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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’m delighted you decided to join me today. And before we get into today’s episode, I want to give you a reminder that Grace & Grit is hosting its first ever book club starting on April 12. This book club is going to run for eight weeks, so through the month of April in May. And the first book of study on Deck is atomic habits by James clear.
Courtney Townley 0:55
So if this is a book that you have long been interested in reading, even if you’ve read it before, and you want to revisit the principles, and more importantly, you want to start applying the principles to your own life, I would highly encourage that you check out this book club.
Courtney Townley 1:11
It is going to be facilitated by an incredible wellness coach and therapist extraordinaire, Claire Schultz Bergman, and it’s I just think it’s gonna be a really unique experience. So I am personally really excited about this. And I know there’s an awful lot of people that are also excited about it, we do have a limited number of spots available inside this book club.
Courtney Townley 1:33
Registration is going to be closing in the next week. So if you are interested, check it out by going to graceandgrit.com/bookclub.
Courtney Townley 1:47
Now, I spend a lot of time on this Podcast, and inside my communities and with my clients coaching around the topic of personal power. Because, in my opinion, owning our power, taking responsibility for generating power, protecting our personal power, and expressing our personal power are all really important elements in the healing process, on a mental level, emotional level and physical level. And while there are a lot of things that rob us of our personal power, and cause what I’m going to refer to today as a power wound, I really want to talk today about what I consider to be the ultimate power wound and what you can do about it.
Courtney Townley 2:51
If you’re someone who’s listening to this today, and you’re feeling a little powerless or very powerless in your own life, and maybe that’s just in one area of your life, where you feel like you’re playing smaller than you would like to be in some way, this episode is for you. So let’s start off by defining what power is. And I think this is really important because as I’ve really done a deep dive into exploring power with a lot of people this year, specifically a lot of women, it’s really interesting at people’s relationship to the word power. So I think it’s really important that we kind of start in a place where we can actually hear the word and not have a adverse reaction to it not have resistance right out of the gate.
Courtney Townley 3:46
The way that I like to think about power, specifically personal power, is that it is our ability to produce an effect in our life. It is the ability that we have to manage and influence our own thoughts and emotions and behaviors in order to create the things that we want for our life. So in the most basic terms, personal power is our ability to be creators in our own life. It is our ability to master ourselves.
Courtney Townley 4:35
Another way that I like to think about personal power is that it’s our life force. It is our ability to feel vibrant and fully alive. And I really believe that personal power is very closely related to self-leadership in that it is very difficult To elevate personal power, without strong self leadership skills, which is why so many of the episodes of this Podcast are dedicated to the topic of self-leadership. We are all stewards of our own power. It is our responsibility to generate it, and protect it and spend it in ways that feel congruent with how we want to be showing up.
Courtney Townley 5:36
So let’s talk about what a power wound is. A power wound is anything that robs you of your power on, necessarily. And I could give you so many examples of power wounds. But here’s a short list. Not setting boundaries in our life. Not being able to say no. Not expressing ourselves. Not taking care of yourself is a power wound. Not taking responsibility for your own healing is a power wound. Not making decisions, not keeping promises that you make to yourself. And the ultimate power wound is really related to that last piece of not keeping promises to ourself. Because I believe that the ultimate power wound that we inflict upon ourselves is distrusting ourselves. It is a lack of self trust.
Courtney Townley 6:55
And look, nobody wakes up one day and says, Hey, you know, I’m going to decide consciously today to just stop trusting myself. That’s not how it happens. It’s not a conscious decision to stop trusting yourself. And it’s not one event that causes you to stop trusting yourself. Distrust is usually a byproduct of a pattern in our life. It’s a slow drip. It is behavior that is compounded over time, we have broken promises to ourselves so many times, that we no longer trust ourselves. We have said so many horrible things over so many years to ourselves, that we no longer trust ourselves. And this power wound, of lack of self trust, doesn’t just happen by breaking promises. Of course.
Courtney Townley 7:59
It also happens by ignoring our own needs, disconnecting from our physical being. So we just think all the time, but we don’t actually spend time dropping into our bodies. It happens by not taking time to get to know ourselves. So we keep ourselves so busy, that it’s really hard to trust someone that you never spend time with. We also adopt a lot of beliefs that other people have about our life or about who we are. And we adopt those beliefs unconsciously.
Courtney Townley 8:42
Again, it’s I don’t really think it’s a conscious decision that we do that. But we heard things when we were kids, or we heard things as young adults. And then we repeated those thoughts over and over and over so many times that they actually became beliefs and their beliefs that are actually robbing us of our own self trust. And to me, this is also very closely related to self image. Because self image is really the habit. It is a pattern of how we see and how we think and how we feel about ourselves. And all of that is really rooted in our beliefs. Right?
Courtney Townley 9:30
What we’ve adopted what we have that that tape that is consistently playing in our head. We talk a lot about self image inside of my Rumble & Rise community because self image is really governing so many of the choices that you’re making in your day. And I like to think of it as a cognitive shortcut that helps our brain to make otherwise difficult choices in advance. and it helps us to streamline our decision making process. But if your self image is not helping you to make decisions that are congruent with what you really want for your life, it can be hugely problematic. So self image is really the supreme habit, a habit that informs all other habits.
