What Do You Need To Shed In Order To Level Up?

Growth always means that we will be letting go of pieces of ourselves. When we think about taking things to the next level, we often think about the person we need to become to get there. But what parts of you have you been hiding from that are buried under inherited conditioning? Because shedding these and becoming more of who you are at your core is the best way for you to create the life you want.    

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Welcome to " You need a coach bitch with Chris Hale. I'm your host Chris Hale. I'm a certified life coach that helps queer creatives. Take their passion, turn it into a purpose and get paid. If you are looking to make an impact on the world with your work by dismantling internalized, oppressive thought systems by using coaching spirituality and a lot of cursing, you are in the right place.

So let's get to work.

 Hey friends, how are you today? I cannot believe we are three weeks into this year. I was talking to a friend Monday and she was like, we're gonna be in December before we know it, and we're gonna be saying the same thing, like, I can't believe this year is over. And I agree like, well, time really does seem to just speed up and yeah.

I also feel like I have been sick forever. So it's interesting how our concept of time differs based on how we feel. If I think I'm running out of time to sort of get back on track for the year, then I will experience time as going by too fast. But if I'm frustrated about not feeling good and wanting to be better like now,  then it seems like time is just dragging.

So  do it, that which you will . Um, it's funny cuz I was coaching a client yesterday on her coaching and I was saying that like, I think that coaching, like my thought about coaching is that it's just the easiest job ever. Now I know that it does take time and skill to get to that point. Um, just like anything else.

But like when you think about it for me, at the very.  of all of this, I believe that my client is the expert on their life and that I'm just here to point things out that I say that are like getting in their way or maybe not quite congruent with what they say they want, or to help them question their beliefs about things.

So I can offer something like what I just offered, right? Um, about how like I'm experiencing time.  and then you all just get to do whatever you want with it, right? Like however you want to use it or not use it. You can agree, disagree, question it, apply it to your own experience, whatever, and it's all perfect.

And in the context of a session. What you choose to do with it would basically inform where we go next. It would inform what questions I ask or what observations I have based on everything you have told me up until that point. It's such a collaboration and so it just never feels like work. I feel like we're just there together.

Like kind of figuring something out and we're just bouncing ideas off of each other. Again, I know this can take time to get to this point, and I do think a lot about the amount of trust that I need to have in the skills that I've acquired. Um, and I also know that a lot of coaches and teachers and consultants.

They're not really allowing themselves to build that kind of trust in themselves. So one of the things I'm kind of toying with is a group program for coaches that would help build this kind of trust. This is just one of the many ideas that my brain is keeping up in the cloud and I haven't decided which one is being brought down next.

So to be continued on, Today, however, we are talking about taking things to the next level. This came up in two different coaching conversations this week, and I just love this topic. It's one of the reasons I'm even in this line of work. I have this like obsession with self-improvement, , um, not always the healthiest.

And like I also see when that can be an indulgence, right? For others.  used to avoid some of the harder work of just like sitting with our humanness and feeling shitty sometimes. And I'm also guilty of this, and when I talk about leveling up,  feeling shitty is exactly what we are going to experience, but I think we have this idea that it's going to feel amazing and this can be why so many of us never actually take things to the next level because we are not having the experience that we think we quote unquote should be having.

So one of the ways that this can actually come up is isn't a very practical way, which is that you. The things that you did to get you here are gonna be different from the things that you need to do to get to the next level, right? From an action perspective, right? So some of the systems, say for instance, that you had in place that helped you make your first a hundred thousand, are not gonna be the same systems that you need to make a million dollars, right?

You actually might need to have more robust systems to. Um, accommodate that, that type of growth, and that is something that I talk about with my clients, right? Like when they want to uplevel, like do they actually have the capacity to serve more people?  with the way things are now and what kinds of changes need to be made in the way that they're working, their systems, their structures, like the infrastructure has to be there for them to be able to accommodate that kind of growth.

But really, , when it comes down to it, it's going to be the mental shift into like accepting their ability to grow into that person that's going to get them to take those actions in the long run. So we really do need to focus more on who you are becoming or like what you have to let go of rather. And how do you become more of you in the journey.

to getting to that next level so that you're able to take the actions that are gonna be necessary for you to take things to the next level. So why does leveling up feel so bad? Well, I think it's because to keep advancing through life and growing, what we're actually doing is shedding layers of BS that we've been hiding under.

we're actually becoming more of ourselves. We are revealing parts of ourselves that we've been hiding. That was literally a question I asked one of these clients. Um, what parts of you have you been hiding from? What parts of you have been, have you been hiding from the world or your people, your clients, and I think it's a natural part of development to take on things from the outside world.

