Podcast Episode:
308: Restoring Your Personal Power in 2023
Power is the root of a lot of the topics I dive into on the Grace & Grit podcast and in my paid programs.
I have called it a lot of things – integrity, self-leadership, personal responsibility – but at the end of the day, we are really talking about power. What it really takes to step into your power to live an authentic and fully expressed life.
In this episode of the Grace & Grit podcast, I invite you to consider what power is and how you can improve your relationship with it, and your capacity for it in 2023.
Welcome to Grace & Grit.
The Grace & Grit podcast is your go-to resource for reclaiming, generating, protecting and expressing your power as a woman in midlife.
This show will completely change the way you think about health & well-being and help you make your second act the best one yet!
Transcripts are auto-generated.
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 0:27
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley, I hope you’re doing awesomely well. I hope you are taking good care of yourself. And I’m always deeply grateful for you tuning in and listening to this show. So thank you for being here.
Courtney Townley 0:44
Now, a little note from the outset of this Podcast today, I’m actually in New York City for a few days, and I am recording this episode from my hotel room. So if the audio quality is a little bit different than usual, or you hear some background noises that are not, you know, things you normally hear in my home office. That’s why.
Courtney Townley 1:06
And, if you’ve been listening to the Podcast for any length of time, I hope you know that I’m a very big proponent of ditching all or nothing thinking. Because when we expect ourselves to perform at the same level all the time, it acts as a huge barrier inconsistency. So this is me being a living, breathing example of not being able to produce the episode in the way that I normally do, but still showing up. So I hope that that maybe inspires you to show up somewhere in your life in a different way. Even if it’s not at the level that you normally show up, showing up is still so much more powerful than not showing up.
Courtney Townley 1:49
I’m actually in New York, because I’ve been working all year long on realigning some of my messaging within Grace and Grit. We launched our first website a decade ago, and a lot has changed in that time. I have changed as a human, my coaching has changed, my messaging has evolved. And it’s just time to bring that all into full expression.
Courtney Townley 2:16
I have been working with the genius Hillary Weiss all year long on, you know, working through copy working through messaging. Working on bringing this all to life through visuals on the website, we will have a new website in 2023, which is super exciting. And tomorrow, I’m spending all day with Hillary working a little just kind of fine tuning all of this. And I’m just really excited for all of it.
Courtney Townley 2:43
And it’s also really interesting being here because I remember the first time I ever came to New York City. I was 15 years old, and I came to spend the summer at Alvin Ailey. I was dancing in a summer program with Alvin Ailey. And I remember being just having such a mixed bag of emotions being here.
Courtney Townley 3:05
I was from I’m from Wyoming. And so obviously New York City is a very far cry from Wyoming. But I just I was excited, I was in awe, I was a little bit intimidated and scared just because of the noise and the hustle and the bustle of the city. And, you know, I’ve been here many times since. But coming back on this trip, it just feels really special to be coming here to do work on my creative expression on such a high level. And really just considering where I started in my relationship with New York City. So anyway, I just thought it was worth sharing a little bit of that.
Courtney Townley 3:49
But what we’re really here to talk about today is personal power, more specifically restoring your personal power, and what that might look like, because I am really excited to be diving deeply into that topic within my community Rumble & Rise in 2023.
Courtney Townley 4:10
It’ll probably come as no surprise to you longtime listeners, that power is really the root of so many topics that I dive into here on the Grace & Grit Podcast, and in my paid programs. So we talk about leaking power, reclaiming power, generating power, protecting your power, owning it, sharing it, restoring it, so many things. And I may not say it in exactly those words, but that it is in essence, what we’re talking about is restoring these things on a personal level and why why is power a word I or theme that I am so committed to addressing because I really believe it’s the work that I help women do.
Courtney Townley 5:00
I’ve called it a lot of things. I’ve called it integrity. I’ve called it self-leadership. I have called it personal responsibility. But at the end of the day, we can kind of summarize all of that into personal power. And personal power is really what it takes to live an authentic and fully expressed life. So, in this episode today, I want to invite you to really consider what personal power means to you, and how you might go about improving your relationship with your own personal power in 2023.
Courtney Townley 5:42
So unofficially, the way that I’m looking at the work that we are going to be doing inside of Rumble & Rise in 2023, which for those of you who might be newer listeners, Rumble &. Rise is my paid community where we take a lot of the concepts that we talked about here on the Grace & Grit Podcast, and we go a lot deeper into the practice of those concepts. But unofficially, I am looking at the work that we’re going to be doing inside of that community next year, as Project Restore Personal Power. And we’re going to be starting the year really strong with a Masterclass about Power Vision.
Courtney Townley 6:22
So power vision, being clarity around what personal power means to you, what it will take for you to own your personal power. And everything starts with vision, right, because fuzzy vision produces really fuzzy action. And so getting clarity on what this means to us and our vision for it is such an important part of leaning into the work that it will take to bring that to fruition.
Courtney Townley 6:56
So just to mention this, that if you want to be a part of an incredible community dedicated to restoring and expressing personal power and 2023. Now is the time to join.
