Episode 15 Transcript

Arivee Vargas: Hi I'm Arivee Vargas. I believe we're all so powerful beyond our wildest imaginations. We have the ability to overcome the fears, self-doubt, negative beliefs and all the other roadblocks that hold us back from having the life and career we really want and deserve. That's why I created the Humble Rising podcast.

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I want to help you get clear on what a joyful and fulfilling life and career looks like for you. And help you go after it with all you have. Each week, we'll talk to badass inspirational women sharing their journeys. We’ll dig into their successes, their failures, challenges, the different shifts, in their careers in their personal lives and so much more. Be inspired, get motivated, and get ready to rise. This is the Humble Rising Podcast.

Arivee: Marianne Williamson says in a “Return to love.” Your personal power is not something that is going to reveal itself at some later date. Your power is a result of your decision to reveal it. I know I'm always telling you that you're more powerful than you realize. That you can choose to be powerful in this moment, you can choose to activate that dormant power and potential within you to make the changes that you want to have more meaning in your life to have more fulfillment in your life, to have what you're longing for in your life. Including your career. To have a job that you actually like. Not just that you're good at. Remember, your job doesn't have to be everything either, right? It can serve its purpose, like allowing you certain financial or other types of freedoms while you find things outside of work that do fulfill you and give you meaning in other ways. But to unlock that potential and power within you to get to those feelings you want to have about your life and your career and to move towards the life and the career that you want with all that fulfillment, that meaning, that joy you have to start. And this is where we all start, right? We start with an honest assessment of where we actually are. So this is the time to focus your attention less on the external and more on the internal. We're going inward for some information. If there's one thing I've learned about working with women and helping them create change in their life and in their career. And this is true for me 100% also, it's that you have to start with being honest about where you are right now. In the area you want to improve, change or shift. You wanna feel like you aren't surviving to make it all work each day, you wanna stop feeling drained and start feeling more alive. You wanna take better care of that beautiful mind. Spirit and body of yours. You wanna feel less anxious and more calm. Do you want better relationships with those that you care about? Do you want to feel more excitement? More energy? More meaning? Do you want to shift from one job to another, one role to another, one career to another, one industry to another, one employer to another? We have to start with being radically honest with ourselves about where we actually are in relation to those specific aspects of our lives that we want to change, improve or shift.

Getting honest with yourself means listening and observing what's in your heart and in your mind. What does that mean? It means getting quiet. I know that's hard for us for so many of us, me included. That's a real challenge. We're used to going and going and going. We're used to moving on to the next meeting, the next item on our To Do List the next task, the next goal. It takes a lot for us to pause. It takes a lot for us to proactively decide to pause because so often we feel like we barely have time to take a breath.

Years ago, I was forced to pause. I had an identity crisis related to my career and being a new mother, I was trying to be strong and show that I had it all together, but I did not. I was compartmentalizing, suppressing and avoiding what was going on inside of my heart and inside of my head, I was telling that voice in my head in my feelings to stay quiet. I didn’t have time for them. That's what I thought that voice was telling me that I was meant for more than what I was doing at that time in my job that I wasn't the person I knew I was capable of being. I knew that I needed more meaning and fulfillment, and that voice is also telling me that the time had come to stop the proving to feel worthy and successful, to stop looking externally for approval, for validation to make me feel like I was valuable and worthy. And this is all true. Despite the fact that I felt challenged by my work and I adored the people that I worked with right until I shined a light on all of those truths and got curious about how I was feeling. I was stuck in confusion and stress. About what I was experiencing and what I was longing for, what I really wanted, I mean, that's where much of what I call my intentional personal growth journey started. And you don't have to have an identity and values crisis like me. Right. You might just feel this push and pull this resistance. You know something isn't right, or you might have a longing for something different, something more, something that isn't what you're experiencing right now. We need to be OK with confronting ourselves. Our thoughts and feelings, all of it. We have to be OK with feeling all of it. We have to be OK with thinking what we think and being aware of it. We have to be OK with facing where we are and how we feel about the different parts of our lives. The only way you get to point B. Or towards the vicinity of point B, or to move towards the life and career that would make you feel more of what you wanna feel and experience is to understand your starting point. We have to understand where you're starting from first 'cause I don't. I don't believe you can move forward until you know where your starting point is. The truth of your starting point, not what you wish it was, what it actually is, and the truth starts with you being honest with yourself without judging yourself or getting down on yourself.

So, here's the work I suggest you do. It's all introspection, so we're going to have to be open to leaning into discomfort. OK, so grab a pen and paper, and if you don't have a journal, totally fine. Just grab a pen and paper or do this on your laptop. So, what I first want you to do is to find a quiet space and time to sit down and again with your pen and paper, ask yourself one question. What am I feeling and experiencing right now about each aspect of my life? This means you're going to go through each part of your life. Job or career, your relationships so there could be relationships with a partner, friends, family, colleagues who can break that down however you like. It includes your mental state, your emotional state, your physical health. If you're a parent, include parenting, finances, spirituality, community. Think about this as a 360-degree view of your own life. Some coaches are further this as the life wheel or the wheel of life assessment but write down everything on your mind and in your heart, right, every single thought and feeling. Just observe what comes up for you and write it down. You know, you might have been, and you might be doing this bottling up your thoughts, your feelings, and what's just going on for you. So, from time to time when your emotions rise up within you and you feel that tension in your body, you probably try to keep it together right, you distract yourself or you get distracted. You make yourself busy, but when you do this writing exercise, you don't have to keep it all together and there's nothing to distract you. So, give yourself permission to let it go and feel everything and write down those thought you might not have dared to say out loud if you get stuck and you find it hard to free right in this way, because this really is a free write. You wanna let it flow? You wanna kind of go where your mind and your heart takes you? But if you get stuck and you have trouble doing it this way, here's my alternative suggestion. So, you're still gonna go through each category, but instead of answering that open question of how you're feeling about each area and what you're experiencing, instead, ask yourself. If I had to rate each of these areas on a scale of zero to 10, zero being no satisfaction and 10 being amazing like best ever satisfaction and flourishing. How would I rate this aspect of my life and then ask yourself why did it give it this rating? And then what would make this rating a score of 10?

