Try Self-Love

The theme this month is "Gifts," and honoring what we want and what is best for us. This falls in line with having good boundaries instead of weak ones and choosing ourselves.

For Becky, honoring herself means that when she knows that she should be doing something she tries to follow through on it whether or not others are going to like her choice or not. She is a person who is kind, loving, and supportive of others and to herself.

So instead of trying to put everyone else first and make everyone else happy, which is an impossibility, she tries to do the things that will give her peace and help her become the person that she wants to be. Each day adding to the person she wants to be.

We can choose to honor ourselves in a self-loving versus a self-seeking way. Sometimes when people try to take advantage of those of us who choose ourselves, they will use manipulation or attack us in some way by telling us that when we choose ourselves, we are being selfish, which can create a feeling of guilt for someone who is a people pleaser.

But the truth is that when you act in your own best interest and are doing what is healthy and for you, you're not harming anybody. You're not out to hurt someone when you do this. This still might hurt people who really count on you to meet their own agendas. Your intention is to be peaceful and to be healthy, not to hurt anyone.

In the past, Kristen was a big people pleaser and would feel so guilty about choosing herself that she simply could not do it. And this created resentment toward those whose agenda she always felt she had to follow.

Creating boundaries creates self-worth and self-confidence. When you feel this way, you are not out to hurt anyone. Building up our own self-worth is the key. We can lovingly support other people, but it's really not our job to be carrying anyone else on our own backs.

When you truly love yourself, you can truly offer love to others. Obligatory love tinged with resentment is not real love. self-trust is also a good way to honor yourself. How I want to respond and who I am is the same in all situations instead of morphing into what I think the other person wants to hear.

Honoring your own best interests is also really important as well. As Dr. Phil says, "We teach people how to treat us." You need to tell people what you need and don't assume that they know already. They can't read your mind. It's on us to communicate our needs and we suffer when we expect people to meet our needs and expectations if they can't or don't know what they are.

You may inadvertently inflict pain onto someone else in the short term. You will have less conflict this way. But in the long run, you will suffer more because you will just be bottling up all the anger and resentment and then explode.

When we are in a situation that is not good for us, we always want to believe that it can return to when it was wonderful. It becomes important to recognize that when something is no longer good for you or healthy or working for you and that it is, in fact, bad for you.

We aren't suggesting that you just go out and end your relationship or quit your job if that's not right for you to do. But just pay attention to what is working for you and what isn't.

Just make sure that you communicate what you need and see how it goes and decide form there. Choose you.

Pain can be a great catalyst for growth and if it hurts someone when you stop choosing them and their agenda, it's a great opportunity for them to step up and start doing what was theirs to do all along.

You need to eventually take responsibility for what you have allowed from others. In the long run, if people start doing what they were supposed to be doing for themselves all along--taking care of what is already theirs to take care of--and us staying in our own lane.

If you come up against a brick wall with someone or some situation and it hurts every...

Merry Christmas and happy holidays! Becky gives a short Christmas message that will help you find peace amid the hustle and bustle. Remembering the reason for the season will help you on your path to greater self-love.

Today, Kristen and Becky discuss our personal narratives or the stories that we tell ourselves that run our lives. We can step out of the story, AND that takes some work. On the other side of the story is the unknown, which can make it difficult or daunting to even want to go there.

Author Debbie Ford used to be on Oprah often and she wrote many books about the shadow and our story, one of which is called: "The Secret of the Shadow: The Power of Owning Your Whole Story." There is a quote from this book and it says: "The deeper truth is that I have a story, but I am not my story."

Our story begins with our beliefs and our conditioning as children. In order to survive we create a story because as children, our inner critic takes over and reminds us every time we fail or mess up in some way. Then, we start to see the "proof" of our story in all our life experiences. We grow up living out the story more and more.

When you have thoughts that create your behaviors and your patterns, it creates an identity or the story you are living in. You CAN shift out of the story and start walking down a different pathway.

It's important to be able to step back and ask ourselves what the beliefs and stories are and also ask how they are really serving us. You really need to be aware of the story first and foremost.

