350: Defying Defaults: Life on Purpose

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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now. As she breaks down the fairy tale health story, you have been chasing all of your life, indispensable action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 0:28
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. In fact, welcome to the very first Grace & Grit Podcast episode in 2024. And let me be among the first to welcome you into the new year. I know we’re already almost a weekend, so I’m sure you’ve been welcomed by a lot of people. But it seems significant, always, to me the start of a new year that we have made it into another new year, and that we have 365 days ahead of us to do whatever we want with. I hope you had a great holiday.

Courtney Townley 0:59
And look, if you didn’t, I want you to know that I see you and I have so much empathy for you. I have been there in the thick of dark holidays. And it’s not a whole lot of fun. In fact, it wasn’t all that long ago that we had the holiday from hell, we had COVID in our house, my dog lost his eyes. That part of the roof blew off our house all within the span of a week. And that is not an awesome way to start a new year. But however you’re starting the new year, whether you’re feeling strong and resilient, or you are feeling depleted and burnt out. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you are here, you have found your way to this show. And it is my high hope that today’s episode will spark something in you to move forward with a bit more grace and ease.

Courtney Townley 1:46
Now, by no means do I think that the new year is the only time we should be reflecting on the direction we’re traveling in, and the work that we might want to do. In the coming months. I think that work can be done anytime time of year. And in fact, I think it should be done often throughout the year. That is one of the things I lean into heavily with my own clients. But I do think the start of the year is a time where an awful lot of people tend to reflect on the year past, what’s working, what isn’t working, and then using that Intel to reshape some behavior to move forward a little bit differently.

Courtney Townley 2:30
And look, the work that we call ourselves to do is different for all of us radically different. For some people, it looks like mending a relationship with a loved one with a co worker with themselves. For some people, it looks like a career shift of some kind, maybe that looks like literally changing careers, or leaving a career or starting a new career path. For some people, it looks like really starting to take radical responsibility for their health. Maybe that looks like losing weight, which I usually like to refer to more as fat loss. Or it looks like building muscle. Or it likes it looks like getting more sleep or baking more time into your schedule for rest and recovery. Where we want to apply effort, how we want to use our next 365 days is different for all of us. And the skill sets that will actually help us to show up to do the work that we’ve called ourselves to do is actually the same. And we’re going to tap into a little bit a few of those skill sets today. In this episode.

Courtney Townley 3:54
I want to share with you just from the outset a little bit of where my focus is going to be in the year ahead. I’ve decided that I really want to lean into the work of simplifying and streamlining my life as much as possible. And the reason this is a focus for me is because at this age and stage of my life, it has become incredibly clear to me through the practice of observation that I am really good at creating a lot of unnecessary work for myself. I literally create extra work in terms of making very petty things a big deal. I spend far more time than necessary on certain projects in my business. I use extra words when I talk I use extra words when I write. I have things in my home that just feel extra. They don’t feel necessary. They don’t feel useful. They don’t feel loved. And simplifying and streamlining, to me really means that I start to lessen that work, that I start to deliberately shape and create more time in my schedule, to do whatever we call this white space, right?

Courtney Townley 5:26
It’s time that I would probably use for self discovery, creative pursuits, travel, connection, these kinds of things. So I’m really hungry for more time and space. And this is, to me, the benefit of focusing on simplifying and streamlining my life is I will create more time and space. And I strongly feel that with more time and space, I will be able to make even more of an impact to my life, to my community, to the world, in my in my way.

Courtney Townley 6:08
And on that note, this idea of impact is partly what we are infusing our theme inside of Rumble & Rise with this year, if you don’t know what Rumble & Rise is, it’s a community I built years ago for women who listen to this Podcast, who want to actually take the work that we talk about on this show, and really apply it to their life. So it’s an incubator of sorts for the type of work that we talk about here on the Grace & Grit Podcast. And our theme for 2024. Inside that community is power, purpose, and impact.

Courtney Townley 6:51
And the reason I chose this theme, is because the entire space of Rumble & Rise is really dedicated to women who are interested in refining their self-leadership skills. So they can more easily stand in their personal power, they can more easily live with an on purpose. And they can more easily make an impact in their world and to their world. And look, not everyone is ready for the membership experience, I get that we have 10s of 1000s of listeners on this Podcast every month, and the membership is nowhere near that large. It’s actually very small and intimate. And I do realize that memberships can kind of be a turn off for some people because they feel like it’s just, you know, they have to pay out every single month, whether they’re using the thing or not. And I am so passionate about the work that we do inside this community. And I have been racking my brain for years on how to expose more people to the type of work that we do inside of that community. Without feeling like they have to start with a membership commitment.

