The question I get asked most is where is the best place to start when it comes to healing after divorce? My answer is always to start building a foundation of self love and respect for you. To be able to fully heal after divorce you need to know who you are by nurturing your relationship with yourself. Listen in as I explain the importance of getting to know yourself after divorce and some steps to take to begin building that ever important relationship with you. There's also a challenge to get you started on your self discovery journey. Download 51 Ways To Get To Know You by clicking here. To schedule your free consult with me click here. What you'll learn in today's episode:
Why you don't have a good relationship with yourself.
Why getting to know yourself is your most important work.
Your first steps to getting to know yourself better.
Join the challenge of self discovery.
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Do you struggle with finding ways to love yourself and really connecting with who you are after divorce? Do you wish that you could just have a plan to follow to help you build confidence and self love, and someone to talk to to help you stick to that plan and help you get back on track when you get off track? I'm here for all of that. Click here to schedule your free discovery session with me and we'll come up with your confidence plan after divorce.
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Are you lost and confused about who you are after divorce? Don't worry. I've got 51 Ways to Get to Know Yourself Again. Click here to download.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome back to Becoming You Again. I’m your host Karin Nelson. I’m a certified divorce confidence coach and this is the podcast where I teach you how to reconnect with yourself, create emotional resiliency and live a truly independent life, so you can have an even better life than when you were married.
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Karin Nelson. I’m so glad you’re here today. Things have been growing over in my private divorce FB group lately and one thing that I’m often asked in that group is where is the best place to start when it comes to healing after divorce?
By the way, let me just give a quick shout out to my group on FB. This group is for women who are going through a divorce or who are divorced who want guidance and support as they figure out this new chapter in their life. This group is amazing. It’s a great place. I’m in the group every day interacting, guiding, asking though provoking questions, teaching and the women in this group are very giving and very supportive as well. If this sounds like a group that you want to be a part of, then come join us. It’s called Becoming You Again After Divorce. I am going to link it up in the show notes so you can join that way or you can search it on Facebook, either way. Please come and join if you feel like you want a group of women that can be supportive and loving and show up for you as you go through this transition in your life.
All right that was a bit of a tangent but let me get back on topic. So women are always asking me where is the best place to start when it comes to healing after divorce and my answer is always, by learning to love yourself. And a big part of that self love exploration is getting to know who you actually are and creating a good relationship with you.
The majority of women who go through a divorce go through a harsh realization that they don’t know themselves very well. Women are socialized especially in Western Culture to give of themselves, to take care of others, to put others first and really not focus on our own wants and needs – because doing that means that you are selfish and being a selfish woman is ugly and wrong. Like this is what we are taught. Maybe not outright taught this but for sure it is in the underlying surface of everything that we see in society. It is ingrained in us from the time we are little.
For me, this socialization came from my religious upbringing. I was raised knowing that it was my duty as a woman to be a wife and a mother. I was taught that my husband’s needs including his happiness and his success were paramount and if he was happy then I would be happy too, as would our family. I really believed that idea and put my whole self into putting my husband and my kids needs, wants and desires before my own. And I don’t think that it is wrong to want to be a mother or to want to love your husband and support your husband. That is not what I am saying at all. What I am saying with this podcast is that I don’t want you to do those things at the expense of yourself. At the expense of having a good relationship with yourself as well which is what I did and which is what so many of us women do.
So when I was going through my divorce I didn’t know who I was. I did not know Karin, me, as a woman in many, many ways. And I have women asking for my help with this all the time as well. They are confused about who they are. They are confused about what they like. They are confused about what they want out of life. They don’t know if they have hobbies or if they do have hobbies, they haven’t allowed themselves to enjoy them for many, many years. They want help getting to know themselves after divorce, but it’s been so long since they’ve given themselves permission to even explore this option that they are confused about where to even start.
So I want to talk more about how you can get to know yourself after divorce and how you can begin to rekindle the relationship with yourself, because this relationship with yourself it truly is the most important relationship in your life.
