Latest / Stuck No More Voices / 326-You Do Not Find Your Story. You Notice It.

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326-You Do Not Find Your Story. You Notice It. · Stuck No More Voices

• 0:00
  Speaker: You keep saying you do not have a story.
• 0:03
  Speaker: You have hundreds, you just have not noticed them yet.
• 0:07
  Speaker: Hey, welcome back to the Stuck No More Voices podcast.
• 0:10
  Speaker: I'm Theresa Croft.
• 0:11
  Speaker: I'm a visibility strategist helping Christian women go from their calling to their stories, to the message that hits their ideal audience.
• 0:20
  Speaker: If this is your first time, subscribe, will you, on YouTube or share this podcast on Apple or Spotify,'cause someone might really need this episode.
• 0:31
  Speaker: So we talk about stories, and I'm really believe I've been having so much fun listening to stories as I open up the calling sessions table.
• 0:41
  Speaker: And I'm telling you, there have been such dramatic stories.
• 0:44
  Speaker: If they didn't have a pivot or a transformation, I think I'd be left on the operating table of despair.
• 0:51
  Speaker: But, uh, to see the pivots, to see the changes, to see the transformation in these stories has truly been mind-boggling.
• 0:59
  Speaker: So I thought still I'd jump in with my regular series going on, where do you find your story is this one.
• 1:06
  Speaker: And I've gotta tell you what most women get wrong about their story, they think it's a story that something you find, like a buried treasure, and you have to dig it up.
• 1:18
  Speaker: But so they wait and think,"Okay, this story's gonna come to me." But they don't realize the good stuff is in the ordinary day moments of your life.
• 1:29
  Speaker: I wanna set you free from that today.
• 1:31
  Speaker: You don't have to go looking for it.
• 1:33
  Speaker: Your story is not lost.
• 1:35
  Speaker: It is just hiding in plain sight.
• 1:38
  Speaker: You do not find your story, you notice it.
• 1:41
  Speaker: So I already got a story from today.
• 1:44
  Speaker: I was, had an appointment, but before the appointment, I was having my Jesus and coffee time, you know what I'm saying?
• 1:49
  Speaker: And I had, uh, f- my daughter's fiancé had brought a box of coffee that was left in his truck for who knows how long, and I was excited.
• 1:59
  Speaker: I made first a French press, and I drank that, and I thought,"Oh, so good.
• 2:02
  Speaker: I'm gonna have another one." I had another one, and then all of a sudden as I was getting ready, I put my makeup on, I don't notice anything, but I sit down at this table, y'all, and all of a sudden my face is more cherry than Santa's cheeks.
• 2:16
  Speaker: It was just blowing up red, and I'm thinking,"Okay, where's the heat coming from?" I'm looking around.
• 2:21
  Speaker: That light, I'm like, that's not hot.
• 2:23
  Speaker: That's not hot.
• 2:24
  Speaker: I couldn't, I couldn't go away.
• 2:25
  Speaker: I couldn't run.
• 2:26
  Speaker: I had an appointment.
• 2:27
  Speaker: So when she came on, I was like,"You know, sorry about my red face." Thank goodness it was a storyboard so I could hide behind the story.
• 2:35
  Speaker: What was the problem?
• 2:38
  Speaker: 5-second pause] I realized that particular coffee had mushrooms in it, healthy mushrooms, and it had been baking in the back of my daughter's boyfriend's car for who knows how long, and the mushrooms had an effect on me.
• 2:54
  Speaker: So sometimes things happen in the ordinary of days, and sometimes it causes embarrassment.
• 3:00
  Speaker: Got more on that in just a bit.
• 3:02
  Speaker: So this week, I want you to look at your own life like a detective.
• 3:08
  Speaker: A detective does not invent clues.
• 3:12
  Speaker: You walk into a room that everyone else already walked through, and you see what they missed.
• 3:18
  Speaker: That is e- exactly what we're doing with your life.
• 3:22
  Speaker: Same rooms, new eyes.
• 3:25
  Speaker: Let me show you where the clues are hiding, okay?
• 3:27
  Speaker: This one God showed me before an activation, and he said,"Tee, if people feel like they don't have a story, just pull out a picture." And I had this picture of my daughter.
• 3:38
  Speaker: Oh, she was so happy.
• 3:40
  Speaker: Gonna, gonna help her dad wash his Harley, but the story behind it was the years that I did not, was not actively involved in my kids' lives, trying to survive the drama, the trauma.
• 3:53
  Speaker: I later asked her to forgive me, and she said,"That's okay, Mom, you were trying to just survive yourself," so.
• 3:58
  Speaker: But let me tell you where your own eyes can get sharper.
• 4:03
  Speaker: I've been digging through this book by Matthew Dicks called Storytelling, and I just feel the Lord telling me personally to start telling stories, but to start teaching women, businesswomen, to tell stories so they really can connect.
• 4:20
  Speaker: So when they, people go through the scroll, they stop at yours because you're telling a story.
• 4:26
  Speaker: So Matthew Dicks taught me something really powerful.
