Episode 68 - The Three Things You Need to Make a Change: Awareness, Capacity and Skills Part One

Do you know what you need to make a change? I do. I can’t wait to share my framework for change with you. To make a lasting change, you need three things: awareness, capacity, and skills. In this episode, I share real-life strategies and examples of these three elements, and I invite you to join me on July 15 from 1-2 PM PST for a free skill-building workshop. It’s easy to get stuck on the “skills” part of making a change, which is why my Stop People Pleasing group coaching programs and workshops are designed to empower you to develop and practice new skills with courage, openness, and support.  Get ready to delve into the process of change and learn how to navigate the discomfort that often accompanies it.  I can’t wait for you to listen.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] You are listening to the x good girl podcast episode 68. I want to talk about three things that you need to make a change. One of the things that I like about my brain, there's plenty of things that I don't, but, um, Because of my background as a teacher, I'm able to think in terms of like structures and systems in a way that is really helpful when it comes to this question that we often ask ourselves, like, how do I fix this?

How do I change this? And whenever I'm working with a client or inside of Stop People Pleasing, I teach these things, and I want to offer them to you as a framework and a guide for looking at a problem and for deciding, okay, what do I need to be able to make a difference here? The three things you need to make a change are awareness, you need capacity, and you need skills.

Awareness [00:01:00] is just, simple as it sounds, you need to recognize that something is not working for you. That might seem so simple, but how many of us are so used to living in discomfort, or so used to just living out the same habits and patterns that don't feel good, that Don't even, it doesn't even register as a problem.

It's just constant resentment, or constant anxiety, or constant discomfort in one form or another. Awareness is just be having the ability to become the watcher of your thoughts and experiences and not just the participant who isn't aware of what's going on. That's awareness. Capacity is the ability to tolerate doing something different.

It's the ability to be in connection to yourself in a loving, gracious [00:02:00] way to be able to not people please or to not apologize or to not say yes. Capacity is simply, um, you can think about it as, you know, do I have the energy for this? Do I have the ability to tolerate the discomfort of trying something new?

And do I have the capacity to take care of myself? If it doesn't go well, that's capacity. And we have different capacity on different days for different reasons. It's not a constant. But in order to know and to be in touch with your capacity, you have to be connected to your body. Which is why some of us, you know, are still building capacity.

Third, you have to have skills. You have to have a different way of engaging with the same situation. You have to have either different words to say or a different plan that will enable you to [00:03:00] try to get a different result. And sometimes we're lacking the skills simply because we were never taught them, right?

Like, How to process emotions. How to be with our big emotions in a loving, gracious way. I was never taught that. I was just sent to my room. So, It's no wonder that one of the skills we need to develop is how to process emotions, but I want to just give you a little bit of information on each of these so that they can serve as a guide to you to know where might I want to focus for a little while.

And then I want to give you some examples and stories of how we use this inside Stop People Pleasing to help Get something different to help stop people pleasing. So for awareness, you have to be able to not beat yourself up. It's the central skill because if you're going to be aware of [00:04:00] yourself, um, apologizing, let's say, and you start beating yourself up, why do you always apologize?

You sound so dumb. Why are you doing that? That shuts down your awareness fast. So, awareness is built on the ability to be gentle and gracious or at least neutral. Oh, I see myself apologizing here. Interesting. Because if you're going to go into the criticism and judgment, you're not going to want to notice things.

You're not going to want to build awareness. It is such an amazing experience to watch people inside Stop People Pleasing and clients develop this awareness because sometimes it comes on gradually and slowly and sometimes it comes like all in a moment. I was working with a client and Her husband had a run out of gas.

He was very upset and stressed out. He was [00:05:00] tired. And he started texting her all of his feelings and all of his, you know, irritation about what had happened. And she noticed for the first time how quickly she jumped in to try and fix it, to try and offer him solutions, right? He was a grown man. He had run out of gas.

