Change Requires Contact With Reality

Automatically transcribed, so the wording is close but not exact.

Macie: Hey friends, have you all ever had someone say something to you that has stopped you dead in your tracks? That is exactly what we're going to be diving into in today's episode of This Is Not Your Practice Life podcast. I'm really excited about it. But before I dive into what we're going to talk about, I just want to let you know that if you're not on my email list, what are you even doing? I just finished a three week freebie for the women in my audience that was amazing. I want to thank every single woman who showed up, especially if it was her first time ever engaging in my audience or coaching with me in any way. If you're not signing up for freebies, I just want to let you know that is one of the quickest and most valuable ways to really learn how coaching can help you and especially what I can do for you as a coach.

I had so many women that completed this freebie and are now going on into their client experience because they saw if they could get that much out of three weeks, what could they get out of spending more time working on their goals together? I have a goal this year to many more freebies than I was able to do last year as we transitioned from living in Las Vegas back to our hometown in Kentucky. So the way that I often communicate these freebies is through my email list. If you're not on my email list, I highly encourage you to do so. And when you do join the email list and maybe you get that very first email, make sure that you flag it as VIP or you save it to your address book because email has become a little janky with AI these days and they flag a lot of emails as junk, trash, spam, and promotion.

So although I hope I land in your inbox whenever you sign up on my email list, it's not always the case. So when you do sign up on the list, just make sure that you're checking junk, trash, spam, especially if you don't hear from me in the first 24 hours, it might have gone to another folder. So make sure you get on the list because I do already have a freebie that will be coming down the pipeline in the next several weeks. And it's going to be short, sweet, but very powerful. So just make sure you're on my email list so you don't miss a thing. Okay. All right, let's talk about this. I really want to talk about wanting change, but not really knowing how to create it or feeling as though you are doing something to create change that you want, but it's not working.

So years and years ago. If you are new and unfamiliar with my journey, I was someone that started my coaching journey feeling really defeated. I had been in therapy for majority of my life, 17 years to be exact. And though I found it very helpful to have a therapist and to talk through all of my family history, all of my, you know, the family drama, the moments that I feel scarred me for life that created trauma, everything that I talked about in 17 years of therapy was very, very helpful. But I didn't quite feel like it equipped me to know what changes I needed to make after I left from the couch. ⁓ I would be okay for a couple of days and then I would go back into my therapy sessions and I would just feel like I was on this hamster wheel where I was repeating things that I've already said a million times.

I'm feeling better because I'm talking about it, but I don't actually feel better in my life overall because nothing is really changing. And I what I didn't understand was how do you feel better when there are people in your life that you think if they changed, you would feel better. You think if they treated me differently, I would feel better. If they were a different human being, I would feel better. If they understood what they're doing wrong, that's really impacting my life, I would be doing better. How many of you can honestly say and listening to this right now where you're like, yeah, I really believe if my mom changed, my dad changed, my grandparents changed, my siblings changed, my cousins, my extended family, my coworkers, certain friends, my partner, whatever, your life would be a lot easier.

If you feel like also you are doing work to change yourself, but nothing is really moving the needle. And you're convinced that it's because of everybody else around you, this is going to be an episode that may slap you in the face just as it slapped me years and years ago. And and even recently, in a way that my therapist about two years ago said something to me that absolutely rocked my world. So we're going to be blending some therapy and some coaching together ⁓ based on my own experience. So this is not any kind of therapeutic advice for you, by the way, but I am going to share with you the things that have been said to me that have rocked my world and that have given me a visual for what was happening and why it was hard for me to create change when I wanted it really, really badly.

So first and foremost, something to also know about me, and maybe you can relate as well. I have always been a very visual person. If you are in my coaching world, if you do my freebies, if you watch on YouTube, maybe you're doing that right now. ⁓ if you have worked with me in any capacity, you know that I have a visual for everything. I'm a very creative mind and when I'm learning, listening serves me well, but seeing, feeling, touching serves me even better. So for my clients, I'm very much the the kind of wack-adoo that gives a wack-adoo example. But it sticks with them forever. And so this episode is going to be no different. If you're listening to it, that's great. But just know if you do happen to jump over to YouTube, there will be a visual for you to kind of see what I am describing in this episode.

So I have always been very visual. I've always been a huge dreamer. I have been someone that can easily go to a place in my mind where I think about what could be, what can be. What I want, I can envision my dreams and my goals. That's never been a difficult thing for me. And maybe you're that way too. But if you are this way, I will just tell you when you go to make change or you really want change to happen, there are some things you need to be able to look at within yourself that can harm you more than help you or delay you more than move you, if that makes sense. So being someone that Constantly could easily go to the clouds and basically escape my reality and go into the vision that I want for my life and what I would envision.

That was easy to do. So anytime that I felt stressed out, anytime life got hard, anytime I was frustrated with someone, ⁓ I would just immediately go into what I call dream world into visualizing what changes I wanted to make, what What I wanted in my life to be different and what really mattered to me as far as getting to a place different than where I was at. So naturally, I spent a lot of time in my head. And I'm really talking to women and men who are maybe listening to this episode. If you are in your head a lot, you may really relate to this episode. So I was very much in my head all the time because as soon as something felt uncomfortable in my life, as soon as there was an interaction I didn't really like, I wanted to escape it as much as I could and go into where do I really want to be?

