SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, drinking, life, minivan, values, choice, thinking, therapist, idea, stuck, talk, left, book, brave, yoga, feel, work, big, women, realize

SPEAKERS: Casey McGuire Davidson + Becky Vollmer

00:02

Welcome to the Hello Someday Podcast, the podcast for busy women who are ready to drink less and live more. I’m Casey McGuire Davidson, ex-red wine girl turned life coach helping women create lives they love without alcohol. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was anxious, overwhelmed, and drinking a bottle of wine and night to unwind. I thought that wine was the glue, holding my life together, helping me cope with my kids, my stressful job and my busy life. I didn’t realize that my love affair with drinking was making me more anxious and less able to manage my responsibilities.

In this podcast, my goal is to teach you the tried and true secrets of creating and living a life you don’t want to escape from.

Each week, I’ll bring you tools, lessons and conversations to help you drink less and live more. I’ll teach you how to navigate our drinking obsessed culture without a buzz, how to sit with your emotions when you’re lonely or angry, frustrated or overwhelmed, how to self soothe without a drink, and how to turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

I am so glad you’re here. Now let’s get started.

Hi there. Today, my guest is Becky Vollmer, and we are talking about having the courage and taking the steps to get unstuck. Becky is a Speaker, a Yoga Teacher, and the creator of You Are Not Stuck. A movement that empowers people to pursue the lives they most deeply desire. She guides a global community on social media that is several 100,000 Strong, teaches online courses about empowerment and choice. And leads sold out programs that combine movement breathwork, self-exploration, and action planning at yoga and Wellness Centers across the country. We’re going to talk all about Becky’s background and what brought her here. But this is about moving from being stuck and depressed and sad and not sure what to do and overwhelmed into the next phase of your life. So, Becky, welcome.

 

02:17

Thank you. I’m so excited to be with you. Yeah, we were just talking that we have a lot of friends and people in common. And in fact, one of my private coaching clients absolutely loves you has taken your course and was telling me over and over again, that I had to have you on the podcast.

 

02:36

Well, I’m so glad you listened. And I’m so glad I’m here. It’s really great to talk with you.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  02:40

Yeah. Well, so just to get started. I was reading your book this whole last week. It’s fantastic. But tell me about the work you do and what brought you to helping people get unstuck?

 

02:54

I’ll tell you. I don’t have a quick answer for when somebody says, Well, what do you do for a living? Because I’m not sure if there is one word or two words that would encapsulate Well, let’s see, I’m sort of a recovering corporate dropout. And I’m a yoga student and teacher. And I’m just really somebody who wants to just to light a fire under everybody’s asked. And there’s nothing that encapsulates that. So, what the work that I do, I would describe the work that I do is trying to teach everybody who would be willing to listen to me about the principles of empowerment and choice, trying to trying to give folks the permission to make some choices in their lives, to live the lives that they want to live rather than the lives that they feel stuck in.

 

Yeah, so my, my journey to that was, you know, from the Corporate world, through the yoga space, through just writing and talking about these issues and kind of integrating that into Yoga teaching on a whim, literally on a whim, like one Saturday afternoon, I was thinking, you know, the people who are on Facebook, who are listening to me talk about empowerment and choice. Like, they’re really only coming here to figure out what time I’m teaching yoga on Tuesday morning. Maybe they don’t care about this, you know, this other stuff. How would I strip out all that content and just throw it on a separate Facebook page? And I called it, You’re Not Stuck. And it just it resonated with people because I think so many of us for so long have felt inexplicably stuck. And so, it just kind of grew and grew and grew and it gave me it just gave me the chance to talk to more people about my favorite subject. So, and here we are today.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  04:51

I love that and I was telling you that when I was reading your book, I felt like our backgrounds not only in working in corporate and drinking too much and deciding to stop and feeling that sort of like, for me, it was just like desperation, of being stressed out and anxious and unhappy. On the Sunday night dreads of not wanting to go to work. But you know, our feelings and how we kind of got out of that space were really similar. I describe myself even as my website as a practical dreamer, a retired corporate ladder climber and a recovering people pleaser. And, you know, I think part of the practical dreamer part is my search for security and wanting to change and shift but wanting to do it in a way that made me comfortable and kind of, you know, when you were talking about getting permission from your friend, and we can talk about that, just I needed permission to almost leave corporate, from my husband, you know, because we’d like signed up for this life where I was the breadwinner, and he was a sixth grade teacher. And so, I made the money for years, and was really, I felt trapped with the mortgage and the health insurance in the kids. And it had been my choice, but at what point are you allowed to change that?

 

06:21

Yeah, I relate to just those questions, you’re asking yourself so deeply, because I can remember feeling so strongly. Even though I wasn’t happy, doing something that at one point had made me very happy, right? I remember thinking like, you’re just, you know, you’re, this is what you chose, this is what you signed up for, this is the life you picked, and you’re so far down the path, it wouldn’t make any sense for you to switch direction right now, you’d have to start over, you’d have to be the low woman on the totem pole, you have to prove yourself all over again. And then to what end, you might just end up in exactly the same spot again. And that was a real fear for me. And so, when I recognized that a small shift wasn’t going to cut it for me, I really needed a wholesale change. That was both exhilarating and absolutely terrifying. I mean, like, loose in your bowels kind of terrifying, right?

 

I can remember the moment that I decided that I was going to leave my corporate job, which was really my first, I would say that was my first big experience with getting, “unstuck”. I’ve since realized, like that was just, you know, that was practice, it didn’t seem like it at the time. But that was lower stakes practice, because I’ve since had to, you know, do it in my drinking and in the sobriety that’s followed. And I had to do it in ending a 12 year marriage, and then you know, falling in love all over again, and re-marrying and blending a family. So, I think what I’ve learned is that we don’t just get unstuck. Once we do it, we do it. Once we do it again, we do it again. But hopefully over time, we learn enough about how the process works. We learn to recognize our own sense of stuckness, before we get too far down the road, and making the difficult changes and choices that helps get us out of that rut become it just becomes a lot easier.

