#206: Remodel Your Home, Remodel Your Life

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.

Hello, beautiful humans.

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Welcome back to Your Favorite You. I am still Melissa Parsons, your favorite podcast host and life coach.

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If you follow me anywhere outside of this podcast or if you're one of my friends in real life, you already know what's been consuming a quite large percentage of my brain lately.

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My hubby and I are in the middle of remodeling our primary bedroom and bathroom. We decided to hire designers to help us with this vision.

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They have brought in contractors, two guys, Joe and Mal, who have been almost unbelievably working exclusively on our project for the whole duration, not juggling three job sites, just ours.

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And it has been a genuine gift and also a daily master class in how a remodel actually works. First, I wanna shout out Seif and Stewart Designs.

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Ellen Seif and Stephanie Stewart have been an absolute joy to work with. Um, we have the same sense of humor.

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They make me laugh and, um, they have figured out how John and I tick and that's been fun. And then Joe and Mal have been just an absolute delight to have in the house.

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They're funny and true craftsmen and they work really hard and it's just been a, a real treat to have them in the house. So Mazzarello Home Improvements.

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So Joe Mazzarello is the owner and he's awesome, so you can follow him on Instagram too. He goes by Joey Mazzarello if you wanna follow and see my bathroom and bedroom come to life. Okay.

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Somewhere around week two of what we think is gonna be an 8 to 12-week transformation, I was standing in what used to be our bathroom and what is now, structurally speaking, a construction site.

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And it hit me, "Oh, this is coaching. This is exactly what I do with my clients." The parallels are so precise it's almost funny.

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So today I wanna walk you through the beginning of my actual remodel, the decisions, the surprises, the messes, and show you kind of piece by piece how it maps onto the work of remodeling a life.

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And I also wanna say that I reserve the right to do more episodes on this because we're only, we're about four weeks in, so my suspicion is that there's gonna be more fodder and there's gonna be more parallels that I see between remodeling a room and remodeling your life.

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So here's the first thing I had to reckon with. I am for the most part physically capable of doing a lot of this work myself. I could learn some of these trades. It would take me a real long time.

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I could figure out plumbing with enough YouTube tutorials and probably many days of my life that I would never get back.

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Um, I could probably figure out electrical wiring too, but not without the risk of, you know, setting my whole house on fire.

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But what I wanna tell you is I could do this, but it would take me exponentially longer and it would come with its own particular set of frustrations.

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The frustration of trial and error, of not knowing what I don't know, of making an expensive mistake because nobody warned me about the thing that experienced licensed professionals see coming from a mile away.

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I also could have probably designed it myself, and I have done that, um, in different rooms of my house and with, with varying levels of success and varying, um, satisfaction in the outcome.

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So anyway, we hired Ellen and Stephanie. They brought us to Mazzarello Home Improvements.

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Not because I'm incapable, because capable and efficient are two completely different things, and because there is real value in having someone beside you who's done this work many times before and can see around corners that you may not even know exist yet.

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And this is exactly what coaching is. Of course you are capable of figuring your life out on your own. I want to say that clearly because I never want my clients to believe that I think otherwise.

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You could theoretically work through everything alone eventually with enough time and enough trial and error and enough painful lessons learned the hard way, but a guide changes the timeline.

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A guide changes the experience of getting there. A guide like me sees the load-bearing wall before you accidentally take a sledgehammer to it.

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And that is not a knock on your capability; it's just what expertise is for.

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Here's another thing I didn't appreciate fully about remodeling until we were standing in the middle of the decision ourselves. The scope is entirely up to you.

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We could have simply changed the paint color and swapped out the countertop and some of the light fixtures and called it done. It could have been a weekend project, relatively speaking.

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Instead, we chose to take it back to the studs, to strip it down to the bones and build it back up intentionally. And on the other end of the spectrum, we could have gone even further.

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We could have knocked down walls. We could have made an addition to the house entirely. We didn't need to take it that far, but we could have.

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I want you to really hear this because it's the heart of how I think about coaching.

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Working with me can be choosing a new paint color and countertop, or it can be knocking down walls and completely rebuilding. Both are legitimate. Both are a project.

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You're never signing up for one scope and quietly being handed a different one.

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I'm not going to hear, "I just want a little more confidence in myself," and secretly steer you toward excavating your entire childhood, whether you ask for that or not.

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The scope is yours to choose. And here's the part I really want to underline. You can always change the scope in either direction at any point along the way.