You have been living in the story of your family for generations even before you are born, is when you are born, you already are inundated with the messages about who you have to be in the family what role you have to play, so this role and story you are in is already mapped out for you. You are already stuck in the story right off the bat. And this is the only identity you know, so it's just safer to stay in the story you are comfortable in. For instance, it keeps you safe believing that you have to measure up by doing x,y, or z to earn love. A lot of it can be about "I am not worthy unless I am doing this..."

The story keeps growing as we continue to "prove" to ourselves that we are not good enough in some way. The world just continues to reflect back to you the story you believe in.

This is how you start to notice your thoughts: by noticing your life experience being reflected back at you.

The story might be a horrible one, but it has kept you alive since you were little. And now, if you want to change it, you certainly can.

Once you realize that you have a choice, that is when you are able to make the change. Self-awareness is huge, and sifting through your beliefs and your needs that were not met as a child helps you start to be able to move onto a new neuropathway and to have the choice to do so.

This might all sound hard and negative but the cool part about it is that it is very empowering to be able to change your life in this way. You can feel so disempowered when you are in situations where you continue to get abused, lied to, or losing jobs.

These stories are lies. They are not the truth about who we are. Our brains try to protect us and keep us alive by telling us to stay small and to not get hurt. It can keep us in hiding. Once you become aware of the beliefs, they can loosen and be replaced by healthier beliefs.

It's about creating the life that you want. People often want to be loved but when they have to opportunity to be loved by themselves or others, it can actually be very frightening. And this can keep someone stuck because people often believe that they aren't worthy enough to be loved. This can keep you in self-sabotage mode.

When you decide to change your family's story, you are living in your power. Then your children have a chance not to do the dysfunctional things that you and your family have done for generations. This is, quite literally, how we change the world. If we all change ourselves--our beliefs, our patterns, and our stories and we start having new experiences that prove to us that we are living a better life, that...

November's theme is communication. November is Communication Month worldwide, so we want to discuss Nonviolent Communication (NVC).

First of all, Becky and Kristen are excited about Thanksgiving with family around.

About NVC: there are so many resources online for NVC and around the world to learn how to increase your nonviolent communication skills.

This is a fascinating concept that is also a life-long pursuit. Marshall Rosenberg is the creator of Nonviolent Communication. NVC is a way of communicating that leads us to give from the heart.

Words in and of themselves can be "violent" and can wound others. So, this a great way to express yourself more clearly, to be heard, and then to be able to her the other person is saying.

One of the purposes of NVC is to be able to hear our own needs and those of others. There is no way you can hear another person if you can't hear yourself first.

This is because if we take something personally and think they are criticizing us, it will make us react emotionally and feel defensive so we are not hearing what the other one is truly saying.

There are four components of NVC:

Observation

Feelings

Needs

Request

In the Observation stage, it's important not to evaluate or judge or making assumptions about others and yourself. Have compassion for yourself first.

In the Feelings stage, stop denying responsibility for your feelings. "You made me mad!" "She made me crazy!" Instead, say, "I feel..." and to further it: "I feel...because..." Express your vulnerability to resolve conflicts.

When you explain how you feel, use a feeling word instead of making it into a thought.

In the Needs Stage, we need to acknowledge our needs behind our feelings. Judgments and criticisms are just expressions of our own needs and values.

When you are criticizing someone, you alienate yourself from the actual need that is behind that criticism. You are simply projecting your needs and pain from the unmet needs onto the other person.

You have four options when someone criticizes you:

1. You can take it personally and blame yourself just as they have done.
2. You can blame someone else.
3. Shine the light of consciousness on our own feelings and needs.
4. Shine the light of consciousness on the other person's feelings and needs as they are currently expressed.

This means that when someone is upset, you have to be very secure in your feelings and needs to be able to put it all aside in order to make them feel validated and heard so they can calm down so you can connect with them.

In the Request stage, we want to make sure it's very clear so the other person understands and also that it is not a demand.