 

But before I went off on that tangent, I can remember the moment where I told my husband, that’s it, I’m ready. I’m just going to quit with no plan B. And this was after several years of really hand wringing, you know, and asking myself all those kinds of questions that you were just talking about Casey. And, you know, I had, I had played the game of like, How can I maneuver the pieces? Or how can I shape shift myself to fit better into this? You know, they were only offering me a particularly shaped, I don’t know, whole for lack of a better word. And it was like you can fit in it or not fit in it. It’s up to you. But I really tried to morph myself into it. And when I reached the place where I just couldn’t anymore, I couldn’t reduce my schedule further. I couldn’t just take on one client. I couldn’t. I mean, I was to the point where it’s like, oh, God, maybe I’ll just work for HR or something.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  09:41

Like, switch to, I’ve thought about that. I also had this dream of being like, a Dentist office Receptionist like, that was this ridiculous dream I had when I was like, stressed out and anxious in Corporate. I was like, God, every time I go to the Dentist, I was like they’re there. Schedules look so manageable, like, which is silly. I’m not. If you’re a Dental Receptionist, I’m sure it’s stressful. But you know how you have, like, some people are like, I just want to be a Barista. And I wanted to be a Florist. I wanted to work in a flower shop and just play with flowers all day long and make people happy with the bookcase that I would hand them. That sounded a lot more appealing than then the shit sandwich I was trying to eat.

 

Yeah, yeah. So, when I, when I called him and I was like, hey, it’s time I got to do this. And his response was, Okay, how about, we sit down, we talk about it. We do the math on the expenses, we, you know, put it all in a spreadsheet, and we figure out how we make it work. And I was like, Okay, that sounds great. I’ll yeah, we’ll do that I was out of town. Yes. When I come back in a couple days, we’ll do that. And then the longer I sat with it for hours and hours and into the next day, and the next, I called him back, and I was like, I got to do it now. And he repeated, come on home, we’ll talk about it. We’ll you know, we’ll whip out the spreadsheet. And I was like, if we’ve got to make this work on paper, it will never work. There’s no way I could pause. How do we replace a six figure salary? How I couldn’t come up with the how. I only understood the why of needing to leave. And the specific what that leaving was the action I needed to take. I just couldn’t wrap my head around how it was all going to work. And so, when I finally was like, I just really need you to hold my hand and jump off this cliff with me. And God bless him. He did. And yeah, I’m so grateful. It’s coming up on exam. It’ll be 10 years in January since I made that choice. And I don’t regret. I don’t regret it for a minute.

Casey McGuire Davidson 

Hi there. If you’re listening to this episode, and have been trying to take a break from drinking, but keep starting and stopping and starting again, I want to invite you to take a look at my on demand coaching course, The Sobriety Starter Kit®.

 

The Sobriety Starter Kit® is an online self study sober coaching course that will help you quit drinking and build a life you love without alcohol without white knuckling it or hating the process. The course includes the exact step by step coaching framework I work through with my private coaching clients, but at a much more affordable price than one on one coaching. And the sobriety starter kit is ready, waiting and available to support you anytime you need it. And when it fits into your schedule. You don’t need to work your life around group meetings or classes at a specific day or time.

This course is not a 30 day challenge, or a one day at a time approach. Instead, it’s a step by step formula for changing your relationship with alcohol. The course will help you turn the decision to stop drinking, from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

You will sleep better and have more energy, you’ll look better and feel better. You’ll have more patience and less anxiety. And with my approach, you won’t feel deprived or isolated in the process. So if you’re interested in learning more about all the details, please go to www.sobrietystarterkit.com. You can start at any time and I would love to see you in the course 

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  11:58

I mean, you know what’s interesting? I like when I was in the corporate world, I, my thoughts. And of course, I was like drinking a bottle of wine a night at the time. And you know, my thoughts were on this constant loop, like, what is wrong with me? Why am I so stressed out? Like, why can I cope, and then it would go into all the band aids, right? Like, maybe I should do yoga, maybe I need a good therapist, maybe I need a girls night, I should meditate. I should train for 10k I should write this all down. And then I was like, or I could just open another bottle of wine and forget it all. And then I realized, like, I was basically running through my day, right? Drop off, kids at daycare, go to work, be stressed out, come home. And look, drinking was not helping me I removed the alcohol. And like 60% of my life got better. The part that didn’t get better was it was more obvious what was not working instead of just blaming myself, because I thought I was drinking too much. But I was basically running through my day, gritting my teeth going on hyperdrive, and then coming home and the first chance I got, I would essentially knock myself unconscious with a bottle of wine over my head, like literally try to check out of my life, and then do it again. And it’s that is a crazy kind of sad way to live when I looked around and was like, why am I so unhappy? Like, my life is pretty good. Like I’m financially secure. I have a husband who loves me, I have beautiful kids, I have friends I have skills, and yet, I’m unhappy and angry. Like, what is that? You know, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. Like, I feel like that describes like 50% of the women I knew in corporate who were in their mid 40s.

 

13:53

Oh, I think it’s absolutely an epidemic. And I found myself chuckling when you were describing, you know, the list of things that maybe you should do you know, maybe I should get a therapist, maybe I should run a race maybe

 

14:08

less, it’s like guitar lessons will fix this a lot. Ease will fit. Right?

 

14:14

Well, the irony is that Casey I was doing all of that. I mean, I’m laughing thinking back at. So even, you know, even as I was at the height of my corporate career for years and years, I had been a yoga teacher on the side. I’d done yoga teacher training back, I don’t know, probably eight years before I left corporate. And I even started a corporate yoga program at my old agency, which is kind of fun. But I had a therapist. I was running 10 K’s. I was meditating and doing breath work. Like I was doing all the things I could think of. And it didn’t occur to me that the thing that was absolutely killing. Any connection with my own intuition, with my own inner wisdom with my own soul was the fucking gallon of alcohol that I poured on it every chance I got. And interestingly, I actually, I left corporate America a full year before I quit drinking. And it was because of my experience of in that year between leaving my job, and finally having the chance to spend the time with my daughters that I wanted, they were still young, they were five and three, when I when I left, I had one who was going into, into kindergarten, my other one was still, you know, a little baby. And I had, I had the white picket fence, suburban American Dream. Like, I got to walk with my girls, walk with them on the sidewalk, a little one on each hand their little pigtails doing what pigtails do. And we would literally skip up the sidewalk to drop my oldest one off it kindergarten. And then, I would take my little one to daycare. And then I was free. And all of a sudden, I had no responsibilities. I had nobody watching me, I had no deadlines, I had no work product. So, I got to do my absolute favorite thing in the world, which was drinking.

