Episode 287 Minisode: Are you available to Be. Here. Now?
00:00
Even though I pride myself on being emotionally sober, I’m also human. As you can imagine, I get overwhelmed. I work too much. I get out of balance. I have to self-correct. And this episode was from a few months back when I woke up on a day where I just felt like it would be better if it was already over. I was grinding and I was having to make a lot of big decisions and learn how to be a leader and grow a team and build a business.
00:29
And I was just feeling the full weight of what it means to put your money where your mouth is, to swim for it, to go for it, to build something new while also staying true to who you are and what you want. And on this particular moment, I had an awakening, a shift that was so simple, but so powerful. And that was the idea of being available to be here now, available to be in my body, available to
00:59
brush my teeth, available to walk up the stairs and get on the treadmill, available to not know how everything was gonna work out, to not know how long I’m gonna be struggling, even though I think, spoiler alert, life is a struggle, happiness is on the other side of struggle, and if you’re not struggling very long, you get unhappy really fast. And so learning how to be available to be here in the middle of the struggle was kind of a game changer. I realized, again,
01:28
I love to remember things that I once knew and then I forgot and then I have to remember again. I mean, that is my life, right? But I realized again that peace isn’t something that’s waiting for me at the end of a list. Peace isn’t the paycheck at the end of a perfect week. Peace is right here, right now in the pause between your thoughts. Peace is your connection in the present moment.
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So in this episode, I’m gonna teach you how to connect with the present moment with a very simple mantra. I’m available to be here now.
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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.
02:46
I woke up at 5.15 this morning and my alarm goes off at 5.45. And as soon as I realized I was awake, came into consciousness, my mind just flooded with all the things I feel like I have to do, all the stress points that I’m struggling with, all the decisions that I’m making that could turn out to be the best thing I ever did. I followed my gut, my intuition and my heart and look at how well that worked out or.
03:13
yet another opportunity to learn from what didn’t work. I have been carrying a heavy load, putting a lot of pressure on myself. And as we all know from rewrite workshops, I’m creating the reality by describing it that way. Pressure, struggle, heaviness. And while I like nothing better than to rewrite my stories, I can’t deny that that’s my experience in the present moment. So at 5.15,
03:42
I was like, wait a minute, brain, you are not dragging me out of this bed. This is my time. I get to stay here from 5.15 to 5.45. It’s not time to get up. I’m not getting on the treadmill yet. And so I flipped into my phone and got into my Calm app. have a subscription and I followed Jeff Warren. He’s my guy on the Calm app. And so I scrolled a little bit and I popped on one that was about being available, something like that. I’m available.
04:12
He just talked for a few minutes about how coming into the present moment of wherever you are and just saying, I’m available to be here. I’m available to be here when it feels hard. I’m available to be here when I’m uncertain about, you know, next steps. And I extrapolated that because at 5 45, when my alarm goes off, I got to go get on the treadmill. I choose to go get on the treadmill. Let me relanguage that.
04:41
But every morning I do my one mile run. And because it’s not that long, it takes me exactly 11 minutes to run one mile. get on. I don’t even do a warm up. I just go. And if I have the right music or I’m listening to a podcast, it’s pretty quick. But as I was listening to Jeff talk about being available, I realized that I’m really wishing away those 11 minutes.
05:05
I don’t enjoy minute one, I don’t enjoy minute two. My favorite thing is to realize I’ve not been paying attention to the time and oh my God, it’s at minute 10. And at minute 10, I bump up my speed and do a sprint for the last minute. And so doing the meditation, I thought, you know what, I’m gonna try something different today and I’m gonna be available to just be where I’m at. And so when I got out of bed at 545, I was available to not have done my run yet. I was available as I was brushing my teeth.
05:34
to let it be like, oh, I can’t wait till this is over and I’m not on the treadmill right now. Like I don’t have to worry about it right now. I haven’t even brushed my teeth. And then as I walked up the stairs to get on the treadmill, I was available to walk up the stairs. I was available to be there as I navigated the stairway and then all around all my daughter’s paint stuff in the loft and then going to get on the treadmill. I was available for each step. I was present.
