Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. I wanna talk about a topic that I, I've talked about in the past, but it recently came up in a coaching call that I had, and I sort of witnessed this shift in such a short amount of time that I figured it's a really important topic to kind of revisit. And it's something that I think every single person should spend time working on. It is a foundational piece of shifting. Whatever it is you wanna shift, if you wanna go after more goals, if you want to silence that inner critic, if you wanna stop beating yourself up all the time, if you wanna just enjoy your life a little bit, you wanna have more gratitude, whatever it might be. If you wanna show up as a better partner, as a better parent, as a better employee in your work, in your business, you get it.

It is the core of really everything. And I want to talk to you about what you may not be seeing, um, and how to change it. And I'll stop being elusive. It's the story that you have about yourself. Okay? Now, you can call this like your self concept. You can call it, um, really the narrative you have, the, your self worth, whatever you wanna call it. It's a story that has been made up over decades that you have sort of found evidence for and that you've held onto that has likely become a lot of baggage. And that baggage weighs you down. It stops you from going after things. It stops you from enjoying your life. It keeps you beating yourself up. It causes a lot of damage. And what's fascinating is that I think a lot of people think they need to change a lot of their circumstances in order to feel better about themselves.
They need to change, you know, how successful they are or how much they weigh or what they look like, or, you know, the who their partner is or if they're married or whatever it is. And then they'll feel better. But the reality is, is that until you change that story, it doesn't matter what else you add on. We're gonna talk about that. Nothing changes until you change that story. And the beauty of it is that nothing actually has to change When you change that story. You can have find so much more fulfillment and so much more enjoyment. And so really the most bang for your buck is learning how to change this story. And so, what am I talking about when I say change your story? For all of us, we look at a very narrow set of facts to decide who we are. I am blank.
This is just how I am. And we make it, you know, all sorts of things. Like this is just my personality, this is how I'm wired, this is the way my brain works, this is my zodiac sign, whatever it is. But it's a sort of, um, quote unquote excuse for like how you operate, okay? And what I want you to know, if you take nothing else from this episode, it's that it is set on a very limited amount of evidence. It's not to say that that evidence isn't true, and that's not there. It is. It's just that like if you look at, let's say your whole world, you're looking at the whole world. Let's just give as an analogy. Let's say you are up in space and you can see all of earth, but you zoom in with a telescope and you zoom into America.
Let's just say you just like come down and you look at the topography of America. And if you decide that all of earth is this, is this land looks like this, you're gonna miss a lot, right? Like, yes, of course that land does exist on earth as well, but there are tons of other lands, there's tons of other climates, there's tons of oceans, there's, there's a lot of other things going on. And so I want you to think about it in the same sense. Like if you look at yourself and you look at your photo, let's say, and you zoom into one part of your photo, if you look at like, you're just looking at your, um, hand, let's say you're not gonna get the full picture. You get what I'm saying? , my analogies need work. I hadn't come up with one before, but uh, before this episode.
So you get what I'm saying though. It's like you take this whole big thing and then you zoom in and you're like, well, that's me. We all do this. Okay? And I'm going to tell you like as an example, um, what my story was, I've talked about this before. My entire story about myself was that I'm a lazy person, okay? And I truly believed this for, you know, more than half my life was this is just who I am. I'm just a lazy person. And I had a lot of evidence to back that up, okay? It's not that as though that that wasn't true. It was, I loved taking naps. I love laying down anytime I possibly can. I always would prefer to do nothing rather than do anything. I'm not someone that like, loves to be outdoors. I was never athletic. I was never a sports person.
Even as a kid. Like, you know, kids love. I mean, I did play out outside, but like, I would rather kind of be in my house. I would rather be doing kind of low energy things like playing with dolls than like riding a bike or going outside. And so a lot of, you know, adults, sort of how this this story starts is that you start hearing it from other people, maybe even well-intentioned, but your parents will make a quip or say something or your teachers will say something and then you start taking that on as an identity, okay? And so I started really realizing like I was different than other kids. Like my sister has always had a ton of energy and she is more of like always into sports and always into like athletics. And so my parents would compare us not in like a good or bad way, but just, you know, my mom would say like, why don't you go out with your sister and play more and why are you laying in here?
