Ep 186: Which Beliefs are Stopping You?

How many of you are holding back your brilliance because of one thought your brain offers—usually in a moment of fear—that you accept as fact without ever questioning it?

Today, I’m sharing a personal story about something that pushed me right up against that kind of thinking. I was selected to speak at TEDx UTD, and I was thrilled—until I realized what no one had fully emphasized: there are no teleprompters. No notes. Just you, a stage, and a fully memorized talk.

My brain immediately offered the thought, you can’t do this. And for a moment, I almost believed it. But here’s the thing: belief may not do the work, but it allows the work to begin. I had to be willing to consider the possibility before I could take a step toward making it happen. This episode is an invitation to look at what beliefs may be holding you back and not let them stop you from finding out what you’re actually capable of.

Click HERE to read the full show notes.

Transcript

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.

Hey there, welcome back to Your Favorite You. 

I am still your host, Melissa Parsons, and I'm really grateful that you're here with me today because I am writing sort of a personal episode, you could say it's even unusually personal, even for me. I'm going to tell you about something that I've been working on for the past several months. 

It has me a little bit more terrified, a little bit more proud. It has had me a little bit more frustrated and certainly more lit up than almost anything I've done in my recent memory. And then after I tell you about it, I'm going to connect it to you because there's something about this story that I think all of you might need to hear. 

So let me take you back a little bit. I have a friend and a fellow physician coach. Her name is Kelly Casperson, Dr. Kelly Casperson. If you don't know her, go look her up right now. She is brilliant and bold and the kind of human who makes you want to be a braver person just by being in her orbit. 

She's even been on the podcast before, actually, and we can link that episode in the show notes. A couple of years ago, Kelly gave a brilliant TEDx talk. The title was Why We Need Adult Sex Ed. And it was, I mean, it was exactly Kelly as you would expect. 

Smart, necessary, a little bit cheeky, and of course, deeply important. I, in support of her, watched her talk and liked it and commented on it on YouTube, which I'm going to be asking you guys all to do once mine comes up. 

And something lit up in me. And I thought, I want to do that. Of course, not Kelly's exact talk, my own. I have ideas that are living in me, things that I believe need to be said and need to be heard, which is, of course, why I have the podcast and why I want to do a TEDx talk. 

So the talk I'm doing is called What a Funeral Home Taught Me About Living. And before you wonder, yes, of course, we're going to come back to the title, don't worry. But wanting to give a TEDx talk and actually giving one are two very different things. 

For a long time, it stayed right where a lot of my big ideas live, which is on the someday bedside table. And then I went to the physician coaching conference and it was brilliant, as usual. And one of the speakers that was there was a man named Cesar Cervantes. 

Cesar coaches people to get their ideas onto the TEDx stage. And I don't know exactly what it was about that conversation. Maybe it was the energy of being around other physicians who are doing brave, brilliant, unconventional things. 

But when I sat down for a short consult with Cesar, I was a hell yes before I even stood back up. I was the first person to sign up to work with him that day. I was the first in line, and I was the first person to say yes to him. 

Cesar helped me take the idea that had been rattling around in my head and shape it into something that TEDx would actually say yes to. He helped me find the format, the arc, the argument. And on February 4th, 2026, I found out that I had been selected to speak at TEDx UTD, UT Dallas, the University of Texas at Dallas. 

The talk is on April 10th, 2026, and it will be released on YouTube some weeks after that. So I was very, very excited. I was so thrilled. And then I realized something that nobody had mentioned in quite enough detail before I signed up to do this. 

There are no teleprompters at TEDx. You don't get any cue cards. There is a stage, a red circle, a mic, and you. That's it. Which means you have to memorize the entire talk. The entire talk. I'm going to pause here and let that land for my other type A, high-achieving, I can handle pretty much anything, women listening. 

Because when I say the entire talk, I mean at least a 12-minute talk, word for word, on a stage, in front of lots of people, a live audience, and then being recorded for the internet, for YouTube, forever. 

Now, I am nearly a 53-year-old perimenopausal woman. By the time I give this talk, it will be about six days after my 53rd birthday. So I will be a 53-year-old perimenopausal woman. And I say that not as an excuse and certainly not as a complaint. 