Courtney Townley 7:08
Did you just hear that the horn honking see classic New York, right.
Courtney Townley 7:14
If you have been considering joining Rumble & Rise now really is the best time to join because we have the biggest discounts of the year, happening throughout December. So you can check out what those specials are by going to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble.
Courtney Townley 7:34
So what is power? Well, if you look up the definition of power, you will see things like capability of doing or accomplishing something. Authority, influence, all of which I would agree with that is how I look at power. And some synonyms of power are words like capacity, which I love, energy, sovereignty, integrity, authenticity, and full expression. So those last few are ones that I added to the definition that I looked up online of power, but integrity, authenticity and full expression, I believe are very close cousins of power.
Courtney Townley 8:32
And then the opposites of power are things like incapacity weakness, integrity, pain, which you’ve heard me talk a lot about on this show integrity, pain, being living our life in a way that is completely out of alignment with what we truly want for our life. So if this is what power means, the capability of doing or accomplishing something, authority influence, what is personal power. And I want to break that down into four parts for you today.
Courtney Townley 9:14
Because the way that I think of personal power is number one, your level of personal awareness. Number two, your ability, or sorry, your depth of personal integrity. Number three, your ability to maintain promises that you make to yourself, or I should rephrase that and say, your ability to follow through on promises you make to yourself. And number four, your capacity to be fully expressed.
Courtney Townley 9:47
So I want to speak a little bit into each one of these things. Let’s start with the first one. Your level of personal awareness. Awareness is the way out and the way in In what does that actually mean? Well, awareness is the way out of unnecessary suffering in your life. And we create a lot of unnecessary suffering, by the way that we think, or by not expanding our capacity to feel certain emotions, or by trying to control things that are not within our realm of control.
Courtney Townley 10:29
So awareness is the way out of unnecessary suffering. And awareness is the weighed in to your power. Awareness is the most potent component in restoring your personal power. Because if you aren’t aware of how you’re moving through the world, or what you desire, or who you truly are, and what ignites you, you’ll never be able to fully express yourself. And we lose personal power. In a lot of ways, when we don’t have awareness, we end up outsourcing a lot of decision making in our life, which can really lead us off track from from what we want for our life.
Courtney Townley 11:27
We can get caught up in the hustle culture of always doing more and wearing our to do list like a badge of honor, even though very little on that to do list is actually in alignment with things that we want to be doing. We get very distracted by so many things, other people’s opinions, things that just aren’t that important to us, but we spend a lot of time on. And we also get out of awareness with ourselves because we’re afraid we’re afraid of tuning in going in and looking at the reality of the life we’ve created. Because sometimes when we look at that reality, it just feels like so much damn work to change it. So awareness is key always. And there’s a lot of reasons we aren’t aware, hustle, fear distraction, are just a few of those reasons. So when it comes to awareness, how do we start stepping into our personal power? Well, in summary, I really think it’s shining a light on what we do and why we do what we do. I always say that healing happens in the light. And awareness is the light.
Courtney Townley 13:01
Years ago, I had lost a diamond in my wedding ring TWICE, Like literally twice in the span of a few months. And miraculously, I actually found the diamond twice. And I found it by employing a little trick that someone taught me, which was I had a sneaking suspicion that I had lost. It’s a tiny little diamond, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it was probably in my living space, which at the time it was a tiny little apartment.
Courtney Townley 13:37
So my friend advised me Hey, Courtney, turn off all the lights in your apartment and get out a flashlight, and start going through the apartment floor shining a light on the floor in you know, little little doses at a time to see if you can’t find it, because the flashlight might expose the diamond. Lo and behold, I got on my hands and knees, I went through every inch of my tiny little apartment. And not once but twice. I found that silly little diamond, which we were then able to put back in the ring. And eventually, like literally cement it into the ring. There’s no chance this diamond is ever coming out again.
Courtney Townley 14:25
So I like to think of awareness as that flashlight. It’s the willingness to shine a light on every dimension of our life, to make sure that we are showing up in a way that keeps us in our power. And questions asking yourself really good questions, I believe is a really powerful practice of awareness. It is that flashlight and coaching can really help us with that.
Courtney Townley 15:03
And not just coaching. I mean, talking to friends, right? Getting therapy, there’s lots of different levels of help that we can get to help with awareness. But this is why I love coaching so much, because to me, coaching is a practice of asking really good questions. It’s not about me solving your problems. It’s about me asking questions that help you to solve your own problems. And when you’ve worked with a coach long enough, you start asking yourself good questions. So you stop relying on the coach because you start relying on yourself more and more.
