Latest / Notes to Her / Note 72: Girl, Put the Reinvention Plan Down

Transcript

Note 72: Girl, Put the Reinvention Plan Down · Notes to Her

• 0:14
  Yaya: Hey, girl. Hey. Welcome back to Notes to Her, the daily pep talk. I'm Yaya, your confidence and mindset coach, and I am back after a little break to kick off season two. I am so excited to be back.
• 0:26
  Listen. In season one, I took a little break this past summer. It was supposed to be short, but I extended the break for good reason. I decided to spend the summer building something that I have been wanting to build for years. It's a community called Slay Society, and I will tell you a little bit more about what that space actually means to me later in this episode.
• 0:48
  Now back in July, I dropped Note 71. It was a bonus app called have the confidence to walk away, and that episode is truly dedicated to any woman in a situation, whether it is a relationship, a job, a life, or a dream that no longer suits them, and it's no longer beneficial to them, and they're looking for permission to walk away. So I am giving it to you. If you haven't listened to that one yet, make sure you check it out because I was really passionate about the message. Today, we're gonna be talking about the thing that you've been putting off all year.
• 1:20
  Mhmm. You know the one that I'm talking about. The one that you keep telling yourself that you're gonna get to eventually. I have been noticing a pattern lately that I've been seeing online, and I've heard it from women that I talk to every week. A lot of women in their thirties and forties are feeling stuck.
• 1:36
  The life that they're in right now doesn't look like what they actually want anymore and they're standing there looking for another direction, trying to figure out what to do, where to go. Have you ever felt that way? Feeling stuck is exactly what this episode is about and I wanna tell you about what I've learned. You do not need to reinvent yourself to get out of it. You need to rediscover yourself and those are two completely different projects.
• 2:14
  When a woman experiences that stuck feeling that I just described, a lot of times her first instinct is to think that she needs to become somebody completely different. A new routine, a new five year plan, a new personality if that's what it takes, and definitely a new hairdo. We have been sold this idea that reinvention is a reward for surviving something hard. Go through enough, and you get to walk on the other side as a completely different woman, one that nobody would even recognize. And I've watched a lot of women leave relationships and immediately start trying to become this whole new person instead of taking time to ask what got buried while she was busy loving somebody else who didn't deserve the effort.
• 2:53
  I've seen a woman lose her job and start chasing a version of herself that she saw in somebody else's fifteen second clip, a woman whose actual life she has never seen. Most of the time what looks like being broken is actually just being buried. There's a difference between a woman who genuinely needs to become someone new and a woman who has spent so long surviving, performing, and holding everything together that she's forgotten who she was before any of this started. The first woman needs reinvention. The second woman just needs help getting out from underneath everything that she's been carrying, and most of us are the second woman.
• 3:34
  We just call it the first because reinvention sounds a lot more impressive than trying to explain at dinner what rediscovery does. Let me tell you why I know this so well, so so well. A couple years ago, I was in a bad car accident and the accident completely changed my life, and I ended up leaving my corporate career. Now although I can't really go into a lot of details right now, got a little gag on her, but the accident left behind PTSD and general anxiety, and so no two days are the same for me. With the accident and me leaving my corporate job, my life has completely changed.
• 4:13
  I was used to having structure in my day, either I was in meetings all day or I was on-site in an event running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Now I had found myself having no job, no structure, and a budget that looked completely different from the one that I built my life around. I didn't sit down one day and decide it was time to build a new life, a new me from the ground up. I couldn't have. Honestly, at that time, I didn't have the energy for a whole new anything.
• 4:43
  Some days I didn't even have the energy to leave the couch, let alone reinvent a career. What I actually did though, slower than I wanted to and messier than it looks like from the outside, was go looking for pieces of me that were already there. The part of me that has always been good with people, the part of me that has been the friend who tells you the truth instead of the version that you want to hear, The part of me that has been building something on her own since she was 14, long before she ever had a business card that said coach on it. Actually, I still don't have those, so I probably need to order some. But the confidence business owner didn't come from nowhere.
• 5:19
