Episode 290 Minisode: You need a vision for WHO you are becoming
00:00
I recorded this episode after a coaching call that I led a few months ago. It was one of those sessions where you can feel the shift happen in real time. A woman came in and got into the breakthrough session and she was feeling overwhelmed and frustrated and just caught in that repetitive thought loop, the rumination where nothing seemed to be working. But by the end, something inside of her had changed because we were able to uncover
00:29
how she actually wanted to see herself in her own story. And that’s the heartbeat of emotional sobriety, learning to hold a vision of who you’re becoming, even when you don’t know what that looks like yet. I want you to listen to this episode with your whole body. I’m not just giving you advice. I’m giving you a reminder that your power is never lost. It’s just buried under the stress and stupid story you’re telling yourself. So let’s get into it.
01:03
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.
01:38
So on yesterday’s coaching call, I worked with somebody who was in the weeds, as we have all been, and just really overwhelmed and really focused on everything that was wrong, what she didn’t want. And it was about a 45-minute session. But the shift for her came when we were able to identify how she wanted to see herself in the situation. oh
02:07
This is the power of coaching because she got into the hot seat thinking that the changes that needed to be made in order for her to be happier or to work through this would be changes that her partner would have to make. And even though she was speaking the words of, know I can only control what I can control, she didn’t have any frame of reference for what it is that she could actually control other than her misery and her anger and her frustration at the situation.
02:37
But remember that any time you’re experiencing negative emotions, frustration, overwhelm, defeat, anger, fear, shame, any time you’re feeling negative emotions, then the problem is the story you’re telling yourself. You need a different perspective. You need a bigger angle. And when I asked her, how do you want to see yourself?
03:04
The bottom line, I’ll skip through all the weeds, is that she wanted to see herself as positive, effective, non-judgmental, non-argumentative, non-combative. She wanted to see herself as positive and also powerful in that she wasn’t just going to roll over and take what was not an acceptable situation to her. And here’s the good news. Your brain will help you get what you want when you know what it is that you want.
03:33
And so being able to identify what she wanted out of this situation, she wanted to see herself as positive and powerful. She wanted to show up as positive and powerful. Now she’s got a problem that her brain is gonna help her solve. And the shift that she experienced that anybody that was listening to the call experienced energetically was the shift of like a parting of the clouds, clarity, like, oh, okay.
04:03
And what was really cool is that she was even able to identify like, don’t even know what that would look like or sound like. What would it mean to be positive and powerful? And I’m like, yeah, that’s the work that you now have to do. You have no neural pathways. Again, no frame of reference for what it would be like to be that way. You just know this isn’t working for you. And it didn’t work for your mom, which is where you learned it. No offense to all the moms out there. But when you ask your brain, OK,
04:32
What does it mean to be positive and powerful? And you have a belief that you’re capable of becoming that. Well, that aligns your mind and body. Your mind and body are now officially on the same page, which is why she experienced a lift of her heart, an opening of her mind. Her creative juices started flowing. I sensed that she couldn’t wait to get off the call because she wanted to map out exactly what positive and powerful meant.
05:00
And this is why it’s so important to expose yourself to role models and contents and characters who are living the way you want to live, who are being as you want to be, who have done the hard thing, who have made the transformation. That’s the power of community in this program, is that you get exposed to women who are one month, three month, one year ahead of you. And you’re beginning to see, oh, they were how I am.
05:29
and now hearing their stories of how they’ve evolved and how they’ve changed, it shows you what’s possible. If you don’t know something is possible, you don’t even know to want it, much less ask for it or expect it for yourself. But once it becomes normal that, oh, that’s actually one of the options, and it’s no harder to be positive and powerful than it is to be weak and sad and stuck and disconnected, in fact, it may actually be easier to be positive and powerful.
05:58
You just got to work through all of these negative emotions. And so I want to talk to you about how important the vision is that you have a vision, that you know who you want to be, that you know how you want to feel. And then the details of what you need to do will fall in line. They will just magically appear because your brain’s job is to help you get what you want. But you first have to provide your brain with a vision.
