Have you ever worried that the decision you make will be the wrong one, and so you stay stuck making no decision at all? Have you ever beat yourself up for "saying the wrong thing" or "doing the wrong thing"? Have you ever second guessed a decision during divorce? Have you ever taken the blame for something that seemingly "went wrong"? If so, you're not alone. These are all forms of self doubt that many women experience throughout their divorce.
Today I'm talking everything self doubt. I'll reveal where those self doubt narratives are really coming from and I'll equip you with the way out of the self doubt trap so you can rewrite the narrative that shows up in your brain. Learning to drop the self doubt will ultimately lead to you owning your personal power in your own life.
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Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it shows up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Most people think when you're going through a divorce, what you need most is the lawyer in your corner, and while that is true, it's great to have somebody on your side who knows the law and can guide you in that direction, what you also need is someone there supporting you in your mental and emotional needs as you go through this process and moving into your life after divorce. That's what this podcast is all about. This is Becoming you Again, episode number 156. And I'm your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well-being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life, so that your life can be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast. My lovely ladies, I am so glad to be here recording this podcast with you today.
Today, I'm going to be talking about self-doubt, because it's something that so many of us, especially women, struggle with on a constant, daily basis, and so I'm going to talk about how you can, first of all, recognize if you have self-doubt and how you can step into feeling more powerful in your own life, because I think it's really important for us, as women, to feel in control of our own experience. I think sometimes that can be really difficult. I know, when I was married, I didn't always feel like I was in control of my own experience. I very much felt like I was second fiddle to so many of the decisions in my life, second fiddle to literally everyone else. Like, everyone else came first and then I was just there and it was really hard for me to understand how to make decisions for me that would support me. It was really hard for me to know what was right without second guessing. It was hard for me to trust myself, to have confidence in myself. I really didn't feel powerful in my life in many, many ways, and I know that that is the case for a lot of women. So I'm going to talk about it today. I'm going to talk about why this happens to be the case and how you can start to change that and feel more confident, feel more in control of your own power, of your own authority over your own self, your own life, your own decisions, and how you can stop doubting yourself so much when it comes to your day-to-day life. So let's just jump right in.
I truly believe that every person women especially, because we have this thing that we like to talk about, which is our intuition. But often we are told we are raised, we are socialized to discount that intuition. But I truly believe that we inherently know, as women, how do we powerful in our own lives? The problem comes when we don't know how to recognize all of the thoughts that have been fed to us throughout our entire life that are blocking us from stepping into our own power, from being confident in our decisions, from feeling capable in living a life that is directed by us, by our intuition, by our choices. So what is self-doubt? What does that even look like? It can look like so many different things. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. As you're listening to this, you might even have some pop into your head that I don't list and you're like oh yeah, that shows up in my life, like this oh yeah, I do that in this way.
So know that these few examples that I'm giving you, it's not like a complete list of how self-doubt shows up for many of us. It can show up in many, many different ways, but it can look like lack of confidence in yourself. Maybe it shows up as beating yourself up after you do something, after you say something, after you make a decision, after you show up in a certain way and you didn't like that, so you just berate yourself over and over and over. It can show up in questioning your decisions, questioning your decision making, second guessing yourself, being wishy-washy about which way to go. It can show up in not believing that you have the authority in your own life to apply for that job, to be a good mom, to even be a mom, to go out into the workforce, to be a stay-at-home mom, to make any of those kind of decisions about the direction you want to go in your life. You might not feel like you have the authority to do that, you're not capable of making that decision. You might feel like you don't have the skills or you don't know enough to apply for that job or go to school to get trained in that thing, or to be the PTA mom of your child's class, like whatever it is right.
We very often discount our skills, our knowledge, our intellect, our brilliance because of the self-doubt it could show up like if something goes wrong, then you immediately take the blame for that thing. It's because I made that choice, it's because of me, it's because I am the one who showed up in this way and we take on all of the blame for everything that has gone wrong, right, and again it can show up. Self-doubt can show up in many, many, many forms in our life, and the problem with this self-doubt is that when it shows up, it's very difficult to rely on and to trust our own opinions, our own thoughts, our own abilities, even in doing things in our life, and so we want to try and change that right. But here's the really interesting thing about self-doubt that I have been studying, that I've been learning about, that I have experienced in my own life, that I'm watching my clients experience and that we talk through. One of my mentors has been talking about this over the last little bit and I've been learning a lot from her, and his name is Carl Lohenthal, and like taking all of these things in, all of these experiences, all of this information, the interesting thing about self-doubt is that it's essentially like a group of thoughts that are sitting in your brain and that your brain is spitting out at you over and, over and over again, and it's been doing this probably most of your life.
Like, our brains are truly incredible. They have this incredible function of being able to work on autopilot, right? We all know this. Like when you drink water, you don't have to think about okay, I'm going to put this in my mouth and then I'm going to swallow and it's going to go down my throat. And like when you're driving, even you don't have to think about. Like all of the motions, all of the things that you do when you're multitasking as you're driving.
