You Need a Coach B*tch

Pick Your Pain

• Chris Hale • Episode 101

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This episode is a sanctuary for those grappling with tough decisions, offering an embrace of self-compassion as we discuss 'picking your pain'—a mantra for intentionally choosing our challenges and the life we yearn for. Join me as I unpack the complexities of juggling personal crises with staying connected to those we hold dear. We confront the inner critic that often amplifies our doubts, sharing insights on how to nurture our emotional well-being amidst the trials we face. There's a candid exploration of how skills honed in one aspect of our lives, like managing finances, can ripple into unexpected areas, fostering resilience and adaptability. Listening to this episode, you're invited to step away from the pursuit of perfection, instead prioritizing self-care and embracing growth at your own sustainable pace.

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Speaker 1:

Hey Bestie, how goes it in your world? I have to admit, the last week has been rough around here. We have an 18 year old little fur baby here and he was having a rough week. It's crazy because we've gotten so much extra time with him that it almost feels like he's never going to die, to be honest. But the reality is starting to sink in as he has like more bad days more frequently and you know, we can sort of see the signs of decline. We had a few days this week where it seemed like he had declined too far and it turns out he was just very dehydrated and fighting off an infection and so he's on the mend and we're very grateful for that.

Speaker 1:

But what started happening is that when he's unwell I start like preparing myself for the end and I start heavily mourning him and before he's gone and it's just very emotional and it's very exhausting. And there are things, real things to mourn, like the fact that he has changed so much. He's not the same sprightly little dog that he was. How we interact with him has changed. All these transitional phases have needed some sort of space for grief and I think it's been good to be present with that and to be practicing grief as something that I can process and not be afraid of. I think having grieved people I love in the past in my life has helped me with this skill. But it does not mean that it's any easier. It just means that I can move through the waves of emotion with more self-compassion and care, and they don't stick around as long. They don't stay stuck to me. I don't stay in rumination about them. I'm not rushing myself to feel better. I'm accepting the difficulty of the situation and I'm letting myself have the full range of emotions that comes up with that. And that's probably the nicest, most loving thing that I can do for myself. And that is kind of a perfect segue into today's topic, which is pick your pain.

Speaker 1:

So oftentimes we're holding off on like making decisions about things because we're afraid of the discomfort that we're going to feel. And the thing is is that future discomfort is always unknown and we don't deal with the unknown well around here. We don't like it. We're like I don't know what's going to happen. Let's's not go there, especially if you have any perfectionistic tendencies. We want to control the future, we want it to be neat and tidy and we're trying to make it that way. But life is not neat and tidy and also filled with pain. But what does it mean to pick your pain? For me, it's always about choosing what you want to manage your mind around. You will have to deal with discomfort and that pesky inner critic that we've talked about, no matter what decision you make. So what are you willing to go through that hard work for? As Glennon says, we can do hard things, and I will add that you are worthy of doing hard things for yourself to have the life that you want.

Speaker 1:

Things are hard in life, especially right now with, like all of the upheaval and unrest, the rising cost of living, we're just all feeling a little bit more of that pressure. So many of us are struggling in a myriad of ways and all we can do is make choices that align with what we want and then be willing to get our hands dirty and do the work to keep going. Every once in a while there's like this post that goes around that says something like being overweight is hard, but so is being in shape. Which caveat it is possible to be in shape and like not be a size two or have a 30 inch waist, but that's a whole other conversation. But like other things it talks about is like finances and like being in debt is hard and saving money is hard and like you get the idea, it's kind of like all of these either, or black and white kind of statements, and a post like this, I want to say, does not take in the nuance of every person's experience and that for some people, saving money is actually like impossible because of their cost of living and their ability to make enough money. And like someone's ability to lose or gain weight is is dependent on so many factors and it's not just about, like how hard they try or how hard they work.

Speaker 1:

But I do. I like the message that we get to pick our hard or pick our pain in this instance. I don't like the absolutism of like the original post and I don't like how it makes things seem so black and white, but I do think there is something to this that is useful for us. So I want to add that there's no judgment around what you pick to work on and what you decide to do or not to, and what you have the spoons for. This is not a morality thing, this is not a good or bad thing, and I'm learning this lesson for myself as I step away from perfectionism.

Speaker 1:

I've stopped making my bed every day. I've stopped trying to keep an immaculate house. I've stopped caring if I leave the house in sweatpants versus jeans. My house is meant to be lived in and we're two very active people taking care of a very needy dog. Our priorities need to be on supporting ourselves and doing that in a way that doesn't burn ourselves out, and I've actually been in burnout for like what feels like years now, but that's because I wasn't taking care of myself for such a long time. I'm still recovering from how hard I was working myself back in like 2021, 2022. I was like full time at LCS and teaching dance and taking occasional one on one clients. I was just like doing the most and I hadn't really learned yet that anytime I try to push that hard that I inevitably max out, even though, like I experienced it, I didn't. I just thought, I don't know what I thought, I have no idea, I just was not listening to myself, and I've learned that I cannot sustain that kind of life. It's just not for me and I can really only focus on one area of growth at a time, while also working and having relationships and taking care of myself and my dog and all those things. So one area of growth. That's all I can really do.