  She's been in there the whole time, buried under decades of a career that paid her bills on time and a nervous system that was still learning how to trust the world again and on a budget that had no room for reinventing anything. Now a lot of women are scared to reinvent themselves because they feel like starting over means they failed somehow, and I get it. So let me share a secret with you that nobody else is probably saying. When you decide to become someone new, you're not actually starting from zero, even if reinvention convinces you that you are. You still have years of experience and skills.
• 6:02
  Every hard lesson you have already paid for, every version of you that already knows how to survive something, because you have survived something before this one. Think of it like this, say you inherited an old wooden table and somewhere along the way somebody painted over it with some cheap white paint, thick coats that covered every grain of the wood completely. Reinventing says get rid of that old thing and get a whole new table, just buy something new. Something that hasn't been through anything. Rediscoveries says pick up the sander and work through the layers one coat at a time because underneath that paint, the actual wood is still there.
• 6:43
  It was always there. It was just needing somebody to uncover it instead of pretending that it was never good to begin with. Now I know rediscovery takes a little bit of work and a lot more time, but the real cost is not just your time and it's not just your energy. If you don't take the time to rediscover you, you are also losing parts of yourself because you are too busy pretending to be someone that you're not. So here's a step that I want you to make and I want you to actually do this, not just nod along while you're driving or folding laundry.
• 7:18
  Stop asking yourself who you need to become and start asking who you were before you had to survive whatever happened to you. That woman hasn't disappeared. She is rooted, sitting quiet underneath everything that you've had to carry to get through however long it's been. And this is actually the whole idea that I'm building toward next month, because as we head into a new month, I want you to think about being rooted, not rushed. Rediscovery doesn't happen on a deadline, and it doesn't happen because you're forced into a five year plan with a launch date attached.
• 7:54
  You have to slow down and get rooted enough to actually hear her again. Reinventing tells you to burn it down and start from nothing. Rediscovery tells you keep digging until you hit what was already solid underneath you the whole time. Because there's always a newer version of Chase, while the other one is a homecoming, and homecomings have endings. You actually get to arrive.
• 8:21
  So now remember at the beginning of this note, I told you that I was gonna tell you more about Slay Society and what it meant to me. Slay Society is a community that I build for ambitious women rediscovering themselves, working on becoming more confident, and doing things scared, all of that. But I sat on that idea of having a community for at least three years. Three years of thinking about it, talking myself out of it, telling myself I would get it done once things settled down, once I had more time, once I felt ready. And if I'm being honest with you, only 40% of my hesitation had anything to do with Tommy.
• 8:58
  Most of it was fear, and they had gotten so good at sounding responsible that even I believed it. But over the summer, while I took the podcast break, I built Slay Society, and it is the clearest example I have of rediscovering instead of reinventing. I didn't wake up one day with a brand new idea. The idea had been brewing in my head for years, but I finally stopped ignoring the one thing that I'd been carrying since I was sitting in my home office, dreaming about it during those quick little breaks that I squeeze in in between a day full of meetings. That's why I built a challenge inside a society for the woman who feels stuck and trying to figure out their next step and it's called get unstuck.
• 9:41
  It's seven days of many challenges to help you literally get unstuck. It's the same digging that I just walked you through except with structure around you instead of doing it alone on your couch the way that I had to. But if that's where you are right now, the link is in the show notes for you to get started. And before I go, I want you to sit with one question. Think about who you were before whatever hard season that you're in.
• 10:09
  Before the job loss, the breakup, the diagnosis, the burnout, the year that set more out of you than it ever gave back. If she walked into a room today, would she recognize the woman that you were trying so hard to force yourself into becoming? Or would she just want you to stop performing and come home to her instead? You are not behind, life did not skip past you while everyone else moved on, and you are not broken either. Not after everything that you've survived to still be sitting here listening to this.
• 10:48
  Now listen, that girl, that woman, she might be buried under a season that has asked more of you than most people will ever know, And trust me, I genuinely get that. But the woman underneath all of that still knows exactly who she is. So if you don't take anything else away from this episode, here's what I want you to know. Go find her. You don't have to go build a new her, you just have to rediscover who you truly are.
• 11:17
  So season two is officially here and I am glad that you are back here with me. Stay tuned because in the next episode, we're gonna be talking about coughing season and why that is not your time to start settling. Not on my watch.