 

Yeah. And I found myself drinking earlier. And earlier and earlier. I mean, I was already in probably for a decade, somebody who drink at least a bottle or two of wine a day, much more on the weekends. And of course, it’s not the quantity that matters. It’s the it’s the motivation behind it. Oh, yeah.

 

You know, but when I realized I was day drinking every chance I could, I mean, I’d be taking my kids to the pool in the summertime. And I can guarantee you what was in my tumbler was not iced tea. You know, every, every chance I had to be doing anything. I always brought a drink with me. And that made me realize that it wasn’t the job that had made me miserable. Yeah, it was my own way of thinking about myself about myself in situations about what kind of agency and autonomy I had, it really wasn’t about the job. I was so confused all those years trying to blame the external forces. It was really because I didn’t know what it meant to make choices for myself to have boundaries for myself. I mean, alcohol may have been my big addiction. But my first addiction was codependency. And that’s probably still the one that I struggled with the most today.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  18:05

What’s funny is when you’re saying that I’m smiling and nodding, and it’s because, you know, I also drank a lot. And it was definitely a coping mechanism because I, I wasn’t ready to do the other work. And I truly believe when you’re drinking, the way I was drinking, you can’t do the work, like you’re too muddled. You’re too craving and withdrawal and thinking about everything else, you kind of have to get rid of that first. But I remember my husband telling me that I had sort of a daddy complex with every boss I ever had. And by the way, it did not matter if it was a woman or a man, like it was like I needed the pat on the head, I needed the gold star from them. And I would work as hard as they would ask me to which of course, when you have someone who will do that you just keep giving them more showcase your work till midnight. And I went to a therapist, and she was like, well, you get to set the boundary of when it is too much. And I was like no, I don’t, you know, like, I don’t get to set that boundary. It’s just how much they pile on me. I need them, you know, just that lack of agency and that fear about it. It was really hard to work through. And you know, I just realized even when even when I stopped drinking, you know that was the presenting problem right? Like, that was what may be finally decided to change. And you know, you got rid of some of the crushing anxiety and the headaches, and the hangovers and you know, all that shit. That’s a nightmare, the guilt and whatever. But then you’re left with the reason that you drank in the first place. And you know, the good news is you finally get to deal with it but that’s I love your book because that shit is not easy. You know, you talk about like, it’s not that you don’t have choices. It’s that kind of you’re scared to make them dinner shitless

 

20:13

Yeah, scared, absolutely are. All are. And if that’s if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that we all are. I mean, there’s such an undercurrent of fear running through the life of almost every woman I know. Almost every woman Oh, no, it’s it’s fear. And it’s also obligation. It’s sort of you made your bed and you need any it’s a good bad, like, that’s what’s the hard part, right? Because everybody’s like, you know, my husband would be like, do I worked at L’Oréal? He was like, Are you fucking kidding me, you, you basically sell makeup and talk about skincare and go get lattes, and this is crushing your soul. And it was Dallas that I look at it, it is ridiculous that I was just barely coping. But I think some of that is just the underlying work that needs to be done around having a choice. I feel like we’re trying to go back to that now, which I had no desire to do. I feel like it, I would be a different person in that role. Because of like, the inner work I’ve done to this point. Like, it wasn’t the job.

 

21:27

I couldn’t agree with you more. I mean, I honestly, I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m thinking back to a conversation that I had with my therapist at the time. And I think you’ll appreciate this. In the environment that I worked in, we had to track our time, and build it out to clients. And so, we tracked it in 15 minute increments. And oh my god, if there’s anything that will screw with your head, it is tracking your life in 15 minute increments, like I don’t know how attorneys who Bill in six minute increments can say a turn. I mean, that is that is terrible.

 

22:08

I remember one standing in line at the dry cleaners and you know, waiting for my turn to step up to the counter to pick up whatever I was picking up. And just like tapping my foot and thinking, you know, I bet $350 an hour, do you have any idea how much this is costing? It’s like, oh, God, it’s also artificial, right? The construct is artificial. And of course, my time is not worth $350 an hour as you know, as whatever I was at that time. But in talking with my therapist, I was lamenting the fact that at the agency where I worked, we had a minimum number of hours that we were expected to record every week. Now, not all of those hours were billed out to clients. Most of them were but the more senior you got, the less time was actually billable because you had more supervisory roles or administrative roles or pro bono clients, you name it. Anyway, at that time in my career, I want to say something like 85% of my 50 hours a week was supposed to be billable, which is a really high bar. And so of course, what you would do is you just have to work more hours in the week to make sure you were hitting your billable targets. And but you didn’t want to record all of those numbers necessarily, because that would skew a measurement called utilization. The clock started over every Monday morning. So, you work you worked your 50 hours, the previous week, minimum 50 certain percentage of those billable and then every Monday morning, the clock started over at zero. And as I was talking about that, and you know some other things that were really just, you know, I just felt like they were weighing so heavy on me.

 

My therapist gave me the homework, and this is my gosh, this has to be this has to be close to 20 years ago. She was like, Okay, so your assignment this week is I want you to fail at something. I was like, what would what do you mean? Like, I don’t fail at anything. I was a straight A kid. I was an overachiever. I skipped first grade. I mean, I don’t fail at anything. I excel at everything. She’s like, Yeah, I want you to I want you to fail, pick something, you know, maybe fairly small consequences, and fail. And so, I really had to wrack my brain to think like, okay, what can I do that would have relatively riskless consequences, and I was like, You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to leave my time short. On that week, I only logged 48.75 hours rather than ran Maddox. I mean, right?