• 4:30
  Speaker: He said, um, you keep coming back, and what you find is your best stories do not come from the big, loud events.
• 4:40
  Speaker: They come from the small, ordinary moments, like I just shared.
• 4:44
  Speaker: He calls it the five-second moment, that tiny beat where something in you shifts, where you see differently or you feel different or you know something you did, not now, one second before.
• 5:00
  Speaker: Blink, and you miss it, but those five seconds are the whole story.
• 5:05
  Speaker: Like that last story, the five seconds was the coffee had mushrooms in it.
• 5:10
  Speaker: So when you look at those old photos, don't hunt for the dramatic day.
• 5:15
  Speaker: Look for the five seconds you can find out of that story.
• 5:18
  Speaker: God is usually in that small moment.
• 5:21
  Speaker: I looked at another picture the other day, and it was a sad day.
• 5:26
  Speaker: I was living on the land because my husband wanted to build on the land, and I was living in this dull, small camper.
• 5:35
  Speaker: And one day, I sent a picture to my kids, and they were alarmed.
• 5:41
  Speaker: I wa- I was close to them.
• 5:42
  Speaker: I wasn't alarmed, and they came rushing that weekend, took him to the hospital, and moments later, diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
• 5:53
  Speaker: That's not the five second.
• 5:55
  Speaker: This is it.
• 5:56
  Speaker: When I realized that, I know I should have been sad, but I had instant relief.
• 6:03
  Speaker: I don't have to live in that camper anymore.
• 6:06
  Speaker: I get to go home to where I, this little town I love.
• 6:11
  Speaker: Sadly, it was a sad moment, but that was it.
• 6:16
  Speaker: When he got cancer, can I say I almost felt free?
• 6:20
  Speaker: That's a little rough one.
• 6:22
  Speaker: I realize that.
• 6:24
  Speaker: What was the reality?
• 6:27
  Speaker: That you can find out of your little stories.
• 6:29
  Speaker: Like my reality there is I don't have to live in that small camper out in the middle of nowhere where the moose run and the, you know, it was just rough.
• 6:38
  Speaker: Which leads me to a gold mine of stories.
• 6:41
  Speaker: To those w- if you journal daily, you got a gold mine of stories.
• 6:47
  Speaker: Your journals, the words you wrote when no one was watching are some of the truest you own.
• 6:53
  Speaker: Read an old page and notice what you were carrying.
• 6:57
  Speaker: T- then look at text messages.
• 6:59
  Speaker: Scroll back a year.
• 7:00
  Speaker: I do that all the time if someone says something nice, and the conversations you almost forgot are full of turning points you didn't name at the time.
• 7:09
  Speaker: Voice memos, your own voice caught in a real moment.
• 7:12
  Speaker: Sometimes you hear a thing you were not ready to hear when you said it.
• 7:18
  Speaker: So in my journals during my combative times of trying to survive in my house, those journals w- were gold mines, and what would happen was, as I would have time with God, he would speak to me,"Listen to the vinedresser." And it impacted me.
• 7:35
  Speaker: I could conjure them up.
• 7:37
  Speaker: I shared a few on Facebook, and I realized people were relating to that.
• 7:41
  Speaker: So from being stuck in a marriage but yet still going to God, I ended up with Listen to the Vinedresser: 31 Declarations of Who You Are in the Vine.
• 7:53
  Speaker: I published, self-published on Amazon The journal.
• 7:59
  Speaker: I, by the way, I took them down because I'm gonna re-edit them.
• 8:03
  Speaker: I was kind of acting on some of the parts there.
• 8:06
  Speaker: Here's one that gets me all the time and I have to be careful with it.
• 8:10
  Speaker: Facebook memories.
• 8:11
  Speaker: Yeah, did you know you can go to your Facebook page or your profile, scroll down and find memories, click that thing, and boom, one memory after the other.
• 8:20
  Speaker: The other day I was at work and I did that.
• 8:22
  Speaker: I had some spare time and I was like, ugh, you know, it was really hitting me, especially when it came to my kids.
• 8:31
  Speaker: I had this one picture that I saw just recently.
• 8:35
  Speaker: It was my little son, he's probably about four or five, and I would take him to the radio.
• 8:40
  Speaker: I was working at the radio station.
• 8:41
  Speaker: I would take him to the radio station and, uh, lay him down on that Winnie the Pooh inside the control room because he would scream out if I took him outside.
• 8:52
  Speaker: And then I'd say,"Okay, you gotta be quiet.
• 8:54
  Speaker: Go back to sleep." And then I would open the mic to pray.
• 8:58
  Speaker: We only had three prayer times that time, and that was the longest I'd be on the air.
• 9:03
  Speaker: So I'd open the mic,"Oh, dear Jesus, we love you and...""Rah, rah, rah, rah." Turn it off.
• 9:08
  Speaker: "William, shut up.""Oh, Father..." It's mic on.
• 9:11
  Speaker: "Oh, Father God, you're so awesome.
