Mom On Purpose Foundations: Becoming Her

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello, my beautiful friend. Welcome to the very last episode inside the Mom On Purpose Foundations series. The series has been so fun for me to really hash out and dive into the main core concepts and tools that I find to be most helpful inside my coaching practice. I hope they have been impactful. I hope you continue to go back through these episodes and use them and get results just completely free just from this podcast. That is my hope for you. With that today I want to end this series with the Becoming Her process.

This is my process of change. It’s the before and after. I don’t know if you used to watch the show where they would do the style before and afters. Who was it? It was like with Stacey and Clinton. Um, I’m drawing a blank on the name. Let me look What Not To Wear. That’s what it was. That show was so fun to watch because I think in part we love seeing the transformation and it was about so much more than clothes. If you’re not familiar, you know, with these team of fashionistas and professionals would come in and do a total makeover for someone who more than deserved it. And it really, it, it really wasn’t about the clothes. Yes, at the end they had this great new wardrobe and knew how to dress their bodies, but oftentimes there would be tears. There would be so much more growth than just the clothes.

And I think that’s why we love a before and after. We love a transformation story. It’s so relatable. It’s something we all want and have experienced and continue to want. And I think that when you understand how to do that process yourself, you can do it in any area of your life. This is also why I think we love a good documentary. We love a good before and after. We love it in houses too, right? A good remodel. So how do you do this in your own life? How do you change and become more of who you want to be? Well, I want to tell you because it is one of my favorite things to do in my own life and in my clients’ lives, and I want to share with you some of their journeys and my own journeys and kind of how to approach this topic in a way that is so doable and like a special tool belt of skills that you have that you can apply whenever you want to do this process.

So I like to think about there’s current you and then there is future you. And future you is coming. Future you might be more of current you or it might be a completely different version of you. And what is most likely to determine that is you. You have the opportunity to change intentionally if you want to. If you don’t, you’ll still change, but it will be based on your circumstances, it will be based on other people. It will be based on things sort of, um, that you are reacting to. And sometimes this can be helpful, like if you have a best friend who just tells you to go after your dreams and so you do that, that’s great, but instead of leaving it up to chance, I want to teach you how to create that change for yourself. So some examples of how you might want to change.

You might be someone who feels a lot of overwhelm and frustration in their lives and you want to become happier. You might be someone who yells a lot and snaps a lot and overreacts a lot, and you want to be become calmer. You might want to lose weight, you might want to become more laid back. You might want to make a career transition. You might want to have so much more work life balance. Like right now you work 50 hours a week or 60 hours a week and future. You work 30 hours a week. You might want to become someone who enjoys playing with her kids. You might want to become someone who doesn’t complain. The journey of transformation is so unique and individualized to you and where you’re at now and where you want to go. A part of that means accessing your inner desires and what’s on your heart for who you want to become.

No one can tell you that for you, but you can have a coach or someone like me to help you quiet the noise, quiet the mental chatter to help you access what’s already there that maybe you’ve silenced for a while. So if you’re someone who is in a season of life where you got a lot going on and it doesn’t feel possible to create the life that you want or have what you want, you may be in the habit of telling yourself, well, what’s the point? I can’t have it anyway. And when you do that, you train your brain not to come up with more wants and desires because it knows that you’re just going to squash it. And so your brain just gets quieter and quieter. And so over time you might not even know what it is that you want and that’s okay.

I just teach you how to quiet that part of your brain, access those desires and let some ideas come up. And then you get to a point where that becomes a well-oiled machine. And you can continue on this growth journey. And I want you to think about it as the process of change, the before and after the caterpillar to butterfly, but one that continues forever just because that’s the privilege we have in this lifetime. It is not something you do where you arrive. You might achieve your goal, that’s awesome, but there’s always going to be something else that you want more of. And when you learn how to want from approving of yourself just because that’s who you want to be in the world, it can be a really fun process to do over and over that’s very different from wanting to change from disapproval.

