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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. This is your host, Courtney Townley. As always, I am so deeply grateful that you’re here joining me today. And I don’t know about for you. But I know for me, the holidays are top of mind for a couple of reasons. Number one, I live in the US. And we are rolling into Thanksgiving week, which is kind of the beginning of our holiday season. But even if you’re not in the US, I know the end of November, certainly through the month of December. There is a lot of opportunity for stress that comes with the holiday season.
Courtney Townley 1:00
I want to remind you that stress isn’t always a bad thing. We can have wonderful stressors in our life, having company in our home, traveling to go do something fun. Adding more to an already pretty full schedule, even though it’s really great stuff like all of that is stress. And what affects the human body is not necessarily only distress, but our total stress load that we’re carrying. And an awful lot of us are carrying more stress than usual around the holiday season. So inside my Rumble & Rise community this month, we have been doing a deep dive into what it means to thrive through the holiday season. And today I want to share a little bit of that with you.
Courtney Townley 1:46
More specifically, I want to talk about self sabotage. Because you may have the best of intentions to travel through the next few weeks with ease and grace. And a few weeks from now, you may very well find yourself sliding down the slippery slope of negotiating your way out of your good intentions. And this is what the personal development world loves to call self sabotage. And personally, I think that label is terrible. Because I don’t think it at all references what’s truly happening. I also think it’s very disempowering, and ultimately problematic, because it implies that you are intentionally damaging or harming yourself in some way. And I don’t think that’s what people are doing.
Courtney Townley 2:41
If you actually look at the definition of self sabotage or sabotage, it says to damage or destroy something on purpose. And look, I’ve been coaching women for well over 20 years, and I have yet to work with a woman who was trying to damage or destroy herself on purpose. That doesn’t happen.
Courtney Townley 3:03
What does happen is I’ve worked with an awful lot of women who are very unrealistic about what they can actually accomplish in a day. They’re not taking time for adequate restoration, they have detached from themselves in an effort to provide for everyone else, and tend to everyone else’s needs to the point that they no longer know who they are, they no longer know what lights them up.
Courtney Townley 3:28
And this, of course, can lead to a lot of really interesting behavior. So if you find yourself this season, going against the grain of how you plan to show up, I want to offer and encourage you to stop thinking about it as self sabotage. Because again, it’s not useful for you to imply that it is it robs you of your power, it is full of blame and shame and judgment. And we don’t do any of that here in the land of grace and grit. So let’s discuss the reality of what’s truly going on in the face of behaviors that we often labeled as self sabotage.
Courtney Townley 4:14
But before we do, here’s a few examples of what behavior labeled as self sabotage might actually look like. So you tell yourself, you are going to drink less alcohol or eat less sugar this season. But you don’t. You commit to showing up differently in certain relationships, more tolerant, more compassionate, more grateful. But you don’t. You commit to setting firm boundaries. And you’re really clear on your reasons for doing that. But when the moment comes to set a boundary, or more importantly enforce a boundary. You don’t.
Courtney Townley 5:00
So again, this isn’t self sabotage, you are not purposefully destroying your best laid plans. What you are doing is what humans do. And what humans do is they seek safety and comfort and the path of least resistance. So you might be saying to yourself, Okay, Courtney, if it’s not self sabotage, why does this happen?
Courtney Townley 5:29
Now, for so many reasons this happens. I feel like the last eight years of the Podcast has been dedicated to explaining why this happens. But today, I really want to hone in on three reasons. We tend to not show up for ourselves, especially during the holiday season, because my hope is, you will keep these things in the forefront of your mind. And that maybe, just maybe they will help you to navigate the season. A little differently this year.
Courtney Townley 6:06
The first reason we aren’t following through this time of year is we’re self soothing. We are seeking safety, by self soothing, we are seeking comfort by self soothing. So what is self soothing? Well, it’s really just referencing the behavior that an individual uses to regulate their emotional state by themselves. So when you’re feeling sad, when you’re feeling frustrated, when you’re feeling anxious, when you’re feeling disappointed? What do you do? How do you honor that emotion? Well, the truth is, most people don’t honor the emotion, they numb it, they ignore it, they deny it, they talk over it, they do a lot of things, but honor it. And what I want to offer you here today is that the holiday season is going to be ripe with opportunity to experience. A lot of what people would label is difficult emotion, stress, frustration, disappointment, grief, is one that I actually come up against a lot with my clients this time of year. And all of those emotions can feel inconvenient. They can also feel really scary, if you aren’t used to feeling those types of emotions.
Courtney Townley 7:35
And if we don’t have much capacity to feel these things, because we haven’t practiced feeling them and processing them in healthy ways. We build patterns of numbing and avoiding these emotions. And if that is your practice, that will certainly be your default mechanism this season. So when you are feeling uncomfortable in a social situation, and you’ve always reached for alcohol, when you’re uncomfortable, you’re going to do more of that this season, if you don’t stay awake. If every time you’re feeling a big emotion, like sadness, or disappointment or grief, you have a pattern of eating sugar. When those emotions boil to the surface, this season, you’re going to be tempted to do more of the same.
