#167 Finding Your Calm

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hey there, welcome back to Your Favorite You.

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I am still Melissa Parsons, and I am still so grateful that you're here with me today. I want to talk today about finding your calm and finding your center. I want to talk about recognizing that you have calm available to you at all times.

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And I know for many of us, especially those of us who identify as type A and high-achieving people, this is difficult. Not because comp isn't available, but because it's a place that we haven't often been to. And for some of us, we may have never been there at all. So I want to talk about what it means to find your center and what it actually feels like in your body and how to practice going there as often as you possibly can. Because I'm telling you this, once you find it, everything can change.

I was doing an IFS session recently with one of my clients, and she's really just getting in touch with this calm-centered part of herself. She has always identified as a type A, go, go, go type of person. She's new to coaching, and this discovery was completely foreign to her. She first felt this feeling earlier this summer when she was in Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons.

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She was able to breathe deeply and relax in a way she'd never really experienced before. She described it as dropping her shoulders, the ability to take slow, deep breaths, and really a sense of spaciousness.

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And once we were on the call kind of talking about what calm and centered felt like and kind of getting to know this calm and centered part of herself, she said, oh, I do remember feeling this this past summer when she was out in the national parks and she didn't recognize it at the time, but was able to recognize the feeling in her body and know that she had felt it before this coaching call that we were on yesterday.

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So for so many of the brilliant women that I work with, calm and centered are not really familiar territories. They've spent most of their lives in motion. You know how it goes, achieving, producing, managing, doing, and simply being, being centered, being still, being calm.

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These aren't practices and places that they've been to before, and they aren't things that they've practiced doing. It's like there's this part of them that exists, but they've never really formally met it.

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They don't know what it looks like, what it feels like, or how to access it. So my client wants to cultivate her relationship with this centered part. She's planning to take small breaks in her day to get out in nature for short periods, breathing in the fresh air.

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And she's starting to build a relationship with this part of herself that she's just discovering. And when we asked this part of you how she wanted my client to show up for her, she said, get outside, get in nature.

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During our session, we had an interesting question come up. So I was curious and trying to figure out, is this calm-centered feeling a part of her? Or was she actually accessing her capital S self? So remember, if you've listened to any of my episodes that have talked about internal family systems before, our capital S self can be described by the eight Cs.

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So they are calm, curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, clarity, connectedness, and creativity. For this client, this calm seemed to be more of a part than of her full self. And we discussed that working with this part would help her understand it more over time.

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Of course, we both had thinking parts that wanted to figure it out right then and there. But we agreed to let that go for now and just take some time getting to know this feeling in her body. And I assured her that, you know, over time, she would be able to understand it better.

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And just a reminder that our capital S self is always there underneath all the protective and exiled parts of us. We just have to learn to better access it. So I want to talk a bit about my own discovery of this calm and this centeredness.

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I have two distinct memories of discovering my own calm and center. And honestly, I can't remember which came first. And it probably doesn't matter. They're both so clear to me. The first was in 2018 when I started practicing yoga for the first time.

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I realized that I could find calm even in the poses that were difficult for me with the addition of my breath, which of course, if you are a yogi, you know that that is yoga. The breath is the practice.

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And as long as you're breathing, you're practicing. I discovered that it was a practice to quote unquote stay on my own mat, to not worry about what other students in the class were doing, to not even worry about what I was able to do in the last class and compare myself today to the me of the past.

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This practice of staying present, staying centered, staying with my breath has kept me grounded both on and off my mat. The second memory was at my busy office as a pediatrician. So at my old office, all of the doctors and nurses have a shared workstation.

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And with five doctors and nurses working at the same time sometimes, you can imagine how chaotic that could get. I love the musical Hamilton. I love all of the songs. And in the second act, there's a song called Hurricane, where Alexander Hamilton sings about being in the eye of the hurricane, where it is quiet for just a moment.

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So I would be in the doctor and nurse workstation, visualizing myself being in the eye of the hurricane, where I could find my inner quiet, even with everything kind of swirling around me. Before getting coached myself, I would have told the story that I got sucked into the swirling and then my day would go to shit.

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And of course, I was living as a victim to the chaos around me. But after coaching, I realized and recognized that I had a choice. I could choose to get involved in the madness, and much of the time it was none of my business anyway, or I could choose to stay in my calm in the eye of the hurricane.

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I hope you can imagine what I chose most of the time once I realized this. And when I did choose to get involved in the chaos, I didn't have resentment about it because it was my choice. That's the power of recognizing your center and choosing from there.

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So why is finding your center so hard for us high achievers? There are many reasons and they're different for every person. But I would venture a guess that most of us have a part that tells us when we're not in constant motion or when we're not stressed out that we're somehow doing it wrong, that something bad will happen if we stop.

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And we likely equate stress and busyness with our worth and our value. If I'm not busy, I'm not important. If I'm not stressed, I'm not trying hard enough. If I'm centered and calm, I must not have enough to do.

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There's often a fear that being centered means you'll stop being productive, that you'll lose your edge, that you won't achieve as much, that you'll become somehow complacent or lazy. But I want to tell you the opposite is actually true.