 

25:02

I mean, rebel, right? rebel with a capital R. And I, you know, as soon as I hit like submit on my electronic time entry, oh my god, I was terrified. And I’m thinking like, I was going to walk in Monday morning to just this horrible lashing either like, a literal lashing or a tongue lashing, or something. But I was pretty terrified that there was going to be a great repercussion to that. And you know what? Nobody said a word. Nobody said a word. Yeah. And I was like, Wait, are you telling me that all of that fear that I had around that was somehow kind of in my, in my mind what? And that was a real lesson about that sometimes the things that I’m afraid of the things that we’re all afraid of. We really make those monsters much bigger in our heads than they are in reality.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  26:03

Yeah, I think that’s so true. And I think it doesn’t matter. Particularly what the job itself is because I’ve talked to stay at home moms who feel that way, that they’re not doing enough for their kids that they have to volunteer for x or do Y or, you know, all these Pinterest expectations in their head. I remember. So, my best friend. I worked at one corporate job. I didn’t live in Seattle, right. So, she worked at Amazon, which is a notoriously brutal workplace. And she worked at Kindle during the days it was launching like Kindle. You know, it was the biggest initiative, its company. And yet, every time I saw her, she was pretty thin. She was pretty like, oh, yeah, I left at six. I’m doing this cooking class, whatever. I mean, she’s my idol. But I was saying to my husband, I was like, Maybe I need to go work at Kindle. Maybe that’s the answer. Abby seems pretty relaxed. And he was like, vape, it’s not the job. It was just like, Oh, my God. But I mean, in the book, you cited some numbers that are, I completely believe are true, and yet are really alarming. And I do think it’s a lot of that inner work. But you said that two thirds of Americans feel stuck in a rut, that a third confess to not having the confidence and the motivation to take a big risk. And that only three out of 10 Americans were happy in this assessment in this study. The people are just feeling sad, depressed, overwhelmed, and this is the one that that I felt, which is amazing, right? You were a straight A girl. You didn’t. You didn’t feel it. Anything. And yet we feel helpless.

 

27:59

Yeah, yeah. So, some of the numbers that you cited there some of those are from some research that I did back in 2015. Some are taken from some other sources. Yeah, the research that I did in 2015. It was about a year and a half after I left. And I want to tell you why I ended the research and then dive in a little bit more into the numbers. So many people would come up to me and they were like, Oh my God, you were so brave. You were so brave to quit your job. I wish I could do that. I you know, I just I don’t have the guts to do that. But you are so awesome. And I’m like, wait a minute. I was not awesome. I was not brave. Yeah, I was backed into a corner. I was miserable. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t leave the house to go to work without like, stopping at the freezer and in shoveling a bunch of Ben and Jerry’s in my mouth. I couldn’t come home without downing a bottle or two of wine. I mean, I remember this, like, your body was physically rebelling against.

 

29:08

Oh my god. I had a panic attack. One day, as I was walking from my office to a client’s office, and I had never had anything like this happened to me before. I was standing at the street corner waiting for the stoplight to change so that I could cross the street. And as soon as you know the little walk sign lights up, and I go to, you know, take a step forward, and my body did not move. Literally my body did not move. And I’m wheeling it I’m saying come on legs. Let’s go What the fuck? And they’re like, no, no, we’re not moving. My entire body was frozen on that street corner. And I remember kind of looking back at to my office, and I looked forward at a client’s office. And I’m trying to just jumpstart something I couldn’t I literally couldn’t turn left couldn’t turn, right. And so, I ended up calling a friend in the office, and I’m sobbing. I mean, I’m just sobbing cars are zooming by, and I’m just standing there sobbing. And she came, and she got me and, you know, she took me into this bank lobby, where it was warm, and she just put her arm around me and let me cry until I could catch my breath. And so, when people were coming to me saying, You’re so brave, I was like, an unknown. I was the girl having a panic attack on the street corner, who then stayed for another seven or eight years, right? So, I, there was nothing brave about what I did. I just reached my limit. And so, it really got me thinking about why do we? Why do we stay in situations that I mean, they’re practically killing us. And it seems like we could just as easily make a different choice.

 

And so, the survey that I put out in the field, several 100 People responded with, say, 600 or so people. And I wanted to get at how people felt about being stuck. And then what they did or didn’t do, about those feelings. And that the most compelling finding for me out of all of that, were the numbers around how people described feeling like they needed to change versus being ready to change versus finally being empowered to change. I mean, six out of 10 people said, I’m I know something big needs to change. More than four out of 10 said, Yep, I’m ready. But it was only 14% KC that said they felt empowered to change.

 

Yeah. And so that, to me, that’s what I call a call that the empowerment gap. It’s like, it’s this idea that we are not authorized to prioritize ourselves. It’s like, it’s this, felt sense in your body of being totally illegitimate in your own life. Like you feel like you are unsanctioned to take charge. But I mean, my question is, who better to sanction your own life than you want?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  32:29

It’s that idea of like cultural expectations and sunk costs. And, you know, I feel like the way we drink it’s really a very maladaptive coping mechanism to feeling helpless and stuck and trying to give yourself some reward for literally getting through your day. I mean, I was I was not. It took me a lot, I call myself a practical dreamer, because I have this real need for security. I’m sure based on my childhood, as everything is right. But my husband had been telling me forever, he was like, you should, you should go out on your own, you should be a consultant, you should be XYZ. And just that fear of doing that was so scary to me. And then, you know, when I would tell him the day after Thanksgiving, you know, Black Friday, I was an e-commerce. Like, I don’t want to do this in five years. Like, I don’t want to do this next year. I don’t fucking want to go into the office on Monday. And yet, I would not leave. And my Therapist finally said, I think you should be a Coach. You know, a Sober Coach. And I was just like, No. No one can make money being a Sober Coach. It’s not a thing.

 

You know, everyone’s a Sober Coach. But she was like, I’ve never heard of such a thing. And she was just like, No, you should, this is what you should do. Good Therapist.

 

So, we have a waiting list. Good Coaches, what you know, she’s like, I know, 10 women today, who would need this, right? Because they drink too much. They work at Microsoft; they work at Amazon. They come in for 50 minutes, a week, and yet are struggling with their drinking and everything else. And so, it was her permission. Not my husband’s not myself. It was her telling me that I should do this that finally gave me the permission to do it. And looking back. Yeah. Why could I have not done that for myself? You know?