Here again, I'm going to coach you here a little bit judgment may come up for you. Don't try to suppress it or ignore it. Feelings often come back stronger or scream at us to be paid attention to if we. If we do that, if we try to just suppress them, avoid them, ignore them. Acknowledge that judgment. Acknowledge that feeling. Let it come if it's there, and gently ask if it can give you some space to do this work. Explain that you understand it's there. You get it. But it can sit in the passenger seat for now. You're tuning into yourself here. You're giving your brain the ability to let what's inside out. And facing facing all of this, facing your feelings, your thoughts can be challenging facing the thoughts we have in questioning them, which is the next step, isn't easy, but we can't do this work if we don't try to face them in the first place. And it is your most uncomfortable thought and feeling, they have to face the most. It's the stuff you're unwilling to, admit to yourself. It's the stuff you're unwilling to say out loud. It's the stuff that you don't like thinking about. It's the stuff you are trying to avoid feeling. That is where the work is first, you acknowledge you identify, but where the deepest transformation can happen. Where we go, we go underneath. We go deeper than surface level as you can get to the stuff you don't wanna feel. You don't wanna know that you feel this way. You do know, but you don't want to write it down 'cause you wanna see it, you don't wanna read it? 'cause, that's uncomfortable for you. But that's where the work. That's where the I I wanna say this is where the magic happens is where the transformation is possible. As when you get deeper into the stuff you don't. One, admit the shit that you don't wanna deal with. That's the stuff you have to deal with, cause that's what you're resisting the most. Right? And then what happens is we're talking about the stuff that will apply to so much more than one aspect of your life. Because we're getting to the root of it. So, if right now you're having that feeling in your gut or in your mind, and your mind is going bananas right now because this is hitting home for you, that's a sign that you have to do this work.

Someone recently told me that if she started writing and letting it all out, her hand would fall off because she'd have so much to write. And I told her, oh, just let her let her hand fall off. No, I don't wanna. Don't want her to let her hand fall off. Obviously. I told her if her hand hurts that much, she should stop writing and come back to it. Or she could grab her phone and open the Voice memo type app and talk into it. But what often happens is you don't wanna face our thoughts, so we think, oh, I'll never be able to put everything on paper. So, it the resistance comes. Oh, I will never be able to finish line. Be able to put. It all on paper. Oh, my hand will hurt. But what that is, that's just your brain getting uncomfortable. It's starting to sense the discomfort coming and it doesn't like that. Our brains want to keep us safe, so we have to practice being honest with ourselves enough that our brain recognizes that we're challenging ourselves to grow in new ways, to increase that joy, that fulfillment that we want. It needs to learn that there's no need to panic. There’s no need to panic here and that if we start to feel that sensation rise up, we can take a moment to pause and tell ourselves, alright, this is part of the process, OK, brain, don't worry. And because I'm a complete nerd. You already know this. I'm a total nerd. I need you to know that these types of writing exercises aren't just a bunch of woo woo stuff. OK, it's not exercises like this are backed by scientific studies related to emotional agility and happiness and wellbeing. Like, did you know that writing in a journal 20 minutes a day for three days in a row about your emotions and thoughts can decrease your stress and your anxiety and improve your mood? I mean anecdotally, so many of us experience that, right, me included. But there's research that backs that stuff up now for those of you who are still feeling resistance to writing, the way that I'm suggesting, you can take an external happiness assessment to get you going instead. So, there's one external happiness assessment you can take that's called the Perma profiler. P E R MA profiler, and I'll add this information in the show notes, but Perma stands for the five pillars of wellbeing. Which is your positive emotion engagement relationships. Meaning and accomplishment, which is based on someone research the multidimensional measure of what it means to flourish, and you'll receive scores and assessment. Based on your responses to, I believe it's 23 questions measuring your overall wellbeing with these pillars, along with negative emotion and health, I still encourage you to explore the results of those assessments by writing more about why you rated yourself the way you did when you took the assessment. And what would make that specific area be at 10 for you, but you can try the assessment if you're having just more difficulty getting started with the other approaches, right. The important part is that you you start and you do the work, OK. And the next episode. I will share how you can use this information that you've basically shared with yourself to start taking steps towards what you say you want and need in your life. But for now, tune into yourself and write, get it all out. Do that internal inward assessment. Get real, honest with yourself. I know you can do this. Your journey starts when you decide it's time to be honest with yourself about everything, especially the stuff you rather tune tut then tune into and to give this gift of honesty to yourself, it's really the start of unlocking the potential in power. You have to change to change what needs changing and to go after what you're longing for. Don't forget I'm in this work too. I'm right here with you.

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Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. If you want my weekly doses of inspiration and motivation, click the link in the show notes to subscribe. And if you’ve been asking yourself how to figure out that next step in your career. I've got a career clarity guide just for you. Check out the show notes for the link. Until next time my friends keep digging deep and keep stepping into how incredibly powerful you are.

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