What do I really envision for my life? Where do I really want to go? What are my goals? What do I want different in the next five years? And that felt very productive. So my story around it was, yeah, I'm always in the clouds, but it's productive. It's thinking about what I'm going to change and where I'm going to go. Now, fast forward after 17 years of therapy, I took a one year break. And then a year later, I met my very first life coach, met and hired. And that was such a profound shift for me. It went from talking about everything that I had always talked about on repeat to being called out on my parts, the parts that I needed to take responsibility for. Because what I knew from 17 years of therapy was that my childhood and life was very much dysfunctional and that a lot of it was not my fault and that there was a lot that I couldn't control.

But leaving therapy, that's all I knew. I knew I was validated. I knew that what I had dealt with my entire life from all these different therapists, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, that life was definitely not quote normal. For me, and maybe even more so than what you would expect in a typical family. It was dysfunctional, it was abusive in many ways, it was manipulative, there were not narcissistic tendencies, ⁓ there was a lot of survival, there was a lot of secrets, and so things were very unhealthy. And I knew that leaving therapy. But going into coaching, we could know all of that and not make excuses for why we were where we were as an adult. And that really rocked my world in coaching.

So after about a year of working with my very first coach, she had, you know, friends and there were people that I was meeting in her community that also did maybe coaching of some sort or healing retreats and things like that. And I went to one of my first healing retreats, which was basically like you go around and you you talk about your feelings and there were like some woo-woo things and it was truly an incredible experience. But I will never forget what that coach slash healer woo-woo you know friend that I genuinely still love to this day, I'll never forget what she said to me. I was talking about a lot of the things that I was working on in my first year of coaching things that I had talked about through 17 years of therapy.

⁓ the very first thing that she said to me that stopped me in my tracks was, Macie, you're really, really good ⁓ Living in the clouds. And she goes, and I don't say that in a bad way. I can tell you're a dreamer. I can tell that you are in your head a lot and you visualize and you know exactly where you want to go. You know exactly what changes you want to make. Like I know that if I ask you where you want to be in a year from now or three years from now or five years from now, you don't hesitate to tell me where you want to be. It's very, very clear. And she said, but I need to give you a visual of what's actually happening because you can know that as much as you want. And yet the years can pass and you may never experience it if you stay in the clouds.

And she gave me this visual that I was basically like anytime life felt hard. Anytime I was disappointed in interactions with my family or, you know, anything that just was not ideal and didn't match my vision. I would become so uncomfortable in my body. I would become so uncomfortable with the feelings of it all. It didn't match my vision. It didn't match where I wanted to be a year from now, three years from now, five years from now. Life in reality felt very different than life in my head and where I was trying to go. And so she told me, she said, it's basically like every single time you become emotionally dysregulated and your nervous system. gets all flustered, you basically grab a little balloon and you float up with this balloon to this cloud.

And you're almost looking down on your life, completely disassociated from it. ⁓ So, like the version of you that dreams and sees where you want to be up in the clouds. And then there's the of what you actually experience ⁓ on the ground. She goes, the problem is you cannot. Create anything that you see for yourself in the clouds, unless you go down to the ground. And what you're trying to do and avoid by being in your head all the time or being in the clouds is avoid the ground and nothing will get built there. She said, what you're going to have to get really good at doing is. Is knowing what your vision is and knowing you know why you go into the clouds, but then actively choose to float back down or take the ladder back down into your reality so that you can actually build what you see in the clouds.

What she was essentially saying is you cannot disassociate from your body. You cannot leave your body for long periods of time. You can't be in your head constantly. And expect that being in your head is going to foster the results that you're wanting by, you know, not being on the ground. And what this brought me to is how interesting, how hard we fight sometimes to escape this discomfort in our life of knowing what we want and what we need to change versus the actual doing. So I created this little visual. For any you all that are watching on YouTube, there's this little visual on my board and it has the cloud and it has the stick person in the cloud. If you're constantly in your head and you know where you want to be, or you're constantly thinking about where you want to be and the changes that you want to make, you're up in the clouds in those very moments.

And that feels good because in some ways it's a coping mechanism. It's a coping mechanism of like, I don't like how I feel. when I look at the reality of my situation. So let me go into my mind into creating my ideal situation. So what we do is we go in the cloud and we stay there and we kind of look down like this bystander in our own life and we're watching the reality of what's really going on, but we're fighting with ourselves. I don't want to go down there. I don't want to go down there. I don't like how it feels. I like how it fills up in this cloud. I like what my life looks like up in this cloud. This is my dream life. The reality is though, you can't create from the clouds. So there comes a point where you have to have, I call it my come to Jesus moment or the harsh reality moment, where the only way to make what's in the clouds a reality in your life is to walk down the ladder.