Courtney Townley 8:13
So in 2024, I have decided that we are actually going to experiment, everything’s an experiment with selling the masterclasses each month on their own. So as a listener of the Grace & Grit Podcast, you will have the option to pay a small fee for the monthly masterclass and a companion guide that we create to go along with it to help you really get the most out of the teachings of that class. And my hope is that by being exposed to these classes, people will start to really understand the value of being a part of a community of women who are all dedicated to learning these kinds of skill sets. So if that’s something you think you might be interested in, and you want to hear more about January’s masterclass, you can head on over to graceandgrit.com/masterclasses and you will see our first masterclass is called Power Up: Direction & Drive Reconsidered.

Courtney Townley 9:24
And this first masterclass of the year is all about getting clarity on where you’re headed this year, where you want to apply effort. It is about ensuring that you are using the right kind of motivation to drive your journey. It is going to give you some hopefully inspiration and tools to start making decisions faster and stronger. And also really challenge you to consider the metrics that you are going to use to ensure that you’re navigating in the direction you said you wanted to go. So lots of great stuff coming up in this class. I’m really excited about it and I would love you to partake.

Courtney Townley 10:07
So again, you can go to graceandgrit.com/masterclasses to find out more about that. And today I want to kind of tap into a little piece of this conversation of what we’re going to be talking about in that masterclass which is defined defaults. We call this, Defying Defaults: Life on Purpose.

Courtney Townley 10:28
And what does that mean? What is a default? Well, it means that we’re choosing consciously to not live on autopilot. We’re choosing not to sleepwalk through our life and call that a life. Defying defaults means that you are taking radical responsibility for what is and what is not working in your life. And renovating accordingly. It means how you show up on the regular, that’s what your default is how you are showing up in your life, you are a product of your habits, habits are defaults, and you have defaults that are absolutely supporting you, nourishing you growing you. And you have some defaults that are definitely depleting you and stalling you and stagnating you. So how did defaults develop? Right?

Courtney Townley 11:28
Well, by practicing a behavior, it’s as simple as that. We practice behaviors, and we get some kind of reward when we practice a certain behavior. And that inspires us to keep doing the thing. And with lots of practice, thanks to neuroplasticity, we develop new neural pathways in our brain, we start developing very strong neural pathways in our brain to the point that our brain just reacts with certain behaviors, we don’t even have to think about what we’re doing. So when we are living life, consistently, without thinking about what we’re doing. And a lot of our defaults are not serving the life that we say we want to live, you can see where things go very sideways. There’s a quote I heard years ago, I don’t know who said it, but I use it. Often, I should probably look up who said it.

Courtney Townley 12:30
The quote is this, your reactions are a testament to your practices. Keep in mind reactions are things that we don’t consciously think about, we just behave, we react to life in a particular way, because we have practiced the behavior so frequently. So if you want to really reflect on whether or not your current practices are supporting you, look at how you’re reacting to your life. And that will tell you a lot.

Courtney Townley 13:05
Circling back really quickly, I want to give you a couple examples of how our defaults develop. Because I just said like we we start practicing a behavior, we get rewarded for that behavior. And then we stay in that cycle to the point that it just becomes a reaction. And so an example that I’ve often used is around sugar. To illustrate this. A lot of us have the experience as children of being rewarded with something sweet for doing a good job. And it drives me crazy that schools do this because they’re just starting what can really turn out later in life to be a very unhealthy habit. So as a kid, if you are rewarded with something sweet every time you do a good job, well, you’re getting a reward for doing a good job. And then you go off to college. And you continue that behavior, right.

