#43 Freedom

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 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 intention.

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. Welcome back to episode number 43 of Your Favorite You. First, a heartfelt thanks to those of you who keep coming back every week to listen. And I request, if any of the podcasts that I'm sharing speak to you, or you can think of someone who would love to hear my thoughts on a weekly basis, please share an episode with them.

I would really appreciate it. Today's episode is all about freedom, and as I write it, I am listening to the amazing George Michael belt out a song that he wrote, recorded, and produced. You guessed it, Freedom. The digitally remastered version is playing on repeat as I come up with what I want to share with you today.

As a quick aside, I watched the Netflix documentary about Wham last night, and I really enjoyed it. So, if you're like me and enjoy the music of Wham and continue to love the music when George went solo, I would recommend the documentary. It's really hard for me to believe now that I have boys their age that these talented young men rose to stardom in their late teens and early twenties.

It's pretty remarkable. Okay, onto the topic for today. I would like to invite you all to contemplate what it is that you might need freedom from. It could be a relationship that's run its course. Maybe it's a relationship with a friend or a partner or a romantic interest, or maybe it's a family member.

It might have made sense to be in this relationship in the past, but it doesn't make sense anymore, and you need freedom from this relationship. It could be being mean to yourself in order to attempt to change your behavior. As I've shared before on the podcast and many emails, social media posts, webinars, and the like, we have been taught that shaming ourselves and being mean to ourselves will help us stop behaviors that we want to discontinue.

But I promise you that it does not work like this. It might be helpful in the short term, but it never works in the long run and actually usually ends up making things worse. You might need freedom from trying to control other people in your life in order to feel peace who has not fallen into this trap.

If you know someone who has not fallen into this trap of trying to control others to feel peaceful. I would love to meet her. I firmly believe that this type of unicorn does not exist, and I believe in unicorns, just not ones that have never attempted to control someone else to make themselves feel better.

I was just coaching a fabulous badass woman about this. This week, she was wanting to control her 16-year-old son and have him act differently than he was acting. It's such a trap because it feels so fucking true. If he would just listen and act the way that she knows would be safer, then she could relax and enjoy her relationship with him.

This enticing trap keeps her so stuck and every person who thinks that she's certainly not alone. I coach another woman who desperately wants her husband to be reliable and do the things he says he's going to do. But he has shown her over and over and over again that he is a master at starting things, but his follow through is less than stellar.

When she's caught in the trap of thinking that he has to change in order for her to be happy, it totally blocks her from seeing the good things that he is already doing, and it totally blocks her from seeing the multitude of ways that she can get stuff done without needing to rely on him for these things.

You could also need freedom from saying yes to others. When you really want to say yes to yourself, think about how much time you spend in an average week doing shit you don't want to do. If you're anything like the average people pleaser, this is likely a ginormous amount of time. How are you giving the time to things that you don't want to do, keeping you from living out your dreams?

I recently had to practice this in my own life. Having the momentary, uncomfortable conversation of saying, no, that is not going to work for me. It's hard to do it in the moment for sure, especially if this is something new that you're practicing. The thing that would've really sucked though was to have said yes in the moment, trying to avoid that uncomfortable feeling.

Then having the dread and the regret leading up to the event and scrambling around to fit this thing that I did not want to do into my life. This event would've actually involved my whole family. So, I would've also had to coach myself through dealing with their absolutely warranted, bitching about what I would've been asking them to do when I really didn't want to do this thing in the first place, who listening needs freedom from hating your body or the way that you look or feeling it each day.

Ladies, if I am being honest, I still struggle with this one for sure. I have gotten so much coaching on this. I have done lots of work on it, and I tend to swing wildly between loving my body and being so grateful for it, for everything that is done for me and for what it is still doing today, to being so mean to myself, for not recognizing that as an all things in life for me.

There's a 50/50, there are fluctuations, and if I want to change my body, it's up to me to make that decision and to keep making that decision. Even, and maybe especially when I'm feeling good in my body, I know for sure that none of us can have a healthy relationship with ourselves by hating our body. My favorite me currently has to lovingly question myself whenever I'm being mean to myself about my body.

Does anyone listening need freedom from comparing your life to what you see others portraying on social media or in their annual holiday letter? First, I want to normalize this behavior because we all have a left brain, which loves to categorize and put things into a hierarchy. So, we will always compare and judge, this is not a problem.

The problem comes when we don't recognize that anyone that we're comparing ourselves or our family, or our marriage, or our parenting too, also has a less than insta-worthy or holiday letter worthy. Side to their life that they are likely not sharing unless they're a life coach. This is why the quote, “be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a battle.

You know nothing about hit so hard. We tend to forget that when we are scrolling through carefully curated social media profiles, we see also if you are the holiday letter writing type. Wouldn't it be so refreshing to have everyone write the shitty things as much as they write the shiny things? I know that so many of us need freedom from being anything other than exactly you.

How might your life change if we all had the freedom to be exactly ourselves, what would you do differently? Any part of you that you are thinking is not welcome, we want to question. Remember, there is no such thing as too loud, too quiet, too silly, too confident, too shy. Those are all just lies I imagine the list goes on and on for most of you.

I know it did for me prior to hiring my first life coach. Like I said, I'm still working on all of these things to varying degrees and with varying degrees of success, but that is not a problem. So, none of us is ever done. We get to keep iterating and iterating as long as we're alive. Some of you might absolutely love this fact.

It might frustrate the fuck out of others of you who thought that there was some fictional fi finish line that you were heading toward. To some of you, this might sound like a lot of work. Let me tell you something. It is way more work to stay the same. If you are not Your Favorite You, we definitely discount the cost of not doing the work and of staying the same.

I invite you to think about it. People schedule consults with me because they want freedom from negative self-talk, from worrying about what other people think, from not being able to say the hard thing. From having zero boundaries or very loose boundaries from underearning. This is especially true for us women.

We're so cut up in this from thinking that their specific flaws are holding them back in life from imposter syndrome, from fear of taking what they think are scary next steps in their life from going through the motions of life without any joy. From using alcohol to feel more confident or to escape their day-to-day life from having regrets about life.

These are just some of the reasons from the past few months that my clients have listed as why they want to work with me when they fill out the little application on the consult form. And these are only a very few things that we work on every week in coaching. If you would like freedom from any of these things in your life, or if there are other topics holding you back from being Your Favorite You, please book a consult. I would love to help you.

Thank you for listening to the podcast and loving on me all the time. Now that my group launch is closed, I am opening up two spots to work with me one-on-one. If one-on-one coaching is more your jam, please reach out to me to book a consult by going to my website, MelissaParsonsCoaching.com, and clicking on the Work with Me tab.

I would love to discuss with you how I can help you on a one-on-one basis. Talk to you soon.