My Transformations From Doing This Work

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 friends. How are you today? I have been in such a state of reflection and appreciation as this season of having two kids comes to an end and baby boy number three is about to join us earth side. So with that, I’ve been thinking about you and I’ve been thinking about this podcast and the Mom On Purpose Membership and the blog and the social media and kinda all of the components that make up this community. And I am so grateful for you being here.

I am just thinking about, you know, this season of gratitude and with Thanksgiving I’m also reflecting on what I’m thankful for and I can’t think of a better podcast to do today than talking about my transformations from doing this personal development work because there has been nothing more impactful and life changing than this work. I remember before I ever started actually applying this work, I always had a knack for asking kinda life’s bigger questions. I took a lot of those courses in college and I have a philosophy minor and so I’ve always been interested in topics like this, but there’s such a difference between learning and consuming and actually applying the work. It’s the difference between reading books about cooking and reading books about food and nutrition versus actually going in the kitchen and making a recipe and making dinner and testing and finding out what works.

And the difference isn’t small, it’s huge. Just as you can imagine, the difference between reading about a recipe versus making a recipe, it’s just so big. And I remember when I was kind of stuck in that loop of consuming. I knew that I needed to do more to make changes in my life. I knew that I wanted to make changes in my life. I didn’t really know how I enjoyed learning and consuming, and I was really into podcasts and personal development books and all of those things in my early twenties. And it wasn’t until I started actually applying the tools that I just changed so many things about myself and about my life. And why I love sharing that is because it still is what fuels me today to get through challenges and to live more purposefully and intentionally and to create the life that I want regardless of the hand that I’m dealt.

So I want to take you back. Let’s talk about where I was before doing any of this work, before applying any of this work. I would say that in general, my limiting beliefs about myself were that I am too type A, I’m too much for most people. I’m destined to have bad relationships. I am someone who kind of is always going to struggle with family. And these limiting beliefs kept me in a cycle of dating guys who I knew I didn’t want to marry. They kept me in a cycle of dead end relationships. They kept me in a cycle of overworking. And so I would try to get happiness from my goals and from my work and from my job. And also I would try to get love from the men I dated. So the pattern here was that I was always looking for the feeling outside of me.

And I like to think about stories and the stories that we tell and the stories that I would tell myself and how I would live out the same story, but just replace the characters. Do you do this? Just take a moment and think about it because I think this is what most of us do on default is we have this story of ourselves, we have this story of the world, we have this story of how things go and regardless of our circumstances, we just kind of fill in different characters of that story. And the work that I’m talking about here, the personal development work of working on yourself, of going inward and changing is about changing the story. And I’m just so proud that I have changed so many of the stories that I’ve wanted to change so that I can create the life and the future that I want.

And I had a lot of kinda that victim mentality poor me in a lot of self pity, kind of always feeling like, like was happening to me. And yet trying to overcompensate for that by being the fixer. A lot of the times I know that I work with so many of you who are like me, you’re like that first born type, a high achieving,woman who takes on so much responsibility. And I remember when I first learned about hyper responsibility, I was like, what? Because I always thought being responsible is a good thing and it is. But since doing this work, I now think a lot of concepts in terms of spectrums, and you can be too far to one side with respect to responsibility. So if you think of a responsibility spectrum, for me, I was way on the far end of not just taking responsibility for my life, but trying to take responsibility for other people’s lives and fix their problems.

And it was just not helpful for me at all, and it definitely wasn’t helpful for them. And on the other end of the spectrum is kind of the opposite, where you’re not taking responsibility and you’re looking for someone else to kind of come in and save you. So,just something that I found to be really helpful as I applied this work and started to change my stories and change the way that I thought about myself, and I thought about relationships and I thought about other people. I cannot tell you how dramatic of a change it was for me to go from someone who always struggled with dating, always struggled with, dating men who partied too much or who drank too much, or were just too focused on friends in a way that you could tell it was like coming from immaturity and they didn’t want the family life that I wanted and to know, in my mind that I was so convinced that that was just like my destiny.

