Rewrite Your Story

Hello and welcome to the recap. Call recap.

Call of the club, which is made for gentle purpose driven creative business owners, for gentle purpose driven creative business owners, and we talk about creative foundations, what’s going on in our nervous system? We talk about life, how all of life has to come with us as we build unique businesses, learning our own system and form of sales, marketing organization that works for us, because we are a unique breed today, this week, as the recap would go, what we started with was our complaints. We unleashed them, we opened up the door to hearing unapologetically what was in there, and we complained more intentionally than we’ve ever complained.

we took this permission slip of let’s complain and combined it with let’s complain for a reason, not because we’re going to keep living from these complaints, but because we’re doing some research. We want to hear what words are in there, repetitively, recycling, probably from childhood or from our parents or our tribes or our culture that are not working for us, but we want to see how it seems they are serving us. We let all the words out, let all the words that were holding us, holding us down, what we were stuffing down and keeping to ourselves, letting out all the things that we’re trying to fix and change and hide.

And I encourage you, as you build this skill of listening to what’s in there to that it doesn’t keep your creativity hostage or keep you scared by keeping you the same, there’s a purpose to it. It’s not complaining for complaining sake. It’s not venting, it’s not gossiping.

It’s hearing what’s in there that we’re trying to change without even knowing it’s in there. And because we now understand how powerful those words, those thoughts, those complaints are, how steadfast they are, how convincing and factual they seem, we started to realize that they take their job very seriously for keeping us safe, and in that way, they’re precious, right? We have to bring them, though, into the light and help them now to see you’re not alone.

I’m listening, but I’m not going to knee jerk, respond, and do the things that I think are going to help that situation, because our life is staying the same, and that is not necessarily what we want sometimes, hearing the stories that are in there are step one of rewriting, and that is our monthly topic, rewriting the stories of our life, because those stories are made up of 1000s of smaller stories, and those smaller stories are made up of millions, billions and trillions of thoughts and words that are on loop. We’ve been saying them, these thoughts, these words, on repeat for a long time. And what happens when we repeat a thought over and over hundreds of 1000s of times, it becomes a belief, and once it’s at the level of belief, we start thinking of it as a fact, or as the truth, as the way of the world that’s unchangeable or permanently who we are, not true.

It’s a loop, a thought loop, and if it’s a thought error, we don’t want that to keep looping. one of the stories that I had to rewrite around my relationship, especially to my creative pursuits, my craft, my art, music, and I especially had to look at once I heard some of the complaints coming up. It was around dashed hopes.

And I know you all have dashed hopes in your life, and you’ve probably come to a belief or a story set about dashed hopes. I had to look at what I was making, dashed hopes mean about myself and my potential. And y’all know, if you’ve been around my world for a minute, that for the first decade or of my life, I believed that I was put on this planet to be Annie in the Broadway musical Annie.

I knew every song, every lyric, by the time I was six, it had been introduced to me at very beautiful, pivotal times in my life by beautiful family members. And I even got to go see the Broadway show when I it was right at the moment where the whole I remember the glow of the stage. It was my fate, my destiny.

when the school musical came to the high school, and it was going to be Annie, but I was only in seventh grade, and yet they were gonna let the seventh and eighth graders also auditioned. I knew the reason that they were gonna also let the seventh and eighth grade graders audition was because I was still in seventh grade. I was meant to be any all it felt right, it felt good.

It was a yes. All my systems were a go, and I knew, I’d never known anything. when it came time.

Time for the big day, the big audition, and I did my thing, and it was magical. I sang well, I said my monolog. Well, all of the things I had prepared went well.

I was full of Yes. And when they posted the cast list, and I was not Annie, I was not grace, her mom ish figure, I was not Molly, her best friend. I was not even Miss Hannigan.

I was Duffy. I was the mean bully orphan that was in a bad mood through the whole show. It was devastating, , deep, dashed hopes that I didn’t realize.

But right then I made a whole bunch of decisions, and a big part of my story was formed at age 12 about what was possible for me and probable for me in my life. And then life happened, and there were plenty of wins, even musical ones, literal, actual competitions and big things that I was going for that did work out, but none of them really went back and touched that fateful day when I was not any until I decided to go and look at the whole thing again. Hope you can hear those sirens.

They’re big over here. I decided to rewrite that story. I decided what I wanted to make all of that mean about me and my life, right?

I realized that those things were that what that one day, that one event, was not evidence that reinforced the story that I had been letting it do, and as soon as I saw the other possibilities for what it could mean, because I was devastated that I pivoted. I started playing the cello, I started playing the piano, and that I started to do very well. it was I was able to use it as evidence that I can go in any direction with music.

