00:39

Hello, everyone.

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00:40

Welcome to Life, Mastered. We are coming to you a day early today because it's a really exciting day in our Master Coach community. Our new book, She Rises, is officially live. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about it.

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00:57

And I know I've been talking about it over the past few weeks, but I'm going to talk to you a little bit about it and tell you exactly what to do today. And you are going to love today's episode. We are diving into the stories we tell ourselves, the emotions that we feel, and we're really truly talking about helping you today to notice where you are limiting yourself, limiting yourself in this very day, in this moment, limiting yourself in what you are believing is possible for you financially, for your relationships, for every area of your life. That's what we're talking about today. I cannot wait to dive into it with you, but I will wait because before we go there, She Rises is out today and it is available on Amazon.

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01:45

Now, there are three very important things that I'm going to ask that you do. Number one, I would so appreciate your support, as would my 12 co-authors, in buying the Kindle version of this book today for just 99 cents.

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02:00

So it is on sale today as a launch bonus, 99 cents. You get that electronic version of it. And besides, that Kindle purchase specifically is how we really communicate to Amazon. Like people want to get their hands on this book.

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02:15

So your 99 cent purchase, first of all, you're going to love the book. Trust me. And it's a huge help to us as well. So step number one is I want you to pause this podcast and go buy the Kindle version, but don't do it yet because I have a step two for you.

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02:31

Okay. So the first chapter in the book that I have written is all about really stopping the hustle, stopping the overworking and understanding how when we stop that go, go, go stress cycle, we are able to ultimately achieve more, more financially, more personally, and truly a greater sense of well-being.

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02:54

So why am I telling you all of this? Well, I have a free workbook download that goes along with that chapter, and you're going to want to download that today as well, because this leads us to step three.

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03:06

I am so thrilled to offer up a four-week live training that I will be doing in October. So in October for four weeks, I'm coming. Usually this type of training program and this length of time would be around a $2,000 offer.

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03:26

Today, as you buy the Kindle and you download the workbook, you will unlock access to joining me for this live training, the Life Mastery Reset, completely free. Today only. So this is when you can go ahead and pause this podcast.

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03:44

Go to the link in the show notes or go to MollyClaire.com. Buy the Kindle version of She Rises. Download that workbook after you purchase that. You can find that in the show notes as well. And it's also right in that first chapter.

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03:56

It's going to tell you exactly where to download that. And then, of course, step three, once you download that, you're going to get a lovely little thank you page that is going to give you that coupon complimentary access to four weeks of live coaching, live training with me.

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04:12

In the life mastery reset, we're going to look at your four core. We're going to look at the different areas of your life and see where you're out of alignment. We're going to create an alignment map for you to help you to understand, okay, what is in the way of me really releasing the stress?

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04:27

What is in the way of me getting clarity in my life? And how can I actually move into feeling more connected with myself, more alive professionally, and really clear on creating a great life? Because I mean, right, I think back and we all thought we knew what it took to be successful.

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04:45

And I know I had the map in my head: go to college, right, get married, have the kids, do all these things. And fortunately for me, I wouldn't have said this years ago, but fortunately for me, doing those things did not work out the way that I hoped it would.

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04:59

And yet what that has forced me to look at is really learning myself to a greater degree. And because of this and because of the work I'm able to do here, I have really truly realized that we all are trying to build a life that we believe is going to give us what we want.

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05:18

And ultimately, we miss out on actually knowing who we are and building that life from more of a sense of purpose, self-connection, connection with one another and that vulnerability. So it really is a shift from achieving and checking the boxes to saying, okay, wait a minute, who am I?

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05:39

What is my greater purpose? And if I were to throw out all the rules and all the things that I've believed were success and I just leaned in and I listened to myself and what's calling to me and those parts of me that are screaming out when I'm lacking peace.

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05:54

What is there and what can I learn from it? And how do I build my life from that powerful place within? So all that being said, if this is speaking to you, the life mastery reset is going to be epic and I am thrilled to offer it to you.

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06:10

This is how I am just celebrating the launch of this beautiful book with these incredible women. And let's go. Let's just go. All right. So there's all of that. Before we dive into the content today, one more thing I want to make very clear to you is that we still have spots for the October retreat.

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06:28

So I know a few of you have asked, are there spots left? There are in the shared spaces there. It is going to be an incredible three days. Melanie Faye and I are going to be there. And actually several of the master coach authors from the book are going to be there.

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06:41

We are going to be truly having the space to be still, to clear out the noise, and to really decide what is it that I am done with in my life? And how do I move forward to actually make change? Not just to have a few days and feel good for a few days, but to actually go home and really almost, I think of it as like, you know, the etch a sketch where you can shake it up and you can move the etch a sketch from one side to another and you just clear the slate, right? A clean slate. And now what do I want to create? So that's what that's going to be all about. You can check in the show notes for that. Now, here we go. I'm going to start out with three questions for you.