Courtney Townley 10:29
Think about this, if I don’t feel that I’m worthy, if I have a self image of no self worth, if I don’t think I can be successful at something, if I don’t believe I’m the kind of person who fill in the blank, it is going to affect how I show up in every aspect of my life. So if we don’t take time to pause and consider our own self image, your self image might actually be a power wound, it might be the very reason you don’t trust yourself. Because you don’t see yourself as someone to be trusted. And I see this a lot, and even with our relationship with our bodies, right?
Courtney Townley 11:20
Body image is a part of our self image. And I think one of the big reasons a lot of women don’t trust their bodies, is because they have spent decades encouraging themselves to distrust their bodies through the way that they’re thinking. So how does this show up? Right? Like how, how do we know that we’re not trusting ourselves? How do we know that we have this power wound of distrust? Well, it might show up for you as indecision, simply not giving yourself permission to make decisions because you don’t trust yourself to make the right decision. Which I always find really interesting.
Courtney Townley 12:09
Because the only thing that makes a decision, right, is that you decide to make it right. But we often think there is someone out there that needs to approve of all of our decisions. And so we hand over the power to those outside entities, those outside people, rather than trusting our own knowing that creates distrust with ourselves. We also might be showing up in authentically in our life, doing a lot of things that we don’t really want to be doing. Because we don’t trust ourselves, to show people who we really are. We don’t trust that people will like who we really are, if we’re authentic with them. So we end up living a very inauthentic life, we get stuck in careers we hate, we stay in relationships that don’t really nurture us.
Courtney Townley 13:06
We don’t go after the things that we truly want. Because we aren’t trusting ourselves. We don’t take risks, life starts feeling very frustratingly small. Because we don’t trust ourselves, to mess up to be able to fail and pick ourselves back up. So we just don’t try at all. You might be someone who is constantly outsourcing all of your decision making. You want other people to decide for you how you should be living your life. You’re before you make a decision, you’re running it past everyone in your life to see what they think about your decision. Because you don’t trust yourself enough to just be okay with the thing that you know is right for you.
Courtney Townley 14:07
And I also think a general lack of fulfillment is usually an indicator that we have some self trust issues. Because there’s a reason we’re unfulfilled. There’s a reason we’re not going after the things that would light our life up. And I feel like that always circles back to the self trust conversation. So the bigger question is, how do we start healing this wound? And obviously, this is, I think, really an individualized process. Everyone’s process is gonna look a little bit different. But what I do know for sure is we have to start acknowledging the wound itself.
Courtney Townley 14:50
We have to acknowledge the spaces and places in our life, that we’re doubting ourselves that we aren’t really showing up in the way that we want to be. And I’ll tell you, for me how this is showing up in a really glaring way right now, I think a lot of you have heard me say that about probably 18 months ago, I spearheaded this project of writing a book. And it’s been on my heart for many, many years, I hired a coach to help me write a book proposal, then I hired a coach to actually help me write the book. And I would say, I’m about 50%, done with this book. And I haven’t written for three months, I put like a full stop on the project.
Courtney Townley 15:37
And why, for the exact reason we are talking here about lack of self trust, I have a power wound around self expression, through the medium of writing. And I’m just now acknowledging that because the resistance is so clear. And I have a lot of self doubt, I have a lot of doubt that people won’t want to read the book, people won’t want to share the book, people will just horrifically criticize the book, that I’m not a good writer that I’m I mean, it just goes on and on and on. And so being in that space right now is first.
Courtney Townley 16:18
So first, I have to acknowledge the wound, I have to acknowledge this level of distrust in myself. And the second part is that I have to start getting wildly curious, compassionate and curious about why I feel these things. And you know, what’s at the root of it really, is that it’s new. I’ve never written a book before. It’s totally unknown territory. So for you, maybe it’s that you really want to go to the gym, but you haven’t been in 20 years. Or you really want to take a trip by yourself, but you’ve never done it before. I don’t know what it looks like for you. But we all wrestle with doing things that we haven’t done before.
Courtney Townley 17:08
And so being compassionate and curious with ourselves in that space, really allows us to ask the question, Do I like my reasons? Do I like my reasons for not writing this book? And here are my reasons. I’m I haven’t been writing, because I’m afraid of judgment. Because I’m afraid I’m going to fail. Because I’m afraid that I’m going to find out things about myself that I didn’t really want to find out. And do I like those reasons? I really don’t. I really don’t like my reasons for not doing the work.
Courtney Townley 17:59
Knowing that helps me to decide hard that I really do want this, I’ve always wanted this. And so am I now willing to get in the arena with discomfort and practice writing? And get my first book out there? Am I willing to keep asking for help to express myself through writing? Am I willing to show up on the regular to start trusting myself in the arena of being an author? And yes, I want that level of trust with myself. And so it requires that I’m in this really messy, hard place of rumbling with a lot of resistance, and simultaneously showing up anyway. So I share that with you because I’m sure that in some way, shape or form in your own life, you can identify with that. And for all of us, it circles back to self trust.
Courtney Townley 19:13
We can live in a space of distrusting ourselves because we’re unwilling to try because we’re unwilling to figure it out. Or we can heal this wound by showing up and doing the work that we’ve called ourselves to do. messy and imperfect and all the things so I don’t know who needed to hear that today. I don’t know what your specific power wound is. But I bet you do. And it’s worth healing. So you can reclaim all your power and be a fully expressed human.
Courtney Townley 19:52
Alright my friends, I hope you have a great day and I will see you again next week. Take care.
Courtney Townley 20:03
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.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
