Episode 274 Minisode: Who are you NOT to be powerful
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Growth isn’t always obvious. Sometimes it shows up quietly, like waking up in the middle of the night with your heart racing and no idea why. And that’s what inspired this episode. Just one of those tiny little moments where I realized that my body was trying to tell me something that my brain had just been too busy to notice. And what it showed me was subtle, but powerful. It was just a seemingly innocent limiting belief that had shaped
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how I’d been seeing myself for decades. So if you’ve ever wondered why it can feel so uncomfortable to outgrow the version of yourself that everybody else has gotten used to, then this mini-sode will feel familiar. This isn’t about fixing yourself or pushing harder. It’s about listening gently to the part of you who’s just afraid of your own power and potential, and then giving yourself permission to stop letting that part of you
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Call the shots.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine, and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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Sometimes I wake up and I don’t realize I’m awake because I’m in my head. I’m doing the TikTok reels or writing a new podcast episode or telling some guy what I really think of him that I should have said this or following up. I mean, I just, I get busy and sometimes I don’t even realize I’m awake, but the moment I realize I’m awake, I give myself permission to not work, to not solve problems like.
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I set boundaries with my brain. If I’m not going to sleep, well, I’m not gonna work either. This is my time. This is the only break I’m gonna get over the next 18 hours. So I’m gonna take my break. But last night when I woke up, I really struggled to set those boundaries. My brain kept wanting to pull me back in. And I recognized that I was experiencing anxiety.
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And I wasn’t sure why. Like, you know, I knew the thought patterns that I wanted to go into, but I had woken up from asleep. And so I thought maybe I’d had a dream. And so I tried to remember what had triggered kind of a cortisol dump, like I could feel it. And I couldn’t recall any sort of dream sequence. So I just asked my body, like, what is it that’s bothering you, baby? I like to say that to myself. And I tried to just relax my mind and say, show me.
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show me what’s in there. And all of a sudden, a memory came to mind. And there’s been something that my dad used to say to me a lot. And I’m a daddy’s girl. My dad’s the best dad in the world. But the older he gets and the more I go through in life, the more I can see there’s some fixed mindset going on. I mean, for sure that guy’s got some dated opinions and he’s happy to share them with you. But you know, I still love him dearly, but I’ve had to.
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expose some of the limiting beliefs that I adopted in childhood just because he raised me that have really held me back. And one of the things that it came to mind that he used to say to me was, don’t you go getting too big on me. You’re my little girl. So as you know, I’ve recently gone through a divorce and I’ve had to transition from having an expensive hobby and being a cute tax write-off into a powerful woman.
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who is totally capable of handling not only my finances, but all of my own decisions. Like I have no desire to date. I’m done with the husbands. I’m done with the dudes. And I am stepping into a version of myself I have never been. And as my business grows, I can see so much of where I’ve been holding myself back out of fear, wait for it, that I’m gonna go and get myself too big.
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And I wanted to share that with you because it is simple, small things like that that are not even based in trauma, for God’s sake. I mean, my daddy adores me, and I adore him. There’s no trauma there. And yet, at some point, as a little girl growing up into a grown woman, I began to fear getting too big, like,
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bigger than my father or making more money than my father or making more money than a man. Like I’ve had this belief that being tiny and small and pretty and good makes me lovable because that’s how my nervous system patterned. Like that was my attachment. That’s what I did to get love. And whenever there was a time in my life where I had a super stretch goal, it was really kind of squashed.
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in favor of safety. There was no, oh, I’m going to go study abroad, or I’m going to go to college out of state, or I’m going to take a job somewhere after college. No, I moved in with my first husband, literally sophomore year of college. We got married junior year. I went from my dad’s house to my husband’s house. And there’s no evil intent or ill will here. I was simply raised to be a girl who stayed home.
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I mean, yeah, I stayed home with the kids for 20 years. I stayed home and I stayed small. And I performed really well at the tasks that were assigned to me, the tasks that ultimately were in service to father or husband or somebody other than myself. Because wanting something for myself and being less available to serve people in my life, men or women, like whatever, would somehow make me selfish and maybe even unlovable.
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And so here I am at 50 years old, cutting ties with the marriage, making big decisions to stay in my home and figure this out and figuring out how to scale my business so that I can have a larger group program. You know, I’m doing all of this stuff at 50 years old, wondering why it feels hard and unfamiliar and scary as fuck. And so I’d like to thank my body publicly in this little private podcast here.
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for showing me that that belief has been causing me a lot of nervous system dysregulation. And it’s definitely patterned in there. Like I can’t just release it. There’s some tension and tightness, but I’m very aware now of the problem, know, asking you shall receive, hey body, what’s going on? And my body’s like, uh turns out we’re scared of getting too big for our britches down here. And I was like, oh, okay, all right.
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So, you I know everything I want is on the other side of fear and I’ve been taking actions despite that, but it was really cool to connect the way I’ve been feeling with that childhood belief. And so your takeaway is to realize that whenever you’re trying to grow beyond your current comfort zone, your comfort zone, the borders are the electric fence, the energy of your emotions and your emotions are all coming from somewhere.
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and stopping and taking the time to expose the beliefs that are holding you back. I’m going to leave you with a Marianne Williamson quote. And she says, our deepest fear is actually not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
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Actually, who are you not to be?
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80%, so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.