 

34:34

I think it’s because in some ways, well, it goes back to fear, right? It goes back to sunk costs. It goes back to this idea that normal is anything you’re used to, and I wish I could take credit for that phrase. If you’re familiar with the book, Emotional Sobriety. I’m reaching over and grabbing it off my bookshelf right now, who wrote that if people don’t know that one?

 

34:58

This is emotional. Super. It’s by Tian Dayton.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  35:06

This might be one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read. I want to put it in the show notes.

 

35:09

Yes, please do it. So, one of the things that she says is normal is anything you’re used to. Yeah. And you know, of course, she’s not saying normal is anything that’s, you know, right or good or normal is the way it should be. Normal is just what we’re used to. And then it becomes really difficult to look outside of the walls of what has become normal to us. But your story about your therapist suggesting you pursue a coaching business reminds me of a conversation that I was having with a woman at a retreat just a couple of weeks ago. She was talking about, you know, here she is, she works in this one field. And she and then her background is in this other field. So, she’s got she current situation is medicine background is in government. And she’s thinking, she’s, she’s left, she’s left both of them, right. She’s now free to pursue whatever she wants. And she’s like, I just don’t really know, where I could fit in, you know, what kind of environment will allow me to bring together these two skill sets. And I’m thinking, Well, why is your thinking limited to existing infrastructure that you could plug into? And what about the idea of building your own scaffolding to stand on creating something brand new out of whole cloth? I mean, there is no way if you had, if you had told me when I left public relations 10 years ago, hey, in 10 years, you’re going to be a you’re going to be like an empowerment speaker who also talks about sobriety, and you really weave in a bunch of yoga philosophy, and you wrote a book about it, I would be like your Hi, you know, I never could have, I never could have put myself in that situation. Because that’s not a job that existed 10 years ago, it was something that just organically was created through the power of my own choices, following my soul following that wisdom, following that intuition. And kind of letting my skill set determine what was going to be next, as opposed to letting a box that somebody else wanted to put me in determine what skills I was going to utilize

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  37:56

when especially for clarity driven women who are high achieving, like, we want to know what the outcome is, we want to know what goal we’re going for. And the idea of just taking a step without a net, despite being able to achieve everything we’ve ever been able to achieve. That’s terrifying, because we almost want to guarantee you know, in a career, you’re like, I do XYZ, I become a manager, director, VP. I get the title, I get the ego, I get whatever. So, the idea of just taking a blind step is terrifying. But when you were talking, one of my favorite quotes, I’m a big vision board. And I’ve got him all over the house, literally. But it’s a quote by Howard Thurman, and it says, Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself, What makes you come alive? And then do that? Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. I mean, not people who are gritting their teeth trying to get through each day without a panic attack.

 

39:03

Oh my god. I mean when life feels like it’s just a constant wedgie. That is not living. You know, we’re here for more than that. But what it makes me think of, you know, you mentioned taking a blind step. There’s a quote that I include, in my book, since we’re trading quotes, it’s ill doctorate, and it’s the idea that, you know, you don’t, you know, you can, you can drive, you only have to be able to see as far as your headlights will go, you can’t see the whole journey. But you can make the whole journey that way. Just seeing what’s right in front of you. And that to me, takes me back to the importance of choices. Yeah, to me, everything we do is all about choices. You know, we talk about fear, and how fear really holds us back. But the opposite of fear isn’t just courage, the opposite of fear is choice. But the magic part of choices is learning to be able to make them not from this place of our, you know, our ego, our brain, our acquired personality, our conditioning, right? We don’t want to make. We don’t want to make ego guided choices. We want to drop down into something deeper and make soul guided choices. But I think the trouble is, so few of us, we’re all pretty acquainted with our ego. Yeah. I wish more of us for more deeply acquainted with our soul.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  40:48

So, in your book, and in your work, you take people through the process of doing that, because like you said, most of us have no idea how to even look inward. And a lot of times people are like, you know, there’s also this guilt around like, first world problems. My life is pretty good. Isn’t this very self-involved, navel gazing? To expect more, like isn’t, I should be happy, this is good enough. But you also talk about one of my favorite phrases, which is not this, like taking the time to get brutally honest about what we’re unhappy with, regardless of whether we think that is valid, or whether we should be happy with it. So, can you take us through some of those steps that you work with people on?

 

41:43

Yeah, you know, not this, we obviously have to give credit, where credit is due. And here we just bow to the, you know, the great Elizabeth Gilbert, the patron saint of brave women everywhere. If anybody who’s listening to this podcast has not read Liz Gilbert’s 2016 essay called Not This essay.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  42:11

Press pause now. Will put it in the show notes. So, we have all the good links, so people can find them and won’t have to stop driving to remember.

 

42:18

Okay, okay. Very good. You know, she talks about, you know, if you won’t take the time to listen to that deep life force within you, that saying, not this, and the one that won’t be silenced, you could end up stuck in this place of not this for a very long time.

 

And, you know, for me, there’s another. There’s another phrase that I come back to a lot around the idea of not this and you hit the nail on the head, Casey, when you were talking about what we think we should be happy with, right? There is the Psychology of should, but there is the Psychology of want. And when those two things are, are at odds with one another, we get like this real sense of indigestion, right? I blame this on it’s like, the curse of what I call, other people’s opinions and other people capitalized. Right?