So in the example of weight loss, if you’re hating your body thin, it’s exhausting, it’s defeating, and overall it just makes you miserable. And so even if you push through and you do achieve that goal, it can be sort of a letdown because you’ll continue with that mindset of disapproving of yourself and you’ll want more. Maybe then it’s, you know, your skin is saggy or you want more muscle tone or something like that. You’ll want more of a change, but you’ll feel so exhausted because you’re hating yourself along the way. And so instead of, I hate my body, so I want to lose weight so I can love my body, it’s I love this body, I love my body and I want to change it. And you can continue that process of change however you want just because that’s who you want to be taking care of your body.

So practice wanting just because you matter and your desires matter. Practice loving what is accepting, what is approving of what is, and wanting more just because that’s fun. I love doing this. Oh my goodness, it is part of my life’s work and it just makes my life so much more fun. So I want to talk a little bit about how you might do this as well as how I’ve done it. I cannot recommend the Becoming Her journaling process that I teach enough. It will walk you through exactly how to journal to create the person who you want to be. The reason that this is important is because on default, that primitive brain of yours will create more of who you’ve always been. Part of the motivational triad that your primitive brain has includes being efficient and efficiency means doing more of what you’ve always done. Even if consciously you don’t want to do that thing.

So lemme give you an example, overwhelm. I coach a lot of my clients on overwhelm. Consciously you might say, I’m so sick and tired of being overwhelmed, I don’t want to be overwhelmed anymore. But if your body has practiced that feeling for the last decade, it’s not enough to just set an intention that you want to change it because your body has rehearsed that feeling for a decade. And in the name of efficiency, your primitive brain says, oh, I know what we can do here in this circumstance. Let’s just pull out overwhelm because that’s what we’re used to. Your brain overrides that preference of wanting to feel calm or joy in the name of efficiency because efficiency is useful for its survival. So quite literally, you will create more of who you’ve always been on default. And it’s again, not it enough to just set an intention to want to change.

You actually have to practice it. I give the example of watching a video, of making a recipe and thinking, oh, I know how to do that. Well to some extent, yes, you’re aware of what you need to do, but until you get in the kitchen and make that recipe multiple times, you really don’t know how to do it. Another example I often give is exercising or doing, you know, fancy yoga poses or doing a handstand. You can watch a video and learn how to do a handstand. And you might even think, oh, I know how to do that handstand, but your body doesn’t know until you practice it. And it might take a month every single day of 30 minutes of practicing it. I like to remind myself that the time is going to go by anyways. So 30 days will go by, you can continue to be who you’ve always been, or you can add in this 30 minute routine where you’re practicing a handstand so that at the end of the 30 days you now can do a handstand.

It’s the same thing with changing and creating a new version of yourself. The process of becoming, if you want to become more calm, more lighthearted, more warmhearted, more fun, any of those internal transformations, you absolutely can do that. As one of my brilliant private clients said, oh my gosh, this is magic. It’s work, but it’s magic. That is the truth. Just like doing a handstand and practicing that is a little bit of work, it’s not complicated. It just takes some practice. Getting those reps in that is exactly what it’s like to practice new thoughts and new feelings. So when you journal, the reason that this is really powerful is because you intentionally tell your brain, we’re not going to focus on the thoughts and feelings that we focused on yesterday and for the last decade.

We are going to focus on these new thoughts that I’m going to write down right now and day by day, slowly but surely your brain memorizes those new thought patterns. And then when you’re not journaling, instead of your brain picking up on that old patterning, it’s going to pick up on what you wrote this morning. All of a sudden your brain’s going to say, oh, what about that thought that we wrote down this morning? Let’s try that on. And you’re going to see the impact of that, and you’re going to create a little bit of momentum. That new neural pathway, that new highway, that new way of being, that is what you will create when you journal into your future.

Part of this journaling process is getting into the energy of becoming the person you want to be. I like to say who not how for shorthand instead of, well, how do I do that? How do I lose the weight? How do I stay calm? How do I become more laid back? How do I increase connection in my marriage? How do I stop yelling at my kids? These are the questions that we typically ask on default. It’s the first question that our brain kind of offers to us. It’s the how question, but how is all about the actions. And hopefully by now what you know about actions is that they’re really this symptom of what’s going on underneath. So behind every action is the thought and feeling driving it. Sometimes you can take some shortcut actions, but for the deeper work where you’re transforming your emotional state, your identity, who you’re being, you need to do the thought and feeling work first and then the action work.