Courtney Townley 15:55
And I just want to share an example of this power of awareness. And I have shared this example many times, but I just think it’s such a relevant example. And one that a lot of people can relate to that, you know, up until I was in probably my mid 30s, there were certain aspects of my life that I was incredibly reactive, and aggressive in but aggressive in an unhelpful way. Another way of saying that is I was angry, I was really angry about certain parts of my life. And any time I got close to exposing the truth of that area, I would kind of lash out in anger. So if my husband brought up certain topics, I would get really reactive, and super defensive, and really angry. And through a process of working with a coach, and actually simultaneously getting some therapy, I really started to see that my anger was a protection mechanism. It was as Brene Brown calls it my armor, it was my attempt at keeping myself safe. So it wasn’t coming from a bad place, it was actually coming from a very kind place. It just wasn’t being expressed in a way that was useful to me. And I don’t know that I ever would have come to that knowing on my own. And once I was able to see it for what it was. I’m just I’m still in awe of how profoundly my reaction started to change because of that level of awareness.
Courtney Townley 17:53
So, all this to say, in order to step into your personal power, you have to be committed to a heightened level of awareness, which is not always feel good. In fact, a lot of times I’m gonna just prepare you. It’s the opposite of feel good. It’s looking at the messy house, and realizing that you have a lot of work ahead of you. But you can’t clean up if you aren’t willing to look.
Courtney Townley 18:25
Okay, let’s talk about the second component of stepping into personal power, which is developing your depth of personal integrity. What does that mean? It means the real work of your life is not losing weight is not exercising more, those things may be a part for you. But those are not the objectives of your life. I mean, I guess they could be if you really wanted them to be, but I’ve never coached somebody who really wanted that those things to be the objective of their life. But the real work of your life is learning to be at peace with yourself liking who you are, how you move through the world, and why you move to the world the way that you do. But we lose a lot of power by not doing that work.
Courtney Townley 19:26
And what we do instead, is we work really hard to get other people to like us. We spend a lot more time working on other people getting to like us than we do on learning how to like ourselves, learning how to be at peace with our decisions. And we detach further and further from our truth. We move further and further away from who we actually are which moves us into the land of that integrity pain that I talked about at the start of the show. I know integrity. Pain is a term a lot of you are familiar with, because I’ve been talking about it on this show for literally eight years.
Courtney Townley 20:07
But again, if you’re newer to the show integrity, pain is, is a very real pain that we feel from not being in truth with ourselves from not being honest with ourselves from not aligning our actions with what we truly want for our life. And so we restore our personal power by getting radically honest with ourselves by looking to ourselves, to make strong decisions, rather than always seeking out the opinions of others. Rather than letting fear and other people’s opinions direct our lives, we direct our lives, we claim ultimate authority and influence over our lives.
Courtney Townley 21:04
Years ago, I was working with a client who was an executive in a really big financial firm. And she had spent almost two decades of her life building her way up to the position that she held in that company. And by the time I started coaching with her, there was a lot of friction in her relationship with that job. She had spent so much time so much money, so many resources, building to that level in that career. And she was starting to recognize that she didn’t want to be there anymore. There were other things that had bloomed in her life, that she wanted to be spending more time on her children, her marriage, this creative pursuit that had been in the back of her mind for a lot of years. And the reason she was rumbling so hard, was largely because of the opinions of other people.
Courtney Townley 22:10
What her parents were gonna think, what her friends were gonna think, the fear of will I be successful if I pursue something else. And all of her rambling, was actually feeding into a lot of drinking. Because she was spending so many of her resources on something that was no longer, exciting and fun, and useful to her Yes, useful in that it was bringing in a paycheck. But it wasn’t helping her to thrive as a human. And because she was an integrity, pain. She was drinking every night when she came home. So through the course of obviously, a lot of coaching, we started to uncover some of the reasons why she wasn’t taking action towards these things that she really wanted to be pursuing. She did end up making a tremendous shift in her life, in terms of career, and lo and behold, her drinking became less of a problem. In fact, the last time I spoke to her, she was really feeling hugely at peace in her relationship with alcohol.
Courtney Townley 23:32
Alright, let’s talk about this third part of personal power. Restoring your personal power will include your ability to maintain promises that you make to yourself, your ability to follow through on promises that you make to yourself, which basically is just doing what you said you would do for yourself. And a lot of my clients are awesome at keeping promises they make to others, while simultaneously also being awesome at consistently breaking the promises that they make to themselves. And when you break a lot of promises to yourself, that is incredible fuel for self doubt. So we stopped trusting ourselves. And we start playing really small in our own lives. To the point that we don’t like our lives, we don’t recognize our lives. We don’t feel fulfilled by our lives. So we reclaim our power.
Courtney Townley 24:46
We restore our power by learning how to show up for ourselves on the regular to honor what we truly want for our life. Which is scary and I’m comfortable. And it’s very different way of moving through the world than what we’ve been doing. And it requires the ability to coach ourselves. This is why I always say that I am only someone’s coach until they have the capacity to do that work for themselves. Because that’s my goal as a coach is to help someone become so awesome at coaching themselves, that they no longer need me.
Courtney Townley 25:35
And it’s so interesting, because I hear this transformation all the time, on group coaching calls, which we do on a regular basis inside of Rumble & Rise. So in the beginning of someone’s process, they’re asking a lot of questions. And they’re asking for a lot of coaching to work through their own rumbles. And once somebody has been in that space long enough, what ultimately starts to happen is they start presenting as if they have a rumble, which they do, they’re still working through rumbles always, because that’s life. But they present it in a way where there’s not really a lot of work needed on my part. Because they’re coaching themselves as they’re presenting the rumble, it’s really fascinating to watch.