And then to be where I am now, to be with someone and married to someone who is so stable and so awesome and is a rock in our family and to have a healthy, connected marriage that still comes with all of the marriage problems that you all know about if you’ve been married for longer than a day. But I’m so grateful to have created this awesome, stable family life that doesn’t have any of the challenges that I thought it would. And for that I only can attribute the success to doing the personal development work of changing the limiting beliefs, of changing the story, of changing my relationship that I had with myself and truly believing that my future could be different. And I have had a variety of coaches along the way who have helped me do this. I remember, going to therapy for a few months after a really bad breakup and it was really helpful.

I actually really liked and enjoyed my therapist. And then she said, awesome, you’re doing great and you’re done. Our work here is complete. I remember thinking, oh my goodness, this is so helpful. And now what? And that’s really when I decided to dive into how can I apply personal development to my life instead of just reading about it. Like I’m all for the next big personal development book that comes out. I absolutely, still consume content, but I don’t just stop there. And I think that is what kind of gives me a little bit of an edge in terms of actually seeing transformations. Like I’m willing to do the hard work because it’s hard work either way. It’s really hard to be in self-pity and, and feel like you’re the victim of your life and not live the life that you want. So I would rather choose the level of hard where I’m working on skills where it’s difficult, but I’m trying where I can feel proud of myself and see results.

Yes, some failures as well, but also knowing that I’m creating the future I want. It’s just like that’s my flavor of heart. It’s just really, what fuels me and what inspires me. I remember too how much of a people pleaser I was. And this really came from my story about relationships. Not just romantic relationships, but friendships and family. I as that first born type a, girl who grew up in a time where telling kids Good job and you’re good if you do X, Y, Z, and good girl was like the norm for parenting. I really grew up with this, strong belief that my goodness was determined by other people kind of telling me that I am good. And that led to just a ton of people pleasing, which means saying yes to everyone else, even when it’s internally a no for me.

And I have done so much work on this and what’s required is still hard. It’s vulnerability. It’s telling myself the truth. It’s knowing that my goodness doesn’t come from the things I do, but it is inherent within me and we are not fed that story. We’re still validated based on the things that we do. And so I spent a lot of time really practicing loving myself, taking care of myself, validating myself, and really building up such a secure relationship with myself where I would define in the past, my relationship with myself was much more insecure, much more of that like anxious attacher, fueled by a lot of like self-doubt and looking outside of me for, all of that security. So by practicing self-confidence, by understanding and acknowledging and becoming aware of my relationship with myself, I completely changed how I relate to myself, how I relate to others, how I relate to the world.

And of course, I’m not perfect at it, but I’m so proud to be able to say that that people pleasing part of me is significantly smaller. I still care what other people think. I’m still a human being. I still, you know, have thought loops that happen in my mind, the overthinking from time to time, but most of the time I can manage my brain. And that is a skill. It is like the most life-changing skill. When people tell me that they just don’t have time for this or they’re not interested, I, I can’t even understand it because life is so much harder in the worst way without doing this work. I’ve been there, I’ve been in the place where it feels so overwhelming, it feels like, you know, good just isn’t good enough. It feels like, yes, my life looks fine on the outside, but on the inside it doesn’t feel great.

I thought it would feel so much better. And that was another huge transformation that I had. Just seeing that on the outside my life looked great. Like I had graduated law school, I had a great job, I was, you know, friendly and popular and going out and had all of these, you know, “relationships”. And yet it didn’t feel awesome. It didn’t feel great. I didn’t feel fulfilled, I didn’t feel happy. I felt kind of like I was on a hamster wheel of anxiety, of overwhelm, of hustle, and really always looking for that next thing to make me feel a certain way. So whether it was like that next job to make me feel happier or more proud of myself, or whether it was that next guy to make me feel more loved or whole or complete, there’s always something that I was kind of chasing.