Courtney Townley 14:01
So every time you do well in your life, or you experience some kind of success. You celebrate with food, more specifically, you celebrate with something sweet. And that may not just be on occasion, it might actually be every freaking day of your life. Because we can rationalize absolutely, that there are things to celebrate every single day of our life. And then maybe later in life, you actually get married to a partner, or that you maybe not even married but you’re just living with a partner who really has the same pattern. So we just keep reinforcing, reinforcing reinforcing sweet treats for celebration and good jobs. And anytime we want to feel a little bit better. And then our default becomes turning to sugar and we are beating ourselves up. Maybe not Understanding why we have such an attraction to sugar. And why just understanding that the chemistry of sugar is not all that awesome for us isn’t enough to change the behavior. Another example might be that when you were a child, maybe you got attention for doing a good job, right, or just attention for acting out in a certain way.

Courtney Townley 15:25
And so you continue to do that throughout your life, to the point of becoming a workaholic and borderline pushing yourself to burn out because of those patterns, so your default, like mine is, might be to create a tremendous amount of unnecessary work for yourself. So there’s a lot of consequences to living our life on default, right and not by design, because that’s really the opposite. You can call it by design or on purpose. But living life by default, has a lot of consequences. And of course, I’m speaking to the defaults that don’t serve you. So living on default creates a tremendous amount of integrity pain. If you’ve never heard the term before integrity, pain is when our actions are misaligned with what we say we want for our life. And let’s face it, we all have habits that are very misaligned with what we want for our life. And integrity. Pain is the very real emotional pain, sometimes physical pain that results from that misalignment. Other consequences of living on default, are chemical disruption.

Courtney Townley 16:42
Right, so we are creating more stress with a lot of these default behaviors. And more stress, as many of you most of you probably know, really jacks up chemistry. And I largely work with the midlife population, women in their 40s 50s 60s and beyond. And we are already rumbling with a challenging hormonal landscape. So when you add a lot more chemical disruption on top of an already radically shifting hormonal landscape, life gets extra hard. Another consequence, of course, is our things like insecurity. We don’t feel good about ourselves, we don’t feel secure in who we are, because we don’t even trust ourselves to do the things that we say we will do. That leads to powerlessness, it leads to, of course, very low confidence. And with low confidence, you will probably not make a very big impact in your life with anything. Because you aren’t showing up very often.

Courtney Townley 17:54
So the alternative, of course to this is really cultivating a life on purpose, living life by design, so many more benefits to that. And look, it’s not saying that you won’t have defaults, you’re still going to have habits in your life habits are a beautiful thing. They are your brain’s way of conserving energy. But we want to cultivate habits, of course, this service. And so when we get very intentional about new behaviors, we want to develop new skill sets, new practices, things really start to shift on the health front. Because we start to radically reduce stress. And I’ve long believed, and I’ve said this many times on the Podcast, that my definition of health is our ability to manage the total stress load of our life. And your stress load is always changing. Right?

Courtney Townley 19:00
So we have to be able to manage the total stress load of our life. And one of the ways that we can do that is really being intentional about how we show up in the world. So we aren’t creating byproducts that are producing more stress in our life. I also just want to add that defaults. One of the benefits of really living life on purpose is that it helps us to restore our personal power. So when we live life on purpose, life by design, we get very intentional about how we’re showing up in the world. We’re literally taking ownership of everything. Now we aren’t taking ownership of everything that happens to us. But we are taking ownership for how we show up within everything. We’re staying awake to how we’re showing up

Courtney Townley 19:56
you know no one ever consciously says things to themselves like You know, I suck, I’m unlovable, I’ll never succeed on this. That’s not on purpose. That’s by default. We started that language in our brain, who knows when it doesn’t really matter. And then we built a really strong practice out of it to the point that it’s just our default. But we aren’t consciously choosing to self narrate in ways that are self deprecating, or, you know, create a lot of stagnation in our life. But when we become awake, to that being an issue, we can start shaping our self narrative on purpose. And that changes so much. living life on purpose also will make you more resilient. Because you are in control, it will help you to start taking more risks in your life. Because you start proving to yourself that you’ll have your own back even when others don’t, you’ll be willing to be more visible, and put more of your ideas out there. Because you have more confidence. And as a byproduct of all of those things, of course, you will make a bigger impact.

Courtney Townley 21:19
Now, living life on purpose shows up really differently for all of my clients, I coach on so many different topics with my clients. For one client, it might look like having a really hard conversation with a loved one, because they’re feeling resentful, or they’re feeling a lot of internal friction around an issue. And so they need to use their voice and have a difficult conversation with a loved one, be willing to risk discomfort. In order to be authentic and true to the other person. That’s really hard to do, because you don’t know how the other person is going to react. But what is also hard is not having that conversation and living with the resentment and internal friction forever. Some of my clients have sold businesses, because they just realized that they were finished, they were complete with that phase of their life. I have clients who they’re leaning into their life on purpose looks like starting a new business, it might look like leaving a relationship, it might look like doing an amazing things like travel or athletic pursuits, or taking on new passions.