Why are you, you know, you're always laying down. There's like, you can't be this tired your child or whatever. And so I started getting it, not only that like, um, that I had these, but that it was bad, right? That like, I should be able to have more energy and I should be able to go do more things. And the fact that I don't is some kind of character flaw that I have. And that sort of built, because as I got older, the same kind of patterns continued. Like I tended to want to sleep more than I think most people. Like I'm not one of those people that can operate on like four hours of sleep. I just can't. Like I need the eight hours, nine hours. I could still nap during the day I would. Um, and so I just started solidifying this story of like, I'm just this really lazy person.
I don't have a ton of energy. And then when I started doing this kind of work of changing my own story, I started really looking at like, well, if this is one part of it, like yes, there is evidence to show that like I like low energy things and I don't have a lot of energy for things that maybe other people do. Um, but if I zoomed out and I looked at my whole life and I really like looked for the evidence to the opposite of that, right? To be like, well, how's it not true that I'm lazy? Like, how is there evidence that I'm not a lazy person? And let me tell you, there was a mountain of evidence. What was fascinating is when I started writing this, it was like I was almost embarrassed that I kept this story up for so long because I was like, well, I, you know, had always been a straight A student.
I had always gotten like the best score in the class. I had perfect attendance at school. I had like held down a job from when I was 14. I started like working in different retail shops, and then I became a tutor and I worked all throughout college. So it's like, you know, I was holding down a full-time course load while also working. I, you know, went to law school. I started working as a lawyer. I would work routinely 60 hour, 70 hour, 80 hour weeks. Clearly I had the energy to do this stuff. Like, yes, when I got home I didn't wanna do anything else. But I was ignoring all of that to prop up this story of like, well, I'm just a lazy person. And the reality is, is that that story was extremely harmful to me because it would stop me from dreaming about certain things.
Like I really thought, I can't do these things because I don't have the energy. I can't start a business on my own 'cause I don't have enough energy to do that. I'm not, you know, like I'm too lazy to do that. And when I started really like shifting that story, this is one part of my story. There's obviously other parts. But when I started really looking at that differently, it started really changing how I see myself. And it started allowing me, like I spent so much of my life beating myself up for that, constantly trying to change myself, constantly being like, why am I like this? Why does everybody else have all this energy? What is wrong with me? Why can't I just get it together? To really being like, I mean, I clearly have enough energy to take care of myself, to do all the things I need to do to reach my goals, to become successful, to make money, to be a functioning adult.
Like why am I telling myself I don't have enough energy? And so much of the shame lifted, right? So much of this dirty pain that I was heaping on myself because I thought that there was something wrong with me. That there was something like deeply wrong that needed to be changed, that I needed to be fixed somehow. And what was fascinating is that when I just changed the story, the need to change, that evaporated, right? I didn't, I wasn't some broken person that needed to like figure out my, I laugh 'cause I was gonna say, figure out my energy levels. I can't tell you how many doctors I went to, how many blood tests I did, how many functional medicine people I went to, how many cleanses like I think back over the like 20, my 20, 30 years. And I really thought, this is a problem I have to solve.
What can I eat? What supplements can I take? What, you know, meditations can I do? How do I increase my energy? Until I was like, maybe this isn't a problem. Maybe the problem is that I think I should just be different and I'm not. And this is the way I am. And actually there's this whole other side of this then I'm not even looking at. And what was fascinating is like just moving that attention spotlight. So my spotlight was on, you're lazy. You can't, you don't have enough energy, you can't do whatever x, y, z to. I clearly have enough energy to take care of myself. I'm freaking killing it. Actually, imagine what I would do if I had more energy. I would take over the world. Maybe it's good that I don't because I've managed to do a lot with the energy I have.