Courtney Townley 26:27
So self coaching can be considered self-leadership. It is self authority, it is self influence, it is your capacity, to direct your behavior in a way that keeps you in integrity with yourself. And I would argue it is the most powerful skill you will ever learn in contribution to any area of your life. If you want to improve your health, if you want to improve your relationships, if you want to improve your relationship with money. The way to do that is to develop skill sets that allow you to coach yourself in powerful ways.
Courtney Townley 27:16
So the fourth piece of restoring power is your capacity to be fully expressed to expand your capacity to be fully expressed. Because as I always say, there are things you are here to cause, contribute to and inspire. And I don’t know what those things are. But I’m willing to bet that you do. Even though you might be convincing yourself, that you don’t know what those things are. The bigger truth is you just may have stored them away somewhere. They’re in a dusty box somewhere in the depths of your psyche. And you’re convincing yourself that you don’t know what these things are. But with a little digging, which can translate into with a little with some really good questions. You will uncover that you do know what those things are. But we lose our personal power in regards to our full expression. In an effort to prove ourselves all the time we’re proving our worth rather than owning our worth.
Courtney Townley 28:34
We’re trying to make other people happy, by molding our life in a certain way, to the point that we are neglecting parts of ourselves. We’re neglecting our health, mental, physical, emotional, we’re neglecting the things that are truly on our heart, our passions and pursuits. And none of that helps you to step into your power. It’s actually leading you away from it. So we restore personal power by owning our worth rather than proving it by spending our life energy expressing what we are, rather than spending our life trying to fit the mold of what other people think it should be. And that is hard. Because there is no shortage of opinions on how you should be living your life. opinions from your parents opinions from your friends, a parent, you know, opinions from your co workers from the culture at large.
Courtney Townley 29:44
But think about this, do you want to be loved for being a version of yourself? That’s in integrity pain that isn’t authentic, that isn’t true. Or do you want to be loved for the pure unedited version of who you actually are. And in order to be loved as that version, that second version, which I hope is the one that you would choose, we have to be willing to express that version of ourselves. But I work with clients every day, who have built relationships, on the foundation of neglecting themselves. They have built relationships by diminishing themselves rather than fully expressing themselves. And when a relationship is based on that, and then you’re afraid of losing the relationship, you’re just going to continue to behave in the same way. I’ve worked with clients who have stayed in careers that they’ve hated for decades, because they’re afraid to make other people uncomfortable to or who stray from things that they deeply care about. Because they don’t want to inconvenience someone else.
Courtney Townley 31:08
So this is your reminder, as this siren is playing in the background, if you can hear it, this is your reminder that nothing is more valuable to the world than your authentic full expression. What if the sun waited for approval to rise every day? And was like wrapped up in self doubt? Should I arise? Should I not? What if birds asked for permission to sing? What a flowers didn’t bloom because they were worried that someone wouldn’t like the way that they bloom? Or wouldn’t like their fragrance? Right, the world would be a really dark and dismal place. And some of you might say it already is a dark and dismal place. I don’t choose to see it that way. But even if you see it that way, it just be more so.
Courtney Townley 32:09
Someone recently referred to me as a fearless leader, one of the members inside of Rumble & Rise who I adore. And you know, it was it was such a it was part of a beautiful testimony that she left about her experience inside the community. And I was thinking about it that that phrase fearless leader and my response to her was was this so I’m going to read it to you because I think it’s really relevant to what we’re talking about here.
Courtney Townley 32:35
I said that I think perhaps I’m not a fearless leader. But rather I’m practicing on being a brave one. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by that fear is not traveling with me. And I keep choosing over and over again to believe that fear is not a Do Not Enter sign. But rather a beacon pointing me in the direction of my own growth and my own full self expression. I want to be a champion for bravery, authentic living, and full self expression. So I let fear point the way. And this is a work in progress, that I will hopefully be engaged with the rest of my life. And I hope you will be too I hope you will sign on to be engaged for the rest of your life with the work of being a fully expressed human. Which absolutely is some of the hardest and also most rewarding work of your life.
Courtney Townley 33:57
So if you’re someone who’s listening to this today, and this message lands for you, restoring personal power is the work that we do inside of Rumble & Rise, and the 2023 curriculum inside of the community isn’t just going to help you restore yours. But it’s going to help you profoundly expand your capacity to express your personal power, whatever that means for you. Because it means radically different things to everybody.
Courtney Townley 34:26
For some people, it’s saying what needs to be said, going after the things on their heart. For some people it looks like stepping back and bowing out of certain responsibilities that they’ve taken on. And for all of us it looks like stepping up in some way. Even if it’s starts and it always starts with stepping up to own your worth.