We all have cultures and communities that we're learning from. We wanna fit in, we wanna feel a sense of belonging, but I would say like being a part of a group that's been margin. Can carry some extra baggage that might be a little harder to shed. Um, and that is going to be specific to each person, and it's going to be specific to like the various identities that you hold.

So the first step in this process is to figure out what condition, beliefs, and mental habits are standing in your way. A great example is around money. So if you have a. And you want to take that business to the next level financially, but you are brought up with being taught that desiring to make money is sinful or bad, then you're gonna have a really hard time making more money.

Money becomes a moral right? It's this bad thing. So the work. Would be first in neutralizing money and then deciding what you want to believe on purpose about money. Sounds simple, but it's not easy because the reason you adopted that belief was for safety in some way, and usually it has something to do with not upsetting our caregivers.

That's like the first people we're protecting ourselves from, in a sense, right? We don't want to be abandoned by them, so we conform to their beliefs and. , if we're supported in thinking critically and forming our own perspective, it might be easier to shed some of these things, but if having your own thoughts was caused for punishment, um, or just was looked down upon in any way, then you are going to be hesitant to let them go, and this is the thing that's going to feel bad.

It's that tug of war between what you've been conditioned to believe and what you desire to believe. If you can sit with that pain and not rush to get rid of it, you will be able to make that mental shift You want to? . This is the part that people have trouble doing though I see it all the time. My clients just wanna like get rid of the old belief, and that's not how it works.

You can't just get rid of a habit. Neural pathways don't just disappear. We have to spend more time focusing on the new habit and stop reinforcing the old one, and eventually it'll be less active. But that takes time. Another reason people have trouble with this idea of shedding is that it means you have to spend time getting to know yourself.

And for a lot of us, because we've been taught from a very young age, that we are wrong or bad or, or in the case of being queer, that we should feel shame for who we are. The idea of getting to know the real US can be fucking terrifying. But I think what most of us are really afraid of at its most basic level is ourselves.

We're afraid of, of us. We're scared that we're going to find out something about ourselves that's going to make us unable to love ourselves. And then the next part of it is right, that question of like, if I become more of me, will people reject me? And some might.  but others, right? You might when you really become more of you this, we say this in business all the time, like you're actually gonna attract more of the right people, more of the right customer.

But yeah, some of the people in your life who benefited from you being the old version of yourself, they might wanna exit your life now. And we don't have control over that. But that can feel really scary. And this is where radical self-acceptance and then eventually radical self-love come. . There is this great book by Sonya Renee Taylor.

I've probably mentioned it before, but it's called The Body Is Not An Apology that I think is a must read for all queers, people of color, women, anyone who's been in a group that's been marginalized, but really everyone, if you can learn to be a safe space for yourself, you're going to be more willing to do this kind of deep excavation into knowing yourself better.

And for me, at the end of the day, my main goal for all of my clients and all of you out there is an improved relationship with yourself and the goals that you set in terms of financial growth, increased skill, or a completed project are all just a vehicles for this kind of self support. Another common roadblock comes from our society's addiction to suffering as a means to get ahead, right?

So hustle culture, you know. No pain, no gain. Nose to the grindstone, right? We believe that hard work and self-flagellation are the most virtuous ways to achieve our goals, and while shedding is not always fun when we do it, we begin to live with more ease and flow. When we go all in on our strengths, when we build a business that looks and feels like us, things stop being quite so hard, and this can be a major mind fuck, and it can lead to you making the process of leveling up much harder than it already is Because here's the thing, you're gonna see things being.

As not in line with how you believe they're supposed to be, right? That's not the way you're supposed to achieve your goals. It's supposed to be hard. So when we strip away the things that are weighing us down and we feel that pressure valve release, it's incongruent with what we believe is supposed to be happening.

The uncomfortable work here is challenging our beliefs about suffering being the way to achieving our goals. This is work that we don't often want to do. It's why we keep choosing the wrong partner. For instance, that famous quote in um, perks of Being a wallflower is true in a sense. The one that says, we accept the love, we think we deserve.