 

When you reach that place where you’re just like, absolutely up to here, right? It’s like, we’re right at your throat, you’re up to here with other people’s opinions. Like, you realize, I just can’t swallow one more of these, or I’m going to lose my freaking mind. That’s when I think we have two choices. Like we can keep swallowing other people’s opinions. Or we can spit that shit out. Yeah, and decide to honor the wisdom and the intuition of our own soul. And I think the first place we have to start is looking at our own values. And, you know, everybody thinks, Oh, God values here we go again. But I mean, be honest, when was the last time you may have sat down and thought about the evolution of your values? Because here’s where it starts when if you go back to your family of origin, we are born into that set of values, right? Or parents, which of course is informed by their whole lifetime, right? So. So they’ve got a set of values that we are born into. And okay, so then we go off to school, and maybe our school has some values. Maybe it’s a religious school or a public school, but usually in any sort of institution is going to be built around some set of values that is worked into our psyche over to Time, then let’s say you move into the into the work world. Again, that’s an institution that’s going to be built around some set of values some culture, right? Which may or may not necessarily be yours, but you’re probably going to live it, then maybe let’s say you pair off with somebody, you partner off with somebody. Now you’ve got another individual. Yeah, who has a set of values that go all the way back to their family of origin. Right. And all this time, you or you know, I, I have just been adopting everybody else’s values. And it wasn’t until I stopped and realized, first of all, your values may not be mine, I may have somehow adopted different ones or outgrown those or replaced some. But until I really sat down and kind of asked myself, What do I stand for?

 

Yeah, what is my North Star? What do I, you know, what do I really believe in? And when I allowed myself the grace to understand that my values that it was okay, that they were going to evolve over time? Yeah, just as I had. And so that’s when I understood like, Oh, it’s this sense of constant gardening, right? We don’t just plant a garden once and think, Okay, there’s my garden for forever, right? We’ve got to water we’ve got to fertilize; we’ve got a deadhead; we’ve got to pull the weeds. When seasons change, you know, maybe we plant something else, or whoever annuals, maybe we have perennials.

 

The point is, it’s never just one and done that I’ve done. Yeah, we have to get into that habit of asking more regularly tending to more regularly. So, once we understand how our values have evolved over time, then the next bit of work for me is to evaluate that, like plot that against the way we live out our values. So, if you think of values as your north star priorities, then or how we bring our values to life, and you know, priorities, just by their very definition, it’s what takes precedence over something else. And so, I can talk about values. But if I’m not bringing them to life with the way I spend, you know, my energy, my time, my attention my money, then, then that’s just that’s empty talk. Right? So, for example, I can talk I can say that I value my sobriety. But unless I’m out there prioritizing self-reflection. You know, if I’m a 12, stepper, you know, working the steps, getting to meetings, working on my resentments, working on all of the other aspects of emotional sobriety, if I’m not prioritizing those activities, then I’m just talking sobriety, I’m not actually living sobriety. So, I find there’s I when I take people through the exercise of values and priorities, there’s often a really big gap between the way people realize that they are prioritizing their time, their money, their attention, versus how they would prioritize if they were actually living in accordance with our values.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  48:38

You know, it’s interesting, when you said that one of the clearest moments that I had of what I valued versus the choice I had to make was, I was working, and I been to coaching school. So, I had done some values reflection work, it, of course, was part of it. And I was at least aware that, you know, you talk about writing your obituary, and I want to talk about that, but I knew that, you know, what I wanted in life at the end of my life was not for them to say she was a VP or a GM at L’Oréal, like I could give a shit, right? I wanted them to say, she had a really strong marriage, and she had kids who, you know, went to college, and wanted to come back and sit around the kitchen table and tell her all their stories. And I wanted to take my daughter to the bus stop in the morning and I wanted to travel the world to basically I wanted to be happy, like in my mind what happiness is. And my boss who what she wanted from me was to work on nights and so she was very ambitious, not married, not kids really wanted to move up the ladder like had a very clear goal. So, her goal for me was to work nights and weekends to present to the higher ups to you know, I remember it. Hold them, like didn’t really want to travel that much like, in my marriage, in my life, in my sobriety. To me, being in a hotel room in New York, away from my morning workout group, away from my kids, my husband, my schedule was not good for me going to drinking dinners every night, right? This was not the life that was good for me. And then, they said to me, like, okay, it’s 25%. I mean, this is them looking down on me. Like, Jesus Christ, it’s 25%. Too much travel for you. And I was like, Yeah, that’s a week of every month, me in a hotel room, at drinking dinners, big presentations that give me anxiety with people, I don’t know. And I was like, yeah, that’s too much. And so, what helped me there was not only realizing that my priorities needed to reflect what I wanted in life, but I looked at my boss, and I looked at my boss’s boss, both women, one didn’t have kids, one did. And I asked myself, do I want what they have? Their life, their time, their energy, their priorities, how much time they spend at home? And if the answer is no, then I, by definition, have to disappoint them. They have to not approve of what I do, and for people pleaser. Oh, my God, that’s terrifying, you know?

 

51:21

Yeah, I do know. I do know that. What I also know is that people will recover from BS by you. But when we ignore the voice of our soul, like that’s an abandonment from which we may never bounce back. So, I would, in the old days write a decade ago, two decades ago, I would have disappointed myself a million times over to prevent disappointing anybody else, like I couldn’t live with that. Now, I’ll choose me almost every time and not in a selfish way, in an aligned way. I should say it’s become much easier. The more I get to know myself, the easier it’s become for me to say no to the things I want to say no to.

 

Yeah. And, you know, sometimes it’s funny, like, several years ago, when my, you know, my youngest daughter was probably in second or third grade. And one of the other moms in her class said, We need somebody else on the committee on the parade, float building committee. It’s like, just once a week on Tuesday nights, and we drink a lot of wine, why don’t you come and join us. And I’m thinking to myself, Oh, my God, I would rather stick my head in the oven and just slam the door a bunch of times before I’m going to go one, or go on a parade float, to spend my precious Tuesday night with a bunch of people that I really don’t know, when I’d much rather be allocating, you know, spending that time in accordance with my priorities and my values, and be with my family. And three, no one I’m going to put myself in a position of hanging out while everybody else is drinking. Yeah, the reality is, they would never even miss me. Yeah, they would never even know that I wasn’t there. But if I had gone, I would have been miserable. So that’s an easy choice in favor of me. Yeah, me and my priorities and my values. So, me and my sobriety, me, and my family, me protecting what precious time I have.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  53:42

Yeah. But you have to figure out what your values are first. Right? Your values become anything that’s important to someone else?