06:28
And then once you have that vision, you have to start coloring in the details. And then you have to be aware that whenever you start to doubt or you’re worrying or you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s the litmus test. That’s the sign that the mindset that you need in order to carry the vision, the container of your vision is a neural pathway. And when you’re feeling negative energy in your body,
06:56
It means that you’ve fallen out of that neural pathway. The mindset is collapsing. You’re not embodying the nervous system of the person who will manifest that vision. And that’s OK. That’s normal. That’s to be expected. You don’t wake up one morning on a perfect Monday and say, OK, never again. I’m always going to be this way. No, you come in and out of emotions. Your neural pathways.
07:25
emotional right your mind changes when your mood changes so you have to be very diligent to shift your focus out of your mind and into your mood and be aware that when you are quote stressing out that you can’t stay stuck in your head about all the things that are stressing you out because what’s stressing you out is the old mindset the old limiting beliefs that I can’t do this
07:54
I don’t have time for this. This is never going to work. I’m never going to get this right. This is too hard. This is not possible for somebody like me. You can’t let your brain hijack your nervous system. You have to recognize when you are back in the old neural pathway. Again, you don’t wake up and become the version of you that you want. You identify, you create that vision. You get clarity around the desires of your heart. And then you
08:24
practice and you repeat and you practice and you build the skill that is required for you to hold your vision to hold that neural pathway even when life is life being and all the external things seem to be going wrong. The version that you want to be is the version of you who is practice and is skilled at interrupting the old neural pathways.
08:52
moving down into the body and dealing with the energy instead of the English. Your body speaks energy, not English. And the skill that you need is how to bring your body back into that parasympathetic nervous system where you are calm, you are relaxed, you are safe, so that you have access once again to a brain that’s working for you instead of against you. I promise you.
09:21
that it’s not your job to figure anything out, my precious overthinking friends. It’s not your job to get everything right. It’s not your job to check all the boxes and cross all the T’s and dot all of the I’s. Your job is only to hold the vision, which is a feeling. It’s a vibration. It’s a frequency of energy. Because when you are in the vibration and frequency of joy,
09:49
and curiosity and excitement and calm and peace and optimism and compassion. When that is how you feel in your body, that is how you think in your brain, which is why there is no higher priority for you ever than to align the mind and the body. When the body feels good, the brain thinks good. The game isn’t to figure out how to achieve all your goals. The game
10:16
is to be able to hold the vision, hold the connection to the energy that you need for creativity and inspiration and motivation. And so the next time you hear yourself say, I’m so stressed out, stop, drop, and feel, because the call is coming from inside the house. It is not all the things out there that you think you’re stressed out about. It is just a disconnect from the neural pathway that would give you
10:46
Everything that you need to move forward solve problems remove the obstacles and climb the mountains There are really only two states of being that you need to be aware of one is your primal your fear state your stressed state and the other is powerful primal and powerful and When you’re operating in primal or fear all of your energy is being drained
11:13
due to faulty mindset, shitty limiting beliefs, biases, assumptions, old patterns and habits of behavior that you learned and were taught in moments of stress and pain and trauma and suffering. When you are in the primal state, that’s where the stress and the anxiety and the overwhelm and the doubt and the anger and the depression and the indecision and the procrastination and the self-sabotage all come in.
11:41
That is when you are in the fight, flight, or freeze. That is when you are in the sympathetic nervous system. And my friends, that is a present moment problem that can only be solved in the present moment. Going up there and looking out there drains your energy, drains your battery. And so when you feel drained or overwhelmed or over it, you have to realize that you’re
12:09
body is in the wrong state. And then if your mind and your body were aligned, that that is what restores your energy, not fixing and figuring out everything out there. All you have to do is notice which state your body is in and realize that you have collapsed into the container of your vision instead of being the container for your vision. When the heart is open, the mind is creative.
12:37
You have the energy to do what you need. And so when you don’t have it, it’s because your mindset is off. It’s telling you lies. It’s speaking fear and shame and pain into your body. And that is what is disabling your energy and motivation. You have to stop, drop, and feel. Put your hand on your heart and say, I’m available to be here now. I can feel this now. I’m not going to think on this. I’m not going to act on this.
