#35 Belonging

Read the full episode transcript

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, Your Favorite You listeners. Welcome back for another episode of the podcast. I am recording this episode just after launching my first small group cohort of women on the path to becoming their favorite versions of themselves. We met for the first time less than 48 hours ago, and it was nothing short of spectacular. I have been kind of teary about it all week. The teariness started on Monday when I invited them all to our private Facebook group and asked them to share a little bit about themselves there. Of course, I went first and shared some thoughts about me, and then each of them shared so beautifully. This might be the first time that you're listening to this podcast, so I'm feeling called to read to you what I shared with them in the group, so I'm going to share it right now.

This is what I wrote: I am Melissa Parsons. I am your coach. I have been a life coach for 24 years - 22 years as a pediatrician, although I didn't call myself a coach then, and now three years as a certified coach. I found coaching in 2018 when I recognized that I had the life that I had always dreamed of, but something was off. I initially hired Katrina Ubell to work on weight and body image issues. I then hired Maggie Reyes to work on my marriage, and after coaching with Maggie, she suggested that I was so powerful in my own self-coaching that I should consider becoming a coach myself. So I took that leap in March 2020, and Melissa Parsons' coaching was born on May 27th, 2020, which was, coincidentally, my mom's birthday. When I certified, I decided I wanted more training, so I completed Bev Aron's Deep Dive Coaching program. I then found that I wanted more training on trauma, so I have worked with Bonnie Badenock for the past one and a half years, and I'm starting another year of training with her in July to further deepen my knowledge. I will always have a coach to help me look at my brain. Right now, I have two coaches: Maggie to help me with my mindset and Stacey Boehman to help me with my business. I am part of her 200K coaching program.

You will hear me talking about countless coaches, referencing their work, and lauding them for all the good they bring to the world. I'm still very active in the Life Coach School alumni group and in the Deep Dive alumni group, so I have access to the most amazing coaches on the planet. It's so fun. Many of you know that I'm married to my med school sweetheart, Jon, and we have been together since 1995. We have two young adult sons: our eldest, Jack, is 21, and our youngest, Owen, is 18. We are also the proud parents of a chocolate labradoodle. His name is Barney Stinson Parsons, and he is 10 years old. I'm so honored to be your coach and can't wait to see your responses to this post. So that's how I introduce myself to the group and, if you're new to the podcast, that's my story with coaching. Just before our kickoff call last Wednesday, I reached out to my friends who are also coaches.

We refer to each other as work wives. So hi Hala, hi Lindsay, hi Maggie, hi Sara. I was asking them to send me all the good juju in the universe, and my friend Lindsay sent back a quote that she had seen that morning that she said was perfect for me. She said she wrote it down. She wasn't sure why she wrote it down, but then she knew that she needed to share it with me, and the quote is this: "Being nervous isn't fear; it's adrenaline; it's your body preparing you to do something extraordinary." The quote is by Simon LeBon, the lead singer in Duran Duran, and boy, was the call ever extraordinary. Some powerful shifts are already happening in the group, and it was such an honor to be a part of and to witness. All of this is a preamble to what I want to talk about today.

The first topic I taught in the group was the concept of belonging, so of course, I want to tell you all about it too. Believe it or not, you make decisions every day about belonging. In every group that you participate in, you decide to belong in your family, with your friends, with your work colleagues, with your book club; you get the idea. You also get to decide not to belong in certain groups anymore. This could be your family or your former group of friends or the people you used to work with. Although you are likely in groups of people who are all completely different people at several different ages and stages of life, you likely all have way more in common than you have differences. If you focus your brain on the similarities, thinking, "Wow, she's just like me," you will see the similarities all over the place. For sure, most of us in the Western world, and I would venture to guess that a significant majority of you listening to this podcast, are left-brain dominant, and we're living in a world that caters to left-brain individuals.

Your left brain has several jobs. One of them is to categorize things. And your brain, uncoached, wants to spot all the differences. There's nothing wrong with that. It's kept you alive and well to this point. And, of course, we want to celebrate the differences between us because they're what make us uniquely us. Your left brain also wants to put everything and everyone in a hierarchy. As I'm the voice of this podcast, you might want to put me near the top of the hierarchy and on a pedestal. Please don't do that. I'm human, just like you, and I am for sure going to make mistakes. Some of these you will have a front-row seat to. I will tell you all about them. Some of these will happen when you aren't paying attention and some of them you may have no knowledge of at all.

It's normal for your brain to want to figure out where exactly you fit in the groups that you're in. In my coaching groups, we intentionally agree at the beginning to decide that we are all messy humans here on Earth, learning how our favorite version of ourselves handles life, and we're working to become her or simply just allowing ourselves to be her. I believe that in order to feel like you belong in any group, you first have to belong to yourself. You have to become safe with yourself so that you can feel safe in each and every group you decide you want to be a part of. For some of you, this is going to come naturally, and for others of you, you may have to work on it a bit, and for some of you, you might have to work on it a lot. None of this is a problem. I'm here to be your guide if you decide to coach with me. What does it mean to be safe with yourself? It means learning to trust yourself if you don't already. It means learning to trust your body, your gut, your intuition, your inner knowing, whatever you call it.

We have all been, unfortunately, socialized to ignore our bodies, and so much of what we do in coaching is to unlearn old things that we've learned in the past, or to go back to a time when you did trust yourself, when you did listen to your own body, when you did listen to yourself and everything turned out just fine. It also means that we need to drop our binary thinking. We naturally want to categorize ourselves as right or wrong, the decisions we make as right or wrong. What if there is no right or wrong? There are only decisions and actions that either lead you closer to your favorite you or teach you something you need to know on your way to your favorite you, just taking a slight detour, if you will.

The crazy thing that happens when you decide that you belong in any group you choose to be a part of is that it makes it so much easier for you to choose to not be part of groups where you no longer feel like your values or your choices in life align with that group. You don't have to feel bad that you've changed. You don't have to make the people in the group where you no longer choose to belong wrong for not having changed. It just is what it is. There don't have to be any hard feelings. I've said it before and I will say it again and I will keep saying it until the end of time: It is a privilege to be able to leave something - a friend group, a job, a relationship, even your family - if you choose not to belong there without hating it.

It's a privilege to be able to leave something without hating it. You can love something and still leave it if belonging there no longer aligns with what you want or value in life. I would love it if you would intentionally decide that you want to belong in my next group coaching cohort. We start in August, which seems far away, but it will be here before we know it. Go to MelissaParsonsCoaching.com/group where you can book a call to schedule a consult with me to decide that group coaching is the next step to becoming your favorite you. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.

Thank you for listening to the podcast and loving on me all the time. Although the doors are closed for the inaugural group of women wanting to become their favorite versions of themselves. No worries. You still have the opportunity to work with me in a group setting. This group is for you since you are listening to my podcast, you will get amazing coaching plus the beauty of a community of other women who are interested in thriving as much as they can, and you also will want you to succeed at becoming your favorite you.

There is benefit that is undeniable from watching another woman being coached on an issue you've had in the past, or one that you're currently having. Our brains just see so much more possibility when we are not the ones in the hot seat. You'll also have the ability to come every week and share your vulnerability and watch others share their vulnerability.

We know that shame only grows in silence. There is power in being held by other incredible humans who are often caught in some of the same traps that you are with your thinking.

Please go right now to www.MelissaParsonsCoaching.com/group and schedule a consult with me so that I can hear how I can help you, and we can decide together if you are a great fit to join the group.

You'll need to join the waitlist. We start in August. Please join us. You will not regret it.