And as you know, I love to set goals. I’m all for like, let’s go after it. Let’s set a big goal. But when you do it from a place of lack, which is how I was doing it before, it’s from scarcity. And you can’t outrun yourself. So, you know, you’ve all heard the saying probably like wherever you go, there you are. So said differently. Sometimes I’ll say to my clients, you take your brain with you and I cannot tell you how helpful it’s been for me to clean up my brain, to clean up my thinking, to take responsibility for how I’m feeling, to make decisions about the kind of person I want to be, the kinda life that I want to live. Having the audacity to just feel so grateful and appreciative and like celebrate my life on a daily basis for no reason. And that is work that is so worth doing.

So when I’m talking about the work here, I am talking about personal growth tools, mindset shifts, self-reflection practices, all of the frameworks that I teach inside the Mom On Purpose Membership, and inside my Mastermind that I have found to be helpful. I spend a lot of time creating my own tools. I have some other tools from my coach training that I’m trained in as well. And the combination, I think is what continues to make both of these programs a huge success. And also I’m doing the work as well. So I see what’s working from my clients. Gosh, we have hundreds of members in this membership and from the small group of Mastermind women who I get to work with, it is such an honor and it’s becoming like my most favorite thing. So if you don’t know about the Mastermind, just head on over to momonpurpose.com and you can get on the wait list over there.

We are doing an early enrollment and we already filled the first spots that I had anticipated, would be the entire Mastermind and I’m going to open up a few more spots. So if that is something that you are interested in, definitely make sure that you are on that list, so you can get all of the information. Okay, now I thought it would be fun to list out 20 of the transformations that I’ve had, big ones and small ones. And of course, whether it’s big or small depends on my interpretation of it and how it’s impacted my life. But I think that we don’t take enough time to celebrate our wins, to see the journey, to see how far we’ve come. And my hope with this list is to show you that it’s possible for you to change in so many ways just because you want to, just because that’s what you want for your future.

So instead of thinking that you have to repeat the past and repeat who you’ve always been, you can create a completely different and more fulfilling life, one that aligns with the one you want. And it might be that you want to go big and change everything, or it might just be that you want to, you know, stop yelling at your kids and that’s one transformation that would be life changing for you. So take this list as a way for you to see a little bit more into how I’ve used the tools. And my hope is that it inspires you to think about other creative ways that you can apply personal development to your life. So number one, I paid off $206,000 of student loan debt. This was one of the transformations that really catapulted me into changing my life. I didn’t want to get married and start a family with all of that debt.

I didn’t like having all of that debt and I didn’t really know a lot about money, but I was an attorney and I thought, well, I’m going to figure it out. And that led into transformation number two, which kind of goes along with number one, which is that I built an online business. I created an online business that has had many iterations by now. So if you’ve been along since the beginning, my little baby blog was called Finance Girl. I talked about money and paying off debt and ultimately learned about online business, which is really just business except you pay and, have a website online it’s really interesting where we separate out online business from regular business. But when I think about, the services that I pay for, like even just with my house, yes, someone comes out here and does it, but they have a website and I pay online.

And it’s, it’s just, it’s interesting that we think about it so differently sometimes when we talk about online business, but it’s really just the same thing as business. My services, my coaching, my courses, my programs, all of that are all online. So it falls into that bucket. And I have become so passionate about and obsessed with learning online business as it continues to change. And that is something that was never in the cards for me. I just, I can’t even emphasize that enough. I was not like the entrepreneur kid selling lemonade or gum at school. I always thought I would have a job and be a lawyer. And so this transformation is so much about identity as it is about the actual result of having the online business. Transformation number three, again, goes along with numbers one and two, but it is worth mentioning here separate, which is that I quit my prior careers of practicing law as an attorney and becoming a certified financial planner.

When I started my blog, I learned about money and I learned about the different careers with respect to money and ultimately ended up getting my CFP and working at a registered investment advisory firm, managing lots of money, and, working at a really reputable firm. I loved that job and it came to an end. I decided to close that chapter. I also decided to close the chapter of practicing law before that one. And so quitting both of those careers that are pretty prestigious and kind of looked upon from at least my peer group and family as, really big life accomplishments and to be quitting those so young was surprising to most people. I wouldn’t say that, you know, people ever gave me a hard time about it or, expressed any, kinda doubt, but it was sort of seen as, okay, well that’s, that’s different.