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07:27

So in the coaching space, in this space of creating our lives, we hear this idea of having stories about ourselves and often releasing stories about ourselves, right? Because our brains are meaning-making machines.

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07:46

That is how we are wired. We go through life and we create stories around the interactions that we have. We create meaning, right? So if I have what I would consider a negative interaction with someone professionally, well, then I'm telling a story about that, right?

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08:00

I'm telling a story about what this person's intentions were or the ways they were behaving and what was wrong and what was not acceptable and how I was being treated, right? We create this story around situations, good, bad, or somewhere in between, but we create stories.

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08:19

And in the self-help space, in the coaching space, we hear a lot about releasing the stories, rewriting the stories. And this is an incredibly powerful concept. And there are very good reasons why many people, most people, get very stuck in actually releasing the stories.

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08:45

And I'll take that a step further, why some people have actually a negative experience or relationship with this idea of releasing stories. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Because the fact of the matter is that we do tell stories.

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09:00

And the stories we tell ourselves do impact us. They impact the way we feel. They impact what we believe is possible for us and ultimately what we're going to create. And there are reasons why we struggle to let them go.

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09:12

So we're going to talk about that. And here's the first question I want to ask you. When you think about this idea of you telling yourself a story about yourself and who you are, what is the story you tell yourself about who you are right now?

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09:30

And this story could include things like how organized you believe you are or not. This story about yourself could inform you as to what limitations you believe you have, what abilities or inabilities you have.

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09:47

The story that you tell about who you are impacts what you expect of yourself. It impacts a lot of things. So just take a minute and think about what is the story I tell myself about who I am right now?

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10:11

Now we're going to go to a second question. What is the story you have told yourself about your past? The story you've told yourself about ways you were mistreated, about ways you were left out, ways that you missed out.

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10:25

What are the stories you tell yourself about your past that now make sense to you as to why your life is what it is now, for better or for worse, right? What is the story about your past that you tell yourself?

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10:41

And you can easily find this because you can think about what you tell other people about what has happened to you in the past. So that's the second question. What is the story you have told yourself about your past?

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10:53

And I've got to pause here because if you're judging yourself for whatever this story is, it's never going to be helpful for us. Okay. We all tell stories. We all tell stories about ourselves that people could say are, you know, have pieces of untruths, right?

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11:08

Very normal. And we all have stories about ourselves that people would say put us in a victim role because we've all experienced things where we have very well felt victimized or mistreated, right? So as we look at stories from our past, it's all going to be a mixed bag, but we're really looking at it just to be curious.

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11:28

What is it I am believing as absolute about my past? And in particular, what is the story about my past that feels very present for me now and feels to potentially be very limiting in terms of what I can be or what I can do now?

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11:51

Okay, third question. What is the story keeping you from what you want? Is it a story like, I don't get to have what other people have? Is it a story that tells you, well, I'm not the type of person that has that life.

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12:09

I'm not the type of person that gets that kind of relationship. So what is the story? What are the beliefs about yourself that are keeping you from what you would ultimately want? Now we're going to come back and revisit these questions, but first what we're going to do is we're going to lean into why do we resist?

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12:31

So if we can just play for a minute and all get on board with this idea, even if just for a minute, that potentially what I am telling myself is true for me or is true about me, is a story that is informing what is or is not possible.

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12:50

It seems that it would be pretty important to pay attention to what those stories are, to maybe sift through them a little bit and find out, is what I'm telling myself here absolutely true? Is what I'm telling myself here actually useful for me?

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13:10

Is there potentially a completely different perspective on me and on my experiences? And that perspective could potentially create new possibilities for me, bring new freedom, bring more openness, show me more choices and actually make more possible for me, right?

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13:33

Whatever we believe is possible, that is our limit, right? Because what we believe, we will look for evidence for that, that confirmation bias. So if we know that we should maybe consider shifting these stories, why don't we do it?

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13:49

So think about this. In my own mind, my stories about what happened are often going to seem very absolute, very real. I know what I experienced, right? I know this is what happened. It seems absolute.

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14:05

And we all feel that way to a degree. Now, granted, the more awareness we have, we're at least aware at some level that it's not absolute. But I just want to highlight that our truth, what we each believe feels absolute to us, right?

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14:18

So if these stories seem absolute and they seem real, then doesn't it make sense that as we are working to release or shift, to release that story seems to invalidate your own thoughts, your own experience, invalidate your emotions.

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14:37

Right? If I'm looking at a situation and I'm saying, oh, well, that's a story that you've made up, Molly. Think about it differently. Think about it better. Well, there's a part of me that immediately is saying, wait a minute, I know what I felt.