The first thing you need to be willing to do is give yourself permission to explore who you are. I say this because if you have a habit of shutting yourself down, of telling yourself no to trying something new or buying something for yourself, or going out with friends or doing something that sounds interesting or fun; If you have been putting your ideas, and your needs, and your desires and your wants on the backburner for years, then it is going to feel very uncomfortable to do things for yourself. You are probably going to feel some guilt over thinking of yourself first. And so this act of giving yourself permission can help you feel more free and open to learning more about who you are.
Alright one way you can explore getting to know yourself is to ask yourself some really good questions and take some time to answer these honestly.
The first question you can ask yourself is what is your overall opinion about yourself? I want you to write that down. What do you think about yourself? What is your opinion of you? After you write down your answer, please do it without judgment, by the way. Can we just write this down so that we can be like in scientist mode? Write down all of your thoughts and then evaluate without judgment. Like no I should not be thinking that; yes that’s a good one. We’re not going to do any of that. We are going to write them all down and evaluate. Okay? So from there after you have written all of your thoughts down about yourself, your opinion about yourself, I want you to decide if it’s in good shape or if there is room for improvement. This is where I am a scientist and I am evaluating my experiment of myself. Right? I’m evaluating what I am thinking of myself. Is it in good shape? If it is, amazing. And if not, there is probably some room for improvement. Let’s see where we can improve. Okay?
The next questions I want you to ask yourself is what are your dreams for the future? You maybe have never asked yourself this question and given a truly honest answer where you are answering from your knowing. I definitely had never done this until I got divorced. Whatever my husband’s dreams were, those I adopted as my own dreams. Okay. Now maybe you do have the same dreams as him and you’ve decided that that is the true and honest answer. Great! Go for it. But what I really want you to tap into is what are your dreams for the future. And be honest. Open up. Be willing to figure out what that is. Be willing to let your brain work on it. Don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t quite sure. That’s okay. These questions are for exploring and four allowing yourself to be open. They are not for judgement. They are not for beating yourself up for not knowing or not ever asking or for taking on someone else’s ideas. Okay? If you don’t know the answers to these questions yet, write it down on a paper and leave out the paper and read the question each day and really let your brain percolate on it and get to work searching for some answers. Your brain is really good at searching for answers and then figuring things out. So put your brain to work especially on something as important as this.
The next question that I want you to ask yourself is kind of a two part question. The first part of this question is, when I’m doing this, I feel vibrant and alive. And so what is that thing? Right? What is the answer to this thing that makes you feel vibrant and alive? Figure out what that is. And the second part to that question is depending on whatever you wrote down, when was the last time I did that thing and how often do you allow myself to do it? So whenever I do this thing, I feel vibrant and alive and how often do I allow myself to do that thing? Right?
So spend some time answering those questions and open yourself up to getting to know more about who you are as a person. As a woman. As a human.
When I worked with Karin Nelson as my divorce coach I worked on myself from the inside out. Best of all, I learned to love and forgive myself through my divorce. I found me again and started putting my needs first. I learned to create healthy boundaries without people pleasing or being codependent. I found my confidence again and I am proud of who I’ve become. I would tell any woman who is going through a divorce that if you are struggling to know who you are or if you’re struggling to believe that your life can be good again, then you need to work with Karin as your coach. She helps you see that your life doesn’t end with divorce, and it’s really the beginning of something new and amazing. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, click the link in the show notes to find out more about how to work with Karin Nelson.
So before I end today’s podcast I want to offer you a little challenge that you can undertake on your own to get to know yourself. I want you to think about this movie Runaway Bride. It came out, I don’t even know, like 10 to 15 years ago somewhere in that range. I could be off but I think it is somewhere around there. And if you remember it it’s a movie that had Julia Roberts and Richard Gere and Julia Roberts’ character was notoriously engaged to several men at different times and Richard Gere is a reporter writing a story about her about her because she never actually ends up marrying any of these guys. She gets to the altar and then just does not show up or breaks off the engagement or whatever, right, and that is why it’s - hence the name Runaway Bride. Right. Okay so during part of the movie Richard Gere points out to Julia Roberts’ character that whatever eggs her boyfriend at the time or her fiancé at the time likes she adopted those as her likes. She adopted those eggs as her likes. Like one guy really liked scrambled eggs and so those were the kind of eggs that she liked. And one guy really like poached eggs and so those were the eggs that she liked and one guy really liked over easy and so those were the eggs that she likes but she never really could say on her own independent of what her fiancé at the time thought what her choice of favorite eggs would be. And he pointed this out to her.
