354: Master Key: One skill that will transform every dimension of your life.

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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. I’m delighted you’re here. I know the sea of podcasting is expanding by the day. And so the fact that you are here listening to this show, giving a little bit of your time and attention to this show, I don’t take that lightly. And I hope you reap a lot of value out of today’s episode.

Courtney Townley 0:48
Now I am a year older a couple weeks ago, I had a birthday my 47th birthday to be exact. And I’m telling you that because it dawned on me the other day that I have now been traveling in the health and wellness space as a professional for almost 30 years, 30 years, which makes me feel a lot of things that makes me feel sort of amazed that I am 30 years older. And it also makes me really happy. Because I have made a 30 year career out of something that I truly love. And I have such a passion for 30 years later, I am truly not bored. I have days where I get frustrated and disheartened and all the things that normal business owners feel. But bored is not something that I ever experienced in my line of work, I am so lit up about it.

Courtney Townley 1:41
And I just feels like such a privilege to be able to do this work. Now that being said, I also want to recognize that this industry, I truly feel would probably not exist, at least not to the extent that it does. If more people were teaching the real work of behavior change. I know I’m not telling you anything that you don’t know, when I say that you can buy an endless supply of programs, promising to change your life that have a lot of skill sets baked into them. But at the end of the day, there really is only one skill that you truly need in order to change your life. And I call this skill the master key.

Courtney Townley 2:28
And it is the very topic of today’s episode. So if you’re excited about that you’re in the right place. Now to get us started, I want to tell you about just a quote quickly that I came across the other day that really just hit me like wow, that is just so ridiculously true. And the quote is this very short and sweet.

Courtney Townley 2:49
The magic you’re looking for is in the work that you are avoiding.

Courtney Townley 2:56
Once again, the magic that you are looking for is in the work that you are avoiding. And you know that I know that about myself. And we also know that there will be things, lots of things that we do not want to do. When it comes to improving our life. These are the very things that we avoid. You may not want to exercise to get yourself more fit. You may not want to put more forethought into food in order to improve your relationship with food or to be fed better throughout the day. You may not want to go to bed earlier. Even though you strongly desire to get up tomorrow feeling energized and ready for the day. You may not want to have difficult conversations that had been weighing on you for weeks, months or maybe even years. You may not want to ask for help. Even though you see that help would probably be useful at the point you’re at. You’re someone who maybe resists setting boundaries, even though you understand that having boundaries could really help you to reclaim a lot of time and energy. You may not want to give your body the rest that it needs to keep showing up for you in a powerful way.

Courtney Townley 4:44
I don’t know what the things are that you don’t want to do to move your health and happiness to higher ground. But if you ask yourself that question, I am willing to bet without a lot of effort the answers will be revealed to you And what you resist along your journey is different than what I will resist. Because like I always say to my community, we all have different curriculum. Right?

Courtney Townley 5:14
Life is presenting us with a curriculum, to study and become masters have to be our fully expressed healthy, vibrant selves. And your curriculum and my curriculum are a little bit different. I’ve always enjoyed exercise, this is a great example, I really look forward to it, specifically strength training, I really enjoy it. And I know a lot of women inside of my community that risk that, that resist the heck out of strength training, it’s work that they would prefer to avoid, even though they understand the value of it, and they want the benefit on the other side of doing it. So even though strength training is something that I don’t necessarily resist, feeling my emotions definitely is, especially the big emotions, the more difficult emotions, that work does not come so easily to me. years ago, I’ve shared this on the Podcast before, but I think it’s always funny to remind you of this years ago, I was working with a therapist, specifically around befriending my emotions, most specifically around anger, understanding my anger and learning how to process it in ways that were useful to me and less destructive to the people around me.

Courtney Townley 6:44
And I distinctly remember her, just encouraging me to spend time feeling these big emotions, that I was so scared of like anger, just sitting with my anger, getting curious about my anger. And I remember saying to her at the end of a call, so you’re asking me to spend time I don’t have feeling things I don’t want to feel. And her response was precisely, absolutely, that is your curriculum. And indeed, it was, I’m certainly not a master of this skill set. I still resist the heck out of it a lot of the time. But I will tell you the work that I have done around it has profoundly changed every dimension of my life. So again, we all resist work in different areas.

Courtney Townley 7:38
I’m watching my son right now resisted doing his schoolwork specifically in math, even though he wants to become better at math. I’m watching my husband resist getting help with his sleep challenges. Even though he is desperate for a good night’s sleep. I’m watching my clients resist putting themselves to bed asking for what they need and 1000 other things.