So on my little board, I have a ladder. You have to walk down the ladder. Okay, go all the way down. And you have to be on the ground. So that actually means what you're gonna have to learn is truly regulating your nervous system, truly learning emotional intelligence skills, truly learning how to cope in a healthy way, truly learning how to shift your mindset in the moment, truly learning what is actually going to be required of you to heal inside of yourself. To stay down in the reality so you can create the life that you like to escape to when you're in the clouds. And so I had this moment two years ago with my therapist where I was disappointed in some people in my life. And I didn't even realize it, but I had almost reverted back to being in the clouds.

I would say, like after this healing retreat that I went to, probably a solid nine years ago or eight years ago, I did pretty good about. being on the ground, like being in the work, being in the arena, as Brene Brown says. Like I was in my work. I was doing my best not to escape. I was learning all these skills and tools and things that I now, you know, carry on and help my clients understand. I was learning how to really be in my life so that I could change my life. But sometimes when life gets really uncomfortable, we revert back without actually realizing it. And without realizing it, I had reverted back. And I'm so glad because even though my therapist doesn't know this, She said something to me that brought me back to this visual, making me realize what I was doing.

And I was about just people in my life and like how they were frustrating me ⁓ and wanting them to be different and wanting my life to be different and wanting to see myself in a different space maybe three years, five years, whatever it may be. ⁓ And she just Had this moment where she looked at me and she said, Macie don't let remove you ⁓ ⁓ Or don't let vision ⁓ your reality. It was some form of that. It was like this ⁓ blowing epiphany yet again, where it was like, my gosh, I've been in the clouds. I've been in the vision. And The vision is clouding the reality of what is happening down below. And the only way that I can change in my life what I want to change is by getting back out of this cloud and going back down into the reality.

And at that time, two years ago, that felt really hard. It felt like I've done a lot of work and I have a lot of tools in my toolbox and I have a lot of skills. I don't necessarily want to be on the ground. I want it to be different. You know, like sometimes we feel that way. It's like, ⁓ my gosh, I'm doing all this work. And just because other people in life are not, you know, and I want these changes, I have to go back down to the ground. Like, why can't they, why can't they change their reality so that my reality will change? But it it just, it was this moment where she reminded me, you're letting vision and what you want to see remove you from the reality of what is actually in front of you.

And if you want your reality to be different, you're going to have to do something to change that. You cannot let this ideal world or this visual world and what you want to see or who you want people to be cloud you from the realness of what you're seeing. So if there are traits in someone that you're seeing that you're not happy with, you like what she was telling me is you can easily go to the clouds and be like, but I can justify this for them, or I can, I can live with this certain thing, or I can imagine that in three years, maybe this is what'll change. And I was playing in my mind again. I was playing in what if and possibility and vision and here's what it could be. It could be this.

It could be this. It could be this. And her point was don't let that vision of what could be Ultimately cloud you from the reality right in front of you that you have to face because you're going to have to essentially be on the ground, face what's actually in front of you in those people or that person or whatever you may be going through. You're going to have to actually face what it is, not what you desire it to be, so that you can figure out what is actually within your control. So I really hope that this episode helps you. If you've been trying to make changes and you haven't been able to make them, you really want to check yourself am I? in the clouds because I can't be in two places at once.

I'm either up in the clouds as a bystander looking down on the life that is actually happening without me while I live in the clouds, or I actively choose to come down and be in my body in the work, regulating my nervous system as I'm healing, having the hard conversations with people. making sure I'm facing what's hard, making sure I'm showing up assertively, making sure That I'm actually addressing what is going on in reality. That's the only way we can truly make change. So you just have to ask yourself, in any given moment when you're wanting to make change, especially if you've been trying to make change and nothing has been changing, have you been doing it from the clouds where you don't have any real control other than what you visualize?

Or have you been? doing a healthy balance of both where you visualize what you want and you often come down into the reality of what you're experiencing and actually get to work, which means things in you have to change. You have to be able to regulate your nervous system. You have to be able to have hard conversations and address what needs to be changed. You have to stop people pleasing. You have to set boundaries. You have to honor yourself more. You have to find that power. If you're in in if you're a woman, that that feminine energy, that feminine flow, like you have to be able to do all of those things. And you can't do them from the clouds. So if there's changes you've been wanting to make and you're like, why haven't I made these changes?

I feel like I've been working on myself. I've been listening to podcasts forever. I've been, you know, signing up for free courses forever. I've been doing all these, I've been reading books forever, and nothing is really moving the needle. You have to ask yourself, am I just consuming and then going in the clouds of like, hmm, that would be nice. I would love to be here. Or are you actually in the trenches in the arena doing the work because there's a difference? All right. I hope that this episode helps you and gives you an epiphany like it gave me years ago and then again two years ago and helps you recognize that the best way to change your life is to make sure your two feet are always on the ground, facing what you need to face in life in order to move yourself forward.

And as soon as you can take radical responsibility for that. Everything changes around you. And if you need any help doing that, I would absolutely love to help you and be a part of your journey. You can visit macierenae. com learn everything you want to know about me, my programs, my podcasts. You can look on Google reviews to see what it's like for women who's who've actually worked with me. And if I can help you in any way, schedule a free 60-minute consult so we can talk about what's best for you. And don't forget to join the email list so that way you don't miss Everything I have coming up. I'll see you again soon.