Courtney Townley 35:01
If you need help with that, I would strongly encourage you to join us next year. Like I said at the start of the show today, the best rates you’re going to get on Rumble & Rise and 2023 are this month through the month of December. We have discounts on two packages number one is an annual membership and the other discount is on an annual membership with some private coaching attached. So I would love you to join us I would love to see what your full expression really looks like. And again, you can find out all the details and sign up for membership by going to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble. Alright my friends, I hope you have a wonderful day and I will talk to you again next week. Take care.
Courtney Townley 35:53
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.
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 0:27
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley, I hope you’re doing awesomely well. I hope you are taking good care of yourself. And I’m always deeply grateful for you tuning in and listening to this show. So thank you for being here.
Courtney Townley 0:44
Now, a little note from the outset of this Podcast today, I’m actually in New York City for a few days, and I am recording this episode from my hotel room. So if the audio quality is a little bit different than usual, or you hear some background noises that are not, you know, things you normally hear in my home office. That’s why.
Courtney Townley 1:06
And, if you’ve been listening to the Podcast for any length of time, I hope you know that I’m a very big proponent of ditching all or nothing thinking. Because when we expect ourselves to perform at the same level all the time, it acts as a huge barrier inconsistency. So this is me being a living, breathing example of not being able to produce the episode in the way that I normally do, but still showing up. So I hope that that maybe inspires you to show up somewhere in your life in a different way. Even if it’s not at the level that you normally show up, showing up is still so much more powerful than not showing up.
Courtney Townley 1:49
I’m actually in New York, because I’ve been working all year long on realigning some of my messaging within Grace and Grit. We launched our first website a decade ago, and a lot has changed in that time. I have changed as a human, my coaching has changed, my messaging has evolved. And it’s just time to bring that all into full expression.
Courtney Townley 2:16
I have been working with the genius Hillary Weiss all year long on, you know, working through copy working through messaging. Working on bringing this all to life through visuals on the website, we will have a new website in 2023, which is super exciting. And tomorrow, I’m spending all day with Hillary working a little just kind of fine tuning all of this. And I’m just really excited for all of it.
Courtney Townley 2:43
And it’s also really interesting being here because I remember the first time I ever came to New York City. I was 15 years old, and I came to spend the summer at Alvin Ailey. I was dancing in a summer program with Alvin Ailey. And I remember being just having such a mixed bag of emotions being here.
Courtney Townley 3:05
I was from I’m from Wyoming. And so obviously New York City is a very far cry from Wyoming. But I just I was excited, I was in awe, I was a little bit intimidated and scared just because of the noise and the hustle and the bustle of the city. And, you know, I’ve been here many times since. But coming back on this trip, it just feels really special to be coming here to do work on my creative expression on such a high level. And really just considering where I started in my relationship with New York City. So anyway, I just thought it was worth sharing a little bit of that.
Courtney Townley 3:49
But what we’re really here to talk about today is personal power, more specifically restoring your personal power, and what that might look like, because I am really excited to be diving deeply into that topic within my community Rumble & Rise in 2023.
Courtney Townley 4:10
It’ll probably come as no surprise to you longtime listeners, that power is really the root of so many topics that I dive into here on the Grace & Grit Podcast, and in my paid programs. So we talk about leaking power, reclaiming power, generating power, protecting your power, owning it, sharing it, restoring it, so many things. And I may not say it in exactly those words, but that it is in essence, what we’re talking about is restoring these things on a personal level and why why is power a word I or theme that I am so committed to addressing because I really believe it’s the work that I help women do.
Courtney Townley 5:00
I’ve called it a lot of things. I’ve called it integrity. I’ve called it self-leadership. I have called it personal responsibility. But at the end of the day, we can kind of summarize all of that into personal power. And personal power is really what it takes to live an authentic and fully expressed life. So, in this episode today, I want to invite you to really consider what personal power means to you, and how you might go about improving your relationship with your own personal power in 2023.
Courtney Townley 5:42
So unofficially, the way that I’m looking at the work that we are going to be doing inside of Rumble & Rise in 2023, which for those of you who might be newer listeners, Rumble &. Rise is my paid community where we take a lot of the concepts that we talked about here on the Grace & Grit Podcast, and we go a lot deeper into the practice of those concepts. But unofficially, I am looking at the work that we’re going to be doing inside of that community next year, as Project Restore Personal Power. And we’re going to be starting the year really strong with a Masterclass about Power Vision.
Courtney Townley 6:22
So power vision, being clarity around what personal power means to you, what it will take for you to own your personal power. And everything starts with vision, right, because fuzzy vision produces really fuzzy action. And so getting clarity on what this means to us and our vision for it is such an important part of leaning into the work that it will take to bring that to fruition.
Courtney Townley 6:56
So just to mention this, that if you want to be a part of an incredible community dedicated to restoring and expressing personal power and 2023. Now is the time to join.
Courtney Townley 7:08
Did you just hear that the horn honking see classic New York, right.
Courtney Townley 7:14
If you have been considering joining Rumble & Rise now really is the best time to join because we have the biggest discounts of the year, happening throughout December. So you can check out what those specials are by going to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble.
