I Want You to Know That Your Wants Matter

What is the purpose of your life?

Why are you here?

If you had asked me these questions three years ago I would have probably answered that I was here to be a good mother and wife. To help others and contribute to the world. To make myself into a better person and overcome my faults and weaknesses.

But I certainly wouldn’t have told you that I was here for joy, for excitement, for expression.  I wouldn’t have told you that I was here just to delight in each new day and the experience of being a human with all of my good and my bad, my light and my dark.

When did we as women get sold the idea that we need to work for our joy?  That our greatest gift to the world is sacrificing our own wants and pleasure to take care of and serve others?

I can’t remember there being a moment when I took this on, it just always seemed to be the reality. And I didn’t have the awareness back then to recognize the pain and sadness in the fake smiles of the women I grew up surrounded by.  

When women try to fit themselves into too small of boxes, all kinds of things happen. 

  • There are women who become so filled with resentment at not accomplishing their own dreams that they pour all of that energy into controlling their children and living through them.
  • There are women who slowly fade into addictions to substances like food, alcohol, and medications to numb the feelings and tolerate the intolerable.
  • There are women who hustle and checklist their lives away trying to earn that love, trying to earn the right to feel good and like they are enough.

When you grow up believing that you do not have an inherent right to be who you are, feel how you feel, and act accordingly, parts of you have to be shutdown, ignored, or numbed to survive. 

And then you go through life feeling like you’re half alive and half zombie. Always trapped between making others happy or choosing happiness for yourself.

But I want to dispel that lie. The lie that somehow you will hurt the ones you love by choosing happiness for yourself first. 

The reality is that you’re not doing anyone a favor by people pleasing and lying to yourself and others to try and be what you think you’re supposed to be, because eventually, you won’t be able to sustain it.

Trust me, I know.

I hustled hard for my self worth for the first 29 years of my life and definitely throughout 10 years of my marriage, and then one day I hit a wall and realized I was so empty of joy and connection in my life that I was done.  

I had created a life that was there to fuel and take care of others lives. 

And the crazy thing was, no one else knew that I wasn’t happy.

When I did eventually move forward with divorce, my husband at the time told me that he just hadn’t understood how bad things were, and I knew that was because I had done such a good job at what I thought I was supposed to do –  pretend that I was happy.

But pretending is no longer our lot in life as women. The world is shifting and women are waking up to the beauty of trusting themselves. 

Of believing that they are worthy of a full life lived on their terms and filled with all that they desire – whether that’s a career, marriage or no marriage, bearing children or no children, partnership, adoption, travel, stillness, play, pleasure, excitement, passion, relief, and peace.

And it all begins by letting go of the belief that your wants are selfish and you’re greatest calling is to take care of others. 

I want you to know that as you honor what you love and feel called to in your life, you will become more round and full. 

You will fill up with yourself and the excess will spill over onto everyone and everything in your life.  Then your children will grow up with a mother that loves them not because she has to, but because she is so in love with herself and her life that it happens naturally.

This is the gift given to the world when women love and honor themselves first.

Make the Decision to Stay or Go Intentionally and Then Always Have Your Back Going Forward

Sometimes you can get so caught up in stressing about past decisions and regret that you miss the life and decisions happening right in front of you.

Then life begins to feel like you’re always chasing the tail end of it. Always reacting and recovering rather than intentionally heading where you want to go.

When we make a choice and then don’t have our back on it, we become our own worst enemy.

We put fuel on the fire of those negative inner thoughts and then they go to work tearing us down mentally.

This is why so many of my clients are afraid to decide.  They are afraid of what their mind will do to them afterwards. 

But here’s the thing, every single thing that happens to you after you choose to stay or go is something you get to choose to interpret however you want. 

If you choose to leave you can make going out and getting a job because you’re no longer dependent on your husband’s income mean:

  • an opportunity to try new things or
  • a depressing consequence of previously choosing to be a stay-at-home Mom.

If you choose to stay you can make your husband continuing to forget to take out the trash mean:

  • “He still doesn’t love me and I should have left,” or
  • “It’s just not his thing and it means nothing about how he feels about me.”

The key will always be your mind and what you choose to make everything mean.

When you make the final decision whether to stay in your marriage or go, the greatest predictor of success will be what you choose to make that decision mean and how you have your own back going forward.

This is the foundation that we build together in coaching through examining all of your habits, thoughts, patterns, feelings, beliefs, etc. and making sure that you know yourself and what you want most BEFORE you decide.

Then when you do make that decision, you are set up for success afterwards. 

Instead of floundering and struggling after divorce or spiraling back into depression and contention after choosing to stay, you move forward with purpose and direction into a new future.

It is worth every ounce of time, money, and effort to invest in yourself in this way before making one of the biggest decisions in your life.

This is the work I take my clients through. This is how they decide whether to stay or go, make their decision, and move forward without regret.

You Can Trust Yourself

“I can’t trust myself.”

By the time I was starting to consider divorce, I had already had many years of practicing this belief.

I had developed a pattern of looking to people outside of me for guidance and insight into what I should do in my life.

This looked like taking copious notes at religious meetings and then trying to checklist everything that had been mentioned.

Listening to every comment from my spouse on my appearance – “don’t like bangs, too much jewelry” – and changing it accordingly.

And oversharing with my friends and family in the hopes that someone would tell me the right things to do.

And then, when I would actually decide on my own, when things got tough or didn’t work out like I’d thought, I would beat the crap out of myself mentally. “This was such a stupid idea. What were you thinking? You look like an idiot. Don’t ever do this again.”

It’s like a part of my brain had become this negative animus that was there to constantly shame and judge me whenever I struggled or wasn’t perfect.

It was a seriously sucky way to live. Always worried about what others thought. Always trying to control their thoughts about me by taking actions that I thought they would like.

It was exhausting and felt like a hamster wheel because, newsflash, you never have control over what another human being chooses to think about you.

But coaching changed all of this.

I learned that I could CHOOSE my beliefs about myself.

That the statement “I can’t trust myself” was just a thought. And after seeing what that thought was producing, I could choose to let it go and believe something else about myself.

Slowly, little by little, I started to understand how the negative thoughts I had about myself weren’t helping me at all.

Instead of “motivating” me to change and helping me “get better,” they were creating the very things I was trying to get away from – fear, inadequacy, anxiety, depression, abandonment of self, people pleasing, and hiding.

I slowly started to develop trust in myself by changing my thoughts and my life has steadily improved ever since. I now actively practice thoughts that help me develop trust in and love for myself.

Change is not impossible, and it’s also not as hard as you think. What you believe about yourself is not set in stone, and it absolutely is not a fact.

I work with my clients, step by step, to find these old beliefs about themselves that no longer serve them, and to try on new beliefs that start creating the life they want. Because when they know they can trust themselves, then the choice to stay or go becomes clear and they move forward.