No one really knew what I was doing to this day. I still don’t get a lot of questions about my career and that’s fine. That’s okay. No one has to understand what I’m doing here. I understand it. My clients understand it. It is so rewarding and fulfilling and I’m so grateful I never let me stress this again. Never would’ve been able to quit practicing law nor practicing as a certified financial planner without these tools because I felt so anxious doing it. I was so worried. And yet I knew that it was the decision that was right for me in my future. And so I didn’t let those feelings stop me. But had I not known how to apply these tools a hundred percent, I would still be probably an attorney in Ohio with a lot of student loan debt, would be my guess. Alright, the next transformation, transformation number four is one so near and dear to my heart, and that is becoming a dog person.

I was never a dog person at all. And now I am obsessed with my little puppers, Penny and Benji. I have a mini goldendoodle and a mini bernedoodle and I love them and I love that I have two of them and their little brother and sister and they just bring so much joy and messiness, to our home. And I didn’t grow up with dogs. I was never a dog person. And to just decide that my future self had dogs was an exercise in using the future self tools that I teach that again, I would’ve never come to had I not known how to apply that tool. I’m like, that is so cool. Number five, shifting from that type a energy to embodying more slowness and feminine energy, to not feeling so rigid all of the time and thinking of it as a dial that I can turn up and down life changing again.

Never thought that was possible. I hear people say all the time, well, I’m just too type A right? And it’s like, well, the more that you say that, yes, the more that you will live into that. And so really working on my identity and deciding who I want to be because I get to decide that not anyone else has truly changed my life. Number six, I already talked about, but I listed it here. I stopped dating the wrong guys, the guys who didn’t have the same values as me, the guys who I couldn’t see myself having a family with, and yet I would just continue to date because there was “chemistry”. I stopped all of that. It was a huge waste of time. And I met Steve and started dating Steve, my now husband. We have the most amazing family and it is stable and steady and loving.

And of course there are challenges, but it’s like the good kind of challenges that you want that come along with being married and, and having kids. And I’m so grateful for that work because I just, I truly cannot imagine on top of the regular ordinary challenges of marriage and kids having the challenges that would have come along with some of the men who I dated before. So I’m really proud of myself for just maturing in the way that I viewed relationships is ultimately what that, that transformation was about. Number seven, I quit drinking. I quit drinking, gosh, five or so years ago. And I don’t identify as sober. I don’t think I had a drinking problem. I just saw myself as a mom in the future who didn’t drink. And so I just quit on the spot. And I haven’t drank since. I give myself permission to redecide.

And I think it’s so cool that this is my relationship with alcohol. Again, something I always thought would be a part of my life. Number eight, I moved across the country twice. I would have never done this, but for learning decision making tools and learning about like new beginnings and completing and making endings deliberately without making it means something has gone wrong and just having such an abundant way of thinking about decisions really helped me do this without any guilt, without any worry, without kind of self-doubt or guilt. And I think that’s really cool because now I have these experiences where I’ve lived in many different places. I really love that. Number nine is I lost 25 pounds. That was kind of the weight that I had. That was what I wanted to lose before ever getting pregnant. So 25 pounds I lost, I maintained that.

And then I have lost the 40 ish pounds after each of my pregnancies. I’m so proud of that. I don’t have any drama about losing weight. I kind of like and enjoy the process of doing that work. It’s something fun. And it’s not because over there I’m happier. It’s not because I like myself more over there, it’s just because that’s who I want to be and I want to look and feel and be a certain way. And that is awesome because that is not the messaging that we as women are given with respect to weight or weight loss. Number 10, three kids in three years, what, I never in a million years would’ve thought that my journey to getting married was, I don’t know, 15 years before I stopped dating the guys who I knew I didn’t want to marry in the first place. And so my journey to marrying someone who I really wanted to be married to and to create that romantic relationship and family marriage unit took so long, right?

