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She Almost Missed Her Own Life (And She's Not the Only One) · Your Utmost Life

• 0:00
  Misty Celli: She was one of the most accomplished women in her field, the career, marriage, kids, the research credentials, and a calendar so full she had scheduled herself right out of her own life.
• 0:11
  Misty Celli: And somewhere in the middle of all of it, she lost herself completely, not dramatically, not all at once, but quietly, the way it always happens, roll by role, obligation by obligation, until the woman underneath all of it had gone so quiet she could barely hear herself think.
• 0:28
  Misty Celli: She was literally studying human connection for a living, and yet she was the most disconnected she had ever been in her life.
• 0:35
  Misty Celli: That woman is Brene Brown, and her story is not just her story.
• 0:39
  Misty Celli: It might be yours.
• 0:40
  Misty Celli: If you've ever felt like you're living for everyone else, don't know who you are anymore, and you catch yourself thinking, is this all there is?
• 0:47
  Misty Celli: You are in the right place.
• 0:49
  Misty Celli: You were never meant to disappear into your roles.
• 0:51
  Misty Celli: Somewhere between everyone's needs and everyone's expectations, you've become invisible, disconnected, and living on autopilot.
• 0:58
  Misty Celli: This podcast is where you learn the principles and strategic tools to reclaim who you are.
• 1:03
  Misty Celli: Design a life that is fully and intentionally yours, and show up every day as the utmost woman you were always meant to be.
• 1:09
  Misty Celli: Not just for everyone else, finally, fully for yourself.
• 1:12
  Misty Celli: This is where you begin the process of returning to your utmost self.
• 1:16
  Misty Celli: Not by accident, not by obligation, but by design.
• 1:19
  Misty Celli: Welcome to your Utmost Life Podcast.
• 1:21
  Misty Celli: I'm Misty, Identity and Self-Leadership Coach for Ambitious Mothers.
• 1:26
  Misty Celli: Here's what I know about you.
• 1:28
  Misty Celli: You are smart.
• 1:29
  Misty Celli: You are capable.
• 1:31
  Misty Celli: You are doing all the things showing up for everyone.
• 1:34
  Misty Celli: The kids, career, marriage, the obligations that never seem to end.
• 1:39
  Misty Celli: And you are exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with how much sleep you got.
• 1:46
  Misty Celli: You are living a full life that somehow feels empty.
• 1:50
  Misty Celli: And part of you, that quiet part that shows up at 2 a.m.
• 1:55
  Misty Celli: is asking whether this is really it, whether this is really all there is for you.
• 2:01
  Misty Celli: That question is not a crisis.
• 2:04
  Misty Celli: That question is an invitation.
• 2:07
  Misty Celli: I want to share with you a true story about a real woman whose story I believe is going to crack something open in you because it did for me when I really sat with it.
• 2:16
  Misty Celli: The woman whose story we're telling today learned the hard way.
• 2:20
  Misty Celli: At the top of her career, in the middle of her life, surrounded by everything she had worked for and profoundly quietly lost.
• 2:28
  Misty Celli: By the end of this episode, you are going to understand why feeling lost is actually the beginning of an utmost lie.
• 2:35
  Misty Celli: But before we get to her story, I want to take a moment and just be here with you.
• 2:39
  Misty Celli: There is a chance that you came to this episode carrying something heavy today.
• 2:44
  Misty Celli: Maybe it was a hard morning.
• 2:46
  Misty Celli: Maybe this week has already gotten away from you and it's only Monday.
• 2:49
  Misty Celli: Maybe you looked in the mirror this morning and didn't quite recognize the woman looking back.
• 2:54
  Misty Celli: Not because anything dramatic happened, but because she just looks tired.
• 2:58
  Misty Celli: She looks like she's been carrying something for a long time and she's not quite sure she remembers what it feels like to put it down.
• 3:05
  Misty Celli: I want you to know that I see that.
• 3:07
  Misty Celli: And I want you to know that what you're feeling is not weakness, ingratitude, and it's not selfishness.