Courtney Townley 8:33
Unfortunately, a lot of self soothing strategies are really harmful to our well being. But we don’t engage with those behaviors with the intent of being harmful. I think that’s really important to recognize. We engage with those behaviors to try to make ourselves feel better. And that’s a beautiful thing. What isn’t so beautiful, is some of the vices that we’re choosing to regulate our emotions have some really severe long term consequences, even short term consequences. Right.
Courtney Townley 9:14
If I eat a bunch of sugar tonight, I’m going to be pretty reactive and edgy and not feeling so good in my body tomorrow. But if I continue to eat sugar throughout the next six weeks, in large quantities, I’m probably gonna get really sick rolling into the new year. And I’m going to have a lot of other issues to contend with. I’ve been watching I don’t know if any of you if you watch on Netflix the show dead to me. I think it’s called dead to me. Anyway, it’s a really great little series and it’s funny, it’s about two women, and they make a bunch of mistakes and they become fast friends. Anyway, they were having a conversation with each other and one friend says to the other, hey, do you want to talk it out and The friend looks at her and says, No, I want to drink it out.
Courtney Townley 10:04
And I just think that’s such a great example of how we are often trying to self soothe. We’re self soothing with things that aren’t really helping us to process the emotion and long term. So all of this to say, a great question to ask yourself as you travel through the season, is how might you self soothe this season in ways that actually promote your well being rather than deplete it? And one of the ways that I like to ask this question to myself often and much, is simply when I’m feeling really agitated, and I can see that I am triggered to do something that is not going to be useful to me, or that’s going to pull me out of integrity with myself. I will ask myself, Courtney, what do you really need here? It’s probably not the alcohol, it’s probably not the sugar. It’s probably not another episode of Netflix.
Courtney Townley 11:12
What do you need, really? And that in itself is a practice.
Courtney Townley 11:19
So if you start doing that, and it feels awkward, and you’re not really sure of what the answer is, it’s normal. But keep at it, because over time, I think you might be really surprised at what starts to show up. Well, I’m just really tired, I just need to go to sleep. You know, I’ve been meaning to have that conversation, and I still haven’t had it. And it’s kind of eating away at me, which is making me anxious. So of course, I want to eat sugar. How about I just have the conversation instead?
Courtney Townley 11:54
All right, let’s talk about another reason or another. Yeah, another reason why we self sabotage, which you can’t see me doing this. But I’m putting in air quotes because I really want to ditch the label. And I want to encourage you to ditch the label of self sabotage. But when we are engaging with behaviors that appear, self sabotage, ie, because that’s a word. One of the other reasons might be that you are focused on constraint, rather than focused on freedom. What does this mean?
Courtney Townley 12:31
Well, it means that you focus on what you can’t do, or what you shouldn’t do, rather than what you want to do. So what focusing on can’t looks like or constraint looks like, I can’t skip a workout, I have to work out religiously, or six days a week, or whatever your exercise program is throughout the whole holiday season. I can’t eat sugar. I shouldn’t drink every night. Now, it’s totally normal. When you hear language like that, and you’re the one saying it to experience a fierce resistance. We experienced fierce resistance to anything that we’re told we can’t do. Humans love freedom. They don’t love constraint. I don’t think any animal in the cute in the animal kingdom likes constraint. And it can be incredibly liberating to remind yourself that you can do anything that you want to do while simultaneously reminding yourself why you’re making a particular choice. So what does that sound like?
Courtney Townley 14:02
Well, it sounds like I don’t have to make time to move my body at all. I don’t have to make time to move my body ever if I don’t want to. That is true. You don’t have to move. And simultaneously, you can also think I am choosing to stay committed to intentional daily movement. Because it makes me feel so damn good. So I remind myself that I get to do whatever I want. And I simultaneously remind myself why I’ve chosen this particular thing to do for myself.
Courtney Townley 14:56
Another example is I can eat all the sugar I I want, I can eat it whenever I want. This is the beauty of adulting. You can and simultaneously reminding yourself, why you’re choosing to limit your intake, I’m choosing to limit my intake of sugar, because there’s so much I want to experience this season. And when I’m sick and tired and reactive, I miss out on so many of the things that are important to me. And there’s so much freedom in that second statement. Because when I align myself with the things that really serve my well being, I get to live life in a much more powerful way, I get to experience life in a much more powerful way.
Courtney Townley 16:06
So again, remind yourself that you’re an adult, and you get to do whatever you want. And simultaneously, remind yourself why you’re making the choice you’ve made. Because again, we’re looking for freedom. And when we see the path to freedom, me not eating so much sugar offer affords me so much freedom, I can move better, I can think better, I communicate better, I sleep better, the list goes on and on. So whatever it is that you want to put some parameters around in terms of behavior this holiday season to keep yourself well. What is the freedom on the other side of that? Focus on that? So a great question, just to ask yourself, is how might I be able to find freedom this season? Rather than focusing on what you can’t do, what can I do? And then the final thing I just want to mention to you today, because I think this is so important, is a lot of women stray from their own integrity around the holiday season. Because they’re tired. They have a very low resource availability. What does that mean?