15 years, that’s a long time. And yet I just kept going. And then three kids in three years, bam, fast, right? It’s just so fascinating. Sometimes your transformations will be really fast and sometimes they’ll be really slow. Sometimes it’s because of you and what you’re doing or not doing. And other times it’s not. It’s sometimes it’s out of your control. I share this because I want there to be examples out there of transformations that are fast and are easy. When I think about losing weight easy, when I think about having kids, it’s, it’s hard and challenging to go through, but it is way easier than a lot of the other transformations that I have done. And you just don’t hear that narrative at all. Okay? And so I say that not to use against yourself, right? Just like, you know, other transformations would be really hard for me compared to you might be really easy.

So for those of you who don’t have a sweet tooth or you don’t eat sugar, like to me giving up sugar completely, I’m like, that sounds impossible. That sounds like a hard transformation that I’m just not up for right now. I do think in the future I’ll give it a try. I imagine it being extremely hard compared to, giving up drinking or having my three kids in three years. And so I think having examples of transformations that we can see from people who are doing this work and seeing how sometimes, yeah, they’re hard and that’s okay, you can keep going and other times they’re easy and that’s awesome. Embrace that. Don’t make it hard If it can be easy. That’s kind of what I want to exemplify here by talking about it being easy. So please don’t use that against yourself. If any of these transformations that I’m saying are easy for me are harder for you because for sure there are transformations that have been harder.

Like I said, marrying someone who is so amazing and secure and just a great partner. That was one of the hardest transformations I did and took, you know, almost 15 years to do. And for many of you it was probably a lot shorter of a time. So number 11, making multiple six figures while working part-time with young kids. Never in a million years would I have believed that this would be possible. I run my business so efficiently, I have scaled back my team and really upleveled what I’m offering. I have a retention rate that is extremely high inside the Membership and inside the Mastermind. And it is, I think because I am always trying to overdeliver to my clients, I’m always trying to,make it feel like you won the lottery by what you are paying for and what you are getting. And I know that when I have invested in myself and I get more than I feel like I’m giving, it is so fun.

It’s so fun to be the client on the receiving end of that. And I have to say, as a coach, as a entrepreneur, as kind of an expert who is providing these tools now, it is really fun to be on the other side as well. I still have coaches. I’m still in programs, high level and as well as smaller memberships. And I love that I get to be one of the experts out there who’s also offering these tools in my own unique way because it has, just come with such fulfillment for me. And I think it’s pretty cool. I have set up this business really efficiently in a way that affords me to be able to be home with my kids. It’s just something that I wanted to do. I want to be home with, all of them for their first three years of life.

And so that’s what we’re doing. Number 12, stopped yelling. I grew up in a family of yellers. Yelling would definitely be like my default. And yet I’ve used these tools to stop. It’s not from a script. It is from doing the inner work of looking at my thoughts and my mindset and my feelings and learning how to process feelings and change the way that I’m thinking. It’s breaking generational cycles just by this one transformation. Number 13, I stopped worrying. This is one that I continue to use. Worry comes up and I put it in the backseat with my mindset tools. It just doesn’t serve me. I still care. I still am thoughtful. I still am solution oriented. I just don’t have my problems fueled by worry. Number 14, I navigated my relationship with my dad and his passing. And I worked through the grief, the grief that was our relationship when he was alive.

And the grief that followed when he passed. And coming to terms with the way our relationship was and is has been so freeing because a lot of times, particularly with people who don’t fit the ” norm ” of what we think people should be like. So my dad definitely didn’t fit the norm of what typically we think of as a good “dad”. I did so much work to see that it’s so much more complicated than that. And he was so complicated and in part our relationship was complicated. But I know that we had such an amazing relationship and I’m okay with who he was and I made such peace with that. And that was such a gift that I gave to myself. And, and I’m not blaming him and just getting really clean about the negative emotion. I wanted to feel like sadness and loss while at the same time still giving myself permission to just love him and like the magic and the inspiration and the joy that he did bring to my life instead of trying to villainize him or always have his back like that, all or nothing thinking that was, a beautiful opportunity for growth for me because applying it to someone who I was so close with and who was so complicated really gave me the tools that I can use in any other relationship.

