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7 Softening Practices for Greater Strength & Self Connection · #BeMoreLobster

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to start this podcast episode by sharing with you a quote that was kind of the genesis of this conversation.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it's by Tony Robbins, and it goes like this: Remember, you are creator of your life, not a manager of your circumstance.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Prime yourself.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Decide what to focus on.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And when I read that, it was a full-body yes.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: But if you'd given me that quote 18 months ago, I probably would have thrown my phone out of the window.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what I come to realize as I thought about those two different versions of myself was that I've really come to realize that there is so much strength in softening.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I've realized that some of the biggest shifts, transformations, changes that I've created in my own life has come from a place of surrender.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so today I want to share with you seven ways to soften so that you can strengthen.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I am so excited to share this with you.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're ready, you know what to do.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Grab your brew and let's dive right in.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So 18 months ago, my dad had been gone for 18 months.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: I just really just realized that I was completely dysregulated in my nervous system.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was suffering with PTSD.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I was just about to move house.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I just realized I was in perimenopause.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: So like it was a bit like in my life.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I could, I know now I could have made myself feel that and see that in a different way, but also extend the belief that I was in the right place at the right time.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: I did what I could with the resources that I had.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I believe that I wasn't ready to hear it in that way, and that now when I feel this full body yes, I'm like, yeah, I'm taking that all on board.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought about the difference between those two people and going back to that surrender, and I realized that what has brought me to this place now where I feel so much power in myself is that I've given myself so much more softness.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to share with you seven areas where I've really felt that and invite you to think about where you could adopt some of these softening practices so that you can strengthen the areas that you feel that you need more strength in.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with oh, that's my alarm going off, reminding me to be committed, present, and certain.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's a whole other episode as well.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So here we go.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: The first one, and I think it's no surprise that this is top of the list, is when you soften self-judgment, you strengthen self-belief.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us are probably pretty damn expert at judging ourselves for the things that we've done, for the things that we haven't done, the things that we, you know, the for the way that we look, for the way that we dress, for the the thing, the results that we've created in our life.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us are very well rehearsed at self-judgment.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: We've got so much unconscious language, reminding ourselves every single day where we lack, where we're not enough.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we can soften that and we can lean away from it, and we can just practice a little bit more self-love, we actually start to strengthen our self-belief.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I had an easy way of telling you how to do it.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna just offer you that sometimes it's just about hearing the voice and not listening, or it's about hearing the voice and saying, thank you for reminding me of an old program, but I'm working on on, you know, on creating a new one.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe that was true then for me, but it's not true for me now.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like you've got to find your own way.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I should have probably um put this as a prerequisite, maybe.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: But as I'm saying this to you, maybe you could ask yourself a defining question to say, what does it look like for me to soften here?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: How could I create more softness here?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So can you do that for me?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or you offer yourself that question as we go through this.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: So let's practice that now.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: What does it look like?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: How does it show up for you when you soften your self-judgment?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe for some of you, it's just allowing yourself to have all the feelings, have all the language, have a good cry, and then let it go.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe for some of you, it's about writing stuff down on a piece of paper and going, burning it under the full moon, like whatever it is for you.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: The next one is really, I love this one, and it's about when you soften your definitions, you strengthen your possibilities.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So this kind of leans a little bit on the fact of if we've all got what we call an internal representation of everything.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: So we've all got these little pictures in our brain of what it looks like to achieve and what you know, what we think we should look like, and how we think we should talk, and what kind of, you know, what kind of family we have, and what, you know, societal values, cultural values.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what I've seen with my clients is that they have, and I've seen this with myself, they have very definite ways of how things should happen.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm gonna make this result, I have to follow this exact strategy, and I cannot deviate from that because if I do, I'm going to fail.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I have to look that exact way, or else I'm gonna be unhappy.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: We have got definitions literally circling us in in every single area of your of our lives.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to invite you now to you're gonna start noticing more than you've ever done before, where you catch yourself in a definition that's keeping you prisoner.