Latest / The Wild Woman Within: Recover from Burnout & Achieve True Work-Life Balance Through Feminine Energy / #5| Romanticize Your Life: Stop Waiting for Permission & Buy Your Own Damn Flowers

Transcript

#5| Romanticize Your Life: Stop Waiting for Permission & Buy Your Own Damn Flowers · The Wild Woman Within: Recover from Burnout & Achieve True Work-Life Balance Through Feminine Energy

0:01
SPEAKER_00: Today, we're breaking out of the cage that says your life isn't worth celebrating until someone else decides it is.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: That you need the relationship, the success, or the perfect circumstances before you're allowed to enjoy being alive.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Wild Woman Within.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: For fiercely independent corporate women who are damn good at managing everything and burn out from trying to.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: Through spiritual practices and ancient wisdom, you'll reconnect with your feminine energy, recover from burnout and achieve true work-life balance.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: So you can build support.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: And wild free.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until I started living differently that I realized I'd been worthy of it all along.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: And I want to start by taking you back to a time when women traveling alone wasn't exactly celebrated.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean that women weren't doing it because of course they were.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: And listen, there's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting that.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: I wanted that.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: And I also have it today.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing: somewhere along the way, we develop this ridiculous idea that a woman's life was somehow incomplete until she had somebody to share it with.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: And God forbid she decided to go experience the world before that person ever showed up.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: Because then comes the commentary.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: Oh, the commentary.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: She goes everywhere with that same girlfriend.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: I bet they're secretly gay.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: Or here's a dungeon.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: Oh, she goes on all these cool trips.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: I bet she would just wish she'd find a good guy to go on trips with.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: As though traveling the world was somehow a consolation prize for not having a husband.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: And then here's my personal favorite.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: She's using up all her good years.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, she's going to be too old to settle down and have a family.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's a lot of cuss words I want to point to that sentence.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: But a woman could be standing out in front of the Grand Canyon having the most extraordinary experience of her life.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: And then somebody back in her hometown is worried she's wasting her good years because there's not a man standing beside her.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: What in the actual?
3:24
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: I think that's what's so fascinating about this is that half the time, these people don't even know you.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: They don't even know what you want.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: They don't know what you dream about, what you've survived.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: They don't know if you're happy or lonely or healing or exploring, or just out there enjoying the hell out of yourself.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: They don't know.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: But they have opinions, like they have assholes.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: And I'm here to tell you something.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: There's probably nothing someone has said about you that you haven't already said to yourself or about yourself at some point.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's why those comments sting.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes the Peanut Gallery, they're not introducing new insecurities.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: No, I think they just repeat the ones that we've already been carrying.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: And for the love of God, stop treating unsolicited commentary like it's some kind of professional consultation.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: Just quit.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: Nobody asks for it.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's paying for it.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: And I could guarantee you that you probably don't owe a single person in that peanut gallery a dime just to keep living your life, right?
4:41
SPEAKER_00: And here's where this gets interesting.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: Because even when we stop listening to other people, sometimes we keep listening to the version of them that we've created in our own heads.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we become our own critics and judges and our own gatekeepers.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: And then before we know it, we're not waiting for society's permission anymore.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: We're waiting for our own.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: And I know this because I've spent a long time doing exactly that.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: I've been buying myself flowers for a very long time, long before Molly Cyrus made a cool with her song Flowers.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying that because I um was ahead of some cultural trend.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm saying it because buying myself flowers was one of the first ways I started changing my relationship with myself.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: For a long time I had this idea of what romance was supposed to look like.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: I wanted the relationship where somebody sent me flowers just because.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Not because Valentine's Day or my birthday, or they did something wrong and needed to apologize.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: I've had plenty of those.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: But because they were thinking about me, just they saw something beautiful and thought, oh, Rachel would love these.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: And I waited for that.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: I waited for the right relationship and the right person.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: And eventually I had to realize that I could keep waiting for somebody to bring me flowers, or I could just buy the damn flowers because I love flowers, right?