Number 15 kind of summarized a lot of what I’ve already talked about, which is just breaking generational patterns, breaking up those stories that I would’ve just continued to live and just put new characters in. That is something that is life changing. I gave that gift to myself. And anyone can do that. You don’t have to continue to repeat the stories that you’re telling about yourself.

Number 16, I make such better decisions. Oh my goodness. The decision making skill is one of the best skills. It’s what gets me out of overwhelm. It’s what helps me decide how to plan my days and calendar. It’s what fuels me and gives me purpose all through making better decisions. There’s a Decision Making class inside the Membership that is a 10 out of 10, and I coach on decision making a lot. I just find it to be one of the most underrated and most helpful tools. Number 17, I have fewer regrets. What most people don’t realize is that regret is a choice. It’s not something that just happens to you, it’s the way that your brain interprets something and then you feel regret, but you don’t have to feel regret. So when you work on your relationship with yourself and you trust yourself and you have a really secure relationship with yourself, even when you can’t determine the exact outcome of something, you can still decide you’re not going to have a regret about it.

So for example, I decided to have a VBAC after my first was born with a C-section. And gosh, I didn’t even put that on the list. That’s another one of my transformations. I never would have made that decision. But for these tools, like never in a million years. And so what I had to come to terms with was that there was a chance that it would end in another C-section. And I don’t know about you, but for me, if I could decide between laboring for, you know, 24, 36 hours and then having a C-section, or just scheduling a C-section, I would much rather just have it scheduled. But there’s no way to know the actual outcome. There’s no way to know what will happen. So deciding to go for a vaginal birth after a cesarean, that’s what a VBAC is called. That’s what it stands for.

It came with knowing that there was a possibility that it would end in another C-section. And I was fine with another C-section. I just didn’t want to go through all of the labor, if I could just schedule it. But if I scheduled it, then I wouldn’t even be trying. And so instead of deciding that if it ended up in a way that I didn’t want IE, if I labored all that time and then ended up in a c-section, that I would regret it. I told myself, I can only control who I am in this circumstance. Who do I want to be? And I’m going to have my own back no matter what happens. So I decided in advance that I wasn’t going to regret going for the vbac, even if it resulted in a c-section that was so freeing. I had such peace, even though I knew okay, that would be harder for me, like less, less enjoyable, let’s say more, more pain physically.

But it’s still who I wanted to be. No regrets. And oftentimes what we think might be, you know, worst case scenario often isn’t. And in this case, I was able to successfully have that VAC, which is so cool. But just an example of how you can coach yourself through work, through the mindset of decision making, of having your own back, of feeling really secure about who you are and not having regrets because you just decide you’re not going to regret it. Okay, number 18, I continue to set and achieve really big goals, whether it’s a personal goal or whether it’s a business goal, whether it’s a health goal. I think about some of the goals I have upcoming to get really fit physically. I have always lost the weight just from applying these tools, but I haven’t gone on like a fitness strength training journey.

And we’re really excited for that. So that’s just an example of how I continue to incorporate these tools in not just like my personal life with respect to staying calm and being patient, which I do, but also for achievement and for things that I want to create in my life. Number 19, I feel so much more internally balanced. I am not looking for balance externally in some proportion of hours. I feel balanced internally and that has been such a game changer. And number 20, I am gentler, I am kinder and I am more connected to myself and to others. This is something that I would describe as kind of being in my head versus being more grounded. And when I was always in my head, it was kind of a lot of that masculine energy versus now I feel much more heart centered and it’s a balance of both.

It’s the yin and the yang, but it’s super cool, at least I think so that I have been able to make this transformation stick and can really have a softer side to myself that I just absolutely love. So with this list of transformations, I hope they inspire you even in just a little small way to take that first step, whether that’s getting a coach, joining a community like Mom On Purpose, journaling, writing down a goal, just getting started, changing the patterns that you’re in, and becoming from a place of love and approval of yourself, not from a place of lack or thinking that you’re broken or need to be fixed. I promise you, your life can feel as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. That is the work my friend. Thanks for being here. I will talk with you next week. 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.