And it was amazing to see how much more, um, peace and calm and confidence and, um, motivation I got by just changing that part of the story. Okay? So that's one example. But I've worked with a lot of clients where I have helped them where they come in and they will tell me the story as if it's fact. And they'll go through this story of, a lot of it is, you know, what has happened to them in their childhood. But what's fascinating is instead of looking at the story of what's happened to them in their childhood as them being the hero of their story, as them figuring out the skills that they needed to overcome whatever was happening in their, in their childhood, learning how to survive, whatever their family dynamic was, whatever the home situation, whatever their socioeconomic class, whatever, it was like they learned a way to survive that.
And instead of having such immense amounts of pride and like gratitude for yourself and seeing yourself as a survivor and as a fighter and as a resilient person, they would constantly come in with these stories of, well, I am X, y, and z. Always terrible, right? Just the most self-loathing types of beliefs of like, I wasn't a good kid and I was, you know, um, I always had these issues in school and I was always like too shy and I didn't make friends and I'm not really sociable and I don't, you know, whatever it is. And when we kind of re-craft that story to look at it from just a different angle, a little bit of a different angle, like not that we're changing anything, but we're like, Hey, how else can we look at this story? What else can we see that happened that made you act like this?
Right? What, what other explanation is there other than you're a terrible human being and you just need to be different? It's wild to watch the difference in people and be like, oh my God, yeah, that is true. I did do that. I did survive this, I did figure this out. I did protect myself, I did protect my siblings, I did whatever. And it's like the, the, um, confidence with which that gives to realize like, this story doesn't have to be just bags and bags of baggage that you are just carrying with yourself of how terrible you are and whatnot. I recently, the reason I even wanted to do this episode is because, um, I recently had a one-on-one call with a client, and within like 30 minutes, it was wild to see the different way that we looked at her story. So she came in and like a lot of people that come to me, she was very frustrated with sort of where she's at.
And she had this entire story that she should be further along, that she didn't have all of the things that she should have had by now, um, that she has failed in all these ways, um, that she sort of has, it's like a failure to launch into adulthood. Like she didn't, you know, hasn't bought the house or had the spouse or the kids or whatnot and didn't have, um, the job that she wanted. And so she was coming, you know, not realizing actually the poor girl came to coach about something else. And I was like, Nope, we're coaching on your story. Because she came to say like, well as if all of these are just facts, like this is the truth. How do I get the job that I want? Or how do I work towards getting this life? And I, I started gently kind of pointing out like, think about how exhausting it is to carry this story every day.
Every day you're waking up and you're sort of trying to put on a smile and be like, I guess I'm gonna go apply for jobs. But in the back of your head, if the entire thought is I'm terrible, I haven't done what I'm supposed to do, I'm not as good as other people, I'm too far behind. I should be further ahead, I should have done more. And you're just carrying that, it's like a little sack. You're just throwing over your shoulder and you're like, all right, I guess we're going on with our day just carrying this like immense weight and then wondering why we're also exhausted and we're also burnt out and we're also tired of life and we don't know what to do from here. And so we sort of slowed down and I was like, I wanna just know more about your story.
Like, I wanna understand, okay, we don't have these things that society has made up to say that this is like some kind of marker of success. Like you're supposed to have a house and kids and whatever. Which by the way, I have an entire community full of people that have those things that checked off those things and are still not happy, right? It's like we all see that, we all have that around us. We know people that, you know, buy a house and then have way more stress because they now are on the line, you know, for the cost of the house, or they get married and they have the kids, but the relationship isn't great or they sort of lose themselves in it, or they don't have any time for themselves or whatever. So it's like we all know that like this is not some sort of like remedy.