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You might start out thinking you just want to paint and you just want new light fixtures, and three sessions into coaching, you realize, "Oh, this actually goes much deeper than I thought, so let's take some of this back to the studs." Or you might start out thinking you want a fully gutted renovation, and partway through you realize, "Actually, this smaller shift is exactly what I needed.

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I don't need to knock down every wall in my life to feel better." Both directions are allowed. Certainly, neither one is a failure or a sign that you did it wrong the first time.

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And one more thing on this, because I think it matters. You could always change your mind, period, at any point in either project.

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If you wait until later to make a change, it may take more time and cost more money than it would have if you had caught it earlier. That's true with a remodel.

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Moving a decision after the walls are already closed up is a different, more expensive conversation than moving it while the studs are still exposed. And that's true with your life.

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Waiting to change your mind doesn't make the change impossible. It just usually makes it a little bit more time-consuming than it would've been if you had trusted yourself a little bit sooner.

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But it's never too late. You can always change your mind.

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If you have ever read the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff to a child, or if you've been a child who had it read to you, you probably know the premise.

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You give a mouse a cookie, and then he's gonna want a glass of milk to go with it, and then he'll need a straw, and then he'll wanna check his reflection when he's done, which means he needs a mirror, which means he notices his hair needs a trim, and on and on it goes.

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One small request cascading into an entire unplanned chain of events. This remodel has been, over and over again, exactly that book come to life. Here's my favorite example.

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Before we decided to do the full remodel, I had bought a relatively new shower head for our primary bathroom shower.

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Once the remodel started, I decided to take that shower head, or I decided to ask Joe to take that shower head and put it in my boys' bathroom, since it's my shower during the construction.

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I thought it would be a simple swap, right? 20 minutes tops.

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Joe was like, "No problem." Except the new shower head then needed a new diverter in the tub, which meant taking a closer look at what we thought was an access panel to the plumbing behind that bathtub.

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This turned out to not be an access panel at all. It was a dummy panel, purely decorative, leading nowhere, likely so that the house inspection would pass with a check mark.

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This meant that Joe and Mal had to actually build a real access panel from scratch just to reach the plumbing.

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So what could have been a 20-minute shower head swap turned into a multi-day project, all because of one small action that set off a chain that nobody could have predicted.

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And we kinda laughed about it. Joe was like, "They made more work for themselves by not having the access panel there." It didn't make any sense to him.

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So I wanna tell you about the other time I gave a mouse a cookie, because that's the reason I'm sitting here talking to you at all on this podcast.

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Back in 2018, I started coaching because I wanted a different relationship with food and with my body. That was it. That was the whole ask. One thing that I wanted to change.

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Except working on my relationship with food and my body and seeing all the amazing changes that I was able to make there made me think, "Oh, my gosh. If I can make these changes on my relationship with my food and my body, what about my relationship with my husband?" Which led me to marriage coaching with my own coach, the incredible Maggie Reyes.

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You've heard me talk about her multiple times, and she's been on the podcast multiple times.

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This led me to fall completely in love with the process of coaching itself, which then led me, at 48 years of age, to leave a career in pediatrics that I had spent decades building and become a coach myself.

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I could never, not in a million years, have seen that coming from where I started.

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I gave the mouse a cookie in 2018, hoping for a slightly better relationship with my body, and I ended up with an entirely rebuilt life.

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That was one hell of a remodel, and I am so unbelievably glad we gave the mouse a cookie both times.

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In my boy shower, because I love that damn shower head in there, I can now wash Frank in there with no problem 'cause it has a handheld shower head.

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And then back in 2018 when I hired my first coach. You genuinely never know when you agree to one thing what chain of events it might set up. And that is not a reason to avoid starting.

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I think it's a whole reason to start. Okay. Another part of the remodel. Years ago, we had done a small repair in that same bathroom, in our primary bathroom.

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The shower pan was leaking, thankfully into the unfinished part of our basement where we were able to catch it early. We hired someone at that time. We thought it was handled.

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Turns out, the person who did that repair was a bit of a hack.

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I can say that with a laugh now, but it wasn't funny in the moment that I realized that Joe discovered that this person had cut into one of our floor joists in several places just to install the new shower drain.

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He'd also, in a incredible Einstein move, screwed directly through the waterproofing that he installed, which meant that there had been a slow, silent leak through that waterproofing for years.

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Mold developed in the subfloor, of course, and in some of the framing. We likely would have never known any of this if we hadn't decided to do this bigger remodel and actually open the walls up.

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This is almost too perfectly what coaching often looks like. We start out addressing the thing you came for, a paint and countertop concern or maybe a to-the-studs concern.

