislike spending $0.10 on a paper bag at the grocery store.

Koren (00:16:41) – Call it my old beliefs of getting free paper bags my whole life. Until whenever California changed the law and we had to start paying for it. I just don’t believe in paying for paper bags. So we have paper bags at home that we’ve saved. We have cloth bags. That’s what I’d rather use before spending money. And again, it’s $0.10. I have lots of $0.10 coins in my house that sit around unused, and so it’s not a lack of resources. And it’s not about saving money. It’s this belief of what’s okay and what’s not okay. We have these beliefs all the time. And yes, sometimes when I do go to the store and I don’t have a bag with me, I have to take a few deep breaths, cut myself down, and give myself permission that it’s okay to spend money on the bags. Like these are the things that go on inside my head, right? And there’s an awareness because it’s such a strong value of mine. Right. And it’s okay if I do it on occasion.

Koren (00:17:39) – I just worry sometimes about it being the slippery slope. So what are your old beliefs that may be causing you unnecessary suffering? Right. Like even the bag thing is kind of causing some unnecessary suffering because it does take brain juice when I’m at the store. And here’s the thing. As I asked these questions today, you may draw a blank right now. It’s okay. That happens. And it’s now that we’ve created this awareness, it’s this window of possibility, right? Where as you go through your day, your week, your month, the holiday season. You’re going to start to notice where is your resistance? Where maybe you are having unnecessary suffering. And then you can ask yourself, is this necessary? Is a suffering necessary or is it unnecessary? What are these choices that I’m making? Is this an old belief that no longer serves me? Or does it still serve me? Is this a strength that I dialed up? Because I’m currently rooted in fear. Shame. Those are important questions to help you start to unpack what’s going on.

Koren (00:18:50) – And then you get to decide, as the leader of your life, what is the way of being you want to move forward given your responsibilities, given your constraints, what can be true for you? The suffering I was going through each winter took up a lot of brain space, and it became such a part of my identity. And remember, it was celebrated with my best friend and approved of by my husband and approved of wasn’t like he approved of it, but it was like, oh yeah, this is what we do. We we were tough. We can do hard things. Right. And like and yes, we can do hard things, but 47 to 57 degrees in your home is ridiculous. It was unnecessary and wasn’t necessarily saving us money. That’s the important thing, right? If you’re going to make these decisions, that’s the other part that’s really important, is to follow through and see what the conclusion is. Because often we make these decisions when we move on and we never go back and re-evaluate.

Koren (00:19:46) – I’m unlearning that behavior and thinking more about what supports me in the winter, and that is in alignment with my values and priorities. So it’s still not to be wasteful, right? The cost of gas has gone up over the years, I realize that, and how can I be so that I can be supported in my home and not spend a lot of energy on this, and also not be wasteful because that’s an important value. Wasteful with energy. Wasteful with my money. Wasteful with buying things for the environment. It means that my home won’t be 84 degrees, which is 29°C again in the winter. It also means that this winter I’m going to set my thermostat so that in the mornings I wake up to a warm home. I like it to be cool at night while I’m sleeping, but I also do like it to be warm before I get out of bed. And guess what? I have the thermostats that can easily program that. That’s what would support me, and to take my time and to set that up.

Koren (00:20:46) – So as I go through and create a life I love, I find these small bits of life to make tweaks to unlearning old behaviors, ways of being. Cultural programming takes awareness and self compassion, not judging myself. And today’s show is an example of what Brené Brown says of owning our story and loving ourselves. Right. It’s really important that we own our story and love ourselves. We want to. Either hide away from our stories, put her head down, run away from it, or beat the crap out of ourselves. Neither of those actually help us create changes that we want. It just creates more dirty pain, right? So usually when we notice these types of things, we then beat ourselves up and say, oh man, I’m dumb. Like, the more that we can laugh with ourselves and say, oh, I’ve been unnecessarily suffering. I’ve been believing this story of I’m like doing such good things by struggling in a cold home. Nope. Not so right. One of the things that Kristin Neff, who’s a professor at University of Texas and she’s been on the show that she taught me, is that compassion is the biggest motivator for change.

Koren (00:21:56) – And one of the things that I know in the work I do with my clients, my own personal work, is compassion, can help with leading us to self awareness as well as the space to even think about these things. So as we end today, my question for you is where in your life may you be having unnecessary suffering in the choices you make? And what are small tweaks that you can change to reduce or get rid of that unnecessary suffering? All right, my friend, I’m smiling big for you. Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you’ll love my weekly emails. I know you’re thinking, Koren, really? Do I want another email in my overflowing inbox? Yes you do. Yippee skippy you do. These are short. They’re sweet. On Fridays, I send out the Friday podcast. It’s a great reminder that there’s a new show, and it comes straight into your inbox of the latest episode. Awesome. You click on it, you go straight. Because we all need reminders.

Koren (00:23:04) – We have busy, full lives. And then on Sundays I have my Sunday Love column and these are emails I write from the heart. They’re filled with love. We need more love. We all do, myself included. These are short emails where you get a quick takeaway so you can incorporate this into your life, because people often want to know what to do and how to do it. And maybe sometimes it’s a story that you get or there’s like one time I wrote about the ten ways to practice gratitude, and that became such a great tool when one of the readers was struggling and the middle of the night, because it can be a scary place in our brains in the middle of the night. And she remembered the email that I sent about ten ways to practice gratitude. And she was able to practice gratitude and fall back asleep. And that was an awesome lesson for her to incorporate into her life. Go to the show notes, and there’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up and get these emails in your box.

Music (00:24:06) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

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