• 3:14
  Misty Celli: It is a sound of a woman who's been giving everything she has to everyone around her and has finally gotten quiet enough to notice that she has been disappearing.
• 3:23
  Misty Celli: That noticing is not a problem.
• 3:25
  Misty Celli: That is the beginning.
• 3:26
  Misty Celli: So take one breath.
• 3:27
  Misty Celli: You are allowed to be here to want more.
• 3:30
  Misty Celli: You are allowed to hear the story and let it mean something to you.
• 3:35
  Misty Celli: You are exactly where you're supposed to be.
• 3:38
  Misty Celli: So let's go.
• 3:39
  Misty Celli: Here's what I want you to imagine: you are a researcher, a professor, a wife, and a mother.
• 3:45
  Misty Celli: You have spent years, decades actually, studying human beings, studying what makes people feel connected and what makes them feel shame.
• 3:54
  Misty Celli: Learning what separates the people who live with their whole hearts from the people who don't.
• 4:00
  Misty Celli: Interviewing thousands of people, filling notebooks with data, identifying patterns, and wrote them all down on a list.
• 4:07
  Misty Celli: And then one day you look at that list and you realize with a kind of clarity that hits you like cold water that you are not living a single thing on it.
• 4:18
  Misty Celli: You have been so busy studying everyone else's life that you forgot to live your own.
• 4:24
  Misty Celli: You are the researcher who cannot apply her own research, the professor who cannot take her own course, and the woman who knows intellectually and precisely what a wholehearted life looks like and is living the opposite of one.
• 4:37
  Misty Celli: But before we go any further, I want to ask you something.
• 4:41
  Misty Celli: Does any part of that feel familiar?
• 4:43
  Misty Celli: Not the research part, but that gap, that place where you already know what your life is supposed to feel like, and you wake up every morning knowing you're not living it.
• 4:55
  Misty Celli: Because the gap is what we're talking about today.
• 4:57
  Misty Celli: Here is what Brene has said publicly about where she was in that season of her life.
• 5:02
  Misty Celli: She was proving herself in every single role, performing all of it, showing up for all of it.
• 5:08
  Misty Celli: She has written that she was so consumed with the doing that it was difficult for any emotion other than fear to get her attention.
• 5:15
  Misty Celli: Fear was the thing running the show.
• 5:18
  Misty Celli: Not love, not purpose or joy, but fear.
• 5:22
  Misty Celli: Fear of not being enough, fear of being seen, a fear of what would happen if she put the armor down for one minute and let people see who she actually was underneath those credentials and roles and accomplishments.
• 5:35
  Misty Celli: From the outside, she looked extraordinary.
• 5:38
  Misty Celli: On the inside, she was disappearing.
• 5:41
  Misty Celli: That is what is called the identity eraser effect.
• 5:44
  Misty Celli: If you are an ambitious mother who has ever looked up from a full life and wondered where you went, you have felt it.
• 5:50
  Misty Celli: It does not announce itself or show up dramatically, but it creeps in quietly while you were busy being everything to everyone.
• 5:57
  Misty Celli: While you were performing your roles so completely that you forgot there is a woman underneath them who has her own needs, her own voice, her own rhythm, and she has been going quiet for a long time.
• 6:11
  Misty Celli: The cost of that disappearance is not just personal.
• 6:14
  Misty Celli: When a woman loses herself, everyone around her loses something too.
• 6:19
  Misty Celli: Her children lose the whole version of her.
• 6:21
  Misty Celli: Her marriage loses the real her.
• 6:23
  Misty Celli: Her work loses the best of her.
• 6:26
  Misty Celli: And the world loses whatever only she was put here to contribute.
• 6:31
  Misty Celli: The disappearance is never just hers.
• 6:34
  Misty Celli: But here's what I need you to hold on to today.
• 6:36
  Misty Celli: Renee did not disappear because she was weak.
• 6:39
  Misty Celli: She disappeared because she was devoted.
• 6:42
  Misty Celli: She gave everything she had to the roles in front of her.
• 7:26
  Misty Celli: And that devotion, as beautiful as it was, quietly crowded out the woman inside them.