And I think so many of us women do this same type of thing with our husbands who we have spent many, many years with or who we have dated or who we spend a lot of time with, right? Most of us are not even doing this consciously. I want you to be aware of that. There is a lot of social programming going on that we need to keep our husbands happy and by doing that and by liking what they like that in turn will make him happy. So if you have been doing this, don’t beat yourself up. Okay. A lot of this is just programming that we need to deprogram out of our brains that we are not even in the moments aware that it is happening. That is why you can use this podcast and these exercises and these questions to help you figure out what is actually happening inside your head. What actually are the thoughts that maybe are holding you back or keeping you from having a good relationship with yourself?
And then the problem becomes, when we get divorce, one of the things we really struggle with is knowing who we are, knowing our identity. What we do and don’t like. What her hobbies are. What we want to move toward. What we want our future to look like. What we enjoy spending our time doing. Maybe even if we want to go back to school what we want to do. Or if we want to get a job what we want to apply for. We don’t even know what those are because we have never allowed ourselves to be open to that.
So here’s the challenge. Again I’m going off on a lot of tangents in this podcast, but again, let’s get back to the challenge. Here’s the challenge. I’m going to give you a list of 15 things that you can do to ignite your imagination when it comes to getting to know yourself better. I have a free download that you can get by clicking the link in the show notes and this is a very comprehensive list. It’s 51 ways to get to know yourself better. I’m going to give you 15 of those off of this list. But the challenge is for the next month, for the next four weeks, I want you to pick one or two a week and give yourself permission to do those things and figure out what you like and don’t like. Figure out more about who you are as a person. Figure out more about what the hobbies are that you like or what the - you want your future to look like or what interests you do or don’t have as a person. I don’t want this to be a chore. I want this to be fun. Have fun with it. Be open to it. Get curious about you and who you are as a human being, as a woman so that you can build a strong foundation of having a great relationship with you. Open yourself up to getting to know you. Give yourself permission to explore you. Alright so who is in? I hope that you all said yes and raised your hands or gave yourself a high five or whatever it is that you like to do when you are offered a challenge like this but I hope that you will be open to really stepping into challenging yourself to get to know yourself better.
Alright so here is the list of 15 ways to get to know yourself:
1. Go to a restaurant by yourself and order something you’ve never ordered before.
2. Go shopping and try on a few things that you would never have tried on before.
3. Buy something nice for yourself that you’ve been wanting.
4. Take a cooking class from a local restaurant.
5. Take a dance class.
6. Start a blog.
7. Write in your journal.
8. Learn to fix something in your home (and let me tell you YouTube videos are huge resource for this).
9. Take a seminar (free or paid) about something that seems interesting to you.
10. Listen to a book on Audible in a genre you’ve never really read before.
11. Make a list of 10 things that are unique about you that most people don’t know.
12. Go to a bar alone and buy yourself a drink that you’ve never had before.
13. Sign up for a 10K and start training for it.
14. Get a meaningful tattoo.
15. Write down 5 things every day that you love, like and appreciate about yourself.
Alright, again that is not a comprehensive list. I have so many more ideas on this 51 ways to get to know yourself better. I’m sure that you could come up with probably a ton more ways of doing this if you just open yourself up to having fun with it and really trying some new things out. Go download the list. Write out your own list, whatever works best for you. You can click the link in the show notes to get access to my list for free. I want you to know that you are valuable and you are worthy and you deserve to be known, especially by you. Take the time to get to know who you are and fall in love with yourself. It is the most important work you will ever do for you.
That’s it for today. I will be back next week. Bye my friends.
If you like what you heard on today’s podcast and you want to know more about working 1:1 with me, you can go to www.karinnelsoncoaching.com and schedule your free consult to find out more. That’s www dot Karin nelson coaching dot com.
Thanks for listening. If this podcast episode agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow, rate and leave a comment. And for more details make sure to check out the show notes by clicking the link in the description.
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