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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, thank you for being here. Now, I think if you are a regular listener, you probably heard on the last episode that we are hosting our first ever Grace & Grit retreat here in the amazing state of Montana next week, I cannot believe it’s here. This has been like six months in the making. I feel like it’s been 20 years in the making, really. But we have been working on this specific retreat for the last six months, we have 16 women from all over the nation flying here to be a part of this event. And it’s going to be amazing.
Courtney Townley 1:06
But I’m telling you that mostly because when life gets ramped up with more responsibility, which I definitely feel like it is for me right now I have a lot on my plate, it’s really easy to talk our way out of doing the things that we say are important to us. And this Podcast is really important to me. And I am a big proponent of consistency. In fact, it’s a big part of the work that I teach, right, I teach an entire program called The Consistency Code. And so I am actually leaning into my own practice, I briefly considered not doing a Podcast this week, because my brain was just all over the place. And it felt like one more thing to do. But then I just reminded myself that why this Podcast even exists.
Courtney Townley 1:50
And I also reminded myself that this is a great opportunity to practice what I preach, which is to get out of all or nothing thinking, it doesn’t have to be a 45 minute Podcast or nothing, I could definitely do something smaller. And lo and behold, I had a conversation with a client the other day that I thought would be perfect to share on this Podcast. I’m not going to share the actual conversation that we had. But the thing that came up in this conversation, and it’s probably going to be a short and sweet episode. So I am delivering an episode, I think it’s going to be super valuable to you. And all the things still get done.
Courtney Townley 2:30
So I’m sharing that with you, because I’m sure that there are moments in your life where you are feeling. So all over the place that you want to pull out of a commitment that you’ve made as well. And sometimes it makes sense to pull out of that commitment. Please don’t hear me saying that. But sometimes if we just give ourselves permission to deliver in a smaller way, or commit on a lesser scale, we can still show up and it’s a win win for everybody.
Courtney Townley 2:56
Today, what I really want to explore with you is this rumble that all of us really have as human beings, which is learning how to become less reactive to our emotional landscape. Because there is a very high price to pay when we are constantly reacting to our emotions. And that price really comes at relationships like that is the cost of reactivity, we wound relationships, we create messes that we have to spend energy and time cleaning up. And we really ultimately pull ourselves out of integrity with ourselves, because we didn’t necessarily show up in a way that felt good to us. So if you are someone who has spent a lifetime or a large swath of your life being reactive to your emotional landscape, I just want you to know that I first handedly understand how difficult it can be to become less reactive.
Courtney Townley 3:58
In this episode of The Grace & Grit Podcast, I want to share with you one of the most powerful exercises that I have ever learned in helping me to manage my own emotional landscape, particularly when I’m feeling very reactive. And I’ve taught this practice to a lot of clients over the years, and they seem to think that it is equally as powerful to them as well. So if you are someone who is really wanting to figure out how to be less reactive, and how to use your emotions to really help your life rather than create unintended damage in your life, this episode is for you.
Courtney Townley 4:39
I alluded to this but I just want to call it out. I have spent much of my life as a very reactive human and I am not proud of that. But literally from the My earliest memories, I was always very reactive to emotion. My parents used to joke with me, you know I was just so dramatic and made things into such a big deal. And my response to that was always well, I feel things more than most people, which really felt legit at the time, it really felt like oh my gosh, there’s all this emotion, what else am I supposed to do with it. And nobody really had helped me learn skills to help me process that bounty of emotion. So, as it happens so often in the adulting years, we have to take on that responsibility ourselves. And I didn’t really see a pathway for helping myself with that until I was probably in my early 30s. And up until that point, I was really operating as if my emotions were mandates, demanding that I had to react in a certain way, rather than messengers, inviting me to get inquisitive, and better understand the things that were and were not working in my life. And I to this day, I definitely am a huge proponent of feeling your emotions, it is so important, especially at a time and in a world that is actually feeling less.
Courtney Townley 6:22
And what I mean by that is we numb our emotions a lot in today’s culture, we avoid our emotions a lot, we stuff our emotions, we eat our emotions, we do all kinds of things with our emotions, rather than feel them and get curious about them. And that’s really unfortunate, because they have a lot of Intel for you about your life, and how to improve your life. And if we’re always running from that information, we can’t use it to expand our life. So feeling is a deep gift that you can give yourself learning how to feel and experience emotions. But reactivity is not a gift. In fact, I would argue it might be a gift reactivity is a gift, if you are trying to get out of the way of a moving vehicle, right?
Courtney Townley 7:12
Like that kind of reactivity we can all argue is really beneficial. But reacting to every emotion that shows up in your day, is really a fast path to wasting a tremendous amount of energy. And also, like I said earlier, creating a lot of unintended damage. So as my own life evolved and got more complex, I got into a, you know, much more committed relationship, I had a child, I started to build a business, all the things, I really was looking for ways to deal with my emotions, because I realized the way that I was dealing with my emotions was not in any way helpful. It was just making everything much harder. So I signed up for a meditation class. And that was great, right?
