Cwl Ep111: The lesson I learned from a strapless bra (yep!)

Hey, it’s Lisa Corduff. Welcome to the podcast where you can expect inspiring, raw, energising, and transformative conversations with people on the path of personal evolution. I’m here to really live my life. And if you are too, these conversations are just for you. I’m really glad you are here. Enjoy.

Okay. So the title of this podcast might have you a little bit confused, but there’s a really great analogy in here today. And I wanted to share it with you, especially at this moment in time, because what I can see out there is lots of women expecting things from themselves at the moment. And sort of always, sometimes, I think we have these hugely high expectations on ourselves. And a lot of the time we just haven’t quite got the basics right. And when we nail the basics so much more is possible.

Okay. So my bras situation, there’s a few different ways in which I’ve really gotten bras wrong. And my best efforts at clothes have kind of fallen flat. So there was this one time that I bought a really, really lovely top. And I’m not a huge strapless bra fan, but I had one and I had to wear a strapless bra with this. And so I just wore what I had, which was probably too big. It just, it absolutely wasn’t doing the right things. But I thought, “Oh, I don’t wear these strapless bras often enough to justify buying another one. So I’ll just wear this one from 2003.” So these are about 10 years old. And, but the thing is that I’d actually bought this beautiful top. And I smushed on the old strapless bra underneath and wore the top, and it was a disaster.

It was just, it didn’t look right. It didn’t fit properly at all. And I should have just invested in a strapless bra for the next stage of my life for where my boobs were at and my body shape was at. And then it would’ve been fine. I mean, I ended up having to do that because I wanted to wear the top again. But I just, I hadn’t got the foundation right. And nice things, those extra things look better, feel better when we’re nailing the basics. Right?

Another time, it was actually after we’d moved to Melbourne and I met an amazing woman who’s been, she’s actually been so helpful for me, with sometimes I’ll take her shopping if I need to get something special. And She’s just got a really good eye for fashion and what is sort of working. And there was one time I robbed up to school and she just flat out said, you need new bras.

And this is probably, oh, it’s probably 2018, maybe. So I’d probably, I’d known her for over a year, but we weren’t super close friends. But I’d had to buy a lot of new clothes moving to Melbourne from after living in Brisbane for five years, and Sydney five years before that, I didn’t really have a great winter wardrobe. So I was having to buy jumpers, and jackets, and all those things. And I mean, I think on this day I was just wearing a, just a wind sheet or jumper, and yet she was quite able, she’s quite forthright, was able to point out, “Nothing’s looking good because you need new bras, Lisa.”

And I had not thought about buying bras for years. This was a year everything was, I was all over town. Nick was in and out of rehab. I had a kid in kinder, two kids in school. It was just, it was really a tough time and I was not prioritising my own basics. I was so busy taking care of everybody else and just like grabbing jumpers, getting some more winter stuff for my first winter back in Melbourne. And I hadn’t even noticed that maybe if I just had a supportive bra that fit me right now, that everything would look better. What?

Can you see the analogy that I’m trying to get to? Been having lots of conversations with women at the moment about rest on socials. And it’s like, we expect ourselves to do the fancy things in life or the next level kind of things, and yet we’re tired all the time. How are we meant to do that? How are we meant to realise all the big dreams and feel really great about ourselves, our life that we are living, if we’re constantly tired? It doesn’t work, but I know it can feel absolutely impossible to create those small little shifts, but it’s where we need to be at.

At the moment, what I’m looking around and seeing, and I don’t know if it’s a only Melbourne thing, I know that living through the last few years of COVID has affected absolutely everyone. You can’t be a human on this planet who has not been in some ways affected, big or small, by what’s gone down. Right? And for us here in Melbourne, two years, 260- whatever days of really harsh lockdowns, it’s had an impact.

And so has the news, the devastating floods, the things that are happening in the world, let alone navigating our kids through all these changes, if you have them. Now, cost of living is going up. People are getting a bit anxious about budgets and all those sorts of things and takes a very real toll on us. And yet we’ve kind of forgotten the essential things that help us operate at a good, healthy pace and level where we are going for it in certain ways, we’re expecting so much of ourselves and yet we’re a bit off kilter. We have to go back to the, to the basics.

A lot of the conversations I have with friends is like, “Oh my gosh, what was working a year or two ago just isn’t working anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And life feels really fast and I’m getting tired faster. Yeah. What’s with that? What’s going on here?” What if, what if in order to be able to feel good, we stop trying to put on fancy clothes over the top of things and pretty it up, but we actually acknowledge and go back to basics about, in terms of how to take care of ourselves. What if we didn’t make it complicated? What if we were asking ourselves better questions? What if there was space in our lives, we just weren’t recognising it?

The other day I was on a call, I ran a planning session. And I absolutely think that as a fundamental, we should be incorporating pleasure into our life. Just gently seeking out pleasure. And someone said, “I’ve got no idea what pleasure sort of feels like, what that would mean in my life.” And I thought, “Okay, I remember being a bit like that, for sure.” Or I could rattle off a few superficial things, but even those superficial things, I wasn’t even doing them. Or if I was doing them, I wasn’t even noticing them and being in the moment. And what if that was this woman’s homework? Okay. You’re saying you want to achieve certain things this year. What if it actually felt good while you were doing that? What if it wasn’t meant to be hard? What if, as a part of that, you also gave yourself the little bit of homework too, each week, just explore what might feel really good to you? We get to feel good in life.