Courtney Townley 8:07
So again, the magic is in the work that you are avoiding. What is that work for you? Now is a great time to ask yourself that question. You don’t need an afternoon to ponder it, you don’t need hours of time to figure it out. Ask the question. And be willing to listen to the answers, which I’m pretty sure will come pretty quickly for you.

Courtney Townley 8:35
And the second question I would encourage you to ask is how exactly are you avoiding that work? So what is the work that you are avoiding? That you know would move your life to higher ground you name it, it’s probably more than one thing? And then ask yourself, how exactly am I avoiding it? And there’s probably more than one answer to that question as well. If you missed episode 318 of this show, it was titled hiding habits, understanding and conquering the urge to avoid action. And a hiding habit is exactly what it sounds like it is it is a pattern that we develop, to avoid work that we know would actually improve our lives. We hide from the work.

Courtney Townley 9:33
And while there’s probably 1000s of ways that we hide from the work, there are eight ways that I mentioned in that Podcast that I see come up time and time again in my coaching calls. And I’ll quickly review them with you. Because I think it’s really valuable to the whole concept of this Podcast for you to understand what some of the most common hiding habits actually are. So the first one is over consuming information information. So being in a constant state of consuming information, convincing yourself you need more information, but never actually applying what you know, and consuming so much that you actually never have time to do the actual work.

Courtney Townley 10:25
I don’t know a person who doesn’t do that on some level. And we are living in the age of information overload. There is just so much information coming at us all the time. And what I know for certain as a coach is that you do not need more information to start moving your life to higher ground. You can spend years decades even a lifetime convincing yourself that you do. But you’re just hiding from the actual work.

Courtney Townley 11:00
The second hiding habit that I talked about in episode 318 is misaligned busyness, our schedule is so overloaded with to dues, many of which aren’t even priorities for us, they’re not even all that important to the things that we care about. But we are filling up every ounce of our time, with things that aren’t important. Sometimes as a way of hiding from the things that are fixing your marriage, resolving your work, stress, improving your health, when you’re so busy, that you don’t have time for any of those things, how convenient. Because those things are incredibly uncomfortable. And will challenge you on a lot of levels. So it’s easier to stay busy with things that don’t challenge you in that way.

Courtney Townley 11:57
Third, hiding habit I review in that Podcast is avoiding data. We don’t look at our bills, we don’t actually have a way of quantifying the amount of food that we’re eating. We don’t get on the scale. And please don’t hear me saying you need to weigh yourself. I just think that this idea that the scale is a horrible thing, and should be chucked out the window doesn’t necessarily apply to everybody. If that is the right decision for you more power to Yeah. But I also have a lot of clients who avoid weighing themselves for a long period of time, to the point that they finally get on a scale and they’re horrified, and how much weight they have gained because they’ve been neglecting data. And again, this is not an isolated conversation to the scale. Right?

Courtney Townley 12:49
Again, we can talk about avoiding our bills, we can talk about avoiding any kind of metric that would help you to get really clear on the true state of affairs. When we don’t face the data, we can make up a lot of stories, or we can just ignore the issue altogether. So definitely ignoring or avoiding data can be a hiding habit. A refusal to plan or organize yourself, in order to progress in your life to resolve problems head on is a hiding habit. Your brain has a lot of work to do every day. And if you don’t make a plan for how you’re going to show up differently, your brain goes to default, it does what it’s always done. And if what you have always done isn’t serving you, you can see where the problems come in right. Evading decision making.

Courtney Townley 13:48
So not making decisions is a hiding habit. Because when you don’t make decisions, you don’t have to hold yourself accountable to any kind of action. So we can stay stuck in a spin cycle of indecision, getting very stagnant, very stuck. And what would pull this out of that is simply starting to make more decisions. Waiting for the perfect time or convincing yourself that there’s a better time can definitely be a hiding habit. Because we could do that all year long. Right. I’ll get started after the holidays. I’ll get started after tax season. I’ll get started when the summer is over. I’ll get started when the kids go back to school. And then we just start all over again and a whole year, a whole decade goes by because we keep convincing ourselves that now is not the time.

Courtney Townley 14:43
That’s a great way to hide. making other people the problem or hyper focusing on other people’s problems can both be hiding habits. I see a lot of women doing this and the final hiding habit that I talked about in episode 318 is, and again, this is not an exhaustive list, but of the eight that I mentioned in that episode, the eighth one is indulging in self defeating narrative. So we talk to ourselves in a way that we quite literally talk ourselves out of doing work, that is a hiding habit. And the beautiful thing to remember is that habits can be changed.