Speaker 1:

So if you find yourself at a bit of a crossroads around which hard to pick where you're, like, I just don't know what to do. Just ask yourself the question what do I want to manage my mind around? Which hard do I want to do? Because it's going to be hard either way. This goes for the decision itself, right? So, like, stay in the relationship or leave the relationship. You can either decide that, like you're going to stick it out and you're going to do the work in the relationship to create a sense of connection within that relationship, and not for any specific result. I want to like make that clear. Like you, when we do these things, we don't know how they're going to end up. So you can decide to reconnect in your relationship and you and your partner can start doing that work, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to result in you ending up together. It could result in the opposite. That's not the point. The point is like what am I willing to show up for and am I willing to show up to do the work to see how this goes right.

Speaker 1:

So there's the decision in and of itself between, like, sort of picking your heart right, do the thing, stop doing the thing, and it goes for picking things off the menu of life. So am I going to focus on my relationship or am I going to focus on building my business? Because you might not have the spoons to do both, and that's an important thing to understand that life is always in flux, and we've talked about this before Like we're never going to have that perfect balance that we, like, are striving for, that people talk about. Like I don't think that exists. So you're going to have periods where, like, you're prioritizing one thing over another. Maybe financial stability is really the biggest priority before you can even think about what's going on with your relationship. So maybe your relationship is just sort of coasting, maybe it's at status quo and maybe that's okay. Maybe you can even have a conversation with your partner about that. I don't know.

Speaker 1:

But I do want to acknowledge that it can be scary to make these decisions, and there are a few reasons for that. One is that transitions are just hard, right, every transition comes with an amount of loss which needs to be grieved. If you've been trying to do it all and you're making the decision to really go all in on one area for a time, then it's going to mean giving up some things right, and that's going to be tough. You will have feelings around it and you need to honor those feelings and let them have space to move through you fully. The other part of it is that inner critic is always going to be there looking for any sign that you made the wrong decision. So it will point out that, like your friends are going to be mad at you or maybe they already are mad at you and it's like making up stories about how upset they are.

Speaker 1:

Right, like that's what the inner critic's job is for spending less time with them so that you can focus on another area of your life say it's your career or whatever and you might even gasp have to talk to them about it. So maybe you are hiding some things from them because you're embarrassed. Maybe your finances are not doing well and you're in a ton of debt and you really need to work to get your finances in order and you need to work more, and that you just don't have the bandwidth for as much face-to-face time. That's going to feel sad, but hopefully they understand and you all can find other ways to keep your connection, because connection is important and those people are important and leaning on them is important. But maybe you're not going to be able to spend as much time with them as you're going through this phase of getting this other part of your life together and the inner critic is going to make that a bad thing and it's going to focus on the negativity in that situation and it's our responsibility to like bring it back around and do the hard things, have the hard conversations with the people in our lives so that we can clear that out and focus on the thing that we want to focus on.

Speaker 1:

So in the instance of our inner critic, we first want to acknowledge that it's going to be there and that its presence does not mean that you've made the wrong choice, because that's often something that comes up when we start having those doubts or we start feeling the hard. We start telling ourselves like, oh, maybe I shouldn't have done this and that's really what you're afraid of in the first place. That's why we don't make the decision in the first place. You're not afraid necessarily of the repercussions of the decision in any like external way. We're afraid of the internal repercussions of the way that we're not going to support ourselves. So we have to learn we've talked about this too. We have to learn that skill, or practice that skill if we've already, you know, been working on it of having our own back around the decision that we've made, because you are in charge of your life and you get to decide how you live it.

Speaker 1:

So don't let that little voice in your head bully you into believing that you've done anything wrong. And then we need to be, like, open and willing to feel all the things, because that's what's going to set yourself up for more success. We can't push down all of our feelings and we can't disconnect from our emotions entirely. When we do this, we also cut ourselves off from our intuition and we don't want to be disconnected from the clarity of that deep knowing. So I'm not trying to make this sound like it's really simple and easy to do. I hope I've acknowledged enough that like it can be difficult to decide which path to take, because our brains are going to tell us from that perfectionistic space that there is a right thing to choose.

Speaker 1:

But I just want to give you this right now this permission to to understand that there is no right or wrong, there is no good or bad. There's just what you have the capability of working on right now, for you, for your life, and whatever you choose. The skills that you acquire in working on that thing are going to carry into other aspects of your life. So, if it is your finances, the skills that you learn in the working on your finances and I mean like the mental and emotional skills yes, there's probably other also, like organizational skills and the financial management and the math of it all Right, like there are other skills that are happening there that might not be transferable, but, like the mental and emotional skills are always transferable you can always take that like ability to feel any emotion into any other aspect of your life once you've practiced it in one place. So understand that the work that you're doing right, there's no wrong choice, because the work that you're doing is going to flow into the rest of your life and make the rest of your life more full and complete. All right, my friends, that's all I have for you today.

Speaker 1:

I also want to shout out that, like, the last episode that I produced was the 100th episode and I totally didn't even realize it until after the fact and I was uploading it into you know the website that it goes into that it was like oh, the last episode was 99. That means this one's 100. So I'm celebrating 100 episodes still and I want to celebrate and thank you all listening for showing up for the last 100 episodes and being there and supporting and it means so much to me. So, thank you, thank you, thank you for being with me for now, our 101st, 101 episode. Have an amazing week. We'll talk soon. Bye.