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: So here's another way of doing this.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'll and I'll use diet as an example.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: I've had a bad day, therefore I might as well get rid of the rest of the week and I'll start again on Monday.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's a definition.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: What if your definition changed to just say it was just a bad day, doesn't need to be a bad week.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a bad meal, doesn't need to be a bad day.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Does it even need to be called bad?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we saying that?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why are you putting that limitation on ourselves?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we being so black and white?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So when we soften our definition around things, it actually increases possibility, it strengthens our ability to seek new options, to seek new possibilities, to create them for ourselves.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because then we're saying, what else?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: How else could I just how else could I define this?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: How else is this possible for me?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: What if that definition, I could blur the lines on that and make it look a little bit more like that?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: So softening our definition strengthens our possibility.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Leading into this, kind of marrying up with this, is when we soften our stories, we strengthen our ability to create.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's not possible for me.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's easier for everybody else.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna get judged, they're gonna leave me, I'm gonna lose things, this isn't a feel too uncomfortable.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not made for stuff like that.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: I've only ever been a housewife.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do you see where I'm going with that?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Stories can be beliefs that we hold about ourselves and we we reinforce them because we keep repeating them.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when we reinforce them, we act out of them.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we keep creating the same result, even if we don't want it.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: But stories can also come from our experiences.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: They hurt me.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: They did this to me, that thing happened to me.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've had a really horrible childhood or a really horrible, horrible experience.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: We're not denying the existence of the of the of the reality of the circumstance when it happened.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's never a thing.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: But when we repeat the story around it that we've created for ourselves, then we've got to be honest at some point and say, well, where is that serving me now?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: What am I gaining by still holding on to that?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: So when we soften the stories, we strengthen our ability to create.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: We go, we go from being more of a, you know, I found myself in quite like a martyr story for quite a long time.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it has to be harder for me than everybody else.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: I've got young children, I work 20 bajillion hours a day, and my husband doesn't appreciate me and I all the things, totally generational um belief that I had there.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And when I softened that and started, again, going back to definitions and increasing possibilities, and I started to soften that story and just be willing just to let it be a little bit more fluid, I was able to step into a much greater position of power and creation because I'm not being held prisoner anymore by the things that I've kept on repeating about myself.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: I I was literally able to seek for what else could be true, what else is available to me.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: If I've got the same possibilities and availability as everybody else, what does that mean for me?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is a big one.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: When you soften your regret, you strengthen your wisdom.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty sure that nobody listening here has ever not effed up, right?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've all effed up at some point.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you could even change that definition and say it was exactly how it should have been, right?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: You could do that for yourself.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I happen to think that, you know, we've we've all I went around with a lot of regret for a long time about breaking up my family when I left my first husband and thinking that, you know, I was going to ruin my children's life and all the things.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, when we look at, when we go back, if we just soften our soften it and we and we extend forgiveness and compassion and we use the NLP presupposition that says, I did the best that I could with the resources that I had.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: I take full responsibility for the thing that I did.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the wisdom that I gained from it.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: I know that some of my worst decisions that I've made, where I've where I've I feel like I've I've hurt people, have been such, you know, what's the word, a creator of so much wisdom for me about the kind of person that I want to be, the kind of person that I don't want to be, how I want to treat others and how I expect to be treated.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: But also, if I if I'm really honest and look at that wisdom, it was a way that I stood up for myself, I could just have picked a better strategy.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: I just didn't know it at the time because it wasn't available to me.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: So when you soften your regret, you can strengthen your wisdom.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: The next one is about approach.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, again, I'm hoping you're noticing how these are all kind of, they're all in the same palette.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: They're all interwoven.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: They all come into a space of setting you up as somebody who thinks that you're, you know, that you haven't got any control over your life, that you are at the the the will of things happening around you, or you step into the creator place, you step into that I'm taking full personal responsibility, no matter what.