#204: I'm really fucking good at this!

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.

Well, hey there, once again, my favorite podcast listeners. I am still Melissa Parsons, your favorite podcast host. Welcome back to another episode of Your Favorite You.

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I have to tell you something, and I need you to let me finish before you decide I've turned into an egomaniac. I'm really fucking good at my job. I want you to notice how uncomfortable that sentence may have just made you because I felt it too, writing it down, that little flinch, that urge to soften it, to qualify it, to follow it up with a joke so that nobody would think that I am getting too big for my britches.

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I would love it if you would ask yourself why that flinch exists. Because today I'm not going to soften anything. Today, I'm tooting my own goddamn horn on purpose. And for the next however many minutes, I want you to sit in the discomfort of that with me.

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Because my hope is by the end, you are going to want to toot your own goddamn horn too. A couple of things happened recently that made me know that I needed to write this podcast. The first was a new client on her very first consult with me.

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Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, she just stopped and said, damn, you're really good at this. And here's the part I want you to notice, not what she said, but what I said back. I didn't deflect it.

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I didn't soften it. I looked at her and I said, I certainly hope so. I've been doing this for well over six years now and I've put a lot of time and intentionality into being, into becoming excellent at coaching.

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I want you to sit with that for a second because that response surprised even me a little bit when I thought back on it. No, oh, it's really all you. No joke, to move past it. Just a plain confident, hell yes, followed by the receipts.

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And I think that's actually way more rare than we realize. Most of us have a reflex to deflect any compliment the second it lands. And I didn't do that. I want to tell you why. The second thing happened with another new client, also on a consult.

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She told me, I didn't know it would feel this good to just vomit all this out to you and have you take it in with no judgment. I want you to hear that one because I think it's easy to hear it as a nice thing someone said and move on.

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But that is not a compliment about my personality. That's a compliment about a skill. Being still, being completely non-reactive while another human hands you the messiest, most ashamed, most tangled up parts of themselves, and not flinching, not judging, not feeling the need to try to fix.

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That's not something you're born knowing how to do. That is something that you build deliberately over time. So let's just say the true thing: that I spent more than two decades in medicine and now nearly a decade in coaching, eight and a half years as a client myself, learning what it feels like to be on the other side of a chair, and six and a half years as the coach, doing the work of building the skill in myself on purpose, one session at a time. That amazing woman on the consult felt safe enough to vomit her whole story out onto the table between us. That's not an accident. That is creating safety and having the competence to sit with that information.

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Here's the next thing that happened. A mom reached out to me, a mom of triplets that I used to take care of back when I was their pediatrician. She told me they'd just been in for their wellness visit and that they really, really, really miss having Dr. Parsons as their doctor. Now, I have to be honest and tell you that those triplets were little. They're not likely to remember me specifically. The particular way I talked to them, the specific things I said in the exam room.

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That memory isn't theirs to carry. It's their parents. It was the parents that I actually helped so much, the ones sitting in the room, scared, exhausted, needing someone steady and capable in front of them.

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And it's their mom who misses me, not the kids, not really. It's the mom. And she said, you just made me feel like I was a competent mom. And she was a competent mom. Of course she was. And that matters because it means the thing she's actually telling me is you were so good at your job that years later, I still think about how you made me feel as a parent.

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That's not nostalgia for a pediatrician. That's proof of impact that has outlasted my job title there entirely. So let me just say it plainly. I was fucking great at that job too. I'm going to leave that right there.

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I'm not going to follow it with a joke because it's not funny. Oh, and one more thing. If that mom is listening, you can be my client right now and you can come every week and we can discuss your parenting and how you're an awesome mom and how you want to keep being an awesome mom.

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And I can help you stay on track. So full circle moment right there. The third thing that came up this week that made me know that I needed to write this is a little different. And it might actually be my favorite piece of evidence in this whole episode because it's a time that I got to see myself the way my clients see me.

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I've been clearing out storage space on my computer, running low, digging through old files, and I keep running into pieces of old videos of me coaching my people, old session recordings. And I have to tell you, watching snippets of those back to make sure that I can delete them, I am continually impressed, not in a vain way, in a genuine way.