But I hadn’t seen that for years, years, and when I finally rewrote the story, much energy became available to me, much more clarity. And that feeling of Yes, of course, came back. I ended up realizing how that massive dashed hope had helped me build an entire career based on being able to be a multi instrumentalist, and I made an entire program based on music, not a specific instrument, not one specific way of crafting your craft.

It helped me build new relationships, write books, and not be Annie, only at all costs, but be Jack of all trade, master of several totally re changing my mind, and helped me make a lot more money. if you want to change some part of the sticky, painful parts that are not working of your life, your daily experience, and you want to do it yesterday, if you want to stop struggling invisibly and always running into questions , what’s wrong with me and what’s the point, you must decide who you are to you. And if you get an answer that is back when you say, Who am I to me, what do I believe about myself?

If you get an answer that is any less that than, Oh, my God, I love myself, not narcissistic, style, not I’m the best, cocky, better than everybody else, style, but genuine, I feel whole and confident and capable and fortified. Then, if you get anything less than that, then rewriting your stories, rewriting the story of your life, is one of the most creative, sacred and accessible things you can do for free, even if you have no idea how to start it first, even if you don’t really know much about writing, rewriting your story is a skill that you can absolutely develop if you want to. That’s what we did together this week, and we’re doing it all month.

then we moved into a lot of coaching conversations. And I want to remind you here that as you’re doing this work, you can start with a light or a medium or a heavy story. And I’m going to give you a little scaffolding to hold on to of how to start rewriting that story.

think of a problem, think of something that’s coming up that you want to make change or progress on. And the first step is, I want you to do a brain dump, a complete flow. Open the floodgates of what’s currently in there.

Tell the raw story. Don’t coach yourself. Don’t push it down.

Be unapologetic about the raw story, about your beliefs, about why you see the world that way, what happened? Then the next thing you do, once that’s pretty fleshed out, and keep asking yourself, what’s next? What else?

What else is there? Anything else in there? When you feel that’s come to a completion of some sorts, go through and decide, decide what’s still serving you, and decide what’s not and which parts you want to retell.

That’s the work that coaching can help with a lot. Because it helps with outside perspective, neutral perspective questioning in a way that only outside perspectives can sometimes help make little cracks in the armor. The next step, number three is to go out, once you have started to decide, make decisions on the way you’re going to tell the story, and go look for evidence that supports the new way, you’re going to find a lot of evidence that supports the old way.

You have to be intentional about looking for the new evidence, and then when you find new evidence, the last step is to use that for your highest good, never against you. And that will be a little tricky, nuanced part of the path, but that’s it. what else do we talk about this week, we talked about how one of the hardest things about changing your life and rewriting your story is recognizing the difference between trauma drama and habit.

And I’m gonna take a quick moment to remind you that trauma drama and habit being in the same sentence is not because I am minimizing trauma. I know y’all have probably been around being coaches and healers and creatives and the difference. But I want to define them quickly, because living into the distinction of them is part of rewriting your story.

before we even define them, I want to slow down and I want to acknowledge that the word trauma in the same sentence, again, with trauma and habit, can seem I’m minimizing the intensity of pain and trauma. I am not. I’m not saying that these three things should be treated with the same approach.

In fact, if we try to bypass trauma, if we try to jump straight to solving for drama and creating better habits. It’s trying to shower without getting wet. It’s rubbing soap all over our body without even having a water source within reach.

You create a lot of gross, cakey soap all over you. We don’t need that. We cannot override, bypass or positively think our way around trauma.

It requires a spirit, body, mind, time and sensitive support approach. if you want to be healed already, or get over it, or get past it and be done with it, I totally get it. That’s usually where I start wanting things too, but right before really trying to act on , let’s solve it.

I have to distinguish between, is this something that I need therapy type help with to really move through it, because you don’t want to re traumatize as we tell our stories and rewrite them. We do not need to relive, re traumatize or re trigger anything, but we do need to hear things and understand them and be able to talk to them and validate them, accept what’s happened and what’s happening that we can build a lifetime of support around it. This is one of those handoff places between therapy and coaching.

Right? Therapy is made for that made for healing the past, healing, trauma, good therapy can help you with that. Coaching is made for integrating that work and healing into your future, imagining and creating a new future from a new foundation and a new place in your brain.

trauma, we’re going to define as an experience that was extreme or overwhelming or disruptive to your nervous system. Anything that happened that your nervous system wasn’t ready for could be acute or chronic, simple or complex. Could be if the emotional variety, psychological or physical.

I think a trauma is snowflakes. No two are alike, we can’t deal with them in exactly the same way. We experience trauma in our own unique ways.

Its impact is unique, and our ability to cope with it is unique. Now let’s go to drama. The way we define drama in the club is simple story.

The drama is the story you’re telling about something in its original Greek sense. Drama was literally meant to be a story acted out on the stage, intentionally having conflict and emotion and excitement, because that’s interesting and engaging to us. When I work with younger clients, I love how they’re I got this problem, but I don’t necessarily want to do anything about it, because it’s fun.