Courtney Townley 8:04
It was kind of a gateway to understanding that there are other pathways for helping us to manage our brain. And really learning how to be more mindful and more present in the moment was a real relief to my emotionally charged self. And it gave me hope that hey, maybe there is more to understand here, and that I don’t have to live the rest of my life this way. So I ended up a few years later, after my first meditation class, I was in a certification program for precision nutrition. Precision nutrition is a certification school, for coaches and trainers to really help them better understand and behavior change science and better serve their clients. And one of the exercises that I learned in this certification program was an exercise called break the chain.
Courtney Townley 8:56
Essentially what this exercise is, is it’s teaching a coach that when a client comes to you with a story about how they failed, what didn’t go well, how to examine what led up to that moment, but more importantly, how to help the client start to examine what led up to that moment. So I’ll give you just like kind of a concrete example. And this is probably one that a lot of you can relate to. Let’s just say that you have planned a really nutritious meal. At the end of the day you have all the groceries in the fridge, and you have put for thought into this meal, but It’s six o’clock. You haven’t quite gotten started cooking yet. You are tired, you are hungry, you have had a stressful day. And then lo and behold, your partner, your spouse, your roommate shows up with a pizza and breadsticks and is the exact opposite of what you really had in store for yourself that evening.
Courtney Townley 10:05
And of course, in the moment, it seems perfect. I don’t have to cook, I don’t have to exert the effort, right. And we end up eating more pizza than we planned, and we eat way more breadsticks than we planned. And then the story the next day, is how we failed, right? That That wasn’t what I planned to do for myself, now I feel terrible, I have so much regret, and on and on the story goes. So I hear stories like this all the time. As a coach, I have lots of clients come to coaching calls. And they in some way often feel that they have failed at something that they had committed to. And what’s really hard about that for the client is when they’re looking at what didn’t go well as a failure. And they’re really starting to like weave this very dramatic story about why they failed and what a terrible person they are, and how now they can’t possibly create success and all the things is that it just makes them want to quit, it makes them not want to take one more step forward, it is not at all helpful.
Courtney Townley 11:15
But what is helpful is to take a situation like that, and really get curious about why it happened. Like where in the day did things start to lead up to that moment, where you tossed everything to the wind at the end of the day, and really pulled yourself out of integrity with what you wanted to do. And that is that process of walking someone through breaking the chain is very Grace filled. When I can show a woman that hey, like, Did you just hear yourself tell me that you skipped lunch. And then you had a really difficult meeting with your boss. And that kind of left you frazzled and really didn’t resolve the problem that you went in there to solve. And then you got a call from school because your son got injured on the playground and you had to go pick them up. And then you came home and they’re, you know, the dog had pooped in the kitchen or whatever it happens.
Courtney Townley 12:21
We lead, we point out all of these breadcrumbs that led up to that moment of finally saying, I don’t give a shit. Like, bring on the pizza and bring on the breadsticks because I’m tapped out. But when we can, in retrospect, look at all the things that led up to that event, we can treat ourselves with a whole lot more compassion and grace. And it’s a lot easier to stand up again the next day and keep walking.
Courtney Townley 12:54
So I am sharing this with you. Because the other day I sort of started the Podcast by saying this, I was having a conversation with the client. And I was telling her about how I was having a morning where I was feeling super emotionally charged. I was feeling really anxious and really amped up. And as a reaction to that emotional landscape, I could see myself kind of being a jerk to my family, like I wasn’t being super nice. And there came a moment where I think I was starting to pick a fight with my husband, for no reason. And I could see it happening like it was happening to somebody else. And in that moment, rather than continue down the path I was going which was going to lead to mass destruction, like I could just feel everybody’s tension starting to rise because I was on a rampage. And I had a moment where I just took a breath. I literally was putting toast in the toaster for my son. And I slowed my roll.
Courtney Townley 14:05
And I had this little internal conversation of Courtney, what is going on here. And I kind of walked myself through this exercise of breaking the chain. And I saw very clearly that hey, you know your cycles about to start right? And so kind of having a little bit of anxiety and feeling a little amped up around my cycle really normal. Like that’s the thing for me, that’s a pattern. And also with this retreat coming up next week, and wanting to do an incredible job and really serve at a high level the people who are coming to that event that also was making me feel a little bit anxious. There was some anxiety around that as well. And when I could see what the anxiety and kind of the stress of that moment was really about I actually was able to kind of laugh it off And I turned around. And I said to my family, hey, you guys, I’m really sorry, this is not about you. I have so much on my plate right now. And it’s all great stuff. But I’m, I’m feeling it, you know, I’m feeling the pressure of it. And so this was not about you, I’m sorry, let’s move on.