Courtney Townley 15:29
None of this has to stay your MO, we can change these patterns with an awareness. And with a plan, which is why I asked you the question, Where are you hiding? What is the work that you are hiding from specifically? And how are you hiding, because when you highlight those two things, you can get to work. Coming into the light, for lack of a better way of saying it right to stop hiding. And look, we hide for valid reasons. I mean, we hide because we don’t want to get uncomfortable. We don’t want to feel big emotion. And it’s really important to remember that hiding, living your life hiding from the work that you know, would improve your life is very uncomfortable. Which is crazy, right?

Courtney Townley 16:33
Because we’re we’re rationalizing with ourselves, that we don’t want to do that work. Because it’s hard, it’s uncomfortable. It’s scary, it’s unknown. But not doing the work is really scary, is really hard is really uncomfortable. So there’s going to be discomfort either way, which would you prefer to lean into discomfort that actually moves your life or to lean into the discomfort of staying exactly where you are. And worse yet, not only do we convince ourselves, that we shouldn’t take action on the things that we already know, because it’s uncomfortable and scary. But when we have moments of wanting to come into the light, to try to solve the problem, we convince ourselves that somebody else knows our lives better than we do, that someone else has to tell us what to do in order to resolve this problem.

Courtney Townley 17:41
Now, please don’t hear me saying that to get started. Maybe you do need or please do hear me saying I should say that to get started. Maybe you do need a little support. A little education, a little encouragement, a little outside accountability. I am not saying don’t ask for help. What I am saying is there comes a point where in order to make not hiding sustainable, we have to assume the role of the helper, we have to become the ultimate guide, the ultimate leader, the ultimate person to be accountable to the coach, in essence, we have to become our own coach. And this is the master key skill that I referred to at the very start of the Podcast.

Courtney Townley 18:48
The most potent skill that I have learned in 30 years of being in the wellness industry, to that end to help you improve your wellness to help you move your life to higher ground. absolutely hands down is the skill of self coaching. Which is interesting because I think self coaching, well, at least that phrase didn’t even exist probably five or 10 years ago. I don’t even think the phrase coaching existed. Because I know coaching. It’s like everybody’s a coach now, right? Like we hear that phrase everywhere. But when I first started online coaching, health coaching wasn’t even a thing. It didn’t even exist. So this concept of self coaching, the concept existed, but the phrase of self coaching probably didn’t exist 10 years ago.

Courtney Townley 19:49
So what is self coaching? Well, self coaching, in my view, is having the skill set to critically think Think about your own life and make decisions about your life confidently. And that seems like such a simple and reasonable thing to be able to do as a human right. And I see so many women turning away from their own knowing.

Courtney Townley 20:23
In light of maybe believing that there’s someone else who does know better, that there’s someone else that always has to guide them, and always has to lead them. And I think that when we assume that role, and we learn the skill sets that will help us stand firmly in that role of being the leader of our own lives. That’s where change happens across the board of our life. So I believe that self-leadership Essentially, is self coaching, when we learn how to lead ourselves in powerful ways. That is, because we have skills that help us to coach ourselves into taking action, we can coach ourselves into coming out into the light and no longer hiding in our life, because we’re not afraid of our life. We’re willing to face it head on and resolve issues that need need resolving. And there’s a ripple effect to this, right?

Courtney Townley 21:32
That when we start self coaching, we start feeling more confident about ourselves, because we’re making more decisions for ourselves. And that confidence oozes out into our careers, into our relationships, into the way that we take care of ourselves. Self coaching infiltrates every dimension of our life, and we end up living with so much more power. And when I say power, I just want to be clear that I am specifically speaking to our ability to create and serve and make an impact. And I’m also speaking to our ability to influence ourselves. Right, that to me, that’s what power is, it’s our ability to influence our own thoughts, emotions and behaviors, to get us to where we really want to be. And again, self coaching helps us to do exactly that. So how do we do it? How do we self coach?

Courtney Townley 22:45
Well, I think there’s really four crucial skill sets, to the self coaching, conversation. And there are hundreds of skill sets within those skill sets. But these are kind of umbrella skill sets. So the first one is radical honesty. If we are not slowing down, to get inquisitive, to question what we’re doing, how we’re showing up and why we’re showing up that way. We’re never going to create change. And this goes back to that hiding habit of busyness. If you’re so busy that you never have time to be introspective. That is a hiding habit. You don’t have to take ownership of your own behavior when you don’t have time to look at yourself. Or maybe you convince yourself of that. So awareness is really the first step to self coaching, we have to become hyper aware of how we’re showing up. We have to question if those patterns are helping us to create the life we want? And if not, how do we fill those gaps? How do we change behavior. So it does align with what we actually want. All of that requires radical honesty.