Like I check this off and then all of a sudden there's happiness. But I think when you don't have it, you still kind of convince yourself that there was something that you were supposed to do. Like that is some kind of milestone that I don't know, signifies that you're an adult or something. And if you don't hit that, then there's something wrong with you. And so we just start creating that story. So she had like created this story of like, look at all the things I'm lacking. Like her focus was, this is everything I lack. I don't have a house, I don't have a spouse, I don't have kids, I don't have the job I want. And so I clearly like failed as an adult. And I was like, let's just shift that attention spotlight for a little bit, okay? And this is the fascinating, when I do this work a lot of times with people who I'm like, I don't know a lot of your personal stories.
I don't know what happened in your childhood. I'm sure if I knew you, like I do this for my friends, I'm like, I could come up with a million things. But like even within 15 minutes we were just talking about like how she had managed to live abroad for seven years on her own, you know? And I was like telling her like, do you understand how rare that is? How such a small percentage of the world's population will ever live in another country and learn another language and learn how to, um, navigate that entire system of like, how do you stay there and how do you, you know, your visas and all that stuff. It's not easy. And getting a job and staying and like taking care of yourself and meeting new people and having these experiences is fricking incredible, right? And it's also like a really a testament to somebody that is a problem solver and um, can take care of themselves and isn't, doesn't get let fear kind of stop them from experiences and is, you know, all these other things we could keep going.
You get it? Um, we were talking about like as a single woman, how so many of us, not me, I'm not a single woman, but I'm saying so many women that are single, that are living on their own, they don't realize that they are their ancestors wildest dreams. When I say we are, I feel like we are all in one way or another. When you look at this like you are living, you are your ancestors wildest dreams, all of us to one extent or another, whether it's because we have just more autonomy, whether we, it's because we have power, whether it's because we have money, we have our own jobs, we have our own businesses, right? For her specifically, we were just talking about like think about how she's the first person in her entire lineage. Her family included her mom and stuff included that has the choice to live alone, to not get married.
Like getting married is not a hard feat. Anybody can do it. Up until like two generations ago, nobody was even marrying for love. This whole concept of marrying for love is such a new concept, right? It used to be just like some kind of deal that was made within your community, like your father gave you were just property and you were married off, you know, for a number of goats, or you were married off because it created some kind of political alliance or because somebody needed to take care of you and your father couldn't anymore. So he gave you off to the next guy and that was it. And there are tons of people, there's tons of women who wish they didn't have to be married, but there are even to this day in other countries where they would kill for the right to live alone as a single woman to decide what they want for their lives to have a job, to be able to take care of themselves, right?
I'm not saying this to say like, oh, you should just be grateful. What I'm saying is that like there's a different way to look at this story. Yes, you can tell yourself, well, I have just failed because I haven't secured a husband. Or you can tell yourself the story of like, I get to choose and I haven't found someone that is worth my peace, that is worth my time, right? I'm not gonna just give in and marry the next bloke that walks by because I want to be married. It's not the status of marriage I want. It's the love, right? And if I haven't found somebody that I'm willing to, uh, give up my own peace and my own, um, solitude and uh, you know, certain parts of my life, then I am proud of myself for being able to create this life where I get to live on my own.
And that was another thing we talked about. Like, she's clearly somebody that has managed to take care of herself, that holds down a job that's paid her rent, that's lived on her own all her adult life, right? We don't look at these things like, we don't realize like how much that takes that. Like not everybody can do that. And the fact that she has done that, we were talking about how she like crushed these two goals that she came into my, my community with a really specific goal and she crushed it within the first year. The a thing that she didn't think she could do, she did it easily. She also had a health goal and was like, you know, I wanted to get healthy is like dropped 30 pounds. I mean, just, she kept going on and on and I was like, are you kidding me?
You are telling me that this is somehow like a failure in life. You're telling me all these beautiful things that exist in your life that you've created, that you are the center of, right? You've lived abroad, you've had these experiences. You live with your pets. You, you know, uh, fund your own life. You get to live on your own. You get to do what you love. You get to have the job that you want. You get to crush these goals. You get to like focus on your health and your whole focus is like, I didn't do exactly what society told me I was supposed to do. So that somehow that makes me a failure. What are we talking about here? This is insane. This is insane. And then what is funny is that after our conversation, um, she sent me an email and she was like, you know, thanking me for the, for the call and saying like, you know, after it I really like went, was like really, um, reflective.