To do it? Maybe when you were first learning to drive you did, but as you get better and better at it, your brain learns to put things on autopilot. And it does that on purpose, right? It does that so that we don't have to completely focus on every aspect of our lives all day long. If we had to do that, we would get nothing done, we would be very inefficient and it would be very difficult as a human race to accomplish much, which is one of the reasons why we have this autopilot function of our brains. It conserves energy for us, for our brain. It's almost like this supercomputer, right?
However, there are some thoughts and some things that our brain also will just spit out at us on autopilot, that were not originally put there by us, that were not originally thought of by us and they were fed to us. That need to be questioned, that need to be understood, that need to be looked at in a way where we are made aware of them so that we can intentionally decide if it's something we want to keep thinking as we move forward. So this group of self-doubt thoughts that you've got going on in your brain, that I've got going on in my brain, that so many of us women who've been raised in Western society have, have been picked up over our lifetime by society, because of what's happening in society I mean talk about that in just a minute but I do want you to know and I want you to understand this about your brain your brain is not objectively evaluating the ideas that you have in your brain. It is not objectively evaluating your capabilities even. It is literally just feeding you what has been taught to it, what it has picked up through society, through books, through television, through interviews, through teachers, through religious leaders, through articles, through just watching and experiencing things around you. It is picked up all of these things that have been exemplified To your brain in society and it's picked them up and it's put it in your brain and then it just feeds them to you over and over and over, whether or not they've been Objectively evaluated.
Right, which is where we step in. We're gonna kind of separate ourselves from our brain and that's when we get to objectively decide what the best thoughts are that are going to help us step into our own power, whatever that means, whatever that looks like for each one of us, because it's all gonna be different, right, we're all different people. My power and stepping into my authority and my own life is gonna look different. Then you stepping into your own power and your own authority in your life, me Shocking off the idea of self-doubt in my life is gonna look a little bit different than it will for you. That's okay, it doesn't have to look the same, but what we want to be aware of is what those individual thoughts are, that's, our surrounding, the self-doubt and learning how to replace them with thoughts that are more centered in our own power.
So let's talk about Society. Just give a little history lesson here for any of you who might not be aware of what has happened in society, because we need to kind of understand where society even got these ideas when it comes to women, right, like, why has our brain been picking up so much messaging around the roles of women, around Women not being able to trust ourselves, women not being able to make decisions, women not being capable to hold that job or, you know, know this information or Be a leader in some way? Right, where did society even get these ideas? And this is where kind of the history Lesson comes in now. I got my degree in history. I didn't use my degree in history for literally anything other than maybe today and other times when I've talked about history on these podcast episodes and when I'm evaluating the past and where these ideas in my life and your life and everyone's lives might have come from. Sometimes we want to look at history and kind of evaluate that, but it is funny to me, I think, that I, I have my degree in history and yet the only times I use it is when I'm, you know, speaking on a podcast somewhere about this brief history lesson of women throughout history. So let's talk about it.
Women in Western society. Like, if we even go back to Greek times, roman times, right, the men were typically considered to be the thinkers, they were the thought leaders, they were associated with the mind and with reason, like, think about all of the philosophers, you know, aristotle and Socrates and Aurelius and all of those people. Right, they were the thought leaders, they were the reasoners, they were the thinkers. And then women, during that same time, were typically associated with the body, with the emotions, and the emotions were thought of as irrational. Okay, so that's like way back, that's like millennia, right, that is so long ago. And yet I think you can kind of connect the dots here. If we typically think about women today, what are women? Often referred to as the irrational ones, the emotional ones, right, so that has been passed down for like millennia. Okay, that's just history repeating itself over and over and over again.
Okay, but let's bring it into, like the medieval times in Western Europe, and then into the Americas, and then over the last, even like century, women couldn't get a job in many places without their husband's permission, and if they didn't have a husband, then without their father's permission or without their brother's permission. Okay, like, I think it was. I heard a quote somewhere and I think it was France, 1960, or something like that. I might be wrong on the year, so don't quote me on that. Yes, I'm a historian by degree, but I wouldn't say that I know all of the dates. But like I think it was like 1960 women in France could not hold a job without the permission of their husband. Okay, 1960 is not that long ago.
If women got married and they had a job or they had money in their name somehow, like if there was no other male relative in their family that was alive right then, then maybe they inherited some money. But if they got married, guess what? That money was no longer theirs. The men became in charge of the money. Women were not trusted to be in charge of money. They were thought of as like incapable of understanding the idea of money, of understanding how to handle money and be in charge of money. Women couldn't inherit land, inherit money, that kind of thing, unless there were literally no other men, no other male relatives in the family line. And then, of course, like you may or may not know this, but it wasn't until 1974 in the United States that women were even allowed to apply, to apply for a credit card in their name without their husband's permission. 1974, I was born in 1977. So, knowing that it was like my mom, if she wanted a credit card three years, four years before I was born, she would have had to have my dad's permission to be able to do that. And then, in so many other ways, women have been looked at as basically incapable of making decisions about their own lives.