Courtney Townley 7:34
So what is power? Well, if you look up the definition of power, you will see things like capability of doing or accomplishing something. Authority, influence, all of which I would agree with that is how I look at power. And some synonyms of power are words like capacity, which I love, energy, sovereignty, integrity, authenticity, and full expression. So those last few are ones that I added to the definition that I looked up online of power, but integrity, authenticity and full expression, I believe are very close cousins of power.
Courtney Townley 8:32
And then the opposites of power are things like incapacity weakness, integrity, pain, which you’ve heard me talk a lot about on this show integrity, pain, being living our life in a way that is completely out of alignment with what we truly want for our life. So if this is what power means, the capability of doing or accomplishing something, authority influence, what is personal power. And I want to break that down into four parts for you today.
Courtney Townley 9:14
Because the way that I think of personal power is number one, your level of personal awareness. Number two, your ability, or sorry, your depth of personal integrity. Number three, your ability to maintain promises that you make to yourself, or I should rephrase that and say, your ability to follow through on promises you make to yourself. And number four, your capacity to be fully expressed.
Courtney Townley 9:47
So I want to speak a little bit into each one of these things. Let’s start with the first one. Your level of personal awareness. Awareness is the way out and the way in In what does that actually mean? Well, awareness is the way out of unnecessary suffering in your life. And we create a lot of unnecessary suffering, by the way that we think, or by not expanding our capacity to feel certain emotions, or by trying to control things that are not within our realm of control.
Courtney Townley 10:29
So awareness is the way out of unnecessary suffering. And awareness is the weighed in to your power. Awareness is the most potent component in restoring your personal power. Because if you aren’t aware of how you’re moving through the world, or what you desire, or who you truly are, and what ignites you, you’ll never be able to fully express yourself. And we lose personal power. In a lot of ways, when we don’t have awareness, we end up outsourcing a lot of decision making in our life, which can really lead us off track from from what we want for our life.
Courtney Townley 11:27
We can get caught up in the hustle culture of always doing more and wearing our to do list like a badge of honor, even though very little on that to do list is actually in alignment with things that we want to be doing. We get very distracted by so many things, other people’s opinions, things that just aren’t that important to us, but we spend a lot of time on. And we also get out of awareness with ourselves because we’re afraid we’re afraid of tuning in going in and looking at the reality of the life we’ve created. Because sometimes when we look at that reality, it just feels like so much damn work to change it. So awareness is key always. And there’s a lot of reasons we aren’t aware, hustle, fear distraction, are just a few of those reasons. So when it comes to awareness, how do we start stepping into our personal power? Well, in summary, I really think it’s shining a light on what we do and why we do what we do. I always say that healing happens in the light. And awareness is the light.
Courtney Townley 13:01
Years ago, I had lost a diamond in my wedding ring TWICE, Like literally twice in the span of a few months. And miraculously, I actually found the diamond twice. And I found it by employing a little trick that someone taught me, which was I had a sneaking suspicion that I had lost. It’s a tiny little diamond, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it was probably in my living space, which at the time it was a tiny little apartment.
Courtney Townley 13:37
So my friend advised me Hey, Courtney, turn off all the lights in your apartment and get out a flashlight, and start going through the apartment floor shining a light on the floor in you know, little little doses at a time to see if you can’t find it, because the flashlight might expose the diamond. Lo and behold, I got on my hands and knees, I went through every inch of my tiny little apartment. And not once but twice. I found that silly little diamond, which we were then able to put back in the ring. And eventually, like literally cement it into the ring. There’s no chance this diamond is ever coming out again.
Courtney Townley 14:25
So I like to think of awareness as that flashlight. It’s the willingness to shine a light on every dimension of our life, to make sure that we are showing up in a way that keeps us in our power. And questions asking yourself really good questions, I believe is a really powerful practice of awareness. It is that flashlight and coaching can really help us with that.
Courtney Townley 15:03
And not just coaching. I mean, talking to friends, right? Getting therapy, there’s lots of different levels of help that we can get to help with awareness. But this is why I love coaching so much, because to me, coaching is a practice of asking really good questions. It’s not about me solving your problems. It’s about me asking questions that help you to solve your own problems. And when you’ve worked with a coach long enough, you start asking yourself good questions. So you stop relying on the coach because you start relying on yourself more and more.
Courtney Townley 15:55
And I just want to share an example of this power of awareness. And I have shared this example many times, but I just think it’s such a relevant example. And one that a lot of people can relate to that, you know, up until I was in probably my mid 30s, there were certain aspects of my life that I was incredibly reactive, and aggressive in but aggressive in an unhelpful way. Another way of saying that is I was angry, I was really angry about certain parts of my life. And any time I got close to exposing the truth of that area, I would kind of lash out in anger. So if my husband brought up certain topics, I would get really reactive, and super defensive, and really angry. And through a process of working with a coach, and actually simultaneously getting some therapy, I really started to see that my anger was a protection mechanism. It was as Brene Brown calls it my armor, it was my attempt at keeping myself safe. So it wasn’t coming from a bad place, it was actually coming from a very kind place. It just wasn’t being expressed in a way that was useful to me. And I don’t know that I ever would have come to that knowing on my own. And once I was able to see it for what it was. I’m just I’m still in awe of how profoundly my reaction started to change because of that level of awareness.