• 7:31
  Misty Celli: That is not failure.
• 7:32
  Misty Celli: That is the identity eraser effect at work.
• 7:35
  Misty Celli: And recognizing it, naming it, is the moment her own rhythm finally gets heard again.
• 7:41
  Misty Celli: Today I want today I want to show you someone whose story you may already know pieces of.
• 7:46
  Misty Celli: Someone who walked the same three phases I teach.
• 7:50
  Misty Celli: Not because she followed a framework, but because this is simply what returning to yourself actually looks like when a woman who is honest enough and brave enough to do it does it.
• 7:59
  Misty Celli: Her name is Brene Brown.
• 8:01
  Misty Celli: Her story told through the lens of what I know to be true about every woman who finds her way back to herself.
• 8:07
  Misty Celli: In 2007, Brene Brown was a researcher at the University of Houston.
• 8:12
  Misty Celli: She had spent a decade studying human connection.
• 8:15
  Misty Celli: What makes people feel worthy?
• 8:17
  Misty Celli: What makes them feel shame?
• 8:19
  Misty Celli: What separates people who live their whole hearts from those who don't?
• 8:23
  Misty Celli: She had the data, the patterns, and she had identified exactly what the wholehearted life looks like and written down in meticulous academic detail.
• 8:33
  Misty Celli: And one day she looked at her list and realized she was not living a single thing on it.
• 8:38
  Misty Celli: She had described what happened next publicly in her TED Talk, her books, more interviews than I can count.
• 8:45
  Misty Celli: She called it a breakdown.
• 8:47
  Misty Celli: Her therapist called it a spiritual awakening.
• 8:50
  Misty Celli: In true Brene fashion, she said, spiritual awakening sounds better than a breakdown.
• 8:55
  Misty Celli: But I assure you, it was a breakdown.
• 8:58
  Misty Celli: She put her data away, called a therapist, and began complete, honest inventory of her own life.
• 9:04
  Misty Celli: Not her research, but her life.
• 9:06
  Misty Celli: Here is what this phase gives you when you are willing to do it.
• 9:10
  Misty Celli: You get clarity, real clarity.
• 9:12
  Misty Celli: Not the kind you perform for other people, but the kind that comes from finally telling yourself the truth about where you actually are.
• 9:20
  Misty Celli: You get the ground back underneath you.
• 9:22
  Misty Celli: And if you have ever felt like you've been disappearing into quicksand, you get to stop pretending and start seeing.
• 9:29
  Misty Celli: What you find when you look honestly is not evidence that you are broken.
• 9:34
  Misty Celli: It is evidence that you are still there.
• 9:36
  Misty Celli: Without this, you stay stuck in a life that feels hollow and you cannot explain why.
• 9:42
  Misty Celli: That quiet voice keeps asking whether this is really all there is for you, and you keep not answering it.
• 9:48
  Misty Celli: That voice is not a problem.
• 9:50
  Misty Celli: That voice is the beginning.
• 9:51
  Misty Celli: Brene finally answered it in 2007.
• 9:54
  Misty Celli: So what did she do with what she discovered?
• 9:57
  Misty Celli: She did not quit everything or blow up her life.
• 9:59
  Misty Celli: She did not wait until she felt ready or circumstances lined up or until the timing was right.
• 10:05
  Misty Celli: She started making different decisions about how to live inside the life that she already had.
• 10:10
  Misty Celli: She went to therapy, sat with uncomfortable truths, and stopped performing certain she she did not have.
• 10:16
  Misty Celli: She began designing her interior life deliberately and intentionally around the principles she had been studying from outside for years.
• 10:25
  Misty Celli: She built a rhythm of honesty and a structure that reflected who she actually was, and she started making conscious decisions daily specifically and decided in advance about who she was going to be inside her own life.
• 10:39
  Misty Celli: Here is what this phase gives you a week that finally feels like yours.
• 10:44
  Misty Celli: Protected space for the things that matter most, not just the things that are loudest, the experience of falling through on what you said you were going to do and watching yourself become a woman you can trust again.