Just ask for what you need, and all they can say is no. People want to meet our needs, but often they don't know how because we are not specific enough.

This was a little overview of NVC. We really hope you enjoyed this episode!

Credit: Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD

The theme for October is still “Explore” so Kristen and Becky explore what it means to have a relationship with yourself.  

“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.” -Lucille Ball

When you have the embodiment of loving yourself, you can accomplish all your goals and dreams without being held back.

Psychologist Steven Hayes asks his clients “How tall were you when you stopped loving yourself?” “How tall were you when somebody said ‘you aren’t good enough,’ ‘you’re doing it wrong,’ ‘you’re a failure in some way?'”

Before that impactful time, you did love yourself because we are always born loving ourselves. Then we hear it from the inner critic from there on out or other people remind us that we don’t measure up in some way.

People don’t realize that others are only projecting their own pain and inner critic’s voice onto them so it keeps the negative beliefs alive.

As a kid, you can’t even grasp that and no one is telling you that.

Children always think they are in control of people and at some point we may have been told that it’s not ok to cry over little or big things, not ok to mess up, to be overweight, to be messy. We create a block to knowing or feeling our deeper selves.

We think that loving and connecting with ourselves will make us conceited or a narcissist or somebody who doesn’t care about other people.

Loving yourself makes you care about other people even better.

We often spend more time trying to get love and acceptance from other people than we doing knowing and loving ourselves.

Many women have been conditioned that if we don’t do for everyone else, we are bad and selfish.

We get angry and sad and feel guilty, resentful and low on energy when we over-give and never get our needs met. And if we’re sitting around waiting for permission to do something for ourselves, it’s not going to happen, especially when you have been giving and serving them all the time. You will have to make it happen for yourself. This can be scary for many women.

Always do for yourself first in order to be able to give to anyone else. Your cup needs to be filled FIRST.

Take time to do good things for yourself like exercising, making a healthy meal, meditating or praying can help you feel more filled up.

You don’t know yourself when all you are doing is giving to everyone else. You feel lost.

Drinking enough water and eating healthy is just a nice foundation for self-love because then you have given yourself the basics.

Playing is also important.

Spending time with yourself is really important in order to build a relationship with yourself. Are you ignoring yourself all day long? Do you always have distractions going on?

We distract because we really don’t want to fee what is going on inside ourselves. There might be a lot of stuff from a long time ago stuffed inside. This can feel terrifying, sad, confusing, there might be anger, shame and fear as well.

Understand what you like and what your needs and values are. You can meet people who share the same values as you do and that can help a lot in terms of loving and trusting yourself and liking your own company. Start with your values.

Write a list of what you like and don’t like. And this can include people you don’t like. You can choose to limit who you spend time with.

If they are draining you, you may want to move more away from them. These are ways to feed your soul instead of being depleted all the time.

Creating a relationship with yourself does require you to take baby steps at first. Ask yourself, “What makes me lovable?” Then, be aware of what you are thinking about and any objections that arise.

Doing healthy, loving actions also shows yourself that you are important. Create the habits to support these better beliefs.

Accepting...

The Fall is such a wonderful time and traveling in the Fall is also so fun too, so we decided that the theme should be "explore."

In this episode Becky and Kristen discuss ways to get inside our own minds and hearts and discover what is holding us back.

Becky and Kristen give updates since last month about what that have been doing to create better eating habits and balance in their lives as was mentioned on previous episodes.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by new changes you are trying to incorporate into your life, just take a step back and try to break things up into smaller pieces. Baby steps are important.

Make sure that you really want to do and desire to do the thing you are blocked from doing. So, question it. Ask then what that will do for you. How will you know when you have accomplished this goal or desire? What do you have to let go of in order to have your desired goal?

Your WHY is so important to figure out. The questions can be quite profound in helping you find that why and for transforming yourself and your habits and motivations.

Due to not really knowing yourself or not having done the inner work, you sometimes don't really know why you are holding yourself back. Maybe it was family conditioning. We aren't always aware of what is going on. It's really hard to go against everything you were taught as a child. A coach can help you by reflecting you back to you.

