CwL Ep52: Three Things I’ve Learnt About You

Hi, I’m really glad that you have joined me for today’s episode. I’m actually sitting up here at my desk looking outside and it is miserable in Melbourne today, that just rain, wind. It’s like, yeah, goodbye summer. Definitely the cool weather has arrived. I hope you are good from wherever you’re listening from today. The topic that I have chosen to discuss today is one I just went back and forth on it a little bit because no one likes being told about themselves, right?

But I have been working with and observing women in programmes around some sort of behaviour change since 2014. And that might have been around food. If you’ve been listening and you were part of the small steps stage of my business where it was all about making food really simple for women and families, maybe you jumped on board around the time I was helping people declutter and simplify their lives.

You might be listening to this because I’ve helped you grow your own online business in some way. Over the years, I’ve done coaching and I’ve taught people how to show up on video or if you want to talk about trying to bust through things. Let’s talk about showing up on video online. I mean, that whole thing is mindset.

Anyway, people want the skills and I really just basically taught them how to have confidence and give themselves permission to have a go and start practising anyway. Now, as you know, and the doors are open right now for my flagship programme called Ready For Change in which it really is, I deliver tools, a totally different level of understanding around what goes on in your brain and an actual framework to follow, to move yourself from where you are, which a lot of people have this stuck feeling.

We’re actually never stuck, but it’s thinking stuck thoughts on repeat in any area of your life. And I really highlight, I make it really, really practical to shift yourself, to move into the things that you have been putting off, to understand fear and how it’s working against you and our brains are just wired to do these things. That mean that we keep saying we want certain things, but we’re never doing it.

It’s a great programme. The doors are open right now. I haven’t opened the doors for six months. I am not sure when I’m going to open them again. So if you do want details on that, I would be heading straight to lisacorduff.com/ready. But in all of these programmes, the thousands and thousands of women that I have worked with trying to create some sort of shift or change in their life, there are three things that I see over and over and over again. And I’m like, let’s just talk about them. Let’s see if you resonate with them. And let’s talk about what to do because we trap ourselves.

It’s like we’ve built these glass cages for ourselves and we can see through them. We can’t even see it because it’s clear. But we’re trapped in a reality that we have created for ourselves. And I guess it leads to the first thing that I’ve observed. And can I also just say that every single one of these, I have experienced. I am not immune to all of this stuff. I see it in you because I’ve seen it and worked on it for myself.

And the first one is that, when it comes to creating some sort of change, improving something in your life, moving past something, making decisions, all of those sorts of things, all of the reasons why we think we can’t have what we want, what I say over and over again, and this used to be me, is that we’re very, very quick to blame everyone else and everything else around us. Now, for sure there are seasons of our life and there are circumstances of our life. And there are people in our life that can have pretty huge impacts on us.

And I never ever want to disregard the impact that real genuine trauma, and they talk about trauma as little T and big T, both can have on someone. It changes our makeup, changes our ability to respond. But I’m not talking so much about that with this. I’m talking about the reasons you give yourself as to why you can’t have free time. I’m talking about the reasons you give as to why you’re unhappy. I’m talking about all of the reasons why you’re stressed.

Is it, well, I’d be less stressed if I got more support at home or work is so stressful, the kids are stressful? All of those things. Or I can’t get out and see my friends because I’ve got too much to do at home or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we give ourselves all these reasons. And it’s kind of like, we keep ourselves as… Well, I mean, we become victims in our own lives if we never think we have any control over any of the things that are happening in our life. It’s just always someone else’s fault. It’s always our work’s fault or whatever.

And what happens when we do that is we just hand over our power. It’s like we’re just passengers in this life. Everything’s happening to us. It’s like we have no responsibility for anything ourselves at all. And I think we forget, I certainly had forgotten that, in fact, we’re making choices all the time. Our days are a series of choices and we can make different choices if we want.

Classic example is, when I had gone through… And I’ve shared this story before. When I had gone through moving my husband who was unwell, my three kids, picked everyone up out of school, daycare, kinder in Brisbane, moved everyone down to Melbourne, made the decision, three and a half weeks later, we were here. I also did a trip to the U.S. in between that time. I got support from my parents to help pack up the house.

Once we got down here, I lived with them for five weeks and my husband was in hospital. I had to get a house. I had to get everyone sorted, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like it was just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And I had to keep showing up for work and I had to keep everything afloat. I know you know those times where it’s like, I just have to keep going.

And then I got shingles. And my body was just like, “No, no, no. We’re not doing this. We can’t do this. Have you not checked in and seen that we’re running out of adrenaline here, Lisa.” That you’re going to need to stop. And my mentor at the time said, “Well…” I said, “I don’t know how to keep going with work. I don’t know how to show up.” And he was like, “You’re not taking any responsibility for yourself.” And I was like, “You don’t know what responsibility means.”

But he was right. There was no one else who was going to slow things down for me. There was no one else who could ask for help that I just wasn’t leaning into. My stoic self was finding it very difficult to ask for help. I just thought it was all on me. I thought no one else could do anything the way I could do it. And it literally made me sick. And in that moment, it was a really, really big moment in my life. And it’s changed how I thought about my body, and the fact I’d kind of maybe considered myself a robot, and that I hadn’t stopped to process any of the feelings involved in what was going on. I was on some sort of crazy autopilot, and my body knew.