13:06
I’m going to bring my body into a state of regulation. I’m going to say the words that I need to hear. It’s OK. I have you. I love you. I’m not going to abandon you. I’m going to stay with you here now until we can find our way back to being unbothered, unperturbed, unshakable, unfuckwithable, and then refuse to move on. There is nothing more important.
13:35
then aligning mind and body, then reconnecting with the vision of who you really are and what you want. Because when you know who you are and what you want, you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get it. The problem that causes you to give up is that you don’t know who you really are or what you really want. And again, that’s the power of coaching. Because when you are in the right mindset, when you have your eyes on the vision,
14:03
That is when you’re able to literally channel the energy that you need. You become a conduit where energy is moving through you and your brain is operating on a frequency where when you feel free and unfuckwithable, you think like someone who is free and unfuckwithable and solutions just become clear. Your options are known. Your problems are solvable when you are unfuckwithable and free.
14:31
and when you have access to the energy it takes to move through whatever has been holding you back. You just always have to realize that the only thing that’s ever holding you back is your own mind. And there are a couple of things that I wanna just introduce to you kind of as calls to action, low hanging fruits that will make it easier for you to stay in a more regulated state or to make it easier to get
15:01
back to a regulated state, you’re closer to a regulated state. You know, this is all a spectrum how dysregulated you are, right? But there are a couple of practices that I have found go a long way and make it so much easier for me to manage my mind and notice when I’m in a primal neural pathway and pull out of it, then if I don’t do these practices. And so one of the best ways that you can support your nervous system to stay more
15:30
downregulated quite honestly is the caffeine and evening screen time. I gave up caffeine a long time ago. Now that doesn’t mean if I come to your house, I’m not gonna drink a cup of coffee. But in terms of like my daily practices, drinking decaf coffee has really allowed me to stay more calm. I noticed when I’m, the more caffeine I drink, the more jacked up I am.
15:56
And the more it’s just very natural for me to be living in a more stressed out mindset. And then another thing that I try to do, not perfect, if you could just do less, is screen time. Like I don’t check social media. Sometimes I’ll watch a show like on a weekend or something, but most weeknights I’m not turning on my TV. I’m reading, I’m journaling, I’m doing things like.
16:23
taking a walk at sunset with my dog. I’m doing things that just naturally allow me to go to sleep easier. And the easier I go to sleep and the better I sleep, the more regulated I am. The easier it is for me to pay attention and manage my busy brain. And spending time outside, like I said, I usually take at least one walk a day, if not in the morning, then also in the evening. know, trees.
16:53
have been shown to have a uh down regulation effect on the nervous system. We co-regulate with the organisms in our environment, which is why when you’re around people that are all jacked up, you get jacked up. When you’re around trees and in nature and you’re disconnected from your screens and maybe even focused on the birds and the bees and the smells and the clouds instead of not even
17:19
noticing what your surroundings, because you’re so caught up in your head thinking about problems presented to you by a stressed out neural pathway, when you just shift your focus and allow nature to do what nature does, it has a very calming and soothing effect. And I wanna remind you that it feels really good to feel calm. I mean, that’s what got us into drinking in the first place, because we didn’t know how to down-regulate and manage our minds.
17:49
and we wanted to feel positive and powerful, we just didn’t have the skills. And so I’ll end as I began with a reminder of the importance of setting a vision for yourself of what you really want. And what you really want is always a feeling. Maybe it’s to feel positive and powerful. And then once you have that vision, doing whatever it takes to protect the container of that vision,
18:18
which is your body. Who you are being in any given moment is so much more important than what you are doing. And nobody ever told us that. We were all raised to believe that you have to do all the things in order to be powerful and positive. But in reality, you have to be powerful and positive. And that gives you the energy to do anything and everything that you need to do because it’s a natural expression.
18:47
of who you are. So I’ll just leave you with one mental exercise. I want you to come up with a few words that describe who you are becoming today. Take a moment and define that for yourself and then let those words be your compass.
19:07
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.