Self-awareness is always first and foremost in terms of transformation and change.

Becky struggles a little bit with writing her book and the limiting beliefs she has: fear of failure, inadequacy, not good enough.

Compare yourself with only yourself or you will feel like you won't be good enough or measure up.

Leaving your comfort zone is also a way we keep ourselves from moving forward.

People lack confidence and don't put themselves out there because they don't believe in themselves.

We are grateful for one another and our listeners. Until next time!

In today’s bonus episode, Kristen sits down with her friend and fellow coach Julia Pontillo.

Julia is a body relationship coach as well as a health coach specializing in transitioning into a whole food plant-based diet. She has a background in speech therapy which awakened her love for neurology and opened the path for developing a true fascination for the human body. She is now helping women all over the world to heal their relationships to their bodies, ditch dieting and use food as an instrument that works for them, not against them.

Julia has her own story of how she fell in love with her body, as can be hard for many of us to do. She grew up in a very safe home—in a protected environment--in a small town in Northern Germany.

Her main problems in her life were around weight and body image because people started comparing her with her sister, who was very thin. Julia was a little chubby at the age of eight. She was cute but people compared them nonetheless. She started her first diet when she was 12 years old.

This is a hard time of life to diet and restrict nutrients and calories since you are growing and developing hormonally and in other ways physically. But, she and her mom didn’t know better and the family culture made it likely that she’d be ensconced a dieting mindset.

She was preparing for her final exams in speech therapy when she was 22 and she started her first and last very extreme diet where she worked out consistently by doing a high intensity workout and restricting her calories to not more than 1600 calories per day. She did this for about eight months. She lost 18 pounds, lost her period, developed hormonal acne, and had to cut her hair off from chest-length to neck-length. Her hair was so damaged from dieting.

She didn’t see herself accurately and did not think she had lost any weight. She had developed body dysmorphia where she just couldn’t see her body correctly.

People would congratulate her on her weight loss and willpower. She wanted to keep going until she lost every single fat cell on her body.

Then, luckily, she moved to Australia. She started binge-eating, which was the exact opposite of what she had been doing previously. Binge-eating is when one consumes a lot of food in a very short amount of time without stopping. Within 15 minutes she’d have a chocolate bar, one or two bags of chips, gummy bears, licorice. This was a really hard time for her and her body, emotionally and physical.

She then moved to California and started her health coaching training. This is when things really started to change for her. She got very deep into self-development and mindset work, which laid the foundation for where she is today. It wasn’t until January or February this year that she was able to say that she really and truly loved herself and her body unconditionally.

The most important mindset shift that helped her get there was to realize that having unconditional love for someone or something is not a destination that you need to reach or you will suddenly reach once you accomplish the goals you set for yourself.

Many of us might be able to relate in having the thinking that, “Once I lose ten pounds, or once I get rid of the acne, I will be able to love myself.” Then we reach that point and there is still something in the way.

We never really reach that destination.

Loving your body does not happen immediately. It involves a lot of reprogramming and making a decision every day until it becomes second nature. You can start to realize that you can love your body for what it is.

And it’s not really about the looks because Julia says that she still is not 100% in love with her looks all the time. It’s important to understand that your body is not your looks; it’s so much more than your looks. Your looks are just the outer layer of your body.

Understanding that you can control how much you love your body empowers...

Today Kristen and Becky talk about habit change. Taking it very slowly with habit change is the most effective way to lasting change. Small steps equal big change. When we change our habits, we change our entire lives.

Our beliefs or our thoughts create our emotions and from there our behavior is created. From there, we create patterns and that becomes our ingrained identity. So, you become a person who “eats a lot of junk food” or you can become a person who “runs every day” but it all starts with the way you think and the way you believe about yourself.

This is why we do the belief change work as well because when you change your beliefs that were ingrained from a very young age and you have your inner critic telling you need to be better to do better and is on your case all the time, that might make you run many miles a day to be thinner or more fit or better than other people, but if you are being pushed by that inner critic, it can be hard to maintain or to live a life that is really happy when you’re doing such extreme things based on how you believe about yourself.