Courtney Townley 17:41
Well, if you’ve listened this Podcast for a while, whenever I mentioned resources, I am talking about time, I am talking about energy, I am talking about mental fortitude, mental bandwidth. And these are all things that are renewable. But we only get so much of them per day. And I want to just share with you that most women I work with rolling into the holiday season are already feeling exhausted and depleted and time poor. And yet, how do they approach the season, they approach the season by stacking more onto an already overflowing plate. They don’t subtract anything, they just keep adding things.
Courtney Townley 18:35
And remember, if you want to behave in new ways this season, you need to give your brain the resources to be able to do that. But what a tired brain does is it gets really reactive. Because reactivity is a way of conserving energy. You don’t have to think you don’t have to put apply a lot of effort. You simply react. And that’s really wonderful if the behavior serving you. But what we’re talking about here is staying the course with behaviors that may be new to us that we may not be as well versed in. And in order to do that you cannot travel through the holiday season exhausted and depleted and resentful. Because if you are you’re going to keep going to default mode, which is what you’ve been practicing for years. You will put all of your own self care on the backburner and you’ll tell yourself that you’ll get yourself you’ll set yourself together come January 1, which by the way, rarely, if ever happens. So how about rolling into the season this year?
Courtney Townley 19:59
Looking for ways to protect your resources, and not overspend your resources, it’s kind of like budgeting, right? Like a lot of people this time of year are definitely thinking about budgeting for holiday gifts. And most of us understand that it’s probably not wise to spend more than you’ve actually saved for gifts. And overspending has consequences, with our money, and with our behavior. So if you’re overspending, your time, you’re overspending, your energy, you’re overspending, your mental bandwidth, you will not have the resources that you need to lean into discomfort.
Courtney Townley 20:52
And behavior change, of course, is always going to require leaning into a little bit of discomfort. So obviously, these three things are just a few players in the behavior that so many people are labeling as self sabotage. But these three things I pulled out today, specifically for this episode, because I really think they can be a game changer in how you travel through the news through the through the holiday, and through the New Year, and well into 2023, hopefully, throughout 2023.
Courtney Townley 21:32
So just a reminder of what these three things are once again. So we want to self soothe in ways that promote our well being. How are you going to do that this holiday season, because again, the season is going to be ripe with opportunity for you needing self soothing, there’s gonna be a lot of stress, there’s going to be a lot of opportunity for reactivity, there’s going to be a lot of opportunity to feel big emotion. So what will you do when those things come? Because if you don’t decide, you’re going to revert to what you’ve always done. The second thing we talked about is being freedom focused, not being so focused on what we can’t do what we should do what we have to do. But being more focused on what we want to do in order to get freedom on the other side.
Courtney Townley 22:34
Right, so remember, like, again, I always bring up sugar this time of year, because sugar seems to be a thing that a lot of people rumble with. It’s not that you can’t have sugar, you can totally have sugar, you can have all the sugar all day for the entire season if you want to. And there is a level of freedom in that, obviously. However, I would argue and encourage you to consider that there’s so much more freedom on the other side of leaning into the discomfort of not eating so much sugar. So where do you want your freedom? Do you want it in the immediate now? And pay really steep consequences come the New Year? Or do you want to titrate right like that, like it doesn’t mean you can’t have sugar like, first of all, you’re the one who gets to decide I’m not deciding anything for you.
Courtney Townley 23:33
But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. I can limit my consumption. And here’s why. Because this is what I want on the other side. And then finally, we talked about just protecting your resources as you go through the season. I did a poll recently in my Rumble & Rise community. And I asked the community on a scale from like, you know, one to 10. Where are you right now with resource availability. And very few people answered anything about five.
Courtney Townley 24:04
So my point being that if you’re anything like the majority of my Rumble & Rise community, you’re entering the season with low resource availability. And it would be very useful for you to get a pulse on your own resource availability right now. And then use that to inform what you commit to this season. And I would definitely encourage you to probably commit to less rather than more. Because less is just always so resource preserving. It really does help to save so much energy and time. And it’s it’s a graceful way to enter 2023 Feeling more firmly rooted on the ground.
Courtney Townley 24:50
So that’s it. Those are the three things I wanted to remind you of today. I hope this was a little bit helpful. I know again, self sabotage is a term One that we throw around a lot, but I just think it’s so disempowering. So looking at it through the lens of these things, these types of things that we’ve discussed today, I hope will help you to navigate things a little bit differently this season.
Courtney Townley 25:13
If you need more help with this, like I said, our entire theme this month inside of Rumble & Rise is thrive through the holiday season. A masterclass dropped a week ago, you can still get access to that and all of the course materials. And of course, join us on all the coaching calls. So if that’s something that interests you, you can head on over to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble. So once again, graceandgrit.com/readytorumble.
Courtney Townley 25:40
All right, my friends, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. If you are in the US and you celebrate Thanksgiving, I wish you a very safe and happy holiday. And I’ll just finish this podcast by saying thank you so deeply. Thank you for being here for being a listener and for being a Grace & Grit fan. All right, I’ll see you again next week. Take care.
Courtney Townley 26:09
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.