6:18
SPEAKER_00: Like, and I don't mean I think they're pretty.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: I I love the smell of a rose.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: I love the way the petals feel.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: I will sometimes I'll take a rose and I'll gently rub it across my cheek because it's the most extraordinary sensation to me.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: The softness, the delicacy.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: It's just so beautiful.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: And that experience, it it it just brings me to a completely present in the moment sp experience.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not thinking about my inbox or a deadline, not thinking about what I should be doing next.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm just there with this rose.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: And maybe that sounds ridiculous to somebody or to you.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of my point.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: Because I it doesn't have to make sense to you or to anybody else, right?
7:22
SPEAKER_00: The experience says it become less meaningful to me just because you're the only person who understands why it matters.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: When I started buying myself flowers, they felt different.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't receiving them as evidence that somebody loved me.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: I was choosing them because I loved them.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: And there wasn't this expectation attached to them or disappointment attached or a relationship status attached.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: It was just me enjoying something very beautiful.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: And that's one of my first real experiences of romanticizing my life.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: And I want to be careful here.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm in treading water right now, because I'm not telling you that you should never want somebody to buy you flowers.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: No, you're a fiercely independent woman.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: Of course, you can want that.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: You can want romance.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: You can want a partner who pays attention to you.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: And you can also want somebody who knows your favorite flower to surprise you on a random Tuesday.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: No, there's nothing wrong with that.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: What I'm saying is that you don't have to withhold the experience from yourself while you're waiting.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: You can desire love without making your entire life conditional upon receiving it, right?
8:45
SPEAKER_00: I think that's where a lot of fiercely independent women get confused because we hear messages about loving ourselves and being independent.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: And then we can interpret them as, I don't need nobody.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: I can do everything myself.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: I'll just take care of it.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: But before you know it, we've turned our self-love into another form of self-reliance.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: And that's not what I'm talking about.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: Not talking about becoming so independent that nobody can do anything for you ever.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about becoming so comfortable with your own words that you no longer require somebody else to prove it before you allow yourself to experience the joy.
9:24
SPEAKER_00: And that's the difference.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: I think it's especially important for women who spend their days being responsible for everybody else to understand this.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: We can be so accustomed to providing the experience that you forget that you're allowed to have one.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: You're the person planning vacations and the dinner reservations and the birthdays and the one that everybody needs.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: You manage family calendars, you lead the meetings, you hold all the shit together.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: And when you're asked, what do you want?
9:51
SPEAKER_00: you never know how to answer that question.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: What would you choose if nobody else had to enjoy it?
10:06
SPEAKER_00: What restaurant would you go to or music would you listen to?
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Where would you travel to?
10:12
SPEAKER_00: And also, would you still do it if nobody knew?
10:18
SPEAKER_00: No pictures, no social media posts, right?
10:21
SPEAKER_00: No validation.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: Would that experience still be worth living?
10:27
SPEAKER_00: No, to me, that's where romanticizing your life becomes something much deeper than an aesthetic.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: It's not about making your life look beautiful, but it's about being present enough to recognize that beauty is there while you're living it.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: And flowers were just the beginning for me.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, I decided to do something that required a whole lot more courage than walking into a grocery store and buying a bouquet.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: I decided to go to a yoga festival by myself.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: And before I tell you about that festival, I need to tell you why going alone was such a big deal for me.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: Because the woman who made that decision had spent years believing she wasn't worthy of the life she wanted.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: You know, I want to tell you something that I don't think I've fully articulated before.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: You know, there was a long time of my life where I couldn't stand looking at myself in the mirror.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying I had a bad hair day.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: I just genuinely struggled with who I was.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: And I carried this belief that somewhere along the way I had become somebody who wasn't worthy of the life she wanted.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: And I think what's interesting about that is that I didn't necessarily have some extraordinary event that caused that belief.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: It was just a collection of experiences and choices and mistakes and the stories, stories that I created about what those things meant.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: You know, I grew up in a small town.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: And if you've grown up in a small town, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about when I say that everybody seems to know everybody's business, or at least they think they do, you know?