Courtney Townley 17:53
So, all this to say, in order to step into your personal power, you have to be committed to a heightened level of awareness, which is not always feel good. In fact, a lot of times I’m gonna just prepare you. It’s the opposite of feel good. It’s looking at the messy house, and realizing that you have a lot of work ahead of you. But you can’t clean up if you aren’t willing to look.
Courtney Townley 18:25
Okay, let’s talk about the second component of stepping into personal power, which is developing your depth of personal integrity. What does that mean? It means the real work of your life is not losing weight is not exercising more, those things may be a part for you. But those are not the objectives of your life. I mean, I guess they could be if you really wanted them to be, but I’ve never coached somebody who really wanted that those things to be the objective of their life. But the real work of your life is learning to be at peace with yourself liking who you are, how you move through the world, and why you move to the world the way that you do. But we lose a lot of power by not doing that work.
Courtney Townley 19:26
And what we do instead, is we work really hard to get other people to like us. We spend a lot more time working on other people getting to like us than we do on learning how to like ourselves, learning how to be at peace with our decisions. And we detach further and further from our truth. We move further and further away from who we actually are which moves us into the land of that integrity pain that I talked about at the start of the show. I know integrity. Pain is a term a lot of you are familiar with, because I’ve been talking about it on this show for literally eight years.
Courtney Townley 20:07
But again, if you’re newer to the show integrity, pain is, is a very real pain that we feel from not being in truth with ourselves from not being honest with ourselves from not aligning our actions with what we truly want for our life. And so we restore our personal power by getting radically honest with ourselves by looking to ourselves, to make strong decisions, rather than always seeking out the opinions of others. Rather than letting fear and other people’s opinions direct our lives, we direct our lives, we claim ultimate authority and influence over our lives.
Courtney Townley 21:04
Years ago, I was working with a client who was an executive in a really big financial firm. And she had spent almost two decades of her life building her way up to the position that she held in that company. And by the time I started coaching with her, there was a lot of friction in her relationship with that job. She had spent so much time so much money, so many resources, building to that level in that career. And she was starting to recognize that she didn’t want to be there anymore. There were other things that had bloomed in her life, that she wanted to be spending more time on her children, her marriage, this creative pursuit that had been in the back of her mind for a lot of years. And the reason she was rumbling so hard, was largely because of the opinions of other people.
Courtney Townley 22:10
What her parents were gonna think, what her friends were gonna think, the fear of will I be successful if I pursue something else. And all of her rambling, was actually feeding into a lot of drinking. Because she was spending so many of her resources on something that was no longer, exciting and fun, and useful to her Yes, useful in that it was bringing in a paycheck. But it wasn’t helping her to thrive as a human. And because she was an integrity, pain. She was drinking every night when she came home. So through the course of obviously, a lot of coaching, we started to uncover some of the reasons why she wasn’t taking action towards these things that she really wanted to be pursuing. She did end up making a tremendous shift in her life, in terms of career, and lo and behold, her drinking became less of a problem. In fact, the last time I spoke to her, she was really feeling hugely at peace in her relationship with alcohol.
Courtney Townley 23:32
Alright, let’s talk about this third part of personal power. Restoring your personal power will include your ability to maintain promises that you make to yourself, your ability to follow through on promises that you make to yourself, which basically is just doing what you said you would do for yourself. And a lot of my clients are awesome at keeping promises they make to others, while simultaneously also being awesome at consistently breaking the promises that they make to themselves. And when you break a lot of promises to yourself, that is incredible fuel for self doubt. So we stopped trusting ourselves. And we start playing really small in our own lives. To the point that we don’t like our lives, we don’t recognize our lives. We don’t feel fulfilled by our lives. So we reclaim our power.
Courtney Townley 24:46
We restore our power by learning how to show up for ourselves on the regular to honor what we truly want for our life. Which is scary and I’m comfortable. And it’s very different way of moving through the world than what we’ve been doing. And it requires the ability to coach ourselves. This is why I always say that I am only someone’s coach until they have the capacity to do that work for themselves. Because that’s my goal as a coach is to help someone become so awesome at coaching themselves, that they no longer need me.
Courtney Townley 25:35
And it’s so interesting, because I hear this transformation all the time, on group coaching calls, which we do on a regular basis inside of Rumble & Rise. So in the beginning of someone’s process, they’re asking a lot of questions. And they’re asking for a lot of coaching to work through their own rumbles. And once somebody has been in that space long enough, what ultimately starts to happen is they start presenting as if they have a rumble, which they do, they’re still working through rumbles always, because that’s life. But they present it in a way where there’s not really a lot of work needed on my part. Because they’re coaching themselves as they’re presenting the rumble, it’s really fascinating to watch.