By the side of the road, he was safe, there was a gas station nearby, but she still felt like it was her job to fix it. And for the first time in our session, she said, I saw it. I saw the way that I jump in and try and clean up his negative emotions because I don't like it when he feels negative emotions.

I feel like that means something has gone wrong for him and I want to make him feel better. That awareness is the first step to be able to do something. different. And without it, you're just going to get the same result every single time because you just keep doing the same thing, which again, isn't bad or [00:06:00] wrong.

It just means that you're not able to make a change. So sometimes our awareness is of our thinking. Other times our awareness is of our feelings and our awareness is just This feels bad. I don't like it. So many of us live with chronic discomfort because of our people pleasing. Even noticing that is a big deal.

Oh my gosh, I feel so resentful right now. This happened to me the other night. I have a teenage son who is learning to drive. He's very anxious to learn these skills. And after a long and particularly trying day at work, he asked me to take him driving. And I said yes, even though I didn't want to and we were driving around and I was short and I was irritated and I noticed, I became aware of my irritation [00:07:00] and rather than beat myself up or just push it down, I just asked myself, why are you irritated?

And the answer was right there. You're irritated because You're already emotionally tired and mentally depleted, and you said yes to something that you didn't really have the capacity for. So, that awareness, it doesn't fix it, but what it allows me to do is to see my part in it. To see where I can take some responsibility, and so that's what I did.

I just stayed quiet, actually. And I apologize for being grumpy. But some of the questions that you can use to develop awareness are, why is this happening right now? Why am I feeling this? How was this taught to me growing up? How is this modeled for me? Where did I learn to be like this? Or who told me it had to be [00:08:00] this way?

What are the rules that I think I'm trying to or supposed to obey right now? We become aware, sometimes in stages, sometimes all at once. So, it's going to be different for each of you, but if you want something to try and become aware of, here's a couple suggestions. Notice how often you apologize, and why.

Notice how often you pretend, and why. Two great places to work on the skill of awareness. The second skill is capacity. And in order to develop capacity, you have to have self connection, you have to have connection and graciousness with the sensations in your body, the one that feel the ones that feel uncomfortable, the ones that feel very comfortable, the ones that sneak up on you from nowhere [00:09:00] because capacity.

is all about expanding your ability to tolerate discomfort. Anytime you are going to disrupt a pattern or try to break a habit, It is going to be uncomfortable. That's one of the counterintuitive things about it is that we often think that if I'm going to, you know, go after my big dreams and goals, if I'm going to stop people pleasing and become a more independent, free person, that should feel good.

And the counterintuitive part is that it often doesn't because there is discomfort when we try a new skill and we're not sure it's going to go well. One of my favorite capacity stories, um, um, is from a client and I just love it because it's so simple but it's such a great example. She usually gets her drink at a Starbucks, her coffee on the way to work, and [00:10:00] Oftentimes, she does not get the drink that she ordered.

This is so common for so many of us, right? Whether it's at a restaurant or somewhere else. And because of her people pleasing, usually she just smiles and takes the drink and either forces herself to drink something that she didn't order or she throws it away and gets something else. And so we were talking about building the tolerance, building the capacity to tolerate the discomfort of saying, This is not what I ordered.

Now, for some of us, that would be no big deal at all. And for others of us, that would be a really big deal. So capacity is very individual. One day, she was, uh, stressed about a meeting at work. She knew that she was going to try and, um, act differently in the Starbucks situation, but she was already stressed, she had a lot on her mind, and what she realizes, I just don't have the capacity to do this [00:11:00] today.

So when her, when the incorrect drink was, uh, pushed toward her on the counter, she just took it. That is not a problem because it's a recognition of limited capacity. When we push past our capacity, that's when we can cause different problems. So a couple days later, she's back at the same Starbucks, same things happened and the wrong drink is given to her and she recognizes, Oh, today I have the capacity.

And so she got brave and she said, this isn't my drink. And on that day when she had the capacity, she was able to tolerate that discomfort and it was a major win for her. So, capacity is different for everyone around different things. You have to be connected to yourself to be able to expand your capacity.