Courtney Townley 22:42
I mentioned earlier in the Podcast that although we all have different defaults, and we all are calling ourselves to different work this year. The self-leadership skills that will help us to show up to do that work are really the same. So another way of saying this is the path to define defaults, the path to living life on purpose. those skill sets are very similar for all of us. Clarity of direction. I don’t know, a Success book or self help book or any kind of up leveling your life book or Podcast or anything that will not express to you the power of clarity. Getting clear on what you want. And the direction you want to travel in. What do you want to move towards in 2024? That’s a really important thing to ask yourself otherwise, you you spend time on so many roads you don’t need to be on.

Courtney Townley 23:53
And then you wonder why you’re not fulfilled or you’re not feeling successful, or like you’re making progress. And it really boils down for a lot of people to just not having clarity. The second thing I think is really important and very, very common thread for all of us no matter what we’re working on this year is assuming responsibility for what is driving your journey. And in January’s masterclass inside of Rumble & Rise, I’m really leaning into the power of self image and self narrative. Because how we think about ourselves how we think about what happens in our life. And how we think about our lives in general, has everything to do with how you’re going to show up in the world.

Courtney Townley 24:43
So taking a good look at your narrative and choosing on purpose, a narrative that is actually in alignment with the direction you say you want to go is potent. The third thing that I think is really necessary for all of us, no matter what we’re calling ourselves into this year, is making decisions often and much. I like to call this becoming a decision athlete. Because in my brain, an athlete is just someone who moves their body with purpose. And becoming a decision athlete is anyone who makes decisions on purpose. And it sounds so simplistic. But I can’t tell you the number of my coaching calls that focus intensely on simply helping a woman to make decisions, I never make the decisions for her. My goal is just to ask her a lot of questions to help her get more clear and more competent to make her own decisions. But what I do know for sure is decisions are power, they create momentum, you will learn from them, or you will progress because of them.

Courtney Townley 26:03
But when we don’t make decisions, we just stagnate. So, making decisions is a really important skill set. And we’re leaning into it this month in Rumble & Rise, but we’re even going to get take it further in February. So there’s a lot coming up on decision making. And then the fourth thing that I just want to speak to is, is data. So having some clarity on what you are going to use to measure progress this year, I think is really important for so many reasons. One of those reasons is it gets ya to drama, right? I always say data over drama. But it also kind of allows you to have this navigational beacon in your pocket. So when you are doing the work, but you aren’t really sure if you’re headed in the right direction. You have these navigational beacons to help show you through data. If you are indeed moving in the direction you said you want it to go.

Courtney Townley 27:09
So these four skill sets, direction drive. decision making and data are the focus of the powerup masterclass that I teach on Monday. So if you would like to be a part of the Rumble & Rise experience this year, you can go to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble
. If you are not ready for membership as of yet. You can certainly just get access to the masterclass and the companion guide. And you can find out that information by going to graceandgrit.com/masterclasses.

Courtney Townley 27:43
And I will tell you the big difference between just purchasing the masterclass versus membership itself is membership gives you a tremendous amount of support and other resources. So you have access to group coaching calls lots of group coaching calls that we do inside of Rumble & Rise as a member, you have access to additional resources, including an archive of over 50 master classes that I’ve taught since this community started, you have access to an online community where you can ask questions and celebrate wins and challenges, all the things. Where is if you’re just purchasing the master class, that’s what you’re getting, you’re getting the master class and the companion guide and no additional support. But again, the reason I’m offering it is because I do believe it’s a great entry for some people just to have access to that information.

Courtney Townley 28:36
Whatever you decide, I hope you have a very robust start to the year. I hope you do the work that needs to be done to make the most of this year. And I will be back in a couple of weeks with another episode. And I hope I will have you join me for that. Alright my friends have a great start to the year and I will see you again very soon. Take care.

Courtney Townley 29:06
Thank you for listening to the grace and grit Podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story. And it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort and with a little grace and grit anything is possible.