06:04
And then as I started my run, was, you know, I was like, okay, I’m available to be 30 seconds into this. I’m available, you know, somewhere around the three or four minute mark when I break into the sweat. I’m available to feel my body start to, you know, get into the rhythm and the zone and the sweat is starting to come. I’m available to be here without wishing I was there.
06:29
And of course, as our brains do, my brain immediately starts extrapolating this into other areas of my life. Like, how could I be more available to be here, to be powerful here, to be in control here, to be OK here? How can I disengage from the emotion that I’m experiencing and the pull of my brain to stay three steps ahead of myself and
06:58
constantly be pulling myself or pushing myself to get through because this sucks right here and I don’t feel okay. You know, how do I get there as fast as I can because I can’t handle it here. And of course I know I just forget and have to remember a thousand times a day that we always can just be here. And I tell you this because the escape
07:26
of the emotional overwhelm or the pressure or the struggle. The escape hatch from that, ironically, is to just allow yourself to be in it. Because you really can only live one minute at a time. And as much as we’re all a bunch of snowflakes about our emotions, oh, I don’t like to feel this way. How do I make this stop? I don’t like this. The truth is that when you come into the present moment, you’ll realize that your worst emotions
07:54
Don’t hurt worse than a paper cut. You can tolerate your emotions if you disengage from the brain that’s pouring fuel on them. And you just allow, OK, I feel pressure. I feel a struggle. I feel sad. I feel tired. I feel scared. I feel angry. If you just allow yourself to be available to feel those things, then first of all, you stop pouring fuel on them.
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But second of all, you realize that your emotions are giving you a message. And when you’re not paying attention and you’re just running on autopilot, you think the message of your emotion is however you feel is true. If you feel powerless, well, then you are powerless. If you feel weak, well, then you are weak. If you feel lazy, then you are lazy. If you feel stuck, you’re stuck. If you feel ugly, then for sure you should just go back home and give it a rest. Maybe you’ll be prettier tomorrow.
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It’s so funny in a not funny way how much power we give to our emotions and how much energy we spend running away from the messages of our emotions because we believe them. If we feel like something has gone wrong, well then something must have gone wrong. If we feel like somebody doesn’t like us, well then they don’t like us. Like we believe everything that we feel.
09:20
And we don’t realize that our emotions are just like the clouds, you know, and it’s just really raining on our head. It’s sunny everywhere else. We buy into our emotions because we think they’re real. When we feel shame and embarrassment, we tell ourselves, God, you’re a fool. You’re broken. You’re a stupid idiot. When we feel guilty, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what we did wrong. When we feel fear,
09:50
We assume that we must be in danger. We’ve got to figure out how to solve for the latest threat and avoid it at all costs. When we feel depressed, we entertain thoughts like there’s no point in even trying. This is hopeless. Can’t do anything about it. Whatever. Just give up, roll over, eat, watch Netflix until it ends. Like whatever. We don’t have the energy to fight anymore, so it doesn’t matter. And then when we start feeling anxious,
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we start worrying, this isn’t okay, something bad is about to happen. I’m not in control and I gotta find a way to take control. But what we really have to do is stop identifying with our emotions, stop believing that they are telling us the truth. know, emotions are only telling you what you think, what you believe. It’s not about what’s happening out there. Your brain’s job is to notice patterns.
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And so when you have emotions, it’s your little alarm going off saying this is like that. But this is never like that. Everything is a brand new experience. And when you allow your emotions to hijack your thinking, you are destined to see the same things you’ve seen in the past and respond in the same ways that you’ve responded in the past. You’re destined to repeat the past.
11:17
One of the things I’ve been so stressed about is that we’ve had consultants that have been helping us in the business, me and the team, creating processes and departments and standard operating procedures and looking at analytics, know, learning how business is about numbers and learning to read and interpret and respond to the language of numbers. And I came to a decision last week that we were going to move away from the consultants. It’s time.
11:46
It’s been a lot of good, but we were getting to a point where the culture that they were creating with my team, our team, it just wasn’t, I didn’t like it anymore. It was a lot of pressure. It was a lot of hustle and grit and grind. It was starting to go against everything that I preach. And I was allowing myself to go along with it out of fear that if we didn’t go along with it, that we would fail. You know, that I’m just lighting money on fire.