• 10:56
  Misty Celli: Without this, even after doing the honest discovery, you have the awareness but not the structure to hold it.
• 11:02
  Misty Celli: You know what you want your life to feel like, but you cannot find the path from here to there.
• 11:08
  Misty Celli: Monday keeps coming around and you keep starting it over.
• 11:12
  Misty Celli: Brene did not just realize the truth.
• 11:15
  Misty Celli: She built her life around it.
• 11:17
  Misty Celli: That is the difference between insight and a transformation.
• 11:21
  Misty Celli: 2010, three years after her breakdown, Brene Brown stood up in front of 500 people at a TEDx event in Houston and told the complete truth about her life.
• 11:31
  Misty Celli: Not the polished version, but the real one.
• 11:33
  Misty Celli: The one where she named her own disappearance out loud and a room full of strangers.
• 11:39
  Misty Celli: That talk has now been watched over 50 million times because she showed up as herself, fully and without armor, and something in the world recognized the truth of it and could not look away.
• 11:50
  Misty Celli: But here is what I need you to understand about this phase.
• 11:53
  Misty Celli: It is not a stage.
• 11:54
  Misty Celli: It is not a TED talk.
• 11:56
  Misty Celli: It is not anything dramatic.
• 11:58
  Misty Celli: It is the ordinary Monday where you wake up and you know who you are, where you move through your morning with intention instead of dread, where you make one decision that is fully and completely yours and you do not apologize for it.
• 12:12
  Misty Celli: This phase gives you the confidence that comes from achievement, but from identity, from knowing who you are and showing up as her consistently.
• 12:21
  Misty Celli: You get momentum that comes from the inside, not the kind you have to manufacture every Sunday night and watch dissolve by Wednesday.
• 12:29
  Misty Celli: Without it, you do the inner work and then hesitate at the edge of it.
• 12:33
  Misty Celli: You design the week, but don't fully trust yourself to live inside it.
• 12:36
  Misty Celli: The life you designed sits just one decision away while you talk yourself out of making it.
• 12:42
  Misty Celli: Renee did not wait for permission.
• 12:44
  Misty Celli: She stood up and told the truth, and the world felt it.
• 12:48
  Misty Celli: Here is what I want you to see now that we've walked through all three.
• 12:53
  Misty Celli: Truth without design leaves you aware but stuck.
• 12:56
  Misty Celli: Design without truth gives you structure built on the wrong foundation.
• 13:01
  Misty Celli: And action without either one is just more of the same.
• 13:05
  Misty Celli: More busy performance, more Monday mornings wondering what happened to the woman you planned on being.
• 13:10
  Misty Celli: All three in sequence, each one making the next one possible.
• 13:15
  Misty Celli: That is what I teach.
• 13:16
  Misty Celli: And Brene Brown, whether she could frame it this way or not, lived every single phase of it.
• 13:22
  Misty Celli: She was not special.
• 13:23
  Misty Celli: She was just finally honest enough to begin.
• 13:26
  Misty Celli: And so are you, because you are still here.
• 13:29
  Misty Celli: Here's what I told you this story today.
• 13:32
  Misty Celli: The woman who disappeared into her roles, the moment of honest reckoning, intentional redesign, the return of herself, and the ripple effect that returns sins into every corner of her life.
• 13:43
  Misty Celli: That is not Renee's arc alone.
• 13:45
  Misty Celli: That is the arc of every ambitious woman who has ever gotten quiet enough to hear herself whispering.
• 13:51
  Misty Celli: And it is yours.
• 13:52
  Misty Celli: The question is not whether this is possible for a woman like you.
• 13:55
  Misty Celli: Renee just answered that.
• 13:57
  Misty Celli: The question is whether you are ready to stop studying everyone else's life the way she was and start actually living your own.
• 14:05
  Misty Celli: You showed up here today.
• 14:07
  Misty Celli: You stayed with this story.
• 14:08
  Misty Celli: You are already further along than you think.
• 14:11
  Misty Celli: That is not a small thing.
• 14:13
  Misty Celli: I want you to imagine something.
• 14:15
  Misty Celli: Three years from now, maybe less, someone who loves you is telling someone else about you.