So it’s not a bad question, it’s just not the most useful or helpful first question, focusing on who you need to be to create that result. That is the best approach, the most helpful approach in the beginning because when you get into the energy of thinking and feeling like the person you want to become, the actions will flow naturally. If I start telling myself I am someone who is fit and works out every day, if I just repeat that every single day, eventually I am going to take action that aligns with that, because how I identify creates all of my actions, not the other way around. So start telling yourself who you want to be and who you want to become. Now there’s a little bit of an art to this. You want to do it in a believable way, so you might add in some qualifiers.

For example, if I am healthy, just doesn’t feel like an option to you, you might practice I’m becoming healthier. Or if I’m a calm mom, doesn’t resonate with you yet, you might say, I’m learning how to become a calm mom. Focusing on that is so much more empowering and helpful for who you want to be than focusing on, I’m a hot tempered mom, I’m an angry mom, I’m an overwhelmed mom. But your brain has to be directed to think that. And again, remember, the future is blank. And so without direction from you, your brain will go to the past in the name of efficiency.

So the art of change is directing your brain to the future you and telling it what to think and feel so that you can take action from the person you want to become. A part of this is a little bit scary sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes because for whatever reason your brain wants to fear the unknown. It feels unsafe, it feels like death might be imminent, even though in our modern world it’s not for purposes of what we’re talking about here. So let me give you an example. When I transitioned from being a lawyer to a certified financial planner and then to an entrepreneur, my brain acted like it was life or death. Now maybe the business wouldn’t succeed, but that still doesn’t mean death. And of course it did succeed. So all of that fear was just my primitive brain trying to look out for me.

When you understand that you won’t let that get in the way of your transformation, there are other transitions of change of becoming that I made that didn’t come with all of that anxiety and fear. I went from not being a dog person to becoming a dog person. That transformation had a ton of anxiety. I went from not being a mom to becoming a mom. I didn’t have any anxiety at all, none. It was totally fine. And I offer that to you, not for you to use to beat yourself up, please do not do that. But instead for you to see how individual it is, it’s just based on your brain and what it came up with with expectations. I always thought it would be really hard to be a mom. I always thought there would be a lot going on, but I wanted it so badly.

And so I had this level of appreciation with becoming a mom. It was still a journey, but I just didn’t have that anxiety. Now, contrast that with becoming a dog mom and I had so much anxiety. And so I use those as a comparison here for you to see that it depends on you and your brain and there is no right or wrong. And in either scenario, it’s okay. It doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go on that journey. It just means that you might need a few more tools to help you in the journey, and that’s okay too.

There are other transitions that have felt more motivating and exciting for me, like, you know, getting out of debt from law school or losing weight. And that felt very different than my journey to go from being single to being married. That transition was one of my hardest not getting married, like once I met Steve, I felt great about it, but the transition of giving up being single and that single life, I went out a lot. You know, I was very successful. So it was just really fun to go out and spend money and and kind of party from time to time and have all this like amazing set of girlfriends. And it’s just such a different lifestyle than being married and having kids. And I knew intellectually that I wanted that, but in order to get there, I had to give up that life completely.

And the way that I like to think about it is not that something’s gone wrong, it’s just that that chapter is now complete. And so I want to have so many chapters in my life that start and then end. And some of them will overlap and some of them might last my lifetime. But instead of thinking that something has gone wrong because a chapter ends, it’s just, oh no, that chapter is complete. My single chapter, my going out and partying chapter of that chapter is complete. And I didn’t have any particular sadness really about that. I think going through it at the time was scarier than it was sad.

I see a lot of kind of Instagram or social media posts where other moms are talking about feeling sad about not having that chapter. That’s okay too. And so however you’re feeling about it is okay if you know how to just process those emotions and not make it mean that you’ve done something wrong or that somehow you shouldn’t be where you’re at. So just accepting that how you interpret it and feel about it is okay, and that you get to write that story. For me, that transition to give up that life was hard at the time, but I knew I wanted to do it. So I just let it be hard to become the person who I wanted to be with an amazing husband, amazing kids, and an amazing family, and growing from there. And so the journey of transformation is one that continues.