12:16
with my ad spend and I’m heading for financial destruction because we’re not optimizing all of these processes and systems and calling new leads seven times in seven days. And I’m like, that’s what I want. We build relationships, we build rapport with potential clients. I don’t want this. I know that I need to make money and I know that I need to be profitable, but I believe that I can have my cake and eat it too.
12:45
I believe that I could create a culture that is trauma informed and everybody’s nervous system is regulated and that we work together as a team to achieve our goals. I believe that choosing for our needs, our personal needs to be part of the equation instead of, okay, well, you know, we are this much behind schedule for this month. So everybody’s got to like run around with chickens with their head cut off. Like, no. And I’m willing to bet the farm.
13:14
And I keep coming to this place where I have to step out in faith and let go of the fear and say, I believe that we can create something that doesn’t exist. I believe that I can stay true to my values on all levels and make money and be profitable and have a ragingly successful business because we’re also creating something that doesn’t exist in response to the alcohol situation.
13:42
Like this whole thing has been me saying, this is not like that. I’m breaking the pattern. And so when we got into discussions, I put air quotes around that because you can imagine the stress of, you know, my consultant saying, I’ve seen this before. And if you don’t do these things and you don’t put in these metrics and these quotas for your sales team, then you are not going to be successful. And even though I have no idea about
14:11
the model that I want to create. I’m sure other women have done this, know, women owned companies, they’re all over, we can find them. But even though I don’t know what it looks like, or how it will work, I know how it’ll feel. And the way we’ve been feeling is not what I choose. And this is where emotional sobriety gets so important. Because when you first align with the feeling in your body,
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And allow that to become your compass. You follow what feels good. Over the last few months, as we’ve all been doing the best we can, it’s just felt more and more profit-driven, numbers-driven, and it was out of alignment. It all came to a head last week, and my consultant said, you’ve got a problem. You are at a critical point in your growth. And if you don’t.
15:07
make these tough decisions now, draw lines in the sand with your team, tell them how it is, you’re either with us or against us, then you’re not going to be successful. He said, I have seen this before. I have been here before. And that’s when I knew I wasn’t going to listen to him anymore because our feelings are telling us about the past. They are telling us what we believe is true about life, the rules that we think that we have to follow.
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our feelings are telling us what we believe is or is not possible in ourselves, in our businesses, in our life. And when your feelings are not heart open, mind open, energized, excited, motivated, then you got to stop and be available now to feel this so that you can break those beliefs so that you can break the
16:06
patterns of the past. And the reason so many of us get tripped up is because at this point in the process where you are feeling heavy and pressured and struggled and depressed and anxious and guilty and lazy and stuck and weak and all of those things, what you do, the strategy that you’ve been using, if you even kind of identify as an over thinker, is you think and assume the feelings are telling you the truth. And so you go up into your head and try to think your way
16:35
out of the feelings. You try to figure out a way to prove or earn or validate yourself or control or manipulate or fix the situation so that you don’t have to feel that way. We go outside of ourselves to solve the internal feeling because we don’t understand the call is coming from inside the house. We try to think our way and then act or not act our way out of our feelings.
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instead of just being available to be here now and getting really curious about why we’re feeling the pressure and the struggle, what we’re telling ourselves about what is true and possible and real, how we’re dragging the past and wearing goggles and filtering through a brand new situation that we’ve never been in, always we’ve never been here now. It’s never been like this before. And we’re dragging.
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all of those biases and assumptions from the past, and we’re putting those goggles on firm and hard, and we’re projecting it into the new situation, which is why we keep getting more of the same. And when you make yourself available to be here now, to be OK, even though it’s uncomfortable, when you pull out of that neural pathway, the neural pathway that’s telling you you’re powerless or that something has gone wrong,
18:00
or that you’re in danger and there’s a threat and you got to figure something out all now. Like those are neural pathways and your neural pathways are closed loops. When you are in the sensation of anxiety or the sensation of overwhelm, you’re in a closed loop. You can’t think your way out of that. Think about like when you were kid, I don’t know if you’d still do puzzles and mazes, right? But think of doing a maze as a kid. When it got,
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too hard or when you realized you couldn’t get out of it, what do you do? You go back to the beginning, you go back to the center and you try again because when you get stuck in a maze, you realize you’re in a closed loop. You can’t get back out of that. And so you’ve got to just pull out of it. You can’t push your way through it. You can’t drag your way through it. You can’t argue or plead or prove or validate or earn your way out of it.