My kids said to me last night, “Mum, you never sit with us at breakfast.” And I actually don’t have breakfast with them during the week because I have my breakfast after I’ve dropped them off at school. So, it’s usually lunches getting that sort of bits and pieces sorted in the morning. And on weekends, I don’t sit with them because I don’t want to sit with them for breakfast. I want to really enjoy my weekend breakfast. I want to enjoy the coffee that I’ve most likely gone and grabbed to eat with it, to drink with it. I’m sorry. That’s a delicious time for me, don’t interrupt it. Kids, we’ll get you fed. And then I’ll sit and have my beautiful weekend breakfast. And here’s the thing. There are things that feel pleasure filled, but sometimes we’re moving so fast, we just don’t take a moment to notice them. And there is an opportunity to do that. Can you see how that’s just like a basic thing, but it can make a really, really big difference to our lives.

Same with incorporating a little more rest, changing our stories about that. Having it feel less guilt ridden when you actually stop. Or learning how to say no sometimes and just being in the discomfort of that, so that you have more space, because I bet you are craving that. I bet you’re craving figuring out how to do this life thing at a pace that feels manageable. If it’s unmanageable for you, you are absolutely not alone. It’s for sure, the majority of women. But I just wanted to give you that analogy of the bras because to me, it was both of those times it was such a moment where I was like, “Oh, okay.” This is why people always say, you’ve got to build from solid foundations. Because no matter what you are putting on top of it, it’s just, it’s never going to look or feel as good as if you’ve kind of nailed the basics.

And this is something that I am going to be talking about a lot more. I see this as something that we, as women, can easily, easily, so easily just put to the side. And I know for a lot of women, it feels hard. It feels hard to take care of themselves. It feels hard to make time for themselves. I know that right now, there’s a huge level of depletion out there. I mean, I felt this year to be really strange, strange. And I felt like I just wanted to… I felt like I could just come to 2022 and not have lockdowns and expect that I could be a high performance of Lisa.

Oh, that has not eventuated. And for all sorts of different reasons. Everyone’s got their own stuff going on. But a stack of us are dealing with illness in our kids. I don’t know if you can hear that chorus of coughing downstairs, my children because it’s school holidays, they’re here. And in ourselves. And just the toll that things have taken and we kind of went straight back into it without recognising. We might just need to go back to basics for a minute, get those sorted, and then we can build.

I have a really exciting opportunity for you to jump into a free series that I’m running. It’s an audio series. And it’s dropping over five days. They’re going to be five free audio tracks for you to listen to and absorb. And every part of it is about helping you find these little things, these little… Well, it really is about the foundations that are going to help you create a little bit more space, take a bit of a load off, feel a little freer in this life that you are living. Every day I’ll just offer something really, really simple for you to do. I promise it’s simple. I promise these aren’t long audios. I mean, if you’re listening to this podcast, then you probably like audio. I just want them available to you to take you on a little bit of a journey. This is a little mini programme, I guess, and it’s free. It’s totally free. And it’s designed to help you. If you’re listening to this and have resonated with any of this, I’ve designed it for you.

It feels boring, the basics. It felt boring to have to go and get a good strapless bra because I had the pretty top. Let’s just get real with ourselves, we need to build from the basics being sorted. So come along with me on that journey. I promise it’ll be worth your while. And by the end of those five days, you’re going to feel quite different. You’re going to see your life a bit differently. I’m really excited to release it to you and extra other amazing things that are coming at the end of this month, for all of us.

You know that if you’ve been following along here, I create experiences based on what you are telling me on socials. It feels like we’re a community, a bit of a gang over there. And what I’m seeing amongst friends, and honestly what I’m feeling in myself. I’ve had to prioritise the basics and just let life be about that for a little while, because I kept on trying to go when the foundations weren’t steady. And that surprised me and made me a little bit cross, because I thought I had these foundations sorted. But the reason why they’re the basics, they’re the foundations is because they form the basis of everything else we build from them.

And so we will have to return to them because life changes. We change. We have changed. We should be changing all the time. Whether you recognise that or not, you are changing. It’s just, do you feel solid? Do you feel happy? Do you feel rested? Does it feel like things are possible for you? Or do you just feel like you’re drowning? Oh, my friend come along on this five-day journey with me. It’s going to be great. In the meantime, just check that you don’t need to upgrade your underwear. It makes a big difference. See you soon,

Hey, if you feel like you’ve tried all the silver bullet approaches and read all the books and podcasts, and you still find yourself treading water a little bit in your life, then I want to let you know that there’s something brand new that I’m creating that is going to flip the lid on the way that we create change in our lives. I don’t know about you, but things right now have to feel a little bit more fun, a little bit lighter, a little bit easier, and still take us where we want to go. I’m really excited to be sharing more about this with you soon. So you’re going to have to stay tuned.

Hey, if you are enjoying the conversation, then it would mean the world to me if you head over to iTunes and give us a rating and review. It really makes a difference. And it’s my intention to get as many of us involved in real conversations that really changed the game as possible. Thanks so much for your help and I’ll see you in the next episode.