Because of Dr. Casperson, I am on all of the hormones that I need to make my perimenopause not be something that makes me feel like shit. I say it because it is a fact of my biology and my life right now that my memory, even with all the hormones, is not exactly operating at peak performance. 

I walk into rooms and forget why I went. I lose my words mid-sentence more often than I care to admit. It annoys the hell out of my husband. I would be mid-sentence and I will just stop talking because the word is not there. 

I know many of you know exactly what I'm talking about. And I see you and I love you. And of course, we are in this together. When I found out that I had to memorize this talk, my brain very helpfully immediately told me, you cannot do this. 

Not as a question, as a statement of fact. You cannot do this, Melissa. And here's the thing. I almost believed it. So my talk was not written when I got accepted. It was February 4th. The event is April 10th. 

I had about two months. Two months to finish writing a 12-minute talk and then memorize every single word of it. A talk, by the way, about what a funeral home taught me about living. So, you know, light material. 

Super easy to deliver with emotional authenticity from pure memory. No big deal. So, of course, I got to work. My sweet hubby Jon has been practicing with me every single night. And I want you to know what those early practice sessions looked like. 

They were rough. Capital R, capital O, capital U-G-H, rough. We are talking halting. We are talking long pauses. We are talking me looking at the ceiling like the words might magically be written up there somewhere. 

It was not a TEDx talk. It was more like a hostage negotiation with my brain. But I didn't stop. I made a voice recording of the full talk and figured out how to download it into Apple Music so that I could listen to it on repeat, in the car, on walks, while I was making dinner. 

Are you paying attention? Because I didn't do it while I was making dinner. I never make dinner. While I was doing laundry, I color-coded each paragraph of the script, different colors for different sections, so that my visual brain could map out the structure. 

I always get caught up in the green and the purple paragraphs, for those of you who care. Green and purple, two of my favorite colors, my very two favorite colors. There's where I fuck up. I went online and I researched how to memorize a talk. 

One woman suggested a technique where you visualize walking around your home while delivering different parts of the talk. Each location in your house becomes an anchor for a different section of the speech. 

So I walked around the house taking pictures. My living room, my kitchen, my back deck. Each snapshot became a little mental clue, a door I could open to find the next part of the talk. I taped a copy of the script to my bathroom mirror. 

I tried everything, not because I was certain it was going to work, but because I refused to let the part of my brain that said, you can't do this, be the thing that made it true. About two and a half weeks before the event, this just happened, I practiced the talk in my living room, full delivery, on my feet, moving around a little the way I'll move on stage. 

Jon sat on the couch and watched. I got through almost the whole thing. For one line, I needed a small prompt and one sentence I skipped entirely, but I got through it. 12 minutes, a talk about mortality and meaning and what it actually means to be alive, delivered for memory in my living room two and a half weeks before I stand on that stage. 

When I finished, my sweet husband was crying. I might cry right now. He had been there for every little rough patch, every frustrated pause. Every night I sat there going over the color-coded script one more time. 

He knew what it had taken to get from that first stumbling run through to what he just watched. I'm not going to lie to you, I cried a little bit too. And then I thought about a conversation I had had a few weeks earlier with another woman, a brilliant woman whose ideas are worth sharing. 

I was telling her about the TEDx process. And when I mentioned the memorization piece, she said, oh, if you have to memorize it, I will never do a TEDx talk. And I had nodded because at that point, I wasn't sure if I could do it either. 

But standing in my living room that night, I thought, what if she's wrong? What if I had been wrong? Here's what's been sitting with me since that moment. How many brilliant women, how many of you are not sharing your brilliance because of one thought, one belief, one sentence that your brain offers up, probably in a moment of fear that you accept as fact without ever really testing it? 

I could never memorize a 12-minute talk. It might be, I'm too old to start over. Or I'm not the kind of person who does things like that. Or people like me don't get to have dreams like that. These thoughts feel like wisdom. 

They feel practical, realistic, like you're just being honest with yourself and saving yourself the embarrassment of failure. But can I tell you something? Most of the time, they are not wisdom. They are just fear and disguise. 

I am a 52-year-old, about to be 53-year-old, perimenopausal woman who could not in February tell you with any reasonable degree of confidence that she was going to be able to memorize a 12-minute TEDx talk. 