Courtney Townley 15:25
That really seems so silly to maybe celebrate as a success as an almost 47 year old woman. But this is a massive win. Because there was set, like I said earlier, such a huge part of my life where I was always seeing the damage I had done in the aftermath of the event. And now I’m in a place in my life where I can actually see it coming, I can see the destruction that I am about to create. And I can take a deep breath. And I can do a little bit of self coaching, which breaking the chain is. And I can reel myself back from the edge of a catastrophe. So I wanted to share some Pete, like the pieces of that, like just kind of talk you through the steps of how to start experimenting with that. But before I go there, I often share this with my clients, especially new clients, new clients start to work with me, and we start talking about handling emotions in ways that serve their well being rather than cause a lot of unnecessary damage. They understand it theoretically. But it doesn’t prevent them from continuing to be reactive right away. And it’s not supposed to that’s not how change happens. So they take in the information, and they start to understand that Oh, wow, there is another possibility here. But it doesn’t mean they’ve mastered the skill set that will allow that possibility to take place.
Courtney Townley 17:14
So what I’m saying to you here is, you may understand this, as I talk you through it, it doesn’t mean that is going to change every dimension of your emotional reactivity, overnight. In fact, this is how it’s going to roll, you are still going to react. But in the aftermath, you I hope are going to start looking at what happened through a different lens. Rather than looking at it as a total failure, and that you’re a terrible person, you can start looking at it through the lens of, Oh, I see what I did there, I see what happened. It doesn’t mean you still won’t have some guilt and regret and those types of things. You will, but you’re looking at it through the lens of really, hyper awareness. It’s not that you’re the problem, it’s that the reactivity is the problem. And that can be solved. So you’re gonna see it in the aftermath for a while, then what’s going to happen is kind of what happened to me the other day, you’re going to be kind of in the middle of reactivity, and you’re going to see yourself in it. And you’re going to be like, Oops, this is not at all how I want to show up here. And you’re also going to be like, Why is this happening? You’re gonna start questioning what led to this event. And eventually, and I have moments of this too.
Courtney Townley 18:48
They don’t come as often as I’d like, but I’m still working on it. We’re eventually we start to see it humming. It’s like we start to see the train coming at us. And we can move out of the way before it gets to us. So I explain that to you. Because I just want you to understand there is kind of what I call a maturity spectrum, to developing this kind of emotional agility. So steps for you are that you’re going to react, maybe it’s going to be today. Maybe it’s going to be in the next 24 to 72 hours, I don’t know. But you are going to react sometime in the near future in a way that does not feel awesome to you. And when that happens, this is a great place to practice breaking the chain.
Courtney Townley 19:37
So step two, we’ve Step One is we’ve reacted. Step two is we get curious about the reaction. not judgmental, but curious. Why did it happen? What led to that moment? And when you start looking at what led to that moment really look through Rue your day. How did your day roll? Were you well fed? Did you sleep the night before? Have you not moved your body in eight hours? Did you have a terrible conversation with someone did something maybe trigger you in the day? Like, go through your day and see what might have contributed to that ultimate moment of reactivity. And so we look at, we look at breaking the chain, we can understand our emotions and why they have why they are here. Like my anxiety, the other morning was telling me like you need to take a beat. You need to take a breath, remove yourself from the situation, get your head on straight, everything is okay. Nothing has gone wrong here. But I could have gone down the rabbit hole of making my anxiety mean terrible things, the retreats gonna go terrible, oh my gosh, my family is being terrible. My life is terrible. All of that was also a possibility. But I knew it was just going to create more anxiety.
Courtney Townley 21:11
So we break the chain, we look at the events, and we start treating ourselves with compassion, for the emotion that has emerged that we want it to react to. And we breathe into it, we feel it, we experience it. The other morning, it was anxiety for me. I had to be willing to sit with anxiety for a few minutes. And not try to change it radically right away. Just be with it, which I know always sounds terrible. That always sounds terrible. But leaning into the emotion often softens it, noticing where it was in my body helped to soften it, breaking the chain to understand why it was even there help to soften it.
Courtney Townley 21:55
I don’t know who needed to hear this today. But I felt having this conversation with my client the other day, it felt like something that a lot more people might benefit from hearing, I do talk about breaking the chain a lot with my private clients and inside of our Remo Rumble & Rise community. But for Podcast listeners who are looking for skills because we do talk a lot about expanding emotional capacity and what that means and why it is so important for your health and well being. And this is one of the ways that we can start expanding our emotional capacity is to stop fearing our emotions and to start learning from them. And breaking the chain is one of the exercises that we can do to help better understand why certain emotions have shown up this day. So I hope it helps somebody out there. I really look forward to talking to you and another couple of weeks after we have finished this retreat. I can tell you all about it. And until then, my friends take excellent care of yourself. I will talk to you again very soon. Take care.
Courtney Townley 23:10
Thank you for listening to the Grace & 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.