Courtney Townley 24:11
The second step is we learn how to make really strong decisions about our life. And we can try to outsource this the rest of our life. But my argument around this is always no one will ever know you or your life the way that you do. And true confidence comes from feeling like you can navigate your own life with your own decisions. So it’s really learning how to insource more so you can outsource less. And I’m specifically speaking to in sourcing decision making about important things in your life. So we make strong decisions we make Strong decisions about where we’re going to put our focus, what our priorities are, how we’re going to spend our time and dedication to those things, and not just let random things consume our time. That strong decision making, I always say strong decision making is making hard decisions and making decisions hard.

Courtney Townley 25:22
So let me explain that because it sounds horrible. But making hard decisions mean, you can’t do everything. You can’t be in all places for all people at all times. And if you try to do that, which I see a lot of women trying to do that you just you just land and a face plant of burnout, not helpful. So we have to get very clear on what is most important to us. Because time, energy and mental bandwidth are limited resources, we only get so much of them. So the amount that we get each day, how are we going to spend it with intention? That is what deciding hard means we make some hard decisions, right? Hard to sit because it’s not easy. When you decide to focus on one thing, it means you’re not focusing on something else. There’s always sacrifice in making strong decisions.

Courtney Townley 26:25
Okay, moving on to the third step, we’ve got to develop wild curiosity. While wild curiosity is really starting to question, what is driving your behavior. And I will tell you in this the spaces that I teach with my clients inside my community, chemistry drives behavior for sure. So if we aren’t taking good care of ourselves, we aren’t sleeping, we aren’t eating well, we aren’t, you know, getting enough movement in our day. Jacked up chemistry can definitely inspire some jacked up behavior.

Courtney Townley 27:03
So second to that is the way that we are thinking about everything. Your thoughts, drive emotions, emotions, drive behavior. So when we start taking radical responsibility for the sentences in our brain, our thoughts, how we’re choosing to think about life, what we’re choosing to make things mean, we have the power to make life radically better for ourselves. And that is a powerful, powerful skill set. I would say that is probably one of the most crucial skill sets of self coaching is learning how to parent your brain. And I’m highlighting this because as the at the time that this Podcast episode is dropping, which we always were dropping on a Saturday, I am teaching a new masterclass, called The Art of Self-Coaching. And this masterclass is going to do a very deep dive into thought management, how to parent the brain ways of doing thought work. So you can influence your emotions and your behavior your behaviors much more easily. So if this is a skill set, this skill set of self coaching is something that you really want to do deeper work around. And honestly, I wish we all learned this in school because it would have made life so much easier.

Courtney Townley 28:31
If this is something that you would like to explore and become more skilled at, you can purchase the masterclass on its own, which is $29. Just go to graceandgrit.com/masterclasses and you’ll find it there. Or the second option is that you become a Rumble & Rise member, right? This is the work that we do inside of my membership community. We are always working on the skill set of self-leadership. So we have radical honesty, we have strong decision making. And then we have wild curiosity. And the fourth skill set which is also a part of this art of self coaching masterclass that I’m teaching next week is ruthless editing. We have to ruthlessly edit our lives in order to feel powerful in our lives. And what I mean by ruthless editing specifically, is again taking responsibility for how we are choosing to think about what happens in our life, how we are choosing to think about our lives, specifically how we’re choosing to think about ourselves.

Courtney Townley 29:38
Because if we don’t you look at that really closely and edit the parts that are hurting us unnecessarily. Well, again, life is hard, life gets harder. And self coaching is about making life more fulfilling. I won’t say it’s about making life If easy, because I don’t think it’s reasonable to think that life is just easy all the time, it’s not. But feeling like you have choice in how you show up in the difficult moments in the messy moments of life. That is a very powerful thing. And that is something that self coaching will give you over and over again. And your ability to coach yourself through difficult moments through difficult situations. is a skill set that never stops giving. It’ll serve you the rest of your life.

Courtney Townley 30:38
So once again, if this topic of self coaching is one that you’d like to explore more deeply, head on over to graceandgrit.com/masterclasses, and you’ll see it right at the top of that page. Once you purchase the class, you will have access to the class itself, which is 60 minutes and a very robust companion guide that helps you apply the work that we talked about in the class. You’ll have that for as long as it stays online, so you have access to an online classroom. And if you have any questions, you can always reach out to me at courtney@graceandgrit.com

Courtney Townley 31:13
All right, my friends, I hope that you somehow pursue the practice of self coaching because I truly believe that it is the skill that can improve every single dimension of your life. All right, I will see you again very soon. Take care and have a great rest of your week.

Courtney Townley 31:39
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.