• 9:13
  Speaker: We just wanna praise you.""Rah, rah, rah, rah." Mic off.
• 9:17
  Speaker: "I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it." Mic on.
• 9:21
  Speaker: It was just life.
• 9:23
  Speaker: It was an ordinary day of life of getting William to be quiet.
• 9:28
  Speaker: Mic on, mic off.
• 9:30
  Speaker: It didn't always happen that way, but it made me realize something.
• 9:34
  Speaker: How blessed I was to be live on the radio, morning radio show, and I could take my kids in.
• 9:41
  Speaker: I brought my, I brought my daughter in when she was a baby, too.
• 9:43
  Speaker: She wasn't as whiny.
• 9:45
  Speaker: That is a precious moment that just a Facebook memory brought that back.
• 9:51
  Speaker: So I will say, can I say this?
• 9:53
  Speaker: On Facebook memories you gotta be careful, too, because some mornings I get triggered real bad just saying it, memory of something.
• 10:02
  Speaker: So be careful with the Facebook memories, but let me tell you, that is a gold mine.
• 10:08
  Speaker: So listen, there's another place.
• 10:10
  Speaker: How about your prayers, the ones you prayed in the hard season?
• 10:15
  Speaker: God was writing something in those rooms.
• 10:18
  Speaker: Go back and read what you asked for if you ha- if you recorded them in a book or somewhere.
• 10:23
  Speaker: Once again, small moments become huge when God is involved.
• 10:31
  Speaker: So let's talk about another story place, conversations.
• 10:35
  Speaker: The thing a friend said you never forgot.
• 10:38
  Speaker: That sentence, sometimes...
• 10:40
  Speaker: I know I get some texts sometimes from my, my friend who's, uh, my mentor, but also my friend, and I'll explain a situation and she'll respond that had just life.
• 10:50
  Speaker: Well, oftentimes I'll copy and paste it and put it in my Evernote, and I have a section called Memory Stones.
• 10:57
  Speaker: Sometimes they have a story, sometimes they just have words to encourage me.
• 11:01
  Speaker: Yeah, I can pull a story out, but sometimes it's not meant for a story.
• 11:06
  Speaker: Disappointments, the door that closed, the plan that fell short.
• 11:12
  Speaker: The story is often hiding in there, in the place you would rather not look, but look again.
• 11:19
  Speaker: That closed door may have led to an open door of an exact place you needed to be.
• 11:24
  Speaker: I often think of rejection as God's protection.
• 11:28
  Speaker: So do you see it now?
• 11:29
  Speaker: You were never short on stories.
• 11:33
  Speaker: You were just moving too fast maybe to notice.
• 11:35
  Speaker: Eight places, and they're already there with you.
• 11:39
  Speaker: One of them is already sitting in your phone, in your drawer, in your journal, in your prayers, in those memories.
• 11:47
  Speaker: Your life is not a blank page.
• 11:50
  Speaker: It's a full one.
• 11:51
  Speaker: You just have to slow down and read it.
• 11:54
  Speaker: So here's your quiet time this week.
• 11:57
  Speaker: Let's do that.
• 11:58
  Speaker: If you got time with God, let's pick one of those eight.
• 12:01
  Speaker: Yeah, I think sometimes when you're with God, y- those memories can leap out at you, good or bad.
• 12:07
  Speaker: But just one.
• 12:08
  Speaker: Sit with it and ask God to show you the story you might have just walked by.
• 12:14
  Speaker: Write it down, and you notice this is your first thread.
• 12:20
  Speaker: If this stirred any something in you, invite...
• 12:23
  Speaker: I invite you to the next Calling Activation Study where we look at your calling and we help story map out your stories that your ideal client is waiting to hear.
• 12:33
  Speaker: Like these stories I'm getting with the story sessions, I know they have answers as they speak to the person they once were.
• 12:41
  Speaker: And before you go, I want you to hear this.
• 12:45
  Speaker: The one woman th- who thinks she has nothing to share is often the one carrying the most.
• 12:51
  Speaker: That might be you today.
• 12:53
  Speaker: It might be your friend.
• 12:54
  Speaker: So September 15th, check out the Calling Activation Study, and it is a warm, safe place where we can look at your calling, story map, like I said, and really light a fire that you do have stories that matter.
• 13:12
  Speaker: So come sit in the room with us.
• 13:13
  Speaker: Link in the show notes.
• 13:15
  Speaker: And hey, if you got a friend like that, bring her to the activation study, the one who keeps saying she has nothing to say.
• 13:22
  Speaker: You know, we all got friends who say that.
• 13:24
  Speaker: Send her this episode maybe.
• 13:26
  Speaker: Watch what happens when she finally sees her hundreds too.
• 13:31
  Speaker: Your story was never missing, friend.
• 13:34
  Speaker: It was just waiting for you to notice.
• 13:36
  Speaker: So I'll talk to you in the next Calling Table session, or I'll just talk to you in a regular Stuck No More Voices podcast.
• 13:45
  Speaker: I'm Theresa.
• 13:46
  Speaker: Thank you so much for joining me