12:13
SPEAKER_00: And when you're young, that can feel enormous because you're still, you're still figuring out who you are.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: You're making mistakes, you're learning and experimenting, and you're trying to find your place in the world.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: I somehow developed this belief that I needed to be perfect.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: And that if I wasn't perfect, people would talk.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: And if people talked, it meant I had failed.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: And if I had failed, I wasn't worthy.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: You see how quickly that escalates?
12:43
SPEAKER_00: From making a decision we regret to questioning our entire worth as a human being.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: I made decisions in high school that I wasn't very proud of.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: Things that looking back now were just part of being a teenager for the love of God.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: I didn't have that perspective that I have today.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: At the time, I interpreted those decisions as proof that I have failed some imaginary standard of perfection.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: And then once I believed I had failed, I started acting like failure was my identity.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't an experience anymore.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: It was something that I was.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: And that's a dangerous place to live.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: When you believe you're already a failure, making another bad decision doesn't seem quite as consequential.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: You start thinking, well, I've already screwed this up.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: I've already disappointed these people, already ruined the version of myself I was supposed to become.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: What's one more bad decision?
13:43
SPEAKER_00: And then those decisions, man, don't they create more shame?
13:47
SPEAKER_00: And then that shame creates more decisions, and the circle continues.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: And I carried that perspective into college and all throughout the majority of my adult life.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: You know, for about 12 years, I was living with this internal narrative that I wasn't good enough.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: And I think the heartbreaking part of all of that is I still had dreams.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: I still wanted a beautiful life.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: And I imagined being happy and wanting love and a family and doing meaningful work.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: But then in the back of my mind, there was this little voice saying, that's not for you.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: You're not that kind of woman.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: Other people get to have those things, things, things, things, things.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: Not you.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: I think there's someone listening right now who understands exactly what I'm talking about.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: No, maybe your shame doesn't come from decisions you made as a teenager.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: It comes from relationships that didn't work, career decisions, financial mistakes, time.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: That time you didn't stand up for yourself.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: Like the period of the time when you stayed somewhere you knew you didn't belong.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it's not even something that you did.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's something that somebody told you about yourself, or you've been carrying it around like a fact ever since, or something that somebody did to you in a violation that made you just believe something of yourself.
15:17
SPEAKER_00: But no, no matter what, somewhere along the way, you stopped seeing yourself as a person who had experiences.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: You started seeing yourself as the sum of everything you wished you could change.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: I so you began to live accordingly.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: And that's what shame can do.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: Does it change how you feel about your past?
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Changes what you believe you're allowed to have in your future.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: And I think this is one of the most important walls we have to tear down.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: Your past is a part of your story.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: It's not a permanent verdict on your worth.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: You can take responsibility for things you regret without turning those things into your identity.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: You can acknowledge that you made decisions you wouldn't make today without deciding that you deserve to suffer forever because of them.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
16:11
SPEAKER_00: You can build a life without first proving that you've never made a mistake.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: And I didn't understand any of that for a long time until I found yoga.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: I found yoga in 2014, and I wish I could tell you that I walked into my first class and immediately experienced some extraordinary spiritual awakening.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: That would have been convenient, right?
16:41
SPEAKER_00: That's not how it happened.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: What yoga did to me, it created space.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: Space between what I was thinking and what was actually happening.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: Space between my emotions and my reactions.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: Yoga created space between who I believed I was and who I might actually be.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: And for someone who had spent years living inside a pretty unforgiving internal narrative, well, that space was revolutionary.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: Because for the first time I was beginning to notice that I had thoughts about myself that weren't necessarily true.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: I could think I was unworthy, but that didn't make me unworthy.
17:33
SPEAKER_00: I could feel ashamed.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: But that didn't mean shame had to determine every decision I made.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: I could remember something from my past, but I didn't have to relive it as though it were happening in the present.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: And slowly I started making different choices.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: I was paying attention.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: I started asking myself better questions, noticing when something felt right.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes instead of doing what I had always done, I made a different decision.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: And those decisions began to compound.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: One better choice made the next one a little easier.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: One boundary made room for another.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: And eventually I began building a kind of resilience that I didn't even realize I needed because I was no longer relying exclusively on what other people thought about me.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: I was developing a relationship with myself.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: And that changed everything.