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And as we start peeling back the layers of things that have happened and choices you've made and why you made them, we start discovering some leaks. There might be some mold.

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There's some damage that's been quietly accumulating in places that you couldn't see, caused by decisions that you made at the time with the best information you had.

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And sometimes, this is important, the damage wasn't caused by you at all.

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Sometimes it was caused by someone else years ago who did what we can call a hack job in some part of your life and left you to discover the consequences much later on your own.

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Either way, once you see it, you get to do something about it. You get to take your power back.

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You get to rebuild that part of your life differently with full awareness this time, awareness of the decisions you made, awareness of how other people's decisions have quietly shaped you over time.

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That awareness can be uncomfortable in the moment. It's also the only path to an actual lasting repair instead of one more coat of paint over a problem that's still slowly growing underneath.

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Now a smaller point, but one I don't wanna skip because I think it's genuinely liberating. Throughout this remodel, we've made choices that other people might not have made.

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Not because our choice is objectively better, but purely because we like it.

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Two finishes that are functionally identical, doing the exact same job, holding up the exact same way over time, and we picked the one that made us happy to look at. That's it.

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That's the whole reason.

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You're allowed to make choices in your life the same way, choices that are functionally the same as some other option, but that matter to you aesthetically, emotionally, personally, for reasons that don't require a spreadsheet or a justification.

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You don't owe anyone a practical reason for the parts of your life you build purely because you like them.

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I wanna be honest with you about what our house looks like right now in the middle of all of this. It's not pretty. There is dust in places that aren't even part of the renovation.

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There are exposed studs and hanging wires and a bathroom that currently has no bathroom in it.

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If you walked into my house today, you would have absolutely no idea what it's going to look like when it's finished.

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You would just see the mess, plus the mess of us having to move all of our stuff that was in those two rooms into other parts of the house.

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Remodeling your relationship with yourself is exactly the same. There is not much pretty about the middle of it.

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The middle is where your old patterns are torn out and new ones haven't yet been built.

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The middle is where you feel less certain than you did before you started, not more, because certainly was actually just familiarity in disguise, and you've just demolished the familiar thing.

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The middle is dusty and disorienting and occasionally makes you wonder if you've made a terrible mistake. And the entire job in the middle is for you to hold the vision anyway.

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Not because you see it yet in the physical space around you, but because you decided on it before the demolition started, and you trust it enough to keep going even when the current view is exposed studs and dust.

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That's not blind faith. That's just what building anything real actually looks like while it's happening.

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Now, there are gonna be people who look at our finished bathroom and think, "I would not have done it that way. I wouldn't have chosen that color. That's too fancy. It's too dramatic.

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I wouldn't have picked that finish. Those light fixtures are a little much for my taste." And you know what? That's completely fine, genuinely. It doesn't hurt me.

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The same is true for the choices you make in remodeling your life.

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People will have opinions about the boundaries you set, the relationships you end, the career you leave, the version of you that you're building. They would not have done it that way.

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They would have chosen differently. And that's allowed for them. Because here's the thing that settles it every single time. You are the one who has to live in the space you create, not anyone else.

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You're the one who walks into that bathroom every morning. You're the one who lives inside your own mind and your own body every single day for the rest of your life.

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Their opinion about your finishes doesn't have to move in with you. Only you do. So here's what I want to leave you with.

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Whatever remodel you're contemplating in your home, in your life, you get to choose the scope. Paint in the countertop or all the way to the studs.

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You're allowed to hire someone to help you get there faster and with fewer mistakes, even though you're fully capable of figuring it out alone eventually.

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You might give the mouse a cookie and end up somewhere you could have never predicted. And I hope you do.

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You might open a wall and find damage you didn't know was there, caused by you, caused by someone else.

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And either way, finding it is how you finally get to fix it instead of painting over it one more time. You're allowed to choose things just because you like them.

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You're allowed to be in the messy, dusty, uncertain middle of it without that meaning you made a mistake.

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You're allowed to let other people have opinions about your choices because they're not the ones who have to live there. You are.

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And if you decide later you want to change something, the scope, the direction, your mind entirely, you're fucking allowed to do that too. It might take a little more time.

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It might cost you a little more than it would have earlier, but it's never too late to change your mind in your house or in your life.

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If you're looking for someone who's willing and able to help you change your life in a direction that you choose, I would love if you chose me to be your coach.

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Send me a message at melissa @melissaparsonscoaching. Okay. I love you all so much. Thanks for listening to Your Favorite You. I will see you 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!