We do this oftentimes because of confirmation bias. If we have a negative self-image. We are going to choose the partners whose actions are congruent with that negative self image because when someone treats us well, it's out of alignment with the way we see ourselves. So I always ask my clients when they believe things are supposed to be hard, how do you make it harder for yourself?

In the case of growth and becoming more of you, it's usually going to be somewhere around making themselves spend way more time than necessary, trying to do something that does not need to be done or that they could get someone else to do. Or they ignore a strength or a path that would make it less work because it being less work would be inc congruent with the belief that it has to be a lot of work.

It's funny too, how when things don't line up with our beliefs, it can really stop us in our tracks and even delay our growth. So like for instance, for me, I've been doing a lot of nervous system work and.  really trying to make peace with my trauma and triggers and not be mad that they're not like magically going away.

But I also had this impression that through this work I was gonna be like more zen and peaceful and loving, and the opposite is actually happening. I'm currently like more angry, more triggered, but what I'm getting to learn about myself by allowing this to just be is amazing. . So I think in addition to thinking things outside us should be different, we really also believe we should be different and we focus more time on trying to change ourselves to fit the version of us we thought we were going to meet instead of the one that's presenting itself.

Right now, I'm just, you know, I'm a little more angry. And that's giving me an opportunity to learn how to process anger in a more useful and healthy way, which is something that as a child I was never able to do. So by healing these triggers and healing this trauma, I'm like reparenting myself and learning how to be with negative emotion in a way that I was never comfortable with before.

Something similar came up in a Facebook group I'm in where the person was not happy with the thoughts that they were having around money as they're making more money. Um, and they wanted to take their mind off of keeping tabs on how each client gets them closer to their revenue goal. And her thought about these thoughts, right, that were focused on her revenue goal, was that these thoughts were not in line with her values.

So she came to the group like when she realized that she came to the group trying to solve for the thoughts when reality, what would be maybe more useful is accepting that as human beings, we will always have thoughts that center around our own interest, but that we don't have to focus on them. So if this person just focused more on the thoughts that were in alignment with their values, the other thoughts would just lose power.

The shedding here is about allowing themselves to be human and not judge their thoughts. We've all heard the saying that what you resist persists. So by being in opposition to the thoughts, we spend more time engaging with them, thus strengthening them. Instead, if we just allow them to be and shift our focus, we actually get where we wanna go, right?

Like this will allow this coach to get to the next level because instead of trying to coach herself out of it, she can turn her focus to serving people. Instead, thus achieving what she wanted in the first place, which was to be more concerned about service and less about money. So that's what I got for you today in terms of leveling up some of the roadblocks that come up with leveling up.

Obviously, they're usually gonna be thought problems. They're always, or I can say, they're always gonna be thought problems, and how you decide to interact with those thought problems. That is going to be what sort of keeps you back in the long run. So I hope this was useful to you today. I hope you all have an amazing week, and let me know what other things come up for you around the idea of taking things to the next level.

So one of the ways that this can actually come up is, is in a very practical way, which is that, you know, the things that you did to get you here are gonna be different from the things that you need to do to get to the next level, right? From an action perspective, right? So some of the systems, say for instance, that you had in place that helped you make your first a hundred thousand, are not gonna be the same systems that you need to make a million dollars, right?

You actually might need to have more robust systems to. Um, accommodate that, that type of growth, and that is something that I talk about with my clients, right? Like when they want to uplevel, like do they actually have the capacity to serve more people?  with the way things are now and what kinds of changes need to be made in the way that they're working, their systems, their structures, like the infrastructure has to be there for them to be able to accommodate that kind of growth.

But really, , when it comes down to it, it's going to be the mental shift into like accepting their ability to grow into that person that's going to get them to take those actions in the long run. So we really do need to focus more on who you are becoming or like what you have to let go of rather. And how do you become more of you in the journey.

To getting to that next level so that you're able to take the actions that are gonna be necessary for you to take things to the next level.

If you are loving what you're hearing here on, you need a coach, bitch, please subscribe like and share with your friends. And if you want more information on how you can work with me, one on one. Go to theonlychrishale.com where you can find me on Instagram, theonlychrishale.