18:34
SPEAKER_00: So in 2018, I completed my yoga teacher training and I remember sharing something that was deeply personal to me.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: I told them that I had dreamed of taking yoga back to my hometown.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to live there again.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to share what I was learning and I wanted to bring this practice to people who might benefit from it, right?
18:56
SPEAKER_00: But I also admitted that I didn't feel worthy enough to go home.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: Because in my mind, that town still held a version of me that I was ashamed of.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: I had convinced myself that everybody remembered my mistakes and that everybody had an opinion.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: I would always be judged by who I had been rather than who I was becoming.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: And then my friend Ronnie, she looked me square in the eyes.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: She told me how worthy I truly was.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: And there was something about that moment about having another person unrelated to any circumstance before.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: Look directly at the part of yourself you've been trying to hide and refuse to agree with the story you've been telling about it.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: And it didn't magically erase 12 years of shame, but it definitely challenged the foundation that that shame had been built on.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: So Ronnie became my mentor and my Reiki healer.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: And that experience opened the door to shadow work for me, exploring the parts of myself that I had rejected, that I had judged, the things that I tried to outrun.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: And here's what I began to understand.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: I didn't need to become an entirely different person to be worthy of love.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: Right.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: I needed to stop abandoning the person I already was.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: I needed to learn how to look at my past with honesty instead of hatred.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: That's hard.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: You know how to take that responsibility without using responsibility as another excuse to punish myself.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: Perfection, man, it's a tough thing to live up to.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: But it's not the entrance fee to a beautiful life.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: Because that's the shit's never coming.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: Perfection.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: Thank God for that.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine how exhausting it would be to spend your entire life trying to earn something that was never supposed to require perfection in the first place?
21:21
SPEAKER_00: And that brings me back to 2019, the yoga festival.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: To the tent, to the nervous woman who decided to go anyway, because by then I had started building trust in myself.
21:33
SPEAKER_00: Going to that festival was one more opportunity to practice the trust.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't waiting until I completely felt confident or figured out every detail or had become some woman who did adventurous things alone.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: No, I became that woman by doing the adventurous thing alone.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: Period.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: I decided I'm going to go to my first yoga festival, and it was in Snowshoe, West Virginia.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: I had no idea what.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: To expect.
22:01
SPEAKER_00: Never did anything like this.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: I just knew I loved yoga.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: And I was a yoga teacher.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: So of course I should do this.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know these people.
22:10
SPEAKER_00: And I did not know what a yoga festival actually looked like.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: Neither did a lot of people around me.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: Right?
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Because if they did, I wouldn't have received such colorful commentary.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: It was phenomenal.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: God, people be like, what is this?
22:26
SPEAKER_00: A bunch of hippies getting together and doing acid?
22:29
SPEAKER_00: Or what do we even do at a yoga festival other than yoga?
22:33
SPEAKER_00: I bet there's naked people dancing around the fires.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the imagination of these people, they were running wild, right?
22:40
SPEAKER_00: And then there was another end of this spectrum.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's cool.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: Are you nervous?
22:44
SPEAKER_00: Are you sure you don't want somebody to go with you?
22:46
SPEAKER_00: You're really going to do this all by yourself?
22:49
SPEAKER_00: Listen.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: Like some of those questions probably were genuine concern.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: Because if you know me, you know me.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: But there's something really interesting about how we respond to a woman choosing to do something alone.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: So let me just take it to that.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes I think we treat her independence like it's an emergency that needs to be managed.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: As though the fact that she's traveling alone automatically means that something is missing in her life.