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14:51

I know what my experience was. And so I'm not even sure what to do with this. Where is my footing, right? And so I think this is the part we need to really remember is that there is a difference between releasing the stories, releasing the meaning around a situation, and invalidating our experience within it, invalidating our feelings or believing that the way we thought about it or experienced it was wrong.

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15:23

That's the issue right there. That's why we resist releasing the stories. Okay? I'm going to give you a specific example. As a child, my mom was a single mom. We needed help from people at times just to make sure we were taken care of.

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15:38

And there was one household in particular that I would go to somewhat regularly in the summer. And there was some conflict in this family about me being there. So here I am, small child, and the adult male in the house, I experienced interactions with him as him hating me.

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16:05

If I were to tell you the story about it, I would say he hated me. He was angry with me. I was a burden to him. I was treated like a second-class citizen. And I would go further to say the things that I gained from this or the things I believed about this was that something was wrong with me.

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16:28

I wasn't wanted. I'm not wanted. There's no place for me. Right? And so you can see where, if a child is experiencing a tone that they experience as angry, right, maybe a raised voice, maybe treatment of one child different than another.

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16:49

You can see that when a child is experiencing words, emotions, and behaviors from an adult that they're not sure how to make sense of, that they would feel a lot of things, right? And so in this scenario where my story around it was, he hates me.

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17:09

I'm a burden. I'm a second-class citizen. I'm not good enough. I shouldn't be here. What I felt was I felt afraid. I experienced feelings of sadness. I felt as though I wanted to escape. I didn't want to be there.

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17:30

And what I want to highlight here is that my perception of the situation was created by me as a child because of what I was feeling. I was trying to make sense of the feelings. And as we look at this situation at a distance, right, with adult maturity, I can see that what was happening is a grown man didn't know how to deal with his own emotions.

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18:00

I was a child and I didn't know how to make sense of what I was experiencing, other than the way that I did. I can look and see when I visualize some of these experiences as a child, that I was always worthy.

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18:16

I was always important. And it makes sense that I felt the way that I did. It makes sense that I felt as though I wasn't important. But it wasn't necessarily true, right? So now I'm an adult. And now, as I can see that I told a story about this situation where I believed I was very mistreated, I was unloved, I was whatever I believed about it, right?

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18:44

That story was there for me and it makes sense that it was. But the problem is if I hold on to that story, it's going to weigh me down right now. And instead, as I can see that now I'm an adult. No one else's words or emotional state gets to define me or have power over me.

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19:06

It seemed that way then, but it's not true. It's not true for me now. And now I'm wise enough to see and validate my experience without believing any of the stories around it. So my hope is that I'm sharing this with you.

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19:23

Some of the key things I want you to understand is that there is incredible power in releasing the stories we tell ourselves. And by releasing those stories, it does not mean that we need to invalidate ourselves or our experience or our emotions.

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19:39

We can actually separate them out. And the problem is if we don't, if we keep those emotions connected to the story, well, we are put into a situation of either invalidating our feelings or experience, which is never helpful or useful for us as human beings.

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19:57

Okay? Or we're either invalidating them or we're clinging to a story that can explain why we felt the way that we did, but that story keeps us stuck. It tells us we're limited. And another really important thing is that oftentimes releasing a story is to open up to the unknown.

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20:22

If what I've believed was true about me or is true about me isn't true, what's true instead? And not only does it require us to step into the unknown, but it challenges us to believe something bigger and better, which can feel pretty scary, can feel pretty vulnerable, and it requires quite a bit of self-trust.

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20:45

Okay? So as we wrap up this episode, I want to just say a few things to you. Okay? Releasing a story doesn't mean that we were wrong for what we thought. Releasing a story doesn't invalidate our experience.

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21:03

And I want you to consider, what if I can release the stories again and again, and I was never wrong for how I was thinking or feeling about it? And what if all of the emotions that I feel don't need to be explained by a story, but instead the feelings I experience are something inside of me that is simply calling me to pay attention to understanding what I need.

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21:36

So let's follow up with these three questions we started off with. What is the story you're telling yourself right now about who you are? What is the story you have told yourself about the past that potentially limits you and what is possible now for your relationships, for your sense of well-being, for what's possible for you?

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22:04

What is the story that keeps you from what you really want? And what would it take for you to love yourself enough to validate your experience, to allow your feelings to matter, and to be there as a messenger for you, while also releasing that story that is limiting you from ultimately being, feeling, seeing, achieving, and doing exactly what you want.

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22:45

That's what I've got for you. If you haven't already, go buy that Kindle version of She Rises Today. Download that workbook. And I look forward to working with you in the Life Mastery Reset. I'll talk with you next week.