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because even if something happens to you, you can choose that it's happened for you, and you can choose how you show up for that thing.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: You can react, you can respond.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: But this one says when you soften your approach, you increase your consistency.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I saw this over and over and over again when I was a personal trainer where people again came to this place of extreme rigidity.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: I see it over and over again in my coaching now, where people feel like I don't want to be in this place anymore.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be over there.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: So if I do a lot of stuff really quickly, I'm gonna get there more quickly.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: What invariably ends up actually happening is they start doing too many things, they get exhausted, frustrated, burnt out very, very quickly, they stop.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe a week, two weeks, three weeks, they'll start over.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: So they never actually get there anyway.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So if they extended the timeline, it's a softening of the approach.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: If they asked how else could I do it, they soften the approach.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: If they let themselves just practice, you know, doing one thing at a time, they soften the approach.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: And when we soften the approach and we set ourselves up to for consistency, it builds self-belief.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: When we have greater self-belief, we have greater consistency.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like a loop.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: So softening your approach, and again, let's go back to that question.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: What does it look like for me?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Where in my life do I need to soften my approach?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: So that I can practice, so I can strengthen my ability to be consistent.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: The sixth one, this is a little bit like regret, but it's a broader spectrum.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: If I soften my past, I can strengthen my present and future.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: So this is this is wrapped up with stories and it's wrapped up with um it's wrapped up with regret.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: But when we look back at the past and we are berating ourselves for the things that we didn't do or the things that we did do, or we're thinking we should be further along by now, or we're comparing ourselves to other people, or anything when we look back and we know that looking back, whether it's something that happened to us, whether it's something that we chose, whether it's you know, something that we wish we'd done differently, like it doesn't matter, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, but if we look back down our past and we can see that we're creating a story and a definition that's holding us in a pattern now that's stopping us from being happy, fulfilled, living more, having more meaning, having better relationships, a better health, it's time to soften the past.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's time to blur the lines, it's time to be more flexible so that you can actually strengthen your present and strengthen the future, and you can step into that creator role.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, this is it's interesting actually because I didn't purposely write this list in this order, but we started off with self-judgment mainly because that was has been the biggest thing that's held me back for so long in my life.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but this one, this last one here is the thing that's made the biggest difference ever in my life since I found it, which is the thematics.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: So when we soften our body, we strengthen our connection, a connection to our truth, the connection to our innate wisdom, the connection to our innate power.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll just show you now that the the way that I got realized in a very profound moment that there was I was holding so much in my body was a very simple exercise.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: My friend had kind of forced me to sign up for this money mindset training that I didn't want to do.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: This was January 23.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was January.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: No, it wasn't.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was January 24, sorry, January 24, so just over a year ago.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the woman had us doing this very simple practice of kind of just moving our body weight, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm telling you, in less than 60 seconds, I had a complete and utter emotional meltdown on the floor, big snots, the whole thing.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I had no idea what was happening.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: But what I did know in that moment was I had had a release of something I didn't even know that I was there.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: The grief and the stress and the in all this stuff that I've been holding on to, it was it had started to leak out.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe that it was that was the exact perfect moment for this journey to begin.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: So when we soften our body, when we connect back in with our body, when we invite in more fluidity and more fun and more, you know, just more flow, we connect so much deeper with the truth of everything.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: I really hope that you've enjoyed that.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to go back, I'm gonna just list them again for you once more now, in case you've got your pen and paper out.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to remember to kind of to ask yourself the question how what does this look like for me?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: If I were going to decide to soften my self-judgment and so that I could strengthen my self-belief, where would I start?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: What would it look like?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: How is that possible for me?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: So from self-judgment, soften self-judgment, strengthen self-belief, soften definitions, strengthen possibilities, soften your stories, strengthen your ability to create, soften your regrets, strengthen your wisdom, soften your approach, strengthen your consistency, soften your past and strengthen your present and your future, and soften your body and strengthen your connection.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Seeking Simplicity podcast, and I will see you again in the next episode.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Bye for now, you know.