It’s interesting. makes school more fun. we have to acknowledge that sometimes our drama and our stories are really interesting and engaging to us and in the way we used it now, not in Greek playwright time, we also mean drama is something when we’re talking about someone else’s problems and issues that are causing us problems.

there’s drama and habits we’re defining are the things that we do regularly on repeat many times without even knowing we’re doing them. that’s very simple distinctions. But why is it important?

How does this help you rewrite your whole life? Here’s how, if you don’t get and stay clear about the differences of those. Three things, trauma, drama and habits.

They can all be working against you without you ever even smelling a problem. If you do know the difference, but you use them interchangeably, it can get a little confusing to make any significant lasting change, and you can start to do the cycle of hopelessness and despair. If you don’t get honest about when you’re telling a story or playing out a habit that’s familiar and comfortable, you’ll make stories and habits even out of trauma.

It’ll be very confusing. that’s why when, when we play the trauma card, when it’s not about trauma, it’s the ultimate ace card. When we mistake Our drama for trauma, we can get into RE traumatizing territory.

We can get worked up emotionally, mentally, physically, even when there’s no physical trauma or the trauma is not present in our experience. I want to be clear. I’m not talking about the type, hello, welcome, type of trauma that we do need therapy with.

I’m talking about when trauma accidentally slips in to a drama and habitual cycle that leads to more drama, feeling drama, and it can become a habit. Are you tracking? It’s tricky.

this is what we are unpacking together in the club can be tricky to even communicate. remember, you can start with any part of your experience, a light story of something dramatic, a medium story of a habit that you’re dealing with, or the heavy if you have the right support, whatever your wisdom brings up for you as I talk or as you do this work, trust that it is perfect for you and that your brain will put things together. one of the examples I gave this week was I was raised in a family with some pretty conflicting money beliefs, there’s never enough was on one hand.

And sometimes there was, we have much. You’ve got to be grateful for what you have. Sometimes there was, it’s bad to want anything or need anything.

It takes from the rest of our family. And there was also, let’s go on a shopping spree and spend money we don’t have because it’ll help us feel better. Very confusing, conflicting beliefs.

Every Christmas, I heard at least once, Christmas is canceled. We’re taking all the presents back. We don’t have any money.

And yet, every morning I woke up on Christmas Day and Santa had brought double to triple the amount of presents. I thought were possible. The whole house was sparkling.

It confused me. People with lots of money are bad, and money makes everything better. I got both.

think of some of these thoughts in your own head where there might be some confusion, and you made some stories and some habits around dealing with those. The net effect for me, though, was fear and scarcity. I developed this huge need and pride around not needing or wanting anything, not taking up too much space, keeping a small carbon footprint.

And for in college, I was , Oh, I’m above consumer culture, whatever that meant. But I was always conflicted with, I need money to survive, and I enjoy things that money can buy, travel and experiences, and I had a deep desire as I grew to help my family, to help my community with struggles that money could solve. when I decided to intentionally leave the corporate world and make less money for a while, as I became an entrepreneur, I didn’t even know that’s what I was doing.

It brought up all kinds of unhealed trauma and drama and habits, they all sprung into action first without me even knowing it. I did a lot of therapy, then I took a lot of courses, and I did heal, and you can too. And almost two decades later, though, when I was time to pivot a business again, and I decided to shift and move away from one that was lucrative and generating plenty of money without much effort on my part, I knew that I might have another income decrease.

Go ahead and dip on purpose. I had things lined up, but I also knew that it might touch trauma drama and bring up habits. And did it yes, a lot of unnecessary drama too.

But does it mean that I don’t now have the skills of not indulging, sometimes indulging the habits or being dramatic about it? But it also means that I can pull it together a little faster and be zoom out and become aware and find this what that I might be getting some twisted relief from thinking or feeling sorry for myself. All of those still happen, but the chain is shorter.

I wake up a little faster. here’s what I want you to know. As soon as you realize you’re in a habit or you’re in drama, it’s.

Soon as you realize it that you’re not present, you become present in that moment. As soon as you realize you’re caught in an internal loop, a story, you’re no longer caught. You can capitalize on those moments, but what we do in those moments is we go, oh, what’s wrong with me?

Why am I doing that? That’s where we stop. We stop.

We have a solid boundary with ourselves around nothing’s wrong with me. That’s very human. Trauma drama and habits are very human, and as soon as we see the habit, even if we’re in mid habit, you have the option to opt out.

right now, think about making this distinction in your own life between trauma, drama and habit. Think about the stories that are coming up for you in your own life, in your past, and start to apply this. And lastly, we talked about how easy it is to how easy it seems to solve other people’s problems and not wanting to take up too much space in this world.