• 14:20
  Misty Celli: And what they say is not about what you did for everyone, not about how well you managed everything or how efficiently you kept all the obligations.
• 14:29
  Misty Celli: What they say is that she changed.
• 14:32
  Misty Celli: Not in a way that felt foreign or alarming, but in the best way.
• 14:36
  Misty Celli: She came back to herself.
• 14:38
  Misty Celli: And when she did, everything around her came alive differently.
• 14:42
  Misty Celli: Your daughter watches you make a decision that is yours, not anyone else's.
• 14:47
  Misty Celli: And she files that moment away somewhere deep, the moment she saw her mother choose herself.
• 14:53
  Misty Celli: Someday, in her own moment of disappearing, she will reach for that memory like a compass.
• 14:59
  Misty Celli: Your husband looks at you across the table and some ordinary Tuesday and sees the woman he fell in love with.
• 15:04
  Misty Celli: Not the version that is managing everything, but the real version, the one who is present, alive and living in her own rhythm.
• 15:12
  Misty Celli: And you wake up on a morning that looks ordinary from the outside.
• 15:16
  Misty Celli: The coffee's the same, the house is the same, the life is mostly the same, but you are different.
• 15:22
  Misty Celli: You are a woman who knows who she is, who leads her own week, who shows up for the life she designed on purpose, with intention, and with the quiet, steady certainty of a woman who has returned to herself and decided to stay.
• 15:35
  Misty Celli: That is not Brene's life.
• 15:37
  Misty Celli: That is yours.
• 15:38
  Misty Celli: And that is not a fantasy.
• 15:40
  Misty Celli: It's what happens when you do this work.
• 15:42
  Misty Celli: It does not start with a dramatic moment or a breakdown or a TEDx stage.
• 15:47
  Misty Celli: It starts with the decision made right now that you are done going quiet.
• 15:52
  Misty Celli: Brene Brown's turning point came in 2007 when she finally stopped moving long enough to look at what was true.
• 15:58
  Misty Celli: And then, and this is the part I do not want you to miss, she did something about it.
• 16:03
  Misty Celli: She did not wait until she felt ready.
• 16:06
  Misty Celli: She did not wait until the timing was right or the circumstances were easier or the fear had passed.
• 16:11
  Misty Celli: She made a decision from right where she was with everything she was carrying.
• 16:17
  Misty Celli: And that decision changed everything.
• 16:19
  Misty Celli: Your turning point does not have to look like hers.
• 16:22
  Misty Celli: It does not have to be dramatic or public or involve a therapist in a TEDx stage.
• 16:27
  Misty Celli: It can be as quiet as a decision made on a Thursday morning while you are still sitting in your car.
• 16:33
  Misty Celli: But it has to be made.
• 16:34
  Misty Celli: So here's your next stop.
• 16:36
  Misty Celli: And I mean this week, not someday.
• 16:38
  Misty Celli: Come spend an hour with me.
• 16:40
  Misty Celli: I host a free live workshop where we do this work together because here is what I said at the very beginning of this episode, and what I want to leave you with today.
• 16:49
  Misty Celli: You were never meant to disappear into your roles.
• 16:52
  Misty Celli: And that ends here.
• 16:53
  Misty Celli: Come reclaim who you are.
• 16:55
  Misty Celli: Design your life by choice instead of default and start showing up as the utmost woman you were always meant to be.
• 17:00
  Misty Celli: Find your next session.
• 17:02
  Misty Celli: Link is in the show notes.
• 17:03
  Misty Celli: The woman Brene found on the other side of her breakdown, the wholehearted and alive, fully her, she was there the whole time.
• 17:10
  Misty Celli: She had just gone quiet while everything else around her got loud.
• 17:14
  Misty Celli: Your utmost woman has been there the whole time.
• 17:17
  Misty Celli: She's not waiting for you to become someone new.
• 17:20
  Misty Celli: She is waiting for you to come home.
• 17:23
  Misty Celli: You are more than everyone's everything.
• 17:26
  Misty Celli: You are someone.