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The depth and the breadth of the topics we cover. All the different tools and skills I pull out session after session to help the women I work with build a better relationship with themselves. And then from that steadier place, better relationships with the people they love.

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And of course, sometimes the people they just have to deal with in the course of an ordinary life. Here's what's interesting about that. Of course, I wasn't performing for those videos. Nobody was watching over my shoulder while I coached during those sessions.

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That's just what I actually do in the room when nobody's grading me. And when I watch it back without any inner critic narrating in real time, I get to see it the way my client sees it. And what I see is, I'm good.

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I'm really, really good at this. Most of us are too close to our own competence to see it clearly. It becomes invisible to us because it's fluent, because it's the water we're swimming in, because we're not white-knuckling it.

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We're just doing it. The way you don't think about how you're walking while you walk. Those videos were proof I didn't go looking for, but I'm so glad I found it anyway. So now I've laid out these four pieces of evidence, the two consults, the message from the triplets mom, the videos that I unearthed, and I want to ask the real question underneath all of it.

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Why is it so much easier for me to hand you a list of evidence than to just say plainly, I'm competent and mean it? I think a lot of it, of course, is socialization. Women, in particular, get punished early and often for confidence that isn't wrapped in humility, self-deprecation, or immediately crediting someone else.

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Staying small reads as likable. Owning your own skill reads as risky. We'll take a bullet for our best friend's ego all day long, tell her she's brilliant, remind her of her wins, insist she deserves the promotion, insists she deserves an amazing relationship.

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And then we turn around and we just can't do the same for ourselves without immediately adding a but or a caveat. So let me draw a hard line here because I think it matters. This is not me telling you I'm better than other coaches or better than other doctors or better than anybody.

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That is not the point. And it's not true. And it's completely uninteresting. The point is this. I have put an enormous, very specific, sustained amount of work in. First as a doctor for over two decades, now as a coach, again, for nearly a decade.

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I've been doing the work. And it would be dishonest of me to pretend that I don't see the results of that work. Refusing to acknowledge it isn't humility. It's just inaccurate. Competence, acknowledged honestly, is not arrogance.

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Arrogance is claiming skill you haven't earned or using the skill you do have to make someone else feel small. This is the opposite of that. This is just telling the truth about nearly three decades, really, if you count it all together, of care, training, attention, intention, and showing up.

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But I don't want to leave this as just, I'm skilled, because that's not actually the deepest layer here. Underneath the skill is something I think matters even more. I have built a life I genuinely love doing this.

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The competence is real, but it didn't happen by accident. It isn't just a string of lucky compliments I happened to collect this month. It's a body of work, decades of it, two full careers of it. Eight and a half years sitting in the client chair learning about me.

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Six and a half years sitting in the coach's chair, also learning about me, but building that base of knowledge. That's not a lightning strike. That is abundance accumulated on purpose, one deliberate choice at a time.

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And I think that's the piece I want you to hear most today. Not just I'm fucking good at my job, but I have spent my whole adult life building something I love. And I'm allowed to see that clearly and to say so out loud without apologizing for it.

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So here's what I would love for you to do, my favorite listeners. I want you to think of the last time something happened or someone told you that you were good at something. Really think about it. I want you to remember exactly how fast you deflected it, the joke you might have made, the compliment you might have redirected, the, oh, it was really nothing that came out of your mouth before you even had time to think about it.

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And then I want you to go back to that moment just in your head and let yourself actually hear it this time. Just once, just for a second. You don't have to deflect. You don't need a qualifier. You don't need a but.

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And I want you to take it a step further this week if you're willing and up for it. Write down one piece of evidence of your own competence. You don't have to post it anywhere. You don't have to perform it for anyone.

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Just so you can see it the way I got to see myself in those old videos from the outside without any inner critic narrating over top of it. I'm really fucking good at this. I've built a life. I fucking love doing it.

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Say that about yourself sometime. See how it feels. Okay, that's all for today. I'll see you next time.

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!