I say to that there’s only two kinds of problems. You can’t solve other people’s problems, and your problems with other people’s information. we are going to start working with that and staying within our own lane, because the only thing more painful than feeling powerless is being powerful but not doing anything with it.

And y’all are powerful, but sometimes we get stuck in feeling we’re not, and that is painful. Thanks to many of your all the club members willingness to share their stories, we’re able to see where we’re holding ourselves back, and they’re always totally relatable. There are helpful ways to feel though through those feelings, and there are not helpful ways.

But feeling your feelings, whether it’s alone by yourself or in front of others, is not the same as making other people responsible for your emotional well being that’s between you and you. we also talked about the circle of knowledge this week, and I’ll go through it real quickly. We all are in various parts of the circle of knowledge at all times, and we’ve all conquered the circle, and then we’re back in the beginning of the circle.

But the beginning of the circle for all of us is that there are things that we don’t even know, that we don’t even know. And I want you to also overlay while I talk about this, how you anticipate and think about your set of sensations on your body, your feelings when you don’t even know you don’t know, could be ignorance is bliss. Could be a sense of unease, , I know I don’t know something.

But , that’s not even it. When you don’t even know that, you don’t even know, what are the sensations you have associated with that. Maybe it’s that the other shoe is going to drop someday, but you don’t know how.

Maybe it’s one of dread. Maybe it’s one of bliss. Knowing that helps.

Then we move into if once you have become aware of something in the world, you now know that you don’t know. I use the example of tying your shoe. There was a time in your life you did not even know there was a shoe or laces, and then you became aware of it by your observations, by people trying to show it to you.

And now you move into knowing that you don’t know. And that’s where a lot of us, creative, gentle souls, can get stuck with some trauma, drama and bad habits. We feel things when we don’t, when we know that we don’t know.

And when we’re going out and starting to make offers into the world, we’re gonna be talking about a very cool way, very clean, simple, organized system of how to make offers without the trauma and the drama and the habits. But when at first we go out there, we make offers, we get some no’s. People say no, and we go down, because now we are aware that we know we don’t know how to do this, and that’s when we want to pivot or quit.

But if we stay with it, if we take the education courses, if we learn how to manage and process our own feelings of discomfort and not act out of them, we start to move into knowing something. We learn things. We start to use the nose as information of why we how we need to tweak what we’re doing, how we need to make it better.

And then we move into we know that we don’t or no, sorry, we know that we know. We know that we know. And I want you to think about how it feels when that something.

Most of us love it. We become professors, and we stay right there, knowing what we know. We don’t ever want to go back into those other parts of the cycle.

But the way human this works is we then keep moving, and you keep practicing what that , and eventually it moves into your mastery level, into your subconscious. It’s beautiful. The human brain keeps adapting.

And you move into not knowing that . How does that feel when you have mastered something? You can tie your shoe, eat a cheeseburger and talk to your friend as you go on a hike.

You can do your makeup as well. I shouldn’t use that example, because you should not be driving and doing your makeup. You.

Okay, but there are things you can do that are on autopilot because you don’t even know that them. This cycle then repeats over and over, whichever way I’m supposed to be drawing it for y’all over and over. But how we feel in each parts of those can be excruciating, or we can use it for us.

I want you to consider, as we close that you might not have an under earning problem, you might not have an overeating problem, you might not have an overachieving or over learning or over schooling yourself problem, or an over buying problem or an over drinking problem. You might have an under feeling problem. And when you start to be able to sit with and allow the sensations on your body that come from discomfort or uncomfortable emotions sadness, because when you have sadness there and you don’t feel it, instead you eat or drink or shop or scroll, what you’re left with is still sadness and now regret or buyer’s remorse or a headache, the net effect is negative when you have sadness and you allow sadness, and you don’t act from it or out of it, you allow it, and you talk to yourself, of course, honey, this is sad.

It’s okay to feel sad. I got you. You are left with a positive net effect, and that’s the way you can tell the difference between if you are distracting and doing all the things, or if you are letting your feelings happen.

remember, get those stories out, whether they’re in your journals. Tell the Raw Story. Get some coaching, get someone get some help with this.

See what your beliefs are. See why you see the world the way it is, and why start making decisions about how you want to speak differently, think differently, and get to work repeating that a thought on repeat becomes a belief. There are no thought police out there telling you what to think and what to not think.

This is the you and you job. Once you’ve decided what you’re going to start thinking, you go out there and you start building evidence that supports it. It’s there.

Your brain will find it. And then you start using that evidence to fuel you as for your own good, to keep going, because your higher brain, not your primitive brain, but your higher brain that knows there’s more than survival. There’s also thriving.

It will start to help you. Will start to help you see the evidence and help you keep growing. That’s what I have for you this week, my friends, I love you.

See you next time.