So, we want to change your beliefs so that your inner judge isn’t the one driving you.

Your authentic self is.

The punitive part of you that is forcing you to militantly exercise or do whatever habit you are doing is not healthy, according to Becky.

She says we can run ourselves ragged for the wrong reasons and we can also lay around a lot, thinking we are giving ourselves a break and it’s really not healthy either. It’s a fine balance. We need to start our slow. Our brains do not want us to change. This is why when we set our alarms for an early time with the intention of exercising, we can hit the snooze button several times.

We are not going to WANT to do good things for ourselves. Becky listened to a TED talk by a man who has been teaching how to exercise for thirty years and he teaches “You’re not going to want to exercise, so just do it for less than twenty minutes every single day. It’s going to take you five years to want to.”

Becky actually loves to exercise. She loves to make it simple and walk and lift some weights a couple times a week. She is not in the gym punishing herself, but there are people who thrive in the gym atmosphere.

So, there is no good or bad way of doing it, but there are bad reasons for doing things—especially if it’s out of self-loathing or trying to punish yourself.

Becky has been noticing that she sometimes can mindlessly eat sugar (namely a certain chocolate bar) to help her calm down when her traumas come bubbling up to the surface in her life. So, a habit change she made is starting intermittent fasting. She has made it work for her. She can make her fasting window as large or as small as she chooses.  

There are many health benefits to eating this way. She is figuring out her balance and being flexible with herself. Making small goals and habits that can be measurable helps to know you are being successful or not.

Taking small steps helps you slow down, helps you have more control and more decision-making in your life and helps you sustain things better.

You have to work your way past that part of your brain that doesn’t like change. If you decide you’re going to get up at 5 a.m. and run six miles and you’re not used to doing that, you might do it for like a week or so—and you could push yourself by will power to get up—but eventually, your brain will stop you.

It's important to have your “WHY’ in order to make a permanent change. Ask if what you are doing is working for you or not and be willing to step back and re-evaluate things.

Also, just a reminder that shoving food down into our bodies as a way to avoid feelings can actually make us sick over time with things like heart disease, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disorders, or cancer.

The only way we can sustain healthier habit change is by taking...

Welcome back for Season 2!

On today's episode, Becky and Kristen discuss what they have been up to the new beginnings they are creating in their lives.

First of all, we have decided to have monthly themes this season. for September, our theme is "New Beginnings."

September feels like a good time to start anew.

Kristen has been traveling a little and moving kids into college and to new places after college. She has been taking some classes she enjoys and doing some podcast interviews as well.

Becky took some time off of coaching and building her business this summer and spent time with her kids and family, taking some small trips, and starting some deeper therapy for some old trauma she was holding onto. She says her kids told her they had a bad time on their trips, but she is not convinced because they seemed to be having fun.

Kristen has been broadening her coaching skill set by taking courses toward her certification in trauma recovery coaching in order to help her clients with another level of healing.

Kristen started as a spiritual coach and then it trickled down into emotional coaching and life coaching and then health coaching and now trauma recovery coaching. To Kristen, this symbolizes the "rooting it out" process in healing. We look at the past to help you spring forward.

Trauma can lead to spirituality and awakening--at least that has been Kristen's experience. She is now taking an Advanced level of trauma recovery coaching for another certification. However, she has lost the balance in her life, become more of a workaholic recently is now trying to find the balance in her life again. She was running away from feelings as well.

Becky brings up the point that trauma is going to be different for different people. We can't really judge one another because trauma is individual.

We have all experienced some form of trauma on this planet, but often we are not aware that we were even traumatized. It can be a scary word for many people as well.

Normalizing trauma can help people face the fear and shame that it brings up. Having a coach or a therapist standing there with you as you face that trauma can really help a lot.

Becky had a coach tell her about the trauma she had experienced and pointed out that she will not have the business or the life she truly wants until she faces it. That was a real awakening for her.

She now realizes that she needed to re-focus on herself and look inward.