Courtney Townley 26:27
So self coaching can be considered self-leadership. It is self authority, it is self influence, it is your capacity, to direct your behavior in a way that keeps you in integrity with yourself. And I would argue it is the most powerful skill you will ever learn in contribution to any area of your life. If you want to improve your health, if you want to improve your relationships, if you want to improve your relationship with money. The way to do that is to develop skill sets that allow you to coach yourself in powerful ways.
Courtney Townley 27:16
So the fourth piece of restoring power is your capacity to be fully expressed to expand your capacity to be fully expressed. Because as I always say, there are things you are here to cause, contribute to and inspire. And I don’t know what those things are. But I’m willing to bet that you do. Even though you might be convincing yourself, that you don’t know what those things are. The bigger truth is you just may have stored them away somewhere. They’re in a dusty box somewhere in the depths of your psyche. And you’re convincing yourself that you don’t know what these things are. But with a little digging, which can translate into with a little with some really good questions. You will uncover that you do know what those things are. But we lose our personal power in regards to our full expression. In an effort to prove ourselves all the time we’re proving our worth rather than owning our worth.
Courtney Townley 28:34
We’re trying to make other people happy, by molding our life in a certain way, to the point that we are neglecting parts of ourselves. We’re neglecting our health, mental, physical, emotional, we’re neglecting the things that are truly on our heart, our passions and pursuits. And none of that helps you to step into your power. It’s actually leading you away from it. So we restore personal power by owning our worth rather than proving it by spending our life energy expressing what we are, rather than spending our life trying to fit the mold of what other people think it should be. And that is hard. Because there is no shortage of opinions on how you should be living your life. opinions from your parents opinions from your friends, a parent, you know, opinions from your co workers from the culture at large.
Courtney Townley 29:44
But think about this, do you want to be loved for being a version of yourself? That’s in integrity pain that isn’t authentic, that isn’t true. Or do you want to be loved for the pure unedited version of who you actually are. And in order to be loved as that version, that second version, which I hope is the one that you would choose, we have to be willing to express that version of ourselves. But I work with clients every day, who have built relationships, on the foundation of neglecting themselves. They have built relationships by diminishing themselves rather than fully expressing themselves. And when a relationship is based on that, and then you’re afraid of losing the relationship, you’re just going to continue to behave in the same way. I’ve worked with clients who have stayed in careers that they’ve hated for decades, because they’re afraid to make other people uncomfortable to or who stray from things that they deeply care about. Because they don’t want to inconvenience someone else.
Courtney Townley 31:08
So this is your reminder, as this siren is playing in the background, if you can hear it, this is your reminder that nothing is more valuable to the world than your authentic full expression. What if the sun waited for approval to rise every day? And was like wrapped up in self doubt? Should I arise? Should I not? What if birds asked for permission to sing? What a flowers didn’t bloom because they were worried that someone wouldn’t like the way that they bloom? Or wouldn’t like their fragrance? Right, the world would be a really dark and dismal place. And some of you might say it already is a dark and dismal place. I don’t choose to see it that way. But even if you see it that way, it just be more so.
Courtney Townley 32:09
Someone recently referred to me as a fearless leader, one of the members inside of Rumble & Rise who I adore. And you know, it was it was such a it was part of a beautiful testimony that she left about her experience inside the community. And I was thinking about it that that phrase fearless leader and my response to her was was this so I’m going to read it to you because I think it’s really relevant to what we’re talking about here.
Courtney Townley 32:35
I said that I think perhaps I’m not a fearless leader. But rather I’m practicing on being a brave one. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by that fear is not traveling with me. And I keep choosing over and over again to believe that fear is not a Do Not Enter sign. But rather a beacon pointing me in the direction of my own growth and my own full self expression. I want to be a champion for bravery, authentic living, and full self expression. So I let fear point the way. And this is a work in progress, that I will hopefully be engaged with the rest of my life. And I hope you will be too I hope you will sign on to be engaged for the rest of your life with the work of being a fully expressed human. Which absolutely is some of the hardest and also most rewarding work of your life.
Courtney Townley 33:57
So if you’re someone who’s listening to this today, and this message lands for you, restoring personal power is the work that we do inside of Rumble & Rise, and the 2023 curriculum inside of the community isn’t just going to help you restore yours. But it’s going to help you profoundly expand your capacity to express your personal power, whatever that means for you. Because it means radically different things to everybody.
Courtney Townley 34:26
For some people, it’s saying what needs to be said, going after the things on their heart. For some people it looks like stepping back and bowing out of certain responsibilities that they’ve taken on. And for all of us it looks like stepping up in some way. Even if it’s starts and it always starts with stepping up to own your worth.
Courtney Townley 35:01
If you need help with that, I would strongly encourage you to join us next year. Like I said at the start of the show today, the best rates you’re going to get on Rumble & Rise and 2023 are this month through the month of December. We have discounts on two packages number one is an annual membership and the other discount is on an annual membership with some private coaching attached. So I would love you to join us I would love to see what your full expression really looks like. And again, you can find out all the details and sign up for membership by going to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble. Alright my friends, I hope you have a wonderful day and I will talk to you again next week. Take care.
Courtney Townley 35:53
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.
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