23:15
SPEAKER_00: And I want to make something very, very clear.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: I was nervous, absolutely.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: I didn't have all the answers.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: And I sure as hell didn't know exactly what was going to happen.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: But I wanted to go.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: And I hadn't reached a point where I was tired of letting uncertainty make my decisions for me.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: So I went.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: And I can still remember getting there, finding where I needed to be, figure out where to set my tent up, look at all these people who seemed to know exactly what they were doing.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: I was just over here lost trying to figure it out all by myself.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: And that was when I realized nobody was coming to do this for me.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna have to trust myself.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna have to ask questions.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna have to figure things out and get real comfortable being uncomfortable.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
24:01
SPEAKER_00: I did it.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: I figured it out.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: And that might not sound like such a big deal, but for the woman I was at that point in my life, it was enormous because every little thing I figured out became evidence that I was capable, I could navigate an unfamiliar environment without needing somebody beside me to validate every decision.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: And here's what I didn't expect.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: I learned more about myself in those four days than I had in six years of college in the eight months of yoga teacher training.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: And I don't say that lightly or to minimize my education, but I do say it loud because those four days they gave me something education that they hadn't given me alone.
24:53
SPEAKER_00: And it was an experience of myself outside the roles I was used to playing.
24:59
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't the corporate professional or somebody's girlfriend.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't the person that everybody expected me to be.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: I was just being me.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: I was surrounded by people who were living in ways I had barely began to even imagine that they understood the eight limbs of yoga, people who studied the Tao, who explored ancient wisdom traditions.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: I was around people who talked about religious trauma, meditation, energy, chakras, what it meant to really know yourself.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: Some talked about healing and spirituality, and others talked about the body and the nervous system.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: And some people they had devoted enormous portions of their lives to exploring questions.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: I was only beginning to ask.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: And whether I agreed with everything they believed wasn't it wasn't the point.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: The point was that I was being exposed to an entirely different way of experiencing life.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: Like these people were seekers, they were curious, they were exploring.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: They weren't all trying to climb the same corporate ladder or meet some societal expectations.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: They were asking different questions.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: Who am I underneath all these expectations?
26:19
SPEAKER_00: What do I actually believe?
26:22
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to live in alignment with myself?
26:25
SPEAKER_00: What am I holding on to that no longer belongs in my life?
26:30
SPEAKER_00: I remember being absolutely fascinated because I had a good job.
26:37
SPEAKER_00: I had an extraordinary start to my career at that point.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: On paper, things were going really well.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: But being around these people, oof.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: They made me realize that professional success and personal fulfillment were not the same thing.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: I could be successful and still have entire parts of myself that I had not explored.
26:57
SPEAKER_00: I could be capable and be disconnected from what I really wanted.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: Shit, I could even do everything right according to somebody else's definition and still feel like I was missing something.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: And that's really when I started looking at my own life differently.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: Who I was giving my energy to, what I was giving it to, what was I tolerating, what was I doing because I actually wanted to, and what was I doing because I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped.
27:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: I came to that realization and it was so uncomfortable.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to create this life that I was beginning to imagine.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: And to do so, I realized that I was going to have to become a hard no to a lot of shit I had been allowing.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't because like I was better than anybody in my life at that point.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: I think it was more about because I had suddenly figured out my time and my energy.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: How they're not unlimited resources.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: And every yes that I gave to something that wasn't aligned with me was taking up space that could have been used for something that was.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: And here's something else that happened at that festival.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: That's where I decided I wanted to be a mother.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: Now think about that for a second.
28:26
SPEAKER_00: I went to a yoga festival by myself, no partner beside me, no guarantee of what my future was gonna look like.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: And in that experience of independence, I became clearer about my desire for connection and family.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that interesting?
28:51
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we act as though independence and wanting a family are opposing forces.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: Like you have to choose, you're either free-spirited woman traveling the world, or you're the one who settles down and becomes a mother.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: But I was discovering that I could be both.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: I could want freedom and commitment, adventure and stability, and that independence and intimacy all at the same time.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: Like I could want a life that was entirely my own, and still want the life with people that I loved.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's something a lot of fiercely independent women need to hear is you do not have to abandon your independence to experience love.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: You do not have to abandon your desire for love to experience freedom.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: Those two things can coexist, and that's the beauty of having both the feminine energy piece and the masculine energy piece working as a whole.