And I decided to do something that I really love doing, I haven't done in a long time. And it was like this paint. She went and went and like sat and at this like, beautiful kind of, um, scenic view and brought out her watercolors, which she hadn't, I guess done in a while and painted this picture. When she sent me the picture, my jaw dropped. I was like, are you kidding me? 'cause like, I didn't know she has, you know, a secret talent for painting. But this is what I mean, every one of us, every person I've talked to that I've done this with is like hidden talent after hidden talent after hidden talent. Like incredibleness after incredibleness after incredibleness, and then we're all just sitting here like, mm, I'm terrible. I don't have anything to offer. I'm, I didn't make it because I, whatever I didn't give into this capitalistic hellscape that we live in and try to climb the corporate ladder or whatever it might be.
When I saw our picture, I was like, are you kidding me? You can paint too. Oh, and she's a musician. I mean, it goes on and on. And I know if you're thinking like, oh, well that's her, she's, I guarantee you I could do the same thing with you because there's so much there. So many of us have these rich lives where we are, um, just filled with incredible qualities and talents and skills and you know, I, I look at people and I see they might be incredibly intelligent. They might be incredibly funny, incredibly sensitive, um, incredibly artistic, uh, whatever it might be for each of us. It's something different. But it's like what makes that uniqueness within you? And it makes you, um, not just, you know, uh, it's so trite to say it makes you so special, but it really does. And the saddest part of all this is that like, it's right there and we just choose to ignore it.
We're just like, oh yeah, you know, this mountain, I'm just gonna turn my back to the mountain of evidence and I'm gonna look at this little hill. I'm gonna look at this little pile of dirt and I'm gonna say, this is me. This is really the true me. I'm just a failure. Look, everyone can see this pile of dirt. And my job here is to be like, okay, but turn around and look at that mountain. Look how glorious it is. Why are you even focusing on this dirt? Who cares? It's so inconsequential in comparison to this other stuff. And so I say this, as you can see, I get really into this because I think it's the simplest thing you can do. I'm not asking you to change anything. I'm not asking you to, like, I think for a lot of us, we look at this d like dirt pile and we think, well, I need to go out and I need to like get other things.
Accolades. I need to become successful. I need to get another degree. I need to get married. I need to have a kid. I need to do something to make myself feel better, right? To think like, oh, I am actually am worthy. And my advice is simply just turn around. Just turn around and look at that mountain. You don't have to get anything else. You don't have to change anything else. That's all you need to do. It's right there for you. It's so powerful because what's fascinating is that even if you go out and get more, what, look, the image I have now in my brain is like, you know, somebody's like, you're get, you're getting all these things and you're just throwing it behind you onto the mountain and you're still just focused on the dirt and you're like, it won't get any bigger. And you get the next thing and then you throw it behind you again and you're like, okay, but look, the dirt is not getting any bigger.
It's, or smaller, it's the same thing. And it's like, okay, but you can't keep, you keep collecting things and throwing it behind you and not looking at that mountain of evidence. And so if I can encourage you to do one thing is just slowly start asking yourself these questions that help you shift that attention spotlight. Okay? A really easy one is whatever your story is, start with the negative story you have. Write that down. Write down the story you have for your life. Like, what is my story? If my, if I had a title for my story, it'd be like the lazy girl who never wanted to do anything. Let's say that was my original story. Okay? How is that not true? Just find evidence to the opposite of the thing that it is that you think is true. If you've told yourself like, I've failed at life, how is it not true that you failed?