So I think about my life now 15 years ago that would have been mind blowing to me, and right now it’s just an ordinary everyday life. And I like to think about that is how it will be in 15 more years from now. I love the thought and the mindset, it just keeps getting better. I coach my older moms on this inside the membership because there is so much, I think, negative social media out there where your kids are out of the home and that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened. That’s the that know terrible season. And you know, they talk about 18 summers and you only get this much time with your kids, and could you focus on that and make that true? Yes. Do I think that that is helpful? No, I think it’s helpful to see your life as continuing to evolve and grow and change.

And might there be seasons that you prefer over others? Yes. But if you continue to romanticize your life and the journey of your life, then you can adopt the mindset that it just keeps getting better. Even if your kids are out of the home, it’s different and it just keeps getting better. I practice this mindset and it is so helpful for me to focus on my current life and what I love about it and where I want to go. Most people just on default, this is no one’s fault. It’s really just the way that the brain is designed, focused on the past, and the work is to use that smart prefrontal cortex part of your brain to intentionally decide where you want to go.

Now, I do want to mention that it’s not a 100% guarantee, but it’s still worth it. So for example, you know, if it’s 2019 and you’re planning a wedding for 2020 and you’re thinking about your future and how exciting that’s going to be, and you’re going to have this 300 person wedding and you plan it, well, 2020, there was a pandemic and that wedding got canceled. So sometimes things happen in the world, sometimes circumstances happen that we can’t predict, but it’s still worth it to plan and create the you that you want to become in the future. Why? Because what’s the alternative? We just say, okay, throw our hands up. We’re not going to plan or create or become on purpose at all because there’s a chance it might not work out. I like to think that there’s so much growth that happens on the journey, that it’s not even about the end destination.

I have increased my capacity in so many different areas of my life from my different transformation journeys, my sense of self, my confidence, my capacity to do a lot of things, and my capacity to rest. I used to be someone who was so uncomfortable resting and now it is so easy for me to rest and it’s really easy for me to do a lot. It’s kinda like the yin and the yang and having capacity for both my capacity to understand food and how it impacts my body and how to lose weight. If you would’ve told 20-year-old and me that I would be so good at losing weight, I never would’ve believed you. It takes up so little space in my mind. If you would’ve told me then that I would know how to make money, how to pay off debt, that I would not drink alcohol at all, that I would be become a dog person, that I would have a beautiful life with, a beautiful family, that I would go from feeling rigid and type A all of the time to becoming so much more laid back and easygoing and still having the capacity to set and achieve big goals, it would have blown my mind.

And I think about that now and I think about the next 10, 15, 20 years. And I hope that I continue to expand my capacity in all of those areas and in a completely new set of areas just because why not? What’s the alternative? If you don’t give your brain something to focus on, it will focus on the past. It will focus on kind of the problems that maybe you don’t even want to be problems in your everyday life. When you give your brain something to focus on intentionally, that is when the magic happens. Your brain is a problem solving machine. It loves to change, it loves that journey. Now, of course, like we talked about, there are going to be parts of it that feel sad or scary or like anxiety, but that in the name of growth is so much more rewarding and fulfilling than staying the same because your brain gets bored.

And then what happens is you need a lot of escapes to just feel baseline good enough. You’re going to over shop, you’re going to overeat, you’re going to overdrink, you’re going to over scroll, you’re going to feel a lot of unfulfillment, and it’s not a problem with your life. It’s just because your brain hasn’t been given direction to focus forward on who you want to become. It is such a beautiful gift that you can give yourself that I continue to give myself. And with that, I want to leave you with a few journal prompts that I think would be helpful on this topic. Number one, what do I really, really, really want? Number two, what do I want my life to be like in three years? Number three, who do I need to become to create that life that I want in three years? Number four, what about my thinking, feeling and acting is different three years from now than how it is today?

So said differently. If in three years you’re much more calm and easygoing, what are the thoughts that that future you has that are different than the way that you think? Now come on into the membership, my friend. Get the J. ournaling course so that you can learn how to journal to become the woman who you want to be. It is worth it. You will get this skillset and have it for the rest of your life so that you can use it deliberately to create who you want to become. I will talk with you next week, my friend. Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.