29:51
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't because I became home and immediately changed every aspect of my life because I didn't, you know, transformation rarely works that way.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: But I did come home to the same responsibilities and the same world, but the same career with a new perspective.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: I had experienced something different.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: And once you have an experience that challenges the story you've been telling yourself over and over, it becomes a lot harder to pretend that that story is the only available one.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: And I had seen a different way to live.
30:29
SPEAKER_00: So I couldn't unsee it anymore.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: And that was 2019.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: And I genuinely believe that that experience opened the door to so many things that came afterwards.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: Fast forward to today.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: I have a husband who is also my adventure partner and a child who loves and adores life.
30:51
SPEAKER_00: I have some wonderful pets, loving parents, and a career that gives me incredible opportunities.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: And I've created more space for the things that matter to me.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm extraordinarily grateful.
31:09
SPEAKER_00: But I want to be very clear about something.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: This life did not just fall into my lap.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: It didn't happen because I woke up one morning and decided to think positively about the universe, and then all of a sudden it delivered me a husband and child and a healthy work-life balance to my front door.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: And as a matter of fact, none of that happened in that order.
31:30
SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't it be something if it did?
31:32
SPEAKER_00: No, there was a ton of pain and turmoil.
31:35
SPEAKER_00: There were relationships that were oh, just excruciating.
31:40
SPEAKER_00: There were career positions that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt were not right for me.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: I worked from some heinous ass people.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: And there were some difficult conversations, decisions that scared me.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: There were things I had to walk away from.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: Friendships that I had had for 20 years that I had to move away from.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: Plenty of moments when I questioned whether I was making the right choices.
32:07
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes when I talk about these experiences, people remind me that not everybody has the same circumstances I do.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: Not everybody can just go find another job or move away from the rat race.
32:20
SPEAKER_00: Not everybody has a support system that you have with your child.
32:23
SPEAKER_00: And not everybody has the time or money to go traveling.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
32:27
SPEAKER_00: They're right.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: They're absolutely right.
32:32
SPEAKER_00: I have support and opportunities that other people may not have.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: Those things matter.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: It would be incredibly dismissive of me to sit here and tell a woman who's working two jobs, raising children without support, and struggling to pay your bills that she needs to change her perspective and everything will work out.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: That is not what I'm saying at all.
32:52
SPEAKER_00: Perspective, it doesn't pay your electric bill.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't create child care, and it's not gonna magically remove responsibilities that you're carrying.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: And it certainly doesn't make every circumstance fair.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: But here is something that I do believe that no matter what, we have a commonality.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: Even when we can't immediately change our circumstances, we can begin changing the relationship we have with ourselves inside those circumstances.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes that change creates enough space for us to recognize possibilities we couldn't see before.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: It changes what we're willing to tolerate, what we ask for, what we pursue.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it simply allows us to experience a moment of beauty in a life that is genuinely difficult and that matters.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: Romanticizing your life doesn't have to mean booking a trip to Italy.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to mean spending hundreds of dollars on flowers either.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: It's not quitting your job and moving across the country and changing your entire identity.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: No, sometimes it just means making your morning coffee and sitting down to enjoy it.
34:07
SPEAKER_00: Romanticizing your life, putting on music while you cook or wearing the dress you keep saving for a special occasion.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: Eat dinner off the good plates.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: Look at the people you love and realize that these are the moments that you used to dream about.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: How about that?
34:22
SPEAKER_00: I think we have this tendency to postpone our enjoyment of life until the circumstances are just right.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: When the kids are older, when I find the right partner, when I have more money, all of the excuses, they go, go, go.
34:37
SPEAKER_00: And then you get to start enjoying yourself.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: And let me ask you something.
34:43
SPEAKER_00: When is that gonna be?
34:45
SPEAKER_00: I think you've lived long enough that you know life doesn't really settle down.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: One project ends, another one begins.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: The kids get older, responsibilities change.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: You get the promotion, suddenly you have a whole new set of expectations, and there's always gonna be another reason to wait.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: There's never a perfect time to have another child.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: Yet people have another child all the time.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: You can make joy conditional upon the absence of responsibility, then you will probably spend your entire life postponing joy.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: And that's a heartbreaking way to live, especially for women, especially for fiercely independent women who are incredibly good at managing everything.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: Because you're probably really excellent at identifying what needs to happen next, right?