 

53:51

That’s right. And you know, the, you know, the old Ian Thomas quote about, you know, life is going to like, grab you by the hand and say, This is important. No, this is important. And if you’re not clear on what’s important to you, at this point in time, you’re going to be you’re not going to have anything left for yourself. But I really do believe that it’s this idea of this point in time. That is, I think we need to give that a little more attention than we may normally. Because I don’t think we give ourselves the permission to change. Yeah, we don’t give ourselves the permission to evolve. Yeah, and reprioritize

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  54:40

when sometimes that’s scary, right? I mean, I talk to women all the time who want to stop drinking because they’re not this is I can’t wake up one more day with this. feeling so sick or self-loathing or quitting on myself or whatever it is. And yet Some of those, you know, sunk costs are I signed up for this is their partners, their drinking buddy. And maybe they don’t want them to stop, or they’re scared of changing. They’re scared of evolving because they don’t know what that is right?

 

55:15

Well, I think the underlying question, you know, what’s underneath everything you just said is the question of identity. It’s the question of, who am I not just who am I without alcohol? Like, that was one I really had to? I had to struggle to answer that because I didn’t know who I was without alcohol. You know, when I was getting divorced, it’s like, Well, who am I if I’m not so and so spouse? Or when I was leaving my job, who am I, if I’m not, you know, Becky in the killer, four inch heels and great suits and great bags with, you know, the quaffed hair, who, you know, just walks into a room and people think like, Oh, she’s going to solve the problem. Who am I? If I take a back seat and say, I don’t care about solving the problem anymore? What Who am I if I say, You know what, all of this is the problem.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  56:11

You know, in fact me up when I read that in your book, I already was like, Oh, shit, I suck because I’ve never been able to wear high heels in my life. And I’m also I’m five, three, I twisted my ankle, like seven times playing field hockey and lacrosse and rugby. So, like, high heels. Just don’t work for me. I’m like, damn, she could wear high heels. What the fuck is wrong?

 

56:37

You know what’s funny, though, people, people would be like, oh, you know, why are you always wearing heels? And like because flats are so lame. flats are like the minivan of shoes. You know when I drive?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  56:53

Happy? You don’t drive a minivan? Hell yes, I do. Girl. Oh, yeah. stigma against, like, somehow SUVs are okay, but I’m pretty sure I mean, I’m joking. I did not have a third child just because I desperately didn’t want to drive a minivan.

 

57:09

Casey, my minivan has so many magic buttons. I mean, people aren’t shit.

 

57:15

They slide open on the sides. I used to think they were so lame and so dorky. And now like, I don’t think there’s anything sexier than my minivan. Because you know what? It has? It’s reflective of who I am valued. I have evolved man. And did you ever think that a minivan would be the symbol of evolution? But it’s I mean, like right here, I still

 

57:40

at the point like I need to get a new car and I want like an electric jeep. Which is ridiculous because I do not go off road like a Jeep Wrangler. Rubicon did this recently because I’m like, I want to be young, fun, but I will. I can get that way different. I might buy it because fuck it. But you know, you can be young and fun in a minivan. Just saying.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  58:05

All right, I’m not ready to go there with my identity. But maybe if I do some more work with you. I’ll think about it. I don’t know. The title of my second book. My son’s 14. He’s going to be driving soon. I don’t need a minivan, so I don’t need to go there. But um, we’ll

 

58:21

just wait for this. My daughter just turned my oldest just turned 15 She might be inheriting my minivan. Oh, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, my first car was a 1978 Chevy impalas station wagon. Oh my god. It was like this puke brown like baby shit brown color. It was awful. But my daughter might have a minivan talk about doing better than the generation before. She might have a car with magic doors at the press of a button. What a lucky girl.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  58:58

Alright, clearly, I still have stigma for my youth. But you’re not going to get me on the minivan, but I’m going with everything else. All right. So, identity. Is that where we started? I forget. How did we get on cars?

 

59:12

Yeah. Well, you know what, that’s a that’s a really great example. I know. We didn’t start here but identity and cars. Really the question that is, you know, the question that’s underneath your stigma is what will other people think? Yes. Right.

Brené Brown said this so perfectly.

You can never do anything brave if you’re wearing the straitjacket of, what will other people think?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks you do. You do whatever that is. You live your values, you prioritize you. And if somebody else either has an opinion, or a judgment or anything, like, you just bless them on their journey and keep moving on. But it’s about what anybody else thinks.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:00:10

There’s low stakes and high stakes right in between that because, you know, you talked about how normal is anything you’re used to. And in your book, you kind of go into how things that at one point would be non-negotiable or unacceptable over time. There’s this gradual creeping into what you will tolerate. And a lot of women I talked to me mean, you know, you said this in your book, like, the things I hear about most. Yes, are drinking, right, that’s sort of the presenting problem that they need to change underneath that. It’s marriage or relationships, or their jobs, or their habits, or their loneliness or sadness, right. And some things, obviously, we’ve talked about work and income and identity and what you’ve signed up for and all that. But like, what about if your marriage is just kind of okay, somewhat shitty, you’re not that happy, but you have kids, like that’s a high stakes, people will be disappointed in me. Right. That’s hard.

 

1:01:24

It’s incredibly hard. I mean, having been in a place like that, you know, in a decision space like that. You know, when I made the decision to leave my marriage, it wasn’t quite, you know, oh, it’s, it’s fine. But it’s not, you know, it’s not mind blowing. I mean, it. I had a marriage that looked very good from the outside. Yeah. And what people didn’t see was that, you know, on the inside, my husband had kind of dropped a bomb that I didn’t see coming, which was, you know, I, I just don’t love you. And I haven’t for quite some time.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:02:15

I mean, that takes the breath out of your body. Yeah. And that for him. That’s a huge, not this that. You know, he could have just said, I don’t have a choice in the matter, right after this. But that’s right. Right. That’s terrifying.