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When you operate from your center, you're way more effective, more creative, more able to respond rather than to react. And that's hard to believe when you've built your whole identity around being the person who can handle the chaos.

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And sometimes the resistance is simply because it's unfamiliar. If you've never been calm and centered, if you've never experienced that, it can feel very uncomfortable at first and scary even, like something's wrong because you're not in your usual state of stress and motion and cortisol upheaval.

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Your nervous system has to learn that calm is safe. It has to learn that the center is home and it is something that you have to practice. So what does center actually feel like? The sensations, of course, are going to be different for each person, but in general, you're going to feel more open, more expansive, more able to take deep breaths and more able to release your breath fully.

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You might feel more grounded where you feel like your feet are actually on the earth, like you're solid and you're stable. Or conversely, you might feel lighter than usual, like something heavy has been lifted off of your shoulders.

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My client described it as her shoulders dropping and not having to wear her shoulders as earrings anymore and being able to take slow, deep breaths. For me on the yoga mat, it's the sense of being present with my breath, not thinking about the next pose, not wondering when we're going to get out of this freaking pose, not comparing myself to others.

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In the eye of the hurricane, it's that quiet space where the world is still moving around me and I'm not caught up in it. You'll know when you found your center, when time kind of feels different, it's not rushed, when your breath naturally deepens, when you feel present rather than planning for the future or ruminating on the past, when there's a sense of enough rather than not enough, when you might feel connected to yourself rather than fragmented, when your decisions start to feel clearer, when you can observe your thoughts rather than being swept away with them. The beautiful thing is this isn't something you have to create or manufacture. It's already there.

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You're not building a centered self and a calm self from scratch. You're discovering one that's been there all along, just waiting for you to notice it. Here's what I want you to know. Finding your center is a practice, like I said before, and it's going to look different for every person.

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This is one of the things I love to help my clients figure out for themselves. One of the most important things I want you to understand is that this is not something you need to practice for hours on end.

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It can happen in the smallest moments during things you're already doing. So as you're taking a shower or washing your hair in the morning, can you slow down and find your version of calm? Can you notice the water hitting your body?

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Can you notice the temperature of the water? Can you notice the sensation of you rubbing your shampoo in? Can you take some deep breaths as you notice this? Or as you're making your coffee, can you make it a ritual by slowing down for just a few moments?

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Can you stir your cream in slowly, intentionally, present with that action? Or as you're driving to work, while you're sitting at a stoplight, can you bring up the sensation of calm in your body? Can you connect to that centered part of you for just those 30 seconds while you're waiting for the light to turn?

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The more you visit your center, the easier it becomes to find, I promise. Like any relationship, you have to spend some time there to get familiar with it. At first, you might only be able to access it in perfect conditions.

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So while you're on vacation in Yellowstone or at the beach or during a yoga class. But as you practice, you'll find you can access it in the chaos, at the stoplight, in the shower, in the middle of your busy day.

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And what happens is the more you spend in your center, in your calm, the more everything else shifts. You start to respond differently to stress. You start to make easier decisions. You start to notice that you can be more creative.

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You are way more compassionate with yourself and with the people that you love. You can be way more present with yourself and with the people that you love. And this is not because you're forcing anything. It's just because you're operating from a different place.

So here's what I want you to try this week. First, just notice when you're not centered, when you are caught up in this whirl, when your shoulders are up by your ears hanging like earrings, when your breathing is shallow, or when you just find yourself spinning.

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Just notice it without judgment. Second, identify one thing you already do every day that could become a micro moment of center, a micro moment of calm. So whether it's the things that I already suggested, showering, coffee break, stoplight, whatever, you pick and just make it one thing.

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You don't have to do this all the time. Next, for that one thing this week, just practice slowing down, taking at least three deep breaths, noticing the sensation of being present. See if you can find that sense of calm, even just for a moment.

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And I implore you, please do not try to be perfect at this. Do not make it another thing on your to-do list. Just experiment, get curious, start building that relationship with this part of yourself.

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And give yourself permission for this to be unfamiliar and wonky, for it to feel weird at first, for your achieving parts to tell you that this is a waste of time and you're doing it wrong. Like expect that to happen and actually thank those achieving parts for coming in and reminding you that this isn't what they're used to and sending them some love at the same time.

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So just keep practicing, keep visiting. Your calm and your center is there waiting for you and it's patient. It's always there. You just have to keep choosing to come home to it. Remember, you have calm available to you at all times.

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You have a centered self that exists underneath all the chaos, all the achieving, all the doing. It's not something you have to earn or create. It's already there. The practice is simply learning to access it, learning what it feels like, building a relationship with it, and choosing to return to it again and again.

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If you would like some support finding your center, if you would like some support finding your calm, if you want help building this practice in a way that works for your life, this is exactly the kind of work that I do with my clients in coaching.

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Let's figure out what your center and your calm feels like and how you can access it in your real busy life. Because becoming a favorite version of you includes knowing how to find your calm, especially in the hurricane of life.

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Okay, thanks for listening, everybody. I'll talk to you again next week.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!