Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.
If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.
Well, hi there! Thanks again for coming back every week!
I want to share the magic of coaching with all of you...
Some of you might be wondering, maybe coaching is the missing link to help me love my life?
Working with a general life coach, like me, women get help with so many aspects of their life...
Does anyone here listening need help with...
Compassion for yourself? So you can stop beating yourself up...
Trust in yourself? So you don't have to outsource your decisions or delay your decisions going forward...
Who here would like to feel more Peace and Ease in your life? Instead of living with the stress and dread that pervades your life?
Permission to love yourself? So you don't have to look for love from others in all the wrong places...
Who here would like some more self-acceptance in place of the time you spend right now rejecting yourself?
How about forgiveness for yourself and -if you choose it -forgiveness for others? Finally letting go of the grudges you are holding against yourself and other people?
Does anyone listening to the podcast wish they could increase their sense of self-worth? Who doesn't wish they could finally believe the idea that their worth is inherent?
What if I told you that you could actually give yourself a tiny bit of grace instead of shaming and blaming yourself for every damn little thing?
Who here could use to finally fucking drop their perfectionism and show the world - and probably most importantly those people who look up to you - that it is ok to be a messy human every once in a while?
Who here would prefer to go to bed at night with a healthy sense of pride instead of disappointment in themselves every damn night?
Where are my fellow recovering catholics at? Who here would not like to have just a wee bit less guilt than we were socialized and brainwashed to think was necessary to count ourselves among the "good people"...
Who here is intrigued by the idea that coaching gives you the ability to celebrate yourself in a way that helps you remind yourself what a badass you are... it is one of my favorite things to encourage my clients to do...
I'm going to have a podcast on celebrations coming up soon.
It seems that each and every one of my clients, present company included, because I include myself as my number 1 client, so every one of us needs permission to rest... in a world that socializes us to work, produce, and achieve, to the point of burnout for many of us.... this permission to rest is key.
The other thing that most of us need is encouragement to play - each of us has a little girl inside of us who has not forgotten the importance of playing... just being silly, laughing, giggling, being out in nature...
I want to take a few minutes to share with you all some of the amazing comments my group members have made over the past several months.
I always ask them for takeaways and for celebrations. I ask for takeaways from the coaching calls because I want them to remind themselves of the aha moments they had during the call. I ask them for celebrations because after each coaching call, they go out and carry themselves a little bit differently in the world each week. Sometimes it goes great and we always want to celebrate that. Sometimes it doesn’t go so great and we get to coach on that.
Change can be scary. AND, in my opinion, and I am sure in the opinion of the women who have worked with me as their coach, the way MORE SCARY thing after going out and living a bit differently in the world… a little bit closer to their favorite version of themselves… the way more scary thing would be if they had continued living without being willing to change….
OK - So here are some recent takeaways from my group coaching clients:
“I can change my mind. So silly to say that is a takeaway, but it really is. What I choose to believe today that creates an action may not be what I do next time or next year. And that is ok.”
This is an amazing takeaway! Do you know how many women I coach on a regular basis to help them see and know that they can change their fucking mind? Yes, of course we want to have integrity and have our words and actions match, AND we are grown ass women who are allowed to change our minds. As we age and mature, we are supposed to change. We are not supposed to have the same values and ideas about ourselves at 46 that we did at 24…
One of my favorite memes is a butterfly and a caterpillar sitting at a cafe table, and the caterpillar says to the butterfly “You’ve changed,” to which the butterfly replies “Yes, we’re supposed to.”
And don’t worry, I will coach my lovely client about calling herself silly. It is not silly at all… We have been raised to think in right and wrong… and if we change our mind about what we believe, that means we must have been wrong in the past… Nope! That means that we made the decision at the time with the knowledge and the values that we had at the time. Hopefully, over time, we have learned some new things and we can make new and different decisions with that new information!
Ok - the next takeaway:
“I can trust myself. I am already practicing this today at work. Feeling so empowered to have honest, caring conversations to address a couple conflicts affecting my work deliverables. And I’m not asking for permission or validation to do it. I am just doing it. AND if feels amazing”
Can you imagine the hours you might be able to get back in your life if you made the decision to trust yourself? All the time you spend hemming and hawing about what you could do? All the time you spend looking at a problem from every angle instead of just trusting yourself to come up with a solution? All the time you spend crowd-sourcing - asking other people for their trust in your ideas instead of just trusting yourself? Again, we women have been socialized OUT of our own knowing. The world is not ready for a whole lot of us women to decide that their ideas are good enough and start implementing their own fucking ideas. We are starting a revolution, my friends. Let’s not spend one more day NOT trusting ourselves!
Another takeaway from one of our amazing group calls- “I can use the word NO as a complete sentence. It feels so powerful. I have done better with this, creating boundaries and just saying no. I don’t need to explain, just no.”
This too is a revolutionary takeaway. No. No is a complete sentence. Imagine if we were all so radically honest with one another. No need to sugarcoat anything. No need to be cruel or unkind, either, obviously. Be we women have been socialized to think that kindness is making our no flowery. Making it not so direct. I am telling you right now, as soon as you adopt the idea that direct is kind - that direct is loving - your life will change and you will get to feel better so quickly!
Another recent takeaway: “If I’m avoiding feeling something, that is probably really worth exploring, and asking myself why I am avoiding it.”
Yes, amazing client of mine! Let’s figure out which feelings you are trying to avoid feeling on a regular basis! This will help you uncover so much of what might be holding you back in your life!
Here is another glorious takeaway, after my client shared something that was real and raw in the group… “I am in shock and awe that I gave ANYONE permission to be vulnerable today - this is a ME thing! I've never been that person. I tend to sit quietly in the back, but I'm proving that wrong. I'm so appreciative for the brilliant coaching and collaboration with Melissa and how it has helped me open up and accept myself in ways I never thought possible - I'm humbly honored that my share invites you all to do the same. I am proud of myself. I’m definitely becoming my favorite version of me. Thanks to the lovely women in this group - thank you for seeing me without judgment. I've been very afraid for a long time. And cheers to what lies ahead for us all!
This is an amazing takeaway and celebration all in one that really shows the value of group coaching. Being in this group helps each of us to see ourselves in a different light. The magic and the safety that we create in the group allows us to share all the little pieces of ourselves that may not have seen the light of day for a very long time. Shining light on all of those bits of ourselves helps us to see each other and ourselves without judgment.
Ready for the next one? OK, here it is - “My takeaway is that I can do this. I can have my own back and can stand up for myself. It’s up to me to end generational patterns of dishonesty and addiction. I'm showing my boys how to treat a woman with respect and love. I have to practice this on myself, of course, first. I can model loving and respecting myself.”
This takeaway is happening because this amazing woman has decided that she is fully in her power to change the course of her life by refusing to tolerate a less than tolerable relationship with her now ex-husband. Instead of living her life at the effect of what he was choosing to do, she is powerfully making her own decisions about the life she wants to have going forward. It’s up to her to end it. Not in a victimy way of - oh, I am the only one who cares enough to make this change. No - in the powerful way of I am the one who can end generational trauma. It’s up to her. And that is the best news ever. Will it be hard? Yes. But what she was putting up with for years was also very hard. This new hard will give her a chance to have a different relationship with herself and with her boys!
Ok - the last one for this podcast, and I have more where these came from! “My takeaway is that everyone’s life (not just mine) will likely be 50% good and 50% not good. It is not up to me to make someone else's life 100% good.”
Yes! We talk about this a fair bit in coaching, and you have heard me say it on this podcast many times already! We have all kinda bought into this idea that the goal in life is to be happy. I coach my clients to believe the goal in life is to feel all of your feelings - none of them can hurt you unless you get stuck feeling one all the time. Most of us are in a default mode of mostly seeing the negative parts of our life. We don’t want this to be the result in our lives, either. So, when you embrace the idea that a perfect, happy life is not the goal, for you OR for anyone you love - your spouse, your kids, your parents, your friends, you get the idea - it takes so much pressure off. You give up the goal of your kids always being happy with you. Spoiler alert - mine are never happy with me 100% of the time! When you are having a shitty day, you don’t make it mean the end of the world is near. You think, huh, I’m living through the natural ebbs and flows of my life. If I don’t make it mean I am a shitty person just because I am having a rough day… If I don’t make it mean my kids are shitty people just because they are having a rough day… life gets that much sweeter!
OK - that’s enough for now! I just wanted to give you all an idea of some of the practical things we work on every week in coaching. I recognize that unless you have had coaching, you might not have a clue what is available to you if you start.
So this is a sneak peek into the results my Your Favorite You members have been creating for themselves in the past few months… I have about 20 more pages of notes, so if you loved this episode, you are in luck, because I will likely be talking much more about this in the future!
And I want to give a special thanks to my current group members for giving me permission to share their beautiful words and takeaways with all of you podcast listeners…
If you want these kind of results in your life, sign up for our next group coaching cohort! We start May 30th. You can book your consult with me right now by going to melissaparsonscoaching.com/group.
OK, my loves, see you next week!
Hey! It’s still me. I’m thrilled to let you know that you have time to sign up for a consult to join our group coaching program. We start May 30th and we will meet every Thursday at 12:30pm Eastern Time for 6 months.
If you did not get the chance to come to the webinar on May 8th and you would like to learn how to figure out what the fuck you want, and then learn about the benefits and the values of coaching with me, you can email melissa@melissaparsonscoaching.com.
If you're on the fence about whether or not to join us, just book a consult with me. We can spend some time and I can help you make your decision. “Yes” and “no” are perfectly acceptable answers. To book your consult, go to melissaparsons.com/group and book your call right there. Have a great week!