 

1:02:32

Yeah. And, you know, in the same way that I would never want to stay in a marriage, where I’m not loved, I wouldn’t want somebody else to stay stuck in a marriage where they don’t love the person they’re married to. And so, you know, I would say we gave it our best go, we put in about 18 months of hard work of hard marriage therapy work, to try to be able to rebuild. But you know, in the end, it was just something we couldn’t rebuild from. And so the question was, I mean, there were a lot of questions. But, you know, one of the questions was, well, do I stay in something that looks good on the outside? But on the inside, where I see it, is completely empty? Like it’s a it’s a shell? Yeah. And, you know, at that time, my daughters were they were probably eight and six. And I couldn’t go a minute without asking, How will my choice affect them? You know, my parents divorced when I was a young teenager. And so, I knew what it was like to go up to grow up in a divorced family. And, you know, there were parts of that, that I desperately didn’t want for my children. But at the end of all of the considerations, you know, when my ex-husband and I were able to look at each other and be like, Hey, we really tried. Yeah, I ready to call it quits. And we could both give it a full body. Yeah, I mean, it wasn’t like, Yes, excellent. Let’s get out of here. We’re done with this bullshit. I mean, it was a really hard, you know, yeah, we gave it our best. And ultimately, it’s a better choice for us to make to make the decision to start fresh apart in order to give our kids we wanted to give them examples of what love looked like. We didn’t want to give them the example that you know, you stay because you said you would. We wanted to be able to show them that it is okay to have and to grow and change your mind. Even if it means, you know that somebody’s you hurt somebody’s feelings.

 

Yeah. And so, when I talk with my kids now about that, and about that decision, I’m very deliberate about reminding them, you know, guys, it’s okay to change direction, like, no matter how long you’ve been walking down one path, if you really do some soul searching, and you determine continuing in this direction is making me really unhappy. You have my full blessing, yeah, to make a different choice.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:05:41

Well, in some of that is like, you don’t have to look at that as a mistake, right? That gave you information that helps you evolve that learning is part of it, you know, and it’s all learning. It’s like, a clue that, okay, this part I liked in this part, I didn’t because so many people are like, I wish I had never done that. Or why did I make that choice, or now I’ve made my bed and I need to lie in it. And you know, like you said, you’re allowed to evolve, you have permission to change, you actually should change as you grow. And a lot of times, it takes the courage, and you talk about this to disrupt the status quo. I mean, the line I pulled out from your book that I kind of put in all caps was you’re not stuck, you’re scared. And a lot of times we say we’re just stuck. Because that’s easier than we don’t have to make big decisions that are scary, right?

 

1:06:46

And it’s the decisions that it that’s what it all comes down to. It’s like, we all have choices. We just have to be brave enough to make them. And that’s not to say, you know, we that’s not a blank check to go about making selfish in. Yeah, I mean, that’s not that’s not encouraging anybody to just, you know, go out, do whatever the fuck you want, regardless of the consequences, you know, and how other people might be affected. I am not, I am not encouraging anyone to be selfish. But when we make choices from our soul, like that doesn’t make us full, it doesn’t make us full of ourselves. It makes us filled with our self with a capital S. Right? So, there’s our self with a lowercase s. That’s the ego that’s the conditioning. That’s the acquired personality. Self with a capital S. I mean, sister that is the part within you. That is that’s your Stardust, that’s your divinity. That is the part of you. And I know you know, people sometimes will roll their eyes when I say this, but that is the part of you that is God. There is no part of any divine being any higher power, any, you know, source or the universe that would want you crying in your honey nut cheerios because you’re so miserable, and you feel like you don’t have a way out what the universe what source once for each one of us is to recognize that are made of magic. We’re not here to work and pay taxes and be miserable until we die. We are here to find fulfilment to be creative to let our I mean, it’s like the idea of like, it’s time to let the unicorn off the leash man. Live. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:09:23

Oh my gosh, someone said to me once, which I loved. She said you’re a unicorn and unicorns attract other unicorns, and I don’t know why like that just made me so happy because when I was early in the days of getting sober and I was actually in Hollywood occurs hip sobriety group at one point when I was like two to three months sober. For some reason, it became this thing where you were going to an event and you were the only one not drinking and they were like, You’re a fucking rainbow, badass unicorn like, so we would all give each other rainbow unicorns. I would just crack me up when you said it’s time to let the unicorn off the leash. Yeah.

 

1:10:07

And isn’t it interesting when you let like when you finally decide, You know what I’m going to let this unicorn kind of peek out, right, I’m going to let her I’m going to give her some more leash, you realize how many other unicorns there are out there in a good way, right? And you do start to consecrate in the best way, like, when you when we start to talk about these things, honestly, without any shame without any fear, like, it is what it is, here’s who I am, here’s how I’ve screwed up. And here’s how I’m doing different. And we start to just be honest about the narrative of what’s been what is right now, what we hope for tomorrow. And we begin to meet these other souls who are all going through like the same kind of metamorphosis, whether it’s sober people, or you know, people who are seeking through philosophy or spirituality or in the in religion or in psychotherapy, like you name it. When seekers find other seekers, magic really happens.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:11:25

Yeah, yeah. I love that.

 

All right, well, I know people are going to want to follow up with you, they’re going to want to find you. So, what is the best way for people to you know, learn more about you the work you do the courses you have your book.

 

1:11:43

Best way is probably website, which is youarenotstuck.com, pretty much you are not stuck is the way you could connect with me anywhere. It’s my handle on Instagram, it’s the name of my Facebook page, we’re not stuck. It’s also going to the website is the best way you can learn about I have an online course called resolution. It’s a self-paced downloadable course that you can take. It’s one that I for years and years I’ve taught online in small group settings. And you know, finally realize not everybody can make a live call Tuesdays at 2pm. Eastern. So, this is a way to make it available to more and more folks who can do it as they can. And for anybody who’s looking for kind of that real life connection, there are two ways. One is that I do workshops and retreats all across the country at some big yoga bass centers. So, if you’re ever looking to spend a long weekend somewhere, I would love for you to join me all that’s on the website. And then the more accessible version is a weekly zoom call that I host it’s every Wednesdays at noon, Eastern. It’s called, The Circle. It’s a lovely gathering of people from around the world. And it’s literally conversations like this for one hour. And it’s I mean, it’s fuel. It really is its community and its fuel and its insight and its humor. And it’s a place to be seen and held and share. So, everybody is welcome in The Circle.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:13:18

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I’ve loved this conversation.

 

1:13:24

I’ve loved it. Thank you for having me, and I can’t wait to keep talking with you.