And while all of that stuff did have to happen, there were choices that I could have made to support myself the whole time. So that was back in 2017. Ever since then, my life has been an exploration of that. If it’s no one else’s job to help me be healthy and happy, well then how am I showing up for that? And this is exactly what we’ve been exploring in the feel good now challenge.

We don’t have to wait for perfect circumstances. Every single day, we can recognise that there’s opportunities for us to feel better, to take care of ourselves. And so many women don’t wake up to this idea. They live their life just gliding by, blaming everyone and everything else around them for how they feel, instead of recognising there is an opportunity for them to make a different choice, that amongst all the craziness and overwhelm, there is choice.

And when you hand over your power to all of the things around you and you make that mean you can’t be happy, you can’t create an exercise routine, you can’t meet up with friends, you can’t relax. Well, then you are not in the driver’s seat of your life. And that is not what the world needs. It’s not what you need as a woman who deserves to feel good in her life. It’s not what your family needs. We can’t show up for anyone, well, when we’re working from that place, when we’re not sitting in our own personal power, when we’re not recognising our sovereignty to make a different choice.

Okay, that got a bit ranty. Let’s talk about the second thing I have observed and learnt about you, which is me too, right? It actually breaks my heart a lot of the time for myself and for all of us when I can see so clearly because I watch women try to break this. After Ready For Change, there’s actually an opportunity to join me for six months in a programme called Live The Change. I don’t promote it to people outside of Ready For Change. It’s only for graduates of Ready For Change. And you get to work with me and I coach you through modules that have stuff that’s totally life-changing.

Women love that programme. And if you haven’t heard of it before, it’s just because only Ready For Change’s find out about it. So if you want access to that and to work with me for an extended period of time, jump into Ready For Change, it’s totally worth it. But I see them trying to break this. And it’s not a surprise to you that we all have this very, very critical and nasty, in a lot of ways, in a dialogue that we don’t stop to question. We’ve just taken on stories and beliefs about ourselves, about who we are, about how we do things, and we spend our whole lives believing it. We just accept it as our default.

And what we haven’t realised is that it’s literally those thought patterns, habits, just a well-worn pathway in your brain, it’s so easy to take it. And our brains like taking the easy route. It’s actually a lot of work, have you noticed, to change habits, or to change the way that you think. And I share a really great graphic inside Ready For Change that describes this perfectly so that people can see that it’s not… Awareness is one thing, but actually changing your neural pathways, changing the way that you think requires a lot of repetition and almost like grunt work.

But what I’ve learned about women is that without waking up, without stopping to look at where those thoughts have come from, that really critical inner dialogue, those stories and beliefs, unless you actually understand and can spot and can reprogram that dialogue, your change is almost virtually impossible, because just doing things differently is not the answer. It’s never the answer.

If it was, we would just decide, “Oh, hey. Oh my gosh, what did they say? Oh, five servings of vegetables and two servings of fruit a day make us a healthy person.” Right or wrong. That’s the guidelines. And then we’re like, “Oh, so to be healthy, I just need to do this. Oh, okay, cool. I’ll do that then.” I mean, has anyone ever achieved change just by knowing what they need to do? No. It does not work that way because what is happening is way beyond just you having an awareness and a conscious thought. That is not what is driving you to do what you do.

And this goes into the third point. So the first one was that most of us are very quick to blame everybody and everything else around us, instead of focusing in on the choices that we have in each and every moment to create a different feeling. And the second one is that we take for granted and we work by default from the very, very critical and nasty, often, in a dialogue that we’ve just accepted. We’ve just accepted talking to ourselves like we’re a piece of poop.

And you might have very good self-worth. You might talk to yourself really, really well in some areas. And in others, not so much. There’s a reason for that and we don’t need to accept it. And that really comes down to the third point. The third thing that I’ve learned about you is that… And I was here. I was here for the longest time. I was unaware of what’s really happening literally in my brain and how it was working against me having what I wanted.

And so I would just keep waiting for everything to change around me for me to have what I want, because I wasn’t aware of how I could shift things for myself permanently. And to a point where my potential, the possibilities for my life feel limitless. I don’t work from limitations anymore. It’s gone, that part of me. Plateauing isn’t a thing for me anymore. And I see women wait and wait and wait and wait and put off and put off and hope that things will change around them so that they get to feel good and that there’ll be some time that they can actually focus on themselves and some of those things that are happening.

When I started to understand fear, when I started to understand that there are these things that make me feel really good, and I know it, and I’m not doing it, what is happening here? Because aren’t we motivated to do the things that make us feel good? Why I’m not doing this? And I didn’t realise how brains work. I mean, your brain just wants you to stay alive, right? Your brain is not looking for danger. It has so much to filter. Our modern lives are tough for our brains to navigate and it’s just going to filter out anything that doesn’t really matter. It’s going to take easy streets. It doesn’t want to have to make a huge amount of decisions. And really, if we survived yesterday, let’s just do yesterday again.

So you don’t leave your comfort zone because you comfort zone is where everything’s comfortable. Right? Even if it’s actually not, even if there’s absolutely things that aren’t good in your life, people stay in marriages where they’re so desperately unhappy and they know they need to go. But because it feels so huge to get to the other side of that decision, because there’s so much unknown on the other side, they literally just stay because, I don’t know, their brain is like, “Hang on. I’m just going to come in with all the bazillion reasons this might be a really bad idea.”

Notice how our brains don’t come up with all the good ideas. It’s because it’s wanting you to just repeat stuff. It takes a lot of energy to really create big, fundamental changes in your life. So that fear, unless you understand it, and I teach about this a lot in Ready For Change, it has to be a big part of the discussion. You have to get an understanding of how to almost coach yourself through fear. And that’s what I do in the programme is give you tools to be able to handle this yourself.

And we just haven’t made the connection. This is absolute lack of unawareness. I had no idea that basically 90-95% of my life was just habits. Literally doing the same thing that I did yesterday. Don’t you find that? Do you think of a creative, new way to jump in the shower every day? Probably not. You probably do it exactly the same. That’s good. That’s fine. Because it’s a shower and you don’t have to get creative around that. And it’s probably not doing you damage to get into the shower the way you get in the shower.

But what about if it’s the way you talk to yourself about friendships? What about if those habitual thoughts just come in and you never stop to question them, you never stop to ask yourself, “Is this really true?” And you just keep repeating the same patterns over and over and over and over again because there’s this underlying subconscious story and belief going on because our habits and our beliefs and our identities all based at a subconscious level, you can’t think your way rationally through it. It’s not a part of the thinking brain. It’s all sitting there stored. 90% of what we do is subconscious. It’s happening at a subconscious level. It’s so much stored that it is literally driving your life.

And most of us are completely unaware of that fact and of how to work with it, to create the change that you want to create. So we keep writing pros and cons lists. We keep listening to that chatter in our head, instead of going where we need to go, which is exactly what we do in Ready For Change. You will keep repeating the patterns unless you can interrupt them. And I’ve created a really simple framework for you to be able to do that.

And here’s the last thing with this unawareness of what’s really happening is that there’s this sense, I don’t know if you feel it too, that so many times.. And this is also something I’ve had to work through myself is that we actually don’t give ourselves permission to feel our feelings. Oftentimes we can feel sad, we can feel those things, but what is the cause of the sadness? What are we really making it all mean? What are we truly hurt about? And we never scratch the surface because it’s painful.

And so we have all these stored emotion and it’s never been moved. And we wonder why we get triggered easily because we’ve literally never looked at it because so many of us are so busy. So many of us want to forget. And while I am all about recognising we have choice, one of the most powerful choices I’ve ever made in my life, and it’s really only been the last few years, has been to allow myself to feel my feelings.

I think most of us are completely unaware that they’re like little sign posts. And that once you allow yourself to feel them, they’re not holding you hostage anymore. They have a role to play. We can’t bypass our feelings and we should never try to, but we also don’t need to be stuck in them. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got things to do in this world. And yet I’ve had to process a lot of really sad things, a lot of grief. If you’ve been following along, you’ll understand.

So when we do that also as a collective, when we don’t deal with our own stuff, when we’re operating at a surface level, when we’re angry at people resentful, we’re never taking personal responsibility for how we feel, we’re in the blame game, whenever we just indulge that voice in our head that we never stopped to question, we never stopped to question and we never learn the tools of how to turn it around. We might be aware, “Oh my gosh, you are so mean to yourself. You wouldn’t speak to your partner like this or your child like this,” but we think we’re powerless to change it. You aren’t. You aren’t.

And if you want help with that, because you’re frustrated at all of the stories and all of the beliefs that you have that limit your capacity to be your fullest version of you in the world, whatever that looks like, then I really do invite you to check out Ready For Change. It’ll fundamentally change all of these three things for you. You will take back your personal power. You will see, with absolute clarity, the BS you are telling yourself about why you can’t.

And not only that. Because awareness is only one aspect of it. You will be given practical tools that you can use to shift yourself past it, to create stories that serve you and your highest good. I’m so passionate about this programme. I get such a kick out of watching light bulbs go off for women. We have hundreds of testimonials from women of how different they feel on the other side.

If you are ready, don’t listen to the voice in your head that’s saying, “Oh, none of these works for me anyway. Nothing really is too wrong. I should be grateful for where I’m at.” Or, “I don’t deserve this. I should be spending my money on blah, blah, blah, for someone else.” Don’t listen. Honour yourself. The crazy thing is that if you’re a parent, what you’ll learn in this will change your children’s lives too. I am so glad I know this stuff and I am so sad I didn’t know it years ago.

All right. I hope that that was helpful. If you heard some of yourself in that, I hope it’s given you a little bit of insight into the fact that you’re not alone. It’s not a you thing, it’s an us thing, and it’s changeable. See you inside Ready For Change or see you on the next episode. Remember, you can go to lisacorduff.com/ready and join us straightaway. See you soon.