35:32
SPEAKER_00: You can see the risk, anticipate problems, create the plan, execute the plan.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: Can you allow yourself the experience?
35:39
SPEAKER_00: Can you recognize your life is happening right now?
35:44
SPEAKER_00: And there's something else that I want to talk about here because I think when we hear the phrase romanticize your life, I think it's easy to imagine a certain aesthetic, like this beautiful coffee shop or flowers and these solo trips, a sunrise and a sunset.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: And don't get me wrong, I love absolutely all of those things.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: But romanticizing your life isn't about making it look beautiful or everything look beautiful.
36:08
SPEAKER_00: I think it's about developing the ability to experience beauty without needing everything to be perfect.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: And I think that romanticizing your life requires some self-trust.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: It means going somewhere alone or choosing a different career path or ending a relationship that looks perfectly fine from the outside, or maybe it means moving back to your hometown you once swore you would never return to.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes choosing to stay exactly where you are, but showing up differently is romanticizing your life.
36:43
SPEAKER_00: Here's what I want to bring back from my professional world, because as a project executive, I spend a lot of time thinking about plans.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: And one thing that I know for certain is that a project plan is never the project.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: We can create the most beautiful plan in the world and identify every milestone and every risk dependency deliverable, but you have to execute at some point.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: Take action and learn from what happens.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of us are walking around with these beautiful project plans for our lives, but we're not executing.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: We're waiting for the conditions to be perfect for approval, for somebody else to commit to the plan.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: We're waiting until we feel completely ready.
37:29
SPEAKER_00: You don't build self-trust by thinking about all the ways you might trust yourself someday.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: You build it by making a decision, allowing yourself to experience the outcome, keeping small promises to yourself.
37:42
SPEAKER_00: You build it by navigating uncertainty, by realizing that even when something doesn't go according to plan, you're capable of responding.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: That's what happened when I bought myself flowers and when I went to Snowshoe, West Virginia, when I started making different decisions after finding yoga.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: That's what happened when I began challenging the shame I had carried for years.
38:03
SPEAKER_00: Each action became evidence.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: Not that I was perfect, because we already established that's not real, but I was capable of participating in my own life.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: Because when I look back now, I realize that the woman who went to that festival wasn't waiting for her life to begin anymore.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: She was living it.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: She didn't have a husband or a child.
38:28
SPEAKER_00: She didn't have all the things she'd imagined for herself.
38:31
SPEAKER_00: She just had herself.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: She wasn't perfect or polished.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: That woman deserved beautiful experiences too.
38:38
SPEAKER_00: I think that's what we get wrong about momentum in our life.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: I think it's something we do once we've found the relationship in the funny.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: I think maybe we just had a time.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: That brings me to your audacity.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: Even if you're the only one to want you to do one simple thing, simply because it brings me to the light.
39:10
SPEAKER_00: Wear the dress.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: Go somewhere you've always wanted to go.
39:22
SPEAKER_00: And notice whether that little voice shows up in the back of your head.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: The one that's like, you think it's something to wait until somebody can join.
39:33
SPEAKER_00: And then instead of listening to it, watching talk back to them and be like, who am I waiting for?
39:38
SPEAKER_00: The life you're waiting to fall in love with is already happening.
39:43
SPEAKER_00: And you don't have to wait for somebody else to make it beautiful.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: You are worthy of enjoying the life you have.
39:52
SPEAKER_00: Also while building the life.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: If this resonates with you, I want you to come hang out with me beyond this podcast.
40:02
SPEAKER_00: Join the wild council.
40:04
SPEAKER_00: Get a lead with me every week.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: Inside the email of the Wild Council, where we challenge the board.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: To live in our own prison.
40:17
SPEAKER_00: Let's perform it.
40:18
SPEAKER_00: More living wildly free.