Right? How have you succeeded? Look for that evidence. Just literally ask the opposite of what it is you're looking for, okay? And just let yourself see that I've talked about this a lot. There's like the, you know, um, we all have this, um, uh, function in our brain that scans for what we tell it to scan for, okay? Because we get so much information, there's so much coming at us every single day that we cannot keep in everything. So your brain filters out a lot of stuff, otherwise you go crazy. And so when you tell yourself that something is important, your brain starts looking for it. We've all experienced this. You're gonna buy a car, all of a sudden you see that car everywhere, right? You want to move to Australia. All of a sudden news, everything you see is about Australia for some reason.
It's not that it just all of a sudden popped out of nowhere. People will love to believe like, oh, the universe is giving me signs. No, it was there. Your brain was just filtering it out because it didn't know that Australia was important to you. And now that it does, it's like, oh, hey, look at this and look at that. And so you start kind of clocking it, right? The same thing happens with evidence that you have about something. Okay? So if you are telling yourself that you're lazy, your brain is gonna clock that evidence every time. It's gonna be like, look, you didn't wake up today even though you were supposed to wake up at eight. You slept till nine. You're so lazy. Look, you came home after a full days of work, we're gonna ignore the fact that you did eight hours of work and you went to the gym.
You're gonna come back and you wanna sit on the couch. You're so lazy, right? It's going to keep showing you what you, you tell it is true. What you tell it is important. And so it's really important to start shifting that story, to start looking for that evidence. When you start telling your brain, I want you to show me evidence of how I am successful. I want you to show me evidence of how I am capable or how I am a badass, or how I am resilient, whatever. It's, if that's gonna be my new story, is that like, I am this creative badass that has created a incredible life for myself. If that's what I wanna start finding evidence for, my brain will show me that. It'll start being like, oh, remember you also have this talent and you also do this. And maybe you didn't think about like cooking as being creativity, but look how creative you are with your meals.
And maybe you didn't think about, um, you know, how you, I don't know, pack your bag, but even the way that you pack your bag is in such a creative kind of functional way. Um, I'm drawing at straws right now, but you get what I'm saying. It's fascinating how much you'll start seeing because you are looking for it, because you're telling your brain to look for it. Whereas up until now, it's like everything your brain has given you, you're like, oh look, we kind of did this. It's like, yeah, yeah, but that wasn't hard. Yeah, someone else helped us with that. That wasn't, and you keep like kind of batting it away and your brain's like, all right, we don't care about the stuff that we did. We only care about all of the things that we're terrible at. Apparently we only care about looking at everything that we failed at.
So I'm just gonna keep showing you that. And most of us just walk around this life looking at all the ways that we failed. And then it's just a terrible way to live. It's so painful. You don't have to live like that, I promise you. So this is my plea to you. Like I said, I mean, I just recently did this call and I do it a lot with my one-on-one clients. I, I only rarely have one-on-one clients, but when I do, a lot of what we do is shifting this story because it is such a powerful tool to shift everything else. When I can let go of that baggage and that weight that I carry, when I look at myself and that self-concept of who I think I am, who I am in this world, um, it shifts how I show up to this world, right?

It shifts what I go after. It shifts what I allow myself to see as possible. It shifts my happiness, it shifts so much. So start looking for that evidence. Just start seeing how the opposite of what you think is true. Start looking at like, how am I killing it? How did I, how can I be proud of myself? What have I created that is amazing? And there is so much there. Don't let your brain like give you one or two things. Keep digging. What else? What else, what else have I done? What else have I created? That's cool. What else is unique? Um, 'cause I promise you you'll find more and more and more, and it is really the best way to reduce so much of that inner pain, that inner critic, that beating of ourselves up, um, a lot of the, the nonsense, the dirty pain that we heap on ourselves. And I want that for you. So learn how to change that story, my friends. I promise you it'll make all the difference. I hope that you found this helpful. If you do start thinking about your story differently, send me an email, let me know or find me on Instagram, dm me, let me know. I love hearing about how people kind of make these shifts. Um, and I will be back next week with another episode.
Okay?