We're here to help one another and lift each other up when we fall on hard times.

Kristen is hiking, coaching, talking classes, having some housework done and spending time with her one child left at home. Her oldest son is learning to fly on his own out in California and it's a good thing.

Becky went to have lunch with her youngest daughter Layla this week and it made Layla's day! It made Becky feel great, too, and she will be going to spend time with Layla every week now. Layla just turned eight and will be baptized in their church this coming weekend. Lots of Becky’s family will be coming in for the celebration.

Becky’s eighth grader does not want to have her around much at all, so it’s just the opposite of her eight-year-old.

Becky is working on a book about her life she is writing now. This is the truth about her life. It is excruciating for her to write. She wants to run from her feelings while writing the book. She hunted down her secret chocolate stash.

She has decided that she at least wants to write it and then she will decide if she wants to publish it later. She is processing her feelings while she writes.

Kristen is really excited for Becky’s book-writing opportunity—especially for the healing that comes from writing.

This is just a catch-up episode. We have a lot planned for this season.

The interview with Jill Krause really touched Kristen and reminded her that the deep conversations are...

In this summer bonus episode, Becky chats with Marie-Eve Ward. Marie-Eve is an Emotional Wellness Coach for women and breast cancer survivors. She empowers women to break emotionally-triggered habits so they can shed physical and emotional weight, achieve their goals, and reach their highest potential.

Marie-Eve discusses how we get stuck in lower vibration emotions much of the time. The most common ones that come up are stress and anxiety, and they make it really hard to move forward because they are heavy and dense emotions that weigh us down. When we are able to release them, it makes us feel so much lighter.

It's easier to loop in these lower vibration emotions rather than in the higher vibration ones because our brains are focused on the negative. This is because it's the brain's job is to keep us safe, to scan around for any danger. So, it's very easy for us to recognize what's not going well. This stresses us out and gives us anxiety!

It is very easy to stay there if we don't take the steps to move out of those emotions into the higher vibe emotions. This becomes a habit. Emotions become habitual when it's their main way to handle a situation. If it's so ingrained in us to turn to stress to handle situations, it feels natural and normal. This, of course, until we learn how to dela with it differently next time.

The conditioning from childhood can be so sticky until we realize that we can change. When we are so deep into it, we often cannot even recognize that there is another way.

Finding emotionally safe people who vibrate a little higher can help it feel a little easier and make the struggle less so. We do tend to attract people who are at the same vibration we are and who have the same emotional wellness that we have.

If we resonate with those who are at the same level, that can be nice to be so understood but can also drag us down a little bit lower because there is no energy to pull you up a bit.

For example, there are relationships based on complaining. This is why when you emotionally grow, those same people may not stay on the same journey with you. This can be hard for people to do--let go of the old. But we have to let go of the old to bring in the new.

We don't have the capacity or the energy to let everyone into our space. So, it's very important to choose who we do allow into our life and who we allow to have access to our energy.

We are taught from when we are young that when we embark on anything, it should be forever--a marriage should be forever; a career should be forever. When it doesn't work out, we feel like we are letting ourselves down. It's painful because it's a belief we have had for so long.

You have to be able to weight the pain and decide how important it is to keep carrying the weight of a hard relationship. When we have the attitude of "I don't need to change. I am perfect the way I am" it can keep us locked into the beliefs, behaviors and emotions that don't really serve us anymore.

Life is meant to change us and make us better. You may not make the best changes for yourself in terms of a career or relationship if you aren't willing to change when it is time to change.

If we're not pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone, then life will do it for us. Marie-Eve says her breast cancer made her aware of how unaware of how her actions led to her outcomes. She was going on about life like everything will be okay. She wasn't reaching her potential because she didn't believe in herself. When we're not pushing ourselves, it's usually because we have these limited beliefs that are keeping us in our comfort zone.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 29 years old it really opened up her eyes to everything that she was not doing. She had to really look at how she had played a part in inviting disease into her body.

While she was predisposed to breast and ovarian cancer at an early age and genetics...