There was a woman governor in Alabama. Her name was Lerlene Wallace. I don't know if you've heard this story before, but it just came onto my radar within the last, probably month. Lerlene Wallace, she became the governor actually of Alabama in 1967. She was elected to become the governor. However, years before that I think it was in 1961, she had given birth and when she gave birth, the doctors saw some like strange looking polyps or lymph nodes or something I'm not sure the exact like medical terminology, but something that was concerning. They did some tests, turned out that she had cancer and instead of telling her the diagnosis, they told her husband, and her husband did not find it necessary to tell her that she had cancer. So hence she did not undergo any treatments and later died. I think it was a year and a half after she had been elected governor of Alabama.
So it's interesting, right? It's something to take a look at when it comes to history and society and these ideas around women and what we are able to handle. I mean, you guys know I love Taylor Swift and if we just even take a look at the song her song, the man like her entire, that entire song is talking about this idea that, like women, just aren't up to the task. Right, that's how society, that's what society wants us to know about ourselves, that is what society wants to teach us is that women are not men. Women are not up to the task to doing the things that men are, and when they try to, they are looked at as irrational, as angry, as the bitch, as not believed, not capable, like all of these things. So historically, women have had very limited legal rights, and so when you're raised in a society where women have been looked at as not capable of working outside the home, as not capable of signing a contract, of not capable of managing their money, of not being able to handle the news of a disease or something that's going on in their own body and these stories have been going on for thousands and thousands of years then it totally makes sense to me that women do not have a stronger story about themselves, like we're not running around for the most part, like things are changing, and I don't want to.
I don't want to discount all of the changes that have been made over the years. Of course things are changing, but when we want more change, we always have to start with ourselves right and learning to let go of this idea of self-doubt that has been passed down through generation, through generation and generation of our lives, societally and familially. We have to start with ourselves right. That's where change always has to start is within us. And so if we want to accept, if we want to learn to accept the idea that we are smart, that we are brilliant, that we are capable, that we are powerful, that we have authority, it has to start here. It has to start right here in our own lives.
And it makes perfect sense to me that our brains would pick up these group of thoughts of self-doubt over the years and would just be feeding them to you, because it's what society is telling us over and, over and over again. So what do we want to do about this? We want to learn how to reframe these thoughts, these beliefs that we've been fed over many, many years, to a way that fits a narrative that we feel powerful in, to a way that fits a narrative that we want to believe, to a way that fits a narrative that is more truthful to who we are as women and our role in this world. And so here's kind of the good news, because I know I've been kind of talking about like bummer stuff, right, like all this history and the way women have been treated and the way we've been looked at and identified for years and even today in many, many ways, right. So but here's the really good news is that we don't have to change all of the people out there to be able to change these self-doubt thoughts.
Again, it comes back to what we have to do for ourselves, where we have to start with change, and it always has to start with ourselves. And so we want to start with our own thoughts about self-doubt in our own lives. What are the things that we are doubting about ourselves? Get those out on paper and pick one to start with. That's where we need to start is with our own ideas about ourselves and our capabilities. We do that by being intentional with the way we are thinking. We do that by being intentional and replacing these self-doubt thoughts with ones that support us. By doing that, that teaches us to lean into our inherent power, our inherent authority over our own lives.
So what I want you to do is I want you to start to identify some of the thoughts that you have about yourself where self-doubt shows up. Write down a couple. After you've made that list, come up with the thought that you want to think instead of the self-doubt right, something that you are trying to believe, that you want to believe. So we've got our list of one or two thoughts that are based in self-doubt, and then what you want to do is you want to practice that new thought over and over and over again.
Repetition is the key to change right. You're going to practice that new thought when your brain is like yeah, but what about this time when you didn't make that decision and you went back and forth on it? You're like okay, but also I'm learning how to be capable in making decisions without second guessing. You want to like answer your brain when it tries to shoot things at you and just throw things at you. You're going to answer your brain. You're not just going to take everything that your brain tells you face value. You're going to be like uh-uh, I'm going to be intentional in this. I'm changing this idea about myself and this is how and this is why that's how you want to show up in your life Show up with power, show up with authority. It's inside of you.
It's inside of you right now. You have just been fed, over years and years, this idea that you are not powerful, that you are not capable, that you are not good enough. In some way, we're trying to get rid of that. We're learning how to discount that voice that's been telling you that and instead fill it up with the truth of who you are your capabilities, your confidence, your own power, your own authority. My friends, I promise you this is possible. Are you going to be 100% great at it? Ever no, and we're not going to even expect that we will be, but we are going to get better at it. We are going to get better at not listening to that voice, at not listening to that self-doubt, at making decisions as showing up in our own power more often than not and that's really all we can ask of ourselves right To showing up in this more often than not. And the more we can change ourselves, the more we will start to see the world outside of us change as well.
All right, my friends, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. I will talk to you next week. Hi friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real-life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to KarinNelsonCoaching dot com. That's wwwkarinnsoncoaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married. Make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.
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