And capacity is all about just [00:12:00] tolerating the discomfort of choosing something different. Saying different words. Saying no instead of yes. Speaking up about what you want and need instead of pretending you don't have needs. Putting your feelings into a sentence that might feel vulnerable instead of choosing to not be vulnerable.

The capacity to tolerate that discomfort. Having the capacity is an essential skill or an essential element because next we're going to

having the capacity is an essential element of being able to change something. And then the last is skills. You have to know what to do differently to get a different result right we always, there's that saying that I think is so, I mean it's so simple but so true insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.

You have to be able to do something different. And to be [00:13:00] able to do something different, you have to be able to, you have to be willing to tolerate the discomfort of taking a risk and then evaluating how it went. If you're just going to take the risk and then beat yourself up when it doesn't go well, that's not going to help you develop the skill.

Because an essential element in learning new skills is, okay, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to try it. I'm going to tolerate the discomfort of trying it, and then I'm going to look at how it went, and I'm going to say, first of all, great job, you. You tried something new. And then I'm going to ask myself, what went right when I tried this skill, when I practiced saying these different words?

What went well and what didn't go well and what can I do differently next time in order to know if something works, you [00:14:00] have to be able to look at it with generosity and graciousness. So you have to be able to not beat yourself up. You have to be able to have self connection. And then you have to be able to evaluate the steps that you are trying to take, the skills you are trying to build.

So, inside of the Stop People Pleasing group coaching program, we really work on the new skills that you need. How to say what you really want to say. That is a big one for people pleasers because we are so used to picking the words that we think other people will like. Stop People Pleasing It's really essential that we learn to say the words that we, we really want to say.

We have to learn how to feel difficult emotions. To really process them, not just so that they go away, but so that we can learn why they're there. We have to be vulnerable. We have to be able to [00:15:00] take a risk. You have to learn how to have your own back. You have to learn how to want. How it is that you allow yourself to want things and go after them is such a skill that we were never taught.

You have to know how to feel sensations in your body in a loving and gracious way so that you can feel what it's like to be in connection with yourself. and out of connection with yourself. Part of the skill section and developing new skills is the opportunity to practice and get coaching and get feedback as part of your evaluation process.

So this is one of the reasons that Stop People Pleasing group coaching is so successful. You come, you generate new awareness, you develop new capacity, you learn new skills, and then from week to week, you get to practice, [00:16:00] you get to see how, uh, it goes out in the wild to take your new skills for a test drive and to actually apply them in the relationships that you have.

That you're wanting to change because let's face it our relationships is where our people pleasing and our perfectionating really shows up and then you get to come back you get to share what you experienced you get to celebrate what went well you get to get coaching on what didn't go so well so that you know how to fine tune that skill and try again for greater success.

You get to hear the experiences of other women who are doing the very same thing. One of my favorite things that we do inside Stop People Pleasing is we just celebrate. We start with celebrations, and then everyone else has a chance to connect to the celebrations of other people and the struggles of other people in the group as well.

You learn a lot, not just by [00:17:00] learning from your own experience. but from what other people are doing as well. I invite you to come to a skill building workshop on July 15th from 1 to 2 p. m pacific. It's going to be my next stop people pleasing workshop where I will outline the specific skills that you need to be successful.

To be able to stop people pleasing. And I will tell you about the next round of the group coaching program. Everything you need to know. So put it on your calendar. Look for the link in my bio and in my, um, in the show notes to sign up for that. It is free. I would love to see you. I hope this has been helpful.

If you have any questions, About what I've said here, or if you want to share your experience with me, it is one of my most favorite things. When people who listen to this podcast send me a message, they either ask me to clarify something that they didn't understand well, or they tell me about their experiences, because that's why I do this.

I [00:18:00] hope that it is helpful for you, awareness, capacity, and skills, and I'll see you on the 15th.