And I am standing here telling you that barring something going sideways in the next two and a half weeks, which it won't, I'm going to walk onto that stage on April 10th and deliver the fuck out of this talk. 

Not because I was certain I could, but because I refused to let the uncertainty stop me. And this is the thing about the talk itself, what a funeral home taught me about living, because it's not unrelated to this conversation right now. 

The work I've been doing on that stage is the same work I talk about in my coaching and the same work this talk is ultimately about. What does it mean to actually live, to actually be your favorite version of yourself, not to hedge, not to play it safe, not to stay in the comfortable smallness of what feels certain, but to actually fully show up for your one life. 

You have ideas worth sharing. Your story is worth telling. Your brilliance, yes, yours deserves a stage. Maybe not a literal red circle with a TEDx logo. Maybe your stage is a hard conversation you've been avoiding or a business you've been dreaming about or a version of yourself you've been putting off becoming until the timing is better or the kids are older or you feel more ready. 

Here's a secret. Ready is not a feeling you get before you start. Ready is what happens while you're doing the work. Now, I do want to acknowledge something. Memorizing a TEDx talk is genuinely fucking hard. 

I'm not going to stand here and tell you it's easy and you just need to believe in yourself and it all will work out perfectly. That's not what happened. What happened is I made a voice memo. I color coded paragraphs. 

I taped a script to my bathroom mirror. I walked around my house taking pictures of my furniture like a mildly unhinged person. I practiced every single night with my very mostly patient husband who deserves honestly some kind of award or at minimum, a very nice dinner that I will take him out to that I will not cook. 

Belief alone does not memorize a talk. Belief plus a ridiculous amount of work memorizes a talk. But here's the thing. None of the work was ever going to happen if I had stayed inside the story that I couldn't do it. 

The belief had to come first, or at least I had to be willing to act as if it might be possible. That's the door. The work is what's on the other side. So I guess what I'm saying is don't let the belief stop you from finding out what you're actually capable of. 

Here's what I want you to take with you today. Think about the thing you're not doing. Think about the thing you're telling yourself you can't do or you're not ready for or it's too late for or it's just not realistic for someone like you. 

Now ask yourself honestly, is that true? Or is that just a story your brain invented to keep you safe? Because you might be one voice memo, one color-coded script, one very patient spouse or friend away from standing in your living room with tears running down your face because you just did the thing you thought you couldn't do. 

And if you need help figuring out what that thing is, if you need help dismantling the story that's been keeping you from it, of course, that's exactly the kind of work I do. Come find me. April 10th, TEDx UTD. 

I'll be the one on the red circle. See you there, and I'll see you next time.

Before you go, I want to tell you about something special that I'm doing that I know you're going to love. On Thursday, April 30th at 7 p.m. Eastern, I am going to be hosting a free workshop called Why Smart Women Stay Stuck and the One Shift That Sets You Free. 

If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that I work with amazing, accomplished women who have achieved everything that they thought they wanted, but are still feeling stuck in one way or another. 

This workshop is for you if you're tired of overthinking every decision, if you're exhausted from seeking everyone else's approval, or if you know you're capable of more, but you don't even know what the hell more even looks like. 

I'm going to share the one shift that changes everything, which is how to move from external authority to your own internal authority. And I'll tell you, of course, exactly what that looks like and how to make it happen in your own life. 

Here's what makes this even better. Just for signing up for the workshop, you'll be getting a 25 question assessment called, Am I Giving My Power Away? This assessment helps you identify exactly where you've been handing your authority over to others. 

And if you show up live and engage with me during the workshop, you'll be getting two additional bonuses. My permission slips for smart women, which is a collection of 10 beautifully written permission slips that you can save to your phone for daily reminders that you don't need anyone else's permission to want what you want. 

Plus, you'll be getting my five-minute internal authority check-in. It's an audio to help point you back to your own intuition. The women who come to these workshops tell me that they get massive clarity just from the hour we spend together. 

Some say it really helps them make sense of why they're doing what they've been doing. And it's completely free. Go to melissaparsonscoaching.com forward slash workshop to save your spot. Again, that's melissaparsonscoaching.com forward slash workshop. 

Thursday, April 30th at 7 p.m. Eastern. Stop trying to think your way out of being stuck and start trusting yourself instead. I'll see you there.