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You just got to go back to the center. And that is the emotional equivalent of being available to be here now. Because when you are available to be here now and you are OK with the fact that you’re not where you want to be and you don’t know what to do next and you feel bad or guilty or frustrated or whatever and you just are OK with those feelings, this allows you to feel safe.
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The feeling of safety is, I’m going to give you another analogy, like the equivalent of putting your car into neutral. You know, we can’t positive affirmation our way out of negative thinking. It’s like the car gears, when you get in it and a car is running, before you press on the gas, you got to know if you’re in forward or reverse. And being in reverse feels like
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the heaviness, the weakness, the laziness, the guilt, the fear, the shame, the anxiousness, the depression. That’s what your brain is taking you in reverse. It’s taking you back to the past. And so you have to be available to be here now and be safe as you are in this moment so that then you can begin to shift into forward thinking, forward gear, which is
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into a neural pathway that is aligned with the energy in your body, with a neural pathway that is curious, that is hopeful, that is optimistic, that is open to seeing something that it hasn’t seen before. It’s not the neural pathway where you’ve got it all figured out and you’re fucking screwed. It’s the neural pathway that says, I’m available to be here now and I’m open to new possibilities.
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And this is how you regain control of your mind. Because when you’re in the negative emotions and you’re not available to be in those emotions, you’re not available. You’re gonna go push, push, grind, hustle, figure it out. You’re not available to be here now. Then when you’re in those negative emotions, those emotions are controlling your mind and your past is dictating the future.
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the things you’ve been exposed to, the things you’ve been told, how you’ve been hurt, the stupid rules you don’t like, these will become self-fulfilling prophecies. But when you are available to be here now and you shift your nervous system into neutral, into safety, into being okay with a little bit of discomfort, you’re willing to tolerate the discomfort because you know that the answer is within you. You are the source of your own power, your perspective.
21:40
the angle that you’re looking at things from, the view that you are taking of the situation, the questions that you are asking, those are your power because you always think how you feel. And if you don’t like the way you feel, you shouldn’t be thinking. You shouldn’t be listening to your brain. Just come into the present moment and be available to be here now because it’s not that bad. And if you’re not available,
22:08
then you miss the opportunity to change the trajectory of your life. And oh, this has been a theme for me, you guys. Like I have been realizing and catching myself at least a thousand times a day thinking, I can’t wait till I’m through this. I can’t wait till I’m through this. I just have to push. I just have to work harder. I just have to suck it up so that I can get through this. And the truth is, no, I have to be available to be here now.
22:37
Because the faster I try to run away from where I’m at, the sooner I’m going to arrive right back here. Like that’s the way it is. Neural pathways are closed loops. And when you’re in run mode, go mode, hustle, grit, grind, push, push, push mode, you’re going to find yourself right back in overwhelm and pressure and struggle and pain until you learn the lesson. And you don’t learn it once. You learn it a thousand times a day.
23:05
and then you get up tomorrow and then you do the same thing again. And the biggest favor you can do for yourself is to be okay with that because everything we want is on the other side of what we’re willing to struggle for. And we’ve all been struggling, right? I’ve been struggling with the pressure I’m carrying and the stress and the overwhelm, but I do realize from a higher level that the more I solve for those emotions by being available now to feel them, to study them, to be curious and compare
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passionate about them the more I am available to process my emotions around whatever I’m dealing with instead of going out there to try to solve for my emotions the Sooner I can come to a place of peace the sooner I regain control of my brain the sooner I am able to see the bigger bigger picture and notice the opportunities and the options and the more my time will expand because I will be able to see the forest through the damn trauma tree
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that is telling me that I’m gonna be stuck and I’m doomed and destined and I’m gonna screw it all up and I’m gonna be homeless and living in a van down by the river if I don’t listen to all the people that are telling me all the stuff. I am committed to this experiment of living according to my heart and aligning with my energy. I’m going to move in faith, not fear. And I don’t need business strategies to get there. I need emotional sobriety. I need myself. I need to trust.
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that I’m perfectly capable of figuring things out. But first, I have to practice and learn and commit to memory the fact that I am available to